An Embodied Education: Questioning Hospitality to the Queer

Authors

Clio Stearns, University of New HampshireFollow

Abstract

This is an essay about hospitality and the ways we must question frameworks telling us to welcome the queer in educational contexts. I will show how educational scholarship as well as programming for schools, teachers and students have emphasized the interconnected concepts of hospitality and welcome as a way of keeping queer bodies legislatively, physically and psychically safe. While acknowledging the importance of hospitality as a starting point, I examine its limits with the hope of showing how it might foreclose curiosity. I argue that one fundamental problem with hospitality and welcome toward the queer is the way these phenomena can disembody individual and mutual existence. My goal is not primarily to critique extant efforts at queering education but rather to offer an alternate vision of the relationship between queerness and education that takes the body seriously. An aspect of my aim is indeed to provoke; while I understand that an embodied vision for education is unlikely to come to fruition with any alacrity, I wonder if urging queer educational discourse and even programming in this direction might create new possibilities for mutual coexistence and discovery.

Author Biography

Clio Stearns is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of New Hampshire. She is working on a dissertation about social and emotional learning. Her research interests include psychoanalysis and childhood studies. A graduate of Bank Street's Childhood Education and Literacy program, she has published previous work in Curriculum Inquiry, Democracy and Education, and Pedagogy, Society and Culture.

Recommended Citation

Stearns, C. (2017). An Embodied Education: Questioning Hospitality to the Queer. Occasional Paper Series, (37). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58295/2375-3668.1094