Introduction

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our fourth edition of The Wac Reader, a digest of curated articles and sources focused on writing and reading across the curriculum.

This year’s theme is Queer Pedagogy. Embracing traditions of Queer theory and Critical Race Theory, Queer pedagogy is a commitment to reading and writing the world through Queer identities. It is the belief that we can destabilize heterosexual and cisgender structures in our own classrooms if we pay attention to the Queer ways our students, teachers, and staff live in the world. Not strictly limited to those within the LGBTQIA+ community, Queer pedagogy understands the classroom as a space where cultural change can happen, if we can Queer our language, our readings, and our writing practices. We find this topic to be of particular importance this year given that nationwide over 500 bills have been proposed this legislative session attacking Queer and Trans rights.

In our first section of the digest, we will highlight a few key texts that give an overview of Queer pedagogy. We highlight how Queer pedagogies see WAC practices, the classroom, and our students as always-already Queer. Our interviewee for this edition, Mark McBeth, a Queer literacy scholar from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, concurs with this point. He emphasizes that when we see CUNY students as Queer, we can appreciate how our students who come from all over the city, often hold multiple jobs, and are juggling family commitments, continuously confront rigid university structures. Leaning into the Queerness of our teaching practices can help us dismantle such structures and make the university a more inclusive and progressive space.

The second section of the digest highlights a few of the major themes in Queer pedagogy scholarship. For each theme, we summarize the major concepts and reference further reading. The four themes we highlight are:

• Queering WAC administration and writing programs
• Shaping the world through Queer literacy
• Trans pedagogy
• Connections to anti-racist pedagogy

In our final section, we link you to our companion praxis guide that offers 10 practical suggestions for implementing Queer pedagogy in the classroom.

We’re excited for you to read our fourth edition of The Wac Reader and look forward to sharing more of our love for writing and reading pedagogy with you.

Your Friends,

Valerie Fryer-Davis and David Santamaria Legarda, WAC Hostos Fellows

What is Queer Pedagogy?

We’ve selected four articles that give a good introduction to the core tenets of Queer pedagogy. Our first article is Mark McBeth and Tara Pauliny’s “Queering the First-Year Composition Student (and Teacher): A Democratizing Endeavor” in Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy. Based on McBeth’s and Pauliny’s teaching at CUNY, they argue that since our students come from diverse backgrounds, commute across the city, and are often burdened by many responsibilities, they are always-already Queer. Because of their diverse identity positions, even if they aren’t in the LGBTQIA+ community, they often have Queer ways of relating to the world and using language that differ from standardized so-called “professional” writing styles. McBeth and Pauliny see this as a strength, not a detriment. This article challenges us to rethink how we evaluate our student’s writing, specifically encouraging us to embrace the weird writing that differs from our institutional expectations.

Jonathan J. Rylander and Travis Webster’s “Embracing the ‘Always-Already’: Toward Queer Assemblages for Writing Across the Curriculum Administration” argues for a similar point, but for WAC administration. The authors suggest that WAC is also always-already Queer because it offers unique possibilities of writing and teaching that destabilize and unsettle current forms of teaching and the existing disciplinary boundaries. This is a staple of Queer theory: queerness destabilizes existing boundaries and structures. Rylander and Webster suggest that if WAC coordinators, tutors, and fellows lean into the strangeness and queerness of our work, and we listen to Queer bodies, orientations, and possibilities, we can be more effective in our jobs. Their argument also provides some context as to why WAC philosophies are so difficult for instructors to incorporate because it ruffles the feathers of the institutions and disciplines in queer ways. Embracing a Queer WAC helps us to avoid simply reinforcing the disciplinary conventions that we write across.

Turning to writing and the composition classroom, Beth Buyserie and Ricardo Ramírez explore what Queer literary pedagogy looks like in “Enacting a Queer Pedagogy in the Composition Classroom.” They interrogate how dominant heterosexual ideologies are present at a discursive level, and thus we can deconstruct these ideologies through queer writing. Because language shapes our relationship to the world, when we enact Queer literary pedagogy, we reshape our world through new perspectives, language practices, readings, and assignments. Similar to the articles above that propose our practices are always-already Queer, the authors propose that writing is inherently Queer, and being open to these new possibilities are inherently Queer, but Queerness specifically tasks us with focusing on the self and the body in our composition. Buyserie and Ramírez give an example with the personal narrative, arguing that centering the self in writing is inherently Queer. Such a theory has important implications for WAC since it challenges us to always be open to new forms of writing, to Queering our writing pedagogies.

Our final spotlighted piece is Jonathan Alexander’s “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body,” which investigates trans writing pedagogy. In this piece, Alexander proposes that interrogating gender through writing asks us to challenge how we compose ourselves in gendered ways, and it begins to break down some gender binaries. For trans frameworks, writing offers a possibility for representing what has yet to be represented (trans lives), and to exploring these binaries. It also allows students to examine their relationship between their personal experiences and political categories placed onto them. Trans pedagogy gives students a way to explore how their participation in class is always informed by their identity positions. Alexander provides plenty of writing exercises throughout the article that help students explore gender, such as attempting to write from the perspective of another gender. Trans pedagogy implores that we write across gender.

Interview with Mark McBeth

Mark McBeth is a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He specializes in composition and rhetoric, with a focus on Queer literacy and pedagogy. His most recent book, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents explores homophobic literary discourses from the 20th century, as well as the important work that Queer people have done in reading, research, and writing to combat this violence. He has also been instrumental to designing curricula for the John Jay writing program, and has won numerous awards for this work.

In this interview, McBeth sits down with Hostos WAC fellow, Valerie Fryer-Davis, to discuss the history of Queer literacy, how this history is valuable to WAC, and why it is important to emphasize Queer pedagogy in classrooms given our current moment of increasing homophobia and transphobia worldwide.

Themes of Queer Pedagogy

Queering WAC Administration and Writing Programs: WAC and writing centers are often written about for the positive impact they have on students’ learning. However, as Elise Dixon points out in her personal essay, “Uncomfortably Queer: Everyday Moments in the Writing Center,” writing centers can be messy, uncomfortable, rife with failures, and Queer. The Peer Review highlights in an introduction on “Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces,” that we should embrace the discomfort and challenges involved when tutors, students, faculty, and staff engage in everyday conversations of privilege and difference. We need to have these brave and Queer conversations in order to grow our centers and make them safe spaces. It is only then that we might confront the “compulsory heterosexuality” that we find in composition and writing programs that Jonathan Doucette observes in “Composing Queers: The Subversive Potential of the Writing Center.” Doucette implores us to remember Queer movements in our writing so that we don’t reinforce the institutional cisgender heterosexual norms in our WAC and writing centers.

Shaping the World Through Queer Literacy: Language shapes the way that we relate to the world, and thus it is imperative to be inclusive in our literacy. As Mark McBeth highlights in his book, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents, reshaping culture doesn’t just happen in the streets; it also happens through the written and spoken word, through literacy. The archive of Queer literacy that McBeth explores in his book reveals to us that writing can help us learn about ourselves and the world around us. Jon Wargo concurs in his chapter, “‘I Don’t Write so that Other People Notice Me, I Write so that I Can Notice Myself’,” that Queer writing is a form of resistance that defines who the self is in relation to the world. He coins the term “[Q]ulturally sustaining pedagogy,” which is pedagogy that commits itself to writing Queerness as a way to challenge cisgender heterosexual patriarchy. This form of pedagogy elevates embodied experience in our writing. This term has parallels to sj Miller’s “Queer Literacy Framework” that proposes we unpack language that alienates Queer experiences. Miller suggests that if we can teach Queer language, we can create more inclusive classrooms, which can then lead to social change. This theme of Queer pedagogy reminds us that our writing across the curriculum must incorporate Queer experiences and language because of how literacy shapes the world around us.

Trans Pedagogy: For the inaugural issue of Trans Studies Quarterly, Francisco J. Galarte explores the keyword “Pedagogy.” Galarte frames trans pedagogy within Freire’s work to argue that it also critiques how knowledge is constructed from the perspective of authority. Trans pedagogy affirms trans and non-binary people while dismantling institutional cisgender binaries placed onto our students, faculty, and staff, making the university an inclusive space. Benny LeMaster and Amber. L. Johnson in “Unlearning Gender—Toward a Critical Communication Trans Pedagogy” reiterate this point, stressing the importance of making classroom spaces safe for all bodies. An excellent example of trans writing pedagogy is Kate Bornstein’s classic book, My New Gender Workbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity. This book is a perfect intersection of trans and WAC pedagogy in action: it guides readers through dismantling gender binaries through a series of writing exercises. Bornstein reveals here what a trans WAC pedagogy might look like. It is embodying gender in one’s writing, and unpacking ourselves and the cisgender categories placed onto us through writing.

Connections to Anti-Racist Pedagogy: In our second WAC reader, we explored strategies and major themes of anti-racist pedagogy. Our reader on Queer pedagogy would be incomplete without referring back to the lessons we learned from this research because so many Queer vanguards are/were people of color, and because there is a lot of overlap between these forms of oppression. Thus, the two must be linked in pedagogical theory as well, a point that Mitsunori Misawa makes in “Queer Race Pedagogy in Adult Higher Education.” Misawa argues that a Queer Race Pedagogy (QRP) should fully explore classroom dynamics shaped by racism and heterosexism. To combat these harmful dynamics, we need counternarratives of Queer people of color, and we must disarm harmful stereotypes. Wayne Martino et al. give us a concrete example of these pedagogies at work in their article, “YouTube as Site of Desubjugation for Trans and Nonbinary Youth: Pedagogical Potentialities and the Limits of Whiteness,” which investigates how trans and nonbinary people of color use YouTube as a method of self-expression in The Gender Tag Project. The article invites educators to use their own classrooms as spaces where students can reflect on and share their own experiential understandings of gender and how this intersects with processes of racialisation. YouTube could be a useful tool for writing and creating across the curriculum that allows for self-expression.

Queer Praxis in the Classroom

It can often feel overwhelming to incorporate new theory into one’s pedagogy. To help with this, we’ve written up a companion guide that gives 10 practical suggestions for implementing Queer pedagogy into the classroom. The guide covers a wide array of topics from further clarifying how WAC and our students are Queer, to assigning Queer assignments and course materials, to giving advice on how to address Queer students, to highlighting the political stakes of this work. You can browse these suggestions as a PDF or a Google doc linked here.

The Hostos Review

In closing, we would like to draw your attention to a fellow project at Hostos, The Hostos Review, a English and Spanish literary journal that published on Queer/cuir writing and the experience of Queer/cuir bodies in 2020. This insightful issue brings together artists, poets, fiction-writers, and essayists to mediate on the meaning of Queer/cuir as a method of production and as activism. Its short pieces lend itself well to teaching in a classroom environment. Please find the issue here.

Until Next Time…

We hope you enjoyed our fourth edition of The WAC Reader. We plan on organizing time to discuss some of these new pathways in WAC at Hostos this year. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts! If you have a moment, please take our quick Google Forms survey linked below.