ABSTRACT
Drawing on the work of Kevin Kumashiro, this chapter sets its sights on exploring ‘queer’ as a concept that remains problematic in social work education and practice. Queer theories are not highlighted. Queer ways of knowing and seeing are not identified. Students who identify as queer often do not feel safe, and service users who identify as queer are frequently problematised by mainstream social work. Queering social work aims to unhinge queer from limiting notions of understanding, working with and cultural competence, to look at how queer theory can be used to critique discourses, not just about gender and sexuality but about structural inequality and the construction of norms. Kumashiro identifies and critiques four approaches to anti-oppressive education and the ways in which they are either complicit in perpetuating normalising knowledges and practices, or create spaces for disrupting these normalising knowledges and practices. Kumashiro argues that the notion of queer is inherently uncomfortable. He argues that anti-oppressive teaching disrupts comforting knowledge, however this process can be uncomfortable for both students and educators, and therefore it is often avoided. For social work educators, Kumashiro provides pathways toward a queer approach to education that reminds us never to stop asking what is problematic with the norm, addressing the resistance, the discomfort and our own uncertainty.
