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Cluelessness and the Queer Classroom

Cluelessness and the Queer Classroom Donald E. Hall Near the beginning of Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff (2003: 5) writes, “Professors have been trained to think of [their students’] cluelessness as an uninteresting negative condition, a lack or a blank space to be filled in by superior knowledge.” His implication is that often arrogant and certainly consistently disengaged academics are, in fact, the truly clueless individuals in academe. Indeed, the book indicts many, if not all, of us in higher educa - tion today, who, Graff implies, still regularly shuffle into classrooms, lecture to students in inaccessible language, and then shuffle out with a few parting words of scorn for their ignorance. But how accurate is this diagnosis for those of us living, working, and teaching in the fields of identity politics and radical consciousness-raising? This symposium offers several responses, of course, but Graff ’s charge of rampant “obfuscation and exclusion” (11) misses the mark even for my graduate queer theory seminars, and it is wholly inap - plicable to my undergraduate composition classes, as they too are informed by a queer theoretical perspective. Indeed, in this essay, I will use the term queer classroom just as others might refer to the “feminist classroom.” http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Pedagogy Duke University Press

Cluelessness and the Queer Classroom

Hall, Donald E.
Pedagogy , Volume 7 (2) – Apr 1, 2007
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ISSN
1531-4200
eISSN
1533-6255
DOI
10.1215/15314200-2006-029
Publisher site
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Abstract

Donald E. Hall Near the beginning of Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff (2003: 5) writes, “Professors have been trained to think of [their students’] cluelessness as an uninteresting negative condition, a lack or a blank space to be filled in by superior knowledge.” His implication is that often arrogant and certainly consistently disengaged academics are, in fact, the truly clueless individuals in academe. Indeed, the book indicts many, if not all, of us in higher educa - tion today, who, Graff implies, still regularly shuffle into classrooms, lecture to students in inaccessible language, and then shuffle out with a few parting words of scorn for their ignorance. But how accurate is this diagnosis for those of us living, working, and teaching in the fields of identity politics and radical consciousness-raising? This symposium offers several responses, of course, but Graff ’s charge of rampant “obfuscation and exclusion” (11) misses the mark even for my graduate queer theory seminars, and it is wholly inap - plicable to my undergraduate composition classes, as they too are informed by a queer theoretical perspective. Indeed, in this essay, I will use the term queer classroom just as others might refer to the “feminist classroom.”

Journal

Pedagogy – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2007

References