De-storying Community Narratives: Unimagined Community in Queer Educators’ Small Stories

Abstract

Background/Context: Within critical research broadly, scholars increasingly turn to stories and storytelling to pursue equity in educational contexts. Such scholarship does, however, primarily focus on the composition or creation of stories. Expanding the scope of storytelling research, this article turns to queer and trans knowledges to highlight a parallel set of storytelling practices—de-composing practices—and demonstrates their impact on historically marginalized community narratives and the pursuit of equity and justice in the field of education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question or Focus of Study: As critical calls for storying, counter-storytelling, and restorying increase within critical research in education, this article theorizes a parallel literacy practice, de-storying, as part of a set of de-composing practices. Defined as the habitual and often subconscious unimagining of community narratives in alignment with dominant narratives, de-storying shows how certain stories of marginalized communities come to be consistently unimagined. This article focuses particularly on queer community narratives and de-storying’s impact in the form of unimagined ancestors, elders, guardians, and peers. Research Design: A narrative inquiry project, this research study shares data from an inquiry community of nine queer educators. Gathering together 13 times over the course of an academic year, these educators engaged in a structured restorying process and through speculative storytelling reimagined and rewrote narrativized experiences of queerphobia. In particular, small stories demonstrated how de-storying affected these educators’ storytelling practices and, furthermore, revealed that three dominant community narratives (i.e., heteronormativity, queer fatalism, and homonormativity) compressed the potential small stories these educators told. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings from this project illustrate how de-storying practices resulted in four unimagined community narratives across participants: missing queer ancestors, elders, guardians, and peers. De-storying occurred across various intersections of participants’ identities. Findings from this study advance critical approaches to storytelling by revealing de-storying as one of many potential de-composing practices. This article concludes by inviting the theorization of additional de-composing practices in order to center the most marginalized stories within education—namely, those that are actively unimagined.