Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects, Edited by William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas

I first started reading this book early on in the pandemic. Then I didn’t read any of it for several more months. Reading theoretical writing felt impossible at the time. But now, when I’m sitting down to write this, it’s also been a long time since I finished reading the book (I think I finished last summer? Or fall), so I don’t remember much of it now. Thankfully, the practice of going through to type out quotes I marked has been a very helpful review process.

This book is similar to Imagining Queer Methods, but with a more specific focus on writing studies. Several of the authors wrote other things that I’ve read for my orals, or have since encountered/cited for other projects.

(p.3) Discussion of how entering a space as a researcher always changes that space, but beginning to do research in a space you’re already in (such as your own classroom) changes how you act, and so changes that space too.

(p.5) quote from Harriet Malinowitz- “Which of our theories of writing don’t explode when we consider their ramifications for lesbian and gay writers?”

(p.5) Quote from Kirsch saying we should always choose to write our research in genres that match the methods we chose (or choose methods that match our genres, maybe)

(p.8) “For many LGBTQ people, there is a felt sense, as much as a theoretical one, that one resistant method for maintaining our existence involves not being bludgeoned by languages intended to hurt us but pushing back, even in small ways, in order to maintain our own sense of self and community.” - Foucault’s reverse discourse

(p.9) “The realization that language and identity are interwoven and interanimated means that any discipline focused on the study of language must engage theories and rhetorics grounded in such a realization.”

(p.11) quote from Krista Ratcliffe- rhetoric is “the study of how we use language and how language uses us.”

(p.11) “But rather than assume a primarily ontological nature for language and reality, queer rhetorics begin with the assumption that critique— the calling out of language as language— represents an initial and important destabilization of meaning, not to prevent meaning or to pretend that meaning cannot be made but to ask why this meaning at this time and under these circumstances; these are fundamentally rhetorical questions”

(p.12) Rhetorics of Intentionality (as one type of queer rhetoric— the intention matters more than whether you succeed, like it doesn’t matter if you can pass as a gender, the fact that you are trying to communicate that gender means people ought to recognize that as valid). Questions how rhetorics of intentionality would change how we view rubrics and writing assessment (if intention comes above outcomes)

(p.14) Rhetorics of Failure— “a chance to eschew ‘being taken seriously’ in order to be ‘frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant’” and make a ‘detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction.”

(p.15) Rhetorics of Forgetting- strategic forgetting, look for lost/forgotten people and stories, ask WHY “certain elements of our disciplinary past have been forgotten.” Why do some things have rhetorical velocity and some things stay still/left behind?

(p.16) Heather Love, reminds us to pay attention to ‘texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed’ and disrupt the progress narrative of queer history. Resist pressure to redeem the past.

(p.16) Quote from Jean Bessete’s chapter later on in the collection- “When we look for queerness in the archive, what exactly are we seeking?”

(p.16) Right after that quote, from the editors: “When we look for X, what are we strategically forgetting in order to keep X in focus? How could we acknowledge that tension in our work? Why might we need to forget X in order to discover Y?” This is like the questions of measuring sexuality and gender nonconformity— any measure you choose brings into focus some things and excludes other things

(p.25) Gary Olsen refers to traditional rhetoric as “the rhetoric of assertion”

(p.28) This chapter is by Hillery Glasby, she suggests “ambivalence as a methodology because it reduces, or altogether negates, the desire for coherence and polished texts” -seems similar to revisionary rhetoric

(p.29) “write yourself so that Others might know the Self. This can be critical self-care work since difference becomes internalized over time.”

(p.30) quote from Alexander & Rhodes- queer rhetorical practices are those “that recognize the necessity sometimes of saying ‘No,’ of saying ‘Fuck, no,” of offering an impassioned, embodied, and visceral reaction to the practices of normalization that limit not just freedom but the imagination of possibility, of potential”

(p.42) Another quote from them- “We understand queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves.”

(p.43) paraphrase of Rhodes, “because of the heteronormative institutional locations in which teaching occurs, there may be no true ‘queer pedagogy’; there is only the possibility of teaching queer.

(Skipping over everything else I marked in Stacy Waite’s chapter since I wrote about this chapter separately in my Stacy Waite post)

(p.55) “If there were a single conceptual umbrella for thinking about queer/trans methodology, it wouldn’t necessarily translate to a focus on LGBTQA topics so much as on a commitment to rigorously (if not deviantly) questioning our deeply held disciplinary narratives.”

(p.99) In Jean Bessette’s chapter. “Cofounder [of the Lesbian Herstory Archives] Joan Nestle (2015) describes her early commitment to the word lesbian as a ‘noun that stood for all possibilities of queerness, for all possibilities of deviations…Not a role-model lesbian history, not an archive of safe stories, always my own undertaking of keeping in the archives the tensions of lesbian difference’ (239-240).” Also that LHA is “open to a diversity of visitors, unconstrained by ‘academic, political, or sexual credentials,’ race or class”

Sources To Look Up

(Rhodes & Alexander) Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self

(Rhodes) “The Failure of Queer Pedagogy”

Imagining Queer Methods, Edited by Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

Quotes I Marked

(p.4) “Many humanists embrace a ‘suspicion of method’ (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 16) and assume that queer frameworks are incompatible with social science epistemologies.”

(p.7) “We thus envision a dual mandate for queer methods: to outline the conditions of queer worldmaking and to clarify, but not overdetermine, the conditions that ‘make live livable”

(p.14) Bit about Halberstam and scavenger methods

(p.15) Quotes from Munoz about evidence and how the nature of queer history means there often isn’t the traditional kinds of evidence bc leaving evidence is dangerous

(p.17) Note about “zombie categories”— categories that are invented by researchers for particular purposes but don’t catch on because they don’t resonate with people, OR categories that used to resonate with people but are now archaic holdovers

(p.29) - mentions that when Heather Love taught a queer method graduate seminar and invited several established scholars, they said they have no method. Method in queer studies undermines “queer theory’s institutional claims to inter/anti-disciplinarity”

(p.30) “To see one’s practices as beyond method and utterly undisciplined is a failure to reckon with queer scholars’ position in the university; it fails to recognize the violence of all scholarly research— even its most insurgent and intimate forms.”

(p.33) “For those trained in traditional empirical methods, adding the volatile queer to method introduces the scandal of theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies: jargon; small sample sizes, and in some cases of a single (fictional) text; unclear standards of evidence; lack of attention to representativeness; and disconnection from real people, places, and things. For those trained in the humanities, the scandal is just the opposite: the anchoring of queer to method threatens to drain its political potential by submitting to regimes of statistical reduction, the reification of identity, the overvaluing of visible behavior, and the foreclosure of the speculative, the counterfactual and the ‘not yet here’ Jose Esteban Munoz designated as queer utopia (2009, 1).”

(p.33) “Queer research in a humanities framework is not guilty of reduction, but is characterized by attentiveness to what Lauren Berlant, in an analysis of the case study as genre, refers to as ‘tender singularities’ (2007, 669). Yet the fear is that such scholarship brings its considerable methodological resources to bear on merely fictional, idiosyncratic, or hypothetical instances, far removed from the exigencies of anyone’s life.”

(p.55) Discussion on the ethical issues (and practical difficulties) of doing ethnography on a group that you’re not a part of, but argues that refusing to do the research just because of your identity is the ‘skeptic’s cop-out’ and might be the worst position, since you’re avoiding dialogue altogether. At least if you do something shitty, people can talk about it.

(p.90) Story about developing a survey instrument, via casual conversations with queer people, which helped shape how the survey instrument ended up looking. Says most item development studies are done using majoritarian beliefs about minorities, so using queer people as the starting point is unusual.

(p.105) Discussion of the shortcomings of available data on LGBT households, including that the census only looks at coupled households, which excludes single people, people who don’t live with their partners, people not willing to identify their sexualities, bi people, and trans people.

(p.106) Important discussion about how WHAT you ask about (behavior? identity? feelings experienced?) deeply determines the results you get. Also that gay people are a group that is IMPOSSIBLE to randomly sample.

(p.107) description of RDS data collection (respondent-driven sampling) - helps you get in touch with more of a community than you could on your own

(p.110) description of how the researcher used news stories about different neighborhoods as structuring tools for their interviews and how this method is useful

(p.134) Discussion of some of the difficulties in measuring GNC populations

Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies, by Jonathan Alexander

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”

Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, by Julie Jung

Quotes I Marked

(p.3) [Jung had given her students a multi-genre assemblage of her own writing] “Their confusion made it quite clear that juxtaposing genres within a single text disrupts readings and delays meaning making, and that such disruptions can result in reader responses that force writers to revise more deeply.”

(p.4) “Researchers theorized revisions as a process through which writers see their texts again and thereby create rather than correct their written products….Donald Murray was a major contributor to this changing view of revision…In his landmark essay, ‘Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery,’ published in 1978, Murray defines writing as rewriting and distinguishes the polishing work of external revision— ‘what writers do to communicate what they have found written to another audience’ (91) — from the knowledge-making process of internal revision— ‘everything writers do to discover and develop what they have to say, beginning with the reading of a completed first draft (91). Whereas external revision involves making changes based on the needs and expectations of one’s intended reader, Murray explains that during internal revision, the audience is the writer herself rereading her evolving text to discover meanings not yet made clear; positioned as her own best reader, the revising writer creates a space for her text to respond.”

(p.8-9) Chart explaining 4 theories of revision: stage model (revision is editing), problem solving model (solve communication problems that result from your failure to communicate with the audience), social-interactive model (revision is about negotiating the situation and expectations between writer and reader), rhetorical-cultural model (delay consensus, identify and explore sites of conflict, don’t delete controversial parts but add to and analyze them)

(p.12) “In short, I ask that rhetors seek to make themselves heard by demonstrating their commitment to listening to others; I ask that you join me in finding ways to write writing that listens.” (Also argues that multigenre texts are good for creating meaningful reader response discussions)

(p.26) Passage on Mairs feeling like her whiteness prevented her from accurately reading Alice Walker so she let ‘Alice Walker teach me how to read Alice Walker.’ “With this move, Mairs illustrates how revisionary rhetors can learn to respond to texts they fear they cannot understand: They relinquish claims to mastery; by doing so they fall into despair; by falling into despair they become ready to listen.” What she did is she identified different strategies Walker was using and then used those same strategies in her own essay, to embody/feel those strategies herself.

(p.29) - talks about two authors, which she will analyze in this chapter, combining genres that are considered within and without Rhet/Comp, and how that weirdness makes readers uncomfortable, which allows them to think about things in new ways.

(p.33) Multigenre texts vs. “blurred genres” (Geertz)- multigenre texts have stark breaks (white space) when genres shift

(p.43) Discussion of how academic authority is built by tearing other people down, and how that’s mean and unnecessary, and Welch uses multigenre writing to talk about it

(p.45) “We have theorized how the personal has made its way into the academy, but we have yet to examine carefully how the academy has made its way into the personal.”

(p.49) “Because Miller opens with a moving scene about his father’s attempted suicide, I expected him to come out in favor of personal narratives in academic contexts; I continued to read his essay as if he were opposed to disembodied academic arguments. However, when Miller breaks form and reflects on his decision to do so, he demonstrates how genre— in this case, the genre of the personal narrative— creates readerly expectations about how writers position themselves in relation to disciplinary arguments. By stepping back and telling me that he knows I’m doing this, Miller illustrates how my reductive reading has forced him into a corner that he refuses to occupy. His metadiscursive commentary thus demands that I examine how genre expectations shape the way I hear a writer’s argument.”

(p.53) “rather than engage in the disciplines ‘conventions of attack/counter-strike’ (182), however, Lu chooses instead to revise her initial response to Miller’s essay by critically affirming the ways in which she, too, has deployed the same rhetorical moves that disturb her….Lu’s essay is a dramatic example of one reader’s efforts to own responsibly her reactions to a text that disturbs her. My purpose in discussing it here, however, is to suggest the degree to which Miller’s multigenre form encourages such a response.

(p.77) Describes an assignment in which she asks students to write the introductions to two different essays: a literary analysis and a rhetorical analysis of the same short story. The students enjoy this, but she realizes they suck at close reading nonfiction. “I believe rhetoric teachers bear the particular burden of teaching students how to closely read nonfiction.”

(p.82) Shows some different introductions to an early draft of a response to an essay that pissed her off. The first is very “warlike,” which goes against her beliefs against how people should engage in discourse. So she explains her ongoing thought process and shares more attempts at introductioning. One version says she “has trouble hearing” his arguments, which is very different from her initial approach. But her “final” version, which she frames as a “revision” of his essay, goes through step by step in the framing and explores her own emotional and intellectual reactions and agreements/disagreements with his essay. Then, after the framing, she writes about further research she did: she asked several male colleagues to read the essay she is criticizing, then interviews them about how they responded to it and why. My one struggle with this chapter is figuring out where her “revisionary essay” begins/ends as opposed to the rest of the chapter that DISCUSSES her revisionary essay. The sections blend together.

(p.152) Quote from Foucault about progress, in which he explains that he’s not saying humanity doesn’t progress, but that it’s wrong to ASSUME humanity has progressed. The question is not “How have we progressed?” but “How do things happen? And how do things happening now relate to things that happened in the past?"“

Sources I Marked

“The Writing/Reading Relationship: Becoming One’s Own Best Reader” by Richard Beach and JoAnne Liebman Kleine

“Fighting Words: Unlearning to Write Critical Essays” by Jane Tompkins

“The Nervous System” by Richard E. Miller

Publics and Counterpublics, by Michael Warner

I’ve heard enough people cite this book that I thought I had a general sense of what publics and counterpublics are and are about. I was kind of right, but in reading this book, I realized I was also kind of wrong. “Publics” can be anything that someone means when they refer to “the public.” Because every time we say we’re writing for “the public” or “for general audiences,” we don’t actually mean literally anyone. There’s always some additional shape to the audience we imagine, and the audience we imagine is always going to be at least a little bit different than the actual audience. As Warner says, I — as one of his readers — might join, leave, or re-join the public he is speaking to at any time, and he won’t even know it.

Quotes I Marked

(p.9) “A public is inevitably one thing in London, quite another in Hong Kong. This is more than the truism it might appear, since the form must be embedded in the background and self-understanding of its participants in order to work. Only by approaching it historically can one understand these preconditions of its intelligibility.”

(p.10) “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”

(p.11) Discussion of the tension between how a public isn’t an objective, quantifiable thing, but it also isn’t just something totally subjective and infinitely mutable.

(p.12) “One of the central claims of this book is that when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise— over the conditions that bring them together as a public. The making of publics is the metapragmatic work newly taken up by every text in every reading.”

(p.18) note about how two of the essays in this book were “written against what at the time felt like huge blockages in the sayable”

(p.18) “As I began speculating on the close relation between sexual cultures and their publics in the modern context, I came to the conclusion that one of the underlying flaws of the gay and lesbian movement was the way it obscured and normalized the most compelling challenges of queer counterpublics.”

(p.50) “[The unequal distribution of power in mass culture and the increasing involvement of the state in civil society] produce a public that is appealed to not for criticism but for benign acclamation. Public opinion comes less to generate ideas and hold power accountable and more simply to register approval or disapproval in the form of opinion polls and occasional elections.”

(p.52) Stuff about Sedgwick and “the closet” and how “the closet” is a stand-in phrase for a whole lot of rules about what can be said when and where and by whom (and who must say what when, etc.)

(p.67) “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed….Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how can this public exist before being addressed? What would a public be if no one was addressing it? Can a public really exist apart from the rhetoric through which it is imagined? If you were to put down this essay and turn on the television, would my public be different? How can the existence of a public depend, from one point of view, on the rhetorical address and, from another point of view, on the real context of reception?”

(p.70) “The result [of not feeling like you’re able to address a meaningful public with a capacity for listening, understanding, and acting] can be a kind of political depressiveness, a blockage in activity and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation, frustration, anomie, forgetfulness….This is why any distortion or blockage in access to a public can be so grave, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated. Externally organized frameworks of activity, such as voting, are and are perceived to be poor substitutes.”

(p.71) “What determines whether one belongs to a public or not? Space and physical presence do not make much difference; a public is understood to be different from a crowd, an audience, or any other group that requires co-presence. Personal identity does not in itself make one part of a public…Belonging to a public seems to require at least minimal participation, even if it is patient or notional, rather than a permanent state of being. Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member. How, then, could a public be quantified?”

(p.77) “Public speech must be taken in two ways: as addressed to us and as addressed to strangers. The benefit in this practice is that it gives a general social relevance to private thought and life. Our subjectivity is understood as having resonance with others, and immediately so. But this is only true to the extent that the trace of our strangerhood remains present in our understanding of ourselves as the addressee.”

(p.113) “It might even be claimed that, like dominant publics, [counterpublics] are ideological in that they provide a sense of active belonging that masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society”

(p.114) “There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation: not just through its discursive claims…but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scene, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on….Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.”

(p.145) “As conversations get closer to public topics, where opinions would have a general relevance and others’ views would have to be taken into account, people tend to shut up, deflecting currents of conversation. Even active volunteers in civic groups construct their volunteering so as to avoid risky discussion. They choose topics that allow them to avoid dissent. They frame their motives as prepolitical. Journalists and officials actively conspire to limit public discussion, diverting it into testimony that can be viewed as private passion rather than opinion or argument.”

(p.148) Discussion of different norms in academic discourse vs. journalistic discourse (propensity toward infinite complication/nuance) and how there’s very little infrastructure for discussions between the academy and the masses/between professions/disciplines and journalism

(p.150) More on academic discourse, public intellectuals, seeing academics as politics, etc.

(p.157) Some criticism of Marxism that I think is Marxists and poststructuralists strawmanning each other again. Or at least both sides being wrong about their compatibilities. You can believe in discursive/cultural hegemonies and also believe in bourgeois rule via the state.

(p.167) About tolerance and publicness and ethos and minoritization

(p.189) Immigrantphobia as “supplying a concrete phobia to organize its public so that a more substantial discussion of exploitation in the United States can be avoided and then remaindered to the part of collective memory sanctified not by nostalgia but by mass aversion. Let’s call this the amnesia archive. The motto above the door is: ‘Memory is the amnesia you like.’”

(p.194) Observation that in the ancient world, sex is just a personal activity— it’s a verb that doesn’t need a direct object, like laughing, pooping, crying, dying, etc.” You just fuck, and sometimes another person is involved, basically. Who they are doesn’t have big stakes for your identity or the social meaning of the activity.

(p.195) list of activities that don’t seem like they’re related to sex/sexual culture, but they are: paying taxes, celebrating a holiday, investing in the future, teaching, carrying wallet photos, buying in bulk, etc.

Sources To Look Up

The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner

Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture, by John M. Sloop

It still feels strange to me that an academic book really can just be an introduction, several chapters of illustrative case studies, and then a conclusion. I don’t have a particular reason to think this is wrong except for an internal and definitely misguided sense that every book must make big arguments about the nature of the universe.

My partner and I are also having an ongoing discussion about materialism and its relationship with discourse, so I’m excited to read the materialist rhetoric articles cited here!

Quotes I Marked

(p.2) “That is, while cases of gender ambiguity were ‘talked about’ in ways that encouraged an undermining or questioning of the very notion of ‘aberration’ as related to sexuality and gender, bi-gender normativity was for the most part underlined and reemphasized. Significantly, one finds assumed (and not necessarily spoken) within these discourses a series of binary roles and behaviors which ultimately constitute the very notions of male and female, masculinity and femininity, hetero- and homosexual.”

(p.12) This is quoting from someone named Evans- “Once we know that a ‘real woman’ is a cultural fiction rather than an ontological birthright, have we thereby….reduced at all the rewards of continuing to be feminine in ways that society will recognize and approve?” (No)

(p.15) Longer passage about how because of medical gatekeeping, trans people need to present themselves as normatively gendered, and have social pressure to continue doing so after they get access to (XYZ). “A ___ trapped in a ___’s body” still implies that the first ___ has some essential characteristics. Which is different from being able to say “I would like to take testosterone” and being allowed to for no other reason than you’re an adult and you want to. (Even if some people genuinely do feel the first way.)

(p.7) “Here, Hale suggests that people who are [cis] should feel encouraged to write about [trans people] provided they do so in terms of investigating what the public discourse about [transness] tells us about culturla ideologies concerning gender and sexuality rather than what it tells about [trans] identity (which, Hale argues, should be left to [trans people] to investigate).” Everything in brackets is just stuff I changed to update the language

(p.18) “First, critical rhetoric places its focus on doxastic rather than epistemic knowledge. That is, rather than being concerned with knowledge of the essence of objects (e.g., the ‘truth’ about sex) or philosophical discussions about meanings, critical rhetoric is concerned with public argument and public understandings about these objects.” Rhetoric is about an emic perspective!

(p.19) “As Foucault’s work and assumptions were disseminated…almost every aspect of identity and politics was slowly subsumed under the study of discourse. In the most general sense, one of the vital implications of this observation is that those interested in political change came to think more in terms of slow rhetorical transition than in terms of overnight revolution. Lasting change is always a slow process, if only because it requires changes in meaning, and such changes are intergenerational rather than intrapersonal. In Raymond Williams’s terms, meaningful revolutions are by necessity long revolutions.”

(p.20-22)- on Greene (see “Sources to Look Up”), the materiality of discourse, and how reverse discourses and counterpublics always emerge from the dominant discourses, so they’re limited from the start. Unclear if Sloop is critiquing this or not.

(p.23) “While those in multivocal communities and academics ‘in the know’ might be able to look at these as cases of transgression and liberation [like the John/Joan case and Brandon Teena], those without community as Alfred Kielwasser and Michelle Wolf have pointed out in their discussion of televised representations of adolescent homosexuality, are most at risk precisely because the images they see of themselves are disciplined in advance by a hegemonic understanding that ‘holds them in place,’ judging them. When the only [trans] model one has was killed for ‘deception,’ one has understood [transness] only through the way it is policed.”

Sources To Look Up

Michael McGee, 1982, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric”

Ronald Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric”

The Ethnographic I, by Carolyn Ellis

This book is a fictionalized version of Ellis teaching a class about autoethnographic methods. Most of the characters are real (well, fictional versions of themselves), and two are composite characters. This book made me realize how diverse autoethnography can be, that it’s easier in some ways and harder in other ways than I thought, and that counterstory seems to be a kind of autoethnography with a particular theoretical framework (CRT). That answers the main question I had from counterstory— whether it can be done about oppressions other than race. The answer seems to be no, but you can use similar methods with similar “outcome” creations for other oppressions.. But counterstory is a word that belongs to CRT writing and research.

I liked it a lot! It answered a bunch of questions I had and taught me a lot. I like that she used the method she was writing about in order to write about it. I like the hard conversations depicted, and I like the syllabus and other supplementary materials at the back. Another thing I enjoyed was the chapters that are based on her interviews with her students after she had them read an earlier draft of the book, and they discussed her construction of the book and her portrayals of each of them.

Ellis frequently co-writes with her husband Art, a communications professor. They’ve written autoethnographic pieces about some very personal things— such as an abortion that took place early in their relationship. This seems very very hard to do and I’m impressed. I wonder if their dynamic is accurately represented in the book or if they have more fights and hard times related to their shared work than depicted. Although if they did, I guess they wouldn’t keep co-writing together. It’s also wild to me that they each teach the story of their own abortion in their classes. I could never.

I particularly valued the discussions over ethics in autoethnography, particularly with getting permission from people in your life that you wish to write about. Your story is always also their story, and vice versa. I disagree with some of the choices the characters made. I’ve hurt people in the past by writing about them without taking proper ethical measures (like asking and discussing in advance), and I regret it a lot. Ellis talks about how she published a piece about caring for her mom in the hospital. The story includes some very intimate details/moments between them. She didn’t ask her mom in advance if it would be okay to write that, although years later she did share the piece with her mom and her mom was okay with it. What if she wasn’t? There’s another story in which Penny, a student who wrote about her abusive relationship, gave a performance of her piece for volunteers at a domestic violence support shelter. The event did not go well— the volunteers were super uncomfortable by what they saw as her blaming herself for the abuse and Ellis encouraging it/not supporting her. The fascinating and hard part is, afterwards, the researchers and the volunteers had a series of meetings and conversations together in which they unpacked what went wrong and why it went wrong, so Ellis is able to present a nuanced view of many different perspectives in her book, based on the conversations.

I was also left feeling very frustrated, though. We never learned anything about autoethnography during my anthropology degree! And it turns out there’s a whole ton of scholarship about issues of writing anthropology, and I didn’t know about it! I struggled with finding ways to straddle English and anthropology, my two majors, and it felt like none of the faculty knew what to do with me. But all of this was here all along! If someone had known about it, they could have told me. My whole research trajectory could have been very different. I probably would have done something different for my BA thesis. And definitely might have ended up doing something different for my PhD— going for a different discipline or a different school, maybe. It’s hard to say.

Stuff I Marked

p.22- “for evocation in addition to representation as a goal for social science research, for generalization through the resonance of readers, and for opening up rather than closing down conversation.”

p.30 - paragraph on key features of autoethnography

p.39- examples of anthropologists and publishing venues that do autoethnography/anthroliterary things. Stanley Diamond, Sapir and Benedict (published poetry), Anthropology and Humanism (journal), Laurel Richardson

p.39- discussion of factors that affect whether something is called autoethnography or ethnography, autoethnography of memoir

p.64-66- note about interactive interviewing and how it’s a good strategy when everyone involved has personal experience with the topic at hand (good for me and bi research!)

p.89- Ellis’s advice on what to do if you’re anxious about biasing your data/if people will accuse you of biasing your data

p.116— on truth vs. accuracy and the unreliability of field notes

p.117— difference between field notes and a first draft of a story

p.122- one character lists the different genres she used to write up interviews— she was just experimenting to see which ones worked best for her

p.123-126 more on truth vs. accuracy and the issue of validity in autoethnography

p.125- discussion of guy who wrote fiction based on his fieldwork bc his participants were part of an especially vulnerable population and he wanted to protect their identities extra well

p.240- Hector’s project on bicultural identity is kinda similar to my project! Reference this!

p.252- discussion of how to evaluate autoethnographic projects

p.309- how a student’s experience of pain in her body affects her writing

Sources To Look Up

Geertz, Clifford and Marcus, Marcus and Fischer (p.17) - mentioned as anthropologists dealing with issues on the intersections of anthropology and literature

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer

“Assessing Alternative Modes of Qualitative and Ethnographic Research: How Do We Judge? Who Judges?” special section in Qualitative Inquiry (journal)

Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap

This book, as well as The Ethnographic I by Carolyn Ellis, really made me realize how traditional/out-dated a good part of my anthropology education was. This book was published in 2002, and I got my anthro degree in 2016, and we certainly never talked about any of these trends except for a couple chapters on feminist anthropology in my “history of anthropological theory” class. I didn’t even know that “homegrown anthropology” (doing research on communities in the U.S. rather than “foreign/exotic” communities) was already a well established trend. I thought it was just getting started. Many chapters in this book were interesting to me on that level, yet not particularly useful for where I’m currently at w/r/t research and my relationship with anthropology.

Quotes I Marked

p.123- “Must the solution, then, to our marital woes [between gay male anthropology and lesbian anthropology] be a kind of intellectual bisexuality or perhaps cross-dressing? To put ourselves into each other’s worlds, if not each other’s heads, must we be willing to experiment with sexual identity, to undermine definitions we have long believed in, and perhaps to submit ourselves to the uncertainties of crossing gender boundaries?” Context is, gay male anthropology looks at “men who have sex with men” as a behavior, whereas lesbian anthropology looks at sexuality primarily as a political identity

p.195- safe sex education as particularly anthropologically vital during the AIDS crisis (as opposed to celibacy propaganda) because “lots of sex without shame or monogamy” was a big part of the ethos of gay liberation so people definitely would not have wanted to give that up.

p.206- linking barebacking fantasies with vampire fantasies (Garber!!)

p.229- people Valentine considered to be trans men were called lesbians by their own community, and people he considered to be trans women were called gay by their own community. What do you do when people definitely meet the criteria for a group (like trans) but don’t use those words themselves? This is at the Legends Ball, mostly African American and Latinx, House of Xtravaganza was there

p.230- references to “the transgender spectrum” (on materials from the Gender Identity Project founded at the Center), included “drag, cross dresser, cross-gender, femme queen, bigender, transvestite, transsexual, FTM, MTF, NewWoman, NewMan, and …. “ as potential categories

p.233- quote from Jayne County, a trans woman here writing about Atlanta in the 1960s: “There were certain divisions in the gay world even then, but we didn’t have the words for them. Everyone was just gay as far as we were concerned; that was the word we used…It didn’t matter whether you were a very straight gay man, or a screaming street queen, or a full-time drag queen, or a transsexual who wanted to have a sex change: you were gay” - here, straight gay man means a man who is gay but is normatively masculine

p.235-238- more on butch queens, femme queens, and being “gay”- it’s not contradictory or confusing if “gay” means any deviation from sexual and/or gender norms

Sources to Look Up

p.117- Weston (1991- Families We Choose, 1993, 1998), Kennedy (1993), Newton (1979, 1993), Lewin (1993)- all lesbian-feminist anthropologists whose feminism influenced their gay anthropology

p.122- Suzanna Walters (1996) writing about how the “queer sensibility” entails a “denigration of feminism”

p.131- some gay language studies- Murray (1979), Tannen (1984), Read (1980) and Goodwin (1989)

Writing Studies Research and Practice, Edited by Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan

Stuff I Marked

p.xii- passage about “pasisonate attachments” (like Joan’s “passionate utterances”) and wondering where “research end(s) and memoir begin(s)”

p.17 - extended quote about narrative and epistemology in the sciences. talks about ideographic vs. nomothetic. How historical sciences (paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology) are about telling stories about the past (based on data)

p.17 “While the value of personal stories is now widely accepted in composition, it is important to articulate what qualities of observation, analysis, or representation we require if we are to accept any particular narrative account as a persuasive instance of research”

p.20 “I also believe that it is important to recognize that we have invested a great deal of intellectual capital in rhetorical conventions that primarily use ethos (rather than method) to provide evidence that the researcher has produced an authentic account of her experiences or observations. That is, a great part of our ‘index of reality’ rests on textual conventions to suggest that the researcher has ‘been there.’”

p.26- role of emotion in research design

p.30- “passionate attachments” (Royster) and beginning with your own experience/feelings and using that as a guide in historical research

p.38- thing about the value of “eliciting autobiographical narratives in interview-type settings” and how telling a self-story is also a form of self-formation and co-research

p.39- on how the researchers adapted their methods to be more unstructured/semi-structured.

p.41- Framing of questions— “Can you tell us some stories about….?”

p.80- Extended passage on “Doing ethnography” vs. “Adopting an ethnographic perspective” vs. “Using ethnographic tools” and how each of these can/cannot be applied in writing studies

p.115-116- Autoethnography as a “literate art of the contact zone.” Quote from Mary Louise Pratt- autoethnography as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.

p.199- draws a distinction between “textual-qualitiative researchers” (people who study published texts) and “empirical-qualitative researchers” (people who study day-to-day interactions between people, some of which may be written)

p.201- on “bias” and phenomenology and how our investments in research ALWAYS shape our perceptions

p.210- “Rhetorical studies does concern itself with how writing works in public domains, but its history and strong historiographic traditions make situated studies of mundane literacies, technologies, and work difficult to value.”

p.211- concept of a research stance- “a position or a set of beliefs and obligations that shape how one acts as a researcher” (I think this relates to how you decide you want to situate yourself politically to the topic/people)

Sources To Look Up

Wendy Bishop, Ethnographic Writing Research: Writing It Up and Reading It

Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author

Lankshear and Knobel, Handbook for Teacher Research: From Design to Implementation

Johanek, Composing Research

Glaser and Strauss, Discovery of Grounded Theory

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, by Jasbir K. Puar

I wanted to read this book primarily so I could figure out what a queer assemblage is, since that’s a framework I’ve encountered at conferences and don’t really understand. I still don’t really understand— or rather, my understanding is that assemblage theory boils down to “any social thing is super complicated and built out of separate complex social things that are changing in their own ways on their own time.” Kind of like how the human eye evolved from several other separately-evolving systems, maybe. As a social framework, assemblages seems basically like dialectical thinking.

I already had a decent understanding of homonationalism and its relationship to the War on Terror via the introduction of Sodometries, where Goldberg analyzes a cartoon of Saddam Hussein in the context of post-9/11 politics and significant gay rights court cases. While that’s just one example, the concepts and relationships are explained well. So, I feel like this book primarily taught me about more examples— like the torture at Abu Ghraib, and how homophobia (and sexism) in other countries is used to justify U.S. imperial interests (like justifying the war in Afghanistan) but ignored in other places (like Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally). Puar also talks about queerness as regulatory (being “anti-norms” is its own kind of pressure) and secular queerness (which is basically Christian secularism) means queer identity feeds into Islamophobia, since Christianity is naturalized in the U.S.

But, I’m supposed to be thinking about methods as I read this.

So, I kind of see the method in this as looking at stickyness (I think that’s a Sarah Ahmed term) around/between social objects. I don’t feel like Puar is arguing that these confluences of nationalism and homophobia have been intentionally engineered, either at a national level or by individual propagandists, but they certainly exist, and keep cohering around each other. And saying “here’s how stuff is, and how it’s interacting with each other” is valuable, even if you don’t get at the Why (although Puar does get at the Why).

I think another important thing to learn from this discussion is how capitalism (and therefore imperialism) is super flexible and adaptable. Capitalism requires oppression, because dividing workers helps keep everyone down (paying undocumented people less than minimum wage means documented people are less likely to try to get paid more, because aren’t they already lucky, and why wouldn’t the employer just hire more cheaper people?) and keeps workers blaming each other for stuff instead of the bosses (like the fear of immigrants and blaming poor people for their own poverty). But, capitalism doesn’t need oppression in any particular form.

Lots of people profited an enormous amount off of slavery. But abolishing slavery didn’t destroy capitalism. The economic system adapted— to sharecropping, Jim Crow, prison labor, etc. In the same way, while homophobia functions(ed) as a tool to enforce gender and familial norms, and to keep some people in a marginalized surplus labor force (thereby keeping wages/costs down), now capitalism has adapted again. Homonormative families are more than welcome to participate in the market— the gay wedding industry, the gay tourist industry, the commodification of gay culture, etc.

Martinez talks about this too in relation to racism— it’s one of the tenets of critical race theory, that any reform/scrap of progress that is made, white supremacy will find a way to co-opt it.

It’s also similar to Moore’s argument in Dangerous Intimacies— that England started adapting its nationalist self-image to include homosexuality and homoeroticism, instead of always placing homosexuals in other countries (France, Turkey, Italy).

All kinds of special oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) are bound up with capitalism (people in specially oppressed groups also have higher rates of poverty and other money-related difficulties) yet also operate separately from it (e.g. wealthy Black people still experience racism, wealthy white women still experience sexism). And maybe that’s kind of what an assemblage is— seeing those overlaps and how the pieces interact with each other while still seeing them as separately-changing parts.

Bisexual Women in the 21st Century

This book is a book version of an issue of the Journal of Bisexuality that came out concurrently in 2002. As seems typical for this journal, the authors are mostly in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, counseling), while others are community activists not affiliated with universities or in women’s and gender studies. There is one contributor from an English department.

Reading this book was frustrating for two reasons, neither of which are the book’s fault. First, as I felt when reading Vice Versa, it seems like not much has changed in the last 20 years since this book came out. Most of the well-cited books about bisexuality came out in the 90s (or, in the case of this one, shortly after the 90s), and most of the issues and debates they discuss are still happening now. The main difference I see between then and now is now, since 2008, pansexuality has taken off as a similar identity, so people argue about the differences between the two terms. The second frustration was entirely personal— it made me have a miniature crisis about whether I ought to just be in the social sciences, and the difficulties of interdisciplinary interests and work.

One chapter/article, by Laura-Zoe Humphreys, is what I would call a counterstory, written as a dialogue (one of the examples of counterstory genres that Martinez explores). Another, by Carol Queen, is a memoir about the author’s experience pretending to be a lesbian to fit into the community when she was really bisexual. So, this book unexpectedly crossed over with all 3 of my reading lists!

Quotes/Passages/Ideas I Marked

p.4- that bisexual women activism grew directly out of lesbian-feminism, as a reaction against sexism and biphobia within that movement

p.11- standpoint theory (citations included), idea that “individuals located outside of dominant ways of being and knowing are often best able to reveal unacknowledged assumptions operating within such regimes”

p.18- discussion of how “the continuum narrative” (idea that almost everyone is bisexual, and very few people are totally gay or totally straight) does elide important differences between self-identified bisexuals and people who are “technically bisexual in thought or action but identify as gay or straight,” but it also “enlarges and normalizes” the bisexual category while relegating heterosexuality to “just as weird and abnormal as homosexuality” (in terms of % of the population)

p.29- note about method and interview schedule/script, refer back to this later. 22 participants. notes about recruitment tactics and use of snowball sampling

p.41- participants in this study almost all agree that prejudice from lesbians is worse than prejudice from straight people, but they still try to organize with lesbian communities politically and socially

p.76- this article is a literature review of research on bisexual women adolescents, and they identify 4 primary methodological barriers to research in this area- 1) tendency to label all bisexual girls as gay, 2) viewing bisexuality as a transitional phase, 3) “the continued theoretical dominance of the tripartite categorization gay, lesbian, and bisexual despite the rapidly changing social milieu of sexual minority youth” and 4) the marginalization of queer theory. Later in the chapter, they clarify that #3 is mainly about how lots of young people are beginning to identify as queer instead.

p.81- same article as above, this page talks about some of the problems with using self-identification as the single measurement of bisexuality. I understand the limits of this measurement, but I feel like it’s equally scientifically irresponsible to say “well even though you say you’re straight, you have fantasies sometimes so you’re REALLY bisexual.” Since the question of “why do people identify as X when their behavior might make an outsider think they are Y” is interesting and important!

p.111- couple epigraphs about how sexual identity is not just about sex and romance, it comes with cultures too

p.113- talking about cyborg theory, Harroway says cyborgs are post-gender and post-sexual dualisms, and thus have no ideological origins in Western culture, but author of this piece argues that cyborgs and bisexuals (as legible identity categories) are only possible because of the original binaries put in place.

p.115 “It’s useful to be queer when you want to suspend certainty to pose interesting questions, but when you want to relate to others, it may become strategically necessary to act as though your desires consistently match up with a recognized identity label (1997,p.97)

p.116- question of how to “perform bisexuality” or “become bisexual” in the Butlerian sense. Author gives some examples of how she tries to do it but how those tactics also always fail

p.123- examples of words people use “to avoid the b word,” examples of biphobic things lesbians have said to the author and her research participants

p.125- “The freedom to be bisexual can make alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality less the avant garde phenomenon or radical choice and more something which the average woman (person) feels comfortable taking for granted” (Elliot, p.327)

Sources I’ve Marked

p.12- “active interviewing strategy” (Holstein & Gubrium, 1997)

p. 30- “thematic decomposition analysis” (Stenner 1993, Woollett, Marshall, and Stenner, 1998) My understanding is that thematic analysis looks at what topics are discussed, and discourse analysis (in the sense used here, which I think is different from how it’s used in other fields?) means engagement in broader “discourses” (social norms/trends/webs)

Stacey Waite Readings (Teaching Queer, Queer Literacies Survival Guide, How and Why To Write Queer)

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)

Crip Theory by Robert McRuer

This is a book that I had a general sense of already from how people I know talk about its concepts— crip time, cripping composition, etc. for example. I am friends with lots of people who read and work in disability studies, some of whom identify as disabled and some of whom do not (that I know of), but I haven’t done much reading in the field myself, so most of my knowledge is second-hand (third-hand?). So, while many of the concepts in this book were already familiar to me, I was very glad to read this book and encounter them directly myself.

Crip theory is similar to queer theory like compulsory able-bodiedness is similar to compulsory heterosexuality— one of the arguments of the book is that both fields and experiences of oppression have a lot in common. This is partially because homosexuality used to be classified as a disease, or disability, or symptom of some other mental disability/deficit. So some of their respective histories is actually the same history. But McRuer also shows how many liberation movements make their arguments by distancing themselves from others— the disabled. For example, in Imagining Transgender, David Valentine talks about how homophile organizations argued for homosexual rights based on the premise that homosexuals are normal, that there is nothing wrong with us, and that gender nonconformity (which implicitly is something abnormal/wrong) is not an inherent part of homosexuality. This line of reasoning led to homosexuality being deleted from the DSM, but also to the creation of gender identity disorder. We can also see this in the women’s movement and in the civil rights movement— arguments (which are true!) that women and people of color are no less mentally/emotionally/physically capable than men and white people. But these arguments are still based on certain values/standards of ability. They’re also similar in that perfect heterosexuality or perfect gender and perfect able bodiedness are impossible ideals, so society develops cultural mechanisms with which to defend the categories and do maintenance on the boundaries.

Crip time is the idea that there is no length of time that a given task “ought” to take, because different people’s bodyminds are capable of doing things at different rates! It takes me longer to write a first draft than it takes other people. I run out of social/emotional steam faster than other people. But I’m also fast at reading and math. Some people need more sleep to function at their best/happiest than other people do. That sort of thing.

An emphasis on efficiency and there being something Wrong if you take longer on a task than someone else might (what the “standard” is) comes from capitalism. Capitalism always needs to grow, needs to not only generate profit but generate MORE profit, so efficiency is key. If you can hire someone for the same price who does the job faster, you hire the other person. McRuer approaches a materialist analysis, following the work of John D’Emilio in “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” but whereas D’Emilio diagnoses capitalism as the problem, the root source of homophobia, McRuer doesn’t take his own analysis that far. Instead, he says we need “alternate systems” or ways of being. Which isn’t wrong or contradictory to D’Emilio, but it implies a much more reformist solution to the problem. The necessary alternate systems require overthrowing capitalism. They cannot exist on any widespread scale at the same time. If we make a perfectly accessible university, it’s still only a perfectly accessible university— not a perfectly accessible world. To make everything perfectly accessible would require eliminating the profit/efficiency motive, which means eliminating capitalism.

Another section I found very thought provoking is the discussion around pages 36 and 37 about “what if nondisabled people identify as crips” and appropriation. McRuer’s treatment of identification and appropriation in relation to disability is very different than the discussions on these issues I’ve seen in other areas— in relation to queerness and race, for example. Essentially, there is nothing inherently wrong with identifying as crip if you are nondisabled, but it is unlikely to happen in part because identifying as crip is a political commitment. By aligning yourself with the community, you need to be continually and actively refusing and challenging able-bodied privileges and procedures. You can be disabled and not identify with crip, too, because some disabled people may not be interested in participating in disability rights efforts. (This relates to the complicated discussion of people wanting medical treatment for various things but also rejecting the notion that there is anything wrong with them. People’s relationships with the medical model of disability are complicated and I don’t fully understand all of the distinctions between the medical model and the social model and what the social model has to say about medicine.)

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Ruth Osorio about “neurodivergent.” At the time, she had recently begun identifying as neurodivergent, and I asked her what that meant to her/what kinds of things she sees as “counting” as neurodivergent vs. not. One thing she said was that she views a neurodivergent identity as a political commitment to fighting for the wellbeing and rights of everyone in the neurodivergent community— as a term, it has a function as a banner to collect people for political organizing, much like Pan-Africanism and Pan-Indian organizing and “queer.” So, if you have two people with the same diagnosis, one may consider themselves neurodivergent and the other may not. Just like whether or not someone considers themselves “disabled” or "a survivor” varies.

Another part that kind of blew my mind was the discussion of efficiency studies and home economics. I had always thought home economics was some made up bullshit term to make it sound like “how to be a good wife” was a legitimate thing to teach/study in school, because patriarchy. And that’s sort of true, except because capitalism. As the spheres of home and work were increasingly separated, workplace efficiency became a new science, but so did the study of how to optimize homemaking. So, home economics really was a realm of social science, and helped create the notion of What a Good White Middle Class Wife Should Be. (Not going to go down the sidetrack of Engels’s theorizations of capitalism and the family right now, but it’s totally relevant.) But this means that there are ways the home Should Be Run and how things at home Should Be Done. And it makes me think of the modern dilemma, not unique to millennials but certainly widespread among my generation:

In a world where it’s no longer possible for a couple to live a middle class lifestyle on one income, each individual has to work while also living up to impossible standards in every other area of their life— standards that previously, the non wage-earner took care of. So, I’m supposed to be successful at my career and work 40 hours per week or else I’m lazy, but I’m also supposed to go to the gym to stay sexy and fit and cook homemade meals to be healthy and fiscally responsible, and keep my apartment super clean, and be a good friend and invest the right amount of time into my relationship and on and on and on. And I don’t even have kids. There are literally not enough hours in the day for people to do all of this on their own, even if the chores are split between two people. Those who achieve everything are outsourcing it to hired help— most often women of color. So, the standards for compulsory able-bodiedness— in this case, “Everything I would be able to do if only I had my shit together and wasn’t Somehow Wrong” — are impossible for even the most able-bodied people on their own. So this situation is just one end of the spectrum for all other levels of ability/disability. It’s already impossible, and an acceleration of standards for what an individual ought to achieve, but for disabled people, it’s even more impossible, which then casts disabled people as even more failed/flawed/broken/wrong/inadequate.

So, in short, I liked this book a lot but also all the actual solutions to compulsory able bodiedness require overthrowing capitalism. Everything else is either localized so it leaves people out, temporary, or a nice reform that does in fact make things better for people, but hasn’t actually solved the problem.

Three Articles On Rhetorically Navigating Being a Queer Teacher

“Bi, Butch, and Bar Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of Class, Gender, and Sexuality” by Michelle Gibson, Martha Marinara, and Deborah Meem

“Written Through the Body: Disruptions and ‘Personal’ Writing” by William P. Banks

“‘Academic Drag’ and the Performance of Critical Personae: An Exchange on Sexuality, Politics, and Identity in the Academy” by Alyssa A. Samek and Theresa A. Donofrio

—

The first article has been sitting in my inbox for more than a year, since one of my classmates first sent it to me as a recommendation. The second article I initially read during my sophomore year of college, then again during my MA, then again now. I call it the reason I’m in graduate school— it’s the article that blew my mind so much at 19 that I knew I had to keep studying so I could write like that. I’ve also met the author, through my own National Writing Project experience. The third article, I had never heard of until I was researching for texts to add to my orals bibliography.

All three discuss the difficulties— and affordances!— of being a queer professor from particular positionalities, and the various ways the authors have chosen to navigate that situation. Samek (gay) and Donofrio (straight) write a dialogue about some of their private conversations around queerness, scholarship, and privilege. Both come from similar backgrounds so had a lot to connect on, and Donofrio was able to confide in Samek about her discomfort with discussing sexuality in a professional space, and Samek was comfortable enough with her to explain why it was important for her to do it as an ally. The article refers a few times to the concept of ‘academic drag’ — the costume or persona you put on in academic spaces when it is time to Be a Scholar. They also touch on how notions of professionalism exclude queer people’s experiences and expressions and “contain” the queer scholarly project in “safe” (and ignorable) ways, such as by including queer texts on the syllabus but allowing students to avoid discussing sexuality during the class discussion.

This article was not what I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be more about pressures queer students/academics face to repress or hide parts of themselves in the name of professionalism or straight-code themselves or speak/write differently and things like that, and I thought ‘Academic Drag’ was going to interrogate the shared image we have of What It Means to Be Scholarly. Instead, just as the beginning anecdotes about Midwestern avoidance say, it’s mostly about avoiding queerness in discussions, and straight students and professors avoiding reckoning with sexual privilege. Such as how they observe that they were having these conversations in hushed tones in their corner of the graduate office, instead of during their seminar, or instead of Donofrio going to speak with a faculty member about it. Which is fine, but not what I was hoping for.

One thing that confused me is when Samek says that “passing can be transgressive and can afford opportunities for disruption rather than complicity with systems of power” (35). She uses the example of how because she and Donofrio share many other identifications, just not sexual orientation, they were more comfortable talking with each other about a tense issue (sexual orientation) than they would have been if they were more different. I’m not sure what this has to do with passing, since Donofrio states that she already knew Samek was gay when she approached her to have this conversation— in fact, that was why she chose her in the first place. So, I’m really not sure how passing figures into their discussion, or how passing is transgressive— I guess unless the “opportunities for disruption” is just that “gotcha” moment when someone assumed to be straight reveals that actually they are not straight and gay people can be anyone/anywhere. But I feel like we’re past that, at least in most places. And I think U Maryland, being a very large school near a major metropolitan area, is likely a place where just knowing any out gay person is a shock.

I read “Bi, Butch, and Bar Dyke” next, and it was definitely more in line with what I had expected/hoped for. In this article, each of the authors (who correspond with the labels in the title) takes some time to reflect on how their identity performances in the classroom impact their teaching. The bisexual author discusses the uncomfortable, invisible in between of a bisexual identity and some awkward classroom moments in which she was around people making homophobic comments who didn’t know she was queer (in her role as a student and as a teacher).

The butch author argues that while butchness would have been a barrier to professional success in the past, she actually thinks it works to her advantage now (rather, in 2000 when the article was published). Just as male teachers tend to get rated higher in student and colleague observations, she found that she and another butch-of-center colleague got higher ratings than their femme coworkers. She also thinks there have been times when men, feeling intimidated by her, would have challenged her outright if she was a man, but refrained since she is still a woman. She even lists butch as a “privileged” position in a revision to a privilege/oppression chart, which shocked me. (Although, she also put bisexual and transgender people in the same category of “even more oppressed than lesbian and gay people,” which I feel is….incorrect. Both groups get ignored more compared to L and G, but I think trans people have it much harder.)

The bar dyke author talks about her experience submitting a promotion dossier and getting criticized on the personal/revealing/”un-professional” disclosures she made in her self-observational writing. She was told to make herself seem as similar to the administrators as possible, rather than emphasizing her differences with them and similarities with the students. She was surprised that anyone found those sections objectionable, since she had already made the choice to just say “when I was a cocktail waitress” instead of “when I was working at a lesbian bar running drag shows.” The part that I really struck me about this section was when she asked the advising faculty member what would happen if she didn’t change these parts, and the advisor said “Nothing” because her dossier was in fact very good. But she still wanted her to change them anyway. She didn’t, and it was fine. Nothing happened. Yet that “professionalizing” pressure remained—for what? Not even the speaker thought it would actually matter in the real material situation.

I thought this article spoke to the idea of “academic drag” much more than the other one— the bar dyke author is even explicitly told to “write tweed.”

I read “Written Through the Body” last, and I only added it to this set because the first two made me think of it so strongly. Banks’s reflections on his position as a working class gay academic are very similar to the reflections in Bi, Butch, and Bar Dyke, and his hesitations about coming out to students and/or colleagues are similar to Samek’s anxieties in “Academic Drag.”

I want to go dig out my prior printed copy of this article, to compare what I highlighted this time as opposed to last time (and the first time, if I can find the version too). (But my partner is on a phone call in the room where my article binders are). But, what stood out to me this time that I don’t remember paying as close attention to before is Banks’s attention to ethics and to the differences between personal writing and embodied writing.

The ethics part stood out because the last time I read this article, I was using it for inspiration and guidance in a project in which I ended up betraying someone’s trust via the disclosures and “fragments” and “figures” (Banks’s words) that I chose to include. So, I definitely failed and missed the point of the article there.

p.24- “This piece demonstrates and ethical concern for ‘responsible’ personal writing by interrogating itself and problematizing the genre(s) in which it operates.”

p.33- “The value of embodied rhetorics, as opposed to ‘personal writing,’ rests on this distinction: it is, quite simply, impossible (and irresponsible) to separate the producer of the text from the text itself.” Your life experience always impacts how you view or speak about a situation, just like Banks “read himself too far into the sonnet” he was trying to analyze in the opening anecdote.

p.33- “Such writing [personal writing], particularly when it is presented to a professional reader, bears the responsibility of making ‘personal’ knowledge into ‘social’ knowledge that others can use, of adding to a very specialized ‘body of knowledge.’”

p.33— blockquote from Jane Hindman- “When embodied writing is successful— that is, when my personal writing is disciplined and responsible— it transforms my immediate self-absorption with subjective affect into an awareness of not only how my responses have been socially conditioned and socially perceived, but also how I as author can intervene in that conditioning.”

p.34 (Banks emphasizes “disciplined and responsible” from that quote) “Thus, she does not advocate publishing personal diaries in academic journals and passing these texts off as reflectively engaged in a way that makes knowledge for others….If you’ve tried to write like this and get it published, then you know the struggle (the disciplining) that goes on to make sure the writing isn’t merely masturbatory, but also the value to those beyond the self.

These passages were very clarifying for me, and also made me think about Counterstory (and Banks does cite Victor Villanueva, who Martinez also cites extensively). The point is to take personal knowledge and experience and use it to communicate something bigger to to your audience, not to share YOUR story because YOU’RE so important. That’s part of why counterstory uses stock characters and sociological research—these are tools to verify and extend the personal knowledge. That’s the whole point of consciousness raising groups too— to pool experiences to generate knowledge about what is and is not shared experiences/oppressions. Any given thing about me, how do I know if it’s relevant to others, or in what ways it’s relevant? How do I know if X experience is because of systems of oppression, or just something that happened to me, who happens to be in some oppressed groups? By starting with that story/experience and following it — to research, to talking with others, etc.

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, by David Valentine

This book is by an anthropologist who, for his dissertation research, decided to study “the transgender community in New York City” in the late 1990s. He got a job at the LGBT Center doing public health outreach to trans people, which helped him meet folks and make money while allowing him to give back to the community while doing his research. However, he quickly discovered that there was not “a” trans community, and many people who he and other social workers/social scientists considered “transgender” did not use that word for themselves, or hadn’t even heard of the word. So instead, his ethnography became about the category of “transgender” itself, rather than the culture of trans NYC.

Valentine is a cisgender gay man. There may have been things I missed as a cis person myself, but I felt like he was very respectful of the people he met and wrote about. In the book, he emphasizes the importance of honoring how people describe themselves first, and includes several anecdotes about times trans people he was talking to called him out, corrected him, or asked him to stop doing a behavior (such as attending a support group meant for trans women). In these anecdotes, he doesn’t try to defend himself, just talks about what he learned from the experience. In one case, he co-authored an article with a trans contact, and sent it to another trans contact, who was deeply offended by the article. He summarizes her critiques and the resulting discussion they had.

At this point in time, at least at the Center, “transgender” encompassed more people than I think we use it for in 2021. Promotional materials at the Center for events designed for trans people specifically say they include people who consider themselves transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, cross-dressers, and more. Now, most of those words are out of fashion/considered rude, and drag queens aren’t considered inherently trans, although some drag queens are also trans (in fact, Ru Paul doesn’t even allow trans women on his show if they take hormones or have gotten gender affirmation surgery). It seems like the way Valentine and his coworkers were using “transgender” in the late 90s is similar to how we use GNC/gender-nonconforming now— including people we now understand as trans, but also including others.

At one point during his fieldwork, Valentine attends 3 “balls” in one week, all recommended to him by folks at the Center as events that belong to the trans community. This was one of my favorite sections, because while using the same word (ball) and being identified as similar by the Center (all trans), these balls were INCREDIBLY different, and most of the people at each of them did not consider themselves trans at all.

The first ball was the most similar to the balls on Pose or in Paris is Burning. The attendees were mostly young working class people of color, and most of them did not call themselves trans. Instead, participants compete in the categories of Woman (femme afab people), Butch Queens (masc amab people), Butch Queens Up in Drags (masc amab people dressed femme), Fem Queens (femme amab people), and Butches (masc afab people). Valentine notes how while there are rules/patterns for which category someone belongs to based on sex assigned at birth and gender presentation, there were many people whose category did not match his expectations for them based on his understanding of the rules. He also discusses a trans woman who tried to compete in the Woman category but was pressured by the crowd to compete as a Fem Queen instead. Valentine also notes that ALL of the people at this ball, regardless of gender identity, sex assigned at birth, or gender presentation, considered themselves and each other “gay.” This helped me understand why some older people (say, my parents’ age and older) find it so confusing to distinguish between gender and sexuality and what words to call someone— because the words we use now are just different than the words people used to use! Now, the general rule is that a trans woman who exclusively likes men is straight (unless she describes herself differently), but then, “gay” was a word for everyone. Valentine also spoke with people who said they lived full-time as women, considered themselves women, but also considered themselves gay men. What seems contradictory to an outsider (such as a modern reader but also to Valentine) was perfectly sensical and consistent within this community.

The second ball was a “debutante ball” for a group of self-identified cross-dressers, most of whom identified as straight men most of the time, but enjoyed dressing as women on the weekends. The general assumption was that they cross-dressed for their own erotic gratification (probably where part of the stereotype that trans women are just men trying to get off comes from?), and this was true of some of them, but certainly not all. This ball was really just a fancy dinner, and people Valentine talked to explained that the hours spent getting ready together were just as important to many as the ball itself. Very few, if any, of these participants considered themselves trans, although some people Valentine met through the cross-dressing association were taking hormones.

The third ball was a big non-profit event for a group called the Imperial Court, consisting of cis gay men who did drag for fun/art. They were very opposed to being called trans.

Another thing I learned is how some strides in gay rights (such as getting homosexuality taken out of the DSM) came at the expense of trans people. One of the main arguments to get homosexuality de-pathologized was that it does NOT involve gender nonconformity, that you can be perfectly “normal” and also gay. So then “gender identity disorder” got to be in the DSM, even when homosexuality was removed.

Valentine also talks about how people’s use of the word “transgender” to describe themselves correlated with the extent to which they interacted with social services. Part of this he thinks is because people who accessed services (such as events at the Center) were more familiar with the term, while other people had never heard of it before, and part of it he thinks is because in order to get some of those services, people had to learn to identify themselves/categorize themselves that way to make themselves legible to the system. It’s not just a simple case of cis social workers inventing new terms and imposing them upon communities, though. Some of Valentine’s coworkers at the Center who used and helped to pragmatically define the terms (such as the explanatory notes in event promotions) are trans social workers themselves, and some of them operate in positions of authority (such as Valentine’s main contact, Rosalyne).

At the end of the book, Valentine writes a little about how things and terminologies have changed even just in the 10 years between his fieldwork and the publication of the book. For example, he notes how “trans” has narrowed as a category, while “genderqueer” is emerging in part as a rebellion against the institutionalization of “transgender.” I don’t know what portion of genderqueer people also consider themselves trans. I know some do and some don’t.

Quotes I Marked

(p.19) “This book is also about the complicity of social scientists and social theorists in producing the objects they are investigating, and the politics of this process. (Marcus 1998).”

(p.20) “I will argue that the kinds of questions I raise in this book are central to careful, thoughtful, and effective political action.” I agree with this

(p.22) “In short, the category transgender became both the ethnographic object and central dilemma of my research, for if it was potentially socially and politically transformative, my research showed it was not equally so for all people gathered into its purview. More complexly, though, as described above, the practice of gathering all these subjects into my fieldwork imaginary was complicit with the very cultural process I was concerned with.”

(p.23) “My argument is that the idea of the gender-normative gay man is not a natural fact that has slowly gained credibility over 150 years but rather that the replacement of earlier models of gender-variant homosexuality has been a historical achievement.” Basically saying he is not trans, but in other times/places, he may have been considered the equivalent (like the construction of homosexuality being caused by gender inversion)

(p.24) — Note about his choice to not include any images of people, only of pamphlets/fliers/other printed materials.

(p.25) “My primary concern is with the institutionalization of political organizing, legislation, social service provisions, and so on, and ‘queer’ does not figure in these contexts in the same was as the categories it critically examines”

(p.26) - Note about his choice of using “transgender” vs. “transgender-identified,” and how the difficulty of knowing which term to use highlights the tension of “some people who others identify as trans do not call themselves trans” and perhaps vice versa.

(p.30) — cites Foucault when talking about how the goal is to not look at what these categories ARE, but what the categories DO. The Angelidies book about the history of bisexuality situates itself the same way, also Sedgwick.

(p.32)— the word “transgender” was originally invented as a third or non-binary gender category, meant to exist somewhere between transsexual and transvestite. But during the 90s this got overtaken by the collective sense of a range of gender nonconforming people (similar to but not identical to the modern sense of the term). I think the term has narrowed since then. It’s still capacious enough to include people who choose surgery and hormones, people who choose neither, and people in between, and includes non-binary genders rather than only binary trans people, but it no longer includes drag queens/kings, butch lesbians, and other people who transgress gender norms in other ways.

(p.61) — discussion of how accusations of “conflating” sexuality and gender can only be made bc of the cultural assumption that these ARE separate things that can be confused. For some people, this is true, gender and sexuality feel separate. But for some people, it’s not true! For some people (like the fem queens who call themselves gay men but also women, or for non-binary folks for whom “attraction to the same/different gender” can’t have the same meanings as it can for a cis or binary trans person), they are totally interrelated. And some cis gay people also feel like aspects of their gender identity or expression are bound up with their sexual orientation.

(p.72) — discussion of how the traditional anthropologist sense of “community” (geographically bound, culturally distinct group) doesn’t apply anymore, at least in most cases, and especially in places like New York City.

(p.100) “Age, race, class and so on don’t merely inflect or intersect with those experiences we call gender and sexuality, but rather shift the very boundaries of what “gender” and “sexuality” can mean in particular contexts”

(p.154) —Discussion of the word “berdache” from the perspectives of both a cis anthropologist and a trans anthropologist, and how gender and sexuality as categories have been colonized— separating them when other cultures don’t separate them (or at least not in the same ways), and then people in those other places start adopting U.S. words and concepts. Hard to know if/when it’s because they like them better or because of cultural hegemony (probably this one)

(p.159) Quote from Don Donham (1998)- “A certain communicative density is probably a prerequisite for people to identify as gay at all, and it is not improbably that as media density increases, so will the number of gay people”

(p.209) — concept of the “primacy of the ethical” in anthropology— sometimes, you gotta violate best research practices or the cultural norms of a place if it means saving someone’s life or preventing some other kind of harm/suffering. Anthropologists should be activists/helpers first and researchers second (more about this on p.249)

Fashioning Lives by Eric Darnell Pritchard, Other

Aside from the prologue and introduction, I focused my time with this book on Chapter 4, to see how Pritchard went about doing a “webnographic” study. It seems that some of his normal interview participants mentioned various platforms/websites they visited or used to visit and their experiences with them as Black LGBTQ+ people. Then, Pritchard made accounts on some of them himself to look around, participate in chat rooms, talk to people, and get a sense of the community/vibe of that website.

This reminds me of chapters in (Re)Orienting Writing Studies and the Bisexuality Reader by Meryl Storr (I think that’s right)— in the first, Michael J. Faris does a study of Grindr culture that addresses most of the same racist and fatphobic issues, and in the second, the author talks about early chat rooms and gender performance. Even though everything was text based so everyone could pretend to be whoever/whatever they wanted, there were still a lot of social prejudices and norms imposed on people. For example, in one chat room where a third gender option was available, the author found that many people tried to find out what gender they were “really.”

This chapter also reminded me that it’s okay for a chapter to be its own contained or semi-contained discussion. So, theoretically, I could do multiple mini-studies in different areas around the same research questions.

Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth, Chapter 5-End

Quotes I Marked

• Good blockquotes from other sources on p.173 and p.191

• (p.192) Quote from Frank Kameny (astronomer fired after being outed, who wrote about how gay researchers must take control of our own fate in the scholarship) “As a scientist by training and by profession, I feel fully and formally competent to judge good and poor scientific work when I see them—and fully qualified to express my conclusions” in “Does Research Into Homosexuality Matter?” (1965)

• (p.200)— block quote from Jay Prosser about trans literacy and autobiography

• (p.205) “If something represents this trigger for literacy [referencing Gee] for the purpose of dissent and critical awareness, then the AIDS virus and the historical context in which it occurred makes the virus a prime and heinous literacy sponsor of the twentieth century” in terms of activists communicating about AIDS to others, but also in terms of T&D Committee needing to get super scientifically literate and get access to different things to read

Sources I Marked

• American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society by Jennifer Terry

• Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene A. Carruthers

• Sexuality and Genders in Eduction: Towards Queer Thriving by Adam J. Gretemen

"Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy" by Eric Darnell Pritchard, Prologue and Introduction

The prologue and introduction of this book are where the theoretical and methodological frameworks are, as well as the actual methods. I’m excited by the structure of this study and would like to use it as a model for my own. So, I limited this post to just this section, and I’ll write separately on some of the later chapters.

Quotes I Marked

• (p.5) The quote itself isn’t important, but he talks here about an impactful course he took in elementary school called “Rites of Passage,” which was a “literacy environment…that was both liberating and constraining” to him, since it offered certain expectations about what it means to be a good Black man/Black boy. This same idea of liberating but also constraining reverberates through….basically all of the books I’ve been reading, since so many authors or interviewees talk about how their early discoveries of queerness were both so exciting yet so scary— for example, the medical books that talked about homosexuality as a disease and all homosexuals grow up to be miserable, or Jackson Bird, who for a long time didn’t know that you could be trans AND gay, so he figured that the fact he liked men meant he couldn’t be a trans man himself.

• (p.8-9) “That LGBTQ history was not articulated as part of anything I learned about histories focused on the contributions of Black or other people of color. These same stories only garnered what seemed like cursory mentions as part of LGBT history as well. I read pages of essays, speeches, and book reviews, looking for the answer to how I could work toward liberation and not have to fracture myself being forced to either be Black or gay.” (He eventually finds stories of individuals who straddled both movements, even though he can’t find connections in the big historiographies)

• (p.10) Statement of intent for the book— Black rhetoric/composition studies and LGBTQ rhetoric/composition studies both don’t really talk a lot about each other, so it’s time to have a book that does both at once, since Black LGBTQ people have different experiences with literacy from straight/cis Black people, and from LGBTQ people of other races.

• (p.11) “This book aims to live up to the promise of Lawrence’s portraits in documenting, rendering, and engaging with the scenes of Black literacy in everyday life and to assume and represent a diversity of Black and queer lives as peopling those scenes of literacy.” I like this quote because it feels like he’s saying “Just including these folks’ stories in the bigger picture of literacy studies is important, and it is enough for the book to be ‘just’ that.”

• (p.13) “My desire then is to provide a framework through which literacy, composition, and rhetoric may see Black queerness generally and the theory I develop from the life stories of my research participants in particular.”

• (p.16) “By examining the meanings that Black LGBTQ people give to literacy, we see new lessons about the perennial problem of literacy normativity, while these meanings of literacy are simultaneously presenting for our exploration a constellation of literacy practices by Black LGBTQ people that work toward the ends of individual and communal love manifested as self- and collective care, self- and collective definition, and self- and collective autonomy.”

• (p.19) Framing/description of what constitutes as literacy and literacy studies for this book

• (p.22) Does the same thing for “queerness,” in this case extending the term beyond LGBTQ people to include “‘welfare queens,’ teenage parents, drug addicts, sex workers, incarcerated prisoners” and single parents. He includes these groups because “these individuals ‘stand on the (out)side of state-sanctioned, normalized, White, middle- and upper-class, male heterosexuality” and are therefore “insufficiently normative”

• (p.24) Concept of restorative literacies— “literacy practices that Black queers employ as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination.” This is contrasted with literacy normativity, “which refers to uses of literacy that inflict harm…[and steal] emotional resources from people, wounding people through texts”

• (p.34) “Restorative literacies are part of the long African American tradition Elaine Richardson calls ‘survival literacies.’ These survival literacies work to guard individuals against what composition theorists Anne Herrington and Marcia Curtis call ‘the living death of silence’”

• (p.34) “In theorizing the concept of restorative literacies as a personal, institutional, and interactional act, subject to fluidity in contexts and interventions, I, as Beth Daniell writes, ‘want literacy to be associated with choices about language and about identities— in other words, with agency’”

• (p.41) statement of the “chief aim of African American literacies, composition, and rhetoric”: “to excavate, document, understand, and actualize the myriad conditions and traditions that compose a full history of African American literacies and rhetorics.”

• (p.41) J. Alexander argues that sexuality itself is a “complex literacy event”

• (p.48) Statement of research questions— “What are Black LGBTQ people’s relationships to literacy? What meanings do Black LGBTQ people give to literacy when it is used as a tool that causes them or others harm? How do Black LGBTQ people use literacy to make a life on their own terms? How do the life stories of Black LGBTQ people invite us to reconsider the knowledge and cultural logics embedded in the history and theory of African American and LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetoric (LCR)?”

• (p.49) Methods— description of use of recruitment letter, interview procedure and grounded theory use. Revised interview script twice while researching. 60 total participants.

• (p.50) Other Methods— description of use of archival data and what he used it for and why, as well as use of separate oral histories to confirm or find facts

Sources I Marked

• June Jordan, “A New Politics of Sexuality”

• Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed

• Keith Gilyard, Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence (literacy autobiography)

• Jonathan Alexander, “Transgender Rhetorics”

• Qwo-Li Driskill, “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques”

• Eric Darnell Pritchard, “This is Not an Empty-Headed Man in a Dress”

• K.J. Rawson, “Archiving Transgender”

• Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It — lesbian and bisexual women of color in hip-hop

"A Dialogue on the Constructions of GLBT and Queer Ethos: 'I Belong to a Culture That Includes...'" by Jane Hoogestraat and Hillery Glasby

This article’s form, more so than most articles, is directly shaped by the circumstances of its writing. The first author, who submitted it to the journal, passed away before the article finished the publication process. The editors passed it along to the second author, “to provide perspective and to address revision” (p.2). She felt uncomfortable altering Hoogestraat’s text beyond minor sentence-level editing without her permission, so instead, she presents the article as it was originally written, interspersed with her own (clearly labeled) commentary and responses. The result is, as the title suggests, a dialogue about the differences between “GLBT” (culture, community, ethos) and “queer” (culture, community, ethos).

Hoogestraat’s part uses Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart as an example of the construction of gay identity/ethos, and Glasby’s part uses Adrienne Rich’s poem “Yom Kippur” as a counterexample of queer identity/ethos.

Quotes I Marked (some with my commentary)

(p. 3) “Usually defined as a controversial and antagonistic verbal attack, Rand (2008) recasts the polemic as a genre that enables agency, not through the text or speaker, but rather through the form’s effect, affect, and subsequent action” —Glasby defines queer as polemical, but not (or at least less so) gay

(p.4) Quote from James S. Baumlin suggesting postmodernism might be defined as “an age after ethos, since the very notion of the sovereign individual now falls under question”

(p.7) Quote from Butler and Athanasiou: “So much depends on how we understand the ‘I’ who crafts herself, since it will not be a fully agentic subject who initiates that crafting. It will be an ‘I’ who is already crafted, but also who is compelled to craft against her crafted condition”

(p.7) Quote from Alexander and Rhodes- “Now that the homosexual is a much more visible subject, one who is, at times, allowed to speak, then what kind of ethos is that queer allowed?”

(p.7) “It is important to acknowledge if the desire of the rhetor is to appeal to a LGBTQ or non-LGBTQ audience, for what is valued is different, and whether or not the rhetor desires and/or values legitimization” If queerness instead of gayness includes being opposed to (or at least not valuing legitimization), where does that put would-be queer academics? I kinda have to value (some level of) legitimization for the sake of my career, and anything that’s “queer” that I write that is lauded by the academy….must not be that queer after all, under these definitions. It’s such a paradox, of activism (presumably toward a goal, presumably of liberation) and being anti-institutions, anti-normative. If you achieve your liberatory goal, won’t it then be “normal”/accepted to be/do whatever?

I can’t help but think of the line in The Incredibles: “If everyone is Super….then no one will be.” That’s totally true for queerness insofar as it is defined as anti-normative. Or rather, if we successfully dismantle norms, then that anti-normativity becomes normal/accepted. If we abolish gender/the gender binary, then gender stops mattering, which is paradoxical when you want to also honor how gender matters quite a lot to many trans people. If I succeed in my bisexual activist goals, I’ll organize my own identity out of existence/mattering. Which isn’t BAD, but it presents some potential conflicts and contradictions, especially for “queerness” as anti-normative, especially for approaches rooted in identity politics, like Queer Nation-esque approaches.

(p.9-10) “A gay ethos might be concerned with a non-LGBTQ audience (this looking for approval and to establish themselves as “normal’ or ‘safe’ or ‘the same’) whereas a queer ethos cares not about appearing or being normal, but rather about being engaged in critically analyzing the importance of normality and investigating and dismantling the notion of the normative”

(p.10) “What [might it] mean to consciously and intentionally occupy identities in bad faith” - the second half of the sentence refers to “bottom of the barrel identities [that] Warner advocates for in The Trouble with Normal. I’m not super sure what Glasby means here, since what comes to mind for me is people like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, who falsely occupied POC identities. I don’t think that’s what Glasby means, but I’m also not sure what she DOES mean. Maybe it means refusing to accept the negative elements of a queer identity, refusal to accept that you are bad/ought to feel shame? Like, disidentifying, kind of?

(p.11) “Fryer (2010) advocates for the emergence of ‘a new field',’ one that centers on the ethics of identity, arguing, ‘the motivating question is not primarily the traditional question of ethics, what ought we to do? Instead, the motivating question becomes, in this unethical world, this world of hatred and injustice, who ought we to be?’”

(p.12) Quote from Butler “For whom is outness a historically available and affordable option. Is there an unmarked class character to the demand for universal ‘outness’?” This question also makes me wonder about the various factors that lead some people to be out despite pressing class-related reasons not to be (like Leslie Feinberg), while others choose the pain of staying closeted as the better option for their own survival. A later quote on the same page from Halperin— “To come out is precisely to expose oneself to a different set of dangers and constraints.” You’re always choosing which of two situations seems more manageable, even though both have difficulties.

(p.13) Glasby puts her definition in a slightly different way: “A queer ethos is less concerned with non-queer/LGBTQ audiences, focusing more on other queer/LGBTQ individuals, so the rhetor’s moves, appeals, strategies, and content are not concerned with establishing credibility despite/in spite of being queer/LGBTQ.”

The phrase “despite/in spite of being queer/LGBTQ” hurts me, because I feel that tension about multiple aspects of my identity. I wrote about the tension and double-vision I feel when I read scholarship on anxiety/depression rhetorics as someone diagnosed with both of these, as a conference paper I was supposed to present at RSA this past May (cancelled due to COVID). I never want to write and try to establish credibility IN SPITE OF some aspect of myself, but there are so many pressures to do so, both material (I professionally need people to take me seriously and respect my scholarship) and subconscious (some of it is probably just learned discomfort/deeply ingrained notions of scientific “objectivity”).

In thinking through all of this, I have both the blessing and the curse of thinking about it as both a researcher looking to study queer rhetoric and composition, but that research itself is also a piece of queer rhetoric and queer composition. Sometimes, I find myself reading these books and articles more in terms of how to shape my own writing, rather than how to shape my research design/goals. Which then makes those lines all the more blurry. I’ve been waiting to re-read Will Banks’ “Written Through the Body,” since it’s the only thing on my list I’ve read before and I want to come back to it with the most distance/new perspective possible. But from my memory, that article blurs those lines an awful lot as well. He’s writing about teaching composition from a queer working class embodiment, but he’s also writing about writing as a queer working class writer himself. The article performs the very moves it’s discussing. Which is good! I think more articles should do that. But all the queer writing moves in the world aren’t worth much if I don’t have something to write about, so I need to be careful to read each article with both things in mind.

Sources Marked

Fryer (2010)

Wallace and Alexander (2009)

Alexander and Rhodes (2011, 2012)

Rand (2014)

Glasby (2014)

"Queer Rhetoric in Situ" by Jean Bessette

This article provided me with some much-needed definitions (and anti-definitions) of queer, rhetoric, and queer rhetoric. It’s easy to lose specificity around terms when they’re used so often with an unspoken understanding of what they mean, that you stop clarifying what you mean.

Queer: Anti-normative. You can be gay but not queer, and (depending on who you ask) queer but not gay.

Rhetoric: Bessette cites a definition from Condit: “reading texts ‘as they are situated in history is what constitutes rhetorical criticism as a distinct discipline in the humanities” (152). This seems untrue to me, as plenty of literary scholars (in particular History of the Book scholars) consider historical context. But a later definition also cited from Condit rings much more true to me: “we judge a ‘rhetorical artifact not solely on the action within a text but also on how that rhetoric acts upon the context within which it creates meaning’” (157). “Where are the boundaries between literary study and rhetorical study?” has been especially perplexing to me now that I’m reading 30ish queer memoirs for a rhetoric concentration. But an eye toward reception, and multiple receptions, and social impacts, and uptake by the audience, makes sense to me as a possible (although very arguable) distinction.

Queer Rhetoric: Can still be concerned with what is normative and anti-normative, what upholds cisnormativity and heteronormativity and what resists these pressures, but the queer rhetorician ought to stop to consider the multiple contexts that could make the same act or object or discourse event mean very different things, to different people in the same time, or to people in different times.

So then, if one of my primary interests in these memoirs is when they talk about how the author made meaning from other queer (or not queer!) texts, then really the memoir is functioning as evidence of another text’s rhetorical impact, rather than the memoir being the real object of study, maybe.

This also relates to one of my motivating questions for the history of sexuality list, especially the “theories of the history of sexuality” subsection. Historicism, new historicism, unhistoricism, etc. debates are on the surface level about the question of, “How should the history of sexuality be done?” but are kinda also about, “What work regarding the history of sexuality is worth doing and why?” I wouldn’t argue that any particular kind of work in this area is NOT worth doing, but each kind of research certainly has different purposes and impacts. Identifying historical figures and characters as LGBTQ+ is usually ahistorical, but so many LGBTQ+ people today feel super validated and excited by discovering people from centuries ago who seem like them. I think historicizing sexual behavior and discourses and representations is interesting and important, and I definitely want people to be doing that work, but for myself, I’m more interested in how later people made use of different histories of sexuality or sexual histories of historical people, in making meaning for their own lives.