Cluelessness and the Queer Classroom

Near the beginning of Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff (2003: 5) writes, "Professors have been trained to think of [their students'] cluelessness as an uninteresting negative condition, a lack or a blank space to be filled in by superior knowledge." His implication is that often arrogant and certainly consistently disengaged academics are, in fact, the truly clueless individuals in academe. Indeed, the book indicts many, if not all, of us in higher education today, who, Graff implies, still regularly shuffle into classrooms, lecture to students in inaccessible language, and then shuffle out with a few parting words of scorn for their ignorance. But how accurate is this diagnosis for those of us living, working, and teaching in the fields of identity politics and radical consciousness-raising? This symposium offers several responses, of course, but Graff's charge of rampant "obfuscation and exclusion" (11) misses the mark even for my graduate queer theory seminars, and it is wholly inapplicable to my undergraduate composition classes, as they too are informed by a queer theoretical perspective. Indeed, in this essay, I will use the term queer classroom just as others might refer to the "feminist classroom."

To be sure, not all of our pedagogies are supple, well honed, and consistently dynamic; however, I do think it is fair to say that we feminist, queer, materialist, and ethnic studies–based educators would never find our students' "cluelessness" (if we adopt Graff's term) an uninteresting condition; it is, rather, the condition of the general population and certainly the American electorate, a condition with which we engage passionately within the microcosm of the classroom. That shift in underlying premise (assuming a passionate interest instead of lack thereof as our starting point) allows us then to appreciate many of Graff's suggestions while also refining them for our own use. Graff extols conversation as an effective rhetorical tool in his book; this essay is my rejoinder to some of his ideas.

Indeed, I want first to acknowledge that Graff's book still does have much to tell us about the work that we identity political educators do—and could do better—in the classroom; many of his basic injunctions concerning the conversational dynamic that makes for good teaching and its most important payoff—the honing of students' analytical skills—are timely and relevant for all of us. Students do "write better when they have conversations to enter" (158), particularly when they "are in conversation with actual others" (163). I would even suggest that from a Graffian perspective, the queer classroom, in particular, has the potential to be an exciting conversational and analytical venue. There, as basic premises of the class, are the rejection of formulas and a fractious skepticism regarding any quick allusion to a homogenous norm enshrined as core values, as microsocial and macrosocial "goods." And unlike the classes that Graff lambastes, silence hardly reigns there. If Graff is accurate in saying that "Johnny can't argue" (155) in many of his classes, I know from experience that Johnny often has something provocative to say when he encounters a film or literary representation of two men kissing passionately or two women living a domestic and sexual life with no need for Johnny's presence or approval.

So, frankly, I rarely have had to worry about how I might strategize to get Johnny (or Susie, Graff's other fictional student) to speak out, or begin to converse, on queer-relevant topics—they almost always do so with little prompting—but I certainly am concerned with the content of what they say and the presuppositions underlying their assertions. In fact, far from being "uninterested" in my students' knee-jerk responses and ideological collusions, I have often been worried enough to lose quite a bit of sleep.

Certainly Graff makes a compelling case for focusing on skills of argumentation in order to teach students how to write, think, and academically empower themselves: "Johnny and Susie are often forceful arguers out of school, and they can be forceful arguers in school if the moves of the game are not kept from them" (172). Indeed, "forceful" appears to...