Georgia Republicans Exposed through Queer Theory
Interesting battle here in the South. Georgia lawmakers deny value to courses and instructors connected to glaring societal issues in exchange for students keeping classes where they can crunch numbers but — as these blind lawmakers — remain ill-equipped and blissfully ignorant about understanding the rest of the world outside their little hegemony which excludes the rest of the people with whom they must share this planet. Their action implies that those connected with queer theory must be amoral since queer theory does not line up with their own so-called morality.
Steamy sex classes need to go? Is that the real issue or is this outcry by Republican politicians now against this sort of teaching identified in this Queering the Disciplines chapter in Interdisciplinarity by Jon Moran:
“Queer theory feeds into and extends the interdisciplinary concerns of feminism, by developing feminist theory’s concerns with gender codes and differences into an exploration of the cultural construction of sexuality. The text that it has drawn on most productively in this regard is the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), which examines how language and culture construct ‘dominant’ and ‘deviant’ forms of sexuality. Foucault argues that sexuality became prominent in the modern era precisely ‘because relations of power had established it as a possible object,’ and that the ‘discursive explosion’ about sex over the last few centuries has evolved ‘the very production of sexuality’ itself (Foucault 1981: 35, 17, 105). This notion of sexuality as a cultural construct bound up with questions of power and knowledge, rather than as a natural given, is what makes queer theory interdisciplinary. If it were solely concerned with the study of homosexuality, the representation and self-representation of gay people and the questioning of heterosexist laws and attitudes, it would be a specialism with fairly definite concerns. In fact, queer theory draws on poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory to problematize the construction of homosexuality as a unified, foundational category of individual and collective identity. It is therefore far more broadly concerned with the range of discourses and knowledges that organize sexuality as a whole, and with the cultural work that is undertaken to police or subvert those sexual boundaries.” pp. 107-108.
You now know more about the kind of educational imperative queer theory puts forth than these legislators know. Whether you understand every word or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you recognize the theory exists to discourage the power structures that in this case want it dismissed, despite the obvious commentary above exposing its need to be. Notice that in removing inquiry such as queer theory from an institution the institution gives in to the powers that queer theory seeks to expose and keep at bay, powers that are interested in stealing the important identity associated with those persons who make up a community that these legislators would seek to destroy since it runs contrary to their motives.
Removing queer theory renders all of the people connected with it faceless and less than human. It is not “the Christian thing to do” as Christ rendered every life worth dying for and did. He seeks to redeem individuals in these communities that these threatened legislators — and the so-called Christian Coalition they are working with — under the permissible guise and hype of a failing economy — want to erase from our everyday thought and discussion.
