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“This is Not an Empty-Headed Man in a Dress”: Literacy Misused, Reread andRewritten in SoulopolizEric Darnell Pritchard a

a Department of Rhetoric and Writing, The University of Texas at Austin,

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‘‘This is Not an Empty-Headed Man ina Dress’’: Literacy Misused, Reread andRewritten in SoulopolizEric Darnell Pritchard

This essay explores relationships between southern black queer experience, grassrootsactivism, and the literacies of southern culture through a case study of ‘‘Ella Mosley,’’a 56-year-old black transgender woman activist living in the South. Out of the misusesof literacy—the ways oppressive agents appropriate literacy to the detriment of an indi-vidual or community—manifests a mandate and an occasion for social action, identityformation, and affirmation. The rhetorical strategies employed in Mosley’s activism arelinked to her literacies of southern culture and its impact on her sense of self, both ofwhich she draws on in her resistance to anti-transgender rhetorics and policies effectingtransgenders in her city, ‘‘Soulapoliz,’’ and throughout the United States. The essay alsodepicts the usefulness of literacy as a lens on everyday sites of black queer resistance andself-making.

. . .what has to happen is, the mind has to become more open to learning moreabout that which one doesn’t know . . . so you can get past the idea of ‘justa man in a dress’ and get the understanding of a deeper reality . . .At the

very, very least, I think that anybody who happens upon things that I

Eric Darnell Pritchard, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, The University of Texas at Austin. I wish to thankthe editor of Southern Communication Journal. I especially want to thank Charles Morris, editor of this specialissue, for his enthusiasm and support of this work. Thanks to Davida Charney, Ann Cvetkovich, and DavidGlisch-Sanchez who each read and commented on this essay in earlier drafts. I wish to also thank DeborahBrandt and Craig Werner who each commented on earlier papers from which parts of this essay are drawn.Rasha Diab leant a friendly ear and careful advice as I prepared the essay’s final draft. Above all, I want to thank‘‘Ella’’ for consenting to be interviewed and trusting me with her story. Correspondence to: Eric Darnell Pritch-ard, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin, PAR 129, 1 University Station, MailStop B5500, Austin, TX 78712-020. E-mail: [email protected]

Southern Communication Journal

Vol. 74, No. 3, July–September 2009, pp. 278–299

ISSN 1041-794x (print) # 2009 Southern States Communication AssociationDOI: 10.1080/10417940903061094

Downloaded By: [Pritchard, Eric Darnell] At: 18:26 23 July 2009

have written . . . they have to come away withthe idea, at least, that this is not an

empty-headed man in a dress.

Ella Mosley1

In Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, E. Patrick Johnson notes that ‘‘the South,like all regions of the country, is a site of contradictions’’ in that complementing ‘‘theregion’s long history of grotesque racial violence—slavery, lynching, cross burnings,etc.’’ is ‘‘the gentility, civility, and general good manners of the folk.’’2 As has beennoted by a cross-disciplinary body of scholars of southern queer history and culture,further compounding such contradictions are the lives of sexual and gender dissidentpeople in the South, who despite relative absence in scholarship,3 have always beenand continue to thrive in the region. As such, queer folks occupy peculiar positionsof invisibility and hypervisibility, of silence and amplified voice. While such scholar-ship is a critical intervention into southern studies, interventions from which I drawgreatly here, none of these studies of southern queer history and culture have, asJohnson notes, focused exclusively on race.

With the exception of Johnson’s recent work, few scholarly works have beenattentive to black queer southern culture exclusively and even fewer to black trans-genders within that culture. Johnson writes that ‘‘given the supposed provincialismof the South, it is perhaps the last place one might expect to find a thriving trans -. . . or even drag culture, especially in black communities.’’4 The consequences ofwhich have been a dearth of complex and diverse narratives of black transgenderlife in the South. Yet, from the autobiographies of popular drag performers TheLady Chablis and Rupaul, both having successful careers in the South,5 to the oralhistories of Johnson’s four southern informants who identify as transgender orgender variant,6 we are hearing narratives of black southern queerness that aretoo often elided in already marginal histories of southern life. Ella Mosley, whois quoted at the beginning of the essay, is another such story that when amplifiedcorroborates, complicates and calibrates histories of queer southern history andculture.

As an activist for the rights of transgender persons in her state and nationally,Ella and her story fill critical spaces in histories of queer social movementsand cultural activism in the South. Mosley is a self-described unemployed,African American, transgender woman, and Christian in her late 50s. Residingin Soulopoliz, a large urban city in the South, Ella uses her writing and rhetoricalstrategies to disrupt anti-transgender sentiments and policies within her southerncommunity. Before moving forward I want to make clear that this essay is acase study of Ella Mosley’s literacy, and does not attempt to speak for thelives of all transgender women and cannot speak to the unique experience oftransgender men. Merely, this essay is a contribution to the scholarly work neces-sary to complicate and more completely understand the experiences of AfricanAmerican transgender people within black and queer southern communitiesrespectively.

‘‘This is Not an Empty-Headed Man in a Dress’’ 279


Through my case analysis of Ella, I focus on two specific claims. My first claim isthat scholarship on queer southern culture and activism has much to learn about theemergence of movements for social justice by using literacy as a theoretical, historical,and sociological model examining black queer activism. Literacy practices are at thecore of cultural activism by black queers.7 Shedding light on the significance of lit-eracy when theorizing literary, visual and performance as cultural activism is keyto seeing how everyday folks act as political, cultural, and spiritual agents. I amreminded here of the ways scholars in literacy studies have recovered the contribu-tions of ordinary men and women in the Black Freedom Struggle throughout theSouth through a commitment to the place of literacy within those narratives.8 Ella’sepigraph succinctly describes the focus of this essay: to explore the grassroots appro-priations of literacy by one woman, Ella Mosley, to resist the dehumanizing dis-courses about transgender persons deployed throughout the public: discourses thatfoster many negative actions engendering the de facto discrimination against trans-genders in employment through the absence of protections in the EmploymentNon-Discrimination Act (ENDA); ignoring the ways transgenders, particularly trans-genders of color, are disproportionately targeted for bias-motivated violence;9 conti-nuing to pathologize transgender and transsexual identities through classification as amental disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor-ders, fourth edition, text revised (DSM-IV-TR).10 Though these actions emerge fromand foster a number of marginalizing factions, I identify and examine these and otheroppressive agents as representative of what I call the misuses of literacy. To explicatemisuses and codify other patterns of literacy practice as they appear in the lives of EllaMosley and the 60 other black transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer(TLGBQ) people I interviewed11 for my larger work in progress,12 I offer three addi-tional concepts: mandates, rereading, and rewriting. Ella’s challenges to misuses ofliteracy emerge out of her mandate to resist the violence of misuses and to self-affirm.Rereading and rewriting are used to characterize the literacy activities at work in theidentification of and reception to mandates. Each will be further developed in thecase study analysis that follows. Taken together, this locates Mosley on a continuumof individuals’ use of literacy in acts of resistance.

The second claim is that there is a peculiar labor at the intersections of literacy andthe multiplicity of identities; a labor further illuminated and compounded when weconsider regional identity in relation to the already complex relations of race, class,gender, sexuality, and many other identities. Multiplicity refers to how various iden-tities blend in such a way that they change the contexts in which each is seen andexperienced. However, while studies linking literacy to identities are robust,13

research into the relationship between literacy and the multiplicity of identities, par-ticularly intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, are few.14 The formerignores nuances to identity that are crucial to understanding the life stories and lit-eracy practices of black queers. In the section detailing the essay’s conceptual frame-work, I show how multiplicity is central to theorizing the relationship betweenidentities and literacy whenever we are seeking to do so in a way that resists theflattening of identities and be attentive to the ways power, privilege, visibility, and

280 The Southern Communication Journal


other issues shift and change when multiple parts of one’s self are moved from themargin to center of theorizing and representation.

My analysis of Ella Mosley’s notion of the South and southern identity, centeringregion as a variable of meaning in transgender experiences, allows us to trace regionalidentity to her readings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and overall sense of self. Forexample, Ella’s literacies of southern cultural practices engender her identification ofthree specific black southern cultural traditions—racial injustice, centrality of reli-gion, and honoring elders. These reveal complex relations between those identitiesthat would be otherwise elided. As such, this essay illuminates the usefulness of abroadened epistemology for links between literacy and the multiplicity of identities,and consequently, for black queers’ cultural activism as literate practices.

Mosley’s resistance manifests through a complex relation of identity and literacythat go undertheorized and underexamined in literacy and language studies. Conse-quently, though numerous books in African American literacy and rhetoric attend togender, none take up nonheteronormative notions of gender and sexuality exclu-sively. Similarly more book-length studies on literacy and queerness have appeared;though an interrogation of literacy and racialized queerness and sexuality are almostnonexistent. The result is an absence of scholarship on black queer populations inliteracy, composition, and rhetorical studies.

I will begin situating the study by providing an overview of the conceptual frame-work used throughout the essay. Following this is a brief biographical section onMosley, focusing on her identity development and arrival in the South. Then I willhighlight three cultural traditions she identifies as uniquely southern. I explore eachof these through brief examples of the ways they are appropriated by Mosley in heractivism for TLGBQ people in Soulopoliz. I do this with attentiveness to the ways inwhich her own identities are constructed and reconstructed in the process of her acti-vism, and its impact on the rhetorical strategies she chooses to employ or disregard.Next, I will examine Mosley’s rereading and rewriting the misuses of literacy onwhich anti-transgender sentiments and policies emerge in Soulopoliz and nationallythrough a reading of a moment in 2007 in which the synthesis of her literacies ofsouthern cultural traditions and resistance to attempts to marginalize transgendersare clearly visible. The essay concludes with a discussion of the implications forMosley’s story and the stories of other black queers for histories and theories ofliteracy and rhetorical studies.

Conceptual Framework

Both ‘‘literacies’’ and ‘‘multiplicity of identities’’ are key terms within my case ana-lysis of Ella Mosley. As such, some attention to the genesis of each term as I deploythem is in order. The powerful orator Sojourner Truth, a former slave reported tohave not been able to read or write, remarked ‘‘I don’t read such small stuff as letters.I read men and nations.’’15 Truth’s comments are a precursor to Paulo Freire’swell-known statement that literacy is the act of reading both the word and the world.In the case of Ella Mosley, we see this in her reading of southern cultural traditions



and the ways various identities operate within the context of the South, for example.The remarks of Truth and Freire each inform my definition of literacy as a sociocul-tural situated practices of meaning making, including, though not exclusively,reading, writing, and formal literacy skills.16 This definition recognizes multipleplaces and points of literacy acquisition and practice, resisting any depictions ofliteracy as monolithic or autonomous.17 Such a shift has often been denoted bythe use of the term ‘‘literacies,’’ referring to literacy in the plural. Formal literacyoften assumes an essentialized ability for literate activity, as well as an imagineduniversal literate subject.

My uptake of the ‘‘multiplicity of identities’’18 has its roots in work of women ofcolor feminist writers and activists who first theorized and applied ‘‘intersectional-ity.’’19 As stated in the introduction, within literacy and rhetorical studies there isa peculiar undertheorizing of identities as multiple and nonstatic. To move beyondthis issue, I contend that we must return to the full definitions of intersectionalityas theorized in women of color feminist genealogies. For example, in ‘‘A BlackFeminist Statement’’ the Combahee River Collective—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith,and Demita Frazier—described identities and oppressions as being on differentpaths that sometimes intersect and overlap, and at other times seem as thoughthey are experienced, synthesized or blended. The latter part of this definition—the synthesis—has often been ignored while the former—the criss-crossing ofidentities—has been used to define intersectionality almost exclusively. Also, we mustattend to the ways in which material experiences are impacted by the salience of someidentities over others; however, I contend that we must recognize this withoutoversimplifying and essentializing the complex relations of multiple parts in relationto one another. ‘‘Multiplicity’’ references the entirety of this reading of intersection-ality. Through it we can explore multiple oppressions and identities in ways that donot elide the specificity of difference but resist the undertheorizing of identities byacknowledging its complexities in our analysis of the everyday.

Employing methods of grounded theory that stresses a close, systematic, and thor-ough search of participant’s in-depth life story accounts for patterns leading to strongconceptual explanations of literacy and identity, I theorize black queer literacy tradi-tions from the ground up. Four of these concepts, which I will briefly define, are usedthroughout this essay: the misuses of literacy, mandates, rereading, and rewriting.

I develop and use the misuses of literacy to describe how oppressive agents them-selves often appropriate literacy to try to maintain dominance and to inflict harm. Idepict Ella’s response to these misuses of literacy as emerging out of a mandate toresist and self-affirm. Within the context of black queer lives, the misuses of literacyare varied,20 but in each instance there is an occasion for and invitation to socialaction, identity formation, and affirmation. That literacy can be a tool of oppressionor liberation is a matter that has been examined and re-examined in literacy studiesover time.21 However, I was not just struck by this particular narrative as being com-pletely new (though we have not seen it situated this way either), but again by theinstances in which these misuses served as an occasion for and an invitation to socialaction, identity formation, and affirmation.



Mandates22 I define as a pull or push requirement and=or commission for whichone’s literacy is drafted into action within a specific cultural, social, and or=politicalcontext—even the manner in which the mandate is taken up is subject to the agency23

and lived experience of the individual receiving the mandate. External forces impacthow mandates are accessed, interpreted and responded to; however, internal forcesare also significant. Internal forces sometimes emerge out of some external experience,but whether one is conscious of these outside forces or not, internal feelings are aconstant source of interpreting material conditions. Internal mandates such as feelingsof alienation, isolation, and oppression (including silencing, invisibility, etc.) alsocontribute to the ways mandates are accessed, interpreted and responded to by Ella.

Lastly, rereading and rewriting are decoding and encoding strategies respectively.Both are literate acts. Each categorizes and explains the ways in which participantsreinterpret and reconstruct history, culture, communities, and other foundationsas a response to mandates. It is the process of critical questioning and introspectionabout a misuse. This includes picking apart the values, assumptions, ideologies thatunderpin the misuse itself, as well as one’s own privileges, power, and powerlessnessin relation to it. It represents the act of invention and=or reinvention of texts, ideol-ogies, histories, etc. that develop in the liminal space left by confronting the misusesand the act of rereading. Each of these concepts is key to explicating the appropria-tion of literacy by Ella in activism and self-making in Soulopoliz.

Making Herself From Scratch24 (Or Ms. Mosley Goes to Soulopoliz)

Ella Mosley was born in a small rural city in the Midwest region in 1952. Growing up,Ella said that in school she was identified as a male, but that at home ‘‘I would gohome and live my truth, which meant makeup, lingerie and being me’’ with afeminine gender identity and expression. The earliest she remembers identifying asa female was at age 5:

They had a little show, ‘‘Howdy Doody.’’ They had him dressed up like a littlecowboy with freckles on his face. I had a crush on him. . . . And I always identifiedwith the heroines in movies like ‘‘Gidget,’’ ‘‘The Flying Nun,’’ and then there was‘‘Julia.’’ I said ‘‘Oh, I want to be a black nurse like Diahann Carroll.’’

Within Ella’s family, ‘‘it was never an issue with me about, you know, whether I’msupposed to be accepted.’’ Ella also said that while she was identifying as a female,she had no concept of what it meant for one to be transgender, nor did her family.She was just simply being the female she always was; though she speculates that herfamily read her as being an effeminate gay male child and not a girl at all. This wasexpressed at various times in Ella’s childhood very early on:

When I was five years old I have an aunt who has a reputation of always speakingher mind, whatever it was, you know, kind of outspoken. And when she came byour house to visit one day when I was five—I’m told this, I didn’t actually hear theconversation—she told my mama—after she’d seen me play for a while and seeingthe way I was, she said, ‘‘That boy’s gonna be a sissy.’’ And, I guess that just sort ofsaid how I was most of, I mean, my childhood life.



The most common and brief definition of transgender is that it is ‘‘an umbrella term’’used to denote a number of gender variant identities and expressions25; though DavidValentine’s recent work, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category,reminds us to resist flattening uses of the term that overlook the complexity ofwho transgender identifies and who identifies with it.26 In Ella’s case she and herfamily did not know or use the term transgender; she explained that she did not feelthat not knowing or using the word transgender kept her from expressing herself orwould have made a big difference in the degree to which her family accepted her.

In 1971, Ella prepared to enter college. She had been helped to find schools and tofill out applications by a local woman who began mentoring her. With the mentor’shelp, Ella was admitted to an Ivy League institution and became the first in her familyto attend college. While there she grew wary of having to present as male genderedeach day and the violence of having to do so began to take its toll on her work. Elladid not perform well and, after just two years, was forced to end her college career.She remained in the Northeastern city for another six years before making thedecision to move to the South in 1979.

Ella said the major reason she’d come to Soulopoliz in 1979 was to begin hertransition with a doctor who’d help with her sex-reassignment transition withoutrequiring psychological analysis and treatment for ‘‘gender dysphoria’’ (later referredto as Gender Identity Disorder [GID]), before hormones or surgery could be admi-nistered.27 Ella resisted this classification and its effect on her desire to live as thewoman she’d always been:

I came to [Soulopoliz] during a two-week vacation and found out that there was adoctor here who could assist me in beginning my transition without putting methrough a whole lot of red-tape as far as psychological testing and so forth . . .because I knew what I was, mentally, and my only issue was to begin the physicaltransition. I had not been able to find someone in [Northeast city]. . . . Transitionwas not a common path then [1979], particularly for lower income transgenderindividuals. First of all there’s the prohibitive cost of the established psychologicaland psychiatric testing that is required by most hospitals before doingsex-reassignment surgery, so that’s a road block. So, at that time, looking forone psychiatrist who had the mindset to understand the transgender situationand therefore do the proper paperwork was like finding a needle in a haystack.And I was in the mental position at that time that I already knew what I wantedto go with my life and I already knew the inner self, so that I didn’t feel like itwas necessary and I railed at the idea that I had to do that. So it was a Godsendto me to find a doctor that said, as long as you got the money, I’ll give you the[hormone] shot.

She found a doctor in Soulopoliz who would do just that and relocated right away.Unfortunately, the doctor passed away soon thereafter and Ella did not find anotherdoctor willing to assist with her transition on her terms. Ella said, ‘‘I refused toattempt street acquisition—black market hormone sales and silicon injection’’ orother alternatives ‘‘because I, quite frankly, didn’t trust my health to street folks . . . soI was unable to do hormonal therapy.’’ She waited 23 years until she found a doctor



willing to assist her again and has begun actively pursuing the course toward hertransition. Despite the delay in plans for her transition, the spark that brought herto Soulopoliz, Ella has called the city home the last 30 years of her life.

The Literacies of Southern Cultural Traditions as Rhetorical Intervention:Racial Injustice, Christian Religion, and Elder Honoring

When asked about the impact of region on her identity and work, Ella had little trou-ble naming specific examples. From these I glean the following southern cultural tra-ditions because they emerge most frequently in Ella’s description of her activism andlife: legacies of racial injustice, the centrality of Christian religion, and the influenceand status of elders in the South. I argue that Ella’s uptake of these practices portraysa literacy of southern culture that is crucial to the success of her work. However,though Ella’s description of these practices is rooted in her experience with blacksouthern traditions, I would argue that her description of race and class politics,religion, and elder honoring she describes are recognizable in some African Americanexperiences throughout the United States and, in some instances, throughout theDiaspora. Still, that these practices were more visible to her as emerging since herarrival in Soulopoliz, particularly the respect for elders and spirituality, it is consistentwith the ways in which the South is depicted as a place of preservation and deploy-ment for many of the age-old cultural traditions of people of African descent in theUnited States.

Though Ella has been in Soulopoliz all these years, Ella doesn’t consider herself asoutherner exclusively, but rather a regional ‘‘hybrid’’:

Do you consider yourself a Southerner?

[Laughs] Oh, no, I wouldn’t necessary consider myself a Southerner per se. I thinkof myself as more regional. I consider myself a hybrid. My personal make-up hasevolved to a degree where I bring with me a lot of my Midwestern values and ideasas far as my family upbringing, and generally I have applied them to my evolutionof the experiences I have had in [Northeastern city] coupled with those I’ve hadhere in the South.

She says the cultural traditions of all these regions are brought to bear in herwork and reflected in her sense of self too. However, as stated, she did detail spe-cific cultural traditions that, in her eyes, are southern in scope. We see the impactof these three traditions on her work, particularly at the level of choices shemakes with regards to framing her points to make the interventions she seeks.Further, we also see the impact of these practices on her own life, as they helpElla define and redefine the ways she emotes or masks parts of her own identitiesaccording to the needs of the moment. These actions simultaneously display theways Ella rereads and rewrites her southern identity and her conceptions of theSouth in general, against her other identities and politics of race, class, gender,and sexuality.

The first of these cultural traditions pertains to legacies of racial injustice in theSouth. As I note in the introduction, the South is often gestured toward in discourses



of American racial injustice as ‘‘images of insidious race hatred pervade the physicallandscape and cultural backdrop of the land of Dixie.’’28 It is unsurprising that thelegacies of racial injustice, however overt or covert, continue to impact the day-to-day lives of Southerners, just as they do all regions of the United States. As you willsee, for Ella, this issue is manifested in the racial politics she confronts in hertransgender activism, particularly in her interracial relations with other queeractivists and allies.

Ella said that living in the South has left her with ‘‘a supreme distrust of otherraces. I don’t associate as much as I used to in [Midwestern city] with Caucasians.There’s still a definite division here in that respect, and I’ve come to be more likethat,’’ which speaks to the pervasiveness of legacies of strained race relations inSoulopoliz. However, in her activism Ella says, ‘‘I go into it with the attitude thatthe people I am going to come in contact with . . . are striving for that same thing thatI am. . . . I see them from that perspective first.’’ Seeing the ways she can connect withwhite coalition members, Ella says does ‘‘not [mean] that I don’t see their race, but Ibasically consider that we are going after the same progression. . . . And as long as weseem to be headed in the same direction, I don’t find any problem with riding withthem in the same car.’’ Still, Ella says there have ‘‘been a couple times when I questiontheir [some white coalition members’] motives and said, ‘no, I don’t want to bebothered.’ ’’

Given these meditations on race in her organizing, it is unsurprising that thelegacies of racial injustice have had a profound impact on the rhetorical choices Ellamakes in her quests for social justice for all transgender persons, and transgendersof lower socioeconomic status and those of color in particular. One such instance isElla’s recent work with a coalition of activists for transgender rights who are orga-nizing around securing protections for gender identity and expression in theEmployment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). In November 2007, much to thedismay of many transgenders, gender variants, and their allies, the ENDA bill thatwas approved by the House did not include any language protecting gender identityand expression and only spoke to protections for sexual orientation. This wasdespite awareness that this language does not cover transgender persons.29 The coa-lition is made up of the organization Transgenders for Change (TFC), which Ellafounded in 2007, and a host of other mostly queer community organizations inand around the state.

Doing this work, Ella has noticed that many in the coalition have not been atten-tive to issues of race and racism. More specifically, Ella believes that many of theWhite coalition members do not recognize the impact of race or class on the specificprivileges afforded to some members of the group over others. In general, Ella feelsthat she is the only one in the group that calls attention to race and racism inside andoutside of the transgender community. However, to get at these issues Ella has madea conscious decision to foreground them as socioeconomic issues first and then high-light the presence of race within class politics. For example, in one coalition meetingElla pointed out that transgender persons with more money ‘‘makes it possible forthem to create a more regular and stable transition because they’re able to have that



financial ability to pay for it.’’ After discussion and relative agreement on this point,Ella argued that

[I]t is less difficult, say, for a Caucasian [transgender] to get a job, even as simple asbar maid. Even the fact that it is easier for them to find a job, race plays a role intotheir being able to live a more stable existence . . . the African-American transgenderwoman or man will find it more difficult to carry on their transition.

Ella said many in the group began to be more attentive to the ways race and classimpacted the individual experiences of members in the group, while some continuedto ignore this emphasis on race and class, even arguing that talk of these‘‘non-transgender issues’’ threatened the stability of a coalition.

Though Ella recognizes the specificity of the differences in race and class politics ingeneral, including that her reading is not true of all white or transgender persons ofcolor, what I find very interesting is that she makes the conscious choice to illuminatesocioeconomic issues first and then to focus on the role of race therein. Doing so shewas then able to point to the ways race was also being elided in the group’s focus, andthe need to be specific in discussing transgender experiences as they change acrossrace, gender, class, sexuality, and so forth.

I read Ella’s decision to foreground class and to then emphasize race as a rhetoricalstrategy that is keenly aware of the ways the legacies of racial injustice operate in theUnited States, but particularly in an interracial coalition for transgender rights inSoulopoliz. She strategically responds in a way that allows her to forward, throughmasking, a socioeconomic and race critique within the group’s organizing efforts. Apply-ing themultiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis, Ella performs a neces-sary rhetorical intervention into the group’s message that silences those left out by its toonarrow agenda and would have ultimately fractured an already fragile, local movement.Thus, her literacy of southern culture placed particular mandates on her communicativepractice that evoke a response she might not pursue in a different context. In thatmoment we see also how the mandates impacted Ella’s perception of her race.

Another southern cultural tradition Ella encounters in her work is the centrality ofChristian religion within Soulopoliz and the South. Within a region called ‘‘the BibleBelt,’’ the South is often pointed to as a symbol of a particularly potent kind of reli-gious fundamentalism, one that in no way condones TLGBQ people, much less sup-ports their civil rights.30 Of course such ideologies are appropriated from church tochurch, with uniquely nuanced differences around attitudes toward and visibility ofTLGBQ people in black churches.31 At the same time, Ella has had to be attentive tothe complex relationships many TLGBQ Christians in Soulopoliz, including herself,have to Christianity and to black churches in particular. Ella has thus had to use lit-eracy and rhetorical strategies that honor the deep connections that some queers,allies, and opponents in Soulopoliz have to Christianity, while simultaneously chal-lenging Bible-based condemnation of those groups, particularly when it negativelyaffects the interventions she seeks to make in her activism.

While her uses of biblical text have not been to ‘‘beat people over the head withit,’’ she said this is the exact opposite of others in Soulopoliz and throughout the



South. In her struggles to secure city ordinances and resources to improve quality oflife for Soulopoliz’s transgenders, Ella says that many individuals, particularly locallawmakers, reference their religious beliefs in their refusal to offer support:

There is a very real truth to the terminology that’s used for the Southern area whenthey say ‘‘the Bible Belt.’’ Because a lot of what they do and how they live is basi-cally based on, and these are the overall trends, religious doctrine. Or they want tobelieve that what they do is based off of religious doctrine . . . to them, the LGBTQcommunity is not quite right, even if they let us get an inch or two ahead, it’s notquite right because of their religious upbringing. They use it [religion] in a way thatI think is not necessarily conducive to brotherhood for all. And I think that’stwisted. To me that’s a negative twist, a negative spin, on what I see as a ‘‘lovefor all’’ idea of Christianity and the Bible.

Her comments describe the peculiar centrality of religion as a southern culturalpractice and its effect on her quest for TLGBQ civil rights. Most interesting are theways in which her comments theorize relations between the misuses of literacy andrereading on the ground. She describes the process by which she identifies the actionsof the lawmakers as an inappropriate use of biblical text. She follows this throughsuggesting the erroneousness of those uses by suggesting that one can get an entirelydifferent use of the text as a Christian. Here she gestures toward her rereading, agesture realized when she says:

While I am a Christian, and I am a practicing Christian, my whole philosophy onthat basically lies in doing onto others as you would have them do unto you, loveyour neighbor, following the ten commandments, believing in God. But, nottaking what I see as the rules of the Bible, which are rules for life, and using thosewords to make them bend around what I want them to do in an attempt tosubjugate or hold down another group of people.

Ella said she carries this understanding of the bible into direct confrontation withthose who use Christianity to speak against transgenders’ rights or the civil rightsof anyone. She also uses this message to raise the consciousness of other transgendersto the freedom she believes God wants every person to have in their lives. As such,Ella’s approach to Christianity disrupts the often perpetually oppositional relation-ship between queer activism and religion. Ella is thus situated on a long line of queeractivists in the South who have had to challenge the marginalizing effect of religiousfundamentalism in the South while, as John Howard notes of the Mississippi GayAlliance, they ‘‘acknowledge, respect, and finally harness the centrality of religionin the lives of queer [Southerners].’’32 Alongside this, as a transgender woman, Afri-can American, and Christian, Ella’s comments describe negotiating the intersectionsof her identities within the context of this complicated axis of religious southerncultural traditions. Overall, her literacy of religion as a southern cultural practice iscrucial to the rhetorical interventions of her work.

The third tradition that emerges is the status of respect and influence that eldersoccupy as a southern cultural practice. Ella stated that ‘‘in the South, it seems likeolder people are given more respect. . . . It seems like I’ve been called ma’am more



times than a little bit just because I am an older person, as opposed to just calling meby my name.’’ It is an old belief amongst folks of African descent that the elders in acommunity, by virtue of lived experience, are to be upheld with the highest regard bythose who are younger. An African proverb states ‘‘it is the duty of children to waiton elders, and not the elders on children.’’33 Ella recognizes this attitude towardelders as pervasive in Soulopoliz, drawing upon it as a rhetorical strategy withinher organizing efforts.

Part of Ella’s almost daily work for TFC is her community outreach to othertransgender men and women to join the organization. One of Ella’s most difficultgroups to reach has been transgender women aged 19–33. Ella described the waysher age and theirs figure into interactions during outreach:

They [younger transgender women] have a tendency to listen to me a little bit moreand know that I’m not just talking off of the top of my head and when they stop tolisten to what I have to say, I think it makes a little bit more of an impact orimpression. That also feeds into not only what I say, but often how I say it. Thosewho are open to it do see some wisdom behind the experience, because when youhave had experiences like I’ve had, you do learn things.

Having their attention Ella tells them about meetings for Transgenders for Change,what services they provide, that they can help find jobs, and ends as she invites themto join. She said sometimes she hears from them right away, but even when they donot do as she suggests ‘‘they always listen to what I have to say,’’ she says.

Ella also said that she thinks her age makes a difference even when she is not work-ing with African Americans exclusively. For example, describing the ENDA projectshe is involved in, Ella said that the majority White group often listens because‘‘usually I’m the oldest in the crew, so that [age] plays a role there too. They realizethat I’ve seen so much change. A lot of them want to know what it was likepre-Stonewall and so forth.’’

In each of these instances, Ella draws on a literacy of southern culture to identifythe ways eldership functions within the context of Soulopoliz. She then uses it as aspringboard to making the types of rhetorical interventions sought in the interestof transgender rights. And once again, we see how her appropriation of this literacyinvokes a self-consciousness regarding her own identities, in this case, the ways inwhich her age makes possible or limits organizing strategies she would otherwiseoverlook with two separate groups central to the success of her agenda.

Rereading and Rewriting the Misuses of Literacy:The Trans Folks of Color Labor Project, 2007

This section will examine one moment from Ella’s life in 2007 where local lawmakers,their neighbors, clergy, and law enforcement attempted to police and pathologizetransgenders in their quest to advance their narrow ideas of acceptable gender andsexuality. I identify these oppressive positions taken against transgenders as a misuseof literacy in that they appropriate literacy to formulate and deploy anti-transgenderrhetoric and policy with no regard to the personhood of transgenders and, more



specifically, transgender women. In response to a mandate to resist these rhetoricsand policies, Ella, other transgenders in the Soulopoliz community, and their alliesdraw on literacy in rereading the problems of the normative gender and sexualideology being deployed, and also rewriting to make the embattled position of manytransgenders more visible to the Soulopoliz community.

On an afternoon in May 2007, Ella Mosley sat in a Starbuck’s coffee shop meetingwith six other activists whose work centers on TLGBQ rights. They came together tocreate a strategic plan in response to the Soulopoliz Police Department’s announced‘‘crackdown’’ on sex workers, a large majority of whom in this area of Soulopoliz aretransgender women. This announcement took place following many complaints fromthe Centerview Community Organization (CCO) about prostitution in theircommunity.

The CCO based their argument for a crackdown on religious codes of gender andsexual practice. They said that while prostitution in itself was horrible, transgenderprostitution in Centerview was particularly ungodly, deplorable, and needed to bestopped immediately. The CCO thus portray the misuses of religious doctrine Ellareferred to previously and further points to the centrality of Christian religion inthe South, a tradition emerging through Ella’s literacies of southern culture. They ral-lied local clergy and lawmakers to support their calls for a crackdown and shortlythereafter a police presence unlike that which had ever been seen appeared inCenterview with strict orders: Lock up anyone you even suspect may be a prostitute.

Upon learning of this crackdown, Ella was immediately concerned. She felt thepolice department and neighborhood association’s comments were clearly ignorantregarding the ways various isms and phobias impact the material circumstances oftransgenders at large and in Soulopoliz in particular. A local queer community orga-nization, in conjunction with allied transgender activists, including Ella, organized apress conference in which they responded to the CCO’s announced crackdown. Thepress conference was picked up in the local press. Ella spoke at the press conferenceand her comments were also included in the press release the allied organizations sentafterward. In it, Ella stated that it was easy for the officials and community to stig-matize transgender sex workers for being prostitutes when they have little knowledgeof or regard for the discrimination transgenders encounter when they seek employ-ment. Ella, who worked as a receptionist at a local support services organization fortransgenders, said she knew that many transgenders participating in sex work aredoing so because of the difficulty of finding ‘‘legitimate’’ jobs in an environmentwhere laws protecting gender identity and expression are nonexistent. In an interviewwith a local paper, Ella said: ‘‘It’s easy to point the finger at the girls on the streets,but the same people who are fighting for ENDA, you think it’s rough on you? Whatdo you think about us? For trans individuals in Soulopoliz, what everything hasboiled down to is joblessness!’’ Ella describes this disenfranchisement as part of a‘‘ripple effect’’ whereby transgenders are on a cycle of destruction that, for some,leads to ‘‘drug abuse, higher risks for HIV=AIDS and other STDs,’’ and doing workthat positions them at a greater ‘‘potential to become a victim of violence’’ than theyalready were.



Ella’s response employs rereading on a number of levels. First, she resists theattitudes the CCO takes toward sex work by not even engaging in an argument basedon their normative politics of sexual right and wrong. Also, her resistance to thisdiscourse of sexual right or wrong also allowed her to navigate around engaging inan argument over religious doctrine, which the CCO would likely have drawn herinto, given that their arguments were based in their interpretations of the biblicalscripture. This allows her to amplify other aspects of her argument against theCCO and Soulopoliz Police that would have been lost if she allowed them to controlthe debate around religion exclusively. Second, though the CCO attempts to buildtheir argument through an ethos of moral righteousness, Ella points to theirinhumanity by not acknowledging the oppressive forces limiting the economicopportunities for those women who may choose to do other work. Third, she high-lights the hypocrisy of the criticisms in that there is outrage that there are transgenderprostitutes in Centerview, but those working against workplace discrimination on thebasis of race, class, religion, and sexual orientation are the very same people who willnot extend those rights to the transgender community. Lastly, her invokingHIV=AIDS, hate crimes, and drug abuse point to the culpability of the CCO andSoulopoliz in issues much larger than the ‘‘problem’’ that their protest is framedaround; issues affecting not just transgenders, but all individuals. Thus, Ella rereadsthe misuses of literacy operating in the CCO and supporters’ arguments, clearing theway for a reconsideration of the issues from a perspective that must contend with allthe humanity of the transgenders being demonized.

In response to this matter, Ella and the other activists at the meeting developed aninitiative called the Trans Folks of Color Labor Project. Ella said the project ‘‘isdesigned to help end the cycle of homelessness, poverty, and imprisonment thattransgender workers of color face because of systematic biases against their race, class,gender transgression, and perceived sexuality.’’ I wish to pause briefly and highlightthe ways this speaks to the previous analysis of Ella’s description of legacies of racialinjustice as a southern cultural tradition as evidence of her literacies of the Southbeing pulled into her work. First, that the group focuses exclusively on transgendersof color, emphasizing such in its name and mission, further illuminates the awarenessof racism as central to the interventions the group is taking on behalf of the trans-gender community. As such, antiracism is central to the work of anti-oppression writlarge, including anti-classism and anti-transphobia. Furthermore, Ella’s descriptionof race as part of the ‘‘multiple biases’’ at the center of the project’s focus on systemicoppression and the identities of its group members signifies the necessity of interro-gating these legacies of racial injustice inside and outside of the transgender commu-nity, affecting the lives of all. Thus, her literacy of racial injustice in the Southpositions Ella to name race and racism as it relates to her life and the group’s work,rather than be victimized by the ill attentiveness to the issues at work here.

To achieve its mission, the project offers various services including a database oftrans-friendly employers as well as support services that were more explicitly writingoriented. They point to situated literacy practices emerging out of a combination ofneeds in the everyday lived experiences of its participants and in this moment of



resistance. There are many ways writing is included in the work of the project. Thisincludes assisting transgender women with completing and filing paperwork for legalname changes, resuming writing workshops, and providing GED exam preparationfor persons wishing to obtain their high school diploma.

Perhaps the most striking depiction of rewriting was the project’s newsletter Elladeveloped and edited called ‘‘The Transgender Times.’’ The newsletter was distribu-ted to approximately 2,000 people through local dance clubs, bars, and communityorganizations. Ella said she wanted the newsletter to ‘‘get [transgenders] some infor-mation’’ to help ‘‘find a way to come out of this rat race and vicious circle’’ that manyare gripped by. She also used it to continue her focus on consciousness raising abouttransphobia, racism, classism, and other issues.

The newsletter features a regular opinion column by Ella writing under a pseudo-nym. Ella’s literacies of southern cultural traditions are prevalent in much of thecolumns, particularly the respect and influence of elders. One example is the columnin which Ella describes an instance in which students at a local university were per-forming a study in which they were to interview transgenders in Soulopoliz aboutwhat the city could do ‘‘to assist in the improvement of the lives of transgendersindividuals.’’ For participating, each person would receive a gift card to a local gro-cery market. Ella wrote ‘‘to help the students conducting the survey, I have gone outwith the them to talk to the girls ‘in the street’ and in the clubs . . . let[ting] themknow about meetings where they could come to [Trans Folks of Color Labor Project]and complete the survey.’’ She writes, though ‘‘20 or 30 girls we have talked to . . . saidthey would participate, how many have come through for us? A total of six!’’ The lackof participation by the younger women angered Ella, and she took them on in thecolumn writing:

Someone has finally recognized us as a group of people with needs, and is trying totake the steps necessary to address them, and what are we as a group doing about it!A collective nothing! . . . You girls had better realize that you’re not going to be‘‘young & hot’’ forever, and ought to be about taking steps that are going toimprove the situation for the trans community in the long run. Come out of thestereotypical boxes that people of the community at large have put us in! . . .[Y]ou’re not going to find your ‘‘Mr. Right’’ out there like Julia Roberts in ‘‘PrettyWoman.’’ It doesn’t happen in the real world. Wake up.

Through her writing, Ella invokes the authority of an elder. We see this first in herdescription of doing outreach with the students, drawing on her identity as transgen-der, African American, and elder to help them recruit participants. More specifically,she invokes the position of elder when chastising group members and other transgen-ders in the community for a lack of participation in an activity she saw as being ben-eficial to the community. Her comments carry with it an ethos of an individual whohas seen many more years of life than those to whom she speaks; a move that posi-tions her comments to be taken up as more than complaint or shaming, but rather adeploying of aged wisdom. Certainly, coded within Ella’s comments on Julia Roberts’character in the film ‘‘Pretty Woman’’ are a particular stance of respectability aroundsexual and gender politics, particularly sex work, that are problematized within



discourses of sexual agency. Still, one cannot overlook Ella’s embodiment of a parti-cular elder ethos here and the types of interventions that are more and less possiblethrough her literacy of this southern cultural tradition.

Another section of the newsletter was titled ‘‘Queery Attorney Sheila’’ wherereaders could pose questions to a transgender lawyer about legal issues affectingthe transgender community and a monthly interview with a local transgender pro-fessional. Ella said in addition to helping transgenders with legal advice specificallyfacing persons in their transition, the interview feature was significant because itgives ‘‘the community a view of [transgenders] in positive positions, doing positivethings, and providing a positive image.’’ She saw this as a particularly importantintervention into the one-note depictions of transgender women where they arevisible ‘‘only [as] prostitutes, ornaments on Pride parade floats, or showgirls thatlip sync.’’ Though Ella says she understands the politics around sex work and isvery supportive and proud of the transgender community’s part in revolutionizingartistic performance, too often the queer community and larger public onlyembrace one aspect of trans women’s lives, while we ‘‘disregard or forget aboutthe girls’’ as people who are ‘‘trying to just make it day-to-day and pay their bills,just like everybody else.’’

Through the newsletter, several things happened that represented clear victoriesfor Ella’s activism. First, the organization was covered in queer local and nationalprint media, each of which we might read as a mainstream good use of literacyagainst the misuses. One paper highlighted the ways the CCO and those espousinganti-transgender rhetorics were oversimplifying the reasons why some transgenderswere sex workers. In that story a female Soulopoliz police officer, identified as theliaison to the LGBTQ community, referred to the ways transgenders were beingstigmatized and ‘‘the discrimination they face’’ when trying to find jobs. Thus, shepartnered with Ella’s organization to locate employers who wouldn’t discriminateagainst transgenders who applied for jobs. Another news article documented thedecades of cases in which the Soulopoliz Police Department ‘‘profiled and targetedtranssexuals with harassment and fraudulent arrest.’’ It also highlighted documenta-tion of one transgender woman whose harassment and false arrest was recorded andreported to internal affairs of the Soulopoliz Police with the help of national andlocal queer and human rights advocacy organizations.

Another victory for the work of the Trans Folks of Color Labor Project was whenthey were invited to the table at various community organizing coalitions wheretransgenders were previously absent, including the opportunity to develop and facil-itate an inaugural workshop called ‘‘Understanding Transgender Communities’’ atthe ‘‘Soulopoliz Pride’’ activity in 2007. Also, Ella recalled that in time some womenin the group joined the newsletter staff and would write poetry and narratives for thepaper. This emphasizes the ways in which Ella’s activist literacies created a space forother transgenders in Soulopoliz to tell their story, many of them in the midst ofcontinued struggle, but also those who could speak of victory over struggle as well.Overall, Ella believes the newsletter fulfilled her mission to ‘‘educate’’ and ‘‘dispel[false] notions’’ and stereotypes about transgender people.



In 2007, Ella left the Trans Folks of Color Labor Project after having ‘‘ideologicaldifferences’’ with the organization sponsoring the meeting space. Shortly thereaftershe founded Transgenders for Change (TFC). The organization’s membership areall transgender men and women, mostly African American, with a commitment tocontinue to work for the civil rights of Soulopoliz’s transgender community.

Conclusion

The case analysis of Ella Mosley is an intervention into many critical gaps in scholarship.By detailing the story of an African American transgender woman’s activism and iden-tity formation and affirmation in the South, the analysis centers a narrative that remainsinvisible in queer Southern studies with few exceptions. Next, examining Ella’s activismthrough a critical lens focused on literacy practices, I showed the usefulness of literacy asa theoretical, historical, and sociological model for theorizing black queer literacypractices broadly, but in particular, the often-overlooked grassroots cultural activismin the queer South. Doing so, we can point to specific reading, writing, and othermeaning-making practices that are keys to the construction and enactment of culturalactivism that we might otherwise assume and take for granted. Additionally, I showedthe significance of theorizing identities as multiple, examining Ella’s description of hersouthern identity in tandem with the lived experiences of her other identities. Throughthis we tracked moments where her identities impacted and changed the meaning ofone another, highlighting nuances to her lived experience and literacy practices thatwould otherwise be elided. Further, the analysis showed literacy and the multiplicityof identities as being in a symbiotic relationship with one another. This was apparentin the ways Ella’s stories detail how her identity and the identities of others were partof and=or impacted the rhetorical choices made in her attempts at effective activism;most notably, my analysis of the ways her activism was influenced by her literacies ofSouthern cultural traditions. Taken together, this essay is just one of a terrain of possi-bilities within literacy, rhetorical, African American, queer, and southern studies.

While drawing from and forging innovations through the intersections of multipledisciplines, this essay owes much to the ongoing revamping of southern studies.Included in this grouping would be work in black southern studies; the fiction andnonfiction of Dorothy Allison and Minnie Bruce Pratt, who each offer a feminist ana-lysis of race and class in their work; and all of the research in queer southern studiesmentioned in this essay’s introduction. Thus, as each of these works have done, Ioffer here some new ways this revamping of southern studies might continue, whilealso reiterating other calls that have been scarcely taken up.

First, we must continue to examine queer and transgender histories as part ofexaminations of race and racism in the South, not just as some scholarly aberrationoccurring at the still too few moments where race, queer, and southern culturecollide. Related to this, researching African American life at the center of southernculture still requires deliberate action, with the equating of southern culture withwhiteness exclusively continuing to be all too pervasive. Second, we must continueto highlight the diversity and complexity of black lives and culture in the South, being



attentive to the ever present but invisible people occluded in narrow conceptions ofblackness. This includes black TLGBQ people, but also, those whose invisibility iselided because of politics of class, ability, language, and so on. Third, as with Ella’sdiscussion of religion in her activism and John Howard’s description of the Missis-sippi Gay Alliance’s strategy given the centrality of religion to people in their com-munity, queer and non-queer identified people, further investigation into thesignificance of religion on queer southern activism and everyday lives is in order.Fourth, given the ways the South and the civil rights movement are often linked incultural memory, the past and present activist practices of African American TLGBQsoutherners necessitate a more complex rendering of historiographies of BlackFreedom struggles in the South.

Finally, I would be remised if I did not speak to the implications of this essay forliteracy studies. Put simply, it is impossible to understand Ella Mosley and otherblack and queer literacy practices without added complexity to the ways in whichwe theorize relations between literacy and the multiplicity of identities. That is, stu-dies of African American literacy must move beyond nominal inclusions of genderand sexuality (and almost complete silence on black queerness) in theorizing AfricanAmerican literacy practices, while studies of TLGBQ literacy must resist nominalinclusions of race and class. The results of doing so are an amplifying of these ‘‘littlenarratives of literacy,‘‘34 such as that of an ‘‘ordinary’’ black transgender woman’s useof literacy to perform ‘‘extraordinary’’ sociopolitical and life-affirming change.

Notes

[1] Pseudonyms are used for names, locations, organizations, and any information throughoutthe study to protect the anonymity of research participants. As modeled and stated in KathWeston’s discussion of methods for qualitative research in lesbian and gay communities andMignon Moore’s study of gender presentation in black lesbian communities, each researchparticipant is provided with a last name to symbolize their adulthood and a social status thatpeople of color, TLGBQ folks, and other marginalized populations are often categoricallydenied. Kath Weston, ‘‘Fieldwork in Lesbian and Gay Communities,’’ in Approaches toQualitative Research: A Reader in Theory and Practice, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber andPatricia Leavy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 177–184; Mignon Moore,Mignon, ‘‘Lipstick or Timbalands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black LesbianCommunities,’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32.1 (2006): 113–139.

[2] E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press,2008), 1.

[3] See Johnson, Sweet Tea; Carlos Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, Out in the South (Philadel-phia: Temple University Press, 2001); John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer His-tory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999); James T. Sears, Lonely Hunters: AnOral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948–1968 (New York: Westview, 1997);James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

[4] Johnson, Sweet Tea, 338.[5] The Lady Chablis, Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah

(New York: Pocket Books, 1997); Rupaul, Lettin’ It All Hang Out: An Autobiography(New York: Hyperion Books, 1996).



[6] Johnson, Sweet Tea, 338–429.[7] In this essay I will at times use ‘‘black queers’’ and ‘‘black TLGBQ’’ interchangeably in refer-

ence to black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This does not reflect inanyway a belief in the term queer as a catch all; nor does it mean TLGBQ even accounts forall of the complex ways in which people identify. This offers more than one shorthand inreferring to persons occupying queer positions within communities of sexual dissidenceand the African American community. Thus, it is a stylistic choice to break up therepetition of black queers or black TLGBQ throughout, while acknowledging that bothare heavily contested terms.

[8] I am referring to Rhea Lathan’s forthcoming work on the role of what she calls ‘‘Gospel Lit-eracy,’’ a synthesis of spirituality, gospel music culture, and literacy activities in the struggleof black men and women adult learners in the South Carolina Sea Islands for civil rights andpersonal growth. See Lathan, ‘‘Writing a Wrong: The Case of African American Adult Lit-eracy Action in South Carolina, 1957–1962’’ (Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006). See also Stephen Schneider, ‘‘Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichaeland Critical Rhetorical Education,’’ College Composition and Communication 58.1 (Septem-ber 2006): 46–69 and ‘‘The Sea Islands Citizenship Schools: Literacy, Community Organiza-tion, and the Civil Rights Movement,’’ College English 70.2 (November 2007): 136–159.

[9] See the report ‘‘50 under 30: Masculinity and the War on America’s Youth, a HumanRights Report.’’ The report is prepared by Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, or knownmore widely as GenderPAC. A pdf version of the document is available at: http://www.gpac.org/50under30/50u30.pdf (accessed April 17, 2009).

[10] The DSM-IV-TR is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition,text revised, 2000. The American Psychological Association publishes the DSM. TheDSM-IV-TR classifies any gender variance beyond that with which a person’s biologicalsex at birth as gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder (GID).

[11] Interviews lasted approximately 2 hours. I preferred to do interviews in person; however, inorder to achieve the geographic and other diversities I wanted in the pool I did do a numberof phone interviews as well. The participants were interviewed according to a script of ques-tions I developed. The script is sectioned off by topic and covers the following: participants’own understanding of the literacy acquisition and use; participants’ definitions and under-standings of what it means to be a Black TLGBQ person; the ways they live in and react tovarious systems of oppression and disenfranchisements; how their literacy and identitycomplicate and corroborate one another; participants’ take on chat rooms and Web logsas spaces for Black TLGBQ rhetorical engagement; the role that ancestors, fictive kinships,and other precedents play in their literacy acquisition and use; and lastly, their take on theexistence and characteristics of a Black TLGBQ community and a tradition of Black literateand rhetorical practice. I wanted to get a sense of the participants’ own definitions of iden-tity, literacy, as well as insights into who they identify as a part of their community and whois outside of that community. The interview script was divided into categories necessary toretrieve this information as well: general information on background, identity, literacy,schooling, reading and writing today; Black TLGBQ communicative practices; and the roleof technology.

[12] In the book-length study tentatively titled Black Queer Literacies, I draw on the in-depth lifestory accounts of my research participants born 1941–1988 whom I interviewed about therelationships among their everyday reading, writing, and identity formation across theirlifetimes. The study is a significantly revised version of my dissertation project. SeeEric Darnell Pritchard, ‘‘ ‘A Litany for Survival’: Black Queer Literacies’’ (Dissertation,University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008).

[13] I am thinking here of identity as broadly conceived, thus any number of works that attendto the social practices of literacy may fit in this group. Given the large amount of scholars to



which this note refers, it seems too large to focus on any in particular. However, for the sakeof example, Robert Brooke, Romy Clark, Roz Ivanic, Ann Herrington, and Marcia Curtisare just some of the many, many scholars in writing studies whose work comments onrelations between literacy and identity. See Brooke, Writing and Sense of Self: IdentityNegotiation in Writing Workshops (Urbana, IL: National Council for Teachers of English,1991); Romy Clark and Roz Ivanic, The Politics of Writing (London=New York: Routledge,1997); Anne J. Herrington and Marcia Curtis, Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing andPersonal Development (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000).

[14] Of those that take up the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality within a queerand=or transgender context consistent with my uptake of multiplicity, see Catherine Fox,‘‘From Transaction to Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in ‘SafeSpaces,‘’’ College English 69.5 (May 2007): 496–511; Mollie V. Blackburn, ‘‘Agency in Bor-derland Discourses: Examining Language Use in a Community Center with Black QueerYouth,’’ Teachers College Record 107.1 (January 2005): 89–113; Rusty Barrett, ‘‘IndexingPolyphonous Identity in the Speech of African American Drag Queens,’’ in ReinventingIdentities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, eds. Mary Bucholtz, A. E. Liang, and L. A. Sutton(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 313–331.

[15] See Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Life (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 239.

[16] I am speaking here of resistance to the ways literate activities have been discussed as amonolith of formal literacy practices, ignoring the reality that there are multiple ways ofliterate practice. By extension, these definitions ignore multiple ways of literacy learning,and studies of literacy cannot be appropriately addressed without attention to the specifi-city of the ways literacy is acquired and practiced across communities and individualexperiences. As such, I join numerous colleagues in an approach to literacy rooted in theNew Literacy Studies (NLS), a phrase coined by Jim Gee in Social Linguistics and Literacies.NLS treats literacy for ‘‘its full range of cognitive, social, interactional, cultural, political,institutional, economic, moral, and historical contexts.’’ Gee, Social Linguistics and Litera-cies (New York: Routledge, 1990; rpt. 2008), 2. See also Deborah Brandt, Literacy in Amer-ican Lives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Shirley Brice Heath, Ways withWords: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983); Brian Street, ‘‘The New Literacy Studies,’’ in Literacy: A CriticalSourcebook, ed. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry Kroll, and Mike Rose (Boston:Bedford=St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 430–442; Elaine Richardson, African American Literacies(New York: Routledge, 2003).

[17] Street, ‘‘New’’; Richardson, African American.[18] I am applying the phrase ‘‘multiplicity’’ as used by Michael Hames-Garcia. See

Hames-Garcia, ‘‘Who are Our Own People?: Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity,’’in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula Moyaand Michael Hames-Garcia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 102–129.

[19] See The Combahee River Collective, ‘‘A Black Feminist Statement,’’ in All the Women areWhite, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, ed. GloriaT. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982),13–22; Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings byRadical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983); KimberleCrenshaw Williams, ‘‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics andViolence Against Women of Color,’’ in The Public Nature of Private Violence, ed. MarthaAlbertson Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk (New York: Routledge, 1994), 93–118.

[20] As described by many research participants, some other misuses are the erasure, invisibility,or oversimplification of the experiences and contributions of Black and TLGBQ people tohistories; the lack of representation and=or stereotypical portrayal of Black and TLGBQ



people in books, television, magazines, Internet Web- logs, chat rooms, etc.; the sensatio-nalizing and misinformation identified in newspapers and other news resources, one mighttypically depend on for accuracy, and the use of literacy to construct personal correspon-dences (handwritten letters, e-mails) flyers, essays, or any other materials that implicitly orexplicitly do any injustice or harm to another human being or community.

[21] Beth Daniell refers to this as ‘‘the paradox of literacy.’’ See ‘‘Narratives of Literacy:Connecting Composition to Culture,’’ College Composition and Communication 50(February 1999): 393–410.

[22] Jacqueline Jones Royster masterfully examines the push or mandate that Black women havefelt across generations to use the essay as a tool for sociopolitical change. For example, shesays these women ‘‘use language to meet their mandates and purposes’’ (157) or ‘‘rhetoricalpractices are inevitably shaped by mandates that have consistently arisen from material con-ditions’’ (158). In both examples, and others, Royster’s use of mandates, while focused onthe context of the individual and their material conditions, is deployed for its literal defini-tion. She refers to an individual being commanded to perform an act. As my definitionshows, what I refer to as mandates is varied and differs greatly, particularly in this essaywhere I use the word to categorize Ella Mosley’s agency, ethical imperatives, external as wellas internal forces in describing what literacy and self-making practices are made possibleand impossible for her. See Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change AmongAfrican American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) and ‘‘Disciplin-ary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric,’’ Philosophy andRhetoric 36.2 (2003): 148–167.

[23] In the face of mandates a person can acquiesce with it and just reproduce, which is littleagency, or there can be optimum agency, and you can use it to resist. Thus, there is roomfor mandates to not always be something that is a resistance to oppression, rather, inter-preted in ways that are oppressive to other people and groups. There is no specific ethicalfocus with regards to mandates and as such, the paradox of mandates are that two compet-ing arguments, like racist and anti-racist rhetoric, each operate under sets of mandates.

[24] This is a play on ‘‘Making Ourselves from Scratch,’’ the title of an essay by the late JosephBeam in which the writer discusses the construction of black gay identity despite thesilencing of black gay and lesbian historical roots. Joseph Beam, ‘‘Making Ourselves fromScratch,’’ in Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill(Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), 261–262.

[25] Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Beyond Pink or Blue (New York: Beacon Press, 1999);Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (NewYork: Beacon Press, 1997); Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexu-ality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Susan Stryker,Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008).

[26] David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2007).

[27] GID is a descriptor the DSM-IV-TR of the American Psychological Association, publishedin 2000, used to diagnose trans and other gender variant people. For a brief definition ofGID in the DSM-IV-TR and in historical context, see Stryker, Transgender History, 13–16.

[28] Johnson, Sweet Tea, 1.[29] For more on this controversy see Tim Murphy, ‘‘Gay vs. Trans in America,’’ The Advocate,

Issue 999, December 18, 2007; Shailagh Murray, ‘‘Quandary over Gay Rights Bill: Is it Betterto Protect Some or None?’’ The Washington Post, A23, October 18, 2007; ‘‘Falling Short onEqual Rights,’’ The New York Times, Letters to the Editor, November 16, 2007. See also TheENDA Tool-Kit at the Web site of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force www.ngltf.organd also the section ‘‘News’’ on the Web site of the National Center for Transgender Equal-ity www.nctequality.org



[30] Or any other outliers to the rigid gender and sexual ideology followed in some Christianchurches all over the country. For example, many churches still refuse to allow womento serve as pastors or to enter the pulpit and to perform sermons, believing that this is stillmen’s work.

[31] See Johnson, Sweet Tea, 182–84; Horace Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not:African-American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press,2006); Lisa C. Moore and Anthony A. G. Hardaway, ‘‘Southern Sanctified Sissy: An Inter-view with First Lady=Regional Mother Anthony Hardaway,’’ in Spirited: Affirming the Souland Black Gay=Lesbian Identity, ed. Lisa Moore and G. Winston James (Washington, DC:Redbone Press, 2006), 157–161; Jeffrey McCune, ‘‘Transformance: Reading the Gospel inDrag,’’ Journal of Homosexuality 46 (2004): 151–167; E. Patrick Johnson, ‘‘Feeling the Spiritin the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community,’’Callaloo 21 (1998): 399–416.

[32] Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History, xvi.[33] I cannot attribute this proverb to a particular group of African people; however, its uptake

in black cultural practices is no less visible.[34] See Daniell, ‘‘Narratives.’’



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