Toward a Queer Aesthetic Sensibility: Orientation, Disposition, and Desire

Abstract

This article explores the idea of a queer aesthetic sensibility and how it might provide ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling that help one better recognize the imminent potentialities that hide beneath the routine and expected rhythms of the everyday. Thinking alongside the work of Maxine Greene and Jose Esteban Muñoz, the article considers how aesthetic objects affirm one’s existence through the embodiment of gay desire, promoting imaginative action in the pursuit of new possibility. Such an orientation toward the aesthetic reveals an approach to educational practice that promises to promote the values of imagination, attentiveness, and possibility, rather than conformity, routine, and homogeneity, which are values essential to the survival of queer folks who must learn to find new possibilities for themselves and the world.