Moving from the Back to the Front of the Classroom:
Queer Pedagogy in Law
Kim Brooks (Queen's University Faculty of Law)
Debra Parkes (University of Manitoba Faculty of Law)
"The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of
possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor
for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind
and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine
ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the
practice of freedom."
-bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
We intend two meanings in choosing our proposed title. First, as recent graduates of LL.B. and then LL.M. programs, and recent appointees to Canadian law faculties, we intend to draw in our paper on our experiences of "queer pedagogy"¹ while moving, at least symbolically, from the back to the front of the classroom. Second, the paper raises questions about whether and how a queer pedagogy might operate as a situs of resistance both in the classroom, but also (possibly) by extension in the practice of law.
Other panelists' proposals note the effect of queer theory on legal education and law, either directly or by implication. It would be difficult in most law schools in North America today to graduate without hearing the words "gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer " in at least one class. In some schools, there might be an entire component of a course devoted to queer theory or queers in law! A few schools even offer a law and sexuality course. Similar recognition gains have been made in law (at least in Canada). For example, the federal government and many of the provinces have made some attempt at recognizing gay and lesbian relationships as legitimate, as discussed in the paper proposal submitted by Claire Young and Susan Boyd.
But can we do better?
Borrowing from the work on pedagogy undertaken by queer and feminist legal academics, as well as by theorists in other disciplines such as economics, we hope to raise questions about how queer theory, broadly understood, can assist in developing legal education that resists assimilation. In writing and presenting the paper itself, we hope to examine and employ some of the pedagogical methods and theories advanced in the literature on critical pedagogy surveyed, in an effort to shed light on their possibilities and challenges. We also suggest that by imagining ways to move beyond the boundaries of inclusion alone in legal education, we may go at least some way toward transforming law itself.
¹ We use this term to include teaching and learning by, for, and about people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer (collectively described here as "queer"). The term "queer (legal) theory" is used in a similarly expansive way to describe scholarship that seeks to address and theorize the experience of queers in society and in relation to law, rather than in the sense the term is sometimes employed, to describe a specific post-modern or post-structuralist account of the production of gender and sexual identity.