Will Brehm  0:13
Louise Morley and Daniel Leyton, welcome to FreshEd.

Louise Morley  1:16
We’re delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting us, Will.

Daniel Leyton  1:19
Thank you very much.

Will Brehm  1:20
It’s my pleasure. And congratulations on your book. It’s just fantastic. It’s very unique. I haven’t really seen much work on issues around queer theory and higher education. So, congratulations. I guess the starting point in a conversation like this is to kind of go big and sort of say, what is queer theory? Assuming that there might be some listeners out there who might never have heard of that term? How do we sort of explain it in a simple way? What is queer theory?

Louise Morley  1:46
That’s a very good question Will, thank you. Well, queer theory attempts to destabilize, disrupt, and deconstruct norms, binaries, boundaries and understandings of power. It’s used a lot to really signify injurious or hate speech. It recasts abuse and objection as affirmation. But we’re very clear that our book is not just about identity and sexual orientation; the hetero-homo divide. We use queer as a verb, a noun, and an adjective, and we relate it to theory, practice, action, resistance and critical edge. What we’ve attempted to do is to theorize exclusion, objection, and marginalization from multiple vantage points of knowledge. And one thing that’s really important about queer theory is that it’s attentive to the structural and affective processes of exclusion and marginalization.

Will Brehm  2:46
I guess a follow up question would be something around studying issues of transgressions in a way, and how queer theory might do that slightly differently than maybe some of the other ways that people in the academic space have studied transgressions?

Daniel Leyton  3:01
Well, you’re right. We have used queer theory to analyze what we call kind of global dominant movements, so often embraced in higher education and by higher education stakeholders like internationalization, digitalization, leadership, or affirmative action, or widening participation policies. First of all, I might say that these are global movements because they have expanded across higher education worldwide through discourses, policies and practices, and networks of power beyond the national and they promote different contested figures of subjectivity, or subjects, or ways of being. The entrepreneur, the global academic, the exceptional minority, etc. But looking at those global movements queer theory is not just about transgression, the normal or the givens in higher education but about searching in borders for marginalized experiences which are produced by and within these processes. We search through these margins, through these borders, ways of life, relations, and knowledges that open opportunities not just for imagining a different world but also for making in practice new ways of thinking about higher education, new ways of social relations within higher education and knowledge relationship, those social relationships and new ways of thinking about higher education, we are trying to identify within those the potential to show that the present effect of things are not necessary, or are not inexorable. So, that might be the main difference between query theory and other type of theories about transgression.

Will Brehm  4:36
It’s quite fascinating to think about how we might queer the university in different ways and thinking of that as a verb, a noun, an adjective. I love sort of that splitting it around those different ways of thinking about the term queer itself. But I guess before we do that, we need to sort of understand the state of the university and higher education itself, right? Like why does that institution need to be queered, so to speak? What are some of these dichotomies that exist? What are some of these binaries that you see that need to then be queered?

Louise Morley  5:09
There has been other pieces of research that have been conducted, say on LGBTQ+ students, staff, et cetera, and all the issues of oppression, marginalization, exclusion. Our book is the first to apply queer theory to higher education in terms of policy structures rather than just identity politics. And one of the things that we’ve noticed over the decades is that many of the interventions that have been politically and strategically designed to shift exclusionary norms, they can often reproduce them. So, for example, there’s a global movement in counting more underrepresented groups into higher education, it’s called widening participation in Britain, in Chile, its affirmative action, etc. But it works with a policy dichotomy about class. It incorporates a highly stratified, a very certain, a very rarefied social class system. And Daniel and I have worked on this topic all around the world in different continents and there’s a construction of working-class students that draws on a kind of theory of abjection, lack, deficit, etc., and then measured against a middle-class norm. And the same would apply to the global movement around women in leadership, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later. There’s a very central binary in that between women and men. It’s a quantitative goal to count more women into leadership positions. The same with the science, with STEM. And what it doesn’t do is particularly deconstruct the term woman and makes a lot of assumptions about norms, and how women’s lifestyle. Were also very conscious that policy often overlooks affect. It’s often presented in a quite linear, rational projectory. And what we have tried to do is highlight the affective economy of striving for value in a policy context, that it tangles exclusion with shame and failure. So, if you’re excluded, you are a loser. And in order to counter that, you have to be included to become a winner. And there’s a very powerful dichotomy of winners and losers in higher education or success and failure. One of the issues about queer ontology and epistemology is that it attempts to render the normal, unfamiliar, strange and unstable. So, in a sense, what we’ve tried to do is when we queer these dichotomies, is to get some kind of meta level analysis. And we invoke queer theory not because it provides another set of certainties to grid onto the policy turbulence of higher education, but because it dismantles the seemingly untouchable linear certainty itself.

Daniel Leyton  8:18
So, applying queer theory, in this way, we are calling attention also about why an institution such as university, that it seems that resembles itself contributing to the public good in general, in order to do that needs to exclude or put at the margins all those subjectivity or people who do not conform with the norm these boundaries are creating all the time. So, in a way we feel we can show and call attention to why the university plays a role in making exclusions, hierarchies, and ignorance. Or in the ways for example, exclude all the different ways of seeing the wall of knowledges that are constructed by the university as an institution as not scientific, biased, not rational, or not neutral enough. So, I think that is important. And knowing those norms that are reproduced by these boundaries, we have seen in our book, and we showed in our book that they are insistently involved and reinforced by the very same discourses and practices of global higher education.

Will Brehm  9:29
If I understand this correctly, then the proposition in the sense is that queer theory can sort of illuminate and destabilize a lot of these norms that often are taken for granted, aren’t questioned, reproduced unconsciously, and of course, have certain power dynamics, etc., that play out. But you’re also sort of saying that queer theory destabilizes but it isn’t sort of offering an alternative that then sort of gets operationalized and becomes concrete and sort of also has certain sort of power dynamics. So, I guess in a sense, the question, in a way is something around to what end is queer theory work? Is it simply destabilizing or is there another step that it’s also working towards?

Daniel Leyton  10:12
I would say it is not just destabilizing. An important ethos of queer theory is rejecting the here and now, rejecting the oppression. But in order to show that there are other ways of thinking and feeling and doing, in this case, higher education. And those ways are precisely within the borders that are created with the practice of exclusion. Those borders, from a queer theory angle, have the potential to create new worlds and new lives. In this way, for example, when we think about all the exclusionary practices of higher education, with queer theory, we think that it is not just about carving out a new space for new constituencies in higher education, but it is more about challenging and questioning the norms that are not questioned when you just keep open the space of higher education, but in order to integrate new constituencies within the same rigid norms and binaries that are devaluing those experiences and biographies. So, for example, when we think about notions of success or meritocracy, very deeply engaged in higher education values, even within ourselves as academics, right, we believe in those values all the time. But success and meritocracy gloss over, in ways in which they are complicit with exclusion, negative aspects such as shame, failure, stability, self responsibilization and belonging. So, in a way, by showing those negative affects attached to bodies, through those values of higher education, success and meritocracy, we can start rethinking again how and why we can value those borders made by those affects in a way trying to identify, what are the potentialities that those ways of feeling and thinking might bring into the table to reimagine again, another world of knowledge in this case.

Louise Morley  12:12
We tried to make it very clear that we are not offering a simple exchange of one set of certainties for another. What we’re trying to do is to encourage people involved in higher education policy, practice, process to think differently.

Will Brehm  12:29
Let’s pick up that thinking differently around what you brought up earlier, Louise, around women in leadership positions in university about gender equality as a norm and a discourse that exists in higher education. What would queer theory reveal from such a norm that is quite commonplace?

Louise Morley  12:50
Okay. Well, we’ve attempted to deconstruct the term women, and we’ve highlighted the heteronormative discursive regime that informs global narratives to increase women’s representation. And I’ve been involved in this area for quite a while and work from different continents. And there are themes that dominate this whole area. Women are variably represented in terms of being sis heterosexual, the category woman is often immediately equated with being a mother, women are presented as being in intimate partnerships with men, there are a lot of data about who does the childcare, et cetera, whose career is impeded by childcare. And the nuclear family is the dominant model for discussing this. And one of the explanations that you get in so many different national locations, is that women are impeded from seniority by all their domestic and childcare responsibilities. So, there’s all kinds of assumptions about women’s lifestyles here. There’s also this notion that women somehow lack self-esteem and value and worth, in relation to all these powerful men who surround them. Therefore, women has to be individually empowered, they have to have their confidence raised, etc. And again, it’s this binary that women are constantly being compared to men, but they’re being compared in a very negative way, or in a very essentialized way. So, for example, the studies will say that women have better communication skills and better interpersonal skills, women have more empathy in the workplace, etc. These are all highly, highly generalized and essentialized. And often if women do have those, it’s because they’ve been profoundly socialized into caring and thinking about the other, but that could be an archaic stereotype. We’ve lived with neoliberalism for several decades now, and women have been socialized to be very individualistic in a way that would challenge that notion that women are all benign, and men are all very self-motivated and self-focused. This is an area that has troubled us for quite a while. There’s also a big silence around masculinities in this. The women tend to be the object of inquiry, we have to work on the women, work with the women. There’s very little discussion in the women in leadership theorizations about leadership itself. And what we’ve tried to do is to queer leadership and demonstrate that it’s a constructive disruption which has restorative, affirmative, and bridging effect through the strategic articulation of seemingly opposite desires, actions connecting and disrupting. So, leadership is often presented as an unquestioned good and all we need to do is count more women into it. But so much of the research that we’ve conducted in South Asia, for example, it demonstrates that a lot of women are rejecting seats in the leadership. It has too many cultural associations and policy ventriloquism, they feel that they will just be required to implement policies they don’t necessarily support. The other big issue is that heteronormativity is the unmarked norm and primary mode of citation embedded in the gender and leadership scholarship. There’s very little very, very little work on the LGBT leadership, trans leadership, et cetera. It is beginning but it’s still very much at the margins. The mainstream debate constructs women in a particular way. There’s the notion that leadership is intrinsically a good thing, and we have to count more women into it. And there’s very little about other structures of inequality. And in our work, we’ve looked at chrononormativity, which, as you know, is all about age and what is seen as age appropriate. And this is a dominant discourse in any thinking about career progression. There’s this notion that you should be at certain stages at certain points in your life, and those are age appropriate, age related. And there’s a whole set of norms embedded in that thinking that we have tried to trouble.

Will Brehm  17:27
It’s such a good insight and a good example of queer theory and sort of applying it to some of these norms as we’ve been talking about. As I was listening, I kept thinking that a lot of what you’re saying would apply to institutions beyond higher education, most likely. It’s not just higher education in a way. I guess, to turn to higher education more specifically, one of the things that struck me in your book is that you write how COVID-19 quote, profoundly queered higher education. How did COVID-19 do that in your opinion?

Louise Morley  18:00
Yes, excellent question. Well, the COVID-19 pandemic was a non-human force that disrupted higher education globally. And higher education – that very, very dominant and prominent institution – entered into survival mode. But I think what we were interested in was what it surfaced. The norms that it surfaced. And the pandemic seemed to legitimate austerity, purging, reshaping, precarity. So, whose lives mattered, whose employment rights mattered, whose safety was protected, etc. And it very much challenged the notion of higher education being a safe, privileged space. It highlighted vulnerabilities, strength, inequalities in processes, practices, relationships, and infrastructures in higher education. And some institutions used the pandemic to immediately cut contracts, make people redundant, etc. So, another part about the pandemic was how it massively disrupted mobility. Higher education is all about the good life. You engage in it, you engage with the life of the mind, and you have all the benefits of cosmopolitanism, credentialization, higher income, social network, think employability. All of these goods that are attached to participation in higher education, they were somehow suddenly very queered by the introduction of new and unforeseen bodily fragilities and vulnerabilities. And we’ve used the concept of necropolitics to explore those whose lives are of value. And remember that the pandemic coincided with other global movements like Black Lives Matter. So, the pandemic surfaced and exposed a lot of inequalities and hierarchy. But it also exposed heteronormativity in policies around lockdown in the UK, for example. There was a profoundly heteronormative construction of the household. It was based very much on a nuclear family, and particular intimate relationships. The pandemic also breached boundaries about home, work, the digital, the in-person, etc. But a really, really profound part of it was that stasis and immobility are antithetical to the global knowledge economy. For so long, we’ve been told that the international is the dominant goal, and the pandemic disrupted mobility, and the entitlement across borders was unsettled. And citizenship identities shifted. The binaries of belonging and exclusion. Who was allowed to stay in the UK, who was allowed to return to the UK, etc. So, it also illustrated humanity’s unprecedented connectivity and global commodity chains. And COVID showed the precarious and violent situations of students and academics and non-academic staff alike. And it’s been noted in so many different national locations that domestic violence rates rocketed during lockdown. So, what it did was, it massively surfaced and highlighted inequalities that we’ve always known were there. But it provided a kind of stark relief for their inaction.

Daniel Leyton  21:47
And I would add, in a way also that the pandemic signifies a crisis that was used also to further promote the entrance of the digital platforms and companies. And those companies now kind of queer also the private and public divide. So, now we are demanded to take up all those opportunities that digital platforms and digital teaching possibilities have for us in our new environment of higher education. That means that the private environment is our new natural environment of higher education for the public good. So, in a way, that crisis was promoted further by the very same companies that are saying that they are disruptive. In a way that disruption will have unforeseen consequences for the future of higher education.

Louise Morley  22:48
Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. And it was very noticeable how many higher education institutions around the globe seized the moment to make people redundant, to close down departments, to charge huge amounts of money for student accommodation during lock down, etc.

Daniel Leyton  23:09
And also new ways of making people redundant, as Louise said, but for example, through recasting the boundary between the future, the modern, and the old. So, older teachers, or older higher education practices that are not so keen to use the digital in different ways, are recast or are kind of reconceived as the old, as not the ones prepared for the new adventures of the digital platforms in higher education. So, it also is creating new boundaries and new hierarchies that before weren’t in place, so embedded in higher education as they are today, after just two years,

Will Brehm  23:54
It’s so fascinating, because a lot of these issues you raise are still being worked through in universities, and I would imagine in different ways, you know, with Teams and Zoom and trying to figure out how do you integrate some of these tools and learning platforms into your teaching, and if you don’t do it, how you might be perceived by your colleagues who do it. And it becomes this very strange emotional space as well when you’re thinking about your own teaching. And there’s also this sort of hanging on of the work from home, which as Louise was saying, privileged a particular understanding of what home is, and a particular class. When I lived in London the whole idea of working from home wasn’t really feasible because I didn’t have a big enough flat. I couldn’t afford a big enough flat that had another space in it, but the discourse around it sort of assumed that I did. It was always really quite difficult to tell colleagues who did have a separate room where they could have an office and working from home was not a disruption to their normal lives. And so, you can see how universities and staff and the students as well. We’re still working through this. So, I think you’re right. It queered the university, but we have no clue where we’re going after this. When I read your book, one of the other terms that kept popping up was decolonization. And this sort of goes back to what Louise when you were saying how COVID happened simultaneously with these other sorts of movements, and one of them was Black Lives Matter, which is sort of shorthand for this sort of resurgence of social activity and sort of rethinking scholarship, and it sort of comes under the banner now of decolonization. So, what is the connection between queering the university and queering higher education and queer theory and decolonization? Is there a connection?

Daniel Leyton  25:42
Yeah, there is a deep connection. A lot of people say that queer theory is just an invention from the United States or a North American invention, but the truth is that it isn’t. So, queer and colonized subjectivities on the one hand, share histories of subjugation and nonconformity. Moreover, they share a kind of anti-colonial or anti-binary leaning. And in one of their origins of thought through the work of Gloria Anzaldua, for example, who coined the notion of border thinking, and that notion was taken up after by decolonial thinkers such as Mignolo, for example. So, for example, that notion of border thinking, which means feeling, thinking, and knowing from the outside, but the outside that is produced by and attached to the inside that creates that border or that line, or that margin, you know. So, that notion was crucial to understand how we can gain a vantage point of knowledge and experience from that border. And as we say in our book, these global movements promote the digital economy, internationalization in higher education, but those kinds of movements are not understood as embodied. Through connecting decolonization and queer theory, we can see those movements as embodiments not just of typical ideal identity, such as the global academic, the international academic, with all those privileged imaginaries. But as embodiments of different borders, national, gender, class, household borders. And all those borders are meaning that our identities get blurred. So, all those border thinking with queer theory and decoloniality are seen or understood as blurring the identity. And even more, we can think about those borders as forcing academics, for example, to even incorporate even new identities, multiple identities, multiple positioning in their repertoire. And those new positions are most of the time restricted, subaltern, or demand a detachment from, or a silencing from their vital trajectories. I might say that it is true that the idea of decolonizing the university or decolonization is becoming a commonplace instrument to dominant projects of global higher education. I would say, in a way, it is used – especially from universities here in the UK, and in the Global North – as a form of an international granting by the internationalization of the curriculum, for example. But decolonizing higher education from a queer point of view, it means disrupting the linear progressive idea that just the Global North is the place of freedom, for example, for a queer type of life. So, this linear narrative glosses over the historical truth that in the Global South, there has been a huge tradition of queer or nonbinary thinking through for example, South Asian deities, Mapuches’ three gender categories in South America, Argentina and Chile, Yoruba’s social and gender organization, or the  the Indian Hijras, Three spirits in the Indigenous communities of the Americas. So, when we link queer theory and decolonization, we can gain a deeper historical consciousness about what knowledge and experiences and ways of thinking of disrupting the binary are excluded from the Western dominant narrative of higher education or knowledge.

Will Brehm  29:18
I mean, I love it. So, when I listen to all of this, I am convinced. I love the idea of queering everything because anytime you destabilize something, and you can sort of reveal new insights and think differently, think a new world in a different way, all of that makes sense to me. But at the same time, I worry, did I drink the Kool Aid and I just think this is the best thing ever. And so, I want to put it to you, now that you’ve done this thinking about queer theory in higher education specifically, and you’ve done, like you said, a global study, you’ve done a lot of work on this. What are the shortcomings in your mind?  Based on some of the work that you’ve been doing, based on some of your own thinking, what should I be more concerned about in a sense about queer theory.

Louise Morley  30:02
Okay, well, obviously everything is open to critique. And one of the questions that we rehearse was well can queerness maintain its transgressive potential and avoid being incorporated into the machinery of the university. And one of our concerns is that queer has been used to kind of demonstrate neoliberal multiculturalism or it’s used in marketization. We’re in the middle of the pride season in Britain and every year, we have the same debate about what on earth has happened to what used to be known as Gay Pride is now known as parades and Mardi Gras, etc. Has it been massively depoliticized by its incorporatization? Is it a marketing device? But also,  we are quite critical about EDI, you know, equality, diversity and inclusion politics. And there’s a lot of superficiality involved in EDI and we’re worried that queer could be just one more of those indicators that is fairly meaningless in terms of change, what actually changes. There’s a lot of policy symbolism in higher education about EDI but when you actually pick up to inquire about what’s changed, you’ll see not a great deal. It’s also effective capitalism, this idea that you need this huge repertoire and range of communication and interpersonal skills, empathy, etc. You’re able to work with difference. So, one of the concerns we’ve had is that queer could just become a commodity and linked to patterns of consumption, or what we call rainbow capitalism. And there’s also this whole notion of pink washing that regimes, systems, structures that are quite brutal and unpleasant, suddenly do a big pink wash to show how tolerant – and we use that word ironically – and progressive they are. So, I think as with any force, it can be incorporated, and it can be appropriated and diluted and used to demonstrate values that aren’t actually enacted.

Will Brehm  32:32
We have to be careful not to have like an Associate Dean of Queerness, or some sort of like KPI (key performance indicators) around queerness.

Daniel Leyton  32:41
When queer theory is so attached, like in different places in the market, for example. It is so attached to making an identity for example, it can be easily incorporated to any market rationalities, or a conception, which is so often seen, like, if you walk around the street in London or big cities, you will see how queerness shows up all the time in the streets, but through consumption and identities. So, in a way, what we did in the book, from the beginning, we start to discuss this is how we can kind of liberate queer theory from those limited identity politics. We’re not saying that identity politics is something useless but we’re saying that it’s limited in a way. And we knew, and we felt that queer theory can be way more productive theoretically and politically if we use it from the point of view of the politics of structure. How structures work are super important for us in order to queer relationships of power. And in a way, giving a new way of thinking about power relations. Not as static power relations or stable but as a way of considering new potentialities through engaging with those power relationships without necessarily buying into identity all the time, or fixations.

Louise Morley  34:01
We’re very conscious that the term queer can be invoked to demonstrate some sort of critical edge; some edginess. So, for example, building on what Daniel saying about identity politics, it’s very common for people to identify as queer when they leave incredibly mainstream traditional lifestyles. And the queer is the notion that they’re in the process of becoming, they’re open to change, etc. But they often still benefit from profoundly heteronormative privilege, and same with institutions. You add the term queer and immediately there’s an effective response that people have reassurance that there’s some sort of criticality, progress, edginess there. And we are conscious of that and that that is not how it should be used as a kind of branding, but it should be used as a way of thinking, as a way of analyzing, a way of challenging. Not just to label you appropriate to demonstrate your value.

Will Brehm  35:02
Well, Louise Morley and Daniel Leyton, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, congratulations on your book. I think that’s what your book does. It really digs deep into what queer theory is and how it’s connected to the university and just sort of opens up a new world of possibilities and a new world of questions that we might have about our own practices within this space. So, thank you for writing the book and congratulations once again.

Louise Morley  35:26
Thank you.

Daniel Leyton  35:27
Thank you for having us.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Author Publications/Projects

Queering higher education: Troubling norms in the global knowledge economy

Lifelong yearning: Feminist pedagogy in the learning society

Conversations about power, privilege and persistent inequalities in higher education

Affective governmentality, ordo-liberalism, and the affirmative action policy in education

Gender in the neo-liberal research economy

Recommended Resources

Gloria Alzadua – Borderlands

Walter Mignolo – Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism

Queer theories 

Trans* leadership 

Building the cross-border Mapuche nation in Chile and Argentina

Two spirits: The fluidity of gender in Native American communities

Heteronormativity and homonormativity

Interrupting heteronormativity: Toward a queer curriculum theory

Queer theory and Native studies: The heteronormativity of settler colonialism 

Queer activist leadership: Queer leadership in higher education

Queer theory in education

Queer necropolitics

Decolonizing queer pedagogy

Queer theory from the South

Queer Indigenous studies: Critical interventions in theory, politics and literature

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com