I have a horrible habit of taking lots of notes and annotating and then rarely looking back at them, and so I feel like lots of the thoughts I’m having while I read end up stuck on the page instead of staying in my head. For Mark’s book, I’m going to try to write about every chapter, and do it in the form of going back over all the passages I marked and compiling them here. We’ll see if that strategy is helpful.
Passages I Marked For Quotes
(p.2) “We can be sure that acts of literacy remained a key component of how Queer people would identify themselves, name themselves, and rediscover what they could be on their own literate terms.” I feel the truth of this in my bones and could probably tell you the story of my entire identity formation through things i’ve read.
(p.2) “From the Queer exegetical perspective, this hetero-discourse resounded at every turn. It permeated every location, person, and text that one say, heard, or read on a daily basis.” I think a lot of straight people think we’re crazy when we say this or that is obviously gay, or painfully heteronormative. I don’t think they realize. Later in the chapter he talks about how academic discourse forces queer rhetors to take on a straight subject position, and I think part of that is how I feel like I need to over-justify saying….”this is gay!” And how often does “gay” not mean “homosexual” but “disruptive to heteronormativity in some way”? Probably a lot.
(p.3) “Queer literates constantly needed to hone their literacy capabilities to reread how these hetero-literate platforms morphed and then how Queer literates needed to regroup and reword their rhetorical counter-literacy measures”
(p.9) “I write an auto-archival account, similar to auto-ethnography yet through document-driven memories of my own Queer literacy development….Recounting my own benchmarks of Queer literate discovery as a point of narrative departure within a broader historical framework….” Part of Mark’s statement of methods. I marked a lot of these as examples of 1) methods you can use 2) ways you can state them 3) things I’m “allowed” to do
(p.12) “In most cases in composition/rhetoric (comp/rhet) studies, ethnography and/or oral histories have acted as the primary methodology by which researchers have collected information that then illustrated the socio-political action that emerged from the rhetorical competence that can ‘make sense of lives and conditions that to them do not make sense’”(citing Royster, Traces of a Stream)
(p.21) Long quote from Butler (in Gender Trouble) about the straight mind and academic assumption of straightmindedness
(p.22) “Queer literates reread texts and reinterpreted them beyond some prescribed heterosexist existentialism. This tenacity to read counter to what they were told resulted frequently in a collective voice of sociopolitical pliability that spoke the diverse terms of many different Queer intentions.” I’m not totally sure what the second sentence means but the first sentence is important
(p.24)— another methods statement/justification
Sources I Marked To Look Up
“Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness” by David Wallace
Eric Darnell Pritchard, Fashioning Lives
“Archive This!: Queering the Archive” by K. J. Rawson
Stacy Waite, “Queer Literacies Survival Guide”
Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner, Ellen Louise Hart
“Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities” by Harriet Malinowitz
Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse by Candace Spiegelman
Memoir: An Introduction, by G Thomas Couser
Lauren Berlant, “personal as general” (similar to “personal is political”) — not title, but idea, need to find source
“Critical Experimental Writing” by Marianna Torgovnick
An Archive of Feelings by Ann Cvetkovich
Footnote 37 says to look at the writing of Garret Nicholas, Aneil Rallin, Jessica Shumake, and Stacey Waite, accessed through Comp-Pile and searching “queer”
Nancy Miller, “Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts”
Carolyn Ellis, “The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel”
Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit —this and the ones above it up through Nancy are referenced as different examples/discussions of similar kinds of writing labeled personal criticism, auto/ethnography, auto-theory, co-performative research, and intimate ethnography
That’s not quite enough to be a list of its own, but I think some of them can be added to my Methods list and others can be added to my Memoir list. Certainly need to at least look up them all to see which ones I should skim through or read.