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Overview of LGBTQ Approaches to Rhetoric and Composition

in much of the work done by Judith Butler in her text Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, this project specifically and distinctly examines the theoretical and pedagogical contributions of LGBTQ issues and approaches to the field of rhetoric and composition. Much of the work included in this project builds on Rebecca Moore Howard ongoing bibliography, “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered language, discourses, and rhetorics: A bibliography for composition and rhetoric.” However, this project, through a large survey of LGBTQ texts, situates LGBTQ studies in rhetoric and composition within six approaches: Performativity and passing, discourse and discourse communities, the Queer class, confronting queer issues in the classroom, heterosexism/homophobia, and other miscellaneous approaches. While many of these texts fit into several categories and address a variety of issues, this project situates each text in one approach while addressing their multiplicity and how they inform/take from other approaches.

sexuality and passing as a particular sexual identity, whether subversively intentional or automatically assigned. In Kathryn Conrad and Julie Crawford’s essay “Passing/Out: The Politics of Disclosure in Queer-Positive Pedagogy” they discuss passing, not just as an identity, but as a methodology of creating queer space in the class room:

the examination of specific discourses and discourse communities. For example, this project sites Heather Wroth’s essay on AIDS in Bodily Boundaries, Sexualised Genders and Medical Discourses and Paul Butler’s “Embracing AIDS: History, Identity, and Post-AIDS Discourse.” These essays not only stress and recognize the substantial effect of AIDS in the LGBTQ community, but also emphasize how specific discoursive examples support implementing queer pedagogy within and through various discourses and discourse communities.

to language (Jacobs) to what queer knowledge does (Shahani) and to how writers queer the author (Anzaldúa). Because whether or not teachers should out themselves in the classroom is an active category of debate, it also makes up a large sub category of the Queer class approach. In Harriet Malinowitz’s Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities, she exemplifies this debate when she states, “I believed in the political importance of being out, because closeted gay people contribute to the conspiracy of lies that render the false impression that the species we call people is generically heterosexual” (8). There are other theorists who take the opposite end of the debate and then, there are still many who fall in-between the two.

queer issues in the classroom is an alternative approach. Major queer issues in the classroom deal with the common conception of the classroom as a neutral space, which Mary Elliott in “Coming Out in the Classroom: A Return to the Hard Place” refutes: “the classroom is never a “neutral” space. Neutrality, we agreed, is a universal cultural default setting which is almost always presumed to be heterosexual and white; it is not available to those who cannot “pass” as either or both” (7). Other issues commonly theorized, discussed, and debated are those centering on the dichotomy of public and private. In Eleanor A. Hubbard and Kristine De Welde’s study they cite Allan Johnson: Heterosexuals have “the privilege of being able to assume acceptance as ‘normal’ members of society, express physical affection with their partners in public, refer openly to their private lives, live in a world full of cultural images that conger a sense of legitimacy and social desirability, and live without fear that others will find out who they are.” Johnson continues to say, “All of this is a form of privilege because it is systematically denied to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals” (75). Therefore the discussion of private and public merges into the analysis and critique of heterosexism and homophobia.

of the six approaches. However, in Karen Kopelson’s “Dis/Integrating the Gay/Queer Binary: “Reconstructed Identity Politics” for a Performative Pedagogy” she problematizes the examination of homophobia when she states,

also many other miscellaneous approaches which do not fit into performativity and passing, discourse and discourse communities, the Queer class, confronting queer issues in the classroom, or heterosexism/homophobia. The amount of these miscellaneous approaches attests to the surge in and diversity of LGBTQ rhetoric and composition studies.

Works Cited