Disciplining Queer

Ian Barnard

Abstract

This article analyzes a particular set of disciplinings by students and colleagues that coalesced around my teaching of a university course in ‘Queer Theory.’ I use these regulatory discourses and practices as a springboard to investigate how academic and other disciplines (English, in particular) enable and reproduce certain stylizations, epistemologies, and methodologies, and what they implicitly and violently conceal and demonize; how style functions as politics and what the politics of style are; how queerness—queer inquiry and intervention, queer methodologies and epistemologies, queer activisms and insubordinations—might activate, exacerbate, and expose some of these questions and mechanisms. The form of the article enacts the (un)disciplinary politics that I advocate, juxtaposing anecdote, pedagogy and theory, and written in a style whose campiness and ellipticism flout prescriptions for conventional academic discourse.  This style seeks to break down the borders between the rational and the irrational, between disciplines, and between the academic and the non-academic, and to interrogate the conventions that constitute the scholarly.

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© borderlands ejournal 2009