Feminist Rhetorical Resilience

7. No One Wants to Go There: Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom

7 n o o n e wa n t s to g o t h e R e Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg This chapter began with a regional conference paper presentation a few years ago.1 The theme of the conference was Teaching Writing in Diverse Settings. Our panel was the only one on the agenda that examined gender and sexual diversity yet there were few people in the audience. Could this lack of interest be indicative of a more systemic problem? Our sense is that regardless of the commitment of our field to address issues of diversity, heterosexism is so institutionalized that the issues of gendered and sexual diversity generate interest in very limited ways. Scholars within various disciplines note that efforts to publish and conduct research about gender and sexuality are often thwarted. For example, Suzanne de Castell and Mary Bryson recount the ways their research and publishing efforts were stymied within the academy because they were working with material that addressed and theorized gender and sexuality in ways that threatened heteronormative thinking and assumptions. As they note, “A willful cloak of heavy silence continues to shroud sexualities as important sites for both the production and reification of differences both in the textually constructed subjects of educational discourses and in the actual embodied subjects who inhabit the contexts of institutional schooling” (97). Harriet Malinowitz claims that “leaving sexual identity out of the classroom is not an accident; it is an expression of institutionalized homophobia, enacted in classrooms not randomly but systematically, with legal and religious precedents to bolster it and intimidate both teachers and students” (23). This scholarship points to discursive and material causes and effects of heterosexism, which sustain ideas about gender normativity and the belief in a static identity. We suggest that, 212 FEM I N I ST RH ETORI CA L RESI LI EN C E despite composition’s commitment to egalitarian methods of evaluation , pedagogical application, and theory, gender and sexuality are still not really being discussed in ways that offer a sustained challenge to gender(ed), classed, and sexual status quos. Queer theories and pedagogical practices take gendered and sexual identity categories as starting points. Queer theorists analyze language in order to decenter heteronormative notions and illustrate how various discourses—legal, academic, cultural—sustain those norms. Their task is particularly difficult because language itself is steeped in heteronormative assumptions. As Ruth Goldman notes, “Queer theory, despite attempts to avoid normativity, harbors a normative discourse around race, sexuality and class” (179). Perhaps some of Goldman’s “normative discourse” is inherent in language, which both enables us to know and simultaneously limits what we can know. As Wittgenstein asserts, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (qtd. in Fogelin 93). As noted by queer theorists, feminists, and rhetoricians, deconstructing language and its material and discursive effects is an ongoing challenge. Only those most obviously invested in deconstructing heteronormative and ableistic notions tend to engage readily with queer theory, and as Goldman notes, engagement is limited because the concepts currently available to us come wrapped in language. A number of publications have started the difficult work of articulating the many connections between queer theory and pedagogical practices.2 Still, we believe there is a lot of work to be done to challenge assumptions about when to include queer texts in a course and how to approach such texts so they can be used to productively investigate the limits of academic language, social norms, and the way people think about sexual diversity. Like the institution within which writing courses are conducted, teachers and scholars in composition may resist queer theory and the use of queer texts in composition classrooms as much as some of the students we teach. Some composition scholars believe queer theory and queer texts are too esoteric for use in the writing classroom, but we hear their unwillingness as resistance. Because interacting with a queer text can destabilize students’ understanding of what is “real” or “normal,” it has the potential to challenge the institutional structure in ways that can disrupt teachers’ and students’ sense of a seemingly safe classroom space. We argue that using some of the tenets of queer theory within a writing classroom can enable students and teachers to acknowledge and reflect No One Wants to Go There 213 on material space and institutional values as...