Mark grounds each these chapters, as he did the previous ones, in one of his own memories, and circling these memories are his findings from various queer archives and books. “Adult Supervision” addresses literacy acts by organizations like PFLAG (designed to educate parents of LGBTQ+ children), and “Teacher Teacher” takes a look at teacher training curricula from the early to mid 20th century. I used the example from Chapter 4 in my own class, as an example of how a difficult personal memory can lead you to bigger inquiry questions and research projects.
I’m increasingly feeling that queer literacies is the direction I need to go in for framing my dissertation work. As I reflect, I’m not totally sure what I thought the phrase included, but in reading this book, I’m finding that it means a lot of the things I’m interested in, but phrased in different terms than I’m used to thinking about them in.
For example, as I’ve been reading my memoir list, I’m particularly drawn to the sections in which the memoirists describe the various books/movies/etc. that played important roles in their lives/identity formation. The memoirs themselves are queer literacy acts, that some queer people chose to do, when they could have chosen to do other things.
I also think there’s something here related to multiple intelligences— you can have emotional literacy, musical literacy, etc. So all the different forms of queer communication/rhetoric I’m interested in could also be part of literacy, even if it’s not always reading and writing as we traditionally think of it. Just as material rhetoric, visual rhetoric, embodied rhetoric, etc. are all domains of rhetoric not encompassed by Aristotle et. al’s formulations of the term.
Passages I Marked
(p.63-64) “I want to share the stories of my experience and collect those of others so as to figure out how my humble ‘I’ doesn’t represent Queer existence, but can acknowledge a messy collective ‘we’ (albeit a contextualized and tentative, constantly shifting one) that bridges personal/collective historical accounts with other non-preclusive I’s and We’s” — I marked this because it’s another super clear methodological statement, “I am doing this, in this way, for these reasons”
(p.64) “Many Queers use their first-person experience as a point of departure for their scholarship and critical ventures. As Tim Miller has written in ‘Queer Person First,’ ‘As I write this story, it becomes a completely necessary act of looking at the past as a means of negotiating a more empowered and grounded relationship in an uncertain future”
The rest of page 64 is also a larger discussion about methodology.
(p.66-67) “If homophobia becomes more stealth and elusive, queer advocates must continue to hone their counterliteracy abilities to read homophobia’s nuances, research its (re)sources and strategies, and find the words to combat it.” In the next sentence he refers to rhetoric as literacy’s domestic partner, which I enjoy.
(I also marked several passages of quotations from teacher training books that had some of the most egregiously explicit eugenics stuff)
(p.119) Reminder that the Gay Academic Union’s first conference happened at John Jay!
(p.121) Example of Columbia Student Homophile League doing all of the “right” things (paperwork, official letters, etc.), all literacy acts, and being met with silence
Sources to Look Up
“Queer Person First” by Tim Miller
Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences by Sarah Schulman
Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence by Cheryl Glenn
“Shirts Versus Skins” by Christopher DiRaddo- memoir
Textual Orientation by Harriet Malinowitz
“Outtakes” by Clifford Chase (memoir)
American Eugenics by Nancy Ordover
Gai Saber (journal published by the Gay Academic Union)
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman