Queering Intersectional Literacies to Redefine Female Sexualities: A Case Study

Abstract

Based on a 1-year interview-based case study of a preservice English teacher, this article considers the limitations of both intersectional literacies and reader-based responses to texts. In an effort to address students’ problematic discussions of female sexuality, the participant implemented a queer pedagogy that emphasized alterity, or the examination of “other,” while pushing students into spaces of discomfort and uncertainty. Using Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” as the basis of her approach, the teacher and her students’ engagement with literacy practices necessarily shifted when they began to interrogate cultural norms and sites of uneasiness in relation to school-mandated texts. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways that literacy practices are necessarily and constantly mediated through sociopolitical contexts and personal understandings, though readers’ individual perspectives cannot be the sole basis of reading practices.