Final Project: Proposal for Analysis of Queer Space(s) & Rhetoric

I will be examining how researchers across humanities disciplines have researched the issue of the rhetorical construction of queer spaces and its impact on both queer identity and rhetoric as a discipline. This issue will involve integrating scholarship in sociology, ethnography, history, and Composition and Rhetoric because queer issues are not housed in one singular discipline, but instead spread across multiple disciplines.

The methodological approach I plan to explore is the use, limitations, and potential methods of ethnographic research used to attend to issues of queer space and rhetoric. Ethnography is often used to examine queer issues across disciplines for several reasons: first, Queer Theory’s root in gay and lesbian identities and the LGBT social movement created a precedent of ethnographic research; second, the theorization of queer space has often focused on real queer spaces and their impact on identity, again creating a precedent of methodological research; third, humanities disciplines like sociology, political geography, and composition and rhetoric have traditionally taken up issues of queer theory and its extensions; fourth, I hope to revisit theory through ethnography, employing a revisionist approach as found in Ethnography Unbound by Michael Buroway et al. Due to my focus on a queer club, ethnography is a method I plan to employ, and understanding its benefits and limitations will be crucial to successfully gather evidence for my project.

The primary inquiry question informing the larger project that this work is building into is how queer identity impacts the rhetorical reading of both the queer body and queer space. For this course, and a smaller scope, I want to ask what qualitative methods are available to examine this question and what are their productive and problematic aspects. To explore this question, my project intersects with four main areas: ethnographic studies of vernacular rhetoric and literacy practices, Queer Theory, rhetorical theory and/or literacy theory and scholarship on the influence of space on community and identity. The site of my research is a real queer community space, thus ethnography and its concerns are paramount to my methodology. I will be investigating the concerns that ethnography raises—

• what is the relationship of the researcher to the community;
• what are ethical practices that inform the researcher;
• what are tactics that ethnographer utilizes and for what purpose.
in order to develop a plan or execution and ethical defense for my work with the queer club.

To ground and explain the everyday happenings of the queer community site, I will be drawing on queer theory, which theorizes the experience of both gay and lesbian lives and queer as an analytic method. Because the queer community site operates under the structure of its own purpose, which means it has its own practices, rituals and participation, I will also be integrating scholarship that offers a lens for viewing these queer practices through vernacular rhetoric. Finally, scholarship has already been done on queer sites or spaces as well as literacy and rhetorical practices of various communities, and I will use these works to inform and trouble my own ethnographic approach to the queer club.


Working Bibliography
Achilles, Nancy. "The Development of the Homosexual Bar as an Institution." Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: a Reader. Ed. Peter M. Nardi and Beth E.Schneider. New York: Routledge, 1998. 175-182.

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Brice Heath, Shirley. Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and
Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Brown, Stephen Gilbert and Sid Dobrin, eds. Ethnography Unbound. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Browne, Kath. “Challenging Queer Geographies.” Antipode 38.5 (2006): 885-893.

Buraway, Michael et al. Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern
Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1991.

Cintron, Ralph. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and the Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon, 1997.

Cushman, Ellen. “Rhetorician as Agent to Social Change.” On Writing and Research: The Braddock Essays 1975-1998. Ed. Lisa Ede. Boston: Bedford, 1999.

--- The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Duncan, Nancy. BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Kennedy, Elizabeth and Madeline Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Muñoz, José Esteban. "Impossible Spaces: Kevin McCarty’s The Chameleon Club." GLQ 11.3 (2005): 427-436.

Robinson, Christine M. The Web: Social Control in a Lesbian Community. Lanham: University Press of America, 2008.

Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.