Who's a queer scholar?

Meeting 1: Queer Faculty Inquiry Group

Today Liz, Kate and I met to talk about notions of queer composition.  We found it challenging that Warner in "Queer and Then: The End of Queer Theory?" assumes we are already so familiar with queer theory that we would understand how or why it might be over.  But we also appreciated the way Warner imagines a place for queer theory still--more now than ever, maybe--in the spaces "otherwise closed down by the dominant direction of gay and lesbian politics, which increasingly reduces its agenda to military service and marriage."  In fact, as composition teachers we are frequently weighted down by student "interest" in dominant paper topics like gay marriage and gun control.  Snooooze.  We're not always sure how to push them in the direction of more nuanced, complex, topics.  We were amused and delighted with Warner's excerpted 1992 broadside: "I want a dyke for president" because of the way it transcends so much of the staid, unchallenging texts we assign our students (or that they produce for us in the service of "research.")  Liz, especially, wants to know how we can bring texts like "I want a dyke for president" into our classrooms.

Alexander and Rhodes' essay "Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition" playfully screwed with our academic readerly expectations by combining memoir, lit review, fiction/poetry, and rant.  Some of us wanted to resist this "de" composition--intentionally moving students away from ways their identities get composed in socially sanctioned ways--because our main objective (and quantifiable outcome) as writing teachers is still to "teach the toolbox."  This led us into a discussion of Alexander's memoir in which he asserts that he hasn't "fixed" his crossed eyes because having them adds to his queerness.  Since "queer" here connotes "non-normative" and not "sexually attracted to the same gender," we mulled over our own queerness as teachers and scholars in the world.  We wondered to what extent our classroom content or pedagogy strives to (or achieves) life in the margins--queerness.