My partner has been traveling for work for the last week and a half, so I made it my goal to cross one text off my exam lists every single day they were gone.
Here is what I read:
The Room Lit by Roses (memoir)
Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects (edited collection)
Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics (sociology monograph)
”Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (Essay, Adrienne Rich)
Are You My Mother? (Bechdel, graphic memoir)
Portrait of a Marriage (memoir)
Femmes of Power (photo ethnography)
Imagining Transgender: Ethnography of a Category (anthropology monograph)
”Queer Critical Rhetoric Bites Back” (Essay, Erin Rand, 2013)
”The Queer Turn in Composition Studies: Reviewing and Assessing an Emerging Scholarship” (Essay, Jonathan Alexander and David Wallace, 2009)
Pushing myself to read quickly and strategically has been a gratifying challenge. I’m needing to keep a tighter focus on the guiding questions for my lists, especially as my reading this week has spanned all 3 of them: 3 memoirs, 5 methods and theory, 2 history of sexuality/bisexuality. And both of the last two could have easily been on the methods and theory list, and some of those could have been on the history list. I’m supposed to write about my process for choosing not only which texts to read, but where I put each one. And I think it boils down to my guiding questions for each list.
I’ve just been reading Imagining Transgender tonight. It is on my “rhet/comp methods in queer studies” sublist. But it’s anthropology. But rhetoricians and compositionists also use ethnography, and I’m undergraduately trained as an anthropologist, so I’m claiming it as mine. It could also easily go on the history of sexuality list, since it’s a story/study of how “transgender” diverged as a category from “transsexual” and “homosexual.” But I bought this book before it was ever on my exam list because Duke UP was having a sale and the pandemic was just beginning and I wanted to know how to do an ethnography of a concept, of a category. That’s a methodological question. And as I’m reading, while I’m interested in the history, I’m primarily paying attention to how Valentine (the author) chose his research sites, became connected with the people there, navigated their questions and challenges and his positionality as a researcher, and what he chooses to explain in his introduction. He spends many paragraphs on the word choices he has made for the book, and attendant things like punctuation. I particularly like how he situates himself as part of the future past— he is happy to acknowledge that what he is writing will become outdated, and will not make sense or at times seem offensive to future readers, because he knows things will change, although he does not know how they will change.
But the content, rather than the methodology, also makes me think of Trans: A Memoir, and Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, since both are very concerned with the nuances of what these different identity categories mean, who belongs, and the political implications of choosing one over another. (To a lesser extent, the Rich piece falls in here too.)
And then, Sackville-West in Portrait of a Marriage and Bechdel in Are You My Mother are both very considered with how to represent themselves and others, although their difficulties are not over terminology. At the same time, Sackville-West imagines herself as having a dual nature, a feminine part that likes men and a masculine part (Julian) that likes women. Is she non-binary, bisexual, or both? The answer is that the question can’t really be answered, or rather that the answer depends on a ton of other theoretical and methodological considerations. Which is exactly what Rand’s article is about: how does queer criticism force us to back up and take a look at the underlying assumptions of our research? And Alexander and Wallace’s primary argument, as well as many of the authors in the edited collection, is that it always should—that queer studies impacts everyone, cis straight people included.
Femmes of Power made me think about multimodal composing, oddly more than the articles about multimodal composing did. It is co-created by a photographer and a writer, and the photos were methodological collaborations between the photographer and the people being photographed. The text is framed as letters to the people in the photos, but is about what it means to be “femme.”
What does it mean to be femme? I still don’t know, any more than I did after I read My Butch Career. More specifically, I still don’t know if I am femme. I also don’t have a firm grasp on what “femme” as a category is. It’s kind of like its own gender, and it’s kind of like a sexuality (a subtype of lesbian), but it also seems to be something else. You can be femme and also another gender, and that gender doesn’t have to be woman. It doesn’t have a stable, consistent meaning as a “gender presentation” either. It’s sort of defined in opposition to butch, but not always. Femmes of Power is less about interrogating what femme “means” or who “counts” and more about celebrating the diverse kinds of people who count themselves under that umbrella. I like celebration as a scholarly goal.