Being and Becoming

This (deconstructed) autoethnography discusses how I managed my identities as a gay, gender queer educator within primary schools in Victoria, Australia, and how the isolating events I experienced within these institutions catalyzed the transition from teaching to academe. I draw on a fugitive knowledge perspective1—queerly situated local knowledges from my everyday experiences as a teacher—and put to work a queer scavenger2 methodological approach to coalesce the onto-epistemologies of poststructuralism, new materialism, and queer theory. My (re)presented teacherly experiences illuminate the injurious psychic and affective labor resultant from performatively responding to tacitly inscribed and intuitively sensed cisheteronormative discourses in my workplaces, which occasioned censorship, surveillance, and silence. These spatially, socially, and relationally negotiated experiences were both formative to my subject formation(s) and materialized the agentic capacity to leave teaching and move into the academy.