A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) believes that not only should we be trying to turn kids “queer,” we should be using art classes to do it.
According to Campus Reform, Adam Greteman is responsible for teaching aspiring teachers who educate children from K-12th grade. Recently, Greteman published an article called “Helping Kids Turn Out Queer: Queer Theory in Art Education” in the Journal of Studies in Art Education.
Campus Reform says that Greteman’s article suggests various ways to turn kids queer, including “embracing the queer agenda” and “queer art lessons.”
In his efforts to fight against the “heteronormative realities” of most K-12 schools, Greteman argues that art teachers could impart a “queerer agenda” on students that might “actually help kids turn out queer” [emphasis in original].
Greteman, who identifies as a “queer scholar,” lists a few ways teachers could achieve this, such as implementing “queer art lessons,” embracing a “queerer agenda” in class, and using “queer affirmation” strategies to help gay students feel more included.
He also adds that “the inclusion of LGBTQ artists and the need to include LGBTQ students is at this point a rather straightforward approach” to help queer the curriculum as well.
And as typical social justice activists focused on sexuality tend to always do, Greteman suggested teaching the children about queer sex.
“Queerness and its attention to sex may seem inappropriate, but sex is still a core component of the human experience—an experience that visual culture addressed and has attended to for some time—and one that schools cannot deny,” wrote Greteman.
This isn’t the first time Greteman thought kids should be introduced into the sexual world. Campus Reform reports that in 2013, “Greteman published an article on how bareback sex should be taught in sex education programs, to create a “theory of risky (sex) education.”
“My work is influenced by an eclectic array of modes of inquiry, including queer, feminist, and trans theories, pragmatism, Marxism, and post-structural ethics,” Greteman writes in his faculty biography page for the SAIC.
Yeah, that’s exactly who I want teaching children about anything.
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