Queering Professionalism: Pitfalls and Possibilities

“Queering Professionalism opens a new chapter of ‘the impossible professions,’ Freud’s term for the difficulties of authority and desire made within intersubjective situations for education, law, and medicine. Readers will find the breaking heart of educational critique as the chapters contend with the queer workings of humanity. Beyond definitions and their terms of engagement, the invitation is to ‘come as you are,’ and study those in the helping professions dedicated to more life, more freedom, more play, more discourse, more experience, and more imagination.” Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, York University and author ofWhen History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning

“Queering Professionalism is a timely, invaluable, must-read collection of expansive, insightful and critical reflections for students, practitioners, and educators in helping professions who aim to embrace intersectional and anti-oppressive approaches to deconstruct what it means to act ‘professionally.’ The book offers incisive and inspiring critiques of the colonial, racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, and sanist roots of professionalism as a site of social control and proposes innovative ethos to work with marginalized communities.”   Alexandre Baril, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, University of Ottawa and author of Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide

“A critical and insightful collection of writings that decontextualize and critique notions of ‘professionalism’ from both a variety of social locations and caring sectors regarding the ongoing insidiousness of neoliberalism and its deleterious effects on facilitating such care. Through queer resistance this collection contests neoliberal professionalism and importantly provides alternative approaches that will benefit queer educators and service providers, students, and service recipients alike.” Nick Mulé, Professor in the School of Social Work and the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, York University