Description:
Adult and Higher Education in Queer Contexts: Power, Politics, and Pedagogy is largely the product of several years of research and scholarship that...provide[s] a conspectus of significant adult education work at the intersection of sexual orientation and gender identity, variation, and expression. The chapters in this book are, like the concept Queer, eclectic, dynamic, flowing, turbulent, enraging, engaging, encompassing, unyielding, unapologetic, and still they provide just a limited purview of all that is Queer in adult and higher education, lifelong learning, culture, and society. Nevertheless, the sum of these chapters provides readers with an intricate and informative pathway to learn about Queer politics, culture, and sociality and to explore sexual minorities including lesbian, gay, Two-Spirit,1 bisexual, intersexual, transsexual, transgender, and Queer persons and their issues into the present moment. This collection explores identities, subjectivities, positionalities, and socialities that comprise the spectral and fluid nature of Queer. These aspects of Queer being, becoming, belonging, and acting in the world inform and energize a politics of hope and possibility that make Queer terrain a site of transgression and potential change in which social and cultural transformation are the primary composite goals. In our writing, we tend to capitalize Queer to respect the spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities it is considered to include in the ebb and flow of sex, sexual, and gender differences. As you engage in what we hope will be a troubling trek through these chapters, we invite you to interrogate Queer oppression and disenfranchisement, as well as the exclusionary systems and traditions that sustain them. More importantly though, in the spirit of Paulo Freire s (2004) politics and pedagogy of indignation, we invite you to be open to being angry. We want you to use your anger, as Freire did, as a motivation for taking a stand and working for change. We want you to believe and insist that change is possible for Queers so we are respected, recognized, accepted, and accommodated (Grace & Wells, 2007). With delight, we introduce you to the chapters in this book as you begin your learning journey to enhance the motivation to know.
