Educating-bodies: Dialogism, speech genres, and utterances as the body

Abstract

This chapter seeks to examine queer masculinities in education using the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s work is used to rethink how masculinities are conceptualized, negotiated, and articulated among bodies. I reread Judith Butler’s notion of performativity using a Bakhtinian lens to make the shift from performative masculinities to masculinities that are dialogically negotiated in highly contextualized moments. Bakhtinian concepts such as utterance and speech genres are used to reconsider bodily materiality in contemporary queer studies by challenging meanings of queer, masculinity, and education in relation to bodies that are indefinite potentialities. I argue that the shift from performativity to utterance can create new spaces to rethink the relationships among bodies and masculinities where bodies are produced through dialogic relations with other bodies as culture. Reconceptualizing the body as a dialogic relation negotiated through utterances that are highly contextualized reworks what it means to be engaged in educational practices: education becomes less something that is done to the body and becomes more something that is negotiated as the body. The shift from performativity (Butler) to utterance (Bakhtin) allows for new ways to understand educational doings where bodies doing education do not reiterate past educational practices (performativity) but produce education through relations with other bodies and spaces (utterance). In other words, the educating-body as a dialogic relation is not a copy but a quote where something new is always created out of something given (Bakhtin). The vision of this chapter is therefore to rethink the relationships among queer, masculinity, and education by reworking the concepts themselves. I argue that this requires a critical reconceptualization of how queer masculinities are negotiated and articulated in contemporary queer studies. This offers important implications for educational studies where I demonstrate how the body does not receive and then reproduce education. In contrast, I expose how education is produced as the body in contextualized dialogic relations of teaching and learning.