Gender and Education

Gender and Education invites submissions for a special issue titled Queer Imaginaries as Pedagogy, dedicated to exploring and amplifying queer ways of world-making in educational contexts. A queer imaginary refers to the myriad ways queer people imagine worlds that differ from dominant social norms, including alternative ways of being, relating, and learning that are not confined by cis-heteronormative or colonial structures. Storytelling, speculative writing, poetry, performance, and embodied expression are examples of modes for picturing these worlds. 

This issue understands queer imaginaries not only as creative or political interventions but as pedagogical practices in their own right, understanding pedagogy here not as confined to formal schooling, but as any practice through which knowledge is created, shared, and transformed in relation with others. Positioning queer imaginaries at the centre of educational scholarship invites an expanded view of pedagogy that is attentive to relationality, cultural knowledge, decoloniality, affect, and the imaginative work that shapes how queer people make meaning and create lives. 

Queer imaginaries have a long lineage in feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship. Across different times, writers, artists, and educators have used imagination to articulate lives and futures otherwise constrained by dominant norms. For instance, Audre Lorde (1987) offered ways of understanding erotic power and creativity as sources of knowledge. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) showed how borderlands consciousness could generate new forms of identity and world-building. Sara Ahmed’s work on affect, willfulness, and complaint illuminated how queer lives push against institutional pressures and create alternative pathways for living and learning (e.g. 2004, 2010, 2014, 2021). In Aotearoa and the Pacific, writers such as Ngahuia Te Awekotuku (2024) and Dan Taulapapa McMullin (2013) have modelled queer creative practices grounded in history and place. 

Expanding what counts as feminist and queer educational knowledges matters because dominant framings of knowledge often privilege empiricism and rationalism and exclude embodied, affective, spiritual, and culturally grounded insights. Treating these as valid sources of insight allows understandings of learning that attend to lived experience, emotion, pleasure, memory, and the body. Shifting to multiple, situated knowledges opens possibilities for educators and researchers to consider how learning happens in community, through story, creativity, and relational practice. 

Examples of these approaches include queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009), Indigiqueerness and storytelling (Whitehead, 2023), creative pedagogies that use poetry (Klangwisan, 2020), speculative fiction (Butler, 1980), portraiture and performance (Paora, 2025) and autoethnographic methods tracing gendered and sexual histories (Gaerlan, 2024). Pedagogies informed by queer imaginaries might centre joy, refusal, play, kinship, or ancestral connection as methods for thinking and learning. 

Following bell hooks’ call in Teaching to Transgress to approach education as a practice of freedom, this issue seeks work that embraces creativity, relationality, and the courage to think beyond normative structures. In a world where cis-heteronormative and colonial frameworks continue to assert power, this issue creates space for stories and creative interventions that imagine different possibilities and offer alternative visions of gender, sexuality, and education. 

References 

• Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge. 
• Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. 
• Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Duke University Press. 
• Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint! Duke University Press. 
• Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. 
• Butler, O. E. (1980). Wild Seed. Doubleday. 
• Klangwisan, Y. (2020). The limits of (be-)longing: An ode to the edge of gender. Hecate, 46(1-2), 186-192. 
• Gaerlan, E. (2024). Kapwa as queer inclusion. Knowledge Cultures, 12(1), 70-89. 
• hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. 
• Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power. Trumansburg, NY: Out & Out Books. 
• McMullin, D. T. (2013). Coconut Milk. University of Arizona Press.  
• Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press. 
• Paora, T. (2024). Heuristic inquiry, rangahau, the explicit and the esoteric. In W. Ings & K. Tudor (Eds.), Heuristic enquiries: Research across disciplines and professions. Taylor & Francis.  
• Schoone, A. (2021). Can concrete poems fly? Setting data free in a performance of visual enactment. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), 129–135.  
• Te Awekōtuku, N. (2024). Hine Toa: a story of bravery. HarperCollins. 
• Whitehead J. & Abdou, A. (2023). Indigiqueerness: A conversation about storytelling. AU Press.