ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on queer theories to outline ways teachers can cultivate queer reading practices as part of students’ literary analysis repertoires. Queer theories generally understand gender and sexuality as socially constructed categories, focusing on the production of “normal” identities and the possibilities for fluid movement across categories or the suspension of such categories. Queer reading practices would then focus on ways that students and teachers can question genders and sexualities in and through a literary text and explore their own assumptions about (reading) these identities. While any text could be interpreted through such a lens, this chapter focuses on Brezenoff’s young adult novel Brooklyn, Burning, a text that foregrounds queer ideologies and thus serves as an accessible entry point for learning this lens. The novel uses first- and second-person points of view to represent the lives of Kid and Scout, two young people who live on the streets of Brooklyn, New York. The effect of this narrative technique is that the gender and sexual identities of Kid and Scout are ambiguous. Teachers can leverage the novel’s queer elements to help develop students’ queer reading practices, focusing on ways to question the text’s representation of characters and gender.
