Presentation by: Matthew Isherwood
Session: Session A| Time: 9:00AM-9:20AM | Location: Room 208
This presentation considers how Jose Munoz’s (2009) concept of Queerness as Horizon might be used to inform an aesthetic sensibility attuned to queer ways of perceiving and attending “to what is given in the moment of the encounter” (O’Donoghue, 2018, p. 60). Such encounters are considered broadly, including works of art and sites and everyday aesthetic experience (Duncum, 1999). This approach is heavily influenced by the work of Maxine Greene (1995, 2001) and her invitation to apprehend the world through the cultivation of imaginative and connective thought. Such an approach to aesthetic encounters invites the viewer to think otherwise about an issue or topic with which the viewer might already feel familiar, to cultivate a queer sensibility that is constantly on the move. In this way, the presentation proposes that the cultivation of a queer aesthetic sensibility can help teachers and students to become curious participants in the world, enabling them “to challenge the fixed and taken for granted, … open windows in the actual and disclose visions of what might be” (Greene, 2001, p. 110).
The presentation unfolds by discussing how such a queer aesthetic practice helps question and reshape individual and collective identities by “enabling people to realize their imaginations, to ponder alternative ways of being alive in a world with others, to attend differently to what surrounds us” (Greene, 2001, p. 170). The presentation will use various aesthetic sources to discuss the development of a queer aesthetic sensibility in relation to the researcher’s experiences as a same-sex parent. It will demonstrate a kind of commitment to being in the world that animates a sense of personal agency and the pursuit of new possibilities. The kind of meaning this orientation to the world promotes seeks to “expose society’s inherent contradictions” and “offer complexity, ambivalence, and, at times, aggressive confrontations with the status quo” (Becker, 2002, p. 17).
This approach to aesthetics has important implications for educational practices that seek to promote the development of identity and issues of social justice by opening “up alternative ways to contemplate art, education, and queerness” (Greteman, 2017, p. 203).