Emerging queer epistemologies in studies of ‘gay’-student discourses

Education is arguably one of the most significant, urgent, and rapidly changing arenas for research on language and sexual identity, but there has been little synthesis to date of the knowledge and theories of knowledge that are emerging through this work. Here I survey a relatively small but important segment of this disparate literature: studies that investigate classroom talk about and by students who either self-identify as gay, lesbian or queer, or who are positioned as such by others. By bringing together such studies from applied linguistics as well as education and literacy/composition, I seek to consolidate and to cultivate critical explorations of sexual identity, language and learning as interlinked domains. To this end, I identify some defining features of the queer epistemologies that are emerging in the empirical, lingua-centric literature on ‘gay’-student discourses, and I suggest future directions for this sort of work.