Companion-able Species: A Queer Pedagogy for Music Education

Abstract

Abstract What might the "coming out" of LGBTQ studies in music education mean for the profession? How might we interact with each other, enacting a pedagogy based not on a discourse of inclusion situated in terms of identities that necessitate exclusion, but one holding each other in regard, meeting face to face, as companion-able species? What makes lives mundane in affect yet consequential in effect is integral to a queer pedagogy that would seek to create (music-al) lives worth living. As a "category-in-question," Donna Haraway’s (2008) concept of "companion species" acknowledges difference in the context of conjoined processes of bodily worldly entanglements. I add the suffix -able to underscore underlying affection and active participation requisite for the relationality in which we all take part. We are messmates at table, the terms of which do not exist a priori, but which we co-create--a table at which all are guests and no one is host. Rather than "including" queer perspectives in straight music education, a queer pedagogy of companion-able species opens spaces for co-creating a contingent, dynamic table where music education messmates might commit to practices of regard and response in ways that compel us to learn from and with each other in the context of humility, doubt, and respect, using felt, as opposed to sufficient, reason.