Sattar, Atia (ed.): How to Decolonize the Feminist and Queer Studies Classroom

np:, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2025

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How to Decolonize the Feminist and Queer Studies Classroom offers educators accessible theoretical frameworks and practical tools to engage and implement decolonial pedagogies in the feminist and queer studies classroom. While recent research on decolonizing pedagogy largely contextualizes and theorizes the need for such work, this volume moves from theory to practice by centering the words, experiences, and efforts of BIPOC bodies in university spaces. It highlights the voices of BIPOC teacher-scholars of feminist and queer studies as they (1) recount lived experiences of theorizing, facilitating, and occupying the classroom as a site of decolonial thought and praxis and (2) share successful pedagogical practices and materials that promote decolonization. The feminist and queer studies classroom is defined broadly, encompassing both classes in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments along with those in other disciplines that utilize the inquiries and practices of feminist and queer work.

Essays in this volume critically assess the colonial history and canon-making of Gender and Sexuality Studies related disciplines, the challenges of navigating predominantly white-led departments as BIPOC faculty, and the trauma of offering up our own bodies as texts. They question the possibility of decolonization given the corporate colonial histories and structures of modern US universities as well as the imprints of settler colonial theory that repeatedly manifest in our classrooms. And they offer key concepts such as “border trouble,” “non-binary thinking” and “pluriversality” for teaching students to conceptualize difference while recognizing them as makers of their own knowledge despite the universalizing, white-washed logic of higher education systems.

Each of these inquiries is followed by the authors sharing related pedagogical materials such as syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, or assessment rubrics, etc. This combination of narrative and teaching resources offers readers an understanding of the diverse realities of decolonizing pedagogy as well as a starting point to implement these approaches. Taken together, this volume serves as a critical guide to transform the higher education feminist and queer studies classroom into a site of decolonial resistance.