Queer Studies and Education

Book excerpt: Queer Studies and Education: An International Reader explores how the category queer, as a critical stance or set of perspectives, contributes to opportunities individually and collectively for advancing (queer) social justice within the context and concerns of schooling and education. The collection takes up this general goal by presenting a cross-section of international perspectives on queer studies in education to demonstrate commonalities, differences, uncertainties, or pluralities across a diverse range of national contexts and topics, drawing a heightened awareness of heterodominance and heteropatriarchy, and to conceptualize non-normative and non-essentialist imaginings for more inclusive educational environments. Collectively, the chapters critically engage with heteronormativity and normativity more generally as a political spectrum, over a broad range of formal and informal sites of education, and against a backdrop of critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism as the frameworks through which "achievable" social change and belonging are fostered, particularly within educational settings. Taken together, the chapters assembled in Queer Studies and Education invite researchers, scholars, educators, activists, and other cultural workers to examine the multiplicity of contemporary (international) work in queer studies and education with readers' interpretations of queer's deployment across the chapters forming the compass for which to arrive at fresh insights and forms of (queer) critical praxis.