A Quick Review of Queer Theory Classics

For my Queer Theology class, we've taken a quick review run through some classics of Queer Theory.  Two things unsettled me:  I read a lot of this work when it was first published (think Judith Butler and the 1990s), and it was published before many of my classmates were born.  I am fairly sure I am the oldest one in the room.  Our professor, the only one with he/him pronouns, just turned 40, and most of my classmates are in their 20's (I am surmising this because I know that most of them came to seminary right out of undergraduate school, and in fact, one of them is not done with undergraduate school yet, as she's an American U student).

As I was reading summaries of this material, I had an additional odd thought, that I was not only reading this material, but I was teaching it too.  No, I wasn't one of the first ones teaching Queer Theory back in the 1990's.  But in the community college where I taught, in the first year Lit classes that I taught, we explored ideas of gender fluidity.

I did it through the vehicle of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, which was part of the drama section of the Intro to Lit textbook; back then, I was using The Bedford text.  It was an amazing text, and it engaged the students on many levels, not just the question of could you have sex with someone for 20 years thinking they were one gender, but they were a different one?  It will come as no surprise to most readers that almost all my students thought it impossible.  But many of them were open to the idea of some sort of gender fluidity, meaning that most of us realized we're not performing gender in the ways that our culture mandates.

I spent some time thinking about those students, those years before we had the same kind of internet and non-internet resources that we have now.  Those students had some of the worst educations in the U.S. at the time.  I was teaching in the low country of South Carolina, and students with other options didn't go to the community college where I taught.  Many of them were looking to get the minimum education that they could so that other career doors might open.  But they were good sports about the required classes that they had to take along the way, and they sensed my enthusiasm, and I want to believe that we created a great learning environment together.

I think of those students, many of them just out of high school, many of them with children of their own.  I wonder where they are now.  I suspect that they are grandparents, many of them.  They have now been in those careers long enough that they might be thinking about retirement.  I don't imagine that long ago discussions of gender and otherness ever bubble to the surface of their conscious brains.  But I hear from those students occasionally, and I know that the education that they got at the community college did shape them in essential ways.

I am happy to have been part of that.