Queer Pedagogical Desire: A Study Guide

Abstract

����� ��� We are in a queer pedagogical moment in the academy. The moment is not new, but a number of recent books have dramatized it and made it more urgent. In the past two years, studies by Robyn Wiegman, Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed, Judith Halberstam, and David Halperin have illuminated the political, historical, phenomenological, theoretical, and affective contours of institutionalized queer teaching and scholarship. These books allow me in this essay to reflect in a timely way on a recent queer peda gogical intervention of my own: writing the study guide for Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary film, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. 1 My narrative traces the history of the study guide, charting its contexts, goals, and methods, in order ultimately to identify and confront murkier questions about its creation. Having never used or read a study guide, why was I writing this one? 2 Why was I so committed to the project? What simultaneously charged and freighted this rather intense moment of queer pedagogical engagement for me? In Object Lessons Robyn Wiegman considers just such questions in terms of professors’ aspirations to turn political commitment to critical practice. “What is it we expect our relationship to our objects of study to do?” she asks fellow practitioners of identity knowledges (2012, 337). Here, Wiegman considers the “many projects of academic study that were institutionalized in the U.S. university in the twentieth century for the study of identity” (1). Those projects include women’s studies, ethnic studies, American studies, and queer studies. 3 Like academics throughout the university, the inhabitants of identity knowledges want something