This is Not My Title: Mandatory Blog Post

I should start by explaining this post’s delay (insert quintessential student excuse. I typed the whole thing out and then tried to move an image and boom - entire post lost. True story).

I have tried to write this post almost ten times over the past few days, but I haven’t really “felt” compelled to say much at all. In fact, I tend to become completely enraged when I think about how heteronormative ideals affect people’s lives daily. What DiGrazia and Boucher, Alexander and Rhodes, and Yep have to say is not just about a few queer-focused assignments in a classroom for the sake of diversity and tolerance; they are speaking about the justifications “moral” people use to control, limit, and stigmatize my life. I’ve been finding it difficult to focus the reflective post on anything more than a sob story about the myriad obstacles that my queerness poses, particularly regarding same-sex marriage or at least a future that involves some legal protections. In fact, I was listening to NPR this morning and heard about Proposal One, which is being voted on Tuesday in North Carolina. Same-sex marriage is already illegal in NC, but this amendment would further ban same-sex marriages, including civil unions or any related benefits. (Wonderful Wikipedia has a stellar visual aid to demonstrate the "red" I'm seeing regarding this issue.) It’s a ban-amendment to an already-in-place ban amendment. Yep, heteronormativity!

Although the “Unpacking the Hetero Privilege Knapsack” exercise felt like a flop and I wish the discussion been more lively from the onset, I was happy our conversation gained momentum as the class progressed. Yep’s piece was a tremendous supplement to the readings and the lines Alexander and Rhodes blur in Queered. The video fit nicely with the expressivist collage-based assignments and the textual analysis DiGrazia and Boucher included in their course. If the “Writing InQueeries” class were to be remixed/revised/revisited, I think Queered would be a valuable addition. In fact, it could be used as a sample because it covers so many of their assignment goals. I am satisfied with the article I chose, but I found it difficult to balance the focus between queer theory and rhetoric and the applications of the Composition classroom. It felt synthetic and forced at times to keep pushing the discussion back to Composition, which was entirely a self-imposed pressure. On the other hand, from the start, the discussion contained threads of Alexander and Rhodes and Yep, which felt organic and comprehensive. I’m most interested in notions of non-queer and queer authority, which we talked about through different avenues throughout the class period. Even though we did touch on the violence issue, I wish we had done more there. Initially I planned to start with the opening scene of Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She, but the computer froze so I turned to my back-up plan. I sincerely hope the class members found some value in the article I chose, if only for one small reason.

One thing DiGrazia and Boucher’s article does is, hopefully, inspire readers to create assignments that capture Foucault’s focus on harmful discursive power structures that function to regulate individuals inside of their own homes and exert control and normalization processes on their physical bodies. It seems that DiGrazia and Boucher’s dream class includes assignments that focus mainly around self-reflection and transformative writing, but I’m more interested in the second assignment, the textual analysis paper. It seems that a visual analysis would be a good “foot-in-the-door” for this type of critical work. And I think our students are ready for it. My students begin the visual analysis unit by choosing a Banksy image (they are then free to move to other images for the actual essay, or they can stick with a Banksy image and find another to use as well). Every quarter, a handful of them are drawn to this one in particular (I do not/will not use Pinterest, but I encourage someone to pin this):

Without even realizing it, Banksy is a perfect example of queer rhetoric; he resists and challenges norms and he queers “art.” His ethos is questioned, his legitimacy is doubted, and he operates in a liminal, trans sort of legal area. He pushes back against authority and exposes ugly truths by disrupting the things we claim make us who we are. This queer layering could provide for some interesting discussions, so I’m going to experiment more with the queer rhetoric lens alongside Banksy next semester.

PS – if you haven’t yet read Stone Butch Blues (by Leslie Feinberg), please do so. When you read it, you’ll understand why.