• Sheri Osden Nault, University of Western Ontario

My presentation for the Teaching Queerly panel will look at developing and enacting pedagogy as Indigenous, queer/trans, and also the first generation of my family to attend post-secondary. As a Two-Spirit instructor, there are many ways in which the pedagogy I wish to enact in a classroom diverges from what I experienced in my studies and from what my students have expressed as their experience in many other courses. I strive to emphasize core values of community and support between students, space for accessibility in deadlines and assignment formats, and to lay foundations in assignments that allow students to explore positionality whether that be gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, disability/ Madness, trauma, and more. For many of us, this is ideally what we’re doing in the classroom. It is also a significant push back against notions that to be rigorous or to guide students to develop rigorous work in the arts, we must be strict, break down egos, or push students to work beyond the limitations of their own wellness. As I strive to diverge from Euro-centric, heteronormative, and patriarchal artistic canon in course content, I also strive to do so in my expectations of students.

keywords: queer, Indigenous, pedagogy, anti-oppression, two-spirit

Carefully Queer Pedagogies

• Theresa N. Kenney, McMaster University

Following queer of colour approaches to care (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018; Hobart and Kneese 2020), I discuss careful queer pedagogies to explore how teaching queerly practices, models, and experiments with care. I offer a reflection on my own pedagogical experiences as well as a critique of institutions like the university that remain inhospitable to queer of colour care models. I discuss how to experiment with the relationalities necessary to enact carefully queer pedagogies by turning to José Esteban Muñoz’s approach to queerness as a way of “being-with.” Such a move to relationality as careful queerness in the classroom (and beyond it) reminds us that teaching queerly is not about the neoliberal and colonial appetite for knowledge accumulation or value. Rather, teaching queerly now should extend a longstanding racialized and queer care praxis that emphasizes relational and collective care as a crucial survival, but also joyful, strategy in-and-outside of harmful institutions.

keywords: queer, care, pedagogy, relationality

An untidy and lively affair: Writing art histories, fan fictions, and queer forms of close looking

• Daniella Sanader, York University

This presentation will experiment in drawing connections between two distinct strategies of writing—visual analysis and fanfiction, the former a standardized introductory exercise in the academic discipline of art history, and the latter a declaratively “amateur” storytelling practice resistant to institutionalization—in order to reflect on pedagogies of art writing from a queer methodological lens. Is there a queerness to be found in looking closely (maybe too closely), in cultivating embodied intimacy through language, in attending to the “untidy and lively” (to borrow art historian Michael Baxandall’s phrasing) edge where written description grazes against visual material? What pedagogical possibilities can be found when these ambiguities are facilitated differently, when oblique readings and excessive attachments are welcomed and encouraged, for those who are learning how to write about art and its histories? Drawing on recent experiments in art writing and fandom culture, alongside frameworks for queer art historical method, I will use this presentation to loosely reflect on my own work as an art critic, an early-career academic, and former teenage fanfiction author: three modes of writing found along the same spectrum of queer close looking.

keywords: teaching writing, visual analysis, queer methodology, fan fiction, close reading

Not Lonely Fans: Fandom as Para-Academic Episteme in QueerSoftOrange’s Online Queer Collective

• Morris Fox, Concordia University

This proposal aims to explore fandom as a para-academic episteme in the context of queer collective, QueerSoftOrange. With the rise of online platforms in response to the Covid 19 pandemic, such as Discord, fandom is a useful lens to explore affective knowledge commons, bridging academic scholarship and grassroots cultural production. By examining the dynamics of the queer artist collective QueerSoftOrange, this proposal seeks to illuminate how queer fandom operates as an epistemic community, generating knowledge and discourse as informal congregate networks.

QueerSoftOrange’s digital commons, in social media direct message groups and over Discord, creates a hotline for queer artists, modelling intergenerational peer-to-queer learning and collective production, outside of gate-kept educational institutions. QueerSoftOrange have cultivated a dedicated community, collectively producing, peer-exchanging, and disseminating work. This proposal aims to explore how fandom functions within this context, how members of QueerSoftOrange act as fans for each other, and co-create the collective's broader epistemic framework as a fandom to queer art, memory, and culture.

Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from queer theory and cultural studies, this presentation will examine how fandom operates as a para-academic episteme within QueerSoftOrange. It will explore the collaborative nature of fan engagement, the circulation of knowledge and ideas, and the impact of this para-academic framework on the collective's artistic practice.

This proposal speaks to the tensions emerging within the intersection of fandom and academia. By investigating the para- academic within QueerSoftOrange, this presentation tests conventions of expertise and authority, emphasising the importance of peer-based exchange in shaping queer intergenerational knowledge.

keywords: collectivity, para-academia, queer theory, fandom, arts pedagogy