In my last post, I suggested how we might better educate ourselves as advisors and support our queer students as they explore and prepare for the world of work after graduation. Many of these strategies focused on helping students navigate the homo- and transphobic contexts of work. In this post, I consider a different angle by highlighting queer theory’s disruptive potential for our students’ academic journeys and vocational discernment. Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.
A few years ago, one of my queer-identified students shared with me some resume advice they had received from a colleague in our career center: not to include their internship at an LGBTQIA+ advocacy organization because potential employers would respond negatively. This advice confused and frustrated the student. They were out, and their queer identity had played an important part in their vocational discernment. This internship had reinforced their sense of calling by clarifying and strengthening their emerging professional commitment to work in the queer community after graduation. Not surprisingly, this student wanted to know what I thought they should do.
Queer individuals are called to perceive a truth inside themselves, name it as an identity marker, reckon with it, tell the truth about it even in the face of hostility, find others who perceive a comparable identity marker, and build community for the betterment of all of us. That, to me, is the essence of a spiritual journey. It is more than that. In my faith tradition, we refer to this as a call. It is a vocation.
Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman, Queer Virtue (2016).
I have often wondered about the role that queer identity can make in a person’s vocational discernment. In what ways does queer identity become an integral part of how one discerns, what that discernment looks like, and the result of the discernment process? What is the role of eros, desire, and the body in the process of vocational discernment? Most, importantly, how can we educate students in their vocational journey to embrace an embodied discernment that includes gender, sexuality, and passion?
For any person, the process of what I have named “becoming-selfhood-in-relation” comes into being through the integration of many factors— body, mind, and spirit, as well as through social context, culture, history, and social location factors (Embracing Disruptive Coherence, p. xi). For LGBTQIA+ persons there is an added step in a vocational journey: understanding and embracing an identity awareness in relation to the hetero-normativities that exist in society, and making peace with both its disruptiveness and its capacity to create more internal coherence. For LGBTQIA+ persons, a vocational calling is discerned most fully and clearly within the integration of their vocational journey with the process of their queer identification, which is deeply connected to an awareness of gender and sexuality in their lives. Thus, queer embodiment—the visible awareness and manifestation of their queer bodies, desires, and identities—must be an integral part of their vocational discernment.
