December 22, 2005
Kumashiro, Kevin. Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002.
Kumashiro’s book works to formulate a pragmatic and theoretically sound antioppressive pedagogy. To this end, the book describes “four primary approaches to antioppressive education suggested by the current field of research” and, going beyond these frameworks, it also explores “insights and changes made possible by some of the theories and stories that are traditionally marginalized in educational research” (9). Thus, Kumashiro analyzes feminist, critical, multicultural, and queer theoretical perspectives and notes that all four perspectives collectively gesture towards “four ways to conceptualize and work against oppression: education for the Other, education about the Other, education that is critical of privileging and Othering, and education that changes students and society” (30). Reading the first three approaches through poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, Kumashiro notes the value of such frameworks and yet advocates a broader conceptualization of “the dynamics of oppression, the processes of teaching and learning, and even the purposes of schooling” (32).
Conceptualizing oppression more broadly outside the four given approaches leads Kumashiro to consider the stories of “queer activists working against multiple forms of oppression” (9). In the book, Kumashiro defines “queer” as, on the one hand, “gay, lesbian, bisexual, two-spirited,…transgendered, intersexed,…questioning, or in other ways different because of one’s sexual identity of sexual orientation,” and on the other, “in the broader sense of nonnormative” (10). This second definition allows Kumashiro to choose his activist participants on the basis of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and age diversity. Kumashiro’s aim in this diverse compilation was to “always look beyond what I expected and look for perspectives that my own perspectives and assumptions may close off”—to queer the sexual orientation/gender limits of queerness itself, in other words (14).
Troubling Education is organized to highlight its dedication to nonnormative praxis: by juxtaposing “insights from educational research on antioppressive education with stories of queer activists,” Kumashiro examines multiple approaches to combating the multiple oppressions within schools (23). Thus, the five chapters of the book alternate between theoretical analysis and more experimental activist testimonials, and each chapter is followed by a short vignette in the form of an interview between the author and an antioppressive educator. The point of the vignettes is to further trouble the analytical conclusions worked towards within the chapters: the final message of the book is “an insistence that this work never be concluded,” and that antioppressive research and practice continue to work with and against itself to help combat constantly shifting and always multiple educational oppressions.