The prologue and introduction of this book are where the theoretical and methodological frameworks are, as well as the actual methods. I’m excited by the structure of this study and would like to use it as a model for my own. So, I limited this post to just this section, and I’ll write separately on some of the later chapters.
Quotes I Marked
(p.5) The quote itself isn’t important, but he talks here about an impactful course he took in elementary school called “Rites of Passage,” which was a “literacy environment…that was both liberating and constraining” to him, since it offered certain expectations about what it means to be a good Black man/Black boy. This same idea of liberating but also constraining reverberates through….basically all of the books I’ve been reading, since so many authors or interviewees talk about how their early discoveries of queerness were both so exciting yet so scary— for example, the medical books that talked about homosexuality as a disease and all homosexuals grow up to be miserable, or Jackson Bird, who for a long time didn’t know that you could be trans AND gay, so he figured that the fact he liked men meant he couldn’t be a trans man himself.
(p.8-9) “That LGBTQ history was not articulated as part of anything I learned about histories focused on the contributions of Black or other people of color. These same stories only garnered what seemed like cursory mentions as part of LGBT history as well. I read pages of essays, speeches, and book reviews, looking for the answer to how I could work toward liberation and not have to fracture myself being forced to either be Black or gay.” (He eventually finds stories of individuals who straddled both movements, even though he can’t find connections in the big historiographies)
(p.10) Statement of intent for the book— Black rhetoric/composition studies and LGBTQ rhetoric/composition studies both don’t really talk a lot about each other, so it’s time to have a book that does both at once, since Black LGBTQ people have different experiences with literacy from straight/cis Black people, and from LGBTQ people of other races.
(p.11) “This book aims to live up to the promise of Lawrence’s portraits in documenting, rendering, and engaging with the scenes of Black literacy in everyday life and to assume and represent a diversity of Black and queer lives as peopling those scenes of literacy.” I like this quote because it feels like he’s saying “Just including these folks’ stories in the bigger picture of literacy studies is important, and it is enough for the book to be ‘just’ that.”
(p.13) “My desire then is to provide a framework through which literacy, composition, and rhetoric may see Black queerness generally and the theory I develop from the life stories of my research participants in particular.”
(p.16) “By examining the meanings that Black LGBTQ people give to literacy, we see new lessons about the perennial problem of literacy normativity, while these meanings of literacy are simultaneously presenting for our exploration a constellation of literacy practices by Black LGBTQ people that work toward the ends of individual and communal love manifested as self- and collective care, self- and collective definition, and self- and collective autonomy.”
(p.19) Framing/description of what constitutes as literacy and literacy studies for this book
(p.22) Does the same thing for “queerness,” in this case extending the term beyond LGBTQ people to include “‘welfare queens,’ teenage parents, drug addicts, sex workers, incarcerated prisoners” and single parents. He includes these groups because “these individuals ‘stand on the (out)side of state-sanctioned, normalized, White, middle- and upper-class, male heterosexuality” and are therefore “insufficiently normative”
(p.24) Concept of restorative literacies— “literacy practices that Black queers employ as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination.” This is contrasted with literacy normativity, “which refers to uses of literacy that inflict harm…[and steal] emotional resources from people, wounding people through texts”
(p.34) “Restorative literacies are part of the long African American tradition Elaine Richardson calls ‘survival literacies.’ These survival literacies work to guard individuals against what composition theorists Anne Herrington and Marcia Curtis call ‘the living death of silence’”
(p.34) “In theorizing the concept of restorative literacies as a personal, institutional, and interactional act, subject to fluidity in contexts and interventions, I, as Beth Daniell writes, ‘want literacy to be associated with choices about language and about identities— in other words, with agency’”
(p.41) statement of the “chief aim of African American literacies, composition, and rhetoric”: “to excavate, document, understand, and actualize the myriad conditions and traditions that compose a full history of African American literacies and rhetorics.”
(p.41) J. Alexander argues that sexuality itself is a “complex literacy event”
(p.48) Statement of research questions— “What are Black LGBTQ people’s relationships to literacy? What meanings do Black LGBTQ people give to literacy when it is used as a tool that causes them or others harm? How do Black LGBTQ people use literacy to make a life on their own terms? How do the life stories of Black LGBTQ people invite us to reconsider the knowledge and cultural logics embedded in the history and theory of African American and LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetoric (LCR)?”
(p.49) Methods— description of use of recruitment letter, interview procedure and grounded theory use. Revised interview script twice while researching. 60 total participants.
(p.50) Other Methods— description of use of archival data and what he used it for and why, as well as use of separate oral histories to confirm or find facts
Sources I Marked
June Jordan, “A New Politics of Sexuality”
Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed
Keith Gilyard, Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence (literacy autobiography)
Jonathan Alexander, “Transgender Rhetorics”
Qwo-Li Driskill, “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques”
Eric Darnell Pritchard, “This is Not an Empty-Headed Man in a Dress”
K.J. Rawson, “Archiving Transgender”
Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It — lesbian and bisexual women of color in hip-hop