Teaching Queer

Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing

Stacey Waite

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780822982777
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher. Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students (as much work on queer pedagogy has done since the 1990s), the book offers writing and teaching as already queer practices, and contends that the overlap between queer theory and composition presents new possibilities for teaching writing. Teaching Queer argues for and enacts "queer forms"—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing—those that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, and the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms.

CHAPTER ONE

BECOMING THE LOON

Queer Masculinities, Queer Pedagogies

To learn and to teach, one must have the awareness of leaving something behind while reaching toward something new, and this kind of awareness must be linked to imagination.

Maxine Green, Releasing the Imagination

The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where “doing” and “being done to” become equivocal.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

The wild foxes, uncertain, walk across the frozen river, listening beneath for the sound of water. If they hear nothing, they may cross to the other side.

David Rothenberg, Blue Cliff Record

Legitimate Bodies

Imagine what the neighborhood folks might have called a tomboy. Tomboys are, usually up until the age of ten or twelve, seen as benign—a to-be-expected imitation of masculinity. After all, who wouldn’t want to be a boy? Their toys are more engaging, their clothes more comfortable, their privilege already visible to the young girls, who, for a time, want to be them. Still, families will make sure to find excuses—the tomboy has too many brothers, the tomboy has only a male parent, the tomboy does not have a male parent, the tomboy has only neighborhood boys to play with. Why else would she turn to stickball or manhunt? Tomboys are formed through imitation. This comforts those who believe something imitated is not original, not real, not authentic. I was a gifted imitator. And yes, we can, if we need to, blame my brothers, who I watched intently to find out how to do boy—how to take up space, how to call “do over” in the street when a car disrupts play, how to lace up my shoes loose, so they barely appear tied. My mother wished I had more girls to imitate. That would have been more authentic, more real. And we all tell ourselves we want the ones we love to “be themselves.” Who can be themselves if they’re always walking around trying on the identities that aren’t supposed to belong to them?

As children, we get some of our first lessons in difference and domination. Find what is different in the picture. Dominate that difference. Stabilize the difference. Remove it. Categorize it elsewhere. Toss it into your plastic Peter Pan garbage pail. It does not belong. I have dedicated many of my adult years to teaching and to building a pedagogy that blurs difference and tries to call systems of domination into question—heterosexism, racism, classism, sexism—and to call the ideologies that form these systems into question as well. I have selected for my courses numerous texts that aim to disrupt hierarchies and expose systems of privilege of all kinds, particularly with regard to gender and sexuality. I have resisted, for a long time, many male teachers whom I saw as constructing and using masculine domination to lead a classroom. Pedagogy’s interesting intersections with gender and masculinity are striking. And while it is not within the scope of this project to examine the history of pedagogy through the lens of gender, I do want to offer an example of the kinds of historical moments that interest me in terms of the stakes of the classroom practices I intend to engage.

The loon is the only bird with solid bones as opposed to the hollow bones of other birds. This is what makes the loon a brilliant diver.

Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori’s edited collection Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819–1929, provides a lens through which we can begin to think about masculinity and pedagogy and, importantly, about the complex relationship between pedagogy and identity. What strikes me about so many of the documents in Salvatori’s collection are the many ways definitions of pedagogy struggle with essential philosophical and political questions of what it means to be in a body, what it means to be in the lived world, what it means to learn. Gabriel Compayré, in one of the documents (written in 1910) aiming to define pedagogy, writes the following: “The science which claims to establish the laws of education, which would instruct and raise the child and form the man, cannot with certainty construct its inductions and deductions unless other sciences have taught it what man is, what child is—in body, in soul, in his individual nature and also in what he must be in terms of his destiny, his social role” (Salvatori 32). There are several things that seem notable about this passage, of course. But rather than put pressure on the term “science” as an understanding of pedagogy or put pressure on the masculine understanding of who is worthy of being taught, I want to focus first on the ways this passage links pedagogy (“the science which claims to establish the laws of education”) with ontology, with concerns of being (“what man is”). Compayré is quite aware that in order to begin to understand what it means to teach, we must also begin to understand bodies, souls, nature—in essence, being—meaning that pedagogy is not alone a question of education but also a question of ontology, a question of identity, physicality, theology, and ecology. This, of course, is one of the reasons pedagogy is endlessly contested and summarily reduced to one thing or the other. What can we know about what we are? About what “the child” (who is to become the “man”) or the student (or even the teacher) is? And if our vision is always blocked or otherwise blurred by these limits, how can we see what we are becoming, or being, in order to educate ourselves not only about what we might become but also about what it means to teach another being, another being who is also becoming? I ask these questions to remind myself that when I am talking about teaching, I am, without question, talking about and making assumptions about being, about who I imagine myself to be and who I imagine my students to be—though I understand both states of being as temporary and mutable, even if, for a moment, we might find ourselves stable, fixed, or seemingly still.

Loons often swim all day—paddling and pushing through the water. Their leg muscle fibers are mostly red. Loons rest their wings most of the time, though their wings are made of red and white fibers because when loons do use their wings, they use them furiously and steadily.

Nearing the end of this document, Compayré writes, “We must hope that the day will soon come when a scientific schematization will finally be accomplished” (Salvatori 34). He indicates that we will someday be able to know what pedagogy is after science has finally determined what man is. For Compayré, once we know what “man” is, we can know what it means to teach him. Perhaps these questions of “what man is” are part of the reason pedagogy has taken its modern home at times in composition—because writing has something to do with being, because composing thoughts, composing writing, and composing a self permeate every aspect of being. But how do we bring questions of being to questions of pedagogy more explicitly? What will be said of our doing so? What is man? Who is the man who teaches him? What kind of man am I?

I am told by doctors that I have both an X and a Y chromosome (read: male). I look, talk, and walk like a man (read: male). I am carrying what we call here at this historical moment and in most cultures, a “woman’s” body (read: female). But this body alone cannot make a theory of teaching writing. I must, as any writer must, put myself at risk. Writing, much like reading, risks revising the self, having the self in question, even at times in annihilation. I am then a woman who is a man, or, to put it another way, a man who is a woman.

The university classroom, in its long history, is a masculine place. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in Masculine Domination, “The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy [a term he uses to mean the justification of a masculine society as it is constructed] comes from the fact that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction” (23, original emphasis). Bourdieu points out how domination is linked to the masculine but that the masculine is linked to “biological nature.” And anything linked (despite its social construction) to “biological nature” is going to be seen as natural. As R. W. Connell suggests, “True masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies—to be inherent in a male body or to express something about the male body” (45). In this sense, domination is natural, the masculine is natural, masculine domination is natural. Of course, many gender theorists know this not to be “true.” Many gender theorists have shown us that our sense of the natural is actually made, constructed—that what is natural is always in question. However, I am interested in what happens when masculinity’s “truth,” its fragility or fluidity, is exposed via the body, in my case via the “female masculine” body.

I am interested in the way my masculinity (read often as illegitimate because it is perceived to be not linked to “biological nature”) might provide a site for a complicated performative pedagogy in which the now destabilized masculinity becomes a site of contention, disruption, or even horror and melancholy, for students; in other words, the both-at-once-ness of my body itself might launch any course I teach as already disruptive. I could, and at times have wanted to, ignore this disruption; I could proceed to teach as if the disruption is not there. To an extent, most teachers have. We often teach as though the baggage of ourselves has been left at some metaphorical door. We are in the classroom. We are teachers now. We are not women or men. We are teachers. Through this project I have begun to ask questions about the man who teaches my course, the man who is me, who is also a woman.

The word loon is said to derive from the Scandinavian word lom—which means clumsy and awkward person. The loon gets this name because of how graceless it seems on land, its hind legs too far back for walking. It moves in strange jerks and diagonal patterns on the ground. One can always recognize a loon’s sporadic walking.

What I am calling the “illegitimate masculine” (the masculine not lived in a “male” body) is most visible when it comes into contact with or is put under the gaze of “legitimate masculinity.” I am sometimes working alongside male masculine students who seem to fold their arms in refusal when I walk in the room in my suit and tie, who challenge my authority in various complicated and sometimes comical ways, or who might sense my gender performance, perhaps rightly so, as an embodiment of a pedagogy that is asking them to change the way they think about identity. I am fully aware that there are a variety of reasons students might act in these ways; however, over the past seventeen years of teaching courses in the university, I have become acutely aware of resistance that is gendered, that is an embodied response. I can feel this (for different reasons and in different ways) both when I run into a female student in the public bathroom and we both shift our eyes toward the walls, shift our weight from foot to foot with the sense that I do not belong there (despite her “knowing” I am a “woman”) and when a male student looks over my clothing the way my cousin, who is a serious skateboarder, might look at a boy in “skateboarder” wardrobe who cannot “actually” (whatever that means) skate or cannot skate well—or look “natural” doing so. I am a “poser,” illegitimate and nonauthentic. My performance can never be the “real deal,” the real masculine deal. I have not learned my masculinity or been given the “masculine habitus” (a name Bourdieu gives to the set of sometimes invisible codes for masculinity and domination that are taught, reinforced, and handed down in any given society) in an authentic (meaning natural) and institutionally approved way. I am the self-made masculine or, in Bourdieu’s terms, an autodidact:

Because he has not acquired his culture in the legitimate order established by the educational system, the autodidact constantly betrays, by his very anxiety about the right classification, the arbitrariness of his classifications and therefore of his knowledge—a collection of unstrung pearls, accumulated in the course of an uncharted exploration, unchecked by the institutionalized, standardized stages and obstacles, the curricula and progressions which make scholastic culture a ranked and ranking set of interdependent levels and forms of knowledge. (Distinction 328)

Bourdieu’s notion of the autodidact is certainly useful in talking about masculinity and about how masculinity is read by the larger culture and often by students in a classroom. The autodidact, then, “has not acquired his culture in the legitimate order established.” He betrays; he is “a collection of unstrung pearls.” The butch performance clearly echoes the description Bourdieu offers of the autodidact. In this case, it is I who have not had my masculinity sanctioned and approved by the legitimate order. It is my own body (and performance) that “betrays” me, that reveals “the arbitrariness” of classifications—my body standing at the chalkboard, fleshy proof that masculinity might be worn, might be acted out by one who does not have “birthright.” Consequently, my body betrays and in doing so becomes a kind of betrayal. I betray my students, so that in addition to reading seemingly radical texts (like Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, or Vershawn Ashanti Young’s Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, or Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, or Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, or Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), my students are also faced with a teaching body and performance that betrays them. They have difficulty reading or interpreting the texts I give them or the text I am to them to the point that these texts (my body) may seem impossible and illegible. College students might already feel a sense of betrayal in those contexts in which their high school skill sets or former interpretative strategies appear not to work in a new university context. This sense of betrayal could be further intensified when the teacher requires a different set of interpretative strategies in order to be read or understood.

Loons find their prey not by heat or scent, but by sight. They need, in order to survive, to see clearly. For this reason, they look for clear lakes.

Perhaps my interpretative act here, me giving my students’ hypothetical feelings a temporary name—betrayal—is a kind of projection of my own fear, the fear of being, ultimately and forever, illegible. Erased. A poser, indeed. Here, Bourdieu would seem to agree with Halberstam’s assertion, in Female Masculinity, that masculinity “becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body” (2) and that “female masculinity is generally received by hetero- and homonormative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach” (3).

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, in her essay “A Vessel of Possibilities,” writes, “The academy largely insists on the body’s erasure because the body is the undeniable reminder of our private selves. Our bodies betray truths about our private selves that confound professional interaction” (188). While on some level this erasure can serve to protect or function as a kind of safety having to do with sexual harassment or with the unequal power distributions that circulate also dialectically between teachers and students, the erasure still functions as a denial of materiality. The academy is so often a disembodied place—a place where we might be asked to distance ourselves from our bodies, to leave them behind in favor of some intellectual practices that we imagine happen outside of or independent of the body. But our bodies are with us always. We cannot, as it were, teach without them.

There were several long days of snow that year. The students seem tired, having stayed up late figuring the snow would cancel their buses and leave them asleep and warm. I have been teaching at this small high school in central Pennsylvania only a few months. And after the eleventh graders have turned in their papers on “the whiteness of the whale” in Moby Dick, one student stays behind. She leans awkwardly against my desk. She looks down at the patches she has sewn to her backpack. One reads, “If you can read this, you’re too fuckin’ close.” I almost giggle—knowing the school’s policies about the display of such language. “What’s up?” I ask her. “I’m pregnant,” she answers. And we both stand quiet under the horrible fluorescent light. She begins to cry. I cannot come close to her. I cannot comfort her. I have listened hard during my teacher training meetings: Do not touch your students under any circumstances. Do not touch them. They cannot be touched. You cannot trust what they will say. You cannot touch them for any reason.

Embodied Practices

It can certainly trouble both teachers and students when they come face to face with the materiality of the body. It helps me to understand both myself and my students if I think of my masculinity as a kind of embodied betrayal—not because I believe that, as their teacher, I commit a kind of falseness but because understanding the dynamic as a perceived betrayal helps to explain what, for many students, is a challenging and unusual interaction—the androgynous body, the men’s ties I wear to class, the deep voice, the “female” pronoun. The body that betrays “professional boundaries” by not being able to be rendered invisible (a body that appears legible in its normativity might be able to be rendered invisible) is a body that must be reckoned with as one of the classroom’s primary texts. One cannot avoid or ignore it any more than one could avoid or ignore the work of a course that must be done in order to complete it. To be intelligible then might mean to be invisible even if that intelligibility is only a perceived intelligibility. As Judith Butler reminds us, “There are advantages to remaining less than intelligible, if intelligibility is understood as that which is produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms” (Undoing 3). In other words, it is not necessarily a sad story to be an unintelligible body, to be something other than “produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms.” To be intelligible is to be seen through the lens of what already is, or what already appears to be. To be unintelligible is to be, quite literally, a becoming. Butler goes on to say that “if I have no desire to be recognized within a certain set of norms, then it follows that my sense of survival depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred” (3). In this sense, my students do not recognize me, and that they do not recognize me is integral to my survival—that is, if I want to be the person I continue to become and still teach classes in settings where the social norms “by which recognition is conferred” cannot be said to apply to me. I do not have the desire to be “recognized within a certain set of norms,” and so Butler is spot on that this lack of desire means that my survival “depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms.” I am always aware, when I am teaching or thinking about my teaching, that my pedagogy is, at its heart, about my own survival, or about the survival of my kind—those of us living outside “those norms by which recognition is conferred.” There is a selfishness, I fear, to this pedagogy, though most of the time I suspect all teachers are trying to survive, asking students to try on new ways of thinking so that we might live in a more layered world—one ringing more loudly with possibilities for writing, for knowing, and for becoming.

A newly bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Becoming the Loon: Queer Masculinities, Queer Pedagogies
• Chapter Two. Courting Failure
• Chapter Three. Alternative Orientations
• Chapter Four. Becoming Liquid: Queer Interpretations
• Chapter Five. Queer (Re)Visions of Composition
• Works Cited
• Index