Christy Carlson, Trent University
NACADA Annual Conference, Session # 217
Nashville, October 6, 2012
christycarlson@trentu.ca
Queer theory:
 Defining queer
 Intersectionality
 Construction vs. development
 Michel Foucault
 Judith Butler
Queer advising:
 Some preliminary thoughts
 Case studies & discussion
 “The word ‘queer’ itself means across”
Sedgwick, Tendencies
 “As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name
some natural kind or refer to some determinate
object. . . . There is nothing in particular to which it
necessarily refers. It is an identity without an
essence.”
Halperin, Saint Foucault
 Queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,
overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and
excesses of meaning when the constituent
elements of anyone’s [identity] aren’t made (or
can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”
Sedgwick, Tendencies
 Queer as a political orientation, a critique of
identity categories
 “With identity thus reconceptualized [through the
recognition of intersectionality], it might be easier to
understand the need to summon up the courage to
challenge groups that are after all, in one sense, ‘home’
to us, in the name of the parts of us that are made not
at home. . . . The most one could expect is that we will
dare to speak against internal exclusions and
marginalizations, that we might call attention to how
the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the
intersectional identities of a few.”
 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”
 “[A]ll the developmental vectors could be classified
under ‘identity formation’ ” (p. 173).
 “The vectors describe major highways for journeying
toward individuation—the discovery and refinement
of one’s unique way of being” (p. 35).
 “Developing identity is like assembling a jigsaw
puzzle” (p. 48).
 Chickering, Education and Identity
 “A solid sense of self emerges” (p. 49).
 “[T]here is an I who coordinates the facets of
personality . . . who ‘owns’ the house of self”
(p.49).
 Developing identity entails “finding roles that are
genuine expressions of self” (p. 49).
 Chickering, Education and Identity
 Discourses are “practices that systematically form the
objects of which they speak.”
 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge
 “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a
personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in
addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a
morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly
a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his
total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It
was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his
actions.”
 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
 “It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin
than a singular nature. . . . Homosexuality appeared as
one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed
from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. . . [T]he
homosexual was now a species.”
 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
 “The judges of normality are everywhere. We are in the
society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the
educator-judge, the social worker-judge.”
 Foucault, Discipline and Punish
“There is no gender identity behind the expressions
of gender … identity is performatively constituted
by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its
results.”
“Gender is a repeated stylization of the body, a set
of repeated acts within a highly regulated frame
that congeal over time to produce the appearance
of substance, of a natural sort of being.”
Butler, Gender Trouble
 Identity is something we ‘do,’ not something we
‘are.’
 The repetition of norms produces an illusion of a
fixed, inner, essential self—a core ‘doer’ behind the
deed.
 The drive to produce a coherent, intelligible self
derives from a cultural demand of coherence and
recognizability.
 If an identity “is compelled to repeat itself in order
to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and
identity, then this is an identity permanently at
risk, for what if it fails to repeat or what if the very
exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very
different performative purpose”?
 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”
 Selves can be reconstituted differently.
 Fluid
 Multiple
 Fractured
 Historically/contextually contingent
 Discursive
 Performative
 Regulatory
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Awareness of ways our cultural/professional
training may position us as agents of social
control
Awareness of ways our language may construct
(potentially constraining) identities
Focus on possibility and meaning-making
rather than certainty
Facilitate contextualized understanding of
individual identity narratives
Invite multiple perspectives
Invite stories, not simply ‘facts’
Pay attention to temporal dimensions
 In the face of pressures to claim a fixed
identity, ask: Who do these identity
categories serve? Who do they include and
exclude? Who has the power to define these
categories? How are they policed? How do
they change over time and across cultures?
(Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer)
What does your own experience suggest about
these categories/rules?

Butler, J. P. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and
the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. P. (1991). Imitation and gender
insubordination. In D. Fuss (Ed.), Inside/Out:
Lesbian theories, gay theories (13-31). New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J. P. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the
discursive limits of ‘sex.’ New York: Routledge.
Chickering, A. W., & Reisser, L. (1993). Education
and identity (2nd ed.). San Francisco: JosseyBass.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins:
Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence
against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43,
1241-99.
Doty, A. (1993). Making things perfectly queer:
Interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, vol. 1.: An
introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage
Books.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of
the prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of knowledge
and the discourse on language. London:
Routledge.
Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a
gay hagiography. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction.
New York: New York University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.