Jacques Prevert's Queer Acts of Speech, Or, An Apologia for a Postmodern Curriculum (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the dull and boring moments of classroom life, shifting fields of discourse becomes necessary: the familiar must become strange, queer. (1) The aim of this article is to draw an analogy between the debate around the contemporary notion of a queer curriculum and a Parisian poet of the mid-twentieth century, on whom the very term would have been entirely lost. If there is an analogy to be drawn between the two' it is' I shall argue' because this political' pedagogical position and this self-referential poetics are both predicated on the maintenance of radical difference within, against and as part of the homogenizing arena of the status quo. This is a difficult balancing act, all the more so since we are arguably in a moment that can be labelled 'post-queer' even though there are still a number of pressures applied to make us, citizens and institutions, return to 'traditional values'. (2) In the specific context of university teaching in the Arts, and the free thinking that is central to it, a queering of the curriculum can appear at once vital, unnecessary, outmoded and radical. For the purposes of this article, the need for a queer curriculum to play a role in the mainstream of our education system is as present in Australia today as it was in France in 1945. I hope therefore to use this seemingly slender link to reaffirm a contemporary apologia for a queering of curriculum and also a curricularizing of queer, which will lead us to weigh up the relative loss of political edge entailed by a desexualizing, or perhaps 'desexualitizing', (3) of the term against the educational gains to be made by integrating queer theory into the educational mainstream. By looking afresh at a 'traditional' mainstay of the French classroom, I wish both to rediscover its potential for generating radical new meaning and to argue for the universal applicability of a queer aesthetic. This desexualitizing of the term 'queer' will then, I hope, be productively counterbalanced by a sexualized reading of Jacques Prevert's poems, derived not from a model of sexuality--heteronormative or otherwise--but, instead, from a deconstructionist erotics of reading. As such, my use of the term here is drawn from the specific context of the queering of the curriculum, and the queerness that I seek to underscore in Prevert's poetry extends from his characteristic questioning of the nuts and bolts of everyday life, from gender politics at their most basic level to the experience of the classroom and the value of education itself. With this in mind, I shall begin with a review of the recent return to political life of the term 'traditional' as it pertains to my own specific situation as an educator in a university in regional Australia.