Queering Center: A Critical Discourse Analysis of University LGBT Center Theoretical Foundations

Jen M Self
2015 Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis  
The purpose of the present study was to examine the framing discourse of theorization and practice surrounding university-based Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) resource centers. Building on interdisciplinary work by critical feminist, race, and queer scholars in sociology, social work, education, and political science, this study proposed a vital shift from identity politics (Combahee River Collective, 1977) and multicultural (Jay, 1994; Ward, 2008) theorizing and practice
more » ... rks to praxis grounded in intersectional understandings of identity and resistance to interlocking systems of oppression (Razack, 1999) which (re)produce logics of dominance such as racism, gender binaries, and sexism. Supporting this conclusion was my critical discourse analysis of three texts, considered by practitioners to be the "canon" of theorization and conceptualization of campus-based centers. The three unique texts, the only ones published prior to 2011, to prescriptively advise center development and programming, were discursively analyzed through a critical queer feminist lens critiquing the constructs of essentialized identity politics and multiculturalism. The textual analysis indicated that the three texts drew heavily upon the discourses of essentialized identity politics and multiculturalism, and in doing reified homonormative white regulating systems. While making no claims that the three manuscripts represented the entirety of theoretical discourse framing LGBT center development, sparse center scholarship and this study's argument in combination with scholarly critiques of both identity political and multicultural frameworks, asserts a strong claim for reconceptualizing the project of campus centers through a critical, intersectional lens based in the dismantling of interconnected systems of oppression. cognizant that LGBT spaces within public education (across the P-20 continuum) tended to reinforce racial, gender, class, and sexual sociopolitical norms. From a critical queer feminist perspective, I appreciated that my ascriptive 3 and subjective identities as a queer, genderqueer, middle-class, white, non-indigenous U.S. citizen, with access to higher education, positioned me as an institutional player who embodied transgression of gender, sexual, and psychological cultural norms as well as one who replicated whiteness, middle class status, and educational privilege. I recognized that without engaging a comprehensive, reflexive and liberatory praxis of planning and developing a center, I could create a space that catered to a homonormative (e.g., white, middle class, cisgender male, and monosexual) student population; this was an untenable and unacceptable outcome. Roderick A. Ferguson (2005) argued in Race-ing homonormativity: Citizenship, sociology, and gay identity, that the rearticulation of homosexuality as cultural difference in the late 20 th century, transpired through homonormative notions, constructing homosexuality as white, middle class, and adhering to naturalized gender roles not inclusive of people of color and the working class. Consequently, white homonormativity racial formations exclude and regulate communities marginalized by other notions of normativity, regulations that are racialized, classed, and gendered. I was uninterested in creating that kind of center. Years of anti-racist/oppression (un)learning and training, building personal relationships, working within systems (higher education, criminal justice, and medical) which methodically abused, minoritized, and privileged according to one's ascribed positionalities and experiences of both personal and cultural grief fueled my intent to create a space and programming that centered the experiences of the most marginalized people within our queer communities, deconstructed the director's (my) sets of privileged identifications, and interrogated practices which reproduced white homonormativity. However, when I sought scholarly resources to assist in the endeavor, I 3 Identities that come about based upon the ways in which humans must situate ourselves in relations to power; how humans are ascribed to categories and naturalized into power relationships with sociopolitical forces and the physical world (Moya, 2006) .
doi:10.31274/jctp-180810-48 fatcat:vn675udp5rgsflyvaghulxau2m