ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of queer theory and its problematics, and offers some provocations as to how these evolving theories might be applied to the field of higher education studies – especially in relation to structures of inequality and regimes of truth such as academic feminism, racism and decolonisation, sex/gender debates, and social class analysis. Queer is treated as a noun, a verb, and an adjective, and decentralises and deconstructs understandings of power while aiming for an intersectional analysis of oppression. It is argued that queer theory, while protean and quixotic, is about transgression, difference, and defiance of stigma-centric social marginality. As the resignification of injurious speech, it performs as the appropriation, subversion, recuperation, resourcing, and re-casting of a term of abuse for homosexuality to a site of critical affirmation, exemplifying and subverting the regulatory effects of name-calling. Queer and theory meet to offer a generative and abrasive critique of normativity, interrupting processes of normalisation. Overarching questions rehearsed in this chapter include how might normativities, archaic binaries, policy dichotomies, and intellectual certainties be rendered less secure? How to disorder the order and resist and dismantle normative logics rather than carve out a minority space for marginalised communities within the heterocentricity of the dominant neoliberal university.
