ABSTRACT
Significantly, the queer reparations that I gesture towards in this paper are not confined to ‘homosexuals’ – that category is privileged in my discussion because it is the category that is used in the archival fragments discussed below, a key sign under which state opposition to sexual and gender insubordination organised itself in the historical period in question. Queer reparations are of significance to a wider array of subjects than ‘homosexual’ designates; indeed, I am suggesting that as it has not only been the sexual and gender rejects who have been disciplined by the punishment of such insubordination, but all sexual and gendered subjects, then all subjects are proper parties, in the end, to the queer reparative project. Relatedly, my emphasis on experiences of loss and damage throughout this article should not be read as obscuring histories of resistance, subversion, agency, acceptance and passing; of capitulating, in short, to some kind of historical metanarrative of the homosexual as always-already victim. Clearly, as David Halperin and others remind us, education has always been a queer profession (Halperin, 2002). I, along with many others, have critiqued the emphasis on victimhood in contemporary studies of queer youth and queer studies of schooling. As has been made clear by many scholars, part of the limit of such a focus is its depoliticisation of sexuality, domesticating concerns by bending them in therapeutic directions.3 Oddly, this therapeutic turn is often sustained by an amnesia relating to the historical losses and injuries that I will be discussing in this paper, which is why I believe it is timely to press them back into the centre of our critical frame, at least for the time being.
