Remember Students

Queerness and Intimacy in Education

Abstract

Learning as an act of intimacy complicates the structures of and relations within education. Queer theory and Queer identities can help us understand these structures and relations in ways that offer possibilities rather than just reproductive and normative practices. I explore these relations through currerean engagement.  The regressive step forgoes the prose narrative for a poem in a gestural nod to the practices explored in The Postmodern Educator.  Diamond and Mullen’s (1999) posit “As readers, we are more affected by the repeated images and metaphors of a poem than we are by the propositions and statements of prose, gloss…” (25). Artistic form can open meanings academic forms cannot. A poem can capture the messiness of intimacy in education that prose tends to resist. The content is drawn from nearly two decades of relationships and encounters with students as contingent faculty at numerous colleges and universities. Progressing from my poem, I provide a frame to explore spatial and temporal structures in education shape relationships and intimacies.