Preface and Acknowledgements
This e-book, Beyond the Queer Alphabet: Conversations on Gender, Sexuality & Intersectionality, emerges from two interrelated blog series on bullying and on LGBTQI2-S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, intersex and 2-Spirited) issues. We hope that the conversion of the blog series into an e-book will increase the social impact and portability of these important contributions to conversations about equity, diversity and social justice. One of the most important uses of the Equity Matters series on the Fedcan Blog is in teaching and learning. The blog’s content is open access and readily linked to e-courses both in Canada and internationally. Many university teachers from across Canada regularly reported that they were using the LGBTQI2-S entries, as all the Equity Matters entries, for teaching and learning; this open access e-book also provides a handy resource for teachers in K-12 and university teachers. We also hope that this open access e-book reaches wider audiences, and alerts diverse publics to the work of the individual scholars, their research, and public intellectual and community engagement.
One impetus for the interrelated Equity Matters blog series on cyberbullying, harassment, and bullying-suicide, and on intersectional diversity among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, intersex, and 2-Spirited peoples – was an email from Ryan Saxby-Hill and Pierre Normand of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications team. Gay-bashing and cyberbullying had taken the life of yet another young person, this time 18-year old Rutger’s University talented music student Tyler Clementi. How did I, in my capacity as vice-president, Equity Issues, want to comment? Given the spate of bullying-suicides that had taken the lives of so many young people in the United States and Canada, and the stories emerging from Uganda, Mexico, Australia and elsewhere, the Clementi story signalled the need for a more sustained attention to the human dignity and inalienable rights of LGBTQI2-S people. My initial response was “Queering In/ Equality: LGBT Youth It Gets Better,” which was posted to the Fedcan Blog in October 2010.
Given the magnitude of the challenge of homophobia, transphobia and bullying-suicide, a one-off response was clearly not enough. Social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts) reach a diverse public and are an important vehicle for raising awareness and educating on equity, diversity, and social inclusion. Thus, from that initial event and e-mail emerged the idea for editing a blog series. There was an overwhelmingly positive response to my personal invitation to dozens of scholars, public officials and activists across Canada asking them both to contribute to a blog series and to recommend other potential contributors to me.
In the Fall of 2010 a mini-series on hate crimes, bullying and human rights, and bullying in schools and the workplace ran on the blog. The initial blog series aimed to do several things: first, to raise awareness of bullying and violence on the lives of LGBTQI2-S people, the impact on dignity, health and wellbeing and even on life itself; second, to enhance public education on the dignity and human rights of LGBTQI2-S peoples; third, to advance equity, diversity and social justice in Canada and abroad’; and, fourth, to provide an open access resource for teaching and learning both in schools and in higher education.
Thoughtful and timely pieces were written by some of Canada’s leading researchers, including Brian Burtch, Rebecca Haskell, Lucas Crawford, Robert Nichols, Kris Wells, Wendy Craig, Joanne Cummings, Debra Pepler and Elsie Hambrook. Many of these entries eloquently spoke about the need to confront hate crimes, homophobia and transphobia –as well as the need to go beyond these issues in order to achieve a deeper understanding of resilience and the kinds of education and hard work needed to achieve equity across and within diverse LGBTQI2-S communities. This call to ‘go beyond’ phobias suggests a new orientation in what and how we address gender, gender identity and sexual diversity and, especially, intersectionality within the LGBTQI2-S communities in Canada and internationally.
From Blog to E-Book
The conversion of the blog series into an e-book is also the logical next step in the transfer of knowledge to our students and to various publics and, at the same time, to increase scholarly and social impact of equity and diversity research. Recognition of the social impact of the blogs, as social media generally, is growing. One result of the outreach effort to the social science and humanities community was the creation of an informal network of researchers who committed to write thoughtful entries for the series and, if they were unable to do so, to recommend others.
A second outcome of the outreach was the identification and building of an important and timely virtual network of senior and new scholars who are among the leading thinkers on LGBTQI2-S issues in Canada and internationally. This e-book, Beyond the Queer Alphabet: Conversations on Gender, Sexuality & Intersectionality comprises the work of 30 diverse scholars from some 15 social sciences and humanities disciplines, located in over a dozen universities in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
The e-book also embodies the insights that emerged from various social media conversations with diverse communities of interest in gender, sexual diversity, queer intersectionality and critical diversity studies. The productive conversations between and among the contributors, as each blog was posted, traversed a wide array of topics related to sex, sexuality, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity. The conversations also sought to complicate our idea of the ‘normal’ or ‘severely normal’ queer by insisting on an intersectional analysis that engages race, disability, class, age and other dimensions of human difference. In the blog series, as in this e-book, contributors stress the important role that schools and institutions of higher education play in advancing knowledge, a scholarship of engagement, and a more empathetic global citizenship.
The essays engage various ideas of ‘going beyond’ conventional thinking, practices and ways of being in order to imagine more humane ways of engaging each other in our everyday thinking and practices. One iteration of ‘going beyond’ relates to engagement with the queer alphabet – the multiple and overlapping meanings of the L-word, or the T-tensions, or the Q-questions and whether and how I-belongs. Undoubtedly the letters in the queer alphabet have multiplied over the past decades – from LG, LGB, LGBT and QLGBT to LGBTQI2-S, LGBTTIQQ2SA, among others. We’ve made an effort to map many of these acronyms in the List of Acronyms & Abbreviations. The essays also entail going beyond inclusion-as-sameness to a more substantive conception of equity as engaging and respecting human difference. And it especially encourages going beyond attention to LGBTQI2-S issues only in moments of outrageous acts of hate crimes, bullying, violence and crisis.
This e-book is organized in three parts. Part I is entitled, “The Queer Alphabet and Beyond” and includes nine essays that take up the ‘queer alphabet’ and ‘queer vocabulary’ from A to Z. Following Sirma Bilge and Rinaldo Walcott, the essays call for a queer intersectionality and critical diversity praxis in everyday interactions with persons who are different from us. Part II, entitled, “Resisting Closets: Hate, Bullying and Violence,” includes nine articles that explore semiotic, cyber and physical violence and the ways in which these are experienced and resisted. Part III, “Building Resilience:
Towards a More Inclusive Education,” contains eight articles that map the critical role of education and the most productive ways of thinking and learning about and teaching equity matters.
Through this process, doctoral and postdoctoral students were able to connect with senior scholars working in areas of their research, and senior and new scholars alike were able to get constructive feedback on their ideas, share arguments from their new or forthcoming books and participate in a virtual conversation on effecting social change. As well, through this process, some scholars were invited to contribute to research projects, international conference panels, and edited books. This generosity and collegiality continued as each blog was posted. After each posting I shared an excerpt and the blog’s link with an interdisciplinary virtual network of some fifty to sixty diverse scholars. These scholars also shared the entries via their social media networks – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, discussion forums – to further transfer knowledge and, in turn, fuel the astonishing growth in the blog’s readership.
Like the initial blog series, this e-book is possible because scholars across the social sciences and humanities generously shared their time, research and knowledge. In particular, I want to extend a personal thanks to each contributor, as many others who could not contribute but took the time to connect me to other colleagues and students. Much appreciation is due to scholars who generously shared their networks, including Janine Brodie, Brian Burtch, Gloria Filax, Fatima Jaffer, Cressida Heyes, Gada Mahrouse, Catherine Murray, Donna Pennee, Richard Sullivan and Rinaldo Walcott.
This e-book is also the result of an everyday, often invisible, collaborative relationship with the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Communication staff in the Ottawa Secretariat. I especially want to thank the Directors and staff in the Ottawa Secretariat, including three people who have moved on: Pierre Normand was the Communications Director to whom I first proposed launching Equity Matters on the Fedcan Blog; and Caitlin Kealey and Ryan Saxby-Hill were two of the fabulous people with whom I initially worked. Since becoming the new Director of Policy and Communications, Alison Hebbs, along with Policy Analyst Karen Diepeveen, have vigorously promoted the Equity Matters series, while building the Fedcan Blog’s brand in Canada and internationally. Each week Norman Forgues-Roy or Milena Stanoeva posted the blog entries that I invited, edited and forwarded to the Secretariat. I am deeply grateful to them for the collaboration, which has contributed to the astonishing success of the Equity Matters series.
Finally, this e-book has benefited in indelible ways from countless hours of fact and footnote- checking and the timely assistance of my talented undergraduate researcher, Eréndira Cervantes- Altamirano. I am also deeply grateful to my co-editor, Fatima Jaffer, who is known to many readers as the former editor of Canada’s national feminist newspaper, Kinesis. This final work emerges from many early morning and late night telephone calls, text messages and virtual conversations with both Eréndira and Fatima. We hope readers will find this e-book a valuable resource.
Malinda S. Smith
Edmonton, Alberta
17 March 2012