Bis/Inlegvaling lIe Oa/Queev Binav Beconslvucled Idenlil FoIilics Jov a FevJovnalive

Fedagog
AulIov|s) Kaven KopeIson
Souvce CoIIege EngIisI, VoI. 65, No. 1, SpeciaI Issue LesIian and Oa Sludies/Queev Fedagogies
|Sep., 2002), pp. 17-35
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17
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary:
"Reconstructed
Identity
Politics" for a
Performative
Pedagogy
Karen
Kopelson
And
if disruption only
fractures
and doesn't
again
create connection,
[...]
it will lack the vital
energy
[.. .] to sustain its own
taxing
work.
-Joy
Ritchie and Kathleen
Boardman,
"Feminism in
Composition"
ver ten
years
have now
passed
since
Judith
Butler's Gender Trouble
began
mak-
ing
trouble with its
challenges
to the
systems
of
gender
and
sexuality.
The
book has been translated into nine
languages; anniversary
editions have been
released,
and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in
subsequent
articles, interviews,
and
book-length
works. In
short,
Gender
Trouble, and,
most
par-
ticularly,
the
theory
of
performativity
delineated within this
book,
has remained on
postmodern theory's
"center
stage"
since its 1990
appearance.
Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her
original
and more modest intentions for
it,
and she credits the
continually "changing
context
of its
reception"
for Gender Trouble's endurance
("Preface" vii).
While Butler's hu-
mility
and attribution to audiences here are
refreshing,
Gender Trouble's central claims
did constitute theoretical interventions of the first
order,
disrupting
feminism as
many
of us knew
it,
and
helping
to found
queer theory
in the
process. Subverting
common-sense beliefs that
gender
and
sexuality
are fundamental truths of the
self,
Gender Trouble
(in
what are now statements of their own
commonplace familiarity)
tells us instead that both are
always
acts,
expressions,
behaviors, which,
like
performative speech acts,
bring
into existence that which
they
name, and,
through
their
repetition,
come to constitute the identities
they
are
purported
to be. In other
Ka r e n
Kopel
son
completed
her doctoral work in rhetoric and
composition
at Purdue
University
in
August
2002. This
essay
is a revised version of a
portion
of her
dissertation, "Teaching
Trouble:
Performativity
and
Composition Pedagogies-Composing
Connections." She is now assistant
professor
of
English
at the
University
of Louisville.
College English,
Volume
65,
Number
1, September
2002
18
College English
words,
Butler
posits
that while
expressions
of both
gender
and
sexuality
are
widely
understood to arise
"naturally"
from and
correspond "logically"
to some real sub-
stance of the
self,
they
are instead entrenched behaviors that
produce
the illusion of
an
originary
substance.
Repeated
and reified over
time,
the
specific
acts of
gender
and
sexuality
become
(mis)perceived
as the
generalfacts
of
gender
and
sexuality.
Yet,
despite
the continued "center
stage"
status and
interdisciplinary,
interna-
tional circulation of these and similar
claims,
Butler's
theory
of
performativity
has
only recently begun
to
creep backstage
in
composition
studies. As
Joy
Ritchie and
Kathleen Boardman write in the
fiftieth-anniversary
issue of
College Composition
and
Communication,
Butler's
insurgent
notions of
gender
and
sexuality
as
performative
are
powerfully "disruptive
narratives of difference" that "await further
exploration"
in and
by
the field
(599). Performativity
remains most
conspicuously
absent,
per-
haps,
from
composition scholarship
that is
expressly pedagogical
in focus-and this
despite
the
possibility
that,
as Pamela
Caughie argues, pedagogy might
well be "the
site where
performative theory
comes to have
public
relevance"
(92).
The undertheorization of
performativity
in
composition
studies, however,
by
no means reveals a
paucity
of
disciplinary
conversation around issues of sexual iden-
tity
and
homophobia. Many
teacher-scholars in
composition
have
sought
to dem-
onstrate,
for
example,
the
ways
in which sexual
identity
is not an issue limited to
lesbian and
gay
students but is relevant to all
writing
students and
necessarily
situ-
ated within our
disciplinary purview (Alexander; Malinowitz).
Others have
posited
strategies
for
teaching
tolerance of sexual difference to the intolerant
(Alexander;
Berg
et
al.).
Still others have
sought
to determine what classroom conditions and
pedagogical approaches might
best facilitate the
comfort,
safety,
and
optimal
learn-
ing
situations for lesbian and
gay
students
themselves,
so that
they might
"come to
voice" as writers
(Alexander;
Hart and
Parmeter; Malinowitz;
Regan;
Sloane). And,
finally,
an
especially prolific
line of
inquiry
has focused on the
specific challenges
faced
by gay/lesbian
instructors,
with a
particular emphasis
on the
perils
and
plea-
sures of
coming
out,
or
being
visible,
in the
composition
or
English
studies class-
room
(Adams
and
Emery;
Elliot; Malinowitz;
Mittler and
Blumenthal;
Regan).
Yet,
as even this most
cursory
of overviews should
begin
to
reveal,
what these
related strands of
scholarship
have in common is a certain
positioning-and by
cer-
tain I mean both
particular
and assured-of
queer identity.
In other
words,
in direct
contradistinction to
performative conceptions
of
subjectivity,
much
composition
scholarship-again, especially
that which is
expressly pedagogical
in focus-takes as
its
starting point
the
assumption
of a real and stable
gay/lesbian identity
and then
devotes itself to
examining
and
optimizing
educative conditions for
subjects
who
occupy
that
identity. Apparently, composition
studies is not alone in this trend. In
her
ethnographic study
of lesbian
academics,
Subject
to
Identity,
Susan Talburt con-
cludes that
"[d]espite poststructural challenges"
to the
autonomy
of identities and
the coherence of
selves,
"identity,
voice,
and
visibility"
continue to
"prevail
in un-
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
19
derstandings
of
gay
and lesbian academic work" across a
variety
of
disciplines (23).
Queer
and
performative
theories, however,
are
particular
variations of
post-
modernist
understandings
of the self
posing
some of the most
vigorous critiques
to
these
"identity-based" approaches
to
education,
often
zeroing
in on the
approaches'
consummate theme:
visibility,
or
being
"out" in the classroom. In its
disintegration
of coherence and
especially pointed
assault on
any
notions of the
real,
performativity,
and
queer theory
more
generally,
"renders the entire
category
of 'the
gay' suspect"
(Savoy 138),
and instead
exposes
and dismantles the
regulatory processes
of
subject
formation and
categorization
themselves. In this
essay,
I will first
explore
some
queer
and
performative objections, challenges,
and
counterproposals
to the
identity-based
pedagogies
still
dominating composition
studies and
closely
related
fields,
bringing
to the
foreground pedagogies
that take the
instability
of
identity
as a
starting point
and move toward even
greater
deconstruction.
Then,
to redress what is fast becom-
ing
a
gay/queer dichotomy-with
advocates of
identity-based pedagogies positioned
strategically
in one
"camp,"
and
proponents
of
queer
and
performative pedagogies
staked out in another-I will
propose
a tentative theoretical
(re)solution
that dis/
integrates
the
binary underlying
these "two"
approaches
to
praxis.
MAKING IT PERFECTLY
QUEER:
OUT IS IN-AND THAT'S
OUT
(CHALLENGES
TO IDENTITY-BASED
TEACHING)
"Contrary
to its
intentions,"
writes
Henry
Giroux,
identity politics
and
groups
rooted
in
identity politics
"were
simply
unable to articulate a new social vision"
(52).
While
identity politics
has been criticized on almost innumerable
fronts,
one of the most
far-reaching critiques
is that it fails to disturb
hegemonic systems
of domination. As
a
politics
of affirmation and
recognition, identity politics may finally
be unable to
articulate a new social vision
precisely
because,
as Giroux also
notes,
it does not
really
"seek the transformation of
society
in
general" (52), but,
more
often,
the in-
clusion of subordinate
groups
into
society's
extant
power
structures. Of
course,
ad-
vocates of
identity-based
work
(including identity-based pedagogies)
contend that
the mere inclusion or notable
presence
of new voices and
groups
will alter
existing
and even
spawn
new social
structures,
but
queer
and
performative
theories
proceed
from a different
understanding
and take a different
approach.
Queer
theory
chal-
lenges
us to move
beyond
rather than into the
governing
structures of
available,
and
oppositional, designations
for
sexuality.
Because it views all
identity
slots as
"regula-
tory
mechanisms of the dominant culture"
(Carlson 113), queer theory challenges
us to
resist,
rather than run
away
with,
the
ready-made
(and
rainbow-colored)
ban-
ner
LesBiGay;
it
challenges
us,
in other
words,
to
reorganize
or,
perhaps
more accu-
rately,
to
disorganize,
rather than
merely organize
around,
our terms.
Even more
specifically,
as the
performative
rearticulation of
gender
and sexual-
ity posits
the fundamental lack of substance beneath the acts of
gender
and
sexuality,
20
College English
it establishes these
categories
as
highly
unstable and
open
to
resignification.
When
gender
and
sexuality
are understood as
expressions
of
repeated expressions,
rather
than as
expressions
of an authentic
self,
conveniently
bounded
identity categories
tend to dissolve and a
productive
confusion takes their
place.
A
queer
or
performative
pedagogy,
in
fact,
often strives to
confuse,
as it strives to
push thought beyond
cir-
cumscribed divisions-strives to
push thought beyond
what can be
thought
(Britzman
155). Ranging
from
explorations
of the
teacher-body's
mere
presence
as a confound-
ing, uninterpretable
text,
to overt recommendations that teachers
"play
around" in
their classrooms with the
express
intention of
disrupting
students'
identity-based
expectations,
the
burgeoning
work on
performativity
in the
pedagogical setting
re-
jects coming
out in the classroom as an
answer,
preferring
instead to raise unanswer-
able, perhaps
even
inarticulable,
questions
about
uncategorizable
selves. In
short,
a
performative pedagogy
endeavors to
proliferate
innumerable-and inenumerable-
possibilities
for
identity,
rather than to
represent
one bounded
identity
or the
other,
ultimately
to
expose
and contest the
normalizing processes
of
identity's
construc-
tion.
Deborah
Britzman,
in "Is There a
Queer
Pedagogy?" acknowledges
that com-
ing
out in the classroom often does
provide
an
important
"double
remedy:
on the
one hand for
hostility
toward social difference for those who cannot
imagine
differ-
ence, and,
on the
other,
for the lack of self-esteem for those who are
imagined
as
having
no self"
(158).
In
simple
terms,
the teacher who is out can serve as a role
model for
gay
students, and,
for
many straight
students,
becomes a visible
represen-
tative of an
identity
that
might
otherwise remain an abstraction.
Yet,
while one must
be careful not to minimize the
importance
of the "double
remedy"
in and to the lives
of both
gay
and
straight
students,
this role-model
approach,
as Britzman
points out,
often reduces the
gay
or lesbian teacher "to the
problem
of
remedying homopho-
bia"
(158),
and
assigns
us sole
responsibility
for this work.
Moreover,
though, any
discourse that centers on
homophobia
runs the risk of
reducing
hatred and fear of
homosexuality
to a
problem
of the individual
psyche.
Most often defined as an
individual's fear of or
antipathy
toward homosexual
people,
and/or as fear of
lurking
homoerotic desire within the
self,
homophobia
as a term
clearly
forecloses institu-
tional
analysis. Teaching
to counter
homophobia,
then,
as Britzman
puts
it,
"stalls
within a humanist
psychological
discourse"
(158), personalizing
and
pathologizing
the fear of
homosexuality,
rather than
uncovering homophobia's implication
in-its
wholesale
dependence upon-pervasive
and
systemic
heterosexism and
heteronormativity. Finally,
discourses that centralize
homophobia
also tend to enact
a
sneaky
and
dangerous contradictory
movement: while
pathologizing negative
feel-
ings
toward homosexuals as ill-conceived
fear,
they
nevertheless work
always
and
only
from the
point
of view
of
the one who
fears,
thus
ultimately validating
the fear
itself,
and
recuperating (a doubting
and
squeamish) heterosexuality
as norm.
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
21
That it
proceeds
from the
quotidian premise
of
countering homophobia,
how-
ever,
is not the sole reason critics of
coming
out in the classroom find it a
particu-
larly
dull and innocuous intervention in
epistemological
business as usual. A much
more
persistent
discussion,
in
fact,
centers on a
multiplicity
of risks associated with
the "out" instructor's
becoming
the
text,
the
content,
the focal
point
of the class
(see,
for
example,
Adams and
Emery; Ingebretsen;
Parfitt; Talburt,
"On Not
Coming
Out" and
Subject
to
Identity).
Edward
Ingebretsen,
for
example,
contends that to
come out is often to
engage
the
specular
and become the
spectacle-to
risk becom-
ing
not
just
the
text,
but the sex-text of the classroom
(32).
Out
teachers,
he
writes,
become
"entangled
in a
grammar
of the
pornographic"; [.
. .] framed "within a li-
bidinal discourse of
violation, contamination,
and seduction"
(17).
In
simple
terms,
when we come
out,
we become scandalous. At the
very
least,
the overdetermined
"scandal" of our out-ness
may
distract students and/or detract from course
pur-
poses.
It
may
also
prove dangerous,
of
course,
if we are accused of
inappropriately
sexualizing
the classroom
(Chapkis 15).
But from a
queer
or
performative perspec-
tive,
coming
out in the classroom
may
be
counterproductive
because it is to write
ourselves into
existing identity categories
and all the narratives that surround and
support
them. As Foucault has
famously posited, speaking
the "truth" of one's sexu-
ality, although pervasively
viewed as an act of liberation from
repressive
cultural
constraints,
more often
simply obeys
societal mandates to name and confess one's
self/sins, and,
in so
doing,
inducts our
sexuality
into the cultural
machinery
that can
then further contain and
manage
it
(see,
for
example, History of Sexuality I).
From
within
composition studies,
Michelle Ballif
similarly
reminds us that
"[s]peaking
true to the
place
wherein
you
have
already
been
spoken
is not a
point
of
departure."
If it
were,
"we should
expect
to see all
power
structures come
tumbling
down with
every
utterance of
supposedly 'repressed'
discourses"
(88, 79).
What
queer
theorists
see
instead, however,
is that
coming
out
simply obeys
and reinforces the laws of
sexual
categories,
and of their
knowable,
nameable selves.
Indeed,
scholars across a
variety
of
disciplines
have confirmed this
phenom-
enon,
warning
that to come out in the
classroom,
more often than
not,
is to become
the
representative
of an
essentialized,
preconceived,
and
wholly dominating queer
identity.
"If
you
come out in
your
classroom,"
Kate Adams and Kim
Emery
admit,
"you
will be 'the' lesbian
professor,
and
every [...] preconception, [...] every
stereo-
type
and
misconception,
will
get stapled
to
you" (32).
Even Butler calls it "exhaust-
ing"
to come out and have
"[w]hatever you say [.
. .] read back as an overt or subtle
manifestation of
your
essential
homosexuality" (Psychic 93). Moreover,
and
perhaps
more
important,
Butler warns of the risks of "renormalization" now attendant
upon
the
coming-out
act itself
(Psychic 93),
a risk that Matthew Parfitt elaborates in a
paper given
at the 1999 Conference on
College Composition
and Communication.
Reduced
by
the mainstream media to a "cultural
cliche,"
the
coming-out
narrative,
22
College English
Parfitt
suggests,
is
"rapidly losing
its force as an intervention into the values of middle-
class America."
By
the
logic
of this
critique, then,
coming
out is
hardly
scandalous or
"spectacular"
but is sanitized and assimilated into the dominant culture to the extent
that it disturbs
nothing,
and
may
even serve to
"disguise
more than it reveals about
the
complexities
of sexual
identity" (Parfitt 4).
Defending coming
out from "the radical
destabilizing
of
post-structuralist
theo-
ries"
(181), Julia
Creet contends that
being
out is itself a
performative
act crucial to
establishing homosexuality's
"distinctness" and thus to
defending
it
"against
re-
incorporation"
into
heterosexuality
and its narratives
(186).
Butler and others would
argue,
however,
that the insistence
upon homosexuality's
"distinctness" is
precisely
whatfacilitates
its
reincorporation
into extant narratives of
identity generally,
and into
the heterosexual matrix
specifically.
Because to come out is
always
to come out
as,
it
cannot disturb
processes
of
regulatory categorization.
Because it is to come out as
heterosexuality' oppositional
other,
it cannot disturb the
binary logic
that surrounds
sexuality,
nor the attendant
process
of
privileging
and
devaluing
that surrounds this
particular
and
every
other
pervasive binary system.
And because to come out is to
come out into an entrenched and certified
binary system,
it
certainly
can never even
approach,
much less
interrogate,
what is
supposedly
"interior" to
discrete, unified,
and
oppositional
hetero- and homosexualities.
That it cannot do this work
may
be
coming
out's most
pernicious shortcoming,
for,
as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write in their
essay
"Sex in
Public,"
the
"metacultural work of the
very category
of
heterosexuality"
is and has been to
"[con-
solidate]
as a
sexuality widely differing practices,
norms,
and institutions"
(316).
In
other
words,
heterosexuality
is not
now,
and since its invention has not
been,
"a
static
system
of sexual
practice,"
but is a
category
whose definition and
repertoire
of
acceptable
acts alters
and,
to increase its cultural
hold,
usually expands (Connell
394).
While the United States has for
many years
been "saturated
by"
what Berlant
and Warner call "the
project
of
constructing
national
heterosexuality,"
heterosexual
culture "is neither a
single Symbolic
nor a
single ideology
nor a unified set of shared
beliefs." The
project
of social saturation
succeeds,
that
is,
precisely
to the extent that
it convinces us that
heterosexuality
is
singular
and
all-encompassing (Berlant
and
Warner
316-17). Moreover,
while heterosexist institutions work to
promulgate
a
heterosexuality
that is
expansive
and
hegemonic
in its
singularity, they simultaneously
work to reduce the
province
of
queerness by confining homosexuality
to a
position
of aberrant and
insignificant singularity.
As Ladelle McWhorter
points
out in Bodies
and
Pleasures,
"homophobic [...
.]
institutions work hard to
homogenize
us,"
to de-
pict queers
of all kinds "as
practitioners
of a
single lifestyle,"
which,
in
turn,
makes
us easier to
manage,
and easier to dismiss
(88). Thus,
while
heterosexuality
achieves
a
singularity
that takes
over,
homosexuality
is
relegated
to a
singularity
that trans-
lates as
small, anomalous, irrelevant,
unthreatening.
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
23
To the extent that
coming
out as
gay
or lesbian both
lays
claim to an
already
managed identity
and reconsolidates
heterosexuality
as the
singular
and
overarching
norm we have moved
away
from,
it is an act
complicit
in
heterosexuality's
metacultural
work-a
point
that Butler
argues cogently
in The
Psychic Life of
Power. To
Butler,
the
disavowal of
heterosexuality
that serves to constitute a
gay
or lesbian
identity
not
only presumes
the
falsely
unified
heterosexuality
that Berlant and Warner
describe,
but,
by positing homosexuality
as
heterosexuality's
fallen
other,
actually helps
main-
tain the latter's dominance. For
Butler,
in other
words,
a
rejection ofultimately
indi-
cates that some form of identification with has taken
place,
a
process
which ensures
the
perpetual
reconstitution of
heterosexuality
as the
original
and
controlling desig-
nation to be reckoned with-even if
only
to be cast off.
Thus,
in
defining
ourselves
as
having rejected heterosexuality, gays
and lesbians
may reject
instead the
opportu-
nity
to dismantle heterosexual
hegemony.
The
gay
and lesbian "effort to disavow a
constitutive
relationship
to
heterosexuality,"
Butler
writes,
"misses the
political op-
portunity [.
. .] to refute the
logic
of mutual exclusion
by
which heterosexism
pro-
ceeds." She
suggests
that we risk "the incoherence of
identity"
to more
productively
"work on the weakness in heterosexual
subjectivation" (148-49).
In
short,
queer
theorists who
problematize coming
out see it as an act of sim-
plistic re-presentation
that fails to
disrupt
normative
identity
and social structures
because it is
complicit,
even
invested,
in their
perpetual
reconstitution. "To be out is
really
to be
in,"
Dennis Carlson
pointedly
summarizes-"inside the realm of the
visible,
the
speakable,
the
culturally intelligible" (110). Queer
and
performative peda-
gogues,
then,
often take
up
Butler's call to risk the incoherence of
identity. Perhaps
more to the
point, they
are not
only "willing
to risk" but
actually
work to
compose
identities that are
inscrutable,
troubling,
outside the realm of what can be known.
While Butler has
emphasized
time and
again
that
performativity
is a
descriptive
theory
of a
compelled
reiteration that
precedes
and constitutes the
subject, queer
pedagogues
tend to work themselves into the
spaces
Butler does leave us for volition
in order to "work the
weakness,"
as she
puts
it,
in
normalizing processes
(Bodies
237). Thus,
theirs is the
"necessarily impure" reception,
translation,
and
appropria-
tion of
theory
that Butler
describes,
and even
advocates,
in her
updated preface
to
the tenth
anniversary
edition of Gender Trouble
(ix). Performativity,
as it enters the
pedagogical setting,
becomes tactical
performativity, theory
in action at a
particular
site. It becomes
praxis.
QUEER:
IT'S A
VERB;
IT'S A
NAME;
AND
IT'S NOT
JUST
FOR HOMOS ANYMORE
Queer
is a
continuing
moment, movement, motive-recurrent,
eddying,
troublant.
The word
"queer"
itself means across-it comes from the
Indo-European
root
-twerkw,
24
College English
which also
yields
the German
quer (transverse),
Latin
torquere (to twist),
and
English
athwart.
(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies)
In
action,
performative pedagogies
often strive to trouble sexual and other
identity
divisions
precisely by exceeding
what is
thought
and known about
identity's
"evi-
dent" markers. Deborah
Meem,
for
example,
in the
collaboratively
written CCC
essay,
"Bi, Butch,
and Bar
Dyke: Pedagogical
Performances of
Class, Gender,
and
Sexuality,"
describes her own version of what Butler
might
call
"corporeal
theatrics"
(see "Imitation"):
in and
beyond
the
classroom,
Meem finds that her femaleness is
"complicated
both
by
a butch
self-presentation"
and
by
the fact that she is a mother
with
grown
children,
and
argues
that this
overlay
of
identity
markers "leads students
and
colleagues
to react to
[her]
in
ways
that indicate their
(not fully conscious)
aware-
ness of
multiple, incongruent
identities"
(Gibson, Marinara,
and Meem
79).
Talburt
narrates a similar scenario in
Subject
to
Identity,
when she describes
participant
Carol
Davis's
performative pedagogy
(all
names of
participants
in Talburt's
study
are
pseud-
onyms). Finding,
like
many
lesbians of
color,
that her "race obscures her lesbianism"
(29),
Davis works
against
the
"singular
construction" of her
identity
as
always
and
only
that of a racialized
subject (168).
As Talburt
explains, by "insert[ing]
her less
visible identities
[...] strategically"
into classroom
space
and
departmental politics,
Davis refuses both the
fixity
of location and the dominance of one identification
over another. She contests and
complicates society's
monolithic construction of her
as
always
and
only
a black
female;
she
"exceed[s]
the
place
into which she would be
put" (187).
Clearly,
the notion of excess becomes a recurrent theme in the two
preceding
examples:
Carol Davis's
performance
of self
surpasses
her more
conspicuous
iden-
tity
of black woman and its attendant
expectations,
and also contests the construc-
tion of lesbianism as
only
and
always
white.
Meanwhile,
Deborah Meem's self
simultaneously
overflows
categorical understandings
of
female, lesbian, butch,
and
mother. Ritchie and Boardman
(along
with feminists across a
variety
of
disciplines)
assert that
"[o]ne
of feminism's most
potentially powerful
tools is the
deployment
of
what is
excessive,
what is
other,"
and ask that we look to excess as a
possible trope
for
future
inquiry, theorizing,
and
teaching
in
composition (602).
Excess is
productively
disruptive,
Ritchie and Boardman remind
us,
because it can "force dominant
per-
spectives
into crisis
management,"
thus
initiating
more
complex
and rounded
explo-
rations of difference
(602).
Perhaps
the most common
critique
of
identity politics,
of
course,
is that it fore-
closes this
possibility
of
excess;
that
is,
as
marginalized groups organize
to
rectify
their outsider
status,
they
create a
falsely
unified front that itself becomes exclusion-
ary
in its disavowal of
multiplicity
within the
group,
in its failure to make
spaces
for
differences within difference. Performative
pedagogies respond directly
to this di-
lemma, for,
as the Meem and Talburt/Davis
examples begin
to
suggest,
the
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
25
performative pedagogue,
unlike the teacher who comes out as in the
classroom,
allows for
and, indeed,
actively
constructs a self that is
multiple,
a self in excess of
identity per
se. Performative
pedagogy
is thus "a
'doing'
that disclaims
'being"'
(Talburt,
"On Not"
65)-or
at least a
doing
that disclaims the idea of
"being"
as
singular,
unified,
and static.
That
they
allow for
multiplicity,
that
they
enact and
proliferate
differences within
difference,
is therefore seen as one of the
greatest advantages
of
queer
or
performative
pedagogies
over
pedagogies
of
disclosure/coming
out,
which tend to leave the
regu-
latory
and
exclusionary
work of
identity
as a
system
untouched,
and to
perpetuate
confining
notions of identities as
singular,
discrete,
and immutable.
However,
a
queer
or
performative pedagogy
is also
tremendously powerful
in its
ability
to transcend
categories
of
sexuality altogether.
As
Sedgwick
has
written,
and as Meem's and Davis's
pedagogical
and
departmental politics again
reveal,
queer
work
"spins
the term out-
ward
along
dimensions that can't be subsumed under
gender
and
sexuality
at all"
(8-
9),
and thus offers
all
educators theoretical frameworks for
reflecting
on,
interrogating,
and
composing multiple aspects
of
pedagogy
and self.
To
put
this another
way, any aspect
of
identity,
or
any
intersection of
aspects
of
identity,
can be
"queered." Roger
Simon,
for
example,
in the
essay
"Face to Face
with
Alterity,"
describes his
pedagogical performance
as one that
"challenge[s]
stu-
dents to
forego
closure on their
conception
of
Jewish identity,"
as a
performance
that
multiplies
rather than reifies
understandings
of what it means to be a
Jew (100).
Julie
Howard
(pseudonym),
another
subject
in Talburt's
study,
takes a
strikingly
similar
approach
to her
dynamic pedagogical position
of Catholic lesbian
religious-studies
professor.
Like
Simon,
Howard
attempts
to forestall
closure,
to "undercut some of
[students'] rigidities,"
about what it means to be Catholic
or,
perhaps
more
broadly,
about what it looks and sounds like to
occupy
a
position
of "faith"
(105).
Howard
describes her classroom behavior to Talburt as
"playing
with" her
students-keep-
ing
them "off balance"
by deliberately shifting among
and between
positions
of
pro-
vocative
skepticism
and fervent belief
(102).
Thus,
while
identity,
and
pedagogies
based in
disclosing/representing identity,
offer us
only
a
designation
to
be,
queer
or
performative pedagogies
offer us a com-
prehensive way of being
in relation to the
very process of designation.
Queer
is a term that
offers to us and our students an
epistemological position-a way
of
knowing,
rather
than
something
to be known.
Or,
as Britzman
phrases
it,
the
"queer"
in
queer theory
signifies
"actions not actors. It can be
thought
of as a verb"
(153), and,
as a
verb,
can
become a
generative approach
to
pedagogical inquiry
that not
only
transcends cat-
egories
of
sexuality,
but transcends individual selves as well. In other
words,
while
the
pedagogical examples
offered thus far illustrate means
by
which teachers
queerly
perform
their own identities in relation to both what
they
teach and how
they
are
read
by
others,
one can also
queer identity
on a
conceptual
level.
Giroux,
for ex-
26
College English
ample,
offers in the
essay
"White Noise" a
"strategic pedagogical approach
to white-
ness" that
aspires
toward the rearticulation of whiteness in different terms
(51, 71).
While he never uses the term
queer,
the
language
he does
use,
and his
overarching
process, betrays
a
queering sensibility: Believing
that white students have
only
two
opposed
choices-to
accept
normative whiteness or to cast it off as a racist
identity
and then
"over-identify"
with its
"opposite,"
blackness
(51, 69)-Giroux, through
popular
films and other
texts,
constructs a
"layered
account of whiteness" that
"[rup-
tures]
singular
definitions,"
and
"allow[s]
white
youth
and others to
appropriate
se-
lective elements" of whiteness as
progressive,
subversive,
and
oppositional (43-44,
66).
While Giroux's
essay
remains both
speculative
and
flawed,
particularly
in its
failure to connect whiteness to other normative identities such as maleness or het-
erosexuality,
for
example,
and
perhaps
also for its
simple
failure to
acknowledge
the
queerness
of its
approach,
it nonetheless
provides
another
glimpse
of
queering
as
strategy
and
epistemological
stance. To catch this
glimpse,
we need
only queer
Giroux-reappropriating, twisting,
and then
rearticulating
selective elements of his
work in different terms.
QUEER TODAY;
GONE TOMORROW: THE CASE FOR IDENTITY
Across a
variety
of
disciplines
and fields of
inquiry,
scholars have voiced their con-
cern that the
postmodern
sense of
play
that often informs the act of
queering,
and
that informs
queer
and
performative
theories more
generally,
risks
erasing
the
gains
made
by identity politics.
Within
composition
studies,
Harriet Malinowitz and
Mary
Elliot have been
particularly
vocal
proponents
of this stance.
Elliot,
for
example,
in
"Coming
Out in the
Classroom,"
admonishes us to remember our
predecessors
and
realize that
"flirting
on the
edges"
of
identity
is
only possible today
because others
have
struggled
to
solidify
the
very "categories
that we
may
now elect to
perform."
She wonders if "the
gender play
of
postmodern pedagogy"
doesn't amount to
"just
more
self-effacement,"
a return to
"invisibility,"
for
gay
and lesbian teachers and
students who are
already-and
still-in
perilous positions, socially, legally,
and within
the educational institution itself
(699-700). Similarly,
Malinowitz
argues
that vis-
ibility
is indeed "too
precious
a
concept
to sacrifice to the
ostensibly greater good
of
deconstruction"
(75),
and
ultimately
remains committed to
preserving
stable identi-
ties,
rather than to
proliferating
new and
unexpected
ones. It is
important
to note
here, however,
that Malinowitz decides to "fall
back,"
as she
puts
it,
on the
identity
distinctions "that
many
in the field of
gender
studies are
seeking
to
dismantle,"
not
because she believes the
categories
reflect
"any underlying
truth about human iden-
tity,"
but because she believes
they
do reflect "a 'truth' about our
culture,"
and about
our students' needs within that culture
(27, 203). Gay
and lesbian
students,
Malinowitz
argues,
do not need to "dismantle" notions of
identity;
in her
view,
this task has
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
27
proved "distressing" enough
for theorists and activists
"challenged
and
inspired
to
take
up
the
enterprise,"
and "can
certainly
seem
altogether
beside the
point"
for
students
just beginning
to
recuperate
from shame and
experience empowerment
(203). Coming
or
being
out in the
classroom,
for
students,
and for teachers as
well,
Malinowitz
concludes,
"requires courage
and
stamina";
like
Elliot,
she sees the in-
terrogation
of
identity
as a
"luxury"
we still cannot afford
(75).
In
short,
those
who,
like Malinowitz and
Elliot,
make
theoretically
informed choices to enact
identity-
based
pedagogies
often do so based on the
(hard-to-dispute)
belief that
gay
and
lesbian and other
marginalized
students' needs as social
subjects
are more
pressing
than is the theoretical deconstruction of the
subject.
Their fear is that
pedagogies
based in
queer
and/or
performative
theories will have the
decidedly
ironic effect of
theorizing queers right
out of existence-before our existence has even been so-
cially legitimated (Savoy 139).
As the concerns articulated above
indicate,
a
performative pedagogical
stance is
often viewed as a recalcitrant refusal to
"represent
ourselves"
(Chaput 50),
rather
than as the more
complex
refusal to
represent
ourselves as. It is viewed as "tanta-
mount to
capitulating
to
compulsory ambiguity,"
rather than as a
strategic
enactment
ofambiguity (Talburt,
"On Not"
71).
While
any "concealing"
involved in
performative
pedagogies
is
concealing
that
always
and
ultimately
aims to reveal-to
reveal,
for
example,
the
insufficiency
of the
identity categories
we use to frame and understand
one another
(Simon 102-03)-these
acts are often
(mis)understood
as some sort of
"selling
out" or return to
hiding,
rather than as
deeply
theorized moves in their own
right.
Or,
as in the work of Malinowitz and
Elliot,
they
are viewed as
particularly
misguided
theoretical
moves,
no matter how
deeply
considered. In
simple
terms,
queer
and
performative
theories are read as somehow
anti-visibility
and
representa-
tion.
English
and Women's Studies
professor
Toni McNaron
argues
this
position
most
explicitly
when she cites as one of the benefits of
queer theory
its
ability
to
offer "a
protective
umbrella for some
faculty
who
might
otherwise refrain from in-
tegrating
their sexual orientation into their work"
(18).
While McNaron sees this
gesture
toward
"integration"
as
good
for
queer faculty
and their
students,
she ulti-
mately
sees the recent
privileging
of
queer theory
and its
complications
of
identity
as
destructively
"counter to the ideas" of those who have come before
us,
and of
those
who,
today, repudiate queer theory's protective
shield in order to "continue to
advocate for
greater visibility"
and
representation
of
gay
and lesbian
subjects (18).
DIS/INTEGRATING THE BINARY/REFUSING THE RIFT
We live in both/and worlds filled with
paradox
and
uncertainty. (Patti Lather,
Getting
Smart)
At
times,
such
simplifications
are
necessary.
Such a dualism can be
provisionally
use-
28
College English
ful,
to
change
the
perspective
from time to time and move from
pro
to contra. [.
.
.]
What should follow is the moment of new
mobility
and new
displacement,
for these
reversals of
pro
and contra are
quickly
blocked, being
unable to do
anything except
repeat
themselves.
[...]
One must
pass
to the other side
[..
.]
but
by trying
to turn off
these mechanisms which cause the
appearance
of two
separate
sides,
by dissolving
the
false
unity,
the
illusory
"nature" of this other side with which we have taken sides.
This is where the real work
begins.
[.
. .]
(Michel Foucault,
"Power and
Sex")
McNaron does offer us a keen and
consequential insight,
however,
and that is that
the "rift"
forming
between advocates of
queer
work and advocates of
identity-based
work "stands to
splinter
the
gay
and lesbian academic
community" (18).
While dis-
agreement
and
divisiveness,
to a certain
extent,
often confirm that a field of
inquiry
has
"arrived,"
and while
they
most
definitely
can
generate
further,
and often more
intricate and
responsive, theorizing, they
can also
unproductively
divert our ener-
gies. Many
in
English
studies are
already seeking
to mend this
developing
rift
by
advocating
theorized
postures
that
commingle
elements of both
identity-based
and
performative paradigms.
Eric
Savoy
and Catherine
Chaput,
for
instance,
both
sug-
gest
that we "claim the double
imperative" (Savoy 133)
of at once
asserting
and
problematizing, producing
and
deconstructing, identity (Chaput 57).
These two
theorists
argue,
in other
words,
that it is feasible to
adopt
a
subject position
while
still
contesting
its
coherence,
possible
to
agitate
for the
rights
of certain
groups
while still
calling
attention to the
multiplicity
of differences within the
group.
In a
similar
vein,
Brenda Carr invokes
Gayatri Spivak's
notions of both
"strategic
essen-
tialism" and "deconstructive
homeopathy" (which
refers to a
process
of deconstruction
of
identity by identities)
to
suggest
that while we
might provisionally
need the "en-
abling
fiction" of
identity
for
agency,
we can
immediately interrogate
the idea of
identity
"as a stable home"
(123, 136).
AndJonathan
Dollimore
suggests
that we can
adopt
"a radical essentialism with
regard
to
[our]
own
identity,
while
simultaneously
offering
an
equally
radical and antiessentialist
critique
of the
essentializing
sexual
ideologies responsible
for
[our] oppression" (637).
Many
teacher-scholars also advocate a sort of tiered or
stage-model approach
to
identity, asserting
that the
adoption
and celebration of a
socially denigrated
sub-
ject position
is a
necessary, early step along
the
way
to an eventual
displacement
of
the
overarching binary
that exists to
denigrate (Dollimore 635;
Qualley 28).
Donna
Qualley argues
this
point
with
particular judiciousness
in
"Being
Two Places at Once:
Feminism and the
Development
of 'Both/And'
Perspectives."
Here,
Qualley sug-
gests
that
asking
students to
"negotiate
the thickets
of'multiplicity,' 'ambiguity'
and
'complexity' immediately"
is akin to
"asking
[them]
to arrive without
having
trav-
eled"
(2 5). Echoing
Malinowitz, Qualley
reminds us that students
may
need to con-
struct essentialist and
exclusionary conceptions
of self in order to recover from
personal
and
group
histories of
oppression
and come to
politicized
consciousness.
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
29
She
emphasizes,
however,
that essentialist
positions
need not be
permanent,
and
might
instead be viewed as
temporary
safe havens wherein
marginalized subjects
can bolster esteem and foster
community.
In
short,
Qualley
sees
universalism,
es-
sentialism,
and
binary thinking
itself as
phases
to
"pass
through"
in the
development
of self and
philosophy.
Moreover,
she
points
out that
composition
teachers are in an
"excellent
position
to
help
students
keep
their
thinking
fluid and
open
to redefini-
tion
by emphasizing
the
concept
of
revision,"
where revision means not surface
change,
but the total
"re-envisioning
of ideas"
(28).
Certainly,
these astute
blendings
of theoretical
paradigms gesture
toward
pro-
ductively integrating queer
academic work and can
provide
teachers with vital frame-
works for
thinking
about and
constructing pedagogical practice.
Yet,
in another
sense,
it is
precisely
because these
pragmatic
solutions
position
themselves as
blendings,
as
"both/and"
approaches,
that
they
reentrench the rift
they purport
to
bridge.
While
the
concept
of "both/and" has come to serve as a
catchy postmodern
alternative to
the
supposedly
more dichotomous
"either/or,"
the
very
clear sense of combination
conveyed by
the
phrase
still adheres to a
binary logic
that
posits
the continued exist-
ence of discrete and
divergent
elements. It is
possible,
then,
that
any
act of
bringing
together queer
and
identity-based pedagogies
is an act of
continuing
to think them
apart.
It is
important
to note
here, however,
that it is not
only
advocates of both/and
approaches
or of
"visibility"
who lock
pedagogies
of disclosure and
performative
pedagogies
into a "versus"
position.
Queer
theorists and
performative pedagogues
themselves,
it
seems,
are also
(and
quite ironically)
fettered to the dichotomous think-
ing
their work would eschew. For
example,
Olivia Moran
(pseudonym),
another
participant
in Talburt's
study
and a
queer
theorist
herself,
seems to view her
performative pedagogy
as the
polar opposite
of
pedagogies
of
disclosure,
repeating
to Talburt
"emphatically,
several
times,
'I am not the text in
my
class,"'
insisting
that
neither she nor her sexual
identity
is ever
subject
matter for her courses
(Subject
116).
Such
statements,
and the more
general
line of
reasoning
that invokes
queer
and
performative
theories as
remedy
for the scenario in which
teacher-identity
be-
comes a focus of the
class,
betray
a rather
alarming
naivete, for,
certainly,
to teach at
all is to be watched. To
occupy
the
position
of teacher is to
become,
quite literally,
a
focal
point
in that
room,
even in the most antiauthoritarian or student-centered
classroom;
it is to be
gazed upon, interpreted, anticipated, predicted,
and "sized
up";
it is to be
speculated
and
gossiped
about.
Thus,
while "calls for voice and
visibility"
are criticized on the
grounds
that
they
"have created an
imperative [...]
for
faculty
to
figure
themselves as classroom
texts,"
and while
performative pedagogies
are of-
ten
figured,
and
figure
themselves,
as a refusal of this textual
imperative (Talburt,
Subject 130),
the
overarching pedagogical imperative
itself has
always already
even-
tuated in the teacher's
textuality.
30
College English
To understand and indict-or even to
celebrate-performative praxes
as some-
how counter to
visibility
and teacher
textuality
is thus to remain
stubbornly
en-
trenched in the notions of narrow and
singular identity
formations that
performative
theories
contest,
for it is to understand and count as "visible" or "textual"
only repre-
sentations of the
same,
only
endless
repetitions
of what is known and
already
ab-
sorbed
by
the dominant culture. To
indict,
or to
celebrate, performative praxes
as
somehow
opposed
to
visibility
is to
deny
the
obvious,
for it is to
deny
that within and
because of these
praxes, something
does
appear. Indeed,
what come to the
foreground,
what are made visible in
performative praxes,
are
"emergent
identities-in-differ-
ence"-manifestations of selves not accounted
for,
perhaps
not
(yet)
even thinkable
in the dominant
culture,
but
which,
through
their
emergence,
work to transform
what culture can know and think
(Mufioz 7).
A
performative pedagogy
or
politics
of
any
kind is thus not a
regressive lapse
into
invisibility,
nor a
transgressive
refusal of
visibility,
but an
attempt
to render visible
something
we still haven't seen.
In
fact,
rather than
positing queer
and
performative
theories as counter to vis-
ibility,
we
might
be more
productively engaged by
some of the more
complex argu-
ments that
point
to the
ways
in which
queer
and
performative
theories are still
working
within the
paradigms
and
strategies
of
identity politics.
Materialist feminist Rose-
mary Hennessy
and
sociologist Stephen Seidman,
for
example,
both accuse
queer
theory
and activism of
remaining "intensely
and
aggressively
concerned" with
pro-
moting
the
visibility,
inclusion,
and tolerance of a
continually
"fetishized" homo-
sexual
identity (Hennessy
146;
Seidman 13
5).
And
many interrogate
the
way
in which
identity
in
general,
and not
just
sexual
identity,
remains a focal
point
and
organizing
principle
in
performative
theories and
pedagogies.
Talburt,
for
instance,
points
out
that her
subjects' performances
of self
always "rely
on essential
knowledges"
of
identity
even as
they
use those
knowledges
to
produce
inessential selves
(Subject 183).
In
other
words,
pedagogical performances
that aim to forestall closure on
conceptions
of
Jewishness, blackness,
religiosity,
whiteness,
or
lesbianism,
for
example,
or even
those that work to be inscrutable as
anything
known or
named,
must
always
hark
back to what is known and named for their
legibility
as deviation. While these
per-
formances of self
certainly
differ from
representationalism,
in that
they
are
always
relational to rather than
"specifically
locatable within
boundaries,"
in that
they
strive
to
rearrange
rather than fulfill
expectations, they
nonetheless retain as their
points
of
departure
and framework the bounded
categories
that
they
claim to renounce
(Talburt, Subject
145, 184).
This retention of
identity categories
as frame
certainly
has the
unsettling po-
tential to
twist, thwart,
queer,
if
you
will,
the
performative pedagogical
situation.
"[T]here
is a risk to
performativity
in
pedagogy
not often
acknowledged,"
writes
Caughie
in
Passing
and
Pedagogy,
and that is the risk of/in
reception:
while we
may
perceive
our own
pedagogical performances
as
transgressive
frolics in and
among
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
31
the ruins of stable
selfhood,
we
may
be understood to
simply occupy any
of the
posi-
tions we
put
into
incongruous play (95).
Because even
performances
of the most
inessential selves are
drawing
on essentialized
knowledges, they always
risk
reincorporation
as and into
essence;
we are not in control of how the texts of our
selves are
finally
read and
received,
and the will to normalization is
omnipresent
and
strong.
As Butler forewarns
(and
as her own work
exemplifies),
all
acts,
all utter-
ances
(including selves)
"continue to
signify
in
spite
of their
authors,
and sometimes
against
their authors' most
precious
intentions"
(Bodies
241). Thus,
when we "risk
the incoherence of
identity,"
we take an unavoidable risk
that,
ultimately
and in
spite
of
ourselves,
our identities will continue to cohere.
That the retention of
identity categories
leads to risk is
indisputable.
Yet to
understand the
perpetual
recurrence of
identity
as a
deficiency
of
queer
and
performative
theories and
pedagogies (a
la Seidman and
Hennessy)
is
perhaps
to
forget
the theoretical foundations
upon
which theories of
performativity
are built.
As Althusser made clear
thirty years ago,
one is
always already
within the
reigning
ideology;
there is no social or
linguistic position
that is
pre-,
non-,
or
post-ideologi-
cal. As there is no
exterior,
it is
only
"from within
ideology"
that one can ever "break
with
ideology" (173). Foucault, too,
has reminded us time and
again
that "resistance
is never in a
position
of
exteriority
in relation to
power";
that,
by
definition,
resis-
tance "can
only
exist in the
strategic
form of
power
relations"
(History 95-96).
And
Butler,
following
Foucault,
writes that one is "in
power
even as one
opposes
it,
formed
by
it as one reworks it"
(Bodies
241).
Moreover,
as the renowned statements above
suggest,
the fact of the
subject's
implication
in
ruling
social and
epistemological
structures neither
precludes
nor
dooms acts of
opposition;
on the
contrary,
it enables
them, becomes,
as Butler
says,
"the condition of action itself" (Bodies
241). Butler,
like
Derrida,
sees all
performative
acts,
whether
they
are
merely repetitive,
or
queerly
subversive,
as
citational,
as
wholly
dependent upon prior
acts for their
intelligibility (see
Derrida's
"Signature,
Event,
Context").
A
performative
act can
only
work at
all,
in other
words,
to the extent that
it is
recognizable,
and it can
only
be
recognizable
"to the extent that it draws on and
covers over the constitutive conventions
by
which it is mobilized"
(Butler, "Burning"
205).
With
respect
to
identity,
then,
a
confounding
or
incongruous performance
of
self is not less effective because it remains ever-framed
by
the conventions of iden-
tity;
it
is, rather,
only comprehensible
as a
departure,
as a new and
productively
confus-
ing presence,
because of the
enabling
frame it
escapes.
Extant notions of
identity
thus do remain the "raw material" for
performative
pedagogies,
but this is not a testament to their failure. On the
contrary,
it is
only
because we
inevitably
"retain the
problematic object"
of
identity
that we can
"tap
into the
energies
that are
produced"
when
identity categories prove inadequate
(Munoz 31, 71).
It is
only through
the
power
of
identity's
frame that we can mine the
32
College English
power
of that which will
escape
and
expand
its structure. In
Disidentifications,
his
illuminating study
of
queer performance
artists of
color, Jose
Esteban
Mufioz
de-
scribes the work of Latino
conceptual
artist Felix Gonzales-Torres as "a reconstructed
identity politics"-a rejection
of
any
obvious
understanding
of
identity
combined
with a focused and continual
"engagement
with the
question
of
identity" (164).
I
would like to
propose
that we extend Mufioz's localized use of this
phrase
to under-
stand
queer
and
performative
theories,
pedagogies,
and
politics
more
generally.
To
understand
them,
that
is,
not as antithetical to
identity politics
at
all,
but as forms of
radically
reconstructed,
and
continuously renegotiated, identity politics
themselves:
politics
where
identity
is a
persistent
and
provocative question,
but never a
certainty,
where
identity
"is never
pinned
down
by representation" (Mufioz 164),
but end-
lessly
broken down
by interrogation
and
complication.
Queer
theorists could ob-
ject,
of
course,
that
any
conflation of
queer
and
identity-based strategies inevitably
and
quite dangerously
neutralizes,
or even
negates altogether,
the
important depar-
turesfrom identity upon
which
queer
theories were
founded,
and
through
which
they
have
sought
to enact a more radical
project.
While this is a serious
concern,
we must
remember,
as Brett Levinson has
recently
written,
that "in
coming
'out"' into dis-
course,
into
circulation, queerness
is itself
"exposed."
And,
once
exposed,
it either
"opens
itself to its limits" or dies
(101).
In less dramatic
terms,
my proposal
seeks
only
to
acknowledge-and
to remind-that
queer,
as a
signifier
and as a
politics,
will
ever and
inevitably
bear traces
of,
and remain
implicated
in,
that which has
preceded
it. It will
inevitably repeat,
and,
like
identity
before
it,
come to be
(incompletely)
replaced.
Certainly
this
attempt
to reconceive of
queer
and
performative
theories and
pedagogies
as
radically
reconstructed
identity politics
shares much with earlier moves
toward both/and
perspectives.
Yet I
hope
it also
performs
the "new
displacement"
that Foucault calls for
(in
the
epigraph framing
this
section) by trying
to turn off the
very
mechanisms that convince us of two different
sides;
by questioning
the
very
idea of the
rift,
rather than
setting
about
trying
to mend it.
Perhaps
this
queer project
of
passing
to the other side where there are no sides will
prove
as
impossible
as the
project
of
dissociating
ourselves from
identity; perhaps "camps"
will continue to
form,
debates continue to wear rifts between and
inspire queer
scholars.
But,
as
feminist,
queer,
and critical race scholars across a
variety
of
disciplines
and theoreti-
cal
"camps"
have for
years
demonstrated,
there is far more at stake here than the
twists and turns of academic discussions
wrongly
accused of
being
insular,
of
being
"beside the
point"
for our students or for those
inhabiting
nonacademic communi-
ties. Continued
engagement
and
struggle
with hard
questions
about
identity
and
difference,
Simon reminds
us,
are
hardly "parochial pursuits,"
but "are tied to a
political project
whose task is the elaboration
[..
.]
of what it
might
mean to live and
work
ethically
within the embrace of
heteronomy" (92). Compositionists
have
long
Dis/Integrating
the
Gay/Queer Binary
33
been committed to this
project, seeking,
at our best and
perhaps
most definitive
moments,
to
escape confines,
exceed
boundaries,
and transform
styles
of
thinking
in
ways
that
help
to facilitate the arrival and enactment of more
truly
democratic fu-
tures (arratt
2-3;
Davis
643).
Our
acts, utterances,
pedagogies,
and selves
may
in-
deed
signify
in
spite of,
and even
against,
our intentions.
They
can
also,
as Butler's
own work
attests,
signify
well
beyond
our wildest
anticipations.
Offered earlier as a
caution,
these sentiments are also
harbingers
of
hope
for the futures we
envision,
reminding
us that who we
are,
and how we are
received,
in the classroom can even-
tuate in some
unimaginably queer (in)conclusions.
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