“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.