While my exams are long over, summer means I have time to read more scholarship, and I think it’s important to continue writing here about what I’m reading. I know how useful many of these posts have been for me to go back to while writing my diss and other projects.
So, this weekend I’m reading the special issue of Literacy in Composition Studies on queer literacies, edited by Collin Craig, Wilfredo Flores, and Zarah C. Moeggenberg. Their introduction to the issue talks a lot about the importance of deep citational engagement, especially with scholars of color, rather than skimming sources and citing them to say you cited them. This made me reflect on how precarity and work speed-up/productivity inflation create structural barriers to doing so.
This special issue came out in March 2022. I’m reading it in June. Not a terribly long delay. But even just in the introduction and the first article (which I’m currently only halfway through), there are so many things that would have been useful for me to have thought about, read, discussed, cited, etc. in the very proposals I just submitted earlier this week. Proposals that were due, so they took priority over catching up on reading. These proposals would be stronger, and my scholarship would be better, if I had read these pages a few weeks sooner.
I teach 3-3 (as an adjunct), work an adjunct staff job, have two important committee positions in my department, have a summer class to prep for, am trying to write my dissertation, am active in two unions, and active in a political organization. All of this makes it hard to engage deeply with scholarship period, separately from concerns about who or what we’re engaging with.
Sources I Marked in This Introduction
“Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age,” NCTE 2019
“Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Cathy Cohen
Also Cathy Cohen’s reflection piece in 2019 GLQ
Royster, Calling Cards
Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought”
Craig, “Courting the Abject: A Taxonomy of Black Queer Rhetoric”
Pritchard, Fashioning Lives, of course.
Lance T. McCready, Making Space for Diverse Masculinities
Carmen Kynard, “Literacy/Literacy Studies and the Still-Dominant White Center” - it is ridiculous A) that I didn’t put anything by Carmen on my exam lists, and B) that anyone on my committee let me do that. What an oversight.
Quotes I Marked In This Introduction
“use the idea of queer as a provocation to imagine how we might organize across varied communities defined as ‘the other’ by the state and/or racial capitalism” (from the 2019 GLQ piece, Cathy Cohen, 142)
They cite Ferguson (Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique), Halberstam (Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability) and Alexander (Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy) in relation to “queer literacy practices are inherently political” (p VII)
“Queer literacies are inherently social, either in response to normativity or the learned ways we understand and uptake our queer elders’ practices for survival” (p. VII)
At the top of page VIII there’s a discussion of “coalitional possibility” and I marked the paragraph as a whole because a lot of this language, probably unintentionally, reads to me like NGOspeak . Which I’m hesitant to say because more radical groups definitely also talk about coalition-building, but it feels like a liberal word to me that often comes up instead of “solidarity.” Kind of like allies vs. accomplices, although accomplices is also in the process of being hollowed out I think
Marked another paragraph discussing Wilfredo’s experience of being told the anti-racism Queer Caucus panel at CCCC 2021 “wasn’t queer” - this and the earlier quote I marked about queer literacy being inherently political is making me think about a tweet I saw this morning in which someone was arguing that there is nothing inherently anti-capitalist about queerness, and we can see this in the cooptation of Pride. Which I think is interesting, because they’re right in the sense of “queer” as “LGBTQ,” but for me queer is a term that carries political weight, not inherently of course, but because it was popularized/reclaimed for a particular political purpose. And since I think you can’t have full queer liberation under capitalism, to be queer means (ought to mean) to be anti-capitalist. But lots of people don’t feel that way, and lots of people think queerness is about anti-normativity and not about a particular political analysis, so it’s both true and not true. But point being, an anti-racism panel is totally queer, queerness as a political category comes with the obligation to be anti-racist.
The idea of “non-normative citational practices” - I’m not totally sure what the authors are envisioning when they say this phrase, but what it makes me think about is citing tweets, TikToks, just regular people talking about stuff. Because if me doing archival work looking at bisexual magazines from the 90s counts as scholarly work, and that’s where people who were intellectually engaged in bi issues were talking about it in print (meaning not just out loud, meaning it’s something we can access now in their future), social media seems like the 2010s/2020s equivalent.
p. XI- marked a paragraph summarizing Eric Pritchard’s “expanded definitions of literacy” specifically embodied literacy
p. XI- right after that paragraph, “In Black queer culture and some other communities of color, getting read, reading others, reading and writing ourselves is instrumental to performing and fortifying our identities, both individually and collectively”
p. XI right after that — reference to Julia Serano who notes that “passing” discourse (as it relates to queer people) is inherited from discourse around racial “passing”
I marked basically all of page XII for different examples of queer literacy practices and identity expressions