One of the underlying premises of this book is that sexuality shapes and is shaped by large parts of culture, so being “sexually literate” (being able to write, read, and talk about sexuality in an informed and nuanced way) is important. So why not practice writing skills that are useful across main domains while also practicing talking about sexuality?
I first read one of the chapters, “Transgender Rhetorics,” in my feminist pedagogy class during my master’s. It was the first piece of trans-related scholarship I ever read, and I also wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Because students are asked to imagine a scene from another gender’s point of view, but write in pairs, it seems like it’s going to lend itself to stereotyping, and less about imagining the trans experience and more just imagining the experience of another gender. Someone (I think I saw it on social media, I think) once put it like this: rather than asking people to imagine if they had their body but felt like another gender, people should try to imagine that they are their real/current gender, but no one around them notices and keeps mistaking them for another gender. Like for me to imagine I’m trying to live my normal day as a woman but everyone around me suddenly reacts as if I’m a man. When I follow that line of thought, I think about all the experiences I get included in as a woman— conversations I have with other women that we wouldn’t have in the same way if men were also there, for example, conversations in the bathroom together, just conversations about shared experiences that relate to gender— and imagining being excluded from those things, on purpose, is very sad.
Just a couple days ago, I was talking with someone who explained it to me like this: when cis people write about trans people (in this case we were talking about movies about trans characters), they focus on the body, and when trans people write about trans people, it’s about the emotions.
Quotes I Marked
(p.2) “sexuality is a cultural production; it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse.” (this is a quote from Halperin not from Alexander)
(p.6) quote from Cultural Studies in the English Classroom- “Cultural studies…deals with the production, distribution, and reception of signifying practices within the myriad historical formations that are shaping subjectivities. These range from the family, the school, the work place, and the peer group to the more familiar activities associated with the cultural sphere, such as the arts and the media and their modes of production and consumption. In other words, wherever signifying practices are shaping consciousness in daily life, cultural studies has work to do.”
(p.7) quote from same book- “all texts are involved in politics and power: all tacitly endorse certain platforms of action. Language…is always a program for performance.”
(p.27) quote from David Bartholomae- “writers, in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being ‘insiders’ — that is, of being both inside and established discourse, and of being granted a special right to speak.”
(p.45) 3 kinds of sexual scripts, theorized by Gagnon and Simon (1973): intrapsychic (stories you tell yourself about sex and sexuality), interpersonal (how you talk about sex with others), cultural scripts (existing within groups about normative understandings)
(p.51) - note about how birth control and alternative ways of having children have separated reproduction and sex, so sexual identity really is more of a “lifestyle issue” than anything else.
(p.102) Describing the purpose of queer theory: “Are students questioning the naturalized structures of heteronormativity and heterosexism? Are they interrogating naturalized narrations of sexuality, identity, and normalcy?”
(p.105) “As such, the call to ‘work’ or think queerness in the classroom should not focus solely on introducing our many straight students to queer lives and stories; rather, working queerness in the writing classroom should be an invitation to all students—gay and straight— to think of the ‘constructedness’ of their lives in a heteronormative society.”
(p.106) “From a rhetorical standpoint, we could say that straights have the ‘narrative luxury’ of not having to consider their self-narration— at least not as closely and critically as many queers have had to.” (For example, you don’t have to come out as straight)
(p.107) “Since declarations of one’s straightness seem most common when that straightness is called into question or doubt, I have theorized that we could ‘tease out’ for examination a narration of straightness by playing with this ‘soft spot’ in the straight subjectivity— by poking the point where straightness must maintain itself as an identity over and against queerness.” He also talks about how he made a fake webpage called Straightboyz4Nsync and asked his students what they thought about it. The students mostly agreed it’s fine for a straight boy to like NSYNC, but any straight boy who likes NSYNC and feels the need to make a website defending it is probably not straight.
(p.193) Long block quote about a teaching technique called “Freeze frame” where you pause class discussion to do metadiscussion on what is happening in the room emotionally.
Sources I Marked
American Sexuality magazine, started by an anthropologist
James Berlin, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”
Susan Romano, “On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self”
Zan Meyer Gonclaves, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom
Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (***look up for Queer Rhetorics chapter***)
Richard E. Miller, “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone: Assessing Homophobic Student Writing”
Writing from students in a youth and AIDS project- http://homepages.uc.edu/~alexanj/voices_of_youth.htm
Bill Wolff, “Reading the Rhetoric of Webpages: Rethinking the Goals of Student Research in the Computer Classroom”