Locked Eyes

When I woke up to the news of the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub on June 12, 2016, the first words that popped into my head were: “I have to get back into the classroom.” This was an odd thought, to say the least. I was, after all, reveling in the freedom of research leave. But more important, what exactly did the horrific murders of queer people of color at a place of conviviality have to do with the seemingly professional, ordered, square space of teaching? My mind was quickly flooded with other thoughts, communal practices of mourning, and intense reflection on homophobia, Islamophobia, gun violence, and the general catastrophic state of our world. But as the days and weeks unfolded, my dialogues with colleagues, friends, and loved ones kept returning to the classroom and the practice of queer pedagogy. For those of us who teach about GLBTQ culture and politics, queer ways of life, and the public dimensions of sex and sexuality, we couldn’t help but asking: what would it mean to teach our students in the wake of such an event; how would our classroom practice be transformed; did we believe our teaching could ever prevent such atrocity and how?

These conversations lead me back to that first thought, always more and more urgent in my head: I have to get back into the classroom. When I reverse engineered this idea, I realized it sprang from a set of assumptions I hold deeply in my heart: I believe the kind of murderous violence that unfolded at Pulse is born of conservatism in its most classical sense, the idea that one must conserve or defend an idealized way of life that others are seen as eroding or destroying with their freedom or simply their existence in the world; I believe that conservatism can be questioned, and potentially undone, by dynamic engagement with different ways of life and by the presence of substantive interlocutors who question one’s worldview and demand accountability for one’s beliefs and actions; and I believe that the classroom, like the dance floor, is one of many spaces such engagement is set in motion.

The dance-floor and the classroom are strikingly similar. Both are spaces people frequent on a weekly basis where they meet a mixture of strangers, friends, and acquaintances to engage in acts of intimacy: the flow of bodies and exchange of ideas. Like dance floors, classrooms demand the formation of stranger intimacies, where we come to know, take seriously, and engage directly with other people, face to face. We lock eyes with others and something unfolds from that look that is often beyond our capacity to predict. Both spaces have the capacity to transform how we relate to and flow with other people; and just as any good DJ curates a musical selection to orchestrate the mood of a dance floor, so too an instructor is tasked with shaping the emotional atmosphere of a class to draw students in and encourage them to “dance” with one another. We are also tragically aware that classrooms and dance floors are spaces whose social energy and utopian potential can be snuffed out by violence—we have become nearly as accustomed to seeing guns enter these spaces as energetic bodies, ideas, and exchanges. Yet more than anything, classrooms and dance floors can be spaces that incite countless pleasures: the pleasure of shared ideas and bodily sensations, the pleasure of expanding one’s network of relations, the pleasure of losing oneself in a collective practice, only to find oneself again reborn at the end of a session or long night of celebration, more attuned to others. These pleasures are not theoretical or abstract, but experiential. To participate in a classroom is as grounded, and worldly of an act as dancing in a club, and both models numerous ways of being with others in public space.

The comparison between these two spaces then is not merely abstract, but rather a conceptual leap required for our survival. What does it take for someone to look out across the expanse of a dance floor animated by queer, brown, black, and...