Cuir Identities

In the available literature, it is not easy to define what the term “queer” (English word) means, nor is it convenient to try. Defining queer can be inconvenient since every attempt limits the semantic essence behind the term (Halperin, 2003). In this line of thought, defining queer would mean, at least for us, representing the existences, histories, identities, and subjectivities of those who have been wounded by the rhetoric of modernity (i.e., representation). Defining it would also imply an attempt to speak about a constituted world. Therefore, although we understand the queer as “an umbrella term for diverse non-heterosexual identities” (Morandini et al., 2016, p. 911), we also believe it is a fluid and changing notion (Callis, 2014) that allows a more situated and dynamic opportunity to escape gendered labels when documenting student-teachers’ identities. Along with these definitions, we hold the view that the term itself must be situated within the local histories and experiences of those wounded by the colonial regime.

Although there are studies that certainly shorten the gap regarding the study of queer identities (see Nelson, 2004), they cannot and should not be expected to account for the identities of Colombian English language teachers because—as Mignolo (2021) argues—other global situated models cannot serve all local histories. In fact, in the Colombian context, Castañeda-Peña’s (2021) literature review accounts for varied identity studies conducted in the country, and the author concludes that these studies are still scarce and there is space for situating research interest within the local histories of those who narrate their experience. Therefore, we resist employing the term queer and choose to adopt the word cuir (Spanish phonetics) since the latter supposes a geopolitical look toward the South and from the borders and peripheries (Valencia, 2018). Not only does the term cuir become an analytical category to situate student-teachers’ identities within the educational field, but it also enunciates “the constant border crossing where we can establish dialogues through differences to question the despotism of rigid identities” (Bello Ramírez, 2018, p. 110).

We suggest that more research on how language teachers’ identities and cuir co-emerge is needed to extend the conversation since an overt colonial logic has made LGTBIQ+ identities invisible (Enrico & Castro, 2021; Paiz, 2018). This is perhaps the result of the imposition of the “modern-colonial system of gender” (Lugones, 2008, p. 76), which has caused cuir teachers and cuir teacher practitioners to, unwittingly or not, camouflage or conceal their sexual orientations, hindering the free deployment of their identities. One influential factor in that phenomenon is the institutional or social pressure that might risk their career possibilities (Lin et al., 2020). On this basis, although some counter-hegemonic practices have been eroding those logics by “opening a whole scope of epistemological, epistemic and pedagogical alternatives for the oppressed, the border, dissidents, the difference, the queer [cuir]” (Enrico & Castro, 2021, p. 162), there is still a need to understand the cuir enounced in the practicum as a locus of student-teachers’ identity (re)constructions.

Language Pedagogy

Language pedagogy is not just about developing competencies and skills. Nor is it only about improving the skills and techniques teachers need for teaching, along with the theories, beliefs, and value systems (Richards, 2017). Although we accept that the former assumptions present a joint theoretical and procedural ground in teaching a language, they result from a logic in which the notion of pedagogy has been oriented toward “the meeting of standards representing a certain level of acquisition of [any] skill” (Granados-Beltrán, 2018, p. 175). We concur with Granados-Beltrán in that language pedagogy also seems to have an ethical goal that is not considered when the notion of pedagogy is taken apart from those who enact it.

In this paper, language pedagogy is grounded on a perspective toward “an essential methodology within and for social, political, ontological, and epistemic struggles for liberation” (Walsh, 2013, p. 29). If a student-teacher’s cuir identity is to be documented, language pedagogy is a category that must be explored as the relationship between identities and pedagogy is indissociable. On the one hand, identities are pedagogical tools (Motha et al., 2012). For example, Morgan (2004) asserts that a teacher’s identity is a pedagogical resource for language education. On the other hand, language pedagogy, as far as this study is concerned, is the means through which identities are enacted (Ubaque-Casallas, 2023). These two assumptions make us think far from a pedagogy that “operates through the imposition of identities and selection of specific knowledge as human ideals to achieve” (Bello Ramírez, 2018, p. 113). This is a language pedagogy that not only implies a conversation toward the otherness but that embodies one’s identity.

The Pedagogical Practicum in English Language Teaching

As part of teacher education programs in ELT, the pedagogical practicum is a locus for identity construction. Although it is conceived as an opportunity to elaborate and improve the knowledge prospective language teachers have obtained throughout the educational process (Nguyen, 2014), it is also a moment of learning (Castañeda-Trujillo & Aguirre-Hernández, 2018). However, the pedagogical practicum in ELT has barely been explored as the scenario in which non-disciplinary student-teachers’ identities are forged.

From an institutional stance, the Colombian Ministry of Education (Ministerio de Educación Nacional, n.d.) endorses the idea that in the pedagogical practicum, “the undergraduate student addresses knowledge in an articulated way and from different disciplines that enrich the understanding of the educational process and the teaching function in it” (p. 5, translated by the authors). Such a perspective is limited to the transmission and application of ELT disciplinary knowledge (Lucero, 2015) as if it were the main, the most, and only substantial development area for student-teachers. We can infer that this configuration of a modern university catered to institutional discourses of neutrality (i.e., those that assume practices as devoid of contextual factors—hence unproblematic—and subjects as fixed entities) also limits the deployment of other ontological relations.

This vertical logic in the pedagogical practicum in ELT indicates who student-teachers should be. Their identities and subjectivities are not considered crucial in language teacher education. Therefore, “since academic colonialism [is still] present . . . teacher education programs should help student-teachers and educators foster local knowledges” (Ubaque-Casallas & Aguirre-Garzón, 2020, p. 141) but, at the same time, open space for other identities that have been hidden and subalternized by the North/Eurocentric rationale installed in language teacher education programs.

Narrative Research

This study adopts a narrative perspective. From this investigative lens, we assume that:

Narrating implies putting what has been lived into words, as ideas and emotions; re-signifying experiences, filling one’s own history with meaning by re-naming and re-creating a series of events, which rather than responding to chronological and objective order, respond to a logical and subjective framework, which accounts for a particular and complex configuration in the face of the events. (Arias Cardona & Alvarado Salgado, 2015, p. 172)

In this sense, we recognize in the narration a possibility to incorporate “an ethical and political bet of those who [like us] want to re-think the traditional ways of conducting research and approaching the subjects with whom it is investigated” (Arroyo Ortega & Alvarado Salgado, 2016, p. 138). Moreover, we acknowledge that a narrative perspective offers a pedagogical character from which space is opened for student-teachers to account for their identity construction processes. In other words, narratives constitute pedagogical sites when subjects construct and share them with others (Goodson & Gill, 2011). In such sites, onto-epistemological constructions can occur where subjects make sense of their professional selves.

On the other hand, the narrative perspective we propose for this research positions us in a space of co-construction. In this sense, this study moves away from our role as “researchers” and proposes a “detachment and disengagement from the Western/Eurocentric/colonial episteme” (Ortiz Ocaña & Arias López, 2019, p. 156). On that note, we propose from our locus of enunciation (Anthony’s and ours; Grosfoguel, 2011) a collaborative construction on the narratives of a student-teacher concerning his cuir identity. Therefore, we contend that by hearing his cuir story, not only can we document and understand but dwell in the spaces of struggle from which he has formed his identity in a dominant context that is heteronormative and that defines the boundaries of authenticity and recognition.

Context of the Study

This study was conducted at a private university in Bogotá, Colombia. Anthony belonged to a program that trains student-teachers to strengthen English teaching and learning knowledge and abilities in foreign language educative contexts as practitioners. Anthony attended the school assigned by the university to do his teaching practicum three to four days a week for one semester. On that basis, as one of the researchers is a teacher educator at the university where Anthony studied, he invited Anthony to converse about his experiences as a teacher-to-be. This researcher did not participate in the data collection process to minimize any influence over the participant. Thus, the second researcher was in charge of collecting the data. Ethics approval and informed consent were obtained before the study.

The conversations occurred during one semester, every other week, and took place in one-hour meetings at the university. They were held in Spanish since Anthony desired to express his thoughts in his L1. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and translated into English by the researchers, trying to keep the ideas as verbatim as possible. The transcripts were then shared with Anthony for verification and adding or extracting ideas. At the time of the study, Anthony was in his twenties, and most of his teaching experience had been with kids and teenagers, the most common population for the teaching practicum in the Colombian context.

Data Analysis

In this study, we are interested in developing a vision of narrative that distances itself from the extractivist legacy of narrative research, which means the mere extraction of information from participants without their active participation (Rivas-Flores et al., 2020). In this sense, since canonical approaches to research have made participants maintain a passive attitude in the knowledge process, making them feel different, alien, distant, and observed (Vasilachis de Gialdino, 2007), we attempted to interact, converse, and dialogue with Anthony, not as an object under study but as a subject whose ontological reality is valued (Vasilachis de Gialdino, 2009). This meant listening to Anthony speaking from his locus of enunciation (Grosfoguel, 2011) as a cuir student-teacher. Thus, the analysis reflects Anthony’s own intervention in the narrative knowledge-making process through a series of conversations in which sensing and emotioning were key to connecting, to feeling together.

Methodologically speaking, we selected a holistic approach to analysis (Lieblich et al., 1998), in which Anthony’s experience could be first divided into sections or segments of narratives within the broader narrative to be further analyzed regarding the rest of the story. Segmenting Anthony’s experience allows for a more granular examination of specific moments, interactions, and contextual nuances that might be overlooked in a more generalized analysis method. However, since there is a political and transformative sense that we reflected in the analysis of the experiences reported here, we choose to think of Anthony’s experience as a mechanism “of a transformative project” (Beverly, 2013, p. 354) that invited us to speak of a decolonial doing.

In the narratives, we adopt a position of indwelling in which we aim to understand “the person’s point of view from an empathetic rather than a sympathetic position” (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994, p. 25). Hence, we are not talking here about an information collection process but about a sustained process of co-construction of knowledge (Arias Cardona & Alvarado Salgado, 2015) that begins from Anthony’s cuir locatedness. We speak of a process that comprises our epistemological position, a process that does not look for epistemic legitimacy or methodological validity but encourages us and others to release the beliefs we have taken for granted. In essence, we speak of a process that allows us to avoid the knowing-known subject epistemology (Vasilachis de Gialdino, 2003) mainly present in the traditional and canonic objectivist research paradigm that has also dominated teachers’ subjectivities. Our commitment is our decolonial doing from which we resist controlling subjectivities through knowledge.

Anthony’s Cuir Experience

This analysis starts from Anthony’s cuir locatedness (Grace, 2000). This means we situate his cuir narrative in an institutional heterosexuality construction of the teaching practicum that restrains and erases his identity as a cuir student-teacher. With this, we do not mean to build an exotic notion of what being cuir means, but we seek to both denounce that cuir teachers come into sight as the victims in teacher education (Lin et al., 2020) and to make heard a marginalized voice that has been silenced (Ferfolja, 2007).

Anthony’s construction of cuir emerges from his experiences with his body in oppressive situations. For him, being cuir means being marica.¹ Both being marica and young are enacted through language pedagogy and are constituent dimensions of his self as a language teacher. As such, his own lived experiences are the primal source of knowledge that started the production of cuir discourse. This reasoning is defined by Planella and Pie (2012) as incarnated knowledge: pedagogical knowledge that is informed by the lived experiences in the bodies of those who are oppressed by colonial structures of power. Anthony considers that educative contexts (not only as institutions but as communities of people associated with them) subalternate and make invisible the subjectivities of those who, like him, do not conform to specific standards. This is even more evident in his narrative at his pedagogical practicum stage as he enacts space-dependent performativity. This means that he can or cannot deploy his cuir identities as these are subordinated by the nature of such contexts. The following excerpt corresponds to an experience narrated by Anthony in a virtual English class:

Being a marica teacher in Colombia is problematic, especially in elementary schools. In fact, once at the practicum, I was giving a typical class, and some third graders left a microphone on. I listened to a girl saying: “Is that the teacher? He looks weird and too young.” That kid! Because of my age and my appearance, I have been judged a lot. People do not take you seriously, neither do kids. I am used to introducing myself by saying my age, yet I avoid telling them my [sexual] orientation. Just because of my age, people do not take me seriously; imagine if I told them I am a marica. I believe that as a young man and as a marica, one is very exposed to being judged, especially in the school context. These biases are complex; one tries to play along with it, to play it safe. However, it is not only my age; it is the fact that I dress and act based on who I am. I wear light colors; I do my nails when I teach. I am a marica teacher; that is what I do, who I am. My classes, I think, are English; the only difference is that I choose not to imprison who I am. The problem, I think, is that I have been exposed to being perceived based on people’s own representation of what being a male teacher in a school setting means. Besides, if you think about it, in Colombia, a mature gay man can be respected, but a young one may not. I think it is also an issue of social positioning and the respect you get with time.

Anthony’s incarnated knowledge and cuir locatedness recognize that being a cuir teacher is hard when the pedagogical practicum is situated in the elementary school stage. It is a space in which Anthony feels watched and judged. This is because, according to Planella and Pie (2012), “the normalizing judgment is a constant in mainstream pedagogy” (p. 275). Interestingly, although the pedagogical practicum has been thought to be generally about knowing and doing (Kemmis et al., 2014; Lucero, 2015), it has barely been explored from its limiting dynamics. From Anthony’s narration, the pedagogical practicum is both a normative and a disciplinary-based logic that mainly serves student-teachers to re-configure their perceptions of teaching as a profession and a practice (Taylor & Littleton, 2006). However, as it is believed in this study, the pedagogical practicum goes beyond this functional view. Instead, it is a scenario in which identities are built, contested, and re-signified in and through oppression, violence, or erasure.

In the excerpt above, Anthony refers to his age. We believe his self is built from his age, as it is a notable dimension of identity (Mason & Chik, 2020). Furthermore, as age can be seen as socially constructed—hence used as a dimension to privilege or marginalize subjects (Andrew, 2012)—it seems to bring forth prejudice toward a person (Greenberg et al., 2002). Moreover, Anthony is aware of the heteronormative implications age brings to his cuirness. His age is a matter of representation by others that is indissociable from his subjectivity (i.e., his feeling and emotioning) and his appearance as a non-normative teacher. His being young intersects his cuir identity as a young student-teacher when he chooses to wear light-colored clothes and enter the school scenario having his nails done, two heteronormative practices that have been socially assigned to women in Colombia but that Anthony enacts in his teacher body.

Anthony identifies with cuir, for he constructs himself as a marica student-teacher. It is who he is. Both notions allow him to avoid feeling exposed, permitting him to perform differently. This performativity is mediated by the locus, where he enunciates himself in his cuirness, yet he tries to play it safe. This is what we refer to as space-dependent performativity. For Giraldo (2016), “the term marica hides an additional burden [religious and political in Colombian tradition] that terms such as queer or gay simply do not possess; others are their stories, others their battles” (p. 21, translated by the authors). In Anthony’s case, being a marica is a means to build his own identity, the identity of a teacher who exists within the border of a disciplinary and heteronormative identity in which student-teachers’ subjectivities have been made invisible. Interestingly, his language pedagogy also becomes a pathway to perform and emerge from his colonized existence in his attempt to exist, as we will see in the excerpt below.

I give super open-minded classes, and we [Anthony and his students] can talk about many things. I like to offer specific debate topics that interest me in classes. One day in bachillerato,² we were looking at art, talking about art . . . I asked students: “Is this art? Is this not art?” We discussed avant-garde paintings. I said, “This is like a black painting with a white spot.” In one of those sessions, I put the image of a Mexican painter in which Emiliano Zapata is riding on a horse with his penis on the outside in heels. Students were very interested in that. This activity allows us to reflect on how people went to lynch others at the Palace of Bellas Artes and how people made it to the entire Mexican government to make them remove the painting. You see, history was also there, not only language. Come to think of it, doing this in my classes reflects somehow my positioning, my ideology, and those kinds of things . . . even my pain as a marica many times. Doing this is how I think one can reflect one’s identity and the topics that interest you. For example, I like architecture, and I have talked about architectural places in Bogotá that I find exciting; those things are the ones through which one begins to demonstrate who one is.

Anthony’s pedagogy contests and transgresses traditional notions of language pedagogy. It is transgressive as it is not bound to, nor is it restricted by, the disciplinary canon in which non-native English language teachers and student-teachers have been constructed as subalterns professionals (Kumaravadivelu, 2014). Instead, it goes beyond this logic and

advocates that identity is not an objective to be formed but something to put at risk. It is about opening any educational space to the disruptive possibility that otherness has as a transforming difference capable of astonishing and destabilizing the subject. (Bello Ramírez, 2018, p. 119)

Anthony’s constructions of a transgressive pedagogy can also be seen as a trans-pedagogy (Bello Ramírez, 2018), for it can re-imagine other practices that mobilize possibilities, teaching, learning, gender, the body, the cuir, and other possible pedagogical worlds. This pedagogy becomes a scenario to re-exist, a means to “open and engage venues and paths of decolonial conviviality, venues and paths that take us beyond, while at the same time undoing, the singularity and linearity of the West” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 3).

Pedagogy is then a critical component of identity. Nevertheless, the term pedagogy has not distanced itself from the instrumentalized construction that prioritizes Western/North methodological and linguistic foundations (Ubaque-Casallas, 2021). Therefore, Anthony’s pedagogy allows us to think of a form of trans-pedagogy as it becomes “an ethical orientation that anyone can incarnate [which] implies an opposition to the reproduction of heterosexual norms in the classroom. It means to create creative alternatives to historicize and denature the normal and the normative” (Bello Ramírez, 2018, p. 116).

Such a trans-pedagogy makes identity visible, significant, and necessary for teaching. Moreover, this trans-pedagogy opens room to think of space-dependent performativities as cracks that, “for many of us, are the place of our location, agency, and everyday struggle” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 82), a place in which we can humanize ourselves and others through our doings as teachers. Not surprisingly, Anthony’s identity emerges from colonial (i.e., heteronormative, gendered bias) cracks to re-signify language pedagogy as it becomes the personal enactment of his identity.

Anthony’s pedagogy and being a marica student-teacher also challenge the static notions of identity in teacher education. We link this claim to Hall (1997), who argues that “identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being” (p. 4). Importantly, it is in this becoming that Anthony’s pedagogy becomes an action (Castañeda-Peña & Méndez-Rivera, 2022) in which his subjectivity (i.e., sensing and emotioning) fragments the representations of an English teacher. Representations that are mainly and mostly linked to competence and performance in teaching the target language but that silence and reject embodied and gendered constructions of the self. Somehow, Anthony’s pedagogy can be seen as a process of resistance and re-existence, of self-affirmation through which he aims to recover what has been silenced and dispossessed (Mignolo, 2021) in his path of becoming an English language teacher.

If you ask me what I do at school, or at least in the classroom, it makes me feel comfortable. I know that school may be difficult at times; it can hurt you badly. Colleagues, parents, and even students may pack who you are in a label. However, I consider that being a marica who teaches English is an opportunity for me to educate others in what they have not been educated in. I mean, we learn at home the norm. What I am doing is to undo that.

Before we close the analysis of Anthony’s experience, we believe it is relevant to consider his pain as a marica student-teacher. When it comes to language pedagogy, it cannot be denied that it has, for many years, been crossed by abysses of silence and nullity that have naturalized expressions of inequality and violence against individuals. The same pedagogy has silenced many of those it claims to educate. Either because it is just a disciplinary imposition or because it dictates who they are to be. In one way or another, Anthony’s language pedagogy, in the excerpt above, intersects with his pain. However, we do not think it is a pain-based pedagogy. As Flores (2016) points out, it is seen as:

A poetics of harm, not as a vindication of pain, . . . a condition that allows disarming those pedagogies of ignorance that inform our educational work, (re)inventing other emancipatory pedagogies, other school practices . . . other ways of knowing the body and affections, which are based on bodily autonomy, sexual self-determination, and mutual relationship. (p. 17)

Anthony’s pain and pedagogy create a space in between that unmasks and makes us seek to transform ourselves and the world (Anzaldúa, 2002). From such an intersection, there is an evident fight against the oppression of the logic of identity. There is also a pedagogy that starts from the experience of the Other, from the consciousness and expression of multiple intersections and openings in thinking about identity. We believe it is a way of thinking and feeling from otherness, from spaces not yet inhabited by academic rationality.

Finally, since “our identity is not what we are, but depends on how and where we have been classified, how we are seen, and how we see what we see” (Mignolo, 2021, p. 448), Anthony’s pedagogy and experience serve as instruments to reflect upon our wounds in teacher education. Either as English teachers, educators, or student-teachers, we have not, and cannot, escape from the already imposed classifications (e.g., non-native, black, gay, marica, indigenous, mestizo, immigrant, non-proficient, women, peasant, etc.) we must deal with in the academia. Therefore, by acknowledging that “being a teacher is someone who shows the difference and takes charge to interrupt the repetition of the normal” (Bello Ramírez, 2023, 2:28:00, translated by the authors), one’s pedagogy becomes the path to make identity a mechanism of liberation and re-existence.