Just a Little Queerly: Methods in my Previous and Ongoing Research

As a middle child, I have always been occupied with the idea of attention. Especially since my family was composed strangely: my three older siblings are seven years my senior (and older), so they were at a different place mentally and emotionally growing up. Further, I was the middle child of three girls, so I am familiar with diva and femme rivalry culture. As a child, I learned very quickly how to adapt my behavior and discourse depending on who I was talking to: for my mom I whined and yet pleased; for my older sister, I tried to be cool and older than I was; for my younger sister, I fashioned myself a tyrant, El Presidente of our shared bedroom. Added to this layer was school, church, female friends, guy friends, boyfriends, casual flirts, teachers, strangers, etc. I worked very hard to work the room.

Is this how rhetoric is constructed and shaped? From the gusto of a younger child fighting for the attention of an older sibling or a tired, working mother? Or was my rhetoric crafted from my interactions with my authoritative, thoroughly old-school, verbally abusive father? Did I learn to work a room so I could work around him? When neither party was present for me, did I resist or persuade? Does this frame of mind, way of being or construction of identity count as a queer experience? Can someone outside of the LGBT realm ever “really” be queer?

I think it was a queer experience growing up in the house that I did, with its blend of Eisenhower-esque nuclear family values and simultaneously unproductive, devastatingly dysfunctional mode of operating and communicating. In looking back on it, one thing is very clear about my upbringing: my family was fighting something and they were fighting it hard. They were fighting it the way a lower-middle class, repressedly alcoholic, largely uneducated body does. Often that meant fighting each other (physically between males and emotionally between males and females or females and females). I've been fighting ever since, but I've lost a sense of what it is that I'm fighting against, although that is another essay altogether. But what does queer mean in this sense? Surely it means the literal definition, “odd or strange.” While this is true, queer takes on a more complex resonance given that I am a lesbian, self-identified as queer. Was the rhetoric I used growing up odd or was it resisting a binaried categorization of identity?

If we juxtapose my biological or familial growing up, with my second maturation, that of becoming queer, we are faced with similar questions as before; however, divergent possibilities emerge for exploring rhetoric. What does queer mean in the sense of coming out? What counts as queer in a gay club? Was I aware of what it was to be queer then? In truth, I apply queer retroactively to who I was. I knew of the term from undergrad lit theory classes, but I was not living the term.

What it means to be queer and act queerly is further troubled and enumerated if we juxtapose my coming out with my academic coming out as a queer scholar. Oh so many levels! I am a queer scholar, but what do queer scholars do? I once understood queer scholars to be furthering LGBT aims, meaning furthering the rights and histories of LGBTQ people. But I have worked with scholars who trouble such a limited, and historically situated, view of academic work. Some, like Judith Butler, use feminist theory as a diving board into the collective pool of gender and sexuality. Taking a cue from Foucault, queer theorists began to genealogically question the construction of identity and the way that identity comes into being through performance. Others still work with community, but merge theory and the real, highlighting the discursive, political and economic, gendered and racial tensions imbued with sexuality. And now the global queer weighs on our minds, informing suicide bombers in Iraq via Jasbir K Puar in “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.”

Perhaps here is the point where I should address the reader's mounting question: where do I fit into the web of queer I have laid out? I honestly don't know. But what I have come to realize is that I have always been concerned with the theoretical inquiry about what it means to be, think and act queer—in short, its ontology and epistemology. This question, of course, depends not only on context and historicity, but who is using it and for what purpose. It is something that can be theorized, but it is also something that can be lived. I felt decidedly un-queer the first time I went to a gay club and didn't know what to do with the drag queen that approached me (come to find out, she was just trying to make a living on being fabulous). What I do know is that there is something resistant about being queer. It pushes back. It is an unstoppable force to the immovable social culture around it (sometimes movable, but only a little).

In order to answer these questions in the past, I have tackled projects that look at how queer is defined and used. For example, in my undergrad I was introduced to queer theory in a lit class and I was immediately intrigued. We were required to read a buffet of theories (a survey course of course) and then apply one to a novel we were simultaneously reading. I choose to apply queer theory to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James—a tale rife with homoerotic confidences between the governess and Mrs. Grose, not-to-subtle masochistic psychosexual issues between virtually all characters, as well as veiled hints at pedophilia. Despite the cruelty of the sexuality and the stigma and abuse it indicates, I geeked out at the innuendo and entendre, the turning of the implicit into the bodily explicit. At this time I was also taking creative writing classes and underwent writing queer fiction. Technically fiction should be in scare quotes, as my work was really latently autobiographical, or soon-to-be autobiographical in that I was not yet queer, but lived and dreamed it through my fiction. That year I did a student author reading and read my first queer piece “Tuesday and a Roll of Charmin.”

Later, in my first semester of my Masters degree, I would take a methods course with the late Bill Burling, a fiercely Marxist and a modestly well-known Brit Lit-turned-renegade Sci-Fi scholar. I adored him because I think in his straight/laced heart he was queer. It was a lit methods course and over the semester I developed a proposal for a project I have never completed: arguing for Edna St. Vincent Millay's inclusion into a queer canon of female/lesbian writers. This was not a large revelation: it was, however, informed by queer historiography, queer theory, and the definition of what counts as a queer text. Finally, I took a course that allowed me to examine queer clubs, which is my prospective dissertation. I will explain it in more detail in a moment, but I wanted to note that my masters was an important time for me because it began and ended with ruminations on my driving questions.

When I came to SU, I was able to take two courses that allowed me to explore queer issues and queer theory as it appears in Comp and rhetorical studies as opposed to lit. One was Gender and Power with Anne Demo, and from this class I developed a collaborative project that examined queer agitation rhetoric found in the popular or at least fairly well known manifesto “Queers Read This.” The manifesto is a cornerstone of activist organizations like ACT UP and Queer Nation. In this project, the historical events of ACT UP is examined through the discourse it published and circulated in public, focusing on its particularly queer centered audience, which I argued was best understood as an example of James C. Scott's term “hidden transcript” or rhetoric happening underneath or behind the most public or standard discourse. In this essay, I argued that although it was public, activist groups used hidden transcript to rally queers by defining who they were and who the common enemy was. Here, my specific methodology was textual analysis. The other class was an independent study with Margaret Himley that examined queer trajectories of the term queer and queer theory. This course was historic in nature as it was a survey course, but it also engaged in textual analysis as well as ethnographic or life narrative methods. We read a good chunk of Foucault and Butler, who integrate genealogical methods in their work.

Last semester I took Collin's Modern Comp studies course, a pilot project that allowed us to read ten years worth of a journal or issue across journals. I choose GLQ, a renowned interdisciplinary queer studies journal. Each week, we read shared readings and four readings of our choice and posted systematic summaries of the articles on a group blog. This semester-long project then culminated in a mock or trial exam in which we gathered in the lab and answered an exam question in the length of time and method of a minor exam. My specific exam looked at the uptake of Foucault and Butler in the journal by tracking citation patterns, popularity of theories, and flux of popularity among the ten-year span of the journal. This project used methods like textual analysis, quantitative data and lit review in order to report on my specific project. This project was my most multi-methodological to date in both its methods and its blending of methods.

In my graduate level work, the one question that has occupied my mind the most is how we should understand queer, from its multiple angles. This question guides my prospective dissertation, which I must say upfront, needs work. The basic idea of the project is to answer that question through Bakhtin's carnivalesque, in which the queer club is understood less as an economic or commercial business, but instead as a social site of underclass resistance. The (somewhat) sanctioned space for juxtapositions. While this means applying theory to practice, I hope to explore other methodologies that might demonstrate the point. I see this type of project as requiring a multiple approach method due to the complex nuances of the space itself. I hope to compose the kind of project that does for queer geography what Jacqueline Jones Royster, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard have done for African American rhetoric in terms of conceptualizing what it does and should look like to the larger, white culture. What Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks and Gwen Pough have done for African American feminism. What Charles Morris did for queer rhetoric. In short, how it is that we define queer based on how it is that we know queer.

What are some major limitations I expect to encounter as a researcher? First, that the club that manifested this idea is not replicated in my immediate region, which means travel, but it also means stepping back and not romanticizing the “ideal conditions” that began the project. The club back home was one of two like it, so it gathered a large hodge-podge of queer folks needing a queer fix. In other regions, clubs tailor to more specific needs/desires/fantasies because of a larger competition base. A second limitation is that this project will require a high theory approach to everyday experience. This method is a strength of mine and I am good at going in depth on a single issue. However, I am not good at covering the breadth of an issue, or pulling from multiple forms of scholarship. My project will demand not only blending theory with the site of the club, but incorporating scholarship from ethnographic and theoretical orientations, which I do not feel confident doing. Third, I am also not superb at comprehensive lit reviews, which this project will require given its roots in both Bakhtin and queer geography. Finally, this type of project will most likely require ethnographic work, which I have no experience with. I am familiar with interview protocols, as well as ethicality of dealing with ethnographic evidence, but I have never set the parameters, negotiated ethicality of evidence, and gathered ethnographic evidence myself. Further, all the folks who have used these methods seem to use elaborate systems of organization, which I do not know how to do since I am not that intimate with ethnography and its many methods.

What is the distance between the young girl who was trying to survive a queer family and the scholar who wants to examine how we know queer space? The distance at times is large, spanning the multiple deployments or ways of knowing what queer is. At other times, the space is small, taken up only by the difference in the course code. In both literature and composition, I have favored textual analysis to quantitative methods because I have never been trained in the latter. It is hard to mourn the quantitative gap in my knowledge though because I don’t foresee myself being in a position that uses it (although I am struck by the bravado of such a claim and its assumption that WPA work is never in my future). Another concern I have is the specialized nature of my dissertation and its disconnection to the praxis of our discipline. That is not to say that the classroom is not also a queer space that has elements or orientations that are rife for investigation; however, it is to say that the connection of my project to the inquiries often attributed to Composition is troublesome. Here I cannot help but think of Jonathan Alexander’s own orientation to composition, which he likens to an anarchist or an annoying uncle. He sees his role in Comp as always troubling our harsh divides between text and process, literature and “readings,” or on a larger level, our dividing line between writing and English studies. He has found his irregular trajectory amid the traditional composition narrative as productive, inherent even, to what Composition is about. I think that is the queer talking, or reflecting, or revising what it is that we do and for whom. While I do not necessarily share his views, nor would I want to necessarily trouble Comp his same way, I am struck by how queerly he takes his role as teacher, writer, professional, practitioner, etc. For him, the line between the scholarship, the classroom and the experience of living is only a machination of our drive to divide rather than a natural component of the discipline. I delve into these details to say that I too hope to align my inquiry, my methods, my teaching and my experience in much the same way. To approach everything just a little queerly.