Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects - Softcover

Takayoshi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607328178 ISBN 13: 9781607328179

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Re/Orienting Writing Studies is an exploration of the intersections among queer theory, rhetoric, and research methods in writing studies. Focusing careful theoretical attention on common research practices, this collection demonstrates how queer rhetorics of writing/composing, textual analysis, history, assessment, and embodiment/identity significantly alter both methods and methodologies in writing studies. The chapters represent a diverse set of research locations and experiences from which to articulate a new set of innovative research practices.

While the humanities have engaged queer theory extensively, research methods have often been hermeneutic or interpretive. At the same time, social science approaches in composition research have foregrounded inquiry on human participants but have often struggled to understand where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people fit into empirical research projects. Re/Orienting Writing Studies works at the intersections of humanities and social science methodologies to offer new insight into using queer methods for data collection and queer practices for framing research.

Contributors: Chanon Adsanatham, Jean Bessette, Nicole I. Caswell, Michael J. Faris, Hillery Glasby, Deborah Kuzawa, Maria Novotny, G Patterson, Stacey Waite, Stephanie West-Puckett

About this title

About the Author

William P. Banks is director of the University Writing Program and the Tar River Writing Project and professor of rhetoric and writing at East Carolina University, where he teaches courses in writing, research, pedagogy, and young adult literature. He is coeditor of Reclaiming Accountability.
 
Matthew B. Cox is associate professor at East Carolina University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, queer theory and rhetorics, and technical and professional writing.
 
Caroline Dadas is associate professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Montclair State University, where she teaches courses in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality major and the Professional and Public Writing minor.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Re/Orienting Writing Studies

Queer Methods, Queer Projects

By William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, Caroline Dadas

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-817-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword Pamela Takayoshi, 
1. Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Thoughts on In(queer)y William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas, 
2. Making It Queer, Not Clear: Embracing Ambivalence and Failure as Queer Methodologies Hillery Glasby, 
3. How (and Why) to Write Queer: A Failing, Impossible, Contradictory Instruction Manual for Scholars of Writing Studies Stacey Waite, 
4. Queering and Transing Quantitative Research G Patterson, 
5. REDRES[ing] Rhetorica: A Methodological Proposal for Queering Cross-Cultural Rhetorical Studies Chanon Adsanatham, 
6. "Love in a Hall of Mirrors": Queer Historiography and the Unsettling In-Between Jean Bessette, 
7. In/Fertility: Assembling a Queer Counterstory Methodology for Bodies of Health and Sexuality Maria Novotny, 
8. Queering Networked Writing: A Sensory Authoethnography of Desire and Sensation on Grindr Michael J. Faris, 
9. Queer/ing Composition, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, and Ways of Knowing Deborah Kuzawa, 
10. Assessment Killjoys: Queering the Return for a Writing Studies Worldmaking Methodology Nicole I. Caswell and Stephanie West-Puckett, 
11. On Queering Professional Writing Caroline Dadas and Matthew B. Cox, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Re/Orienting Writing Studies

Thoughts on In(queer)y

William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas

Research is always about orientation, about how (and why and even to what extent) the researcher turns toward the objects, participants, or contexts of study. To stand in a classroom in front of twenty-five composition students is to stand in relation to others; usually, we stand there as their teachers, people charged with engaging these students in a host of activities intended to teach them about writing. But what if we're there not only as teachers but also as researchers, as teacher-researchers? Then while we might be oriented toward these students in the ways that a teacher typically is, we're also now oriented differently: we're seeing, being, engaging in more than one way, through more than one role. Our orientations as researchers mean we're in that space asking particular questions, looking for evidence to confirm or contradict working hypotheses; our being there as researchers means that we're operating on multiple cognitive levels, observing, yes, but also impacting that space through the ways our focus shifts.

The same would be true of any research site, whether that's the seemingly innocuous space of a nondescript room used for a focus group, the dusty and moldy space of a campus archive, or the bustling workplace we've chosen to observe as part of an office ethnography. When we enter a carefully chosen room to meet the five people who constitute a focus group, we engage that space and those people, we orient ourselves toward those people, as someone there to facilitate a focus group. We alter space by taking a seat near the video camera or the digital recorder; we ask the participants to move if they are not already sitting in the frame of the camera or near enough to the microphone to be heard and recorded. These orientations speak to our assumptions about who is in charge of collecting data, what counts as data, and which objects in the room have value. The same is true of the archive or the boardroom, or any other site where we show up and point ourselves toward objects of study. And we are also oriented from behind, as it were, by the discipline(s) we are part of, by the intellectual traditions and commonplaces out of which our inquiry questions have emerged — and to which we hope our own answers will contribute.

Experienced researchers know these things. We learned about these orientations in graduate seminars focused on research, or as we began to conduct our own research projects. But we also know that the methods and methodologies we studied and practiced in graduate school do not represent fully objective, ideology-free practices for studying objects, people, and spaces. Rather, each represents a way of orienting a researcher toward an object, a people, or a space. Where these practices — surveys, focus groups, observations, rhetorical analyses, and so forth — become commonplace, where they represent normative/unquestioned activities or epistemologies, they demonstrate not only the ways that each has become an active method for orienting a researcher (and thus also preventing other orientations, other views from taking the foreground) but also how each has become a normative orientation for the field, a well-trodden path whose existence actively replicates itself from researcher to researcher, from discipline to discipline.

Reflecting on the "well-trodden path," Sara Ahmed (2006) writes in Queer Phenomenology, "Lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us ... are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition" (16). These lines of motion are also lines of thought, of inquiry, of what is and is not permissible in the activities and frames that surround inquiry. In the intersections of the humanities and social sciences, where we tend to locate writing studies, these well-worn paths provide institutional and disciplinary validity; they become recognizable paths of inquiry and methods of discovery, and in their recognizability, their visibility as systematic processes, we take refuge in having developed (or co-opted) frames of empirical inquiry that lend our work certain kinds of validity as research. While one of the values of empirical research is that others can follow our methods for themselves and, ostensibly, validate our shared discoveries by reaching the same conclusions, Ahmed suggests that one reason other researchers find what we find is that they follow the line we established; our shared discoveries are as much about the lines we follow as they are about the data we collect or the methods we use to analyze them.

While writing studies has traditionally articulated research practices in terms of activities (methods) and frameworks (methodologies) (Harding 1987; Kirsch and Sullivan 1992), this bifurcated approach can make it difficult for scholars doing queer inquiry work to see how best to approach and understand their research. What counts as queer work, after all? Is it the subjects of our research or the contexts in which we conduct research that make our work queer? Is it the way we collect data or the way we frame our collection methods? Or does queer work involve a more nuanced understanding of these concepts, concepts that guide so much of the way our discipline responds to and frames the work we attempt to do?

This collection represents our attempt to address some of these questions and to challenge the heteronormative orientations that have guided inquiry in writing studies since its inception. The scholars included here work to unpack the complex ways that queer scholarship has impacted the field of writing studies by disrupting not only the subjects and contexts of inquiry but also the frames and activities (and activity systems) in which inquiry occurs. In her groundbreaking study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) students in a writing classroom, Harriet Malinowitz (1995) asked the powerful question, "Which of our theories of writing don't explode when we consider their ramifications for lesbian and gay writers?" (39). The writers included in this collection turn that question toward research method/ologies to ask the field of writing studies, how might queer rhetorics and research "explode" our working theories of research methods and methodologies?

The writers included here also represent an emerging generation of scholars who are poised to address some of the key challenges that established scholars in the field have identified as kairotic for researchers in writing studies. For example, as part of introducing the recent collection Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies, Gesa Kirsch (2012) identifies three specific challenges she thinks worthy of our collective attention. Writing researchers, she believes, should be

1. "adapting different research methods to diverse settings and reporting this research in genres that best reflect these methods" (xi);

2. engaging in "interactive, collaborative, reciprocal, mutually beneficial, nonhierarchical relations with research participants and their communities" (xii);

3. and recognizing that the "increasingly collaborative nature of research" means that "as writing studies has expanded its scope and breadth to include the rhetorical activities of those whose voices have been neglected, silenced, or rarely heard, scholars are showing a renewed concern for representing participants with respect, care, and complexity" (xiii–iv).

These challenges are large and complex, but they also reflect a set of values central to the work of queer rhetorics and, we argue, to queer methods and methodologies. The writers included in this collection attempt to address these challenges in nuanced and rigorous ways, from engaging a diverse set of partners in research to playing with nontraditional genres in order to make their cases or represent their findings. Several authors also directly address the ways queer theories have helped them rethink language use so they can enact the sort of collaborative, nonhierarchical relationships that Kirsch believes our discipline should value. Through engaging new research sites and participants, and by framing and articulating their work through theories somewhat new to writing studies, these scholars offer insights into research practices in our discipline that we believe will help shape the next generation of writing researchers.

In this introduction, we attempt to situate the work that follows by articulating how these projects emerge at the intersections of queer rhetorics and queer method/ologies. This work, we believe, can serve to reorient the field of writing studies, not so that everyone is engaged in work around LGBT/Queer objects/texts, people, or contexts, but rather so that the discoveries and contributions of queer rhetorics and queer method/ologies can help us rethink the work of traditional data-collection methods and frames for inquiry. The projects and experiences reported on in this collection demonstrate how early-career researchers in writing studies have had to rethink our well-disciplined paths in order to do the work they need to do. We believe these pieces will be especially helpful to new and beginning researchers as they begin to think through the complex and often difficult practices of research.

Thinking Queerly about In(queer)y

Any book that attempts to explore queer theories, queer rhetorics, or anything we might want to label queer begins its work in a complicated, in fact quite "messy," place (Dadas 2016; Law 2004). For many, even most, researchers in writing studies, queer theories appear useful or applicable only if the research project involves LGBTQ people, objects/texts, and/or contexts. At the 2013 conference of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, for example, which took place in Savannah, Georgia, the theme for the three-day event was "Queering the Writing Program," and while there were three queer-focused plenary sessions, all delivered by queer-identified researchers who were engaged in queer-focused work, there was very little else about the conference that was queer. William remembers counting fewer than thirteen sessions in which it was clear from the title or session summary in the program that the papers from the session would actually engage queer work at all. More common was that the researchers who attended the event simply ignored the theme. Part of the reason for this disregard is that writing studies has mostly refused the "queer turn" that Jonathan Alexander and David Wallace suggest has occurred in our field over the last couple of decades (Alexander and Wallace 2009). They note that the emerging work of queer scholars in our field has produced a "better understanding of how heteronormativity operates in society at large, in our classrooms, and in the pages of our books and journals" (W301), and no doubt that's true. But as the WPA conference presenters demonstrated one after another, it's one thing to recognize heteronormativity and quite another to see how queer rhetorics shape, disrupt, or challenge our daily practices as writers, researchers, or, in this case, writing program administrators. One presenter admitted what we suspect was true of the majority in attendance: "I know this session doesn't really address the conference theme, but it turns out, we don't really know anything about queer theory, and we didn't want to embarrass ourselves by reading one or two articles and then trying to make our presentation connect to them." While the "queer turn" in the field for queer scholars has been about much more than simply adding gay or lesbian to our menu of identitarian concerns, much of the field, we suspect, has struggled to get past this sort of inclusionary mindset. In this section, we attempt to define queer rhetorics and queer methodologies such that the field of writing studies can better see how these theories of language and writing — about self and other, about agency and its failures — are foundational theories for anyone in writing studies to know and to engage. These theories do not merely explain how to include LGBT people in our discipline or our research, nor simply how to treat LGBT students or faculty; rather, these theories, like all theories, help us to see our work differently, to challenge what has come before, and to offer alternative ways of being in the world, regardless of sexual orientation.

Queer Theory, Language Theory

Early articulations of queer theory focused on two concepts that should have been both recognizable to and welcomed by writing studies scholars at the time: discourse and performativity. Borrowing heavily from the work of Michel Foucault, who posited that discourse, like power, is difficult to pin down in simplistic language structures, early queer theorists came to understand discourse as a method for both enacting power and disrupting it. Foucault (1988) writes, "We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between the dominant discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies" (122). Part of what queer scholars appreciated about Foucault's notions of discourse and power was that they made sense based on our own embodied experiences with language. Like other groups fighting for civil rights, queer people had experienced language hurled at them in rage so as dehumanize and belittle them, the same language they then flipped so those hurtful words, in queer spaces, became discourses of camaraderie, innuendo, and/or humor (Bergman 1993; Chauncey 1995; Cleto 1999; Meyers 1994). We're reminded of that infamously uncomfortable scene in Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (2008) in which Harold hurls the words Jew and fag around in ways intended to be both cruel and kind, aware of both how the world treats these two groups and what it means to play with those terms at parties like the one the characters in the play are attending. For Harold and the other characters at the party, language — and the party itself — becomes a type of resistance to the language outside that space. "Resistance," Annamarie Jagose (1996) writes, "is multiple and unstable; it coagulates at certain points, is dispersed across others, and circulates in discourse ... [that is] endlessly prolific and multivalent" (81). For many LGBTQ people, there is a felt sense, as much as a theoretical one, that one resistant method for maintaining our existence involves not being bludgeoned by languages intended to hurt us but pushing back, even in small ways, in order to maintain our own senses of self and community. Ultimately, this is a recognition that language itself is unstable and that within that instability, marginalized groups can attempt to assert agency.

Another attempt to find agency outside the spaces provided by normativity came about in queer theory's early adoption of performativity as a key concept. Performativity, like Foucauldian notions of discourse, foregrounds that which is "multiple and unstable" (Jagose 1996, 81), in this case referring to gender and sexuality. Early feminist and queer theorists (e.g., Diana Fuss, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler), according to Jagose, began to recognize that woman represents "a regulatory fiction, whose deployment inadvertently reproduces those normative relations between sex, gender and desire that naturalize heterosexuality" (84). Woman — and man, girl, boy, lady, gentleman — doesn't represent a direct relationship between biological or anatomical demarcations of sex systems or sexual organs and language but rather a set of social, cultural, and (at times) biological beliefs that have solidified over time into concepts of gender that suggest individuals, based on anatomical sex, have essential and largely immutable behaviors, experiences, and mental functions because of that anatomy. Judith Butler (1993), however, recognized gender as "a ritualized production" (231) that never fully succeeds but that is always grounded in a language of its own undoing.

The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectations, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate. Moreover, this embodying is a repeated process. (231)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607328178
• ISBN 13: 9781607328179
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Banks William P., Cox Matthew B., Dadas Caroline