Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel, by Lisa L. Moore

This was not the book about 18th century lesbians that I had meant to read. I have a second book on the same topic, also with the word Intimate in the title, on my shelf. But, I accidentally read this one instead, and so have swapped the two on my list. I think this one goes better with the other “Sapphic History” book on my list anyway, which covers a similar time frame but in American literature.

I was pleasantly surprised by how materialist this book is, especially for a book that focuses on analyzing literature. Moore’s argument is essentially that during the 1700s, with colonization, revolution, the slave trade, and increasing industrialization going on (shift from feudalism to capitalism in its later stages), the bourgeoise had a lot of contradictions and anxieties they wanted to shore up/ignore/resolve. Gender, sexuality, and race are three ideological axes with which bourgeoise hegemony sustains itself, so figuring out the role of the Ideal Bourgeoise Woman (and therefore defining Others against her) was important. Making Others works as a justification for division and oppression. The novel, being a bourgeoise genre that rose up during this time, was one way that these ideologies were created/distributed/circulated.

— Most of the following is me summarizing Moore’s arguments

The first chapter after the introduction looks at Millennium Hall. In this book, the women who are living separately from men are depicted as non-sexual, productive, and morally superior. By controlling the working class women around them, they make these women better. Yet even though they live independently from men, Moore argues that the sphere of influence of these women is still the domestic, private sphere. Engels, D’Emilio, and others have talked about how the shift to capitalism also meant a separating of the work/life spheres, since people had to go Out to work in other places, rather than working other people’s land (which they also lived on) or running cottage industries. There is also much talk of “slavery,” but always as a metaphor, comparing women’s subjugation to men to slavery, even though the actual slave trade was very much happening in a big way at the same time. This lets “slavery” be discussed while ignoring actual slavery.

The next chapter is about Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which is kind of the opposite— the women’s relationships to each other are automatically eroticized because of their line of work, and one character teaches Fanny (the main character) how to have sex (with her) to “prepare her” for sex with men. This book also claims homosexuality as native to England, instead of casting it as a foreign French/Italian practice. And the problem with it is framed as inconsistency/difficulty identifying who is homosexual (lack of defining physical characteristics) rather than something inherent to it. Moore also notes how while the plot is ostensibly promoting heterosexuality and women’s desire for men (it is, after all, written to arouse men), there’s times when Fanny seems to be desiring her fellow sex workers and they seem to be more concerned with her enjoyment than their clients’. In the end, she argues that the eroticism throughout the rest of the book is assembled at the end of the novel in service of national bourgeoise English identity. This series of ideological moves lets England incorporate women’s desire/sexual excess into itself while preserving what’s more important: power and money. It’s kind of rewriting the definitions of what it means to be English so that Englishness can continue being (viewing itself as) superior given shifting material conditions.

The next chapter is about Belinda, a novel from 1801. But Moore begins first by discussing a real life court case about Jane Cummings, a student who accused her teachers of having lesbian sex, and discussing Anne Lister, who dressed masculinely and did masculine things and was educated and loved women, but disdained those same traits in other women. Lister can get away with it because she’s nobility. She still wants other women (her love interests) to be appropriately feminine. In the court case, it became an issue of who was more likely to come up with the idea of lesbian sex: the student, or the teachers? Either the student had the idea and made it up, or the teachers had the idea and did it. The court ended up deciding in the teachers’ favor, but for a racist reason: because Jane was half-Indian, they decided that made it more likely that she would know about (and therefore lie about) deviant things. Similar moves to both of these real world examples can be found in the book. The only person who explicitly accuses one character of being inappropriately masculine is Juba, an African servant (slave? Wikipedia says servant) on the plantation. The book treats this as sensical because only someone who is also deviant (Black) would have the correct knowledge to know another deviant. At the same time, that character’s gender nonconformity reinforces the value of “appropriate” female relationships. (Like Lister is still feeding bourgeoise femininity even though she herself does not practice it.)

The last chapter (besides the conclusion) is about Emma, and Moore argues that this book does the same kinds of identity category maintenance but in a much subtler way, because it interiorizes and psychologizes what is external and material in the other books. Emma, then, is an example of how the process that was at work over the course of the decades of the other novels manifested as the 19th century got on its way.

So, how sapphism was treated in novels during this time (and it was treated/present!) was important, but not really for itself— it was important for how its ideological management enabled other capitalist and imperialist processes.

Getting Personal, by Nancy K. Miller

This book is primarily a collection of revised versions of talks/other presentations Nancy gave at various events in the 70s and 80s, along with her reflections on the “occasion-ness” of each piece of writing (since each one was written for a specific context at a specific event) and the nature of personal writing. She talks about “narrative criticism” and what counts as “personal” or “too personal,” and whether this changes based on the gender of the author and/or reader. She spends a lot of time puzzling over what it means to speak “as a ___” (as a feminist, as a woman, as a feminist critic, as a feminist professor, etc.), about her positionality (a word I think she doesn’t like) as a feminist teacher and what that means for how she conducts herself in the classroom.

I forget if it was in another essay I read by her or at a presentation of hers that I saw (maybe a panel?), but I have a vague memory of Nancy talking about her anxieties as a teacher when it comes to talking about illness and teaching a class on illness. I took her graduate seminar on illness, and I knew beforehand, because someone told me, that she is ill herself. But she didn’t talk about her own experiences with illness basically at all in class, even as we read tons of very personal accounts of illness, and even though she does write very personally in some of her work (she had a new memoir come out the year I took the class, for example). The passage I wrote out in the Quotes list below about being unsure how to teach a feminist painting class reminded me a lot of our class. She says there she felt a lot of anxiety about how to present the content and the language with which to talk about it, and her solution was to project the paintings on the wall and talk about them collectively. We did the same thing with panels from the graphic memoirs and photos from the photo memoirs, about illness. And it was great! I remember feeling such appreciation, both on a personal and critical level (what’s the difference?). It was satisfying just to dig in together to get a deeper appreciation for all the layers of the books we read. But with her not speaking personally about material that we knew as students was very personal to her (which is totally her right!), there was a perhaps inevitable effect of distancing. Which I don’t want to say was either bad or good, but it did happen. Which feels particularly odd (distancing) given that she writes so candidly about her illness on her website, which is public. But I can’t say I don’t empathize. I’m very hesitant to explicitly come out to my students verbally, but in my comments to them on their writing, especially if they’ve come out to me in that writing, I think I’m very giving of myself in my own writing back to them. I always try to say to them, disguised as suggestions, “Me too.”

Identifying yourself “as a” ___ is important, but also limiting. “The Epistemology of Ethnography,” which I read last night, talks about this too. Even if you’re organically part of the group you’re studying (one author the article analyzes is a Surimese woman writing about Surimese women, another is a gay person from the rural South writing about gay people in the rural South), your role as a participant-observer always shapes the context you’re trying to participate in and observe. Both roles are compromised by each other. The article also talks about how “as a __” statements have become a genre feature of ethnography, but only in particular sections, bracketing off the positionality of the researcher to only some aspects of the conversation. The research you are able to do, the data you are able to collect, how you interpret and present it, and how it is received, are all affected by how you situate yourself and how you are situated. Data/theory as a binary is both “real” but also constantly undermined by itself. The data you’re able to get is determined by your approach, and what you’re able to theorize from the data is determined by the data you have.

Quotes I Marked

p.xii- “Perhaps what seems most ‘feminist’ to me about the uses of both metaphor and narrative criticism is the self-consciousness these modes of analysis tend to display about their own processes of theorization; a self-consciousness that points to the fictional strategies inherent in all theory.”

p.xiii- quote from Adrienne Rich about stopping saying “the body” (abstract) and always saying “my body”

p.xiii - “one’s own body can constitute an internal limit on discursive irresponsibility, a brake on rhetorical spinning. The autobiographical act— however self-fictional, can like the detail of one’s (aging) body, produce this sense of limit as well: the resistance particularity offers to the grandiosity of abstraction that inhabits what I’ve been calling the crisis of representativity. (Perhaps we also need a moratorium on reciting the litany of RaceClassGender and instead a rush into doing positive things with those words.)” (in the notes, she adds to this that radical language is easy, radical action is hard)

p.xiv- contradictions between autobiography as individualistic and inward, vs. the political (collective) demands of feminism

p.5- “The case for personal writing entails the reclaiming of theory: turning theory back on itself….Do you have to turn your back on theory in order to speak with a non-academic voice?…Being embarrassed. And then being angry about feeling embarrassed. When you write in a personal voice ‘in a professional context’ about what is embarrassing, who is embarrassed? The writer or the reader?”

p.8- idea of “critical plausibility,” discussion of how while mentions of the personal, the writer sitting at her desk looking out her window, are pleasurable to many readers, because they make them feel close with the writer as another real human being, including some personal things (like going to the bathroom) might harm our ethos, our critical plausibility.

p.8- block quote from Barthes- “To read is to desire the work, to want to be the work…To go from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work but to desire one’s own language. But by that very process it is to send the work back to the desire to write from which it arose. And so discourse circulates around the book: reading, writing.”

p.9- idea of a “biographized rhetorical personality", “what gives a reader and a critic pleasure in reading other writers and critics? What produces a kinship of desire to write?”

p.10- idea that “Have you read this? I love it! Here’s why!” and other embodied reactions like excitement are considered critically inappropriate. But why?

p.12- Use of “we” (used to create identification between writer and reader) can be either engaging or alienating to a reader. “It feels good, for a little while, until it starts to feel coercive, until ‘we’ are subscribing to things that ‘I’ don’t believe. There is no specific reference to the author’s self, no attempt to specify himself” (this is a quote from another source)

p.14-15- discussion of how feminist academics (that is, white mainstream academic feminists) still write like everybody else with a PhD for publications. But they did more experimental, political, personal writing in “occasional writing” (for conferences, for newsletters, etc.)

p.16- Nancy says the personal and the positional are different.

p.17- rhetorical paradox of writing a personal reply to another person, but with the intention of publication. You’re writing for that person, but also, for an abstract generalized audience

p.19- “What’s personal? Who decides?…Is it personal only if it’s embarrassing? If not, is it just a rhetorical ploy? Do I wind up saying that ‘bad’ politics aren’t personal? Or am I saying, if I like it, it’s personal, it caresses me; otherwise, it’s just positional, it aggresses me.” She says this about how she feels an essay by MacLean, while discussing himself, isn’t really personal, but positional— one instantiation of the position of white man professor. But then she isn’t quite sure where she makes that distinction and whether it is fair.

p.24- quote from Mary Ann Caws- “Personal criticism as I intend it has to do with a willing, knowledgeable, outspoken involvement on the part of the critic with the subject matter, and an invitation extended to the potential reader to participate in this interweaving and construction of the ongoing conversation this criticism can be, even as it remains a text.” “somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is a belief that the writing is worth the risk. In this sense, by turning its authorial voice into a spectacle, personal writing theorizes the stakes of its own performance: a personal materialism.”

p.25- “At its worst, the autobiographical act in criticism can seem to belong to a scene of rhizomatic, networked, privileged selves who get to call each other (and themselves) by their first names in print…But at its best, I would argue, the personal in these texts is at odds with the hierarchies of the positional—working more like a relay between positions to create critical fluency. Constituted finally in a social performance, these autobiographical acts may produce a new repertory for an enlivening cultural criticism.” Maybe this is why I’ve reacted so negatively to some of the memoirs I’ve read and positively to some of the others, and I haven’t been able to figure out the distinguishing factor. There’s a difference in vibe between that “referring to each other by first name in print” (an in group— several memoirs I read include the authors mentioning authors of other memoirs I read, they have the privilege of getting published writing about each other, in a semi self-contained group) and people who write about themselves but feel like they’re giving something to the reader— like Lillian Faderman, whose book I finished last night.

p.34- distinction between feminist critique (unpacking gender shit in texts by men) and feminist criticism (writing about texts by women)

p.35- burden of the professional feminist critic is it’s not enough to just say if you like the work and why. You have to justify the choice of that work in the first place but also “for political and intellectual reasons be prepared to say something about the writing qua women’s writing”

p.35-36- Nancy gives a metaphor to illustrate the difference between feminist critique and feminist criticism. Doing feminist critique of a man’s text is like an artichoke, and you peel it layer by layer to reveal “the overdetermined discovery of the core” (you set out to find sexism, you find some sexism). Feminist criticism is more like an “onion”- layers with no clear core/center/purpose (that is pre-determined by the project. you have to find it.)

p.36- cites a term from Honor Moore— “the male approval desire filter (M-A-D).” It’s the pressure to do criticism in the traditional way, to receive approval and professional accolades. Nancy envisions resisting the M-A-D as taking down the divider in her bedroom between her bed/TV area and her desk/work area— letting the personal and the critical come together. But for now, she keeps it up.

p.40-41- story about how when she was preparing to teach a class about 18th century French paintings and fiction, she was faced with “two pedagogic anxieties”: how to present the material and how to articulate the findings. She says the second was the bigger anxiety since she was trying to teach a feminist class to people who might not already be feminist. Her solution was to use the same technique that she used in the Memoir class I took with her— displaying images using a projector, and doing group-criticism of what the images are saying and what we can find there. She calls this “the most persuasive tool I have ever used in teaching” because it brought the bodies under discussion directly into the classroom, and “identified all of us in the room as gendered and sexual beings—whether we wanted to be identified that way or not.”

p.48- note about the uncommon genre of writing about the personal (“real”) reasons you got into a field (like Stacey Waite talks about). Nancy instead decides to write about why she got out of French as a field— and the answer is, the anxiety about making mistakes, particularly about the genders of words, was horrible.

p.125-127- discussion of the false assumption that all women readers will identify with women’s autobiographies along the lines of shared womanhood, a universal Female experience. Nancy says that she later discovered that most of the books she chose for an essay on French women’s autobiography all featured a strong demarcation between the authors’ identities as writers and their relationship with motherhood (as a reality or as a possibility). She wonders how, if her scholarship during that time was really happening out of a need to find a path for herself as a woman without motherhood, what is she looking for now (at the time of the writing of this essay) as she engages with contemporary American texts?

p.128-129- talking about teaching at CUNY instead of at Columbia, being an upper middle class teacher of working class students, and how to deal with class as a teacher and reader. The students in the particular class she’s discussing hated a Room of One’s Own, but loved a different essay about being a Woolf scholar, and loved Jane Eyre.

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)

Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, by Marjorie Garber

Angelides described this book as talking about something like “the history of instances of bisexuality” rather than bisexuality as a concept (his aim), and now that I’ve read it, I understand what he means. Each chapter takes on a different theme relating to bisexuals, bisexuality, and discourse around it, and examines different examples of that theme and how they function in their respective times/places.

For example, some subjects include bisexual celebrities, bisexual vampires, bisexual bohemians, different sexologists’ takes on bisexuality, bisexuality in movies, jealousy, love triangles, and threesomes. This book was a little slow going for me because I didn’t want to skim! Even the sections on stuff I already know about (like the discussion of Portrait of a Marriage, which I read a few months ago), I wanted to read them!

Things I Marked

p.21 - Susie Bright, an example of someone self-identifying as a “bisexual lesbian” (people on Twitter argue about whether or not this is a valid thing, so I want to refer back to this 30-year old example next time I see it come up). This is also on p.58- bi-dyke, bi-lesbian, lesbian-identified bisexual, bi-affectional, lesbian, and formally-lesbian bisexual. Also “hasbians” (but this is negative and not a self-identity)

p.22- things “being read bisexually” — people criticized a Calvin Klein campaign because it was making men uncomfortable by making them attracted to the models, and they blamed the company for making an upsetting ad

p.25 - description of man taken for bisexual (noting this so I can later compare it to modern ways people write themselves/read others as bisexual)

p.28 - themes- nonmonogamy/inability to commit, maturity/immaturity, trendiness, hetero/passing privilege

p.30 - list of kinds of bisexuality- Defense Bisexuality, Latin Bisexuality, Ritual Bisexuality, Married Bisexuality, Secondary Homosexuality, True Bisexuality, Experimental Bisexuality, Technical Bisexuality

p.45 - premise of “L.U.G.” - lesbian until graduation

p.57- note about bisexuals and puns (I can’t believe this was already a thing in the 90s hahaha)

p.67- student responses to “Would coming out as bisexual be easy or hard?”

p.81- some discussion around a Gay Pride March taking “bisexual” out of the march’s name, which had been added the year before. One woman asked “Why can’t you just be gay for a day?”

p.84- a political argument for dismissing bisexuals as victims of the patriarchy/betrayers

p.88- June Jordan comparing being bisexual to being biracial

p.93-99- discussion of AIDS as one big factor in stigma against bi men and of lesbian stigma against bisexual women (they touch sperm and so might infect them), and vampires as metaphor for bisexuals as deadly AIDS spreaders

p.105- list of some ways bisexual behavior is described as anything but that. “invisibility is produced as a startling by-product of omnipresence”

p.252- suggestion that “we have made virtually no progress since [1948] in understanding bisexuality’s place in sexual and cultural life”

p.253-254- some data from the Kinsey report

p.323— on “rewriting, encoding, and editing the ‘classics’ in order that they should tell an orderly tale, which is to say, most often a tale with a heterosexual ending”

p.323- idea that a book can have a bisexual plot without having a bisexual character

p.327- “the three of us can’t live together”

p.342- having a crush on a teacher is transference, like a therapist, and a crush can be a crush without being a “crush” (i.e., you can be drawn to a teacher via transference without actually wanting to be romantically or sexually involved with them)

p.390- how in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it’s framed as Brick must be either straight or gay, there is some lie happening, he cannot possibly both love his wife and his best friend

Things To Look Up

The International Directory of Bisexual Groups

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers- Lillian Faderman

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)

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, Edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane

You could republish this book as “Chicken Soup for the Non-binary Soul” and it would fit in just fine. I mean this in the sense that it’s a collection of many very short memoir-essays arranged by theme and primarily (it seems) with the intended audience of people in the same group as the authors (in this case, nonbinary people). Just like all of the Chicken Soup books are.

Some of the stories are sad. Some are about different experiences of nonbinary pain. Some are about pain not directly related to gender (one takes place during an actual coup). But some are not sad. Many of them are full of joy and peace (one is about someone who literally studies the path of Zen). One— and only one— is by someone who is not non-binary— a mother of an agender teenager, speaking from her perspective about her child’s gender journey and the choices she made as a parent along the way. I enjoyed reading that one, but I’m not really sure why it was in this book. It seemed to have a totally different audience than the rest of the pieces/didn’t seem to belong. I hope the mom wrote it with her child’s permission. There’s also a lot of loneliness in the pages— I think specifically of one person in their 50s who said they’ve never met another nonbinary person older than 25, and don’t know any other amab nonbinary people at all.

Several of the writers say they didn’t discover the term genderqueer until the 1990s on online message boards, and one of the editors of the book (who is one of many people who independently invented the term around the same time) said that while they first used it about themselves around that time, they didn’t see the word catch on until much later. So, it makes sense that most genderqueer people are young— the term was just beginning to be used when we were born.

Another word I think of in relation to this book is “gender diversity.” I think it’s easy for this word to feel empty for cis people, for us to take it as really just meaning “men and women and binary trans people and nonbinary people” — 4 categories. But this collection really illustrates just how much diversity there can be within “non-binary.” Particularly, as several of the writers note, the word “non-binary” says nothing about what people are, only what they are not.

Some people use he/him or she/her. Some people use they/them or ze/hir. Some people use gender neutral pronouns but still like terms like Mommy and Daddy and being “one of the girls” or “one of the boys.” Some people do not. One person, whose story is unlike any other that I’ve heard before, says he still feels male internally even though he has been happily living as a woman for several years. He says this is because he transitioned later in life, after decades of being a father and husband. He also says that unlike the trans women he knows, he’s never felt like he IS a woman on the inside, only that he WISHES he could be a woman. So he describes himself as a male who lives as a woman, even though such a description would be incredibly offensive to other people.

I also learned about the many different ways that nonbinary people may and do choose to transition. I knew already that some nonbinary people take low doses of HRT to achieve some changes but not others. But there’s so many (basically infinite) combinations of things people may want to do. Some people change their names, some don’t. Some people use new pronouns, some don’t. Some people get top surgery or bottom surgery (and this is already misleading, because there are lots of DIFFERENT top surgeries and bottom surgeries people can get!). Some people use hormones, or low doses, or only sometimes, or they do for awhile and then don’t, or not at all. One author has a friend who they say describes herself as “female to male to female” transgender, not because she regretted transitioning, but because her gender identity changed over time. Like, I knew that there can be as many genders as there are people in the world. But this collection really helped me understand exactly what that means, or can mean.

Separately, all of the mentions of discovering terms (like genderqueer) and learning about gender diversity online through forums and YouTube videos made me think about the importance of Tumblr to the LGBTQ+ community during the first part of the 2010s. This was the place to go to learn about identity and history. And there was a lot of misinformation too. Now, millennials on Twitter often bemoan the Gen Zers on the platform who are rehashing the same fights and “discourse” (I put this in quotes because in this context it means something slightly different than in the academic sense) on Twitter as we did on Tumblr 10 years ago. Now, people don’t need to go to the library to get information about their identities, but getting information is a lot messier, even if the information is more plentiful.

Tumblr is also, maybe not the origin but certainly the place of proliferation, of “microlabels” that people make fun of a lot. Like “poly pangender biromantic demiheterosexual” (I’m only kind of exaggerating). When I was younger, I was dismissive of people who identified themselves like this. Now, I think it’s a bit more complicated. First, people can identify however they want. Second, just like Sedgwick says in Epistemology of the Closet, defining sexuality primarily around hetero/homo doesn’t have to be the way to do it. She lists many other dimensions of sexuality that we could use for our social categorizing. So, words like these are attempts at describing/categorizing those other things, and they seem silly because as a society we aren’t used to that. On the other hand, LGBT and queer identities are sociopolitical categories that have been in part imposed upon us (by the medical establishment, for example) but are also embraced for political and community purposes. One of the reasons “queer” caught on was because it’s one umbrella term (and anti-normative)— the more people you organize under one banner, the more power you have. So, microlabels diffuse political power instead of collect it. And laws/prejudices/discrimination don’t happen along those hyperspecific lines. They happen along the lines of “this category, that category, or can’t categorize.” But then again, it also seems good for young people to have such a specific awareness of their desires and feelings, even if those feelings change over time. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the book.

But it does remind me of one author who said they don’t consider themselves binary but also don’t consider themselves non-binary, and they reject the term non-binary because to them it connotes upper middle class, white, urban, afab people who present masculine. And that is not them, and they don’t want to be lumped in with them. So, even while “non-binary” is meant to have lots of space as a term, there’s certainly very specific images that come to mind for it, and non-binary folks who don’t match those expectations are unseen/more frequently misgendered (although all nonbinary folks get misgendered a lot).

A History of Bisexuality by Steven Angelides

Angelides set out to write a genealogy (in the Foucauldian sense) of bisexuality as a concept. He ultimately argues that the hetero/homo binary (theorized by Sedgwick and others) is impossible without bisexuality. Or rather, any binary is defined against the idea that there might be a both/neither. Binaries do the work of eliminating overlap between categories.

Foucault describes his process like this: “I start with a problem in the terms in which it is currently posed and attempt to establish its genealogy; genealogy means that I conduct the analysis starting from the present situation.” (Angelides p. 11, Foucault p. 238)

In the introduction, he talks about how the historiographical method of distinguishing between homosexual acts and homosexual identities just displaces the question of bisexuality. What is a bisexual act? Being intimate with people of multiple genders simultaneously? But a multi-person sexual interaction could have many different configurations of acts, and any given person in the interaction may not do “bisexual acts” during that time. And how can we know when someone’s relationships with people of multiple genders are due to multiplicities of desire, vs. due to other reasons? (Socio-economic necessity or expectations, for example.) We can’t, unless someone’s letters, diaries, etc. provide evidence one way or the other. So, Chris Cagle describes the common approach as “monosexual gay historiography.”

Quotes/Passages I’ve Marked

p.8 — Lisa Duggan suggested that queer theory concepts applied to LG history texts might be fruitful, but mostly that hasn’t happened. Queer theory and LG history have “strained relations".” Angelides suggests part of this issue is “an implicit and unproductive distinction between social constructionism and deconstruction.” He says this distinction is silly bc both methods rely on historicity/historical analysis of shifting categories, so they definitely are not in opposition to each other.

p.10 “In this book I would like to initiate a productive exchange between the two fields of queer theory and gay/lesbian history. What I am endeavoring to work toward is what I will call a form of deconstructive history; or more specifically in this case, a queer deconstructive history….In order to do this I want to situate bisexuality not as marginal to discourses of sexuality…but as central to any understanding of the historical construction of binary categories of sexuality.”

p.10 “The more tangible objective of this study, then, is to employ bisexuality as a heuristic device for rereading and rethinking some of the critical moments in the history, theory and politics of sexuality.”

p.12 “Garber’s Vice Versa is less a study of history than an examination of particular instances of bisexuality as they have appeared in a wide range of historical texts.”

p.13— criticism of the Merl Storr anthology (Bisexuality: A Critical Reader), saying that while it does “attempt to document the historical production of thought in relation to bisexuality in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries…these chapters are not historicized analyses of such work”

p.17— argues bisexuality has been cast (in theorizations) as always in the past or the future, never existing in the present. “My argument is that the elision of bisexuality from the present tense has been one of the primary discursive strategies employed in an effort to avoid a collapse of sexual boundaries— a crisis of sexual identity”

p.26— Paraphrasing Irigaray as saying that women are symbolically constructed as “object of the phallic economy,” meaning that “she is but the mirror through which masculine identity is constructed and reproduced.” Masculinity is often defined as “not being girly.” Angelides also says Irigaray is saying that gender itself (as a category/concept( is phallagocentric, I think because the whole result of dividing people into genders is to shore up masculine identity and therefore masculine power. I’m not TOTALLY sure I’m understanding this correctly though. Also talks about the shift in Western thought from “all humans are one thing, women are just inverted forms of men” to “there are two fundamentally different kinds of humans. but male is the best kind.”

p.73— Paraphrasing Freud, childhood sexuality is “a universal prerequisite to the development of gender identification. Normality…is but a convoluted and precarious achievement.” Freud also helped break apart “normal sexuality” from “procreation” by showing how sexual development matters in other ways too. Also quotes from a letter in which Freud tells a woman not to worry that her son is gay because while it’s unusual, there’s nothing wrong or unnatural about it. He also refused to treat homosexuals in therapy unless they showed symptoms of normal things you would go to psychoanalysis for. Being gay was not a cause in and of itself for him.

p.119- Some stats from Kinsey— 18% of white American men had had both homosexual and heterosexual experiences in the past 3 years, and 46% had had them at some point in their lives.

p.122— Melbourne chapter of American Radicalesbians (the group from Tales from the Lavender Menace) also agreed that everyone’s sexuality starts the same in its base nature, but we choose to express it differently. The sexuality of a gay person and of a straight person are not fundamentally different.

p.125— 1972, Melbourne Gay Liberation Publications Group publishes article reflecting current anxieties about too many straights in the Gay Lib movement. Steve Gavin, writing in a NY gay lib magazine, wrote about how straights and bisexuals (a word he puts in scare quotes) should stay out of the movement and should not be included in consciousness raising groups. Angelides says the issue of consciousness raising groups was how the “gay lib for gays only” idea really became a big issue.

p.146— Foucault viewed gay liberation movements as not liberating at all, but a new form of falling prey to the “compulsion to discourse” about sex. Homosexual identity was created by history, so embracing that identity is just following along those same lines of history. quote from Foucault- “It is not enough to liberate sexuality. We also have to liberate ourselves…from the very notion of sexuality.” He saw the movement as useful in terms of getting more civil rights, but that was about it. Also said the phrase “let us liberate our sexuality” doesn’t really have a useful meaning.

p.154 and 157— Critiques of Foucault

p.163- Purpose for the chapter is, “lots of people have noticed bisexual erasure, but nobody’s really made a convincing argument for WHY that has occurred”

p.174 and p.183— Critiques of Sedgwick

p.176— “Bisexuality…is unthinkable outside of binary logic” (in this case the binary is homo/hetero, not male/female)

p.183- treating sexuality and gender as two separate things might work for some people, but for some people, they are very much tied up with each other! “I would argue also that this kind of exclusionary mapping of sexuality serves to sustain the analytical distance Sedgwick has installed between feminism and gay/lesbian/queer studies. That is, bisexuality (and indeed transgenderism) is the pawn that is forced out in an act of methodological and disciplinary secessionism”

p.186— In relation to the above, we have to always remember that “sexuality” as a category first emerged as a disorder of gender. So, while we may often think about them as separate now, they are two divergences of the same initial thing.

p.196 “This deconstructive genealogy is intended, to quote Foucault, ‘not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.’”

p.197- “Any notion of identity is inherently repressive of internal differences”

Sources I’ve Marked

“A Gay Manifesto” by Carl Wittman and “Gay is Good” by Martha Shelley both suggest that everyone is naturally bisexual and people divide themselves into straight and gay for sociopolitical reasons.

Fuss Inside/Out

Du Plessis “Blatantly Bisexual, Or Unthinking Queer Theory”

p.248- note 39, a list of works critiquing queer theory

Lesbian and Bisexual Identities: Constructing Communities, Constructing Selves, by Kristin G. Esterberg

Similar to Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, this is a sociological study from the 1990s on lesbian and bisexual women. In this case, all of the women are from the same college town community. Some of them are affiliated with the university, and some of them are not. Esterberg conducted initial interviews with them over a period of a couple years, and then came back a few years later to do follow-ups and see what (if anything) had changed.

The chapters cover topics such as, how do the women identify themselves? How did they come to identify this way? How have their identities and lives changed over time? How do race and class interact with their sexual identities? What does it mean to them to “be a lesbian” or “act lesbian”? What is the lesbian community like? What are the kinds of lesbians or lesbian social groups in their community? What internal rules or expectations are there? And how do the bisexual women in the community fit in or not fit in?

Quotes and Passages I Marked

Quote from Stuart Hall at the beginning of Chapter 2 about how identity is always “a cover story” and identity can be better conceptualized as the ongoing process of identification since it’s always in progress

p.32— Esterberg says the women interviewed referred to “4 different dimensions of lesbian identity” — 1) having sex with women, 2) having emotional relationships with women (does this mean romantic? Idk), 3) making their relationships with women central to their lives (including friendships), and 4) political dimension. One respondent (p.34) says she sees this political dimension as including that as a lesbian, people don’t expect her to act like other women, so she has more freedom from those standards. She says her brother in law treats her like her own person, instead of just As A Woman

p.41 “Coming-out stories…tell women how to interpret and recast their own past experiences to bring them in line with their current identities” — Esterberg also notes that the negative side of this is, her experiences didn’t match up with the coming out narratives she was familiar with, so she was very confused and worried she wasn’t actually a lesbian since her childhood experiences didn’t line up

p.45 “Other women felt that contact with other lesbians— both in person and through reading— was important in their coming out.” Yeah it definitely never occurred to me that I might like girls until I learned through others that it was POSSIBLE to like girls. Some people come to that on their own, even if they feel like they must be the only ones. I never did.

p.47— question of “can you choose to be a lesbian?” answer from one person: “Maybe.” Some respondents thought definitely yes, some thought definitely no, others thought some people can and some people can’t, etc.

p.49— quote from a respondent— “I think that all women are lesbians. I think it has to do with intimacy. In our society, I think to be with a man is to choose abuse. That’s negating one’s self, because they have power over us in this society. If that did not exist, then I think people would have freedom to choose.” There’s a lot to unpack here lol

p.52- quote from another respondent- “I’ve gotten to do so many of the things that I couldn’t even imagine wanting to do [if I were heterosexual], ‘cause there was no room to begin to imagine doing them.” I think this quote is important— some stuff imposed on us by heteronormativity doesn’t even have much directly to do with sexuality at all. But it still restricts those possibilities, because you’re so busy doing The Straight Things You’re Supposed To Do that it can’t occur to you to do those other things.

p.53— citation of Celia Kitzinger who identifies 5 kinds of lesbian identities— radical feminist, transitional, “special person,” individualistic, and lesbianism as path to personal fulfillment.

p.80— chapter on “performing lesbian identity”

p.88— section on gaydar and “what a lesbian looks like”

p.158— section on “the elusiveness of bisexual community”

Sources Marked

Rust 1992a and 1992b and 1993, Weinberg, Williams, Pryor 1994, Garber 1995, Klein 1993 — all listed as sources on bisexuality

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

"Sorted" by Jackson Bird

I bought this book after reading this article about JK Rowling’s public descent into transphobia and bourgeois detachment. Jackson Bird is a trans man for whom Harry Potter has played a big role in both his life and career (he used to work full time for the charity Harry Potter Alliance). He was interviewed for the article and expressed his sadness about JKR’s transphobia and how his relationship to the series has changed since all of that became public knowledge. A memoir by a trans person about his gender and also Harry Potter? I had to get it. Both personally and for my orals reading, since Harry Potter plays a HUGE role in literacy development among millennials, and many people have stories of how their relationship with HP relates to their relationship with their own gender and/or sexuality.

Bird says this book grew from a pamphlet he put together when he was coming out to friends and family to inform and educate them, without having to have the same difficult conversation over and over again. People liked it and asked for more. His YouTube channel, which originally didn’t have a particular content focus, eventually became centered around trans education. At one point in the book, he says he saw a lot of YouTube content designed for other trans people (like people documenting their transitions), but not a lot designed to inform cis people about trans issues. So, he wanted to contribute to this area.

I think this book does the same thing— naturally, given the situation of its origins. The book reads like it’s intended primarily for cis people and/or trans people who are just beginning to learn about trans-related topics. I can’t help but compare it to Sissy, since Jacob Tobia specifically says in their book that they DON’T want it to be a book for cis people. They want to do a bare minimum of educating on the basics in their book, and mostly just tell their story. In contrast, Bird has many pullboxes throughout the book with deeper explanations of topics and referrals to other educational resources.

It was surprising to me that Bird felt there was very little trans content designed for cis people, since I feel like most criticism of trans media is saying that too much of it is meant for cis people’s consumption and we ought to have more trans media created with a trans audience in mind. But maybe that just wasn’t the case on YouTube in the 2010s?

Sorted and Sissy are similar in other ways, namely that both authors come from similar backgrounds— Southern middle class suburbs, conservative religious communities, film and theatre experience both as children and professionally. While Tobia is from my same hometown, Bird spent the early 2010s living basically my dream life— being 5 years older than me, he was able to actually go to the Harry Potter conferences and actually make friends with his favorite YouTubers, who were also my favorite YouTubers, whereas I was still a young teen and couldn’t do those things. So, these memoirs also feel similar to me just based on my personal connections with the authors.

One thing I think Bird does really well in Sorted is showing how dysphoria can grow over time as your awareness of your gender changes. Not everyone knows from when they are very young that they are trans, but Bird’s story makes it very clear how even if you make it through 20 years of your life without realizing it, that doesn’t make your dysphoria any less painful. In high school, Bird was able to dress and act as a feminine woman regularly, without being particularly conscious of any psychic pain this caused him. As he grew more and more in touch with his gender and identity as a trans man, this became progressively more impossible. Once he started wearing a binder, not wearing one felt all the more horrible, even though he’d never liked his chest to begin with. At one point, he was able to stomach wearing a dress for formal events and just “flip the switch” in his brain for a few hours as long as he had time to emotionally recover afterwards, but then one year, the switch disappeared entirely.

In Trans: A Memoir, Juliet Jacques does describe how originally she didn’t think she would be interested in hormone therapy or gender affirmation surgery, even after she knew she was trans, but later changed her mind about each one. However, she doensn’t go into as much detail about her internal process of how/why her feelings evolved over time as Bird does.

That’s not to say I think any of these three books are better or worse than the others, but they do different things. Both Sissy and Trans: A Memoir say they want to stay away from stereotypical features of “the trans memoir” (like a focus on physical changes and ending with The Surgery), but Trans: A Memoir both begins and nearly ends with Jacques’s surgery (there’s a bit more about other things at the end), and Sorted definitely does build to Bird’s top surgery as the climax, even though he also discusses how no surgery ever just Gets Rid of All Of Your Difficulties, and he still has body image issues— but, as he happily realizes, body image issues common to many men, both trans and cis! However, I don’t know how much of this is a structural choice and how much is just….I’m pretty sure he got his top surgery fairly recently, so between the time it took to write the book and then have it go through the publishing process (it came out in September 2019), I imagine just not that much time has passed in order for more stuff for him to write about in the book to happen.

I do wish, and this isn’t his fault at all, that the timing had worked out that he could have written about JKR’s transphobia and how that impacted his relationship with the series and fandom (if he wanted to talk about it in the book, that is). He talks about it in the interview for the article linked to above, but it’s just a couple quotes and, having gotten to know him through 300 pages of his writerly voice, I’d like to read his thoughts on it!

"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.

Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth, Chapters 3 and 4 (Adult Supervision and Teacher Teacher)

Mark grounds each these chapters, as he did the previous ones, in one of his own memories, and circling these memories are his findings from various queer archives and books. “Adult Supervision” addresses literacy acts by organizations like PFLAG (designed to educate parents of LGBTQ+ children), and “Teacher Teacher” takes a look at teacher training curricula from the early to mid 20th century. I used the example from Chapter 4 in my own class, as an example of how a difficult personal memory can lead you to bigger inquiry questions and research projects.

I’m increasingly feeling that queer literacies is the direction I need to go in for framing my dissertation work. As I reflect, I’m not totally sure what I thought the phrase included, but in reading this book, I’m finding that it means a lot of the things I’m interested in, but phrased in different terms than I’m used to thinking about them in.

For example, as I’ve been reading my memoir list, I’m particularly drawn to the sections in which the memoirists describe the various books/movies/etc. that played important roles in their lives/identity formation. The memoirs themselves are queer literacy acts, that some queer people chose to do, when they could have chosen to do other things.

I also think there’s something here related to multiple intelligences— you can have emotional literacy, musical literacy, etc. So all the different forms of queer communication/rhetoric I’m interested in could also be part of literacy, even if it’s not always reading and writing as we traditionally think of it. Just as material rhetoric, visual rhetoric, embodied rhetoric, etc. are all domains of rhetoric not encompassed by Aristotle et. al’s formulations of the term.

Passages I Marked

(p.63-64) “I want to share the stories of my experience and collect those of others so as to figure out how my humble ‘I’ doesn’t represent Queer existence, but can acknowledge a messy collective ‘we’ (albeit a contextualized and tentative, constantly shifting one) that bridges personal/collective historical accounts with other non-preclusive I’s and We’s” — I marked this because it’s another super clear methodological statement, “I am doing this, in this way, for these reasons”

(p.64) “Many Queers use their first-person experience as a point of departure for their scholarship and critical ventures. As Tim Miller has written in ‘Queer Person First,’ ‘As I write this story, it becomes a completely necessary act of looking at the past as a means of negotiating a more empowered and grounded relationship in an uncertain future”

The rest of page 64 is also a larger discussion about methodology.

(p.66-67) “If homophobia becomes more stealth and elusive, queer advocates must continue to hone their counterliteracy abilities to read homophobia’s nuances, research its (re)sources and strategies, and find the words to combat it.” In the next sentence he refers to rhetoric as literacy’s domestic partner, which I enjoy.

(I also marked several passages of quotations from teacher training books that had some of the most egregiously explicit eugenics stuff)

(p.119) Reminder that the Gay Academic Union’s first conference happened at John Jay!

(p.121) Example of Columbia Student Homophile League doing all of the “right” things (paperwork, official letters, etc.), all literacy acts, and being met with silence

Sources to Look Up

• “Queer Person First” by Tim Miller

• Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences by Sarah Schulman

• Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence by Cheryl Glenn

• “Shirts Versus Skins” by Christopher DiRaddo- memoir

• Textual Orientation by Harriet Malinowitz

• “Outtakes” by Clifford Chase (memoir)

• American Eugenics by Nancy Ordover

• Gai Saber (journal published by the Gay Academic Union)

• Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman

Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth, Chapter 2 (Archival Tracks and Traces: Evidence of Queer Literacies)

This chapter tells story after archival story of queer people from the mid 20th century heading to the library or to the encyclopedia or secretively to the gay magazine to try to find answers. Jonathan Ned Katz describes some of the texts he found as the books/people who “warped me.” Below I’ve listed a quote from him that Mark quoted— “Am I alone, and where are all the rest?” The archive available during this time provided relieving answers (you’re not alone) but also warping answers (you’re not alone, but there’s something wrong with you).

Another person Mark quotes, upon seeing an older man in the library reading the same books he’s been reading, asks the man, “Are you a homosexual?” He tried to find the rest, and make a real connection to a real other person. Maybe they could have sifted through the information and found truer truths together. But instead, the man reprimanded him for asking a “brazen” question.

This chapter painted for me a picture — and a painful one— of the information situation facing young queers in the mid to late 20th century. It was informative to me in this way. But I feel more pushed to add to the story, and use my own experiences to reflect on what is still the same and what is different and why. In a quote I pulled out in the quotes section below, Mark says a younger person will need to do the project on Queer identity crises in cyberspace. So while this blog post isn’t that project, I do feel called upon to write my own little piece

I grew up in one of the most liberal (and suburban) areas of a conservative state, North Carolina. My parents are from rural Western New York. My church was not the kind of church that preached about the evils of homosexuality— it just didn’t mention it at all (until our state tried to pass a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman). My parents later told me that they never talked about gayness with me because they didn’t know any gay people and figured it just wasn’t relevant to bring up. Quite a lot of queer literacy efforts had been made in the 35 years between Mark’s adolescence and mine, but I wasn’t aware of any of it. I didn’t know being gay was a thing that you could be, so I didn’t know to look for it within myself. When I caught myself looking at girls in the way I imagined boys look at girls, I figured it was because pervasive sexism makes the male gaze the norm and I had just internalized that into myself even though it wasn’t real. (I doubt I’d heard the phrase “the male gaze” at 9 years old, but I certainly understood it.)

I first remember hearing the word “gay” in 7th grade, during an after school play rehearsal. JK Rowling had just revealed that she’d always thought of Dumbledore as gay. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew people thought it was a bad thing, so I was fiercely denying it. Dumbledore couldn’t be something bad. An 8th grade girl asked me, “Do you even know what that means?” I admitted I didn’t. She said, “It’s when boys like boys.” Oh. Well, that didn’t seem bad to me. Somehow, I still never put it together that if boys could like boys, then girls could like girls. I didn’t know that was possible until the following summer, when Katy Perry released “I Kissed a Girl.”

Both this announcement by JKR and the song by Perry have been the subject of much criticism from the LGBTQ+ community in the years since then. But both are close to my heart. Some people have said that JKR should have let Dumbledore’s sexuality go un-commented-upon rather than try to earn social justice points after the fact without ever writing it into the book. And lots of people have said the song is biphobic, by playing into the stereotype of women being interested in women falsely, just for male attention at parties. But I’m glad. Because the same girl I’d had male gaze thoughts about in 4th grade, I watched dancing to that song in 8th grade, and I wondered again, before setting those thoughts aside again. Both of these texts, I place in a similar category to the books Mark and the people he quotes found in the library. Confusing, and problematic, but absolutely important.

After that, it was a lot of books. Mostly nonfiction about neopaganism where the subjects also happened to be queer, and LGBTQ+ YA books (many of the same ones drawn on Kobabe’s shelves in Gender Queer). Tumblr was important. The Harry Potter fandom was important— the song “In Which Draco and Harry Secretly Want to Make Out” in particular, which in retrospect is still lowkey homophobic. I don’t remember so much going on forums to read about gay stuff specifically, although I certainly sought out a lot of my general sex ed that way. More and more of my friends came out during high school (and even more in college and after), but I don’t remember talking with them about queerness that much. Mostly I remember watching them, and listening, and we all wrote an awful lot on Tumblr and read each other’s blogs. The queer girls I was closest to were mostly either just as inexperienced with dating as I was, or much Braver and More Experienced than me (not just sexually and romantically), and therefore far too intimidating.

“Pansexual” was becoming increasingly common right when I was entering The Discourse, as were other identity words like demisexual. Singular they and neopronouns were not actually new, but they were newly known more widely. I’m sure there were queer kids who found their community not on Tumblr, but I’m really not sure where else people went.

I got initiated into a lot of the debates around lesbian/bisexual identity and history and terms in this way, via Tumblr, rather than through academic texts, like people pre-internet did. And a lot of that was warped from the original arguments and ideas , or at least presented sans context, and I’ve often felt warped and confused just like my queer literary ancestors. (Am I actually straight and faking it for attention? Am I actually a lesbian and just in denial? Will most lesbians hate me and resent my presence in queer women spaces? What are you if you’re not butch and not femme? Which one am I? Am I something else? If I’m not a lesbian, is it rude/inappropriate for me to use those words at all? What about dyke? Can I be a dyke? How is femme different from feminine? How is a femme lesbian’s gender different from a straight feminine woman’s gender?) Those feelings are part of what led me to focusing on bisexuality as a research interest, and are part of why I’m still totally uncertain about the nuances of what “femme” means.

Answering some of these questions and trying to figure out where I stand in all the Arguments has been one of the motivating impulses for studying LGBTQ+ history. I’m a researcher, and I need to not diminish that, but I’m also just another Queer literate like the ones Mark describes in this chapter, reading book after book trying to figure out my place in the world.

Quotes I’ve Marked

(p.31) “for GLBTQ students, who navigate through patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia, literacy often takes on special roles for their survival”

(p.31) “‘restorative literacy’ acts can reverse the damaging effects of heteronormative discourses and homophobic textual violence”

(p.34) “Most gays have at some point gone to books in an effort to understand about being gay or to get some help in living as gay. In my time, what we found was strange to us (they’re writing about me but I’m not like that!) and cruelly clinical (there’s nothing about love) and always bad (being this way seems grim and hopeless)” — this quote is actually a block quote from Gays in Library Land

(p.36) “Even if Powell finds anonymous comfort in the Queer cybersphere, this techno-literate Queerness comes with its own hazards of homophobic trolling and cyberbullying so I don’t want to deny that contemporary Queer young people don’t still have Queer identity crises with which they grapple. (One of them will have to do that research and write it.)” Challenge accepted.

(p.40) — a Mr. Y writes to ONE magazine asking if anyone knows why “All Queen’s Day” is a thing and why wearing green on that day is a sign you’re queer— wants to know where this notion came from!

(p.47) “In my investigation, the archive acts as the sponsor that has permitted me to find Queer literate ancestors whose literacy labors improved cultural conditions so that I and all Queer people could lead more fulfilling lives. I argue that this Queer literate work must continue when heteronormative rhetorics continuously and unendingly seep into our lives.”

(p.50) “The first question is, ‘Am I alone?’ and the second, ‘Where are all the rest?’” — quoting from Jonathan Ned Katz

Sources I’ve Marked

• “Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner” by Ellen Louise Hart

• Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy, by Eric Darnell Pritchard

• “‘Like signposts on the road’: The Function of Literacy in Constructing Black Queer Ancestors” also by Eric Darnell Pritchard

• “Gays in Library Land,” Barbara Gittings

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe

Genderqueer is a comic/graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir). E is 5ish years older than me, and we had a lot of the same interests growing up. I feel our differences primarily in how that age gap shaped our different relationships to the same things (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fandoms, John Green, Tumblr and fanfiction, queer YA). On a personal level, while I do identify as a cis woman, I certainly still related to some of eir experiences with and feelings about feminine pressures, and eir relationship with eir sister reminded me strongly enough of my relationship with my own sister that I texted her about it while reading and loaned her the book immediately after.

Aside from the many personal connections I felt with Kobabe while reading, I mainly thought about this book in relation to Queer Literacies (McBeth), which I was reading at the same time. Kobabe falls in love with reading through Harry Potter, tracks and documents eir reading extensively through eir teen years, and includes multiple panels that show the titles of some of the many books e read during eir formative years. Most of the books are not directly commented on in the text or story of the memoir, or mentioned in general terms— reading YA, reading fantasy, seeking queer representation.

As a “Queer literate” myself, to use Mark’s phrase, I recognized many of these titles, and many of them are close to my own heart for the same reasons. Several titles by David Levithan appear, and many by Tamora Pierce (although only The Song of the Lioness series in general is mentioned by name in the text). Tamora Pierce has since said on Twitter that if she had been aware of genderqueerness when writing the books, she would have written Alanna as non-binary.

Kobabe’s participation in different fandom communities (and how that relates to eir own gender and sexual identities) is also an example of queer literacy. Eir Queer-Straight-Alliance in middle school rapidly turns into a Lord of the Rings fanclub, with an emphasis on slash fics (fanfiction centered around characters having gay romances and/or sexual relationships with each other). While I wasn’t interested in fanfiction myself growing up, I cannot overstate how big of a deal slash fic was for many queer teens and preteens during the ‘aughts and the first part of the 2010s. Reading and writing slashfic gave young people opportunities to explore their sexualities in a safe, contained way before they became physically involved with others in real life, while bonding with others around a shared interest, and developing writing skills that they will also use in other areas of their lives. While slash fic and shipping more generally is definitely still a thing, I think its popularity has waned as LGBTQ+ representation in YA novels has increased.

Another thought on queer literacies and Kobabe’s book— I was delightfully surprised to notice how e re-drew (I think) a particular panel from Fun Home (maybe e got Bechdel’s permission to reprint instead?) as a visual citation of the comic. How else can you accurately quote from a visual medium? The visuals matter! References to Fun Home and other books are accompanied by page numbers drawn into the background of the panels. It’s such a wonderful and creative form of citation, in my opinion.

After finishing the book, I messaged Kobabe on Instagram to say thank you and let em know I was reading eir book for my PhD exams. In eir reply, e said one thing e kept in mind while writing/drawing was how the book might be used in schools in the future, especially cite-ability.