Queer Rhetorics, Queer Archives:
Reflections on an Uncommon Research Trajectory
As a researcher and scholar, my primary goal since starting my master’s program (1994) has been to explore the vexed spaces that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people, texts, and ideas have had and continue to occupy in academic and non-academic spaces. From my master’s thesis to my first classroom-based research publication (“Just Off the Mark,” Dialogue) to my dissertation (Performing the Not-Me) and subsequent publications as a tenure-stream faculty member, my work has centered on the development and exploration of Queer Rhetorics. I define queer rhetorics in my current book project, Queer Rhetorics: Toward a Politics of Queer Language, as rhetorical practices which emerge from the intimate, promiscuous, and embodied practices of queer peoples, and I note that these rhetorics tend to foreground the following values:
- Queer Rhetorics are oppositional/disruptive: while these range from ironic to deadly serious, queer rhetorical practices involve a political and ideological critique of normative structures that’s inherently disruptive, placing language learning in uniquely oppositional spaces for users who wish to embrace the subjectivities and identities related to queer life.
- Queer Rhetorics are deflective/refractive: because our language practices (continue to) emerge in spaces of conflict and contention, queer rhetorics require users to find discursive methods for deflecting the harmful language and socio-cultural practices of others or to alter and rewrite/re-speak those practices, to understand them through refracted lenses that repurpose the original articulations in supportive ways, or which repurpose those discourses in ways that enact cultural critique.
- Queer Rhetorics are intertextual and involve remix: in that queer people are not (usually) born into queer worlds/homes/cultures, the texts that shape their early lives eventually cease to speak to their identifactory needs, but continue to enact cultural relevance, so queer people often repurpose those texts in ways that both critique those texts and demonstrate queered readings of them.
- Queer Rhetorics are multivalent: central to most queer rhetorical practices is the placing together of different (and often contradictory) artifacts – texts, contexts, cultures – in ways that both critique the originary and evoke something new; these new phenomena achieve value in the sophistication of the valences, which hold and simultaneously threaten to break apart.
Because my work has been primarily theoretical and rhetorical, I have explored diverse archives in order to understand how Queer Rhetorics function in a host of different spaces from first-year composition and writing across the curriculum programs to various digital composing spaces and even into adolescent/young adult literatures (which are focused primarily on identity development). In my earliest research, I was focused on understanding bodies/embodiment and discovering what classical rhetorical notions of ethos might provide for helping us to rethink subjectivity and agency. These same questions took me into various digital spaces for research and inquiry as early networked spaces often promised/threatened the loss of the body and the “freedom” of ideas. Several of my articles and book chapters (e.g., “Queer-Jacketing,” “Digital Spaces,” “Sexualities, Technologies”) challenged this assumption, particularly as it applies to queer peoples, queer bodies, and queer ideas. Others, for various reasons, do not mention “queer” at all, but a careful reading demonstrates how much my (and at times my co-authors’) ideas have been shaped by queer rhetorics.
Another archive for inquiry and queer theory-building has been digital research related to my work as the director of both the Tar River Writing Project and the University Writing Program at East Carolina University. Multiple book chapters and conference presentations have emerged through grant-funded projects that occurred primarily or exclusively in digital spaces. For example, both “UnCommon Connections” (with Stephanie West-Puckett) and “Digital Partnerships” (with Terri Van Sickle) analyze research-based, networked projects involving young writers and teachers. In the former, we used the affordances of networked tools and queer rhetorical values to help a local high school recreate its senior project; in the latter, built out of queer leadership practices, we developed a grass-roots project for disrupting the neoliberal constraints so common in public educational practice over the last forty years. While these texts do not obviously foreground queer rhetorics or queer scholars, in large part because of assumptions we made as writers about the audiences and contexts for their publication, a careful reading of each shows how important queer rhetorical work has been on the creation of the projects and the analysis of the data.
Now that Cultural Rhetorics and Queer Rhetorics are being increasingly welcomed in the discipline, my current and forthcoming projects are working to make Queer Rhetorics a more visible and significant part of Writing Studies. When my colleagues and I began the book project that would become Reclaiming Accountability, my interest in the book grew out of my own attempts to queer/disrupt neoliberal projects in higher education which seek to control from above/outside. Central to the arguments of that book, which also “bubbles up” in the individual chapters and case studies, is that faculty can “reclaim” the concepts of accountability and assessment that are often forced on them from outside in order to develop discipline-based, grass-roots initiatives to support students and faculty. That same concern for queering assessment practices fuels one of my current monograph projects, Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment (with Nicole Caswell and Stephanie West-Puckett), which seeks to unpack the (hetero)normativizing gaze of much assessment discourse in order to reclaim classrooms and writings as spaces were assessment practices can operate through what we have termed queer validity inquiry (QVI). Likewise, the award-winning collection I co-edited with Matthew Cox and Caroline Dadas, Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects, explores the multiple and varied ways that Queer Rhetorics now informs both research epistemologies and methods of data collection that are beginning to influence the discipline of Writing Studies.
I began my research career in Queer Rhetorics as one of a handful of scholars working in this area of Writing Studies; I am excited to see how this area of the field is finally beginning to expand quite rapidly. As Queer Rhetorics comes of age, I am excited about my forthcoming projects and how these new initiatives can help move the field forward.