Abstract
Our work seeks to reflexively make visible the blurring of binary markers at the intersection of our research, sexuality, gender, and professional socialization as a necessary disruption to liberate our intersectional possibilities in the making. We argue the queering of educational leadership is met by the intimate and layered experiences of identity dismemberment operating to tarnish, devalue, and displace the wealth of intersectional knowledge. The ultimate goal is to subjugate the researcher; to trace a stencil of a binary identity whereby the image of the non-binary cannot be conjured as contributors to epistemology, theory, methodology, pedagogy, leadership, or practice. We utilize testimonios to interrogate how these lines were drawn from the everyday of academic life to blur the binary; to conjure the queer in every nook and cranny of experiences until the reification of whiteness, patriarchy, and sexuality is made a mess from which prescribed lines can no longer be drawn. We assert the toll of securing this “way” positioned us in a binary, more often than not, to research about queerness without any overlap in the praxis of queerness in the relationships, institutions, and teaching that guard the landscape of “being” in Educational Leadership. In doing so, we position the (re)membering of our identities at the intersection of Queer and Chicana Feminist theoretical perspectives to theorize a third space to heal and build a leadership practice in our image.
The necessity of claiming new spaces of thinking and being in educational leadership stems from our conscious awareness that our identities and their epistemological origins are an unwanted stranger in educational institutions. We attest, in the totality of our schooling and educator preparation we were not exposed to ways of thinking or theorizing touched by our Chicana Feminist and Queer ways of understanding the world. It was by chance we had the good fortune of coming into contact with Ph.D. mentors in educational leadership who nourished our ways of knowing beyond the traditional canon, valued discussions about Queer Theory and Chicana Feminism, and affirmed our subjectivities in the use of theory and theorizing. Yet, in the larger space of educational institutions across the P-20 + pipeline we were confounded by the orchestration of relationships and discourses attempting to silence the direction of relationships, teaching, research, pedagogy, practice, and policy from more gender liberating frameworks. Thus, in the ongoing socialization as educational actors and thinkers, the narratives of our existence are at best partially known and molded in opposition to ourselves.
What we consider in the context of who we are becoming as academics is not an isolated experience. We assert such narratives are culled in the mess (Manalansan, 2014) of relationships experienced across the P-20 + pipeline, often more interested in conformity than knowledge creation. Within the pressure to conform to these perceived “right” ways of being, thinking, and behaving, a false narrative is stenciled into a prescribed binary pattern where any expression outside of it is “wrong”. Consequently, in theorizing and researching we often wonder just how much we can draw upon our marginalized subjectivities and the degree of repercussions that may ensue. As people of who identify as Queer, Questioning, and racially displaced 1 , we know all too well there are few of us who make it into the ranks of the professoriate, and the ways we negotiate our unfinished narratives hold implications for who and what counts in the legitimization of knowledge. Thus the work of “being” in the academy became a series of intimate decisions where the scholarship pursued offered the opportunity for what was once silenced to be written into the canon. In the scholarly questioning of who we are and who we want to be as educational leaders, we dare to Queer it through messiness, or the “spoiling and cluttering of the neat normative configurations and patterns that seek to calcify lives and experiences” (Manalansan, 2014, p. 99) in the practice of educational leadership.
Our inquiry sought to take stock of where we are in the messiness of deconstructing professional relationships and work regulated by cisheteronormativity, understanding we are in the process of figuring out what this looks like. Our sharing began organically in our relationships as doctoral students studying at the same university and then as assistant professors working at different universities. Dialoguing over several years, reflections were framed as co-creados, the co-creation of meaning made about our mutual struggle, during a time we were also influenced by Queer literature. As such, we first discuss the literature of Queer Theory and Chicana Feminism awakening us to notions of space, subjectivity, and bodymindspirit we found central to knowledge creation driven by more intact and fluid identities. Second, we present a collective testimonio, an urgent story of an oppressive social situation, to depict how we became situated within binary lines from the everyday dialogues of academic life. Last, we discuss what our testimonio helped us discover about the ongoing process of resisting educational norms set in a binary of separating Queer 2 research from Queer practice, leadership, and relationships. Specifically, we propose there are two elements of the healing and regenerative space we discovered; awareness of oppositional spaces and a praxis of tactical movements, and intersecting theoretical understandings to imagine new spaces in the everyday.
Literature Awakenings
Theorizing a Space for the Authentic Self
In the space between the lived body of the scholar and the written word of theory and research we experienced the “struggle of recognizing and legitimizing excluded selves, especially of women, people of color, Queer, and othered groups” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 6). Furthermore, while this liminal space of sharing came to house the archive of specific words and actions drawing the boundary lines of what we could say or who we could be as academics; our conscious awareness was not enough to alter the conditions of confinement. We needed more from the space where our excluded selves came to walk together. It was this sense of longing, to not only claim a space but to be renewed from the power of it that we found Queer and Chicana Feminist literature to make such a path knowable. Anzaldúa (1987) refers to the psychic middle space of fusing the separated parts of ourselves back together as Nepantla, and those who choose to reside in it, Nepantleras. Thus, the work of Nepantleras is communal and occurs between conscious minds who examine the ways identities are torn apart and made to live in a binary existence. Nepantla is, … where the outer boundaries of the mind’s inner life meet the outer world of reality, is a zone of possibility. You experience reality as fluid, expanding, and contracting… Seeing through human acts both individual and collective allows you to examine the ways you construct knowledge, identity, and reality, and explore how some of your/others’ constructions violate other people’s ways of knowing and living. (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002, p. 544).
Queering Subjectivity
Our awakenings were strengthened by the writings of Queer theorists (Alexander, 2018; Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1978; Sedgwick, 1990) who make explicit the construction of a gender binary. Sedgwick (1990) reminds us that “chromosomal sex is turned into, and processed as, cultural gender” (p. 28) and “without a concept of gender there could be, quite simply, no concept of homo- or heterosexuality” (p. 31). As Sedgwick (1990) states, “every given person, just as he or she [sic] was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications” (p. 2) and defined by their “relation to the other” (p. 28). Further, the intersection of these socially constructed identities can get messy. For instance, “a woman’s use of a married name makes graphic at the same time her subordination as a woman and her privilege as a presumptive heterosexual” (p. 32). Despite gender and sexuality being historically defined in terms of normality and opposition to the other, there is in fact no normal way to perform either of them (Lugg, 2003).
Queering sexuality and gender complicates, or makes a mess of, individuals’ entangled subjectivity to cisheteronormativity, but as academics and educational leaders who desire to do so, we are also subjugated and constrained by institutional discourses. For example, the intersection of the multiplicity of identities who breathe meaning-making into the practice of theory in educational leadership research is clouded by a typified cisheteronormative and patriarchal identity (Lugg, 2003; Lugg & Tooms, 2010; O’Malley & Capper, 2015). In this space, the ideal citizen is the docile subject, who will unknowingly maintain institutional wealth and prosperity through efficient production (Foucault, 1982, 1991). Out of a desire for respect, validation, and feelings of self-efficacy, the subject, who has been conditioned by normalizing discourses, judgements, surveillance, and discipline, strives to embody the identity of the ideal professional contrived in gendered binaries (Foucault, 1988). Therefore, if we consider promotion and tenure to be an examination in the Foucauldian sense, it “combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment” (Foucault, 1977, p. 184), which coerces us to comply with prescribed ways of being, thinking, and conducting research. That is, tenure is a game shaping us to (re)produce the knowledge production of the academy, and any such deviation from that privileged epistemology threatens to redefine what it means to be an academic and/or educational leader. In other words, we are “constructed in and through the deed” (Butler, 1990, p. 195) of achieving tenure.
Making Mess
Liberation from idealized identities curated in a binary, requires oppression as a prerequisite. As an illustration, “the phrase ‘the closet’ as a publicly intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made available, obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out [emphasis original] of the closet” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 14). In other words, “where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault, 1990), and as we carry on through our history of lived cultural experience, we begin to question our circumstances and experience a tension from being “divided inside [...] or divided from others” (Foucault, 1982, p. 777–778). It is in this complex relation of being subjugated and made subject to that a new form of moral, self-disciplining power is born out of ourselves (Foucault, 1991); one that is less likely to fully accept our position as a mechanism of cisheteronormativity.
So, as academics and educational leaders who seek to produce a discourse that messes up the space of the academy, we must also consider the elite system of knowledge production that limits our ability to create. As Butler (1990) states, If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities (p. 127). there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations (p. 96).
Furthermore, “acts of opposition or resistance” (Sanchez & Ek, 2013, p.16) are not necessarily garnered by an individual subjectivity, but gain momentum from knowing intersubjectively where meaning-making occurs between conscious minds. The movement into an intersubjective state may allow for more fluidity within social constructions such as gender, race, and ethnicity that in turn project new images from which institutions can operate. Intersubjectivity arises as a natural confluence of reconsidering the nature of knowledge to operate as an entity connected by ways of knowing situated in the body, mind, and spirit where “The body is the ground of thought” as it “responds physically, emotionally, and intellectually to internal and external stimuli and writing records, orders, and theorizes about these responses” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 5). Gender constructed in the binary is the act of oppressing what the body, mind, and spirit connect in the making of gender, played out in the outer terrain of genders known. What intersubjectivity adds to a binary resistance is the consideration for both collective meaning making and collective healing of the bodymindspirit oppressed, to widen the epistemological foundation from which theory, ontology, pedagogy, and practice emerge.
Methodology
Methodologically, the imperative of claiming a new space was derived from our communing in theory of the flesh, (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983) “where the physical realities of our lives — our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings” (p.23) were bridged into the possibilities of where, when, and how we locate and create knowledge. Thus, the methods of pláticas 3 , and testifying organically came about from 6 years of telling one another our truths in the ongoing experience of becoming academics. Central to the methodology is understanding the transitional nature of moving the ways we locate knowledge from a sphere of secrecy into the realm of academic work. We understand this sphere of secrecy as an Xicana space, where the X marks a “crossroads of our positionalities” (Soto, et al., 2009, p. 763) as a Questioning Chicana and a Queer Lusitano/a came together toward a collective political goal that seeks to displace and unlearn patriarchy and white supremacy (Urrieta, 2007) inherent in the academy. We perceive the Xicana space as a 3rd space, first utilized in secret as a matter of tactical survival and as an incubator of strength building for the transition into a mode of research made for the dissemination of the knowledge curated within our Xicana space.
Transitioning our Xicana space into the realm of research, there were a few failed attempts we recognized as being swept away in the undertow of negotiating the first few years of the pre-tenure grind. Perhaps, also, we were not quite ready to “trust” in the intuitive, organic methods of knowledge sharing we knew to help us make sense of the attacks on our bodies, minds, and spirits. The mere defining of our knowledge under the label of research, partially unraveled the natural ways we shaped it. We unintentionally reverted to traditional methods of audio-recording conversations, setting specific meeting times, and defining our manuscript roles. Soon after, the momentum for the work subsided and was eventually superseded by COVID-19. However, we again recovered our authentic connection within an ethic of gentleness in prioritizing a survival of health and wellness in an unprecedented pandemic era. The contours of conversations undergirding a pandemic survival - Are you okay? How is your family? Are you depressed or anxious? - returned us to a more genuine solidarity. The concern for how we were existing, surviving, and getting through gave way for the resistance of our stories to find a home. The truth of our methods was, our own thinking of “methods” had to be put aside and relating to one another had to come back into play to get to a place of vulnerability we were willing to share in scholarly print. By the end of our fifth year as colleagues and friends the time finally arrived.
Two distinct phases informed the steps of our methodology. The first phase drew upon co-creado (Prieto & Villenas, 2012), co-creating testimonios, from our collective (re)memberings of the past 6 years as doctoral students and pre-tenure faculty. The nature of our dialogues were contoured by a sense of urgency to be understood, even if just for a few moments, intuitively knowing this as a survival tool to mediate the toll of cisheteronormativity. Central to this phase was becoming aware of our testimony to one another, we shared in conversation and at times as eye-witnesses, as a location of knowledge. Part of the awakening to our own experiences and observations as a powerful source of knowledge creation was our exposure to Queer Theory (Alexander, 2018; Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1978; Sedgwick, 1990) and Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Anzaldúa, 1987; Bernal, 1998; Latina Feminist Group, 2001) where we found the words to name our experience and thus, rename and create a new space for ourselves in the academy. It was at the juncture of our experiences and theory exposure, the long-term practice of sharing our “testimony”, and relying upon it as a vital tool in the search for a way to thrive academically, that we carved a methodology we became eager to share.
In our second attempt we leaned into co-creado (Prieto & Villenas, 2012) with cycles of writing and brief discussions to share and reflect on testimonios in progress over a 3 month period. We engaged testimonio as a method situated to “challenge objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2017, p. 1). Testimonio is concerned with “a problematic social situation in which the narrator lives” (Beverley, 2004, p. 33). Living in the social situation of education, educational leadership, and academia under the collective duress of our bodies regulated, minds developed devoid of their epistemological advantage, and gender dehumanized, we were concerned there was no room for “we” in the grand scheme of knowledge creation. The central role of the testimonio is to convey the duality of oppressions in a new way and to operate as the vehicle in positioning paradigm shifts in these relationships (Beverley, 1991). The testimonio “always signifies the need for a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world must be brought into question” (Beverely, 1989, p. 23). Therefore, testimonio served a dual purpose, to tell a collective story of urgency and make sense of the binary contradiction where we were positioned to work under bodies of knowledge that made our own illegitimate. With the contours of testimonio in place, narratives were written independently and saved in their full length. Where stories converged, a collective testimonio was narrated, punctuated by each participant’s nuanced experience. The collective testimonio begins by explaining the priority of accessing a 3rd space to reclaim, restore, and heal bodymindspirit torn apart by cumulative experiences of its dehumanization. Stories of each author are weaved together to depict the nuanced ways the regulation of our bodies, exclusion of our minds, and crushing of our spirits are overlapping experiences orchestrated to stultify who we are in the academy.
Collective Testimonio
When the violence of erasure is the bedrock of forming minds in the schooling process, who then create or consume research, bodies of resistance walk upon a cracked foundation of knowledge. We were taught knowledge is objective, factual, and absolute. Therefore, as we think, explore, ask questions, and create, a sense of anxiety is always present, understanding the knowledge we seek to express is buried by an ongoing history of epistemological tyranny. And while we still hold fear of being seen and heard, we share our story to write into the canon what was designated to the margins. In the process of co-testifying, a stronger energy is created; like a magnet we are connected to those present and past working in Nepantla, where the mending of flesh mutilated by bodies of knowledge torn apart sets the stage for theorizing a more healed existence. In recounting the types of daily relational experiences operating to tear us away from our own subjectivities, we theorized a way back to our own ways of understanding the world.
We write to consider theorizing as an act where one is restored; to re (member) our bodymindspirit so powerfully, the delegitimization of our race, ethnicity, gender, bodies, tongues, sexualities, dress, thinking and relationships are no longer regulated by an assemblage of partial truths. We can no longer accommodate theory in life or work fueled by the tradition of silence (Anzaldúa, 1987), where we have no claim to name the world and theorize our existence in it. We assert ways of thinking muted at the intersection of identities disempowered, dehumanized, and in-the-making situate educational leaders to orchestrate relationships of exclusivity reproducing the colonial dichotomy of the oppressed and the oppressor. We ask, what is the good of theory if it marks us a stranger to ourselves? We sought to disrupt the mess censoring which parts of ourselves inform theory, the infuence of non-binary relatedness, and the manifestation of intersubjective realities. This disruption marks Nepantla as a third space from which to theorize, where our collective struggle to mediate the appropriation of our gender, race, and ethnicity is reconciled. Our relationship was the germination for theory questioning, where realities intertwined to share the pain of identities dismembered and the joy in putting back together what a binary fiction of the traditional canon and relationships within tore apart. We recognize this sharing as co-creado (Prieto & Villenas, 2012), reflectively dialoguing together to heal and build “the theory of our practice and the practice of our theory” (Latina Feminist Group, 2001, p. 19). This inquiry brings our co-creados to the space of the written page in the documenting of a collective testimonio where we raise a critical eye to the mess of relationship dialogues situated in colonial diatribes of body, mind, and spirit conformity.
Our Bodies Regulated
Amanda
To silence is to mute expression of the self, including the way one dresses. I’ve never understood what clothing has to do with the pursuit or sharing of knowledge, teaching, or professional activities. Frankly, when I read, write, study, or have intellectual conversations I could not care less what anyone is wearing. I want to listen to someone’s thought process as if I am watching an artist choose the palette from which to paint. Yet, conversations or comments about my dress, in settings focused on sharing research, commence with regularity rather than the exchange of ideas. Even during times designated for professional “socializing”, the dress police stand guard. After one particularly long day of attending conference sessions and presenting my research, I was eager to relax at a dinner and dance social. I chose a comfortable mid-calf length, cotton dress that was embellished by a criss-cross tie lacing just above my rib cage to a bow tied just beneath my clavicle. Standing in the buffet line, chatting and laughing with a few friends, I felt a hand untie the bow and cinch it tighter while she said, “You should not risk exposing your skin so close to your cleavage”. I stood shocked, frozen, and without words to articulate the violation of my body. Perhaps, more importantly, I didn’t have the words to express how demeaned I felt and the stinging hurt of the message, that dressed the way I was, in the only body I have, I did not belong in a sea of academics.
The next day of the conference, I wore a black top with a mock turtleneck convincing myself I had to hide any skin below my neck. After a presentation, a male professor pulled me aside. I felt excited that someone wanted to talk with me about my work until I heard the words slowly release from his mouth in slow motion as if a movie projector was set on slow speed. “Your breasts look great in that top”, he said. My eyes widened with disbelief, my heart sank, and I felt myself shrivel inside. The best I could muster was to walk away. The next day I gave up completely. I wore a loose pair of pants and blouse. “No danger here” I thought to myself, “there’s no indication a body is in here except for the feet walking this ensemble through the conference scene”. As I stepped into the elevator, a senior scholar looked my dress up and down, and said, “Dress for success at all times, you are always on the job market. Every interaction is an interview!”. My eyes widened so large, I caught the gaze of my dear colleague, Bryan, and my mix of shame and anger vibed with their look of disbelief. Finally, not feeling alone, I did not cower in feelings of disgrace any longer. Later that evening, a chair of a session I was presenting work for asked me my background, and when I replied “Mexican”, he said, “Ah, yes, Mexicans were created by a history of rape.” As the evening came to a close, feeling safe in the shared space of struggle with Bryan, I could unsilence myself and dig deeper into the intertwining discourses of shame and oppression in the ways our bodies are patrolled and narrated.
Bryan
The policing of my physical expression began as early as I can remember. From the disapproving gaze of family members when my mannerisms were a bit too flamboyant for their fragile masculinity and patriarchal values, to the incessant name calling in middle school. I never really understood what it meant to “act like the other boys”, I act how I act, this is me, this is what you get, I cannot be someone else. At some point it clicked in high school when someone called me “effeminate”. I had to look up the term, and when I did, I was so offended. Is this how others saw me? Was this the confusion? Was my innate expression of gender too close to their understanding of female? Why is this such a bad thing? While I have come to fully embrace and celebrate my own beautiful expression of self, I carry with me the pain of being othered. Whenever I catch a stranger eying me up and down or staring a little too long, I already know what they are thinking. I am just a little too fabulous for their bland and binary. In each of these moments, I am flooded back with the memories of being constantly ridiculed as I was coming of age. This constant reliving of otherness is exhausting.
Up until recently, I understood my gender expression to be my only marginalized identity. Born to immigrant parents from Portugal and growing up in a predominantly Portuguese-American community in Western Massachusetts sheltered me from the ways that others labeled me. Although retrospectively, I can remember feeling oddly out of place in college among peers whose parents were also college educated, were monolingual, and had a more intimate familiarity with American popular culture that I did, I understood myself to be white in the sense that I am a descendent of Europeans, but this label did not quite fit outside of my predominantly immigrant hometown. When I moved to Texas, my Spanish-sounding surname and my olive skin almost always afforded me a non-white identity. For example, by the dermatologist who dismissed my moles as too common to be concerning, the countless folks who corrected my Portuguese pronunciation of my name (Do-artē) to the Spanish (Do-art-é), and the police officer who described me as “Hispanic” on a vehicle accident report. These experiences made it clear that my own understood identity was in conflict with how others perceived me.
I formed a bond with the dear Latinx familia I met during this time through the similarities of our ancestral histories. We share food, music, language, religion, and the experiences of being the first generation in our families to attend college and to be born in the United States. However, I recognize that although we share many similar immigrant and first-gen experiences, Portuguese-Americans have generally been accepted into US society in ways that have not been afforded to Latinx communities. With Amanda, though, we share a messier experience of being policed, labeled, misunderstood, and othered in ways that intersect with our gender, race, and ethnicity. In both our cases, others see our bodies too clearly defined within Brown/white, gay/straight, male/female binaries, and in so doing, they do not see our intersectional identities, nor their contributions. Moreover, they do not see the unique and creative ways we identify and express our true selves and how these subjectivities should be valued in relationships, work, and research. We are simultaneously visible yet invisible.
Our Minds Excluded
Amanda
The norm of hiding my body, apparently deemed “unprofessional”, also seeped into the ways I hid my thinking and Questioning. In my first few years of pre-tenure life I’ve been told narrative work is not real research, testimonios are interesting - but what value do they hold?, and Chicana Feminist grounded inquiry isn’t what educational leadership programs want. Even when on the national stage, speakers were chosen to bear witness to identities marginalized in the consumption and production of knowledge, a higher education administrator commented “We’ve gotten so far away from real research and people are tired of hearing narratives of oppression”. Now, how do I expect to keep my job or advance when this is the perspective of several who might review my work? More importantly, how do I document the real experiences and locate knowledge central to change if not from the voice of those in most need of educational change?
A few weeks ago I attended a conference and was reminded of the visceral feeling of witnessing the attempted murder of an edarkened way of thinking. I was assigned to co-facilitate a roundtable related to dissertations in progress. The other co-facilitator was a Black male scholar. The roundtable participants were four Black women scholars and one Peruvian woman scholar. Each participant discussed the challenge of combining or creating frameworks as doctoral students, including the resistance encountered by dissertation committee members. I was amazed and inspired as I heard the “thinking” of how the women were infusing and intersecting endarkened feminisms as a lens to locate the different experiences of women of Color educational leaders.
We engaged in a deep discussion of intuitive, ancestral, and historical ways of knowing. The dialogue moved away from the semantics of building a framework and into the thinking and feeling driving the search for ways to approach building a framework. In these moments I sensed an anxiety rise and become heavy in the air. The co-facilitator offered the following advice, “Remember, a good dissertation is a done dissertation. This work won’t define your life. You have to be practical and get it done. I don’t make my work my life.” I ached, feeling the heartbeat of ideas flatline as practicality and efficiency won over the weight and the reach of the work proposed. As the session ended, I gave my contact information and thanked the women for the dialogue. A few months later, and on my birthday no less, I got a phone call from one of the women participants. We talked for over an hour, and her idea was revived from some simple affirmations of her role as a researcher and her positionality as a Black woman who has the most in-depth knowledge of how she would like to dissertate, including what literature to “choose” as the grounding of her framework. She read some of the authors I suggested at the roundtable and she noted none were theories suggested by her committee chair. I shared my own journey of justifying and defending my own choices because I felt strongly about the type of research I wanted to put into the world. I was also up front about the amount of reading and work that would go into considering theories she was not introduced to in her doctoral work. As we closed our discussion, I wasn’t sure if I had been of any help. She said, “I feel so much better, this helped me more than months of classes.” While it affirmed the connection we made, I was also sad recognizing once again the work of dissertating from the positionality of a woman of Color is often met with contempt for her ways of thinking and the lives she seeks to reach. I suggested to my newly formed Black woman colleague, the time is now and across all ages, spaces, and positionalities. “Trust yourself” I told her, “because I know a different reality of dissertating as a beginning rather than an end. It is the beginning of asking all the questions silenced within us”.
Bryan
About 7 or 8 months into my first year on the tenure-track, I had already gone through my first annual review. I was assured that my productivity was great and that my research agenda was one that was pushing the field forward. Despite these great compliments, a surprising recommendation was made. “The work that you are doing is really great, but you should do less of the Queer stuff, because that is not going to ‘count’ in the eyes of the folks who review your materials for promotion and tenure.” Although this was not the first iteration of ‘do the work that matters after tenure’ I had heard, it still stung. Exchanges like this reify that there are preferred and privileged ways of doing research, which one should be careful not to challenge while seeking tenure.
Innumerably, I am turned off by academics’ inability to be critical in ways that reproduce these privileged and preferred research frameworks and methods. In a recent exchange, I presented a co-authored paper that merged the results of a quantitative analysis with our own personal counterstories in order to contextualize the numbers. We drew on Queer theory as well as an emerging literature base from critical race scholars who have similarly enhanced quantitative analysis with qualitative narratives (Covarrubias, 2011; Covarrubias et al., 2018; Covarrubias & Velez, 2013; Pérez Huber et al., 2018). After presenting the paper, there was a long and awkward silence. The discussant finally broke the pause by saying, “I always find it funny when people do quantitative research with a critical framework”. Whether intentional or not, this comment came across to me as an insult, yet another dismissal of my work. I read it as a demonstration of the widely accepted academic norm that for work to engage quantitative analysis it must be objective, and that qualitative analyses are inferior to post-positivist, scientific, empirical approaches. The silver lining in this exchange is that I learned, while considering this discussant for my list of external reviewers, he would likely not be a good choice. The list is getting smaller and smaller.
Sometimes I hate myself for engaging in quantitative work. When I attend conferences and look around, I feel like an imposter because most of the people do not think or look like me. To illustrate, I presented at a roundtable alongside a paper written by a few folks that I knew from previous conferences. They presented their paper, and I was shocked by the framework they used. Their framework was adopted from a roughly 50 year old theory that categorized organizations based on their “femininity” and “masculinity”. They used words like “passive” to describe “feminine” organizations, and words like “assertive” to describe “masculine” organizations. I could feel my heart beginning to beat heavily. A rage was boiling inside of me, and I had something to say. When the floor was opened for questions, I pushed back on the framework used and said that it sounded like an obsolete and traditionally binary conceptualization of gender. I pointed out how problematic it is to categorize organizations, or anything for that matter, by gender, but more so by a stereotypical characterization of gender. The authors responded better than I thought they would, they thanked me for the feedback and said they would reconsider the framework. They did try to justify it and they said that it was a bit outdated, to which I asked why they would use something outdated in the first place. Other folks at the table seemed perturbed by my critique. Two women seemed to have no issue with the framework at all, and said it made perfect sense to them. They reminded me that the way the framework views gender is how most people view gender, and in not so many words, they reminded me that my version of gender is not widely accepted.
Our Spirits Crushed
Amandadnd
Most of my life I have considered myself a heterosexual woman without question. I’ve been married twice and only dated heterosexual men. Entering a doctoral program came on the heels of a second divorce and I told myself I would not involve myself with romantic relationships for at least a year to focus solely on school and family. Six years later, I’ve come to the conclusion my “break” from romantic relationships means something more than taking time for myself. Being in the process of Questioning my identity and gender also created confusion for colleagues I met during my pre-tenure move to the Midwest. The usual conversation goes like this: Academic: How are you and your husband liking the Midwest? Me: I’m not married. My daughter and I are exploring much of the landscape and enjoy experiencing “real” seasons, as we did not get much snow in South Texas. Academic: (Face slightly tilted with a questioning brow furrow). Oh, it’s just you and your daughter? You are single? Me: Yes. (Internal eye roll, here we go again). Academic: Well, you are sure to find someone here. Me: I’m not too interested in finding someone. Academic: Have you found a church? Me: I’m not really looking for a church. Academic: Well, (eyes downward) I’m sure you will find lots to enjoy here.
On the other hand, the assumptions of what my relationships are or what they should be confine me to only two choices; heterosexual or lesbian. There simply is no room for Questioning. As a professor, I feel shoved into the form of a Latina who is expected to be married, feminine, and agreeable. My gender identity is another aspect of professional life constructed for me, and the fact that I identify as Questioning never enters the conversation. The invisibility of Questioning in my becoming holds deeper meaning in that it limits how I question myself and limits the ways I can question in educational research.
Bryan
At 30, during the height of my doctoral dissertation research, I embarked on a gender discovery brought on by a careful reading of Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble. I was really reading this to help get a deeper understanding of subjectivity, but the words spoke to me like nothing I had ever read. I must have underlined and ear-marked 90% of the pages in that book. Butler was describing gender in a way that made perfect sense to me. That gender is an expression that is imposed upon people, who in turn enact it in ways that are complementary with society’s definitions. However, the fact that gender can be anything outside of these socially constructed norms is something that few people understand; those of us lucky enough to not fit the stencil drawn over us. While I understand and accept my sex, it is my gender that was never quite clear. For the first time in my life, I had the language to understand and accept my femininity in new and emancipatory ways. For the first time, I took pride in my emotional and feminine nature, and embraced it as one of the unique ways that I perform/enact/express gender in non-conforming ways. However, I also feel discouraged amidst current legislative and cultural attacks on trans* and non-binary individuals and I question how safe it is to be my authentic self.
Discussion
Seeing our liberated, decolonized, and Questioning reflections through the cisheteronormative white gaze reveals a harsh truth; that our very existence is something to hide, something to compensate for, something to be ashamed of in academic life. To be taken seriously, the approval of our identities is preferred before our work can be considered. Our testimonio reveals how the mess of educational leadership is made by relationships of oppression. Moreover, it reveals the importance of theorizing more inclusively, as part of the larger cause in healing the original split of identities created by colonialism and maintained by patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, and white supremacy. Hiding ourselves in the game of tenure, only to emerge again on the other side, is not an option for us because we fear losing ourselves in the process. Thus, we find ourselves questioning, do we create research and proceed towards tenure in our own image, or do we allow the tenure process to make us in the very image we seek to dismantle? This fine line between acquiescence and resistance allows us to acknowledge a middle space to consider what it looks like to blur the binary in both research and practice.
By refusing to separate ourselves from our research, we have arrived at a third space. How we approach and continue the dialogue of this 3rd space is important for another layer of questions to surface, surrounding the effects of a partial gendered experience, in the early connections we make to whose knowledge counts in the naming of the world and an existence in it. What we discovered in our testimonios was not only the sharing of the pain that arises from the everyday regulation of bodies, minds, and spirits in educational leadership, but also the ways this serves to maintain oppressive binaries. In sharing a collective testimonio we also came to know a 3rd space we perceived as healing and regenerative, with the properties to expand/overlap spaces, elaborated further in this discussion. These properties include; awareness of oppositional spaces and a praxis of tactical movements, and intersecting theoretical understandings to imagine new spaces in the everyday.
Oppositional Spaces & Tactical Movements
Our Queering and feminist endarkening of educational leadership is countered by the intimate and layered experiences of identity dismemberment (Anzaldúa, 1987, 1999) operating to tarnish, devalue, and displace our wealth of intersectional knowledge (Collins, 2015; Crenshaw, 1989). The ultimate goal is to subjugate the Queer and Queer knowledge into submission (Foucualt 1977, 1982, 1988); to trace a stencil of a binary identity whereby the image of the non-binary cannot be conjured as contrubutions to the field. In our collective testimonio, we discuss the pain and confusion caused by the regulation of our bodies both in and outside of academia. These experiences have left us with a more intimate understanding of the ways in which we are perceived, but more importantly, have cemented within us a strong awareness and appreciation of our unique identities. Such a beautiful and empowered existence affords us a place, a third space, of bringing our intersectional beings to the educational leadership work that we do. Unfortunately, however, our collective testimonio also reveals the ways in which our work becomes yet another target for regulating our beings. Accordingly, the confluence of our intersectional human identities and the professional spaces we occupy are a mess in that our subjectivity and intersubjectivity affords us a space of resistance while it also continues to oppress us.
The first example of this in our testimonios is how we both share unique experiences with the regulation of the physical expression of our bodies. While Amanda experiences dismissal of her ideas and regulation of her dress in ways that reify stereotypical ideas of how to look like a female academic, Bryan understands and is constantly attuned to the ways in which their physical expression may be judged. The intersubjectivity of these lived experiences fosters a space of commiseration, which we are able to arrive at through our third space of Nepantla, where we are empowered to push back (Foucault, 1990). We perceive our communing in Nepantla, a tactical response because we do not position ourselves in opposition to others. Being tactical is about considering how, when, and where to respond, considering if the response repositions us in a binary fueling opposition instead of liberation. One of the ways we have pushed back in a tactical way is by cultivating spirits; always questioning the ways in which society defines our gender and sexuality (Foucault, 1982, 1991). Although we are able to find ways to liberate ourselves through the embodiment of a creative spirit, in the physical expression of the body and the body of work we produce; the deep understanding of how we are made subject to mechanisms of power tempers our resistance (Butler, 1990).
Through the friendship and discourses taking place in our third space of Nepantla, we are able to release ourselves from normalized ways of thinking. For instance, both of us arrived at our ways of thinking about and conducting research through a deep, spiritual, and reflective consideration of Chicana Feminism and Queer Theory in the use of testimonio and critical quantitative methodologies respectively. Consequently, we both re-appropriate academic work (Alexander, 2018; St Pierre, 1995) by using it to justify our ideas and write our positionalities into existence as a tactical resistance. Therefore, when our work is published, cited, and presented at conferences, our tactical stance within the academic scene allows us to work within (Urrieta, 2009) the very circles examining us for promotion and tenure. However, while this act of resistance allows us to escape the practice of conformity, we remain subject to normalizing discourses (Foucault, 1977, 1982, 1988).
As our testimonio points out, when we are reminded by some that testimonios do not count as research, that there is a normalized way of conducting a dissertation, that we should defer the work that matters until after tenure, or that critical frameworks are funny, our resistance becomes dismissed as other. This judgment is yet another reminder that we are different, that we do not belong here. Moreover, it is meant to scare us into conformity over the threat that we may not be awarded tenure. As a result, we experience depressive episodes, imposter syndrome, anxiety, fear, and fatigue. Our affiliation with the academy has brought us to a place of reckoning in which we are able to be ourselves with one another, yet the space in which we live is messy because we continue to be restrained by and made subject to binaries. For example, the pre/post-tenure binary seeks to coerce us (Foucault, 1977, 1982, 1988) into deferring any critique of the oppressive discourses in academic relationships. Another binary is evident in the academic stance that critical research is broadly believed to be in opposition to traditional methodological approaches (Baez, 2007; Covarrubias & Velez, 2013; Duarte, 2021; Greene, 2007). Whether inflicted consciously or unconsciously, this division is intellectual violence that stifles our ideas and creativity. This in and of itself is yet another binary. That is, while the juncture of our identities and theorizing empowers us to push the boundaries of what counts as research, we are positioned in opposition to academic tradition. This is where our work has not provided enough fluidity in the way we deconstruct the outward binary of what it looks like to be an academic. We contend that the proliferation of critical work in educational leadership research has not yet changed the apparatus of relationships, pedagogies, institutions, and teaching opposing change. Thus, we remain paused in a tactical stance, reflecting, questioning, and considering the nature of a longer-term response. This warrants a deeper analysis of the theory and multidisciplinary approaches that may have the ability to affirm the authenticity people bring to the field of educational leadership.
Intersecting Chicana Feminism and Queer Theory to Imagine New Spaces
Theory can never totally be detached from our relationality to ourselves, human beings, and the world. The false dichotomy of logical or rational thinking, versus intuitive, spiritual, or epigenetic thinking dismembers the knowledge holder, who experiences many ways of thinking and being at once. Just as bodily organs work simultaneously to make living possible, theorizing is made possible from acts of cognition situated in a sociopolitical context mediating the state of humanity. Considering our humanity is reduced to a cisheteronormative binary we can imagine new spaces from the duality of subjectivities healed. Thus, such a new space is layered in phases of healing and acting upon the world in a state of healing. For ourselves, it was the literature of Queer and Chicana scholars (Alexander, 2018; Anzaldúa, 1987; Bernal, 1998; Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1978; Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Sedgwick, 1990) who levitated us to a spiritual space, where we could feel, hear, and see ourselves unbranded from the colonial, patriarchal iron. With a tongue no longer tamed (Anzaldúa, 1987), we were not empowered by knowledge itself, but by the fluid arrangement of knowing intuitively-through the internal whispers of the body, mind, and spirit shaping the inward and outward construction of gender, race, and ethnicity. Understanding our bodies as a space, we imagined it anew with both masculine and feminine perceived qualities we need not justify. The question of dress is no longer situated by the norms of the academy, but by the fluid ways we experience gender and express it in an outward appearance. The significance of body healing is in the possibilities bodies can deconstruct what it “looks like” to be an academic.
A second imagining we work on, the pre-tenure path as a practice of authenticity, is a bit more challenging. In the daily grind of pre-tenure life, we are subjects who are advised to master the colonial set of instructions for how we can have “successful” academic careers where our identities are masked in the process. The burying of knowledge housed in the core of identities is in itself an act of violence from which to spiritually heal. Yet, as our identities remain marginalized and underrepresented in the academy, we must make sure our existence is written into the canon and the few of us who made entry are protected from a statistical death. Therefore, the urgency of dismantling racial, ethnic, and gendered binaries in education cannot wait, let alone wait for Brown bodies to make tenure. Wouldn’t there be more of us doing the work if there was not a 6 year hazing of our bodies and minds? Deep within, from the tactical survival of our ancestors, we feel the pulse of resistance existing way before the command of the white canon is taught, the letters of Ph.D. are attached to names, and definitely much sooner than tenure.
Thus, pre-tenure, as a space to imagine, is conjured in the ways our daily relationships are committed to unlearning the binaries that confine all of us. As our testimonios detail, in the regularity of dialogues with colleagues, we find our bodies, minds, and spirits under attack and propelled into a location of binary struggle. In claiming a space without attack, we imagine a bridge of dialogue marking a way out of struggle; a bridge of a collective consciousness raising (Anzaldúa & Keating 2002).
Planting questions into the dialogues of our daily academic life where consciousness is raised extends the bridge. We must be careful, however, that consciousness raising is not on an individual timeline, and mindful of the toll such journey takes. What questioning also signifies is a space contoured by our living, not only in the literature we read, but in the middle space where literature connects. While Bryan shared the writings of Judith Butler as a way to question the cishteronomative construction of gender and Amanda relied upon the concepts of the male/female duality of non-binary gender Anzaldúa conceptualizes; it is at the intersection of this thinking we find new ways to question, heal, and understand alongside colleagues. As academics, educators, and researchers, we return to our nature as questioners, but turn it upon our collective will to build bridges of connection where realities are not pre-determined in static binaries. In the example of Amanda questioning what knowledge can inform the frameworks grounding dissertations at a roundtable, came an extended dialogue of a different way to dissertate and a scholar emboldened to create from endarkened feminisms to tell the story of Black women educational leaders. While this connection was made, it also marked a location to question how to better connect with the co-facilitaor of the roundtable. In considering the possibilities, one must be willing to ask questions to understand the co-facilitator’s use of binaries to frame research production in the phrases “a done dissertation is a good dissertation” and “this work does not define my life”. These examples mark the practice of educational leadership; the vulnerability to listen repeatedly until a connection can be made, and to remain hopeful it can be done. The alternative is to remain on oppositional sides, where we may feel safe; yet unchanged.
Conclusion & Implications
Our work reveals while each of us was constrained by a multitude of binaries, shouldering this alone limited possibilities to dismantle them. Furthermore, sharing in our middle space, while comforting, also did not invoke change. Instead, it was getting messy ourselves in the crosshairs of our lived experiences and literature that led us to challenge the binaries we faced and our power to collectively transform the spaces in which they occur. Coming to understand space as temporal, in-process, and fluid, the entry points to attempt such change became more visible. In particular, the circular process of regenerating more non-binary space involved a clear examination of academic relationships, healing fractured identities, and gaining strength from the intersection of Queer and Chicana Feminist theories to forge a deeper solidarity. We wonder if making this middle space known might provide implications for moving past the tendency for educational leaders to teach about transforming schools and academic spaces without living in a more personal space of transformation. One implication is considering how to locate the opportunities to share our profound experience with literature as a means to invite more leaders to consider the ways literature can deepen a self-examination of norms in relationships sustaining the exclusion of identities in research and practice. As academics preparing educational leaders we can situate a norm of not only grounding research from theory, but also how we learn about ourselves and the transformation of collegial relationships more capable of practicing inclusivity. If the literature we read and produce does not change the dialogues and relationships within our own academic circles, how do we expect it to do so in the larger field of Educational Leadership?
We must also acknowledge this self and collective examination, was not without duress, but taught us lessons of patience, healing, hope, and humility that created a solid foundation of solidarity between us. Translating our relationship into implications for how we proceed as educational leaders must also create the conditions for a renewed sense of hope that solidarity can expand. The implication for such an expansion is a willingness to stay in communion with our colleagues where opportunities exist to build bridges in the everyday relationships guiding theory, research, and practice. To nurture the criticality of educational leaders, we not only unapologetically unsilence ourselves in the canon, but bring our full selves to the daily work among educators. Consequently, we are now strengthened enough to envision a process of reciprocity. Reciprocity implies, we find this way together; there is not a charted path for the uniqueness of the contexts in which we live and work. Therefore, we must hold space to question together, “How can schools be inclusive if academics are not?”. It is through this questioning, the field of Educational Leadership can and should open itself up to the messy identities of the folks within it, and in so doing, mess up the binaries that keep the exclusionary structures of education in place.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
