ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, queering human-centrism theory has been productively deployed by educational scholars to ‘trouble’ (Butler, 1990) the binary categories of gender and sexuality and expose their political effects (Robinson, 2013); to reveal how heteronormative gender performances regulate the identities of children and young people in school settings (Blaise, 2005, 2010; Rasmussen, 2006; Renold, 2005; Silin, 1995; Taylor & Richardson, 2005); and to use queer discursive strategies to expose the heteronormative assumptions embedded in school texts, structures, practices and curricula (DePalma & Atkinson, 2009). Most of these queer interventions set out to expose and challenge heteronormativity’s effects upon young people’s lives. In this paper, we set out to expose and challenge the effects of another pervasive form
of normativity that is endemic within western education. This is the normativity of anthropocentrism, or anthroponormativity, as Alice Kuzniar (2006) calls it – the normalized fixation upon exclusively human concerns, agency and exceptionalism that is the trademark of humanist knowledge traditions (Giffney & Hird, 2008). In the early years of education, which is our field of scholarship, anthroponormativity, or the normalization of human-centrism, is notably expressed in ‘child-centred’ pedagogies and the accompanying normalization of the (paradoxically universal) individual child and their
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF QUEER THEORY IN EDUCATION RESEARCH
‘natural’ development towards becoming rational and exercising autonomous agency. This fits within our broader project of de-centring the child by offering a collectivist understanding of childhoods as always situated within heterogeneous common worlds (Common World Childhoods Research Collective, 2014; Taylor, 2013a; Taylor & Giugni, 2012) and entangled with all manner of more-than-human others (Blaise, 2013; Taylor, 2013b; Taylor, Blaise, & Giugni, 2013).
