I really like Stacey Waite because she talks about methodologies for teaching and writing queerly while simultaneously acknowledging it’s impossible to have a queer pedagogy, since the institution of higher education is inherently hierarchical, disciplining, limiting, and bound up with white heteropatriarchical, ableist capitalism. She doesn’t pretend like teaching in just the right way will save the world or make education not bound up with all the bad systems of power. ‘cause it is. Instead, she approaches it honestly: we can do what we can to make things a little bit better, or at least a little less shitty, for ourselves and for our immediate students.
In “Queer Literacies Survival Guide,” her honesty is like…like I’m vegetables at the grocery store and her honesty is the mist that keeps me fresh. Being honest about my own emotional commitments to and motivations for my work is something that is really hard for me, which is part of why I’m drawn to reading so many theorizations of queer teaching and writing— in hopes that I can convince myself it’s okay. Some quotes I marked:
“The truth is I teach to make the world more bearable, which means, for me, to make readings of the world more queer so that I might live more safely and more possible inside it….I want to teach to make the world more bearable for others too, because somewhere in me is the theory that if we can teach our students queer imagination, if we can encourage them to cultivate queerer interpretations, if we can help them imagine other, queerer worlds, then perhaps more queer people will survive” (p.114)
(In relation to being accused of “making everything gay all the time”): “It became a kind of mission to illuminate [the world’s] queerness to others, to ask that others see the queerness of the world, and even imagine the possibilities of queerer worlds. So I became a teacher of writing” (p.113)
“I teach my students to see differently, or I try to, because I want to be safer in this world” (p.113)
So, it’s not bad/useless to try to teach queerly, but its benefits are local. But localized benefits don’t mean they’re not good! I feel similarly about “decolonizing the classroom.” Like, as long as we are teaching in North America in the English language, we haven’t decolonized anything. But teaching Native authors and perspectives is still valuable/important! I read another article this week (“Doubleweaving Two Spirit Critiques”) that definitely helped me understand concepts/topics I hadn’t understood before, and/or understand them in new ways. Even reading just that one article by a Native scholar was good— the author asks if readers know whose lands they are on, what their histories are, what their resistances are. I knew that NYC is Lenape land, but I didn’t know anything else. So, reading that article made me go on a learning tangent about the history of the colonization of Manhattan and displacement of the Lenape people.
Most of “How (And Why) To Write Queer,” a chapter in (Re)Orienting Writing Studies, which I read months ago but mostly don’t remember, is mostly a list of “instructions for writing queer (which is impossible both because queer writing is impossible and because even if it were possible, there would definitely not be instructions” (p.43).
Here are some items from the list and other quotes from the chapter that I marked:
“Queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves (p.42)”
“1. Commit rhetorical disobedience” (p.43)
“2….Certainty is only queer when you are certain your knowledge is partial, failed, and fragmented” (p.43)
“8. Get academic; get theoretical; get narrative; get personal. ‘The assumption, I suppose, is that the ‘personal’ isn’t critical, isn’t socially responsible because it encourages a solipsistic narcissism of knowledge production’ (Banks 2003, 21). Solipsistic narcissism, why not? It might be fun.” (p.44)
“9. Don’t we all have trouble distinguishing ourselves from external objects? Don’t we all obsess about ourselves? Isn’t that why we do whatever it is we do? Write queer because you’re a huge queer or want to be or want everyone to think you are. Write queer because your writing and your self are not distinguishable. The self is all that can be known to exist. Solipsism. Also, there is no self.” (p.44)
“12. Talk about your feelings; they are smart. Express and be curious about emotion, ‘foregrounding emotion as embodied and lived’ and ‘vital for cultivating wonder’ (Micciche 2007,46).” (p.44) I had a teacher once who invited us to start with our feelings but always asked us to then interrogate where those feelings came from and why, and where our feelings could lead us.
“18. Be promiscuous, neither married or monogamized to your discipline, your language(s)” (p.45)
“20. Speaking of multiple perspectives, don’t imagine your audience as some unified discipline, which is not real to begin with. Quote from people who should not be quoted from, quote from people who aren’t in any disciplines.” This reminds me of someone (it might have been Eric Darnell Pritchard, but I’m not sure) who refers to “noted queer theorist Madonna,” and it reminds me of, in their speech at our friends’ wedding, when my partner referred to Taylor Swift as a “neo-Romantic poet.” And it reminds me of “Rhetorical History 2.0: Toward a Digital Transgender Archive,” in which K.J. Rawson questions why some texts/items are considered worthy of archival preservation but not others. Why not archive random queer teens’ tumblr posts?
“29. In fact, you might consider not making arguments and thinking of a writing context that is less like a courtroom (evidence, argument, opening statements, etc.) and more like a carnival, or a nightclub, or a swingers convention.” I have no idea how to do this and still pass it off as academically viable.
“37. If there is not a word for what/who you are/mean/do, make one up: queertext, genderqueer, bicurious, cisnormativity. Words become words when we say, write, and circulate them.” FRINDLE.
“42. Become a ‘scavenger’: develop ‘a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information’ (Halberstam 2011, 13).”
“43. Build ‘assemblages’ (Puar 2007). Writing queer means paying ‘more attention to unfolding relations among what may initially appear as disparate and disconnected forces’ (Palmeri and Rylander 2016, 33). I still have no idea what a queer assemblage is despite having read many things that use the term, and that’s the main reason Puar is on my orals list.
“52. Use ‘I’ whenever you want, but only when you are thinking of ‘I’ as a subjective, socially constructed, and multiple ‘I’ that can never be known—”
“56. Write queertexts, not queer texts….do not accept the adjectival marginalization, the separation of those two words which are one” (Rhodes 2004, 388).” I’m not totally sure what this means but it’s odd to me since trans folks often feel the opposite: it’s trans man and trans woman, not transman and transwoman.
“63. Remember the scholar you were at sixteen.” I’m also not totally sure what this means but I also think it’s the most important.
p.50— Waite admits several ways/times she has capitulated to the demands of the discipline and material pressures, saying “No one can write queer. But we should certainly do it anyway.”
p.50- “Maybe don’t be afraid of the real reasons you got into writing studies in the first place. Narcissism. Survival. Invite it into an essay, an article, a book. Never write anything that doesn’t contain within it the very reason you wrote it, and wrote it that way. Walk into the light of your own terror. Are you really writing a dissertation about assessment because it is an important subject of discussion in your discipline or because in the second grade Mrs. Walsh ruined your straight As by giving you a poor grade in penmanship? Why are you here?”
Quote from Marla Morris, Waite p.99 in Teaching Queer: “A queer sensibility concerns the reception and reading of a text. The text is a site of interpretation. Thus, there is nothing inherently queer about a text, even if one may read a text queerly.” This needs to be the methodological premise of my Shrek article
Teaching Queer p.105 “I want to entertain the possibility that both the escape and the search for what is other than ourselves is always about us— that even when I myself am completing some sort of required reading for a course, that reading is about me. I do not mean to suggest that the book I am reading is about me as if I am its subject but that, through my interpretations and responses, my reading is always about me.”
I also marked a bunch of Waite’s writing prompts in case I want to adapt them later for my own classes
Sources Marked
Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self (Rhodes and Alexander)
Writing at the End of the World (Richard Miller)
I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric (Frankie Cordon)
Writing/Teaching: Essays toward a Rhetoric of Pedagogy (Paul Kameen)
“We got the Wrong Gal: Rethinking the ‘Bad’ Academic Writing of Judith Butler” (Cathy Birkenstein)