ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 49
We’re seeing so much of the violence in society originating in colonized teaching and reinforcing false
binaries, in particular the gender binary. We are all wounded by gender-based violence. Violence upon
the earth is part of that. To soften that binary is a sign and symptom of healing. Already the healing is
happening. We will heal as that gender softens and violence softens and changes.
As we heal by reclaiming our erotic power, which is being fully and wholly alive, we can hold more and
more complexity.
Truly, my love affair with the brilliance of queerness is as expansive as the thing itself.
It’s an identity. A strategy for surviving. An aesthetic. An orientation. A posture. A feeling.
A mood. A politic. A Fuck You. A Yes Please. A fashion. A scene. A community. A critique.
A ritual. A demand. A future. Some days queerness is hope itself.
And yes, it’s a pedagogy.7
Not pedagogy as we’ve come to know it through our experiences of education in systems
inherited from Empire – a study of how teaching can discipline, assimilate, master, control
– but pedagogy as a passion for learning as unlearning, This is a pedagogy that wants to
know in whose bodies, in what context; that already knows we become, unbecome and
transform anew through knowledge and skills, yes, but also through desire
and power. A queer pedagogy not only seeks “other ways of
knowing, doing, becoming and relating;” it produces knowledge
from the cracks of being othered from “normal”
embodiment… Queer Pedagogy does more than elevate
the knowledge of a community unde erasure – it
celebrates the erotic as a primary
organizing principle of life,
and seeks the
wisdom of bodies
that resist being
disciplined,
assimilated,
mastered or
controlled… Where
masculine and
feminine are
taught as mutually
exclusive, when
death feels antithetical to life and
nothing seems to escape division, queerness embraces totality –
holding the whole that was split by too-narrow perceptions of duality
and premised upon misconceived separability.
—Kate
7 https://ecoversities.org/queerness-taught-me-that-an-open-letter-to-the-radical-educators-of-the-ecoverse-and-beyond/
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