A Response to the Orlando Shooting: Queer Communication Pedagogy

Bang! I woke up and soon felt disbelief. Forty-nine lives were lost in one night because of the actions of a man who was able to easily access guns. It felt like a poor imitation of a Tarantino movie. None of it seemed real—but it was. The pain, the blood, and lifeless bodies of people whose lives are consistently marked, unmarked, judged; whose voices are silenced, altered, and cut short; and whose bodies are wounded, physically and figuratively; this time, their lives have been used to make a statement by a gunman. Bang!

Making sense of a mass shooting is an emotionally grueling process. It is difficult to watch news media coverage of shootings, to see pictures of grieving friends and family members, and to read victims’ stories. There is no logic behind such loss, which makes the process even harder to digest. For me, the Orlando shooting was perhaps the most difficult to comprehend to date. I felt as though I were in the middle of a puzzle, a postmodern collage, a patched-together story that was continuously unfolding. Several pieces uncomfortably came together to create an elusive postmodern collage: the event, the context surrounding it, the place, the victims, their stories, the media framing of the shooting, the story of the gun man, the role of religious radicalization, the gun control discourse, and the queer community itself. How could I make sense of all these interlocking facets of a tragedy that hits home, hard and real?

As a queer intercultural communication and critical/cultural studies scholar, my first reaction to the tragedy was gut-wrenching emotional and intellectual pain, like a series of painful and disturbing roller coaster rides. Then came the denial. When the pieces of the story came together and my emotional reaction settled (through the sadness and outrage never really went away), I tried to make sense of cultural and social hate towards queer and racially marked bodies and “othered” lives in our culture. As a scholar and educator, I could not stop but wondering about the role we play (or can play) in the classroom, in academia, and beyond, to change the discourse around the marginalization and oppression of GLBTQ lives, racial and ethnic minorities, mass shootings, and gun control laws. I turned to queer and critical pedagogy to guide me to answers, to peace of mind.

How can we educate our students and the general public about intersectionality, oppression, and “othered” and “marked” bodies and identities? As a culture, we are afraid of in-between experiences and human bodies that do not neatly fit into categories; explaining marginalization is not an easy task. The Orlando shooting victims were individuals whose bodies were marked and remarked in multiple ways; Latino/a, gay, bisexual, transgender, immigrant, or American. As our mainstream media outlets framed their experiences, they failed to focus on these complex identities. It is to be regretted that the victims were framed as victims who were at a nightclub catering to the Latino/a population. In this framing, their complex identities were erased or reduced to victimhood; their bodies normally would have been marked, but in this situation, they were not marked, their queer identities remaining hidden for the most part. As the story progressed, the bodies finally were marked as gay or queer. This unfolding exposed the layers of oppression in our mainstream culture as well as in the Latino/a and queer cultures. It also enabled us to see victims as complex human beings, whose identities are multifaceted and intersectional. As Yep reminds us, our identities are fluid and always changing.¹ Articulation of this idea was not easy for the mainstream media, which felt fearful of framing the event within the GLBTQ and immigration discourse. On the other hand, the gunman was presented as a radical Islamist terrorist, and his American identity was eliminated from the narrative. His identity also was reduced to a particular fragment: with his religious affiliation marked, his intersecting identities were disregarded.

In the mainstream media narrative, the initial picture constructed a conflict between three fragile minority groups: Muslims...