Queer Hermeneutics for an Unbound Temporality: Schools as Passageway

Queer theorists have posited that normativity is involved in a spatial practice. American society has taken great care to assign different levels of value to different identities as well as to the time and space they inhabit. Inequitable structures of power have produced an enormous inequality in the United States, and the American public education system provides sustenance to this social system through a particular method of socializing children into positions of domination and subordination. This thesis attempts to approach these issues from a unique perspective. A queer temporality offers a hopeful alternative in the other. The aim of a queer time and space project is to reject normativity and rescind the power of capital through the centering of bodily subjectivity as the source of individual and collective ambition. In a queer temporality, capital is misplaced, the bodily experience is affirmed, and individuals are free to follow their ambition unhampered by social expectations and normative definitions of success. In order to arrive at this alternative reality, this thesis suggests that schools begin the paradigmatic shift through inclusive practices that create intentional classroom and school communities and through teaching the conflict that manifests in so many forms of oppression. From this will spring a more unbound, limitless framework for individual and collective action and growth.