‘After-queer’: subjunctive pedagogies

This article offers a reading of the 2006 film The History Boys, which depicts eight male working-class grammar school students preparing for exams to enter Oxford and Cambridge and two teachers who prepare them. I read the film’s subjunctive mood, which gestures to possibility and an ‘otherwise’, as connected to an analytic of ‘after-queer’ that complicates linear understandings of youth, sexuality, development, and education. I elaborate three intertwined themes: the boys’ multiple relations to school knowledge; the blurring of categories of youth and adult through circulations of sexuality; and the dislocation of desire from predictable categories of identity. I connect the unpredictability and creativity of identities and desires to the need to open the research imagination to a subjunctive methodology that dwells in complicated temporalities, uncertain knowledges, and disorder that underlies seeming orders.