Queer Communication Pedagogy

Ahmet Atay, Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351658744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses queer issues and current events from a communication perspective to articulate a queer communication pedagogy. Through putting communication pedagogy and queer studies into dialogue, the book investigates how queer theory and critical communication pedagogy intersect in pedagogical spaces.

The chapters identify institutional and educational barriers, oppressions, and issues pertaining to queer lives in the context of higher education. Using a variety of critical methodological approaches (including dialogic methods, autoethnography, performative writing, and visual methods), each chapter theorizes a queer communication pedagogy, and offers a path toward and innovative ideas about materializing queer communication pedagogy as a disciplinary endeavor.

This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students in Communication Studies, Critical Communication Pedagogy, Intercultural Communication, Higher Education, Public Pedagogy, and Queer Studies, and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Part I
Theorizing Queer Communication Pedagogies

1 Queer Pedagogy

Story of a Course

Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins

“Sexual Identity and Communication” (now “Sexualities and Communication”) is a course conceived and first taught at San Francisco State University (SFSU) during the height of the AIDS crisis. It continues to be taught today during a new crisis: the Trump Presidency. This chapter is a duo memoir chronicling the teaching of the course, weaving together pedagogical, topical, and conceptual changes against the backdrop of relevant social and political issues. The editors of this anthology call for the development of a queer communication pedagogy that bridges the gap between queer communication studies and critical communication pedagogy. We outline the evolution of a single course spanning almost 30 years, interweaving current events, teaching strategies, and classroom moments to contribute to the construction of this bridge.

We organize our discussion into four time periods: 1989–1997—Origin of the Course: Sexualities and Communication in the Context of AIDS, 1998–2002—Contesting Binaries and Problematizing Identities, 2003–2008—Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: Developing a Queerer Undergraduate Reader, and 2009–2017—Moving Forward and Backward, reflecting shifts in our teaching in interrelationship with scholarship and the lives of our students and ourselves. In the body of the essay, Mercilee’s portions appear in regular font and Karen’s in italics.

We hope this chronicle inspires Communication professors in departments that have yet to do so to develop and offer similar courses tackling this subject, and to incorporate these topics into classes they already offer; we have found our experiences teaching about sexualities and communication enriching in rewards and challenges.

1989–1997
Origin of the Course: Sexualities and Communication in the Context of the AIDS Crisis

Fall, 1989

Two undergraduate students in Speech Communication approached me in the Fall of 1989. They were helping to design a lesbian, gay, bisexual studies minor related to the Sexuality Studies Program. They wanted me to design two courses in Communication for the Minor: one dealing with the rhetoric of gay liberation and lesbian feminism, and one dealing with interpersonal relationships. I said I didn’t think I had time for two courses but I would like to try one about interpersonal communication, and I thought our department would support it. They were very excited. I was, too, since I was teaching an undergraduate course in gender and communication, then entitled “Sex Roles and Communication” that I helped design, as well as the graduate seminar in gender and communication.

The prospect of designing a new course related to sexual identity and communication, however, was somewhat daunting. I quickly found out there was not a lot of research literature in Speech Communication on the topic since James Chesebro’s edited volume, Gayspeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication, was published in 1981. A bibliography of journal articles written by NCA and ICA members compiled by Fred Corey, Ralph Smith, and Thomas Nakayama (that is no longer online) indicated that only 17 articles had appeared related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues between 1973 and 1990. There were several anthologies at that time about coming out as gay, lesbian, and bisexual but I didn’t think those sources alone would make a good case for a course in communication. I spoke to Dr. John DeCecco, head of the sexuality studies program, about the course. He directed me to their small library, and I combed through copies of the Journal of Homosexuality looking for articles and ideas.

As part of the course proposal, we had to come up with a title. The students and I decided against using the words “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual,” as they were too cumbersome and not inclusive enough; additional letters were being added, such as “T” for “transgender.” Students might not want to come out to their parents via their transcript, so the title should be more neutral sounding. Thus, the course title became “Sexual Identity and Communication.”

The original 1989 course proposal describes the course:

Focus on emergence of sexual identity in social interaction. Explores how interpersonal and small group communication shape the sexual self through private discourse—labeling, defining, self-disclosing—and public dialogue—community organizing and advocacy.

The Course Objectives were as follows:

• 1 To explore interpersonal communication among lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals.
• 2 To analyze the impact of homophobia on identity in social interaction.
• 3 To study the development of the sexual self through communication processes, such as self-disclosure or “coming out.”
• 4 To examine the impact of gender stereotypes on the identities and communication of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals.
• 5 To place the study of interpersonal communication in a historical and subcultural context in which we can broaden and enrich our models of social interaction.

The proposal bibliography included a variety of academic and literary sources that addressed sexual identities, such as anthologies by James Chesebro, Estelle Freedman, and Fritz Klein and Timothy Wolf. I also included culturally diverse perspectives, in particular writings from working-class lesbian feminists of color, such as Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools…,” Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back, and Judy Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue. These activist/artists/scholars explored the problematics of living in overlapping and often conflicting worlds related to their race, class, gender, and sexuality.

I remember thinking it was crucial to make sure the class had enough students to be offered, so I proposed the course to fulfill requirements in both the Speech Communication major and the General Education program. One or more sections of the course has been taught almost every semester since by myself and two other faculty members: Dr. Karen Lovaas, starting in 1999, and Dr. Gust Yep, beginning in 2000. Dr. Yep also designed a graduate seminar in Queer Theory and Communication in Spring 2001.

Meanwhile, the students who got me into this had graduated and I was left alone to teach the first class. I had no idea what it might be like. I wanted the class to be rigorous and well respected to dispel the assumption that since the minor had been designed by students, the norm would be “I’m gay, give me an A.” I wanted to explore these topics from a scholarly as well as an experiential perspective and encourage my students to reflect on the world they were helping to create and that was in turn having so much impact on us all. In 1989, the AIDS epidemic manifest itself in my life as more gay male friends of mine were becoming HIV positive, and more were dying of AIDS. When we designed the course, however, these circumstances were not reflected in our sample readings, perhaps because we did not have academic sources at that time.

Spring 1991 and Fall 1992

Sexual Identity and Communication was taught for the first time in Spring 1991. By that time, the AIDS epidemic was taking a terrible toll in San Francisco and faculty were doing our best to give the students in our department who were affected the best educational experience we could. My first two teaching assistants were David Warrior, a Native American student who received a B.A. from our department and entered our M.A. program with full-blown AIDS, and Michael Underhill, an outstanding undergraduate student from sociology. We put together a reader for the course, which I updated each semester. David encouraged me to publish our reader, and we gave it a try without success.¹ Thanks to Karen, much later, we published our anthology. (Lovaas & Jenkins, 2007).

I used the course description in the proposal but I had altered the major headings and changed some readings. The three major sections focused on Language, Relationships, and Community. I emphasized the role of language reflecting my background in gender and communication and the significance of naming and forms of address for LGB people, both as ways we were targeted and also ways to make social change. I used essays by Lillian Faderman and Ann Fox to counterbalance Richard Troiden’s stage model for sexual identity development, dealt with comparisons of gay and lesbian couples’ communication in relationships, and gave attention to historical perspectives on gay liberation and lesbian/feminist movements and where to go from here.

I adapted the Expectation Inventory I had used in “Sex Roles and Communication” to include sexual identity and asked students to fill out the inventory early on as a basis for discussion. The inventory had two basic questions: (1) What prescriptions or expectations are placed upon you concerning gender and sexual identity from parents, church, media, school, or spouse/lover/family/friends? (2) How has each of these expectations affected your communication? There was a blank space after each subcategory in question (1) for the respondent to write in her or his response as well as space to respond to question (2). Students generally found it easier to come up with expectations than to see, at first, how these expectations may have affected how they communicated with others or themselves. Genders and sexual identities often intersected in these discussions as the expectations based on gender were often very different for women and men but heterosexuality was assumed for both (see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality”).

My readers for these semesters reveal a continuing effort to bring in rich cultural resources, including excerpts from Carmen De Monteflores’ novel, Singing Softly/Cantando Bajito, Icard’s article on “Black Gay Men and Conflicting Social Identities,” and Carrier’s essay on “Gay Liberation and Coming Out in Mexico.” Thus, although identity politics was seen as primarily a white domain, I included the perspectives of African American, Latina, and Asian American men and women who had to make difficult choices about the communities they could lay claim to based on race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual identity.

I created three major assignments: popular media analysis of LGB portrayals in the media; topical oral history of a member of a sexual identity community with which you do not identify; and social network analysis, which involved a mapping of a student’s social network in terms of gender and sexual identities of friends and acquaintances, and frequency and type of associations. The oral history assignment was particularly important to us, since it was a way of learning about the experiences of others and seeing if what we were reading was reflected in their lives.

After teaching that first time, I asked the students to give me feedback on what they had learned over the course of the semester. One student raised his hand and said he had learned there really were bisexuals. Since I was living proof of that, I wasn’t sure how much I had actually accomplished but I guess it was a start.

In April 1991, I premiered Dangerous Beauty: Love in the Age of Earthquakes and AIDS (1991). David and I performed an excerpt at the National Communication Association conference that fall. When he died a year later, he had already shown his excellence as a teacher, working with me for two semesters and teaching his own “Fundamentals of Oral Communication” class. David was one of many students and faculty members lost to us during those years.

Spring 1993

I applied my performance studies background more directly by selecting a play for my students to analyze and perform in class. I choose M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang which was inspired by the opera Madame Butterfly and the true story of a former French diplomat who fell in love with a Chinese opera singer, engaging in espionage for China and maintaining a 20-year relationship before discovering the singer, whom he assumed to be a woman, was a man. This play displays the intersection of race, imperialism, gender, sexual identities, and sexuality in the portrayal of a relationship between two people. It provided particularly rich material for exploration in class activities, discussions, and response papers. It predates more extensive considerations of transsexuality, transgenderism, and gender fluidity to come in subsequent years.

At the same time, we were studying the work of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to bring attention to the AIDS crisis and produce critical changes in medical research and treatment through performance activism. The addition of Kistenberg’s reading (1991) on ACT UP led to exploration of the power of performance in politics. I used the film Stop The Church (1991), documenting one of ACT UP’s most controversial actions, a die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in December 1989. Stop the Church was scheduled to be shown on the Public Broadcasting Service television channel, and then was cancelled, indicating how strongly important people objected to ACT UP’s tactics. I believe, however...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Queering Communication Pedagogy
• Part I Theorizing Queer Communication Pedagogies
• Part 2 Queering Classroom
• Index