Queer futuring: an approach to critical futuring strategies for adult learners

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop queer futuring strategies that take into consideration adult learners’ needs in support of transformational and sustainable change for social justice and equity. Design/methodology/approach This paper develops the construct of queer futuring, which engages queer theory perspectives in a critical futures framework. Adult learning theory informs queer futuring strategies to support adults and inform education to sustain transformational changes for social justice and equity. Findings With social justice in mind, queer futuring opens spaces and supports opportunities for adults to engage in learning activities that address historical and layered forms of oppression. Building on learning needs of adults to create meaning and make a difference in the world around them, queer futuring strategies provide tools for activism, advocacy and building new relationships and ways of being-with. Research limitations/implications The sustainability of our current system of growth and financial well-being has already been called into question, and the current pandemic provides tangible evidence of values for contribution, connection and concern for others, even in the midst of political strife and conspiracy theories. These shifting values and values conflict of society point to the questions of equity and narrative inclusivity, challenging and disrupting dominant paradigms and structures that have perpetuated power and authority “over” rather than social participation “with” and harmony. Queer futuring is just the beginning of a bigger conversation about transforming society. Practical implications Queering spaces from the perspective of queer futuring keeps the adult learner and queering processes in mind with an emphasis on affiliation and belonging, identity and resistance and politics and change. Social implications The authors suggest queer futuring makes room for opening spaces of creativity and insight as traditional and reified rationality is problematized, further supporting development of emergentist relationships with the future as spaces of possibility and innovation. Originality/value Queer futuring connects ethical and pragmatic approaches to futuring for creating the kinds of futures needed to decolonize, delegitimize and disrupt hegemonic and categorical thinking and social structures. It builds on queer theory’s critical perspective, engaging critical futures strategies with adult learners at the forefront.

GENEZA FILOZOFICZNEJ IDEI QUEER WOBEC PODSTAW ANTROPOLOGICZNYCH KATOLICKIEJ NAUKI SPOŁECZNEJ

Artykuł podejmuje próbę odpowiedzi na pytania o podstawy filozoficzne i myślowe queer theory oraz prezentuje głównych myślicieli, którzy wywarli znaczący wpływ na rozwój performatywności w ruchach feministycznych. Przedstawiam genezę i opis procesu subwersji oraz dekonstrukcji pojęć takich jak płeć, małżeństwo, kobiecość, heteronormatywność, binarność, seksualność i ostatecznie queer. Polemizuję między innymi z poglądami Judith Butler, która próbuje opisać pojęcie queer, charakteryzując je jako odtwarzanie performatywnych wypowiedzi, interpolowanych, stanowiących moc wiążącą przypadkowych, obalalnych, rozsadzających istniejące konwencje. Artykuł zestawia powyższe zagadnienia z Katolicką Nauką Społeczną i antropologią Kościoła Katolickiego. Wskazuje na obszary tworzącej się na naszych oczach nowej rzeczywistości.

In the Margins of One Health: Interspecies Solidarity, Care, and Inequality

This article is an attempt to frontally pose a question queer theory gravitates around, yet never effectively spells out: what is a togetherness of those who have nothing in common but their desire to undo group ties? First, I consider the take-up of Lacan’s ethical experiment in Seminar VII, the Ethics of Psychoanalysis by queer theorists. I contend that queer theory has not given Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone its full import, which demands its placement in the philosophical tradition of the West brought to its highest fruition in Kant. I further contend, however, that to do so does not quite offer a solution to the queer problem, for, as contemporary debate on the political import of Antigone shows, the purity of her desire does not immediately translate into a sustainable politics. Lacan himself was faced with the problem of translating his ethics into a politics after his "excommunication" from the psychoanalytic establishment, and came to falter before it. Nevertheless, Lacan’s efforts allow us to pose the undoubtedly queer question of how to group together those whose only attribute is to undo group ties. Responding to the unanswerable demands of a theory and a practice that allows us to answer that question, I propose the figure of the smoker’s communism, as elaborated upon by Mladen Dolar, as a preliminary queer suggestion as to how we might go about mitigating the gap between Lacan’s ethical brilliance and his admitted political failure..

Introducing: Queer Theory (in Three Shorts)

Antke Antek Engel, member of the editorial board of InterAlia, co-operated with Filmfetch (Magda Wystub; Tali Tiller) and FernUniversität Hagen to create three educational films which discuss the tenets of queer theory in a manner suitable for non-academic viewers. The films were released in 2021 and are available on the university’s website: https://e.feu.de/queer-theory-videos and on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh98rBDWATF6bkxKNvpR4gQ

Jars of Light

The 21st century adult male learner lives a multidimensional life with multiple identities impacted by their notion of masculinity and manhood. Traditional notions of masculinity offer consequential stakes for college men which can impact student success and retention. This chapter presents a study designed to examine experiences of diverse undergraduate male learners as they explore the ways of knowing and make meaning of their own notions of how they experience their masculinity regulated and how their perception of other men's notion of masculinity shape their relationship with other men. Utilizing Queer Theory as a framework, educators can reimagine how masculinity impacts lives and boldly reimagine what an affirming and inclusive identity looks like for college men. This chapter will help stakeholders serve as an anchor for men willing to contest dominant ideologies surrounding masculinity while offering strategies to support male student retention through culturally inclusive practices.

Queer Phenomenology

Phenomenology is an often-used form of inquiry within education and the social sciences more broadly. As scholars have employed its methods to answer complex social and political questions, new modes of inquiry have emerged. One such mode is queer phenomenology, which has sought to engage queer theory with phenomenology for an enriched form of inquiry. In this chapter, queer phenomenology will be explored, including its origins in the 21st century and the kinds of questions it can answer. A discussion of queer phenomenology's relation to the field of critical phenomenology is also included. Current research in both the social sciences and education that use this method is covered in depth.

Queerly Troubling International Law's Vision of “Peace”

Queering international law involves dreaming. It requires stepping outside the framing presumptions of “normal” law to reveal and challenge the heteronormative underpinnings of the hierarchies of power and value that the law sustains. Reclaiming the nomenclature of queer from its history as a term of insult and dehumanization, queer theory interrogates the normative framework that naturalizes and privileges heterosexuality and its binary regime of gender. In its reclamation, “queer” gestures toward affirmative assemblages of new meanings and emancipatory imaginaries. In international law, queer theory has been used in many different ways. For some, queerly troubling the normative involves expanding the existing normal to be more inclusive of queer lives, as can often be seen in the field of international human rights law. As life-giving as inclusion is to those barely existing on the margins, without changing the terms of inclusion this approach risks leaving heteronormativity intact and may even buttress it, as with the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. For others, queering international law involves a more fundamental critique of its regimes of the normal that, together, regulate our relations with each other and the planet. The objects of queer theory's structural critique are the conceptual foundations of international law, which rely on heteronormativity as a fundamental organizing principle that helps to normalize inequality, poverty, exploitation, and violence. One example is the “civilizing mission” which justified colonialism and continues to animate present legal norms. As Teemu Ruskola argues in his seminal queer critique, international legal rhetoric attributed normative masculinity to (Western) sovereign states and cast the “deficient” sovereignty of non-Western states in terms of variously deviant masculinities which, together with their civilizational and racial attributes, justified their “penetration.” My “troubling” of international law's account of peace takes a queer structural approach and then outlines some alternative imaginaries suggested by queer theory and activism.

Queer Jurisprudence: Reparative Practice in International Law

Queer theory's commitments are radical and disruptive. They have operated to interrogate the definition and reinforcement of sexuality and gender categories, and to expose and problematize normalized relations of power and privilege in the institutional structures and systems in which we live and operate. Queer's deconstructive and anti-normative (or non-conformist) tendencies, however, can be antithetical to international LGBTQIA+ law reform projects. In much of queer scholarship, human rights activism is framed as reinforcing heteronormative structures of knowledge and power and promoting fixed ideas of monogamy, social reproductivity, and gender identity. In this essay, I work with the tension between queer theory and the law to frame the continued pursuit of human rights by LGBTQIA+ people as queer jurisprudence. I do so by drawing on the methodological tools provided by Eve Sedgwick's technique of reparative reading and Michel Foucault's ethics of care of the self to focus on the lived experience of LGBTQIA+ people. What emerges through the stories of LGBTQIA+ commitments to human rights and legal activism are not themes of naivety, compliance, or assimilation, as often charged, but ongoing efforts toward disruption, creativity, and hope.

Consensus and Diversity in the World Trade Organization: A Queer Perspective

When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995, it was seen as representative of a new era in international law, which claimed to be more functional and cooperative than the Cold War years. Fast forward to 2022, most commentators proclaim that the WTO is in “crisis.” For over two decades, its membership has struggled to reach decisions and, in 2019, the WTO was “dejudicialized” by the United States blocking consensus on appointments to the Appellate Body. In seeking to understand what went wrong, some commentators have focused on the operation of the WTO's consensus procedure and, in particular, the way it can afford states a veto power. In this essay, I take a different approach by considering how the discursive effects of consensus decision making have played into some of the problems facing the WTO today. Inspired by Gibson-Graham's work on “queering the economy,” I do so by unmooring queer theory from its base of gender and sexuality and applying queer insights to a discourse analysis of statements made in relation to the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which lasted from 1986 until 1993 and culminated in the agreement to establish the WTO. I show how the use of consensus decision making served to cultivate an intolerance of economic difference by giving rise to discourses of worldwide sameness and agreement. Finally, I consider what a queerer approach to trade-related decision making might look like.