Identity Politics, Identity and Politics

“a concern with identity underwrites numerous contemporary troubling issues, and those
troubles are often framed in terms of identities considered good or bad, healthy or abnormal,
right or wrong” (p. 160)
“categories of identity cannot sum us up as persons, those categories work as contexts and
constraints on the kinds of identities and identifications we make. In this context, it is
important to note that the categories themselves do not exist as neutral entities from which
various forms of inequality flow: rather, the categories themselves are produced in relations
of privilege and inequality.” (160)

we need to analyze the history and politics involved in the making of identities (and
distinctions between identities) rather than simply considering the effects that flow from
people belonging to identity categories (161)

Nira Yuval-Davis argues that what defines identity politics is that it is one ‘specific type of
project of the politics of belonging’ (Yuval-Davis, 2010: 266). That is, it is a project that is
based on belonging to one (or more) group(s) and not to others. (163)

If to be misrecognized is to be denied the status of full actors in demands for justice, then
misrecognized groups are unlikely to be heard when they make their own demands for both
recognition and redistribution (166)

I think it is fair to say that all forms of identity politics rely on ideas of injustice (towards the
group) and on a politics to end that injustice – what we might call emancipation – in the terms
defined by the group. (169)

Is there a queer pedagogy?

“the absence of gay and lesbian theorizing in education is set in tension with crucial cultural
and historical changes that concern the constitution of bodies of knowledge and knowledge
of bodies” 212

“To work within the terms of gay and lesbian theories, then, allows for the consideration of
two kinds of pedagogical stakes. One has to do with thinking ethically about what discourses
of difference, choice, and visibility mean in classrooms, in pedagogy and in how education
can be thought about. Another has to do with thinking through structures of disavowal within
education, or the refusals-whether curricular, social or pedagogical- to engage a traumatic
perception that produces the subject of difference as a disruption, as the outside of normalcy”
212-213
“the possibility of articulating pedagogies that call into question the conceptual geography
of normalization (…) require something larger than acknowledgement of gay and lesbian
subjects in educational studies. At the very least, what is required is an ethical project that
begins to engage difference as the grounds of politicality and community” 123

“in thinking beyond the limits of curriculum, more is required than a plea to add marginalized
voices to an overpopulated site” 219

“When gay and lesbian subjects are reduced To the problem of remedying homophobia, a
conceptualization that stalls within a humanist psychological discourse of the individual fear
of homosexuality as abject contagion abd shuts out an examination of how the term
homophobia as a discourse centers heterosexuality as the normal” 219

“Inclusive government campaigns of information actually work to produce the basis of

exclusion, discrimination, social policy and moral panic” 221

“There are no innocent, normal, or unmediated readings and that the representations drawn
upon to maintain a narrative or a self as normal, as deviant, as thinkable are social effects of
how discourses of normalization are lived and refused” 226

“these identifications I take as the beginning of a queer pedagogy, one that refuses normal
practices and practices of normalcy, one that begins with an ethical concern for one's own
reading practices, one that is interested in exploring what one cannot bear to know, and one
interested in the imagining of a sociality unhinged from the dominant conceptual order” 227
Su discurso apunta contra la hegemonía heterosexual y cisgénero, al ser un espacio pedagógico que
sólo acepta como estudiantes a personas no-heterosexuales, poniendo énfasis especial en personas
no cisgénero.