Dilution

Reading That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Mattilda, as I'm teaching it next semester, and wondering about the amenability of throwing a book like this at undergrads with relatively middling investments in political action, direct, circuitous, policy-level, or otherwise. I've got this tendency (read: urge) to introduce them to radical critiques of certain 'hot topics' either prior to or concomitant with more doctrinal lines of argumentation, on account of a set of hopes that run something like this: through presenting a line of critique and political intervention that runs counter to a logic of slow, incremental political 'adjustment' I'll encourage, or at the very least provide a fleeting space for, a kind of political engagement at once strangely discomfiting and rife with potential -- the pedagogical impulse, here, is one of estrangement and defamiliarization, throwing students outside of themselves, opening up a space for the recognition of other lives they've difficulty imagining -- with the hope that an earnest, critical discussion of a set of tactics and ideological bents so seemingly beyond the pale will prompt something more than either an out-of-hand dismissal or a kind of underinformed radical posturing.

Insecurity: teaching this text, in this context, particularly through an assumed lens re: the unfamiliarity of students with radical queer critique, runs the risk of positing an insider/outsider dynamic that I'm profoundly uncomfortable with, but unsure how to translate.

Immediate Impulse: to search for ways to make arguments regarding, say, the interconnection of draconian immigration policies and the sanctification of gay marraige intelligible, on an immediate level -- which leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, as I tend, more often than not, to rely on quick, confusing glosses and reductive simplifications based on the conjecture of alternate, possible lives -- i.e. the rhetoric of "say, you were in such-and-such situation" -- which encourages a kind of fantasy recognition ("oh, let's imagine me in such-and-such situation") which makes all too easy a comfortable denial of complicity. How to argue for careful, critical allyship without alienating a classroom?