Queering the First-Year Composition Student (and Teacher): A Democratizing Endeavor

Abstract

Mark McBeth and Tara Pauliny further the arguments in the preceding chapters, demonstrating that the disruption of traditionally academic spaces through queer thinking opens a space for “democratizing sensibilities” that allow students a greater sense of investment in equality and justice. McBeth and Pauliny ask, what if we proposed to our first-year composition students that they seem out of the ordinary (even extraordinary—yet not necessarily exceptional), all working within a space of shifting identities, and all, therefore, queer? Then, what if we then asked them to explore (rather than resist) this non-normative subjective position? The first year of college acts as a liminal space where students “leap forward—or linger at the door,” and freshmen often confront conundrums about their place in academia, their feelings of (dis)identification with intellectual labor, and a burgeoning sense of self that often feels “out of fashion” (Sommers and Saltz 133). For students, scrutinizing this liminal queerness allows their oft-disenfranchising feelings about school to become, instead, productive moments of learning. Using the triangulated frameworks of queer theory, performance studies, and composition/rhetoric research, McBeth and Pauliny provoke their students (and readers) to consider how their own non-normative positions have shaped their intellectual abilities, how these examined experiences can evoke interconnections with other people’s differences, and how these investigations can become an undertaking in identity deconstruction/reconstruction. They demonstrate how many of these discoveries occur in composition classrooms where students do not just absorb information from unilateral lectures but, instead, where they construct knowledge through self-generated, dynamic language that expands their boundaries of knowing (themselves). While incoming students often wrangle with ideas that they heretofore could not bear to know (Britzman), they can also gain a greater sense of the futurity of their own becoming (Halberstam; Muñoz). Ultimately, this study flirts with the idea that, when everyone considers their “queerness” in a personal yet socially grounded context, democratizing sensibilities may emerge through writing, and a greater investment in equality and justice may occur.