The interactions between students, the metanarratives underpinning research methodologies, and the relationship with supervisors and disciplinary norms are central to the doctoral experience. This paper looks at insights generated when doctoral level learning is queered, a process which manifests diversity and generates the need for understanding pluralities relating to how we express desires. This paper argues that LGBTQ bodies tell us about how desire, sexuality, and orientation play a role in leaning students towards or away from the imaginary and material worlds inhabited by academics in normativizing disciplines. Applying Sara Ahmed's (2006) conceptualization of the spatiality of sexuality to a case study around doctoral learning in a particular interdisciplinary context, it demonstrates how queer sexuality throws the typically tacit, unacknowledged life of the body in scholarly processes into stark relief and thus, by materializing desire and orientation, enlightens all human experience of learning, not just that of the LGBTQ communities.