Chapter 3: Disturbing Identities and Messy Entanglements: Teaching Queer Theory in the American South

This chapter will explore the use of queer pedagogy to teach a class simply entitled “Queer Theory” through the English and Women’s Studies Departments at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. The composition habits of students in the class reveal the enactive potential of affective transmissions among students and instructors, engaging various queer subjectivities and the possibilities of queer epistemologies to actualize a new relation between theory and sexuality that disrupts reductive identity categories. To concretize the experiential dimension of this approach, this chapter traverses the personal testimonials of students as they work through such material, marking the engaged, affective, visceral force of writing on the journey of self-fashioning in a regressive, conservative, homophobic culture.