Queering Pedagogy: Countering Epistemic Injustice

Abstract (English)

On September 6th, 2018, in a historic moment in a historic moment for the Queer Rights movement in India, the 150 year-old Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalising non-normative sexualities was read down by the Supreme Court. The judgement acknowledged a collective responsibility in the oppression those with marginalised gender-sexuality identities. In teaching, research and academia, both in India and globally - the Psy-Disciplines have a longstanding history of pathologising queer and transgender identities, which resulted in harmful practices such as conversion treatments. Even today, mainstream mental health curricula/training in India carry traces of this pathologising impulse, and our mental health community has been complicit in perpetuating this stigma. Thus, there has arisen the need for Indian therapists to be trained in queer-affirmative practices. Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI)’s Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice (QACP) Course was built to teach therapists to address the distress of LGBTQ+ persons and promote their well-being. The creators and faculty of the Course are queer/trans-identified trained therapists, with a considerable amount of hours engaged in counselling practice, research, teaching and advocacy with the LGBTQI+ community. They occupy multiple identities within the world of mental health and gender-sexuality, making their contribution to the designing and teaching of this course significant, given how historically pathologized and criminalised it has been.
As most students of the QACP Course tend to be cisgender-heterosexual, it could be considered audacious for a few queer/trans-identified therapists to come together in order to teach them. However, within this course - in both the construction and the delivery, the power of knowledge-creation and has remained, and will always remain, in the hands of queer-trans faculty. We aim to avoid repeating mistakes from the past, such as the widespread pathologization of queer-trans people. We also aim to shed light on knowledge that has been historically overlooked, thus addressing the epistemic injustice that has been prevalent for far too long in the knowledge-production processes concerning queer-trans lives, both globally and nationally.

At the MHI-QACP Course, students learn from the lived experience of our queer faculty, their family members, queer/trans guest speakers, and case studies based on real concerns of LGBTQ+ individuals. Thus, the Course embodies ‘learning from lived experience’ in its entirety. In this paper, through the QACP Course, we will explore how the construction and pedagogy of the course address historical epistemic injustice. We will also expand upon the epistemological shift created when marginalised therapists teach mainstream therapists, instead of the other way around, adding to the body of literature in both the queer mental health and queer anthropology fields.