Queer of Color Agency in Educational Contexts: Analytic Frameworks From a Queer of Color Critique

Abstract

Although queer students of color face multiple obstacles to safe and full participation in numerous educational contexts, cultural and scholarly narratives that emphasize their vulnerabilities can lead educational stakeholders to overlook, and thus miss opportunities to capitalize on, the agency that these students possess to negotiate the barriers to their academic success. To counterbalance discourses on youth as at risk or in crisis, this article explores how a body of critical scholarship known as a queer of color critique can serve as a heuristic for educational research on the agentive practices of queer students of color. Situated largely outside of educational studies, a queer of color critique—much like critical race theories, disability studies, and similar discourses on difference—can organize analytic works across subfields of educational scholarship into a more coherent educational research agenda on queer of color difference while also contributing to broader critiques of homophobia, racism, and other threats to social justice in education.