''Academic Drag'' and the Performance of the Critical Personae: An Exchange on Sexuality, Politics,...

‘‘Academic Drag’’ and the Performance of theCritical Personae: An Exchange on Sexuality,

Politics, and Identity in the Academy

ALYSSA A. SAMEK AND THERESA A. DONOFRIO

Department of Communication, University of Maryland, College Park,Maryland, USA

This article analyzes the process of queering the academy by focusing on the politicsand praxis that constitute sexuality’s role(s) in academic spaces. We advance ourcritique through a dialogue to centralize our own identities as we interrogate thetreatment of the queer project within the academy. Our analysis reveals a contra-diction that hamstrings the advancement of queer rhetorical work in the very locusthat should bring new life to the discipline: the graduate classroom.

Keywords academic performance, containment, gender performance, graduateschool, queer sexuality

[W]e [should] fear not the critical exhibitionism that for too long has beenhampered by academic drag.

—Charles E. Morris III, ‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 34

As good Midwesterners, we know a thing or two about avoidance. Alyssa is a white,lesbian woman from a middle-class, Minnesotan family, and Terri is a white, straightwoman who performs middle-upper class status from Ohio. Years of being reared inMiddle America have taught us both enough to recognize avoidance when we see it.When we go home for the holidays, the veiled (or not so veiled) questions about ourpartners and our academic lives (e.g., ‘‘What does one do with a communicationdegree?’’ and ‘‘How are you still in school?’’) give us ample opportunity to practicethis well-honed skill set. Case in point: When we didn’t like my uncle’s roasted tur-key at Thanksgiving, we avoided it until comfortably in the confines of our ownhome, where we ‘‘debriefed’’ about how terribly it tasted. If we were on the outs withcertain members of the family, we would just stop talking about them, as if they

The authors presented an earlier version of this article at the 2011 Western StatesCommunication Association convention in Monterey, California. The essay received theTop Research Paper award from the Department of Communication at the University ofMaryland in 2011. The authors wish to thank their colleagues, the anonymous reviewers,and the editor for their insightful comments and thoughtful suggestions throughout the editingprocess.

Address correspondence to Alyssa A. Samek, Department of Communication, Universityof Maryland, 2130 Skinner Building, College Park, MD 20742-7635, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Women’s Studies in Communication, 36:28–55, 2013Copyright # The Organization for Research on Women and CommunicationISSN: 0749-1409 print=2152-999X onlineDOI: 10.1080/07491409.2012.754388

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didn’t exist. Indeed, through years of careful cultivation, we learned enoughabout polite avoidance to be able to spot it in the academy and in the graduateclassroom.

This article emerges from a series of conversations between us as we becameaware of and grappled with issues of avoidance pertaining to queer politics and pro-jects in the graduate classroom. More specifically, over the course of those conversa-tions, we became alarmed by the ease with which the queer project could be includedin graduate classrooms and disciplinary conversations while attenuated by otheracademic practices. We were troubled by what we would later come to discuss asthe containment of the queer project under the auspices of the maintenance of‘‘professorial identities.’’ As a result, we quickly realized that our private conversa-tions were largely exercises in finding a vocabulary suitable for discussing the ideo-logical structure of the academy with regards to sexuality. Perhaps they were not soprivate after all. Rather, our conversations functioned as narratives that detailed ourlived experiences with the manifestations of heteronormativity in graduate rhetoricalclassrooms.

Ultimately, we use this piece to offer two perspectives on the contemporaryacademy’s inclusion (or, more appropriately, avoidance) of queer theory and poli-tics, interrogating how the praxis within the spaces used to train future scholars,graduate classrooms, contains the very ‘‘queerness’’ of the queer project. Followingin the footsteps of other scholars who have sought to illuminate the ideologies of thecommunication discipline, we argue that our academic socialization provides acomfortable pretense that facilitates the evasion of the work that meaningfullyqueers the discipline. In practice, the demands of professionalism short-circuit ourability to engage the queer project, effectively weakening the transformative possibi-lities of queer rhetoric and scholarship by seemingly including such discourses=works=voices while simultaneously containing them. Advancing this argumentrequires breaking with certain conventions that would otherwise structure academicpublications. It calls on us to eclipse the demands of professionalism or, using a termwe centralize in this article, step outside of our ‘‘academic drag’’ (Morris,‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 34). As such, we self-consciously offer this piece as an experiment.Berlant and Warner emphasize, ‘‘Queer commentary has involved a certain amountof experimenting, of prancing and squatting on the academic stage. This is partly toremind people that there is an academic stage and that its protocols and proprietieshave maintained an invisible heteronormativity, one that infiltrates our profession,our knowledge’’—and this article (‘‘What Does Queer Theory’’ 348). Through thisconversation, we draw attention to that stage by striving to illuminate the troublingimplications of the academy’s treatment of the queer project.

In what follows we augment the critical insight yielded by our own disciplinarybackgrounds (as feminist rhetorical scholars committed to ideological criticism andthe interventions of queer politics) with the self-reflexivity and self-implicating writ-ing common to performance studies scholarship to offer a composite representationof a ‘‘dialogical performance’’ (Conquergood 9; Alexander and Warren).1 Theseexchanges took place as we, the authors, discussed the place of queer studies withinour academic socialization. After a brief meditation on the theoretical perspectivesthat inform this project, we use six critical emotional=intellectual moments todemonstrate our attempts to grapple with subtle manifestations of what Yepcalls the ‘‘violence of heteronormativity’’ (14) in the communication discipline andclassroom—a violence which often remains shrouded behind cloaks of silence and

Sexuality, Politics, and Identity in the Academy 29

liberal democratic pedagogical ideals. It is those liberal pedagogical ideals that weturn to first.

Academic Socialization and Queer Politics

Education and educational systems have long been fodder for criticism given thesignificant role they play in socialization (Shor). ‘‘The process of education,’’ asAlexander describes it, ‘‘is a quintessential site for cultural proliferation and accul-turation’’ (‘‘Performing Culture’’ 307). As a tool for socialization, schools ‘‘[train]bodies to behave in socially sanctioned ways’’ and can function as disciplinary appa-ratuses, ‘‘evaluatory agencies for (dis)conforming bodies’’ (Cooks and Warren 211).Not surprisingly, bodies in these spaces tend to be disciplined in accordance with amultiplicity of interlocking systems of power and privilege. Countless scholars haveattended to the ways in which educational spaces are traversed by issues of identity,inclusion=exclusion, and access, noting the ways such issues are affected by race(Alexander, ‘‘Performing Culture’’; Alexander and Warren; Johnson and Bhatt;Moreman and Persona Non Grata), colonialism (Moreira and Diversi), ability(Lindemann), culture (Hao), gender (Cooks; Johnson and Bhatt; Lockford), andsexuality (Aleman; Fox, ‘‘Tales’’; Heinz; Johnson, and Bhatt; Lovaas; Morris,‘‘Queer Pedagogies’’; Palmer; Stern; Wright).

As distinct educational spaces, no less immune to issues of power and privilege(Moreman and Persona Non Grata), graduate classrooms are not only spaces ofbroader cultural socialization; they are the spaces where we learn to craft our aca-demic performances. Graduate school is one of the formative periods during whichaspiring academics become acquainted with the norms, conventions, and powerdynamics of academia (Adler and Adler; Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 51–52;Trocchia and Berkowitz 749). This process of professionalization is not benign;rather, it is a mode of ideological acculturation to the politics of the academy.‘‘Professionalism,’’ according to Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland, is ‘‘a culture inwhich individuals practice socially valued skills in exchange for the exclusive rightto practice those skills, the right to impart the knowledge necessary to the skills,and prestige’’ (18); more specifically, they discuss professionalism as an ‘‘identifiableideological edifice’’ and one that clearly operates in establishing structural conditionsfor conduct within the academy (16–18, 43). Perhaps nowhere are the ideologicaldimensions of the academy as apparent as in Blair, Brown, and Baxter’s ‘‘Disciplin-ing the Feminine,’’ a clear illumination of how scholars and scholarship are regulatedaccording to highly gendered epistemological frameworks. In graduate school, welearn to adhere to these frameworks, even as they may reflect sexist, classist, ableist,racist, and heteronormative beliefs, in the name of our ‘‘professional’’ development.

Part and parcel of our academic socialization into the professoriat, our notionsof invention and expression are shaped to comply with the standards of the pro-fession. Yet the ideology of professionalism that circulates within rhetorical criticisminsidiously blinds critics and students of criticism from their own invention practices(Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 16). Obscuring the process of doing rhetorical criti-cism creates a troubling epistemological gap between the choices made during inven-tion or revision and the final published product, especially for students learning howto produce professional scholarship. The form of academic scholarship only exacer-bates that gap. As Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland and Shugart (‘‘An AppropriatingAesthetic’’) illustrate, professionalism in the academy demands highly particularized

30 A. A. Samek and T. A. Donofrio

forms of expression. Drawing on Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland, Shugart chargesthat critics are encouraged to use prose that distances them from their text, promotes‘‘the illusion of objectivity,’’ and creates ‘‘an aura of specialized expertise that isabove reproach’’ (‘‘An Appropriating Aesthetic’’ 281). This form of scholarly writ-ing undermines the stated goals of certain academic enterprises, including criticalrhetoric. Shugart charges that ‘‘the critical endeavor is compromised . . . by featuresindigenous to the scholarly format itself. That is, by the aesthetic conventions ofscholarship’’ (280). Put differently, a certain irony exists at the heart of Shugart’s cri-tique: the very theoretical lens and critical vocabulary bequeathed to the disciplineby the move toward critical rhetoric is attenuated by the standards of academic(read: ‘‘professional’’) expression. Read in conjunction with the mystification thatNothstine, Blair, and Copeland describe shrouding the process of invention (50),the ideologies of the academy are somewhat exculpated from critique by the conven-tions of the profession (Shugart, ‘‘An Appropriating Aesthetic’’ 301–302).

Encouragingly, the disconnects between the goals of critical projects and certainforms of scholarly writing have not gone entirely unnoticed. Most recently, Morris’scall for a critical self-portraiture highlights the gap between the dictates of criticalrhetoric ‘‘to unmask or demystify the discourse of power’’ (McKerrow 91) and theposition of the critic who is seldom called upon to disclose his or her own relation-ship to structures of power and domination (Morris, ‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 32–33). As aresult, critics often stand outside their scholarship in privileged, removed, and pro-tected authorial positions, safeguarded from the implications of their criticism.‘‘Whither critical self-reflection?’’ Morris asks (‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 33). Although someexamples exist of rhetorical scholarship breaking with standard academic forms byincluding personal narratives (Tonn; Ono; Medhurst) or engaging in what Con-quergood refers to as ‘‘dialogical performance’’ (Frank and McPhail; Chavez andGriffin), by and large, Morris contends that such ‘‘critical self-reflection’’ is morelikely to be found outside the disciplinary bounds of critical=rhetorical scholarshipin the domains of performance studies and autoethnography (‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 33).

Performance studies scholarship has long engaged the complex relationshipsbetween embodied, lived experience and cultural expressions of power and domi-nation (Hamera). In privileging and validating what Langellier refers to as ‘‘themundane communication practices of ordinary people’’ (126), such scholarship takesseriously the theoretical contentions of critical theorists such as Althusser and deCerteau in arguing that ideologies are expressed and perpetuated by our livedexperiences; they do not exist apart or separate from our daily practices. Rather,our bodies, stories, memories, narrative accounts, and so-called personal experiencesbecome the rich sites for the analysis of the ‘‘complex workings of power’’ (Hamera 7).

As such, far from the depersonalized, ‘‘disengag[ed], and ‘‘scientiz[ed]’’ languageof academic scholarship (Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 30), the writing in perfor-mance studies tends to be self-implicating. The critic fully inhabits such scholarship.Flashbacks to childhood memories (Lockford; Lovaas), moments from intimateconversations about health=illness (Fox, ‘‘Skinny Bones’’), material from students’evaluations (Cooks)—all of these forms of writing take seriously the ‘‘performative-I’’(Spry 340). All are examples employed to animate such scholarship and to showcasehow ideologies manifest within and structure our perceptions of day-to-dayexperience.

More to the point, in troubling the bounds between the public and private (seeLangellier 138) and taking seriously the way the body enacts ‘‘enfleshed


knowledge’’ (Alexander, Anderson, and Gallegos 2), the embrace of performancestudies scholarship aids in fulfilling the objectives of critical queer work. Perfor-mance studies helps concretize the ideologies that regulate and govern the manyand varied manifestations of sexual politics by forsaking the ‘‘objectification,’’‘‘essentialization,’’ and ‘‘fetishization’’ that Shugart charges marks most criticalwork (‘‘An Appropriating Aesthetic’’). Performance studies work calls attentionto the politics and arbitrariness of the line demarcating what is deemed ‘‘private’’and ‘‘public’’ (Gal). In valuing the body, such scholarship illuminates the livedcomplexity of identities and calls attention to the many ways we may be ‘‘queer.’’The utility of the relationship between performance studies and queer scholarshipis confirmed by scholars who embrace the performative or autoethnographic voiceto interrogate the politics of sexuality and, pertinent to the goals of this article,examine the influence of those politics on pedagogical practice (Alexander,‘‘Embracing’’; Fox, ‘‘Tales’’; Johnson and Bhatt; Lovaas; Morris, ‘‘Queer Pedago-gies’’; Stern; Wright).

To clarify, in conceptualizing queer scholarship and critical queer work, weemploy the term queer in specific ways. First, we use it as an identity marker, thoughnot as an umbrella term or shorthand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender(Berlant and Warner 344). We do this to recognize the possibility for individualsto affirm a queer identity location as opposed to or inclusive of a lesbian, gay, bisex-ual, or transgender (LGBT) identity. Second, referring to someone’s or something’s‘‘queerness’’ seeks to mark the various ways individuals, performances, or disciplinesmight be queer or made queer, that is, emphasizing transgression of binaries, bound-aries, expectations, and structures.2 We specifically call upon this transgressivepotential of queer when we refer to ‘‘queer projects,’’ ‘‘queer rhetorical studies,’’and ‘‘queer politics’’ (Campbell 204). Broadly, work under such auspices has exam-ined mediated representations of LGBTQ identities, recovered the work of individ-ual lesbian or gay rhetors, including Harvey Milk, Larry Kramer, and Audre Lorde,and analyzed queer social movement activism, histories, and coalition building.3

Building upon this body of scholarship, we not only affirm a mainstream ‘‘lesbianand gay political agenda based on a civil rights strategy’’ (Cohen 21) but also seekto challenge the ideologies and structures within the discipline and the classroomby interrogating heteronormativity and ‘‘the logic of the sexual order’’ (Warnerxiii).4 By challenging the ideologies that permeate our culture and our classrooms,the queer project thus contributes to ongoing feminist scholarship in the communi-cation discipline. Together, feminist and queer scholars play key roles in buildingintersectional, rhetorical, and performance studies scholarship by centering sexualityand heteronormativity as critical loci of power, identity, and politics.

We situate our work on professionalism, academic socialization, and queer poli-tics at the intersection of these intellectual endeavors. Thus we are committed toexposing the operation of power in line with the demands of critical rhetoric, con-cerned with the ideological dimensions of academic socialization=professionaliza-tion, and indebted to the rich models performance studies provides for exposingthe connections between larger cultural, disciplinary systems and daily praxis. Inwhat follows, we opt to extend a metaphor advanced in Morris’s work to talk aboutthe convergence between discourses of professionalism or professorial-ism and ident-ity in spotlighting what Morris calls ‘‘academic drag’’ (‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 34) as ananalytical tool to advance our critique. We contend that in learning to don such dragwe also learn lessons about containing the radical politics associated with queer


rhetorical projects. The discourses of professionalism and the separation of theintellectual=cognitive from the emotional=personal that such discourses encourageprovide a pretext for evading the most challenging forms of political work demandedby the queer project: the acknowledgment of our own complicity in systems ofoppression. So we are forsaking professionalism by offering a personal and embo-died dialogue aimed at exposing the way our disciplinary socialization fundamen-tally limits the horizon of queer projects.

Feminism, Feminine Performance, and Sexuality: Social Location andPrivilege

Terri

I remember having a troubling thought in college. As my progressive politics andcritical consciousness started to develop, I recall being in political conversations withother self-identified ‘‘liberals’’ and thinking, ‘‘I’m glad I’m a woman. How embarrass-ing to be a straight, white man in this conversation. At least I have some facet of myidentity I can access to talk about questions of power and oppression.’’ I cringe recallingthis. Years later, writing this statement, I know I was engaged in an act of deflection,using my budding feminism to prevent, rather than stimulate, a reckoning with the mul-tiple forms of privilege I knew I possessed. What I really meant was, ‘‘Let’s talk aboutwomen’s issues so that we don’t have to talk about (my) race (white), sexuality(straight), class privilege (middle to upper class), or ability (able bodied).’’5

I understood the concept of privilege well before I acquired a vocabulary fortalking about it or understood how to use it to advocate for social justice. I hail froma family with conservative political leanings, a family that did not discuss what ourwhiteness or heterosexuality meant. As my politics became more progressive duringmy undergraduate studies, I became struck by a pronounced sense of cognitive dis-sonance. My sense of professional purpose was shifting toward various forms ofsocial justice advocacy. Yet at the same time that I had a desire to uproot systemsof privilege, I was growing aware of the numerous advantages connected to my‘‘social location’’ (Dow, ‘‘Politicizing Voice’’). The contrast between the formerand the latter manifested in a sense of guilt and acute discomfort whenever conver-sation ventured beyond superficial engagement with race, class, and sexuality.

With my interest in social justice, I found a home in women’s studies for some ofthe right (and some of the wrong) reasons. For all the privilege I have enjoyed, theway I perform gender has worked against me, particularly within the academy. Ofthe women I know in academia, I embrace more of the stereotypically feminine waysof presenting the self: I wear makeup, prefer dresses and skirts to pantsuits, and amanimated when I speak, using a number of gestures and smiling frequently. Com-bined with the fact that I am small in stature and look younger than I am, I haveentertained my fair share of infantilizing and diminishing comments, often aimedat the disparity between how someone who looks and acts like me ‘‘actually’’ hasintelligent things to say and does ‘‘serious’’ intellectual work.

While my women’s studies classes provided me with a lens and a language forinterrogating such sexism, it also helped me manage the aforementioned guilt byserving as a means of deflection. Rather than recognize the connections between sex-ism and other forms of systemic oppression (hooks, Feminist Theory 36–42; Collins),studying feminism and gender became comfortable ground, a place where I could


talk largely about the oppression of white, straight, middle-class women while ignor-ing, and without feeling, the burden of the other privileges linked to my sociallocation. Although I would like to write that I grew out of this way of thinking aboutfeminism after my college years, I cannot make that assertion. I think of how oftenas a graduate student instructor I centralize gender differences as illustrations of theoperation of power so that I do not have to engage particularly uncomfortable exam-ples, which might implicate my privilege. In other words, my undergraduatewomen’s studies career provided early lessons in avoidance.

Alyssa

My everyday performance evinces femininity. Unlike some of my close friends, I havenever been addressed as ‘‘sir.’’ Although there are spaces in which I transgress expecta-tions for gender performance, I am rarely read outside the boundaries of my visiblewhite, middle-class, feminine performance of identity.

Taking a critical look at my embodied performances in the classroom, I witnessthe number of ways I cash in on privilege because I perform my gender in line withhegemonic femininity (Lockford ix, 3). My feminine attire, shoulder-length hair, andstrategic accessory choices mean my normative gender performance is rarely ques-tioned or challenged—and it could be legally challenged in many states that lackemployment nondiscrimination laws. These performances, of course, are not onlygendered performances; they are markers of my whiteness, class, and ability, under-scoring how I, as a white, middle-class, able-bodied femme lesbian woman, am com-plicit in heteronormative and other interlocking ‘‘domains of power’’ (Collins 21;Crenshaw).

Hegemonic femininity reinforces assumptions associated with gender perfor-mance (i.e., feminine equals heterosexual) and disciplines people who perform gen-der in nonnormative ways. Moreover, my femme performance not only fuels apublic perception of heterosexuality, it also renders my queerness invisible (Galewski185). Pharr writes, ‘‘To be a lesbian is to be perceived as someone who has steppedout of line’’ (18), for ‘‘heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with itsassumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of powerand privilege as the norm’’ (16). The emphasis on the perception of sexuality crystal-lizes how gender performance functions as a locus where the combined power of het-erosexism and homophobia are played out on our bodies in multiple contexts andspaces every day. Because my gender performance falls largely within the lines, itallows me to move in the world with my queerness unmarked (Pharr 18). As such,my passing performance in classrooms and other professional settings may affordsome comfort from the threat of transgression and difference associated with queer-ness. At the same time, however, in those moments where I want my queerness to beintelligible or ‘‘read,’’ it requires other forms of disclosure and=or performance.These dual limitations of hegemonic femininity should not be surprising given thereciprocal reinforcement of sexism and heteronormativity.

The requirements of professional ideology serve only to enhance the implica-tions of performing gender to conform to such norms. In academic spaces, fromthe classroom to the disciplinary conference to departmental events, the choices Imake regarding attire, makeup, and accessories communicate my gender, race, andclass identities just as they mark me as a scholar, teacher, and colleague. By andlarge, these choices also conform to norms (not always explicitly) constructed by


the ideology of professionalism, and they have distinct implications for the publicperception of sexuality. Given the mutually supportive interaction among heterosex-ism, homophobia, and professionalism, then, are there ways I can harness my pass-ing as a strategic move to queer a space or disrupt assumptions (Lockford)?

Despite the privilege I assume in my gender performance, passing can be trans-gressive and can afford opportunities for disruption rather than complicity with sys-tems of power (Lockford). Instead of opting to think of passing as ‘‘a disguise ordeception,’’ my passing performances are also ‘‘a political strategy that disruptsthe notion of identity as unified and static’’ (Moon 323). As a strategy, it can queermoments of identification. For instance, because Terri and I identify with each otheron multiple levels of social power (via shared gender performances, whiteness, andclass performances), the common ground made our conversations easier. Suchmoments of identification further emphasize the importance of intersectionality inmy work, considering how each of us is variously empowered and=or disempoweredin relation to what Collins calls the ‘‘matrix of domination’’ (21). Though these samemodes of privilege prompt me to question my professional identity as a queer scholarat times, those very points of identification also offer moments for rupture, fortransgression.

Confronting Fear and Initiating the Conversation: Taking Note of Absences

Terri

‘‘I don’t think what I do in my bedroom matters to my scholarship,’’ I thought. ‘‘Isupport the inclusion of queer voices in the academy and am behind more queer projects.But does my sexuality need to ‘inform’ my research? My sexual preferences and beha-viors, those are private and have no bearing on—and no place in—my scholarship.’’

Yet as I rolled those thoughts around in my head, something about this line ofreasoning seemed insufficient. To be honest, it was a mix of indignation and curiositythat motivated me to open up this discussion. On one hand, I was irritated. Howdare a movement I was trying to support ask me to engage with issues of desire?At this point in my thinking, sex was purely a private matter (and at this point inmy thinking, sexuality equaled sexual acts).6 As a woman in the academy, underthe auspices of professionalism, I have learned to be wary of what private infor-mation I disclose. The last thing I want to be obliged to talk about is anything thatcomes close to implicating me in a relationship (straight or queer) or broaches thetopic of (having a) family—terrain that remains fraught for women in the academy(Armenti, ‘‘May Babies’’; Armenti, ‘‘Women Faculty’’; Gerten; Mason andGoulden; van Anders; Wolfinger, Mason, and Goulden).

On the other hand, another part of me knew how selfish this sounded. It was achain of logic that linked sexuality to sex to relationships to family to feminist con-cerns about hampering my professional advancement by risking being read as apartner=wife or mother. Yet I knew something about my logic was off, and I wantedto talk to someone about this line of reasoning. However, I was embarrassed by andfeared how little I knew about queer studies. I fashion myself as a ‘‘good liberal,’’open-minded, tolerant, compassionate, and invested in full equality, regardless ofrace, gender, class, ability, or sexuality. Starting up a conversation wherein I grapplewith what the implications of queer studies might mean for my own scholarship andpolitics could betray the ‘‘good liberal’’ identity I have constructed for myself. I


knew I could not ‘‘impression-manage’’ in this situation. I came to the realizationthat I did not even know enough about issues of sexuality to prevent myself fromrevealing any intolerance that might plague my thoughts. This terrain seemeddangerous—as I could embarrass myself, reveal my ignorance, and damage relation-ships if I admitted to offensive thoughts—and the easiest option seemed to be not toask questions at all and to continue to voice support for LGBTQ individuals andqueer politics while avoiding doing any queer work myself.

Of course, then the question became, ‘‘Where do I have this conversation, andwith whom?’’ I did not feel comfortable approaching any of the faculty. The class-room hardly seemed an appropriate space for this discussion. Although we hadgrappled with some essays from Morris’s Queering Public Address, I perceived themessages we received about the importance of deconstructing heteronormativity inour work to be mixed. Even though we talked about the existence of the queer pro-ject, I sensed there to be significantly less pressure on us to change our critical praxisor engage with the queer project in our research. Although one could never producegood scholarship in a graduate course without noticing the ways in which a body isgendered or raced, questions of the visibility of identity markers surrounding sexu-ality served as rationale enough for avoiding queer theory in papers and discussions(Heinz 95–96, 98; Lovaas 392–93, 398).

I knew I wanted to talk to a peer. I wanted to talk to Alyssa. She and I had had anumber of conversations about sexuality and had established a solid friendship. Yetdid I want to talk to Alyssa because she knew a good deal about queer scholarship ordid I want to talk to her because of her identity? The last thing I wanted to do wasput her in a position where she would be called on to tell me ‘‘what queer peoplethink’’ (Heinz 103). Still, I attempted to broach the subject by talking about thequeer location in the academy.

Alyssa

Sure, Terri, I have a second. What’s on your mind?Long before Terri approached me in the ‘‘safe space’’ of our graduate office to

ask about my experiences in the classroom and my work with queer rhetorical stu-dies,7 I had thought about the implications of being out in my department, myresearch, and the field. Deliberations about outing oneself occur at the intersectionof personal identity, performance, and professionalism. In addition to reflecting onthe timing of my own coming-out process, one that began late in my undergraduatecareer, my decisions also illuminated my growing awareness of how to moderate myperformances to conform to gender norms and heteronormative guidelines for craft-ing a professional identity in an academic discipline. From the first meeting of my‘‘Introduction to Graduate Studies’’ course through the dozen conferences that fol-lowed, I internalized the norms and disciplined my own disclosure and gender per-formances accordingly. Looking back, several moments in my graduate schoolcareer revealed how I turned to modes of professionalism as a means of deflectingor sublimating the personal.

When Terri opened the conversation, I was simultaneously overwhelmed andrelieved. She had clearly decided to approach me in a thoughtful way, and her regardfor me as a colleague and member of our intellectual community put me at ease.Though I entertained tacit doubts about her likely inadvertent spotlighting of myqueer identity and voice as a space for ‘‘answers,’’ I trusted her intentions in this


instance. Being openly queer offers a productive niche within the field, though it alsoopens me up to discipline, exclusion, discrimination, and, for those of us who affirman LGBTQ identity, requests to speak on behalf of the queer perspective or com-munity (Halperin, ‘‘Normalization’’ 341–42; Cloud 123). The latter rarely happens,largely because sexuality typically takes a backseat to other social locations in gradu-ate classroom conversations—a silence that in and of itself speaks to the persistenceof heteronormativity in institutionalized settings like universities (Yep 13).

At the same time, Terri’s discomfort resonated with the trepidation I sometimesexperience at the very moment I make my lesbian identity known, whether in anacademic or personal context. To be sure, sometimes such outing is less my own dec-laration and more my interlocutor’s (correct) assumption. As other lesbian, gay,bisexual, transgender, or queer folks will attest, we rarely come out once. It is acontinual process, one that is steeped in privilege, especially for those who are ableto pass. For some, coming out offers the opportunity to challenge heteronormativeperceptions of their identities.

I had already felt the dual oppression=safety of the closet in the graduate class-room. I played the game of ‘‘in the closet with the door open’’ when I began graduateschool less than a year after I started dating women. In addition, I played the‘‘pronoun game,’’ where I either avoided gendered pronouns or used masculine onesto discuss previous relationships and deflect scrutiny. In either case, my ability to livein these dual modes of visibility=invisibility without being questioned circled back tomy normative gender performance and passing strategies. When I used a responsepaper to Ono’s letter=essay to interrupt my passing practices and come out to mymaster’s program colleagues, it was liberating.8 My voice shaking, I read aboutthe months of half-truths and stilted conversations in which I hid an important partof myself, my queerness. In hindsight, the experience exemplified one way of collaps-ing the personal=academic, public=private binaries, but I wondered about the polit-ical implications of such disclosure. In other words, what had my disclosure done,other than relieve myself of the pressure—of which my colleagues had been largelyunaware? Could I have utilized the rest of that semester to more explicitly queer theclassroom space?

A few years later, as I began my doctoral program, I opted to be open from thestart with the hope that it would not interfere with new friendships or my academicreputation. To my relief, it was of little concern to my new colleagues and faculty,and owning my identity in a new way helped me see rhetorical studies differently.I found a desire to delve more deeply into queer rhetorical histories. This moveallowed me to craft my career trajectory in the field through attention to sexuality,gender, difference, and privilege. My desire to locate and engage with queer rhetori-cal history and to find more of myself in the material I studied increasingly gave me ameans of embracing my potential political impact within the classroom space.

Given this history, when Terri approached me in our office, I, consciously orunconsciously, privileged the academic, theoretical, and intellectual over my ownpersonal commitments. In short, I put on my academic drag, replete with citations.I felt equipped to discuss the ‘‘queer turn’’ in rhetorical studies and opted to take thatprofessional approach rather than the personal, vis-a-vis my lesbian identity. Yetwere they really so separate? As a feminist scholar, I am trained to be consciousof the relationship between my social location and my research. Yet with my per-sonal connection to the queer project, could I end up fostering a ‘‘speaking for’’ thatI endeavored to avoid?


‘‘A Line on the Syllabus?’’ Inclusion, Avoidance, and Containment

Alyssa

Sitting in the classroom, I listened as we shuffled our way through silences and haltingattempts to work with the assigned essay. Was it just me, or did the room feel tense andunsure? Perhaps the tension simply meant we hadn’t prepared or didn’t understand thereading; I had certainly felt that in other classes before. This time, I sensed we had allread the piece. Why was I feeling this way?

As a lesbian student, I found reading queer scholarship refreshing and invigor-ating. It offered a piece of my history, unabashedly centered sexuality as a criticallens, and critiqued heterosexism in public address. Embracing this work as explicitlyconnected to my identity put me in an awkward position within the classroom. WhileI did not want to be called upon to speak for all queer folks, nor for all lesbians, Istill wanted to get into the pieces. Simply put, I was frustrated. Looking around theroom, it seemed that my interest was not shared, at least in the same way. Mycolleagues did not seem the least bit interested in discussing the queerness of thesepieces.

The silence on this particular day was ironically exacerbated by the example ofrhetorical criticism on the table. We engaged in these practices while discussingMorris’s Queering Public Address. In line with our typical classroom practices, wevigorously interrogated the theoretical concepts, textual choices, and disciplinaryimplications, but any treatment of sexuality remained distinctly absent. Noting thatthe class discussion rarely included the words sexuality or queer, I asked myself:What was it that kept my ‘‘liberal’’ colleagues from explicitly discussing the central-ity of queer sexuality? Their silence illuminated a tension under the surface of ourclassroom. It further troubled me because we avoided sexuality and queerness inan essay overtly about sexuality, history, heteronormativity, and public address:Morris’s provocatively titled ‘‘My Old Kentucky Homo: Abraham Lincoln, LarryKramer, and the Politics of Queer Memory.’’ With my intensifying frustration, Itook it upon myself to insert sexuality into the conversation. Quickly relieving thetension, I cited my interest in the queerness of the essay as a justification for myown research. Our evasive treatment of sexuality within the discussion of Morris’spiece raised the question of whether our engagement with the essay represented amoment of ‘‘symbolic inclusion’’—an obligatory line on the syllabus alone—orwhether queerness could truly become a point of contention, discussion, and evengrowth within the classroom (Collins 9).

Upon reflection, I was able to recognize this moment as part of the containmentof the queer project. Scholars such as Anderson and Poirot (‘‘Domesticating theLiberated Woman’’) have analyzed how rhetoric can function, in the context of gen-der, sexuality, and politics, as a tool of containment. In Poirot’s words, ‘‘[C]ontain-ment rhetorics attempt to tame the threat of alternative views through discipline andconfinement, clearly articulating the other as outside of the dominant values andstructures of U.S. culture’’ (‘‘Domesticating the Liberated Woman’’ 266).

In this case, containment functioned in two ways. First, it has historicallydemarcated and defended the line between public and private. Part of the powerand challenge of a queer perspective lies in its invitation for readers to reconsidertheir expectations of public and private, a proposition that fosters discomfort asit confronts avoidance. Like feminist scholarship or the mantra ‘‘the personal is


political,’’ queer studies challenges the public=private binary and the work it does inthe world, including the classroom (Gal 78; Campbell). For example, Berlant andWarner contend that such binaries obscure the ways that ‘‘intimacy is itself publiclymediated’’ (‘‘Sex in Public’’ 553); heterosexual culture maintains its dominance bysuggesting that ‘‘personal life’’ is distinct from ‘‘work, politics, and the publicsphere’’ and contains the possibilities for queer or nonnormative sexual cultures (553).Second, instructional framing and curricular context (or lack thereof) built on thosebinaries attenuate the radical potential of critically engaging queer studies.

In this way, containment can occur pedagogically, even in graduate seminars. Inour public address classroom, the silence in the room confirmed our discomfort. Ourpraxis allowed us to avoid and thereby contain queerness, limiting its transformativepossibilities in the same way curriculum and classroom discussions have the potentialto suppress feminist, antiracist, and other radical scholarship. In this moment, con-tainment was the result of our classroom praxis, one that deployed academic drag inthe service of heteronormativity by maintaining the binaries between private=publicand our personal=academic lives.

In light of this praxis, questions remained: Upon whom did the responsibility fallfor encouraging confrontation (over avoidance) or disrupting containment? Shouldit have been up to my LGBTQ colleagues and me to queer the classroom space?Should I have pressed Terri to complicate her interest in Morris’s critical conceptsby pointing to the import of the queerness of his piece? Should we have relied onour professor to facilitate the kind of explicit, challenging engagement I had hopedfor? Unfortunately, our ‘‘five-foot pole’’ treatment of the piece regarding sexualityfelt par for the course. Sure, it was not a topics course, but we did not utilize sexu-ality as a lens to interrogate other scholarly or primary texts. Like Morris, I believethat we should be asking these questions of other pieces to ‘‘stay our home ground’’of rhetoric and public address ‘‘and render it pink’’ (Morris, ‘‘Introduction’’ 5). Bydoing so, perhaps we could challenge the relegation of sexuality to a zone of privacyby centralizing it within the study of public and private discourse (Gal).

I carried these misgivings about the operation of the public=private binary in theclassroom and the containment of the queer project into my conversation with Terri.Her insistence on the sexual as private, distinct, and separate from notions of thepublic reflected broader assumptions that ignored how sexuality is, in fact, very pub-lic (Berlant and Warner, ‘‘Sex in Public’’ 553). I understood that her insistence onprivacy protected her from exposing too much of herself and marking her privilegeto colleagues, readers, and professors. In part, it was a matter of convenience andheterosexual privilege for her to avoid sexuality (Carbado 203–204). I explained asmuch, noting how that binary served to protect her and her straightness while itoppressed queer folks in personal and professional ways. I noted how the commonhomophobic remark ‘‘It’s fine that you are gay—just don’t flaunt it in front of me,’’for example, uses the private to discipline anyone who is sexual or gender noncon-forming by drawing on a logic that appears in legal precedent concerning sodomylaws and debates about same-sex marriage (Sedgewick 71). Moreover, I felt it wascrucial for her to recognize the binary as heteronormative. We both hail from similarfeminist academic and critical backgrounds; I simply figured we would share a per-spective that recognized the inherent limitations of the public=private divide. Yet shewas insisting on the maintenance of that divide, especially when it concerned herbedroom (not to mention the variety of nonbedroom spaces). Not only does thisinconsistency reveal the ability of scholars to hold paradoxical academic opinions


and private values, it also suggests there is more on the line here than understandingthe construction of public and private. We were dealing with questions of boundariesand individual agency by recognizing we do not always have the privilege to decidewhich parts of our identities are public and private.

Our conversation about sex, sexuality, identities, and public=private binariesprompted a new series of questions: At what point can we not control what in ourworld is kept private? Is it necessary that we keep the so-called private out of ourscholarship? As feminist scholars, we are taught that good scholarship attends towhat Munoz calls the ‘‘mantra’’ of race, class, and gender in scholarship (166). Still,what could this struggle in the conversation tell us of the assumptions about publicand private when considered through an analytical prism of sexuality (Morris,‘‘Introduction’’ 2)?

Terri

As a feminist, I have long been engaged in conversations about the politics of public=private demarcations. Yet these had always been conversations about gender to me—never sexuality. Having put little thought into how sexuality was affected by public=private contestations, I found myself in an ironic position at the start of our conver-sation: a feminist calling for the maintenance of a public=private split.

I began our conversation insisting sexuality was a private issue that had littleconnection to my public and professional work. As our conversations progressed,I explicitly asked Alyssa why my sexuality had any public relevance. She retorted,‘‘Because perhaps knowing what you and your boyfriend did in private would makeholding my partner’s hand in public more acceptable.’’ I paused. Her succinctresponse linked my desire to defend and mark my sexuality as private to conflagra-tions she faces when her sexuality is made public. The disparate amounts of controlwe have over the ability to protect our sexualities as private in the first place becameapparent, and I puzzled at my failure to grasp how I clearly benefit from the domi-nant interpretations of what public and private mean. Yet the subject position Ibegan this conversation from was supported by past academic experiences. In con-trast to the long and involved conversations I had been exposed to about the implica-tions of public=private labels on gender issues, outside of my conversations withAlyssa I cannot recall ever being in a conversation in graduate classrooms that chal-lenged us to think about how the constructions of public and private shape the placeof sexuality in daily praxis, in our critical work, and in academic spaces. My experi-ences with academic discussions of sexuality confirmed Lovaas’s ‘‘impression that,apart from the communication scholars whose research and interests specificallyinclude sexualities, it remains all too easy to omit the subject,’’ to treat the politicsof sexuality superficially, ‘‘or to settle for a nod at it by including sexual orientationin a list of social identity formations’’ (386).

I remember the class that featured Morris’s ‘‘My Old Kentucky Homo.’’ More tothe point, I remember how stilted that discussion felt. Faced with an essay thatprodded us to discuss queerness, our discussion skirted the subject. We talked aboutmethodological choices and attended closely to the form. Although I’m never one toshy away from discussion, I felt uncomfortable addressing the central concerns of thework. I feared I lacked the vocabulary, feared I would accidentally say something thatwould betray my liberal leanings. I sought safer ground. As a scholar who is alsointerested in issues of memory, I opted to focus on the ways in which Morris’s work


was conversant with other perspectives on the formation of public memories.Although Alyssa understandably should have expected more of her classmates, at thispoint in my thinking I did not feel prepared academically to enter a conversation I feltI knew little about, nor could I have connected my ‘‘interest in Morris’s critical con-cepts . . . to the import of the queerness of his piece.’’ Should graduate students in ourdiscipline be able to do this? Yes, of course. But how, if they are not provided modelsor instruction? More to the point, it seemed to me that the discussion was hamperedby contradicting demands. Morris’s work underscores the importance of authorialimplication—what he later discusses as a form of ‘‘critical self-portraiture’’—a movewhich would require acknowledging the connections between our intellectual andacademic lives and our emotional, political, or otherwise so-called private lives(‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 32–33). Yet such a demand runs counter to the predominant func-tion of the graduate classroom space, a space in which we practice our professorialroles. It is the space in which we learn to put on our academic drag and perfect ourintellectual performances thus to deviate from that performance is to take a risk.Although the graduate classroom would have been the ideal space for such a dis-cussion, even with time devoted to Morris’s work, these important conversationssimply never happened. Under the guise of inclusion, we engaged in avoidance.

The Emotional By-Products of Marking Heteronormativity and Silence:Tears, Self-Reflexivity, and Emotional Awareness

Terri

I was overwhelmed. Deep in conversation with someone I consider a dear friend, I wasarguing for the maintenance of a social order that made her life harder. I feltembarrassed by the concerns that had preoccupied me at the start of our conversations.A considerable part of my unwillingness to engage issues of sexuality arose from adefensiveness surrounding a sense of professionalism. I worried associating with whatI considered private and outside the scope of my critical practice would prove damaging.To protect my own power and privilege, I was legitimating a hegemonic structure thatdisenfranchised a friend. This realization was crushing. It challenged concepts at thecore of my identity. With equality on my lips, privately yet self-consciously, I had beenharboring thoughts that undermined my commitment to fighting discrimination. I wascomplicit in supporting a system of oppression that I had barely taken the time tounderstand.

In retrospect (with the benefit of some additional years between me and thatmoment in time), I can recognize and identify the multiple ideologies that convergedto enable me to avoid seeing the connections between queer studies, my scholarship,and the daily praxis of academic life. To begin, disciplinary boundaries demarcatedthe bodies of knowledge I ‘‘needed to know’’ to continue to do my work in the acad-emy (Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 18; Shugart, ‘‘An Appropriating Aesthetic’’280–81) and in some ways enabled me to avoid exposure to more self-implicatingmodels of scholarship with few ill effects on my own academic career. The ideologyof professionalism and corresponding issues related to the ‘‘academic tone’’(Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland; Shugart, ‘‘An Appropriating Aesthetic’’;Tompkins) combined with my (straight, white) ‘‘feminist’’ desire to avoid anyaffiliation with what patriarchal norms would treat as private converged to seem-ingly justify shirking the queer project. The result of this convergence created the


conditions for a topical or superficial engagement with queer studies (Lovaas 386), akind of engagement that allowed for the embrace of the precepts of critical rhetoricwhile leaving intact, unnamed, and uncriticized the daily acts that fed the systems ofpower and privilege I was claiming to want to challenge.

None of the above is written to excuse my own ignorance. I continue to remainsomewhat baffled by how entirely unaware I was of heterosexual privilege. As anaspiring academic in the humanities, I had done a lot of thinking about some identitymarkers: specifically, race, gender, and class. Yet after decades of schooling, theextent to which I have been able to avoid queer studies (and still advance in mycareer) is nearly astounding (although not entirely surprising given Heinz’s andLovaas’s arguments about the place of sexuality in the communication discipline).I had been able to work functionally with this disconnect: intellectually engagingwith critical rhetoric while never forced to interrogate my own privilege (least ofall associated with sexuality). My privilege—which I was blind to and ignored—costsothers, and I had started this conversation seeking to defend that privilege. Theseconversations suddenly became more than academic exercises. I felt the ways Iwas implicated in systems of power and privilege. Breaking out of the professional-ism and detachment connected to the academic role, in the space of the graduate stu-dent office, a variety of strong emotions surfaced as I plumbed the connectionsbetween my praxis and the perpetuation of heteronormativity—shame, guilt, embar-rassment—and I felt the tears well up.9

Alyssa

As I felt myself rather coldly responding to Terri with a shrug and a sigh to indicate myfeeling of ‘‘Well, yeah—that’s what I deal with every day,’’ I saw her eyes begin to wellup. ‘‘Wow,’’ I thought to myself. ‘‘Am I witnessing a version of what women in the1970s called the ‘click’?’’ In that era, it referenced the ‘‘moment of recognition’’ whennascent feminists linked their lived experiences to a shared reality—the personal turnedpolitical—that initiated them into the growing sisterhood called women’s liberation(O’Reilly 16).

In this moment, tears announced the emotional stakes of our conversation. Itwas one of the few times when a self-identified straight friend (and colleague in thiscase) admitted to fear and emotional vulnerability in a conversation about queersexuality, especially as it marked her heterosexuality and privilege. Discussing theor-etical issues had opened up an unfamiliar emotional territory, rarely discussedbeyond noting one’s personal passion and commitment to one’s scholarship or poli-tics. In hindsight, it was a crucial moment of clarity for us both. I realized the poten-tial power of owning my identity=voice as both personal and academic, not only forme but for my colleagues as well, reminding me of the way I had embraced thatpower when coming out to my graduate cohort years earlier (Ono 114).

Terri’s openness about jeopardizing her liberal identity created an opportunityfor reciprocation. She demonstrated the extent to which she would embrace all theemotional honesty she could muster in a rare moment of intense vulnerability. Inlight of the emotional distance she was clearly willing to travel, I revealed my ownconfrontations with privilege, which, in many respects, I shared with her. My white-ness, my middle-class status, and my able-bodied feminine gender performance posi-tioned me within the heteropatriarchal system of privilege that suffused our office atour state-supported university. While this was not the first time I felt compelled to


rail about what Adrienne Rich called ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ (632), in thiscase we used our personal connections with that very system of oppression to ident-ify with each other and animate our shared self-reflexivity. By engaging in whatproved to be a difficult conversation, then, we sought to break down epistemologicaland experiential barriers erected between us.

In part, the safe space of the office provided the interpersonal context to revealthese vulnerabilities to each other, yet why were such conversations contained inthese spaces? Why were they not taking place with our colleagues from across thedepartment? Relegating sexuality, even the discussion of sexuality, to such privatespaces constitutes a safe move, one that distances people from acknowledging thepolitical relevance of such identities. It occurred to me that sexuality was beingtucked into a corner (of our office), and I was implicated in that process. Was ourreluctance to show vulnerability in the classroom to blame for the silence aroundsexuality I had experienced earlier in similar contexts? Can we explain the reasonswhy we, as scholars, are discouraged from interrogating the hesitation we feel whenfaced with alternative ideas or, in this case, the direct challenge from the queerproject in rhetorical studies?

Guilt: Feeling Complicit in Systems of Oppression

Terri

Guilt. That is a familiar emotion. I wonder how much avoidance stems from guilt ordiscomfort over the speaker’s privilege? Still educated and socially conscious scholarswould never ignore race, class, or gender. Why was sexuality different?

What did I know about guilt and privilege? As I quickly scanned the mental list ofworks I was familiar with, I landed upon PeggyMcIntosh’s essay on the ‘‘invisible knap-sack’’ andher crystalline explanations of the daily benefits ofwhiteness.Withher specific,thoughtful examples, McIntosh’s piece makes the operation of racial=racist ideologiesaccessible. Carbado’s work, following in McIntosh’s footsteps, pairs critical=ideologicalcritiques with easy-to-comprehend examples of the ‘‘mundane’’ performance of suchideologies (e.g., ideologies connected to gender, race, and sexuality), showcasing thekinds of connections observable in performance studies work (Langellier 126).

Not only does Carbado’s work illuminate the manifold ways heterosexism con-tributes to the invisible knapsack from which straight people benefit, his reconcep-tualization of the concept of discrimination concretizes the links between identity,privilege, and politics. As Carbado explains, the notion of discrimination groundedin intent lets numerous people ‘‘off the hook’’ and seemingly exonerates them fromthe implications of supporting prejudicial social systems. Instead of thinking of dis-crimination as linked to purposeful or intentional discrimination, Carbado’s workencourages viewing ‘‘those of us who unquestionably accept the racial, gender,and heterosexual privileges we have—those of us who fail to acknowledge ourvictimless status with respect to racism, sexism, and homophobia—a[s] also perpetra-tors of discrimination’’ (190). Most importantly, Carbado treats ‘‘taking identity pri-vileges for granted’’ as akin to the continued validation of systems of oppression (190).

Carbado’s discussion of the links between the act of not challenging the benefitswe receive as a result of our race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability and theperpetuation of discrimination was entirely lost on me at the start of our queer con-versations, an omission that remains troubling to me given my own self-conception


of my progressive politics and the twenty-plus years of schooling I had undergone(with a special emphasis on critical theory and ideological critique in the past sixyears). I benefited from the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with afriend, scholar, and colleague I trust, and this conversation substantially changedmy thoughts about the significance of queer studies to my own academic work; how-ever, what about individuals who do not feel they can engage a colleague on thesesubjects? Is it the obligation of every queer scholar or individual to hold the eagerstraight person’s hand through this terrain? Where does this leave us in terms ofthe ways we can improve the academy?

Alyssa

As Terri discussed her feelings of guilt, I wondered how I could reorient her away fromsuch feeling toward a place of empowerment to make changes through her allyship.While that would most certainly require more than a few conversations, I trusted thatthe process of making unmarked privileges visible was merely the first step.

In many ways the guilt that Terri experienced over the trajectory of our conver-sation was not a feeling I shared. At the same time, I can identify with the source ofher guilt, as I, too, am complicit in multiple systems of power and privilege. Herdiscomfort and vulnerability in attempting to join or take on the queer projectdemonstrates much deeper tensions of identity politics and community membership.Do I feel I cannot take part in a feminist movement that has, historically, harboredvarying distrust of lesbian women? No; like many lesbians who have worked in con-cert with feminist communities, I feel intimately connected with that political project.Identity politics have long come under fire for their limitations, and Terri’s dis-comfort strikes at the heart of those tensions (Gitlin 35; Alcoff and Mohanty 2).

Yet perhaps political organizing and, in this case, queer scholarship is less abouta supposed stable identity and more about alliance or coalition building (Chavez 3;Chavez and Griffin 8; Johnson and Bhatt). Our conversation tapped into historicallysignificant and persistent issues that may continue to keep people divided rather thanunite them to remedy these issues in the graduate classroom and the academybeyond. Indeed, our conversational process itself was yielding a shared sense of com-mitment to a project we identified as important for different reasons; she and I werecreating coalition through these interactions (Carillo Rowe). Moreover, rather thandelineating who can research what, we decided that engaging in these conversationsand writing this piece allows us to enact our allied and coalitional relationship bydemonstrating our commitment to the queer project. Perhaps through this workand sharing it with others we can express our desire to explore notions of identityin the classroom and our research in order to translate that into political practice(Smith 348).

Empowering Ourselves, Taking Responsibility, and Queering the Classroom

Terri

Silence.Though guilt over identity markers I cannot change may not be productive,

allyship can be a means of challenging the systems of power that legitimate or dis-criminate based on such markers of social location (Bishop; Johnson and Bhatt).


Yet, naively, I had assumed I could simply enter queer communities, declare myselfan ally, and begin to do the work of ‘‘queering.’’ Another straight ally—what wasn’tto like about that? I had good intentions; I wanted to help. With the assistance of acolleague, I had grown and matured in my thinking about sexuality and the acad-emy, and I was convinced I could be of use to the queer community as a result ofthese revelations.

As I reflect back on these previous paragraphs, it is easy to see how they smackof paternalism and benevolence, although I had no intention to propagate suchpower dynamics. It is also easy to see how my aid might be rejected and indeedanticipate my surprise over an exchange on queer politics I witnessed a few monthslater. Perhaps a month or two after starting these queer conversations, I foundmyself in a class discussing Butler and early queer theory. Before I entered the con-versation, the discussion turned toward the role of heterosexuals in queer projects.As I listened, I became aware that—shockingly!—not every queer organizationwants my help. I even sensed some hostility toward the arrogance of heterosexualswho assumed the queer project could also be their project. Though I am normallya very active participant in class discussions, I self-silenced.

I started this conversation with Alyssa again, attempting to make sense of mylocation within this morass of sexual politics. As I write this piece, more than a yearremoved from these exchanges, I am cognizant of the extent to which I constantlynavigate the markers of my identity vis-a-vis my politics and praxis. Far from static,this terrain is ever shifting. Yet if I cannot definitively locate myself, how am to han-dle my academic responsibilities? What does this mean for my teaching or for myscholarship? Can I say I am working on a queer project with my research on popularmusic and controversies regarding gender and sexuality? Or do I have no right toclaim that mantle?

Alyssa

What would it look like for both of us—a self-identified queer woman and a self-identified straight woman—to answer Warner’s call to take up queer theory as ‘‘away to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimaginethe publics from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform’’(xxvi)? The bar certainly feels high, though not impossible, especially if we movedour conversations out of our office and into the classroom. How strange to think thatour office had turned into a larger-sized closet, reinscribing sexuality into the private,as something not discussed in polite company, the secret concealed by the discourses ofprivilege circulating around it.

By this stage in the conversation, Terri had confronted and accounted for anumber of complex though sometimes contradictory concerns. While her ownawareness of heterosexual privilege will always be valid, I believe she is selling her-self, and the possibility of our allyship, a little short. Although I am sure there maybe LGBTQ activists that harbor distrust for straight men and women rather thanconsidering them allies, my sense of the community is quite the opposite. I believethat Terri should continue to bring these concerns honestly and self-reflexively toher future classrooms and academic departments. Importantly, the queer project isavailable not only to scholars who identify as queer. It recognizes the power and cen-trality of sexuality, and heterosexuality in particular, as an ideological discourse thatoften goes unrecognized and unquestioned.


In fact, Terri’s concern about not being able to claim the mantle of queer schol-arship feeds the assumption that because someone is studying lesbian, gay, bisexual,or transgender issues, she or he must claim one of those identities, as if those were theonly possibilities. As Dow cautions, we need to ‘‘avoid essentializing the perspectivesassociated with social locations’’ and remember ‘‘the political implications of sociallocations are not necessarily the same as the political commitments of the individualswho occupy them’’ (‘‘Politicizing Voice’’ 247). Part of the project’s appeal is extend-ing the range of voices that add to the disciplinary power and potential of those criti-cal perspectives within communication, cultural studies, and rhetorical scholarship.Perhaps those voices could positively affect the incorporation and actual discussionof sexuality in graduate classrooms, even violating the supposed detached academicperspective to recognize the intimate, personal, and emotional relationships to theseissues.

Ending Avoidance: (Drag) Performances and Nudity in the Classroom

Our series of difficult conversations underscored the processes by which criticalengagement with queer scholarship, questions of sexuality, and interrogations ofpower are contained by the ideologies that structure and inform our academic socia-lization within graduate classrooms. By reenacting this conversational exchange, weseek to offer an example of ‘‘counter-hegemonic cultural practice’’ and offer narra-tives that seek to bridge the gap often purported to separate our so-called private andpublic identities (hooks, ‘‘Yearning’’ 22). The very practice of analyzing our ownlocations of power, privilege, and emotional vulnerability in those temporally andcontextually bound moments shows the productive possibilities that accompany for-saking academic drag and acknowledging connections between our intellectual andemotional lives (Morris, ‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 34; Tompkins). Such potentialities havelong been acknowledged in performance studies scholarship but have less frequentlybeen modeled in rhetorical=critical scholarship. Yet by interrogating those ‘‘private’’moments, we observed the operation of the ideologies that shape the communicationdiscipline and continue to contain the politics of queer scholarship. Though we hesi-tate to offer facile implications or suggest ‘‘with these simple steps we can remedy thetroubling manifestations of heteronormativity in our discipline,’’ we make severalrecommendations concerning professionalism, the containment of queer scholarship,and academic drag.

First, graduate classrooms should be spaces where we critique and not merelyimbibe the ideologies of professionalism. Professionalization is a critical part ofgraduate education. Professional development workshops and ‘‘Introduction toGraduate Studies’’ courses instruct graduate students how to move in professional,disciplinary environments. Yet such courses should not only teach professionalism;we ought to hold professionalism itself up as an object for critique. For example, agraduate class could take up such questions as these: What does it mean to be a pro-fessional? What does a professor look like? What mental imagery comes to mind?Through such conversations we would hope that students and instructors couldunpack the privileged professional ideal (or, perhaps, stereotype) of academics asmustachioed white men wearing tweed coats with elbow patches and doing theirwork in an office surrounded by books. Such assumptions are not only genderedmasculine but have class, race, and heteronormative implications as well. Althoughsome work has been done to expose the ideologies that undergird the communication


discipline (Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland; Blair, Brown, and Baxter; Shugart, ‘‘AnAppropriating Aesthetic’’), we still need more work illuminating the ways the dis-course of professionalism in our field is laced with implicit arguments about the pro-fessor’s race, class, gender, sexuality, ability level, citizenship status (Moreira andDiversi), etc. When the yardstick of professionalism continues to be premised onsuch exclusionary terms, the stakes for transgression—in scholarship and in theclassroom—are only heightened. In part, naming the ways in which such perfor-mances of professionalism rely on academic drag offers a starting point to criticallyquestion not only these performances but also the terms of professionalism itself.

Second, we want to draw attention to and caution against modes of containingqueer politics through pedagogical practices within graduate communicationclassrooms. We are concerned when queer rhetorical studies is deemed pertinentto scholarly conversation only if critics analyze discourse by lesbian, gay, bisexual,transgender, or queer rhetors. Such an approach is clearly problematic. It relies onlinking ‘‘social locations,’’ ‘‘perspectives,’’ and ‘‘political commitments’’ (Dow,‘‘Politicizing Voice’’ 247), and it places the critic in the position of arbitrating ques-tions of sexuality identity. As Morris emphasizes, much of the intervention thatqueer rhetorical studies offers comes from recognizing not only the significance ofqueer rhetors but also how centering sexuality poses a radical challenge to heteronor-mativity (‘‘Introduction’’ 5).

Containment can also occur when instructors position queer rhetorical studies asa ‘‘method’’ or ‘‘lens’’ akin to narrative, genre, or fantasy theme analysis. This fram-ing positions the choice to ignore queer scholarship as one of inventional preference.Rather than reflecting on the politics of embracing queer scholarship (or not), situ-ating queer rhetorical studies as an optional critical lens fails to acknowledge howsexuality cuts across various ‘‘objects, methods, and theories’’ (Morris, ‘‘Introduc-tion’’ 5). If queer rhetorical studies is taught as an optional critical method or onlyrelevant when studying queer authors, the groundwork in the field is set such thatliberal scholars are able to avoid doing queer work while disavowing the politicalnature of such avoidance.

Third, we are both hopeful and critical about the utility of drag and the avail-ability of options for academic drag performances. We will start with grounds forhope. Although, in some ways, our endorsement of academic drag as a critical con-struct is ironic coming from two feminist scholars given drag’s association with akind of caricaturized femininity (see Thompson; Shugart, ‘‘CounterhegemonicActs’’) and masculinity, drag has long been heralded as a transgressive strategy asso-ciated with queer culture (Butler 85). Like gendered drag performances, the critic canuse these performances to transgress the norms of the academy in order to reveal theboundaries (and ideologies) themselves. In short, academic drag need not limit schol-arship; by calling attention to its performative quality, scholars can destabilize pro-fessional ideology in a creative manner. We offer this work both as a performanceand an interrogation of academic drag to demonstrate the transgressive and reveal-ing potential such critical engagement might have in such formal disciplinary spacesas academic journals. As our vacillation between dialogue and analysis suggests, aca-demic drag implies mutability. Like a costume, drag can be put on and taken off;performances can slip in and out of a drag sensibility. As such, we have hope thatacademic drag can be taken off as scholars embrace self-reflexivity about whenand where they are putting on such costumes of professionalization. Moreover,because academic drag is crosscut with race, class, gender, and sexuality, when


multiple identities are brought to bear in our scholarship we should attend to theways that sexism, racism, classism, and ableism coconstitute one another.

On the other hand, though we are heartened by the transgressive prospects oftaking off academic drag, we acknowledge that this process is not without risks.One simple response to the problems posed by cloaking ourselves in academic dragis to ‘‘take it all off’’—go naked. Yet even a brief consideration of the possibilities for‘‘critical exhibitionism’’ as a response to the containment function of academic dragin classroom spaces suggests the limitations of such an approach (Morris, ‘‘(Self-)Portrait’’ 34). Violent material realities can accompany nudity or various levels ofexposure, and the risks of going naked are not the same for everyone. For example,trans bodies risk violence if forced to expose themselves in ways that gender-normative bodies do not. The violence attendant to notions of nudity need not beunderstood literally either. Similar violence can be done in the classroom by support-ing forces of domination that threaten those bodies made more vulnerable byprospect of exhibitionism than others (Yep, ‘‘Violence of Heteronormativity’’;Gearheart) or by engaging in the vulnerability called for by self-reflexivity. Theseexamples emphasize multiple registers of violence, from the tangible forms ofdomination to the symbolic violence that accompanies exclusion or exposure inpedagogical spaces. In other words, the material and emotional stakes of exposureand vulnerability tied up with a call for exhibitionism are high.

Finally, we suggest that significant gains can be made toward the advancementof queer rhetorical studies by simply taking seriously all questions asked of critics,many of which have also been raised by feminist scholars. Queries about how ourbodies and identities operate in academic spaces or questions about our ‘‘private’’affairs should not be dismissed out of hand as unprofessional or uncalled-for in pro-fessional contexts. Rather, we recommend the exercise of interrogating from wherethe resistance to answer such questions emerges. We suspect that such reticencemay be steeped in the ideological benefits that accrue (to some) from bolstering aconservative notion of professionalism. Indeed, we have worked to pepper this arti-cle with such questions. These questions are not stylistic devices; rather, we believefruitful conversations can be produced in graduate classrooms (or other academicspaces) by taking seriously the questions we raise in this piece.

Though we are arguing for the importance of the questions, we do not believe allquestions require answers. A trans faculty member need not respond to questionsabout hir body that jeopardize hir physical, psychological, or economic well-being.Graduate students on the job market need not be coaxed into answering questionsabout family planning. There is no easy formula for determining which questionsshould be answered and which should not. No litmus test exists for determiningwhen to challenge professionalism and when flaunting professionalism is ill-advised.But validating all questions means encouraging critical thought about what weanswer, what we do not answer, and why. We believe the responsibility to do suchwork is incumbent on all scholars.

We offer these suggestions not as answers or solutions per se but as crucial start-ing points for critically and self-reflexively analyzing the ideology of professionalismthat permeates the academy, our disciplines, and our classrooms and serves to con-tain feminist, antiracist, and queer rhetorical scholarship. In the few years we havebeen having these conversations, we have struggled with how to close them. Itmay be that the struggle is, in fact, the very point. Indeed, our satisfaction with thiswork has never come from finishing conversations; it has come from starting them


anew, reflecting on new problems, or hearing from a colleague who has heard of ourresearch and wants to talk more about how he=she=ze might improve his=her=hirclassroom and approach to scholarship. By modeling openness and vulnerability(Johnson and Bhatt 241) and asking questions about the political implications oftransgression in the classroom, our best hope is that this work enables others inthe field to reciprocate and do the same.

Notes

1. As we explain in our literature review, we recognize that our form is a bit unconventionalfor rhetorical scholars; nonetheless, we were inspired to find other examples of pedagogi-cally oriented pieces utilizing a similar format for coauthorship. We mimic the style ofworks by Alexander and Warren and also of Johnson and Bhatt, and we too are cognizantof the risks of using such a format (Johnson and Bhatt 231) as well as of the demands itplaces on readers (Alexander and Warren 329–330). Yet the form, as Johnson and Bhattnote, complicates notions of public and private, which helps advance the goals of this work.Nevertheless, a few important notes about these conversations are necessary. First, we mustacknowledge that the material in italics does not constitute word-for-word quotes from ourconversations. Rather, the quotes are composites—‘‘fragments,’’ to borrow from McGee—that we have re-created and reassembled with the benefit of hindsight. We endeavored tocapture our thoughts and feelings in a manner that remained as true to the moment as poss-ible. Second, we have structured this article to both capture the general flow of our conver-sation while also creating space for critical reflection upon the conversations. Ourconversational composites are unavoidably augmented by hindsight in the act of writingthis article and new insights produced by the work of authoring and revising this manu-script. We have attempted to contain our reflection upon our remarks to the analysis underthe italicized text but acknowledge that our authorial production process—having conver-sations about these conversations—inevitably influences the texture of our text. Finally,this project began more than three years ago. Clearly, the larger political landscape inthe United States has evolved over the past three years, with some notable achievements(e.g., passage of federal hate crimes legislation, the repeal of ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’’President Barack Obama’s public evolution on marriage equality, and historic passage ofmarriage equality ballot initiatives in Maine, Maryland, and Washington) and setbacks(e.g., continued discrimination and inequalities in employment, immigration laws, andpartnership=marriage). We ask for the readers’ consideration if some our assertions are dif-ficult to place contextually amid a shifting politics on issues of sexuality.

2. By using the term queer in these ways, we seek to engage queer rhetorical studies in itsmultifaceted dimensions and create opportunities to queer spaces like the classroom byboth engaging LGBT identities and challenging the boundaries and logics of sexualityand gender that augment the classroom space (Cohen; Lovaas, Elia, and Yep; Halperin‘‘Normalization’’; Halperin, Saint Foucault; Warner).

3. For a sampling of the work that has been done in these areas, see Chavez; Darsey; DeLuca;Dow, ‘‘Ellen, Television’’; Battles and Hilton-Morrow; Cooper; Ott and Aoki; Olson,‘‘Traumatic Styles’’; Olson, ‘‘Anger Among Allies’’; Poirot, ‘‘Mediating a Movement’’;Poirot, ‘‘Domesticating the Liberated Woman’’; Rand ‘‘Gay Pride’’; Rand, ‘‘An Inflamma-tory Fag’’; Rawson; Tate.

4. While some may argue that the queer project within rhetorical studies is primarily alignedwith the LGBT studies project of recovery of identity-based histories, we affirm the pro-ject’s queerness as it confronts and questions heteronormative ideologies undergirdingdisciplinary and sociopolitical histories. Much of the extant literature we reference through-out departs from an identity-based usage of queer and instead calls up the radical, trans-gressive potential of queer politics and queer world-making (Halperin, Saint Foucault 66).

5. Note here that what I meant by ‘‘Let’s talk about women’s issues’’ clearly casts ‘‘women’sissues’’ as the issues that concern white, straight, middle- to upper-class, able-bodiedwomen. In this capacity, the sentiment I articulated in college places white, straight, able-bodied women of means at the heart of feminism. This position, troubling on a variety of


levels, bears historical resonance with some iterations of the women’s movements whichhave spurned coalitional opportunities and instead excluded non-white, nonstraight,non-middle-=upper-class, non-able-bodied others (see Echols; Moraga and Anzaldua;Roth).

6. Through the course of revisions, a considerable amount of time removed from these con-versations, I reflected upon my earlier thoughts as captured in this exchange. Not only doesthe thinking recorded here reflect a failure to critique the power dynamics surrounding thenotion of the private as it intersects with sexuality and privilege, it also conflates sex andsexuality, a mistake that is repeated throughout the early conversations. Months later, sit-ting in a kind of safe space seminar, our moderator remarked that people often reduce sexu-ality to sexual acts alone. In rereading this dialogue, I see evidence of how much thatthinking penetrated my arguments here. Moreover, what is most remarkable about my por-tions of these exchanges is how closely they enact the kind of logic that Lovaas describesacademics using to justify choices to ignore engagement with sexuality in the commu-nication disciplines (see Lovaas 398). Nearly all of ‘‘the possible explanations’’ she listsas reasons why ‘‘the subject [sexuality] appear[s] to received limited attention in many[communication] courses’’ are enacted in various forms as I processed the nature of therelationships between sexuality, communication, and professionalism over the course ofthese conversations.

7. The term safe space has a genealogy of its own. Achugbue of the National MulticulturalInstitute defines safe space as ‘‘a space in which an individual or a group may remain freefrom blame, ridicule, or persecution, and are in no danger of coming to mental or physicalharm.’’ The term is frequently used to designate specific spaces wherein lesbian, gay, bisex-ual, transgender, or queer youth, students, employees, and=or members of a communitycan go and feel safe about their identities and experiences. Safe spaces as related to sexu-ality have been encouraged to target and support LGBTQ youth in particular. Advocatesfor Youth and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) are just two orga-nizations that offer instructions for how to create a safe space (see Advocates for Youth’s‘‘Creating Safe Space for GLBTQ Youth: A Toolkit’’ and GLSEN’s ‘‘New Safe SpaceKit’’).

8. As I write of my coming-out experience as liberating, I acknowledge the ways in which sucha narrative participates in the construction of the closet and its relation to neoliberal dis-courses of visibility related to gay liberation. Scholars have critiqued and complicatedthe closet and the subsequent discourse of liberation associated with the ‘‘confession’’ ofsexuality (which constitutes a guilty subject) by noting how such an individualized narrativecan depoliticize queer politics and de-emphasize the power of heteronormativity to keepsilent those who identify as queer. Indeed, my narrative points to the continued powerof the closet as I interpreted coming out as the most relevant option in those earliermoments. Furthermore, for many, coming out is neither necessary nor important (seeButler; Decena; Dow, Ellen; Foucault; Halperin, Saint Foucault; Heinz; Sedgewick).

9. Notably, this entire section still makes me uncomfortable on a variety of levels. To admit totears is to admit to an emotional performance that is incompatible with the professionaldemands of detachment. To represent and circulate the occurrence of such a moment ofemotional performance to colleagues in the field is to risk feeding stereotypes about‘‘emotional’’ women reinforced by the image of the crying woman (see Hoover-Dempsey,Plas, and Wallston; see also Tompkins).

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''Academic Drag'' and the Performance of the Critical Personae: An Exchange on Sexuality, Politics,...

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