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Discourse and Discourse Communities LGBTQ Approaches Annonated Bibliography

Discourse and Discourse Communities

In her essay, Ford addresses the question “Are there similar challenges in implementing Queer Pedagogy to classroom participants between academic and community educators, and if so, are there areas where cross-sectoral strategizing could improve the development of Queer Pedagogy?” (2). She explores answers to this question in examination of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto’s Working with LGBT Youth training and academic queer theory and how they converge to create successful queer pedagogies. She highlights several barriers both academic and community based education programs face, for example, queer teacher’s exhaustive feeling at being the sole teachers of queer pedagogy and both teachers and student’s hesitance to pedagogies “implicat[ing] [them] in systems of oppression” (22). But despite these barriers, Ford asserts that a collective examination and implementation of queer pedagogy “can create excellent opportunities for social change by working together to create organizational change and educational practices that will facilitate social change” (23).

In this essay, Ironstone-Catterall addresses difficulties within the rhetoric of AIDS activism. In order to understand these difficulties, Ironstone-Catterall maps out the history of queer responses to contemporary AIDS discourses. She states that it is her goal “to look to the ways that these responses and rhetorics have helped to shape queer politicality, and to provide the tools for thinking about the fault-lines of liberal-democracy as it pertains to queer identities and pedagogies” (3). She especially focuses on the notions of public and private and how these divided rhetorics have been, thus far, inadequate. Citing Ann Cvetkovich, Ironstone-Catterall states that in blurring the lines between private and public rhetorical response, “affective life can be seen to pervade public life” (2).

In her book, Malinowitz discusses her experience conducting a class centered on gay and lesbian experience. This class consisted of both LGBTQ and heterosexual student writers. Malinowitz grounds her study in her personal belief that being out is of political importance (8). With this in mind, Malinowitz sets off to establish a classroom environment and composition pedagogy in which it is safe for students to be out. She states that “Leaving sexual identity out of the classroom is not an accident; it is an expression of institutionalized homophobia, enacted in classrooms not randomly but systematically, with legal and religious precedents to bolster it and intimidate both teachers and students” (23). Helping students confront this institutionalization of homophobia through writing and class discussion brings sexual identity into the classroom (perhaps for the first time) and reaffirms marginalized voices.

In her text, Malinowitz takes a unique approach: different from many other LGBTQ composition theorists, she actually puts the focus of her work back on the students. She provides four cases studies of students, who had varying experience in her course. These case studies give an insightful look into how her pedagogical practices are actually being conceptualized and utilized by students. Because of the student centered approach to this text, students’ agency is not overshadowed, displaced, or forgotten.