Troublesome Knowledge: Autotheory in the Queer Classroom

Abstract

Troublesome Knowledge:Autotheory in the Queer Classroom Shannon Brennan (bio) "On the eve of finishing this essay my attention is focused not on how to rework the conclusion (as it should be) but instead on news stories of alleged racism at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)."1 So begins CATHY COHEN'S influential essay, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" COHEN'S opening salvo attunes the reader to the urgency of her project and draws into the political present the act of writing: the "rework[ing] [of] the conclusion." Present on the surface of the text are COHEN'S "attention," her "mixed emotions," and the recursive process of revision. Such moves constitute what readers of this special issue might recognize as an "autotheoretical" gesture. In a turn that's also typical of the genre, what Cohen performatively frames as a "distraction" from her work is not a diversion at all but instead exemplifies her argument's necessity. The story she tells shows a failure of LGBTQ+ organizations to conceive of politics intersectionally, while it also "highlights the limits of a lesbian and gay political agenda based on a civil rights strategy, where assimilation into, and replication of, dominant institutions [End Page 707] are the goals."2 Cohen advocates for a reconceptualization of the meaning of "queer"—not as a static identity marker but as the basis for a politics built on shared relationships to power. Two decades on, Cohen is still "rework[ing] the conclusion." While optimistic about the intersectional work of the Movement for Black Lives, Cohen notes how LGBTQ+ politics has refused "Punks's" intervention.3 Instead, the loudest mainstream LGBTQ+ voices continue to invest in presumptively stable identity categories, the security of which is expressed in well-meaning bromides such as the claim to having been "born this way" or tautologies like "love is love." They invest, that is, not in the radical "identity politics" articulated by the Combahee River Collective, which emphasized the "synthesis of [interlocking] oppressions" on axes of race, gender, sexuality.4 Instead, much contemporary LGBTQ+ discourse emphasizes a putative "identity politics" that is single-axis (rather than intersectional), consumerist (rather than radically politicized), individual (rather than collective), liberal (rather than radical), and organized around securing the identitarian platform from which a self can seek representation and redress rather than investigating the wily question of power's operation in our connected biopolitical, necropolitical existence. These two impulses—toward single-axis identitarian commitments and toward more dynamic conceptions of the subject—are both potentiated in autotheory, a genre in which the self, in its body and in all its particularity, is staged on the page as an object of, vessel for, or method of doing philosophy. Whether autotheory ultimately reifies the neoliberal self as expressed through identitarian taxonomies isn't really the point; the question of the self's reification is always there—implicitly or explicitly. My aim is not so much to offer a political analysis of the works of autotheory that exist but to examine the works of autotheory that might be—the works of autotheory that undergraduate students produce (to personalize: the works that my undergraduate students produce) as they work through what, in the language of constructivist pedagogy, we might call queer theory's "troublesome" knowledge practices.5 What are the uses of autotheory as a pedagogical tool? Given the genre's feminist, queer, queer of color, and trans genealogy, I wish to consider its use as a tool for learning and, more, for "doing" queer theory—for [End Page 708] doing queer theory as Cohen and other QPOC scholars define it, I mean: recognizing and theorizing one's positionality in relation to power and in relation to potential coalitions of care, activism, and resistance.6 To what degree does the production of this genre of writing enable students to cross the threshold—as educational theorists Jan Meyer and Ray Land would put it—into the transformative ways of thinking that queer theory (and its cognate fields: women's and gender studies, trans studies, ethnic studies) looks to enable?7 It's a gnarly question, for contemporary autotheory, like contemporary queer theory, is positioned at...