ABSTRACT
This chapter mobilises queer theory to enable HRD scholars and practitioners to move beyond treating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identities as binaried, bounded and stable categories. Specifically, this chapter draws on the work of Judith Butler to demonstrate how LGBT identities can be understood as performative, unbounded and susceptible to alteration, sometimes with subversive effects. This theoretical development is apposite within the human resource development (HRD) field because it has an impoverished history of recognising and addressing LGBT workplace issues, let alone studying the particulars of LGBT identities. Yet there is a growing consensus among a cabal of critical human resource development (CHRD) scholars that knowledge on LGBT identities must be advanced if HRD scholarship and practice is to become more inclusive. This chapter responds to this call using queer theory as a conceptual resource, in particular the deconstructive strategy of queering, informed by Butler’s work on the performativity of gender. This chapter reviews extant queer developments within CHRD scholarship before showing how Butler’s work can provide the conceptual tools for HRD scholars to queer LGBT identities in HRD theory and knowledge. The implications for developing future HRD practice queerly are outlined.
