What Can Femme Teach us About Pedagogy?

Femme, as an analytic, has arguably not gained traction in queer and trans educational studies until recently because both femme and pedagogy are seen as failures . Outlining some reasons why femme and pedagogy both disappoint and provoke in the Halberstam (2011) sense – namely their elusiveness, power-laden origins, and perceived excess/lack – this article proposes femme pedagogy as an erotic relational framework (Lorde, 1978) that merits more thought in queer and trans educational scholarship. Synthesizing traits identified in key papers (Bimm & Feldman, 2020; Burkholder & Keehn, 2024; Davies & Hoskin, 2021, 2022; Fields, 2023), alongside my own musings, this article outlines five tenets for femme pedagogy: (1) failure & repair, (2) softness & hardness (3) intersectional her/hir/historicizing, (4) embodied connection, and (5) joy & desire.