Including Queer Theory in the academic curriculum

[PacificSpecific]

I teach on a course which has strong real-world relevance (our graduates often subsequently work in high profile positions with social influence). There have been calls to include Queer Theory in the curriculum (suspect many are proponents). Fine... but I would like to ensure this doesn't lead to too biased an approach. Anything we should include in addition, to help counter any possibility of unthinking blind faith in Queer Theory?
TIA

Some of the recommendations on New Discourses might help. James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghassian - I think they all look at the academic side of critical theory and queer theory (and find it wanting).

newdiscourses.com/tag/academics/

Thanks, @Sophoclesthefox - this is very helpful.

Also maybe including Enlightenment liberalism and discussing how debate and dissent and scietific consensus gradually bring about real social justice??

Also maybe the rise of poularism in the social media age, Cambridge analytica, mass manipulation tactics etc??

Thanks @Al77 and @SpartacusAutisticus.

It's an academic-vocational course (don't want to out it, but imagine something like a taught doctorate in human rights law... it's not that, but...). I won't be the one teaching it - they've requested we get an expert in to teach them how to incorporate queer theory into their practice...

There's a difference between being aware of the tenents/beliefs of Nihlism, Christianity, Marxism, etc., and becoming a proponent.

Which is being proposed; understanding or adoption?

Queer theory is postmodernism. It intentionally disrupts and destroys everything, perpetually replacing the established with something new, regardless of what actual value that newness brings.

You’d be bonkers to put it in the same sentence as anything to do with human rights law (or anything similar, since I know that was an almost-example).

Queer theory destroyed the Women’s Studies departments at universities and it’s ‘leaked into the real world version’ has made homophobia fashionable again (redefining gay people as ‘same gender attracted’).

Postmodernism has recently inspired academics to argue 2+2=5 on Twitter.

Queer theory is used to justify child sexual abuse through the idea of ‘Queer time’:

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230113558_5

Queer theory isn’t even to the benefit of LGBT people, it’s added heterosexual people to the acronym en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_heterosexuality
and has replaced transsexuals with NB/gender queer people, renaming transsexuals ‘truscum’ as it goes.

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.821.5306&rep=rep1&type=pdf

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3fterm=truscum&amp=true

Queer theory is a sense-sucking vampire.
For fucks sake, don’t invite it in.

What @bettydukeirabellamyhero said. So spot on.

Thanks AI. I’m a council estate lass who inexplicably ended up on an art degree at Goldsmiths College 20 years ago, so I was a real-time witness as this stuff leaked out of academia and created the quagmire of nonsensical shit that everyone and everything is now bogged down in. At first I thought I was too stupid, too poor, too comp educated to understand it, but now I realise there was nothing to understand, it’s just a middle class wank up a cul de sac. Judith Butler’s dead end for humanity.

Would suggest that what OPs students really want is just some specific LGB&T related stuff, and they’ve heard the term ‘Queer Theory’ and think that’s where to find it (spoiler: it isn’t. See above on ‘Queer Heterosexuality 🤣)

Much better to create some kind of LGB&T module based on material reality with robust data to back it all up, along with real-world problems and potential solutions (perhaps around negotiating rights clashes, with women’s rights and trans rights being a clash and LGB and religious freedom rights being another) than teach pretentious texts that actually result in LGB&T people having fewer rights than before and abuses of children being justified.

The destabilising influence of QT, ie the constant process of undermining normativity, creating new normals and then immediately undermining those, certainly has a place in the arts, but you really don’t want it in say, child protection law and safeguarding frameworks (or maths or medicine or engineering etc )

As an academic working in an area not unrelated to human rights law- there is a depressing amount of queer theory floating about.

I have a colleague who works on women's rights in international law: lots of important work on violence against women and girls in conflict situations for example. Hugely important stuff. She completely buys into queer theory (and the trans narrative). It's an extraordinary level of cognitive dissonance.

Teach it as a ‘what to watch out for’? The theories and arguments are 🤪

The problem is courses often bring in queer studies as:
a. an ethical imperative and
b. to appeal to a perceived market in young people and research.

The problem with a. is you are seen as unethical if you want to question it, subject it to critical thinking, test it against other academic/legal/theoretical ideas, consider its implications. Also the policies of the institution may indicate that to do any of these academic things would be an act of discrimination or some other harassment and contravention of an Equality, Inclusion, Diversity principle.

The problem with b. is it is market led on the basis of fashion, assumption, anxiety (and possibly the ideology of some of those teaching - on the basis that so much 'research' everywhere uses 'queering' as some sort of method). Then it acts as a sort of brainwashing by becoming a fixture of every course (courses without it look deficient or old fashioned). Then it wipes out feminism (because it says it is feminism) and erases any lesbian perspective and pretends that all gay studies are queer anyway.

Academics who do not buy into it will become like pariahs / silenced

If you can subject it to real critical academic rigour without assumption or prejudice brilliant. But few institutions / courses are able to do this. Institutions don't reliably protect academic freedom / rigour / method.

Remind them that the Tavistock clinic was steeped in the dogma of queer theory and how disastrously that turned out!

I agree u need to differentiate between someone coming in to inform or to implement within yr dept. Can you add critically assessing it's impact (e.g. Tavistock, feminism's concerns) if they go ahead.

Bearing in mind it risks turning into a destabilising monster once released....

Probably the best route is to start with actual materialist feminism (like the second sex, or some of the legal rulings around sex) then present the QT and let the comparison (Sensical, reality based analysis vs gobbledeguk) speak for itself... I find it’s helpful to use “some people think” and “others believe”.

For example as a biologist I do discuss sex obviously. I also talk about gender. I list the various things that people believe gender to be, and also emphasize that these definitions are fluid. In stark contrast with sex, which is defined in biology as the mechanism of gene exchange.

if you can subject it to real critical academic rigour without assumption or prejudice brilliant.

The entire point of Queer and Critical theories is that they are defined / created to be incapable of being subject to formal analysis. We’re then supposed to go “ohhh how deep”.

It’s best to just ignore, imo. You can’t use data to critique something if the idea of data itself is a western colonial construct meant to oppress indigenous people ~except indigenous Europeans those don’t actualy exist~

Humour is quite a good route. I know he's pre post-modernism, but when I had to study Foucault (can recommend Gary Gutting's Foucault's Archaelogy of Scientific Reasoning btw), I found Malcolm Bradbury's spoof Mensonge was brilliant at deflating the pomposity of it all.

It's in the style of one of the Fontana "Modern Master's series" - Mensonge ("little lie") is a postmodern philosopher, the crucial facet of whose existence is his possible non-existence, and whose main work, "La Fornication comme acte culturelle", was turned down by all the main French publishing houses and ended up being published by a minor Algerian imprint, printed on toilet paper. Once you've read it, it's impossible to read Foucault without taking a fit of the giggles (Candide similarly wrecks attempts to read Leibniz's Monadology.)

deal with it as you might any other theoretical perspective. point out that most people have underlying metaphysical and epistemological beliefs that inform how they approach ANY discipline.

Is it possible to take a real world example from your discipline (eg a legal problem in your fake human rights scenario) and get them to explore how you might approach it if you had a Queer perspective, a second wave feminist perspective, a QAnon perspective etc.?

Get them to explore the consequences of hidden assumptions

How you would frame the problem from those different perspectives, how you approach the issue of solving the problem
how the different perspectives would inform what you considered to be a just solution.

Might want to reference this?

Derrik Jensen's book was pulled from publiation last year, he says because he criticised queer theory:

dgrnewsservice.org/resistance-culture/movement-building/derrick-jensen-the-politics-of-violation/

Is it possible to take a real world example from your discipline (eg a legal problem in your fake human rights scenario) and get them to explore how you might approach it if you had a Queer perspective, a second wave feminist perspective, a QAnon perspective etc.?

I really like that idea Diane (as an aside, have you ever read "The Pooh Perplex"? It's a spoof of the type of study notes book of essays that has one essay from each school of lit crit - so it has a Marxist take on Pooh, a high-church Christian apologetics take on Pooh, a brilliant piss-take of Leavis... As you can probably tell I love parody.)