Queerly Centered

LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace

Travis Webster

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646421497
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Queerly Centered explores writing center administration and queer identity, showcasing LGBTQA labor undertaken but not previously acknowledged or documented in the field's research. Drawing from interviews with twenty queer writing center directors, Travis Webster examines the lived experiences of queer people leading writing centers, the promise and occasional peril of this work, and the disciplinary implications of such work for writing center administration, research, and praxis. Focused on directors' queer histories, administrative activisms, and on-the-job tensions, this study connects and departs from oft-referenced lenses, such as emotional and invisible labor, for understanding work in higher education. The first book-length project that exclusively bridges writing centers and LGBTQA studies, Queerly Centered is for researchers, administrators, educators, and practitioners of all orientations and backgrounds in writing center and writing program administration, rhetoric and composition, and higher education administration.
 

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.7330/9781646421497.c001

In the early-morning hours of June 12, 2016, a terrorist entered Orlando’s gay club, Pulse, on Latin Night and opened fire, murdering forty-nine people, injuring another fifty-three. Just before news of the shooting broke, I lay awake in a hotel room, energized, following an intensive week at that year’s International Writing Centers Association Summer Institute (IWCA SI). In bed, I scrolled social media, my blood pressure rising and my mouth drying, as the earliest Pulse coverage surfaced in my newsfeed. I didn’t sleep that night, haunted by young, queer people dying; most were people of color and from working-class backgrounds who went out just to dance in a supposed queer1 safe space. By morning, as I packed to leave IWCA SI, I saw coverage of Eddie Jamoldroy Justice. Trapped in a Pulse bathroom, he texted his mother, Mina Justice, for an hour, pleading for her help and saying his goodbyes (Park 2016). Within an hour, his life went from enjoying himself at a historic gay venue to barricading himself in a bathroom with other victims, awaiting the inevitable. He stuck with me. I thought of my earlier life of going out, dancing, drinking, and enjoying gay life. I thought of queer friends of my youth, our community of 1990s gay culture. With IWCA SI fresh on my mind, I thought of my tutors, many of whom reminded me of the victims—their faces, their backgrounds, their dreams in the making.

I returned to work Monday in the writing center feeling punched in the stomach, afraid, and angry. I didn’t want to talk about the events, didn’t yet know how to. John, a participant in this book, who is an Orlando writing center director,2 would later teach me much about articulating my complicated feelings about the Pulse murders. In his interview, he told me he was quite jarred by these events, which were local to his center. He struggled with the shooting but felt Pulse, an atrocity that impacted mostly queer, transgender, and working-class people of color, wasn’t his tragedy to mourn as a privileged white gay man—a sentiment I identified with and struggle with even now. His tutors, many of whom were queer people of color who knew or knew of Pulse victims, contested his personal tensions. Together, he and his tutors held a writing event in the center to help the university community cope with grief and fear, as this book’s later chapters showcase. The event was critical since students at his university looked to the writing center for solace, he says, arising naturally from the intimate, one-to-one nature of writing center work. He told me then that his queer identity made him more open to such work in the first place—a theme that surfaces often in this study.

Like John, I first struggled with talking about Pulse with my writing center staff—what to say, what to do, whether I was the person to do this work. At first I said nothing. I was stung, distracted, paralyzed by Eddie’s story and the stories of others fallen and injured. I was haunted by Texas’s then-recently passed conceal-carry legislation for state universities, which would go into effect by fall 2016, whereby people could legally bring guns, concealed, onto state university campuses. Late in the day, a few tutors, queer and nonqueer alike, dropped by my office seeking community and support, asking for guidance about their own fears concerning the murders. I listened and I consoled while scared and exhausted myself, even in my privileged position and body. A senior tutor—a straight white woman in her fifties—encouraged me to write the staff and the broader community, saying I was the person to do so, referring to my out gay director identity. She said the staff needed me to write. I did. To this day, it remains the most difficult professional correspondence I’ve ever produced.3

In my memo to my staff, I offered my office for Pulse conversations for anyone who needed support. In my office, I heard fear and anger. I heard anxiety about similar events happening at our university—a Hispanic-serving institution on the cusp of conceal-carry legislation in a conservative state. My tutors feared similar events could take place specifically at our center given our very “out” social justice mission and our staff made up of many queer people and queer people of color. This work was somewhere between profoundly rewarding and deeply uncomfortable. I felt equipped for (as participant John alludes to) and called to do this work, like many other queer writing center administrators, which is to say that as a queer writing center director, I wasn’t alone. I noticed through disciplinary venues, such as the WCenter Listserv and IWCA social media, that it was most often queer practitioners who labored to help others make sense of the tragedies through writing center outreach. I noticed and heard through private and public conversations that queer directors had complicated feelings about this work, understanding the labor as critically necessary and deeply embodied but emotionally trying and occasionally exhausting.

I start with this story because, from that memory alone, this project will always be hauntingly enmeshed in how I think about my work as a queer writing center director. This book is about queer people and queer work, but stories like these speak to us all in the discipline, regardless of our orientations. I say this not only because we are empathetic and compassionate about tragedies upon queer bodies but also because these events that impact bodies shape our work—as administrative leaders, as disciplinary professionals, and as people—in writing centers beyond the work of tutoring. Pulse led me to think about my queer body and my administration, especially the ways queer writing center labor intersects with national issues that impact people of difference. But Pulse also led me to inquire deeply, personally, into queer leadership in the writing center field, alongside but also far beyond the work of peer writing tutoring. My orientations to queer writing center research and attention to these events make this book what it is: a study of what queer writing center directors say about their administrative labor; a study about their labor’s implications for what we, in the writing center field, talk about when we talk about writing center administration; and a discussion of how, because it’s through a queer lens, this study aligns and departs from current conversations about writing center administrative labor.

Forward Directions

Following the Pulse murders and their impact on my center and tutors, I have sought to understand relationships between queer identities and administrative posts, especially the evoked work that takes place when queer people take on writing center directorships, as well as the disciplinary implications of that work alongside and beyond lore and hearsay. However, lore and hearsay are quite loud in the broader discipline: for example, in a conversation at a recent International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Conference, two other queer writing center directors and I spoke about our work lives. Just that week, I had helped a transgender tutor navigate their coming-out process to other tutors and had felt pushback during a staff meeting in which I noted writing centers could house social justice missions. My comments sparked head nods from both colleagues. One had just been asked to serve on a campus-climate committee to offer a queer voice. Another colleague, having recently left one administrative post for another, confided how being bullied at his previous institution—namely being called homophobic slurs—impacted his ability to lead his center and support his tutors; being bullied and responding to such treatment, he said, was its own kind of work. In wrapping up our conversation, we noted that queer-led writing centers signal distinct labor and commented, somewhat in jest, that many nonqueer writing center colleagues often disregard such claims as mere lore, countering and drowning queer stories with their own less relevant straight ones. At the same conference, I heard similar sentiments to my colleagues’ and mine echoed at the special interest group for LGBTQA writing center practitioners.

In this sense, Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace speaks to writing center administrative labor and queer identity at a key moment in Western culture’s history in which queer people face concurrent progression, regression, oppression, and violence (as articulated in the previous and next section), and whereby attention to and equity and access for minorities at work is critical. Such a book is kairotic given that writing center research seeks to examine the realities of its work and workers alongside a complicated queer local and global zeitgeist—one relatively absent from book-length writing center studies.

To echo Nicole Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson (2016) in The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, this study is “about a job” (3) but specifically examines what labor looks like when queer people direct writing centers, especially what local and disciplinary phenomena surface alongside queer writing center leadership. This framework informs Queerly Centered’s central research questions, grounded in interviews with twenty queer writing center directors: What makes up the labor and lived, on-the-job experiences of these writing center administrators? What might accounts and analyses of such queer labor teach writing center administrators about writing center work, especially as it interplays with capital, activism, and tension on the job?

Such questions give way to how these twenty queer writing center practitioners teach us, as a discipline, about administrative labor. Participants’ work showcases nuanced, complex labors not yet acknowledged, documented, or investigated formally in the writing center field’s research. Queer labor is linked (1) to participants’ queer backgrounds (what chapter 2 calls capital) that inform their capacities for writing center work in the first place; (2) to activism and its implications for participants’ sites, bodies, tutors, students, and the discipline; and (3) to site-based, interpersonal, and disciplinary tensions (which often take the form of bullying and mobbing) that surface in connection with participants’ queer bodies. While the study draws from the wisdom of queer laborers, this is, first and foremost, a book about writing center administration; it is for writing center practitioners of all orientations, queer and nonqueer alike. Writing center directors identify as LGBTQA more frequently than national averages (Valles, Babc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Queer Writing Center Labor and/as Capital
• 3. Queer Writing Center Labor and/as Activism
• 4. Queer Writing Center Labor and/as Tension
• 5. Conclusion
• Appendix: Interview Questions
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author