Abstract
This chapter uses the theoretical resources of queer theory and rhetoric to argue in favor of the pedagogy of “queer listening” as the best way to advance a transformative feminist agenda within the context of teaching a critical masculinity studies course. As an approach to pedagogical practice, the idea of queer listening begins with the intention to dislocate the familiar and the hegemonic through critical reading practices that characterize “superordinate studies.” However, queer listening deepens and expands that intention through a course orientation that places queer texts at the center of knowledge-making about masculinities, thus further encouraging the practice of rhetorical listening.
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Notes
- 1.
In my analysis, I scrutinize my own syllabus and those of two colleagues at TCNJ, Michael Robertson and Nelson Rodriguez, both of whom generously let me put their work under a microscope and publish the results without hiding their identities.
- 2.
The notion of the epistemological and political opportunity inherent in a subordinate (or resistant) position should sound familiar to readers familiar with either Marxist tradition or feminist standpoint theory.
- 3.
In an excellent article on the subject of teaching men and masculinities as superordinate studies, Brod (2002) details many of the critical reading strategies he uses in the context not of a literature course but rather of a sociology course on men and masculinities in order to make male privilege visible and to reveal the social work involved in creating that invisibility.
- 4.
I used a thick course packet of selected readings, and four novels: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, Russell Banks’s Affliction, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
- 5.
The classic text on the notion of the male gaze is Mulvey (1997). I know that a number of critics have offered queer readings of Peter Pan. Despite these readings, I would argue that the narrative is, most concretely and therefore most importantly, heteronormative, and that its plot revolves entirely around male agency and violence. Obviously, this is an interesting debate for another time.
- 6.
Aristotle argued in Rhetoric that to convince someone of something one needed to show that one possessed the characteristic expertise and authority needed to know about the subject under discussion. He called this ethos (in Greek, ethos means “customary place”). Since one assumes that a university course on a given topic will be a legitimate presentation of the knowledge on that topic, and that the teacher knows what he or she is talking about, to queer masculinity studies in this way makes an interesting, and potentially subversive, use of the presumed ethos of the course (the expertise and authority of the teacher and the texts used as the basis for knowledge).
- 7.
The idea of precedent trustworthiness comes from Susan Miller (2008) and refers to the idea that effective rhetorical forms are effective precisely to the extent that they are able to win audience confidence before their specific content in any given situation.
- 8.
I encouraged group projects but allowed students to work on their own if that was their preference.
- 9.
I remember a television ad that aired years ago for Pepsi that featured two guys watching a football game who mistakenly touch each other and then, with intended comic effect, abruptly move very far away from each other as if struck by lightning, with looks of horror and disgust on their faces.
- 10.
We have a general education gender requirement at TCNJ, and so I typically get groups of guys who take the course together because they think it’ll be the least painful way to get the requirement out of the way.
- 11.
Though Ratcliff doesn’t use him in her work, her idea coincides with Bakhtin’s critique of dialectic and his arguments in favor of “answerability,” the ethical responsibility to respond to the “eventness” of things, not to respond categorically or theoretically. See Bakhtin (1993).
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Landreau, J.C. (2012). Queer Listening as a Framework for Teaching Men and Masculinities. In: Landreau, J., Rodriguez, N. (eds) Queer Masculinities. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2552-2_10
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