"Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy" by Eric Darnell Pritchard, Prologue and Introduction

The prologue and introduction of this book are where the theoretical and methodological frameworks are, as well as the actual methods. I’m excited by the structure of this study and would like to use it as a model for my own. So, I limited this post to just this section, and I’ll write separately on some of the later chapters.

Quotes I Marked

• (p.5) The quote itself isn’t important, but he talks here about an impactful course he took in elementary school called “Rites of Passage,” which was a “literacy environment…that was both liberating and constraining” to him, since it offered certain expectations about what it means to be a good Black man/Black boy. This same idea of liberating but also constraining reverberates through….basically all of the books I’ve been reading, since so many authors or interviewees talk about how their early discoveries of queerness were both so exciting yet so scary— for example, the medical books that talked about homosexuality as a disease and all homosexuals grow up to be miserable, or Jackson Bird, who for a long time didn’t know that you could be trans AND gay, so he figured that the fact he liked men meant he couldn’t be a trans man himself.

• (p.8-9) “That LGBTQ history was not articulated as part of anything I learned about histories focused on the contributions of Black or other people of color. These same stories only garnered what seemed like cursory mentions as part of LGBT history as well. I read pages of essays, speeches, and book reviews, looking for the answer to how I could work toward liberation and not have to fracture myself being forced to either be Black or gay.” (He eventually finds stories of individuals who straddled both movements, even though he can’t find connections in the big historiographies)

• (p.10) Statement of intent for the book— Black rhetoric/composition studies and LGBTQ rhetoric/composition studies both don’t really talk a lot about each other, so it’s time to have a book that does both at once, since Black LGBTQ people have different experiences with literacy from straight/cis Black people, and from LGBTQ people of other races.

• (p.11) “This book aims to live up to the promise of Lawrence’s portraits in documenting, rendering, and engaging with the scenes of Black literacy in everyday life and to assume and represent a diversity of Black and queer lives as peopling those scenes of literacy.” I like this quote because it feels like he’s saying “Just including these folks’ stories in the bigger picture of literacy studies is important, and it is enough for the book to be ‘just’ that.”

• (p.13) “My desire then is to provide a framework through which literacy, composition, and rhetoric may see Black queerness generally and the theory I develop from the life stories of my research participants in particular.”

• (p.16) “By examining the meanings that Black LGBTQ people give to literacy, we see new lessons about the perennial problem of literacy normativity, while these meanings of literacy are simultaneously presenting for our exploration a constellation of literacy practices by Black LGBTQ people that work toward the ends of individual and communal love manifested as self- and collective care, self- and collective definition, and self- and collective autonomy.”

• (p.19) Framing/description of what constitutes as literacy and literacy studies for this book

• (p.22) Does the same thing for “queerness,” in this case extending the term beyond LGBTQ people to include “‘welfare queens,’ teenage parents, drug addicts, sex workers, incarcerated prisoners” and single parents. He includes these groups because “these individuals ‘stand on the (out)side of state-sanctioned, normalized, White, middle- and upper-class, male heterosexuality” and are therefore “insufficiently normative”

• (p.24) Concept of restorative literacies— “literacy practices that Black queers employ as a means of self-definition, self-care, and self-determination.” This is contrasted with literacy normativity, “which refers to uses of literacy that inflict harm…[and steal] emotional resources from people, wounding people through texts”

• (p.34) “Restorative literacies are part of the long African American tradition Elaine Richardson calls ‘survival literacies.’ These survival literacies work to guard individuals against what composition theorists Anne Herrington and Marcia Curtis call ‘the living death of silence’”

• (p.34) “In theorizing the concept of restorative literacies as a personal, institutional, and interactional act, subject to fluidity in contexts and interventions, I, as Beth Daniell writes, ‘want literacy to be associated with choices about language and about identities— in other words, with agency’”

• (p.41) statement of the “chief aim of African American literacies, composition, and rhetoric”: “to excavate, document, understand, and actualize the myriad conditions and traditions that compose a full history of African American literacies and rhetorics.”

• (p.41) J. Alexander argues that sexuality itself is a “complex literacy event”

• (p.48) Statement of research questions— “What are Black LGBTQ people’s relationships to literacy? What meanings do Black LGBTQ people give to literacy when it is used as a tool that causes them or others harm? How do Black LGBTQ people use literacy to make a life on their own terms? How do the life stories of Black LGBTQ people invite us to reconsider the knowledge and cultural logics embedded in the history and theory of African American and LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetoric (LCR)?”

• (p.49) Methods— description of use of recruitment letter, interview procedure and grounded theory use. Revised interview script twice while researching. 60 total participants.

• (p.50) Other Methods— description of use of archival data and what he used it for and why, as well as use of separate oral histories to confirm or find facts

Sources I Marked

• June Jordan, “A New Politics of Sexuality”

• Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed

• Keith Gilyard, Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence (literacy autobiography)

• Jonathan Alexander, “Transgender Rhetorics”

• Qwo-Li Driskill, “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques”

• Eric Darnell Pritchard, “This is Not an Empty-Headed Man in a Dress”

• K.J. Rawson, “Archiving Transgender”

• Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It — lesbian and bisexual women of color in hip-hop

"Sorted" by Jackson Bird

I bought this book after reading this article about JK Rowling’s public descent into transphobia and bourgeois detachment. Jackson Bird is a trans man for whom Harry Potter has played a big role in both his life and career (he used to work full time for the charity Harry Potter Alliance). He was interviewed for the article and expressed his sadness about JKR’s transphobia and how his relationship to the series has changed since all of that became public knowledge. A memoir by a trans person about his gender and also Harry Potter? I had to get it. Both personally and for my orals reading, since Harry Potter plays a HUGE role in literacy development among millennials, and many people have stories of how their relationship with HP relates to their relationship with their own gender and/or sexuality.

Bird says this book grew from a pamphlet he put together when he was coming out to friends and family to inform and educate them, without having to have the same difficult conversation over and over again. People liked it and asked for more. His YouTube channel, which originally didn’t have a particular content focus, eventually became centered around trans education. At one point in the book, he says he saw a lot of YouTube content designed for other trans people (like people documenting their transitions), but not a lot designed to inform cis people about trans issues. So, he wanted to contribute to this area.

I think this book does the same thing— naturally, given the situation of its origins. The book reads like it’s intended primarily for cis people and/or trans people who are just beginning to learn about trans-related topics. I can’t help but compare it to Sissy, since Jacob Tobia specifically says in their book that they DON’T want it to be a book for cis people. They want to do a bare minimum of educating on the basics in their book, and mostly just tell their story. In contrast, Bird has many pullboxes throughout the book with deeper explanations of topics and referrals to other educational resources.

It was surprising to me that Bird felt there was very little trans content designed for cis people, since I feel like most criticism of trans media is saying that too much of it is meant for cis people’s consumption and we ought to have more trans media created with a trans audience in mind. But maybe that just wasn’t the case on YouTube in the 2010s?

Sorted and Sissy are similar in other ways, namely that both authors come from similar backgrounds— Southern middle class suburbs, conservative religious communities, film and theatre experience both as children and professionally. While Tobia is from my same hometown, Bird spent the early 2010s living basically my dream life— being 5 years older than me, he was able to actually go to the Harry Potter conferences and actually make friends with his favorite YouTubers, who were also my favorite YouTubers, whereas I was still a young teen and couldn’t do those things. So, these memoirs also feel similar to me just based on my personal connections with the authors.

One thing I think Bird does really well in Sorted is showing how dysphoria can grow over time as your awareness of your gender changes. Not everyone knows from when they are very young that they are trans, but Bird’s story makes it very clear how even if you make it through 20 years of your life without realizing it, that doesn’t make your dysphoria any less painful. In high school, Bird was able to dress and act as a feminine woman regularly, without being particularly conscious of any psychic pain this caused him. As he grew more and more in touch with his gender and identity as a trans man, this became progressively more impossible. Once he started wearing a binder, not wearing one felt all the more horrible, even though he’d never liked his chest to begin with. At one point, he was able to stomach wearing a dress for formal events and just “flip the switch” in his brain for a few hours as long as he had time to emotionally recover afterwards, but then one year, the switch disappeared entirely.

In Trans: A Memoir, Juliet Jacques does describe how originally she didn’t think she would be interested in hormone therapy or gender affirmation surgery, even after she knew she was trans, but later changed her mind about each one. However, she doensn’t go into as much detail about her internal process of how/why her feelings evolved over time as Bird does.

That’s not to say I think any of these three books are better or worse than the others, but they do different things. Both Sissy and Trans: A Memoir say they want to stay away from stereotypical features of “the trans memoir” (like a focus on physical changes and ending with The Surgery), but Trans: A Memoir both begins and nearly ends with Jacques’s surgery (there’s a bit more about other things at the end), and Sorted definitely does build to Bird’s top surgery as the climax, even though he also discusses how no surgery ever just Gets Rid of All Of Your Difficulties, and he still has body image issues— but, as he happily realizes, body image issues common to many men, both trans and cis! However, I don’t know how much of this is a structural choice and how much is just….I’m pretty sure he got his top surgery fairly recently, so between the time it took to write the book and then have it go through the publishing process (it came out in September 2019), I imagine just not that much time has passed in order for more stuff for him to write about in the book to happen.

I do wish, and this isn’t his fault at all, that the timing had worked out that he could have written about JKR’s transphobia and how that impacted his relationship with the series and fandom (if he wanted to talk about it in the book, that is). He talks about it in the interview for the article linked to above, but it’s just a couple quotes and, having gotten to know him through 300 pages of his writerly voice, I’d like to read his thoughts on it!

"A Dialogue on the Constructions of GLBT and Queer Ethos: 'I Belong to a Culture That Includes...'" by Jane Hoogestraat and Hillery Glasby

This article’s form, more so than most articles, is directly shaped by the circumstances of its writing. The first author, who submitted it to the journal, passed away before the article finished the publication process. The editors passed it along to the second author, “to provide perspective and to address revision” (p.2). She felt uncomfortable altering Hoogestraat’s text beyond minor sentence-level editing without her permission, so instead, she presents the article as it was originally written, interspersed with her own (clearly labeled) commentary and responses. The result is, as the title suggests, a dialogue about the differences between “GLBT” (culture, community, ethos) and “queer” (culture, community, ethos).

Hoogestraat’s part uses Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart as an example of the construction of gay identity/ethos, and Glasby’s part uses Adrienne Rich’s poem “Yom Kippur” as a counterexample of queer identity/ethos.

Quotes I Marked (some with my commentary)

(p. 3) “Usually defined as a controversial and antagonistic verbal attack, Rand (2008) recasts the polemic as a genre that enables agency, not through the text or speaker, but rather through the form’s effect, affect, and subsequent action” —Glasby defines queer as polemical, but not (or at least less so) gay

(p.4) Quote from James S. Baumlin suggesting postmodernism might be defined as “an age after ethos, since the very notion of the sovereign individual now falls under question”

(p.7) Quote from Butler and Athanasiou: “So much depends on how we understand the ‘I’ who crafts herself, since it will not be a fully agentic subject who initiates that crafting. It will be an ‘I’ who is already crafted, but also who is compelled to craft against her crafted condition”

(p.7) Quote from Alexander and Rhodes- “Now that the homosexual is a much more visible subject, one who is, at times, allowed to speak, then what kind of ethos is that queer allowed?”

(p.7) “It is important to acknowledge if the desire of the rhetor is to appeal to a LGBTQ or non-LGBTQ audience, for what is valued is different, and whether or not the rhetor desires and/or values legitimization” If queerness instead of gayness includes being opposed to (or at least not valuing legitimization), where does that put would-be queer academics? I kinda have to value (some level of) legitimization for the sake of my career, and anything that’s “queer” that I write that is lauded by the academy….must not be that queer after all, under these definitions. It’s such a paradox, of activism (presumably toward a goal, presumably of liberation) and being anti-institutions, anti-normative. If you achieve your liberatory goal, won’t it then be “normal”/accepted to be/do whatever?

I can’t help but think of the line in The Incredibles: “If everyone is Super….then no one will be.” That’s totally true for queerness insofar as it is defined as anti-normative. Or rather, if we successfully dismantle norms, then that anti-normativity becomes normal/accepted. If we abolish gender/the gender binary, then gender stops mattering, which is paradoxical when you want to also honor how gender matters quite a lot to many trans people. If I succeed in my bisexual activist goals, I’ll organize my own identity out of existence/mattering. Which isn’t BAD, but it presents some potential conflicts and contradictions, especially for “queerness” as anti-normative, especially for approaches rooted in identity politics, like Queer Nation-esque approaches.

(p.9-10) “A gay ethos might be concerned with a non-LGBTQ audience (this looking for approval and to establish themselves as “normal’ or ‘safe’ or ‘the same’) whereas a queer ethos cares not about appearing or being normal, but rather about being engaged in critically analyzing the importance of normality and investigating and dismantling the notion of the normative”

(p.10) “What [might it] mean to consciously and intentionally occupy identities in bad faith” - the second half of the sentence refers to “bottom of the barrel identities [that] Warner advocates for in The Trouble with Normal. I’m not super sure what Glasby means here, since what comes to mind for me is people like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, who falsely occupied POC identities. I don’t think that’s what Glasby means, but I’m also not sure what she DOES mean. Maybe it means refusing to accept the negative elements of a queer identity, refusal to accept that you are bad/ought to feel shame? Like, disidentifying, kind of?

(p.11) “Fryer (2010) advocates for the emergence of ‘a new field',’ one that centers on the ethics of identity, arguing, ‘the motivating question is not primarily the traditional question of ethics, what ought we to do? Instead, the motivating question becomes, in this unethical world, this world of hatred and injustice, who ought we to be?’”

(p.12) Quote from Butler “For whom is outness a historically available and affordable option. Is there an unmarked class character to the demand for universal ‘outness’?” This question also makes me wonder about the various factors that lead some people to be out despite pressing class-related reasons not to be (like Leslie Feinberg), while others choose the pain of staying closeted as the better option for their own survival. A later quote on the same page from Halperin— “To come out is precisely to expose oneself to a different set of dangers and constraints.” You’re always choosing which of two situations seems more manageable, even though both have difficulties.

(p.13) Glasby puts her definition in a slightly different way: “A queer ethos is less concerned with non-queer/LGBTQ audiences, focusing more on other queer/LGBTQ individuals, so the rhetor’s moves, appeals, strategies, and content are not concerned with establishing credibility despite/in spite of being queer/LGBTQ.”

The phrase “despite/in spite of being queer/LGBTQ” hurts me, because I feel that tension about multiple aspects of my identity. I wrote about the tension and double-vision I feel when I read scholarship on anxiety/depression rhetorics as someone diagnosed with both of these, as a conference paper I was supposed to present at RSA this past May (cancelled due to COVID). I never want to write and try to establish credibility IN SPITE OF some aspect of myself, but there are so many pressures to do so, both material (I professionally need people to take me seriously and respect my scholarship) and subconscious (some of it is probably just learned discomfort/deeply ingrained notions of scientific “objectivity”).

In thinking through all of this, I have both the blessing and the curse of thinking about it as both a researcher looking to study queer rhetoric and composition, but that research itself is also a piece of queer rhetoric and queer composition. Sometimes, I find myself reading these books and articles more in terms of how to shape my own writing, rather than how to shape my research design/goals. Which then makes those lines all the more blurry. I’ve been waiting to re-read Will Banks’ “Written Through the Body,” since it’s the only thing on my list I’ve read before and I want to come back to it with the most distance/new perspective possible. But from my memory, that article blurs those lines an awful lot as well. He’s writing about teaching composition from a queer working class embodiment, but he’s also writing about writing as a queer working class writer himself. The article performs the very moves it’s discussing. Which is good! I think more articles should do that. But all the queer writing moves in the world aren’t worth much if I don’t have something to write about, so I need to be careful to read each article with both things in mind.

Sources Marked

Fryer (2010)

Wallace and Alexander (2009)

Alexander and Rhodes (2011, 2012)

Rand (2014)

Glasby (2014)

"Queer Rhetoric in Situ" by Jean Bessette

This article provided me with some much-needed definitions (and anti-definitions) of queer, rhetoric, and queer rhetoric. It’s easy to lose specificity around terms when they’re used so often with an unspoken understanding of what they mean, that you stop clarifying what you mean.

Queer: Anti-normative. You can be gay but not queer, and (depending on who you ask) queer but not gay.

Rhetoric: Bessette cites a definition from Condit: “reading texts ‘as they are situated in history is what constitutes rhetorical criticism as a distinct discipline in the humanities” (152). This seems untrue to me, as plenty of literary scholars (in particular History of the Book scholars) consider historical context. But a later definition also cited from Condit rings much more true to me: “we judge a ‘rhetorical artifact not solely on the action within a text but also on how that rhetoric acts upon the context within which it creates meaning’” (157). “Where are the boundaries between literary study and rhetorical study?” has been especially perplexing to me now that I’m reading 30ish queer memoirs for a rhetoric concentration. But an eye toward reception, and multiple receptions, and social impacts, and uptake by the audience, makes sense to me as a possible (although very arguable) distinction.

Queer Rhetoric: Can still be concerned with what is normative and anti-normative, what upholds cisnormativity and heteronormativity and what resists these pressures, but the queer rhetorician ought to stop to consider the multiple contexts that could make the same act or object or discourse event mean very different things, to different people in the same time, or to people in different times.

So then, if one of my primary interests in these memoirs is when they talk about how the author made meaning from other queer (or not queer!) texts, then really the memoir is functioning as evidence of another text’s rhetorical impact, rather than the memoir being the real object of study, maybe.

This also relates to one of my motivating questions for the history of sexuality list, especially the “theories of the history of sexuality” subsection. Historicism, new historicism, unhistoricism, etc. debates are on the surface level about the question of, “How should the history of sexuality be done?” but are kinda also about, “What work regarding the history of sexuality is worth doing and why?” I wouldn’t argue that any particular kind of work in this area is NOT worth doing, but each kind of research certainly has different purposes and impacts. Identifying historical figures and characters as LGBTQ+ is usually ahistorical, but so many LGBTQ+ people today feel super validated and excited by discovering people from centuries ago who seem like them. I think historicizing sexual behavior and discourses and representations is interesting and important, and I definitely want people to be doing that work, but for myself, I’m more interested in how later people made use of different histories of sexuality or sexual histories of historical people, in making meaning for their own lives.

Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth, Chapters 3 and 4 (Adult Supervision and Teacher Teacher)

Mark grounds each these chapters, as he did the previous ones, in one of his own memories, and circling these memories are his findings from various queer archives and books. “Adult Supervision” addresses literacy acts by organizations like PFLAG (designed to educate parents of LGBTQ+ children), and “Teacher Teacher” takes a look at teacher training curricula from the early to mid 20th century. I used the example from Chapter 4 in my own class, as an example of how a difficult personal memory can lead you to bigger inquiry questions and research projects.

I’m increasingly feeling that queer literacies is the direction I need to go in for framing my dissertation work. As I reflect, I’m not totally sure what I thought the phrase included, but in reading this book, I’m finding that it means a lot of the things I’m interested in, but phrased in different terms than I’m used to thinking about them in.

For example, as I’ve been reading my memoir list, I’m particularly drawn to the sections in which the memoirists describe the various books/movies/etc. that played important roles in their lives/identity formation. The memoirs themselves are queer literacy acts, that some queer people chose to do, when they could have chosen to do other things.

I also think there’s something here related to multiple intelligences— you can have emotional literacy, musical literacy, etc. So all the different forms of queer communication/rhetoric I’m interested in could also be part of literacy, even if it’s not always reading and writing as we traditionally think of it. Just as material rhetoric, visual rhetoric, embodied rhetoric, etc. are all domains of rhetoric not encompassed by Aristotle et. al’s formulations of the term.

Passages I Marked

(p.63-64) “I want to share the stories of my experience and collect those of others so as to figure out how my humble ‘I’ doesn’t represent Queer existence, but can acknowledge a messy collective ‘we’ (albeit a contextualized and tentative, constantly shifting one) that bridges personal/collective historical accounts with other non-preclusive I’s and We’s” — I marked this because it’s another super clear methodological statement, “I am doing this, in this way, for these reasons”

(p.64) “Many Queers use their first-person experience as a point of departure for their scholarship and critical ventures. As Tim Miller has written in ‘Queer Person First,’ ‘As I write this story, it becomes a completely necessary act of looking at the past as a means of negotiating a more empowered and grounded relationship in an uncertain future”

The rest of page 64 is also a larger discussion about methodology.

(p.66-67) “If homophobia becomes more stealth and elusive, queer advocates must continue to hone their counterliteracy abilities to read homophobia’s nuances, research its (re)sources and strategies, and find the words to combat it.” In the next sentence he refers to rhetoric as literacy’s domestic partner, which I enjoy.

(I also marked several passages of quotations from teacher training books that had some of the most egregiously explicit eugenics stuff)

(p.119) Reminder that the Gay Academic Union’s first conference happened at John Jay!

(p.121) Example of Columbia Student Homophile League doing all of the “right” things (paperwork, official letters, etc.), all literacy acts, and being met with silence

Sources to Look Up

• “Queer Person First” by Tim Miller

• Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences by Sarah Schulman

• Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence by Cheryl Glenn

• “Shirts Versus Skins” by Christopher DiRaddo- memoir

• Textual Orientation by Harriet Malinowitz

• “Outtakes” by Clifford Chase (memoir)

• American Eugenics by Nancy Ordover

• Gai Saber (journal published by the Gay Academic Union)

• Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman

Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth, Chapter 2 (Archival Tracks and Traces: Evidence of Queer Literacies)

This chapter tells story after archival story of queer people from the mid 20th century heading to the library or to the encyclopedia or secretively to the gay magazine to try to find answers. Jonathan Ned Katz describes some of the texts he found as the books/people who “warped me.” Below I’ve listed a quote from him that Mark quoted— “Am I alone, and where are all the rest?” The archive available during this time provided relieving answers (you’re not alone) but also warping answers (you’re not alone, but there’s something wrong with you).

Another person Mark quotes, upon seeing an older man in the library reading the same books he’s been reading, asks the man, “Are you a homosexual?” He tried to find the rest, and make a real connection to a real other person. Maybe they could have sifted through the information and found truer truths together. But instead, the man reprimanded him for asking a “brazen” question.

This chapter painted for me a picture — and a painful one— of the information situation facing young queers in the mid to late 20th century. It was informative to me in this way. But I feel more pushed to add to the story, and use my own experiences to reflect on what is still the same and what is different and why. In a quote I pulled out in the quotes section below, Mark says a younger person will need to do the project on Queer identity crises in cyberspace. So while this blog post isn’t that project, I do feel called upon to write my own little piece

I grew up in one of the most liberal (and suburban) areas of a conservative state, North Carolina. My parents are from rural Western New York. My church was not the kind of church that preached about the evils of homosexuality— it just didn’t mention it at all (until our state tried to pass a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman). My parents later told me that they never talked about gayness with me because they didn’t know any gay people and figured it just wasn’t relevant to bring up. Quite a lot of queer literacy efforts had been made in the 35 years between Mark’s adolescence and mine, but I wasn’t aware of any of it. I didn’t know being gay was a thing that you could be, so I didn’t know to look for it within myself. When I caught myself looking at girls in the way I imagined boys look at girls, I figured it was because pervasive sexism makes the male gaze the norm and I had just internalized that into myself even though it wasn’t real. (I doubt I’d heard the phrase “the male gaze” at 9 years old, but I certainly understood it.)

I first remember hearing the word “gay” in 7th grade, during an after school play rehearsal. JK Rowling had just revealed that she’d always thought of Dumbledore as gay. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew people thought it was a bad thing, so I was fiercely denying it. Dumbledore couldn’t be something bad. An 8th grade girl asked me, “Do you even know what that means?” I admitted I didn’t. She said, “It’s when boys like boys.” Oh. Well, that didn’t seem bad to me. Somehow, I still never put it together that if boys could like boys, then girls could like girls. I didn’t know that was possible until the following summer, when Katy Perry released “I Kissed a Girl.”

Both this announcement by JKR and the song by Perry have been the subject of much criticism from the LGBTQ+ community in the years since then. But both are close to my heart. Some people have said that JKR should have let Dumbledore’s sexuality go un-commented-upon rather than try to earn social justice points after the fact without ever writing it into the book. And lots of people have said the song is biphobic, by playing into the stereotype of women being interested in women falsely, just for male attention at parties. But I’m glad. Because the same girl I’d had male gaze thoughts about in 4th grade, I watched dancing to that song in 8th grade, and I wondered again, before setting those thoughts aside again. Both of these texts, I place in a similar category to the books Mark and the people he quotes found in the library. Confusing, and problematic, but absolutely important.

After that, it was a lot of books. Mostly nonfiction about neopaganism where the subjects also happened to be queer, and LGBTQ+ YA books (many of the same ones drawn on Kobabe’s shelves in Gender Queer). Tumblr was important. The Harry Potter fandom was important— the song “In Which Draco and Harry Secretly Want to Make Out” in particular, which in retrospect is still lowkey homophobic. I don’t remember so much going on forums to read about gay stuff specifically, although I certainly sought out a lot of my general sex ed that way. More and more of my friends came out during high school (and even more in college and after), but I don’t remember talking with them about queerness that much. Mostly I remember watching them, and listening, and we all wrote an awful lot on Tumblr and read each other’s blogs. The queer girls I was closest to were mostly either just as inexperienced with dating as I was, or much Braver and More Experienced than me (not just sexually and romantically), and therefore far too intimidating.

“Pansexual” was becoming increasingly common right when I was entering The Discourse, as were other identity words like demisexual. Singular they and neopronouns were not actually new, but they were newly known more widely. I’m sure there were queer kids who found their community not on Tumblr, but I’m really not sure where else people went.

I got initiated into a lot of the debates around lesbian/bisexual identity and history and terms in this way, via Tumblr, rather than through academic texts, like people pre-internet did. And a lot of that was warped from the original arguments and ideas , or at least presented sans context, and I’ve often felt warped and confused just like my queer literary ancestors. (Am I actually straight and faking it for attention? Am I actually a lesbian and just in denial? Will most lesbians hate me and resent my presence in queer women spaces? What are you if you’re not butch and not femme? Which one am I? Am I something else? If I’m not a lesbian, is it rude/inappropriate for me to use those words at all? What about dyke? Can I be a dyke? How is femme different from feminine? How is a femme lesbian’s gender different from a straight feminine woman’s gender?) Those feelings are part of what led me to focusing on bisexuality as a research interest, and are part of why I’m still totally uncertain about the nuances of what “femme” means.

Answering some of these questions and trying to figure out where I stand in all the Arguments has been one of the motivating impulses for studying LGBTQ+ history. I’m a researcher, and I need to not diminish that, but I’m also just another Queer literate like the ones Mark describes in this chapter, reading book after book trying to figure out my place in the world.

Quotes I’ve Marked

(p.31) “for GLBTQ students, who navigate through patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia, literacy often takes on special roles for their survival”

(p.31) “‘restorative literacy’ acts can reverse the damaging effects of heteronormative discourses and homophobic textual violence”

(p.34) “Most gays have at some point gone to books in an effort to understand about being gay or to get some help in living as gay. In my time, what we found was strange to us (they’re writing about me but I’m not like that!) and cruelly clinical (there’s nothing about love) and always bad (being this way seems grim and hopeless)” — this quote is actually a block quote from Gays in Library Land

(p.36) “Even if Powell finds anonymous comfort in the Queer cybersphere, this techno-literate Queerness comes with its own hazards of homophobic trolling and cyberbullying so I don’t want to deny that contemporary Queer young people don’t still have Queer identity crises with which they grapple. (One of them will have to do that research and write it.)” Challenge accepted.

(p.40) — a Mr. Y writes to ONE magazine asking if anyone knows why “All Queen’s Day” is a thing and why wearing green on that day is a sign you’re queer— wants to know where this notion came from!

(p.47) “In my investigation, the archive acts as the sponsor that has permitted me to find Queer literate ancestors whose literacy labors improved cultural conditions so that I and all Queer people could lead more fulfilling lives. I argue that this Queer literate work must continue when heteronormative rhetorics continuously and unendingly seep into our lives.”

(p.50) “The first question is, ‘Am I alone?’ and the second, ‘Where are all the rest?’” — quoting from Jonathan Ned Katz

Sources I’ve Marked

• “Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner” by Ellen Louise Hart

• Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy, by Eric Darnell Pritchard

• “‘Like signposts on the road’: The Function of Literacy in Constructing Black Queer Ancestors” also by Eric Darnell Pritchard

• “Gays in Library Land,” Barbara Gittings

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe

Genderqueer is a comic/graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir). E is 5ish years older than me, and we had a lot of the same interests growing up. I feel our differences primarily in how that age gap shaped our different relationships to the same things (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fandoms, John Green, Tumblr and fanfiction, queer YA). On a personal level, while I do identify as a cis woman, I certainly still related to some of eir experiences with and feelings about feminine pressures, and eir relationship with eir sister reminded me strongly enough of my relationship with my own sister that I texted her about it while reading and loaned her the book immediately after.

Aside from the many personal connections I felt with Kobabe while reading, I mainly thought about this book in relation to Queer Literacies (McBeth), which I was reading at the same time. Kobabe falls in love with reading through Harry Potter, tracks and documents eir reading extensively through eir teen years, and includes multiple panels that show the titles of some of the many books e read during eir formative years. Most of the books are not directly commented on in the text or story of the memoir, or mentioned in general terms— reading YA, reading fantasy, seeking queer representation.

As a “Queer literate” myself, to use Mark’s phrase, I recognized many of these titles, and many of them are close to my own heart for the same reasons. Several titles by David Levithan appear, and many by Tamora Pierce (although only The Song of the Lioness series in general is mentioned by name in the text). Tamora Pierce has since said on Twitter that if she had been aware of genderqueerness when writing the books, she would have written Alanna as non-binary.

Kobabe’s participation in different fandom communities (and how that relates to eir own gender and sexual identities) is also an example of queer literacy. Eir Queer-Straight-Alliance in middle school rapidly turns into a Lord of the Rings fanclub, with an emphasis on slash fics (fanfiction centered around characters having gay romances and/or sexual relationships with each other). While I wasn’t interested in fanfiction myself growing up, I cannot overstate how big of a deal slash fic was for many queer teens and preteens during the ‘aughts and the first part of the 2010s. Reading and writing slashfic gave young people opportunities to explore their sexualities in a safe, contained way before they became physically involved with others in real life, while bonding with others around a shared interest, and developing writing skills that they will also use in other areas of their lives. While slash fic and shipping more generally is definitely still a thing, I think its popularity has waned as LGBTQ+ representation in YA novels has increased.

Another thought on queer literacies and Kobabe’s book— I was delightfully surprised to notice how e re-drew (I think) a particular panel from Fun Home (maybe e got Bechdel’s permission to reprint instead?) as a visual citation of the comic. How else can you accurately quote from a visual medium? The visuals matter! References to Fun Home and other books are accompanied by page numbers drawn into the background of the panels. It’s such a wonderful and creative form of citation, in my opinion.

After finishing the book, I messaged Kobabe on Instagram to say thank you and let em know I was reading eir book for my PhD exams. In eir reply, e said one thing e kept in mind while writing/drawing was how the book might be used in schools in the future, especially cite-ability.

Poor Queer Studies, by Matt Brim

I reviewed this book for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics (review still in the middle of the editorial process), so I don’t want to write too much about it here. I originally didn’t have this on my orals lists. I bought it near the beginning of the pandemic because Duke UP was having a sale and I wanted to stress-buy books, basically. Then I signed up to review it just because it was one of the two books on the call for reviewers that I already owned. It was only after I started reading that I discovered that it’s not only BY someone at CUNY, but it’s ABOUT CUNY (in part). And that one of my own classmates is in the acknowledgements.

I think it’s a pretty mixed-methods book. There’s university case study, there’s some archival work, there’s some auto-ethnography, there’s some classroom case study, there’s examples from student statements. Some of his own descriptions of his methods include “queer narrative case study” and “queer archival practice,” as well as “making poor queer studies imaginable” as a methodological intervention

One thing I really like is Brim’s deliberate choice to include a partial bibliography within the main text of the chapter, to really put front and center the queer scholarship taking place at the College of Staten Island. I thought that was really effective.

The book also surprised me in how Brim frames the Graduate Center as largely separate from the CUNY undergraduate colleges (GC is “rich queer studies” and CSI is “poor queer studies”), since my experience of CUNY is that there’s so much overlap between campuses, given how we’re farmed out to the other colleges as part of our teaching fellowships and how a large number of GC students work part time at other colleges to pay the bills. And how lots (idk if most) GC faculty are primarily appointed at other colleges, their “home campuses.” So it was interesting to me that Brim feels quite differently from me. Since he received his own GC appointment not very long before the book was published, I assume he wrote those sections before he joined the GC faculty, and I wonder if his feelings about the relationship between the schools have changed at all.

When he started out saying how he was going to talk about how rich queer studies schools ought to collaborate with and give resources to and learn from poor queer studies schools, I automatically assumed the rich queer studies school in question was going to be Columbia, not my own school. My friend whose wife is a Columbia medical student says that lots of Columbia students apparently view the GC as romantic since we’re teaching the working class or something.

But anyway, I found the book really helpful in terms of learning about the field of queer studies and the tensions within it, and it helped me think about CUNY through new eyes (I certainly never would have thought of CSI as a queer school), and it’s compositionally interesting re: the mixed methods stuff I talked about above. I also like that he starts the book with a Virginia Woolf quote. Because I love her.

Some Quotes I Marked

(p.9) [Discussing the notion of queer studies faculty as subversive rebels in the academy] “The problem with our story is that when Robin Hood stole, he gave to the poor. And he didn’t get paid to do it.” This is like the whole paradox of being a Marxist (me, not Brim) queer academic. It’s impossible to not contribute to all the ways the academy upholds capitalism and oppression in all of its forms, if you’re going to be working in the academy. As one of my MA teachers told us, “Once you have a PhD, you are part of The System. And you have to deal with that.”

(p.10) “….the undervalued queer methodology of critical compromise— that we both are and are not our institutions. Critical compromise both isolates and dramatizes a problem and promotes a mode of relative questioning.” I don’t know what I think about this but it’s something I need to think about more

(p.10) “Kristen A. Renn discerns a key tension created by the incorporation of queer methods in higher education research, namely, that ‘colleges and universities have evolved to tolerate the generation of queer theory from within but have stalwartly resisted the queering of higher education itself.’ ‘What is more nonqueer,’ she asks, ‘than traditional doctoral education or the tenure stream?’” I really don’t know how you could queer higher ed without making it just…something entirely different than what it is. Which is probably a good thing that needs to happen, but I’m resistant to it for the obvious reasons of how I’m already invested in it.

(p.12) “Less often, queer scholars have navigated class issues methodologically by finding ways to subvert the researcher/researched divide through, for instance, participatory action research in which knowledge making becomes a shared, cross-class endeavor of coinvestigators from inside and outside institutions of higher ed”

(p.13) [In Inside the Ivory Closet], the author “posited a split between the post-Stonewall scholars who increasingly enjoyed and industriously courted institutional status within the academy and pre-Stonewall writers and activists whose primary commitments were to their communities and to making scholarship accessible beyond the academy”

(p.14) (quoting someone else’s quote of another quote from a listserv) “Much of queer theory seems radical only as long as we ignore the class-base of its production and dissemination” YEP

(p.15) “One of the key functions of disciplinarity is to distinguish between the expert and the novice…We need to ask why the rise of interdisciplinarity, so critical of knowledge silos, did not de-stratify higher education in class terms, especially as the supposedly class-attuned framework of intersectionality has been the methodological byword for much interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences”

(p.15) “Attempts at queer-class disordering of the academy often look like relatively enfranchised LGBTQ scholars studying disenfranchised queer people or cultural forms extrinsic to the academy but with whom and which we feel personal/political connections and intellectual attractions”

(p.15) [again quoting from someone else] “As we descend deeper into the ivory tower we must ask ourselves at what cost. To what degree does incorporation challenge our relevance to the same communities who find themselves at the heart of our research?

(p.19) “socioaffective histories of arrival” (this is accompanied by an endnote referencing Queer Phenomenology)

(p.23) “the ‘problem of impossible evidence’ that attends queer scholarship, which is characteristically concerned with elucidating the ‘vagaries of embodied life’”

(p. 71) “higher education might be more closely aligned with class relations and racial capitalism (including the political economies of slavery) than with democracy (its governing political logic).”

(p.77) “…in other words, class analysis might well produce a critical cul de sac. This is one of the dangers of criticality, our prized method of exposing a problem: that we create a critical space to dwell in. But what if criticality prolongs the problem? What if queer criticality loves a hierarchy?”

(p.78) “What would it mean to stop dwelling in criticality, without merely withdrawing from it, thereby untroubling ourselves and entrenching upper-class white silence as the norm?”

(p.79) “Why pick on ourselves, why investigate our own status-based divisions, when others so passionately underplay our queer contributions? Why not just keep shouting ‘neoliberalism’ into the strongest winds blowing against us?”

(p.80-81) “…how do Queer Studies status agents avoid the contradictions that surely arise between being afforded the most elite education in the world and, at best, making unproblematized claims to white middle-class identity, or at worst, not? My guess is that, compared to their rich students, many White Queer Studies status agents actually feel middle class. Does such a comparison measure in miles differences that scale down to inches when the entire racialized hierarchy of the academy is surveyed? How are we to gauge class status in the academy?” I don’t have a good answer to this but I think it’s important

This quote is actually from Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” but it’s on page 98 of Brim: “If one’s desire lines up with the normative compulsion to heterosexuality, how does one ever separate that desire from that compulsion?”

(p.102) “mainstream Queer Studies likes to pretend that its job is not to prepare students to be workers or part of the working class”

(p.103) “Jobs in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union became queer because they were union jobs. In other words, queers were protected, together, by a solidarity that exceeded their sexual and gender identity but that was inseparable from it.”

(p.116) “Queer Studies can reorient itself to the intellectual work of making better employees in the very real sense that it can enable people to recognize and confront the conditions of their employment that undermine them as queer, of color, gender nonconforming, women workers, and people.”

Sources To Look Up

Kristen A. Renn, “LGBT and Queer Research in Higher Education”

Jeffrey Escoffier, “Inside the Ivory Closet: The Challenge Facing Lesbian and Gay Studies”

Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class

“The Racialized Erotics of Participatory Research” Jessica Fields

Tilting the Tower: Lesbians, Teaching, Queer Subjects, by Linda Garber

“Queering the Profession, or Just Professionalizing Queers?” by Sarah Chinn

Coming Out Under Fire, by Allan Berube

The Universities and the Gay Experience (intro is by John D’Emilio, idk if the whole thing is by him)

The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, by Kevin Floyd

Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (Anne Balay)

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steel Workers (Anne Balay)

Irresistible Revolution, by Urvashi Vaid

Our in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America, by Miriam Frank

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, by tz karakashian

Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson (and also Vita Sackville-West)

This was one of the books I read during my one-text-per-day period and didn’t finish, but I loved it so much I took the time to finish it anyway, later on. This book is partially the text of Vita Sackville-West’s autobiography, which she seems to have never shared with anyone before she died, partially her son Nigel’s narration of his parents’ lives, via his own memories but primarily through their diaries and letters, and partially extended quotes from those same diaries and letters.

I first heard of VSW through Virginia Woolf, as I expect many people do. I knew she was the subject of Orlando, I knew they had exchanged what I would call love letters, I thought VSW was a lesbian and Harold Nicolson was gay and they were each other’s beards/consensually-non-monogamous. I knew VSW had an alter ego named Julian, who took her lovers out in public. I didn’t know that VSW and HN had a deep love between them as well, that they really were primary partners, not just a marriage out of social expectation. Yet they still also had their own separate bedrooms, and lived apart for long stretches of time. Yet it also clearly pained them to be separated. It seems contradictory, but it seems to have worked.

( VSW and VW are part of my own queer literacy story (see post about Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth). I also had a lot of envy I had to work through while reading, since VSW was able to just cavort around Europe with her girlfriend for months at a time while her mother and husband sent her money. Must be nice. )

Quotes I Marked

(p.3) “Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth….Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it” [then she basically says except for Harold, although I do not think she ever gave it to him? At the same time, Nigel says he is fairly sure his mother meant for him to find it after she died.] I think there is no better way of putting the dilemma of the memoirist than this. There is really no fully ethical way to do it, but you are compelled to do it anyway. I think The Argonauts really highlights this too, and Are You My Mother? Both books include talking about how the author shared drafts with a loved one, who was varying levels of uncomfortable with it. But how can you tell someone you love not to do something that their career is based around? There’s so much pressure — probably external, but certainly internal — to press down your feelings.

(p.4) “I realize that this confession, autobiography, whatever I may call it, must necessarily have for its outstanding fault a lack of all proportion. I have got to trust to a very uncertain memory, and whereas the present bulks enormous, the past is misty.”’

In all the memoirs I’ve been reading, it always stands out to me when the author writes about the fact that they are writing it and their reflections on that position/act. And you always have to press on through your self-consciousness, or else the book never happens. I wonder what the memoirs look like where the person failed to move past that crisis/conundrum, so they never finished/shared.

I think this way is the most ethical way to do it— write it, and keep it secret until you and most of the relevant people are dead. I don’t feel comfortable saying everyone SHOULD do it this way, because I think memoirs are super important and enjoyable and I want to read them! And people can enjoy and benefit from them, especially queer memoirs, now! I think a lot of young non-binary people will hold on to Jacob Tobia’s book like a liferaft. But that’s another example of an author whose loved ones (in this case, their parents) weren’t totally thrilled by their portrayal, although Tobia writes about this exact concern with a lot of love for them.

Comedian Bo Burnham talks about how a lot of the stories he tells in his comedy are made up, because his family and friends never chose to be loved ones with a comedian, so it doesn’t feel right to him to have people laugh at stories that are theirs, too.

I don’t think there’s a good answer here.

I’m glad this book exists. I’m glad LGBTQ memoirs exist.

Queer Literacies, by Mark McBeth, Intro and Chapter 1

I have a horrible habit of taking lots of notes and annotating and then rarely looking back at them, and so I feel like lots of the thoughts I’m having while I read end up stuck on the page instead of staying in my head. For Mark’s book, I’m going to try to write about every chapter, and do it in the form of going back over all the passages I marked and compiling them here. We’ll see if that strategy is helpful.

Passages I Marked For Quotes

(p.2) “We can be sure that acts of literacy remained a key component of how Queer people would identify themselves, name themselves, and rediscover what they could be on their own literate terms.” I feel the truth of this in my bones and could probably tell you the story of my entire identity formation through things i’ve read.

(p.2) “From the Queer exegetical perspective, this hetero-discourse resounded at every turn. It permeated every location, person, and text that one say, heard, or read on a daily basis.” I think a lot of straight people think we’re crazy when we say this or that is obviously gay, or painfully heteronormative. I don’t think they realize. Later in the chapter he talks about how academic discourse forces queer rhetors to take on a straight subject position, and I think part of that is how I feel like I need to over-justify saying….”this is gay!” And how often does “gay” not mean “homosexual” but “disruptive to heteronormativity in some way”? Probably a lot.

(p.3) “Queer literates constantly needed to hone their literacy capabilities to reread how these hetero-literate platforms morphed and then how Queer literates needed to regroup and reword their rhetorical counter-literacy measures”

(p.9) “I write an auto-archival account, similar to auto-ethnography yet through document-driven memories of my own Queer literacy development….Recounting my own benchmarks of Queer literate discovery as a point of narrative departure within a broader historical framework….” Part of Mark’s statement of methods. I marked a lot of these as examples of 1) methods you can use 2) ways you can state them 3) things I’m “allowed” to do

(p.12) “In most cases in composition/rhetoric (comp/rhet) studies, ethnography and/or oral histories have acted as the primary methodology by which researchers have collected information that then illustrated the socio-political action that emerged from the rhetorical competence that can ‘make sense of lives and conditions that to them do not make sense’”(citing Royster, Traces of a Stream)

(p.21) Long quote from Butler (in Gender Trouble) about the straight mind and academic assumption of straightmindedness

(p.22) “Queer literates reread texts and reinterpreted them beyond some prescribed heterosexist existentialism. This tenacity to read counter to what they were told resulted frequently in a collective voice of sociopolitical pliability that spoke the diverse terms of many different Queer intentions.” I’m not totally sure what the second sentence means but the first sentence is important

(p.24)— another methods statement/justification

Sources I Marked To Look Up

• “Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness” by David Wallace

• Eric Darnell Pritchard, Fashioning Lives

• “Archive This!: Queering the Archive” by K. J. Rawson

• Stacy Waite, “Queer Literacies Survival Guide”

• Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner, Ellen Louise Hart

• “Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities” by Harriet Malinowitz

• Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse by Candace Spiegelman

• Memoir: An Introduction, by G Thomas Couser

• Lauren Berlant, “personal as general” (similar to “personal is political”) — not title, but idea, need to find source

• “Critical Experimental Writing” by Marianna Torgovnick

• An Archive of Feelings by Ann Cvetkovich

• Footnote 37 says to look at the writing of Garret Nicholas, Aneil Rallin, Jessica Shumake, and Stacey Waite, accessed through Comp-Pile and searching “queer”

• Nancy Miller, “Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts”

• Carolyn Ellis, “The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel”

• Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

• Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit —this and the ones above it up through Nancy are referenced as different examples/discussions of similar kinds of writing labeled personal criticism, auto/ethnography, auto-theory, co-performative research, and intimate ethnography

That’s not quite enough to be a list of its own, but I think some of them can be added to my Methods list and others can be added to my Memoir list. Certainly need to at least look up them all to see which ones I should skim through or read.

Synthesis post 1

My partner has been traveling for work for the last week and a half, so I made it my goal to cross one text off my exam lists every single day they were gone.

Here is what I read:

The Room Lit by Roses (memoir)

Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects (edited collection)

Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics (sociology monograph)

”Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (Essay, Adrienne Rich)

Are You My Mother? (Bechdel, graphic memoir)

Portrait of a Marriage (memoir)

Femmes of Power (photo ethnography)

Imagining Transgender: Ethnography of a Category (anthropology monograph)

”Queer Critical Rhetoric Bites Back” (Essay, Erin Rand, 2013)

”The Queer Turn in Composition Studies: Reviewing and Assessing an Emerging Scholarship” (Essay, Jonathan Alexander and David Wallace, 2009)

Pushing myself to read quickly and strategically has been a gratifying challenge. I’m needing to keep a tighter focus on the guiding questions for my lists, especially as my reading this week has spanned all 3 of them: 3 memoirs, 5 methods and theory, 2 history of sexuality/bisexuality. And both of the last two could have easily been on the methods and theory list, and some of those could have been on the history list. I’m supposed to write about my process for choosing not only which texts to read, but where I put each one. And I think it boils down to my guiding questions for each list.

I’ve just been reading Imagining Transgender tonight. It is on my “rhet/comp methods in queer studies” sublist. But it’s anthropology. But rhetoricians and compositionists also use ethnography, and I’m undergraduately trained as an anthropologist, so I’m claiming it as mine. It could also easily go on the history of sexuality list, since it’s a story/study of how “transgender” diverged as a category from “transsexual” and “homosexual.” But I bought this book before it was ever on my exam list because Duke UP was having a sale and the pandemic was just beginning and I wanted to know how to do an ethnography of a concept, of a category. That’s a methodological question. And as I’m reading, while I’m interested in the history, I’m primarily paying attention to how Valentine (the author) chose his research sites, became connected with the people there, navigated their questions and challenges and his positionality as a researcher, and what he chooses to explain in his introduction. He spends many paragraphs on the word choices he has made for the book, and attendant things like punctuation. I particularly like how he situates himself as part of the future past— he is happy to acknowledge that what he is writing will become outdated, and will not make sense or at times seem offensive to future readers, because he knows things will change, although he does not know how they will change.

But the content, rather than the methodology, also makes me think of Trans: A Memoir, and Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, since both are very concerned with the nuances of what these different identity categories mean, who belongs, and the political implications of choosing one over another. (To a lesser extent, the Rich piece falls in here too.)

And then, Sackville-West in Portrait of a Marriage and Bechdel in Are You My Mother are both very considered with how to represent themselves and others, although their difficulties are not over terminology. At the same time, Sackville-West imagines herself as having a dual nature, a feminine part that likes men and a masculine part (Julian) that likes women. Is she non-binary, bisexual, or both? The answer is that the question can’t really be answered, or rather that the answer depends on a ton of other theoretical and methodological considerations. Which is exactly what Rand’s article is about: how does queer criticism force us to back up and take a look at the underlying assumptions of our research? And Alexander and Wallace’s primary argument, as well as many of the authors in the edited collection, is that it always should—that queer studies impacts everyone, cis straight people included.

Femmes of Power made me think about multimodal composing, oddly more than the articles about multimodal composing did. It is co-created by a photographer and a writer, and the photos were methodological collaborations between the photographer and the people being photographed. The text is framed as letters to the people in the photos, but is about what it means to be “femme.”

What does it mean to be femme? I still don’t know, any more than I did after I read My Butch Career. More specifically, I still don’t know if I am femme. I also don’t have a firm grasp on what “femme” as a category is. It’s kind of like its own gender, and it’s kind of like a sexuality (a subtype of lesbian), but it also seems to be something else. You can be femme and also another gender, and that gender doesn’t have to be woman. It doesn’t have a stable, consistent meaning as a “gender presentation” either. It’s sort of defined in opposition to butch, but not always. Femmes of Power is less about interrogating what femme “means” or who “counts” and more about celebrating the diverse kinds of people who count themselves under that umbrella. I like celebration as a scholarly goal.

Counterstory, by Aja Martinez

This was the first (and so far, only) book I’ve read for my Methods in Rhet/Comp reading list— you know, the only list that is actually in my subfield of English. At first, I was avoiding this list because pandemic-brain made this kind of content feel impossible. Then, it was because memoirs and sexuality studies just felt more interesting/fun. But this list is the most important one for me, I feel.

Counterstory was my first introduction to both Critical Race Theory and counterstory as a method. Well, sort of. I had a general sense of what CRT is but hadn’t read anything in the field, and it was only through reading this book that I realized I’d already read a counterstory-like piece in Betweener Talk, which is written as a dialogue.

An initial list of things that blew my mind in this book:

1. How many jobs Derrick Bell either resigned from out of protest or was fired from due to protest. Badass. And somehow he was still able to be incredibly successful in his career???

2. That CRT scholars agree that Brown v Board of Education probably only passed because it was the Cold War and they wanted Communists to stop trying to recruit Black people by pointing out how racist and fucked up America is/had to maintain the U.S.’s image as being the Land of the Free

3. The idea of composite characters/narratives as a way of integrating research and personal experience and interview data into an argument that is also fun to read!

4. That even though there is plenty of prejudice against counterstories, this is a real method that you can use to write about stuff!

An initial list of questions I still have:

1. If one of the tenets of CRT is that racism is permanent, but CRT theorists also argue that that permanence shouldn’t dissuade anybody from fighting for justice, what are the goals if not getting rid of racism/what do they think are the limits of what is achievable?

2. Could you use a counterstory method to write about axes of oppression other than race? Or would it be called something else, if counterstory is intimately bound up with CRT? Can the tenets be adapted to other axes of oppression also? What would be the ethical way to do that?

3. So, tenet 3 (interest convergence) is the idea that those in power will only let steps toward racial justice happen if they also benefit white people. But one way that racism is used is to prevent mass solidarity— if white workers blame undocumented immigrants for stealing their jobs, then they aren’t angry at the bosses who are more than happy to pay immigrants less than they would pay someone with papers. Et cetera. And that keeps wages low/causes infighting,etc. which hurts everyone, including working class white people. How can we reconcile the fact that all white people benefit from white privilege/white supremacy, while also acknowledging that tenet 3 (interest convergence) applies predominantly to bougeoise white people and is very much bound up with capitalism, rather than applying to all white people equally?

Bisexuality: A Critical Reader, Edited by Merl Storr

I finished this book several months ago but decided I would input all of my notes/highlighted quotes into Zotero before I was allowed to blog about it. I got….bored with that very quickly but kept my word to myself and so never blogged about it.

This is an anthology that “does not aim to be comprehensive, or even to offer a representative sample of published work on bisexuality. It does aim, however, to introduce its readings to the concepts of bisexuality, and to some of the key areas of debate about what bisexuality means and how the concept(s) might be used” (Storr 1). It is also intended to encourage the reader “to interrogate the concept of bisexuality: to think critically about where it has come from and how its origins continue to shape it in contemporary debates” (Storr 1).

The first section of selections is “Genealogy of the Concept of Bisexuality,” beginning with Ellis and Freud and ending with Udis-Kessler in 1992. The second section is about “Bisexual Identity and Bisexual Behavior” (and how these two sometimes overlap but often don’t). Part 3 is on “Bisexual Epistemologies,” or how we can use bisexuality as a framework for thinking about or organizing other things. Part 4 is on “Differences,” both within bisexuality and between bisexuals and other kinds of people.

Thinking back on this book a few months out and just glancing through the table of contents again, there’s a lot I don’t remember, and I will definitely need to go back through and create an index card for each selection. But I do remember that Part 1 made me regret/wish to revise my formulation of bisexuality in my article in the Journal of Bisexuality, and that Part 2 was very thought-provoking in terms of research methods. It also gave me insight into the role of what I would consider bisexual women in the political lesbian movement, which is discussed more in “Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics,” a book I am still at the beginning of. Some women who slept with both women and men identified as lesbians, others identified as bisexual, and others didn’t want either label.

This book definitely requires another skim-read, since pandemic-brain wiped a lot of it from my head, but I’m very glad to have read it.

The Politics of Everybody, by Holly Lewis

This book attempts to synthesize Marxist theory with feminist and queer theory— or rather, to argue for a Marxist perspective while addressing the many criticisms of Marxist thought that feminists and queer theorists have made over the years and integrating their concerns into a materialist framework.

Chapter 1 is nearly 90 pages on “Terms of the Debate,” intended to get everyone on the same page about the different sets of theory, regardless of which school of thought the reader comes from. Chapter 2 is on “Marxism and Gender,” and 3 is on “From Queer Nationalism to Queer Marxism.” Chapter 4 is conclusions, ending with “10 axioms toward a queer marxist future.”

I’m trying to keep this exam list focused on history of sexuality/sexual historiography rather than queer theory, but my tentative exception is for books that provide histories of sexual theory— like this one, and like an anthology I finished several months ago but haven’t blogged about yet.

There’s relatively little work on queer Marxism, since the American Communist Party was Stalinist and therefore pretty homophobic, so I found it useful to read an overview of the various debates between the two. I knew Foucault broke from the CP in part due to homophobia, and that impacted his writing, but I didn’t know most of the other stuff.

However, I was frustrated with this book at times since I think it gives a bad-faith reading of postmodernism and queer theory. Or at least, whatever works Lewis is referring to when she critiques “postmodernism” and “queer theorists” are making pretty different arguments than the works I’m familiar with, and she often doesn’t refer to specific authors or titles. I think there are super valid materialist criticisms to be made of postmodernism and queer theory, but this book alternately either doesn’t make them or obscures and undermines them in the eyes of anyone who is somewhat familiar with them via what I feel are disingenuous (or maybe just mistaken?) readings of their arguments. For example, Lewis criticizes the idea that gender/other things are “discursively constructed” but then argues that they are “socially constructed.” I still don’t understand how those are meaningfully different. But then again, because my education has definitely been a mix of postmodern-influenced theory and Marxist-influenced theory, maybe my understanding of various postmodern/poststructuralist concepts is “wrong” because they were taught to me with Marxist components already integrated.

When I got to Chapter 3, which includes a similar critique of postcolonial thought, I really wasn’t sure how to react, because I’m much less familiar with those theories. I just don’t know if this had an accurate portrayal of po-co theory or if it was similarly strawmanning.

In other parts of the book, though, I do think Lewis does a good job of being sympathetic to why political movements developed in the directions that they did (like queer nationalism) and how they led to positive developments in comparison to what came before. Part of what took me so long to finish this book is that I was reading it alongside a reading group that was discussing similar issues, and I was spending a lot of time arguing with other people in the reading group about queer theory and doing background research to see which of us was actually correct. (I still think I’m correct but bought some other books to read to make sure.)

This is one of those books that made me think about how everyone says you should read for main ideas and connections with other texts, you don’t necessarily have to closely read the whole book, but….I definitely did read the whole book, and I think that’s part of why it went so slowly for me. Need to go through all the pages I marked and compile a doc of my notes/things I thought were important.

Many Love, by Sophie Johnson

Many Love is an illustrated memoir of Johnson’s experiences with love writ-large (including family and friendships) and how exploring polyamory has shaped her views and made her who she is beyond just her sex/dating life. I think it’s just as much about friendship as it is about romance. Johnson is bisexual, and while other memoirs I’ve read (such as TSR/TSB) are written by non-monogamous people, I chose this book for my list because it’s really ~about~ that set of identity and relationship issues.

I really enjoyed it and read it in only two nights. Interspersed throughout Johnson’s memories are also many citations of interviews, data, and other external sources that have informed her understandings, that she includes for the benefit of her readers too. She includes several helpful hand-drawn charts of different terminology, even gender and sexuality words not directly related to the content of the book.

In the beginning, she acknowledges that she is a cisgender bisexual white woman, and isn’t that a perspective that’s fairly well represented as far as LGBTQ memoirs go? Her response to this is to include one such chart that represents information that others she spoke to (particularly trans people, I think) asked her to include for her readers’ edification. This is where she explains things like cis, trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, etc. I think this and the citations to other perspectives are good things to do, but I don’t feel like they fully answer the recurring question of memoirs.

On the one hand, everyone should be allowed to share their experiences! And with memoir, you only have the perspective that is yours. On the other hand, as Juliet Jacques discusses at length in her own book, the publishing markets aren’t infinite. Only so many writers get contracts, and while anyone can self-publish, there are lots and lots of benefits — both writerly and financially— to having a contract.

However, I don’t think Many Love is self-indulgent, even though it is about her self. Each chapter has a very clear broader message that she wants to discuss and impart to her readers via telling about her own experiences. Particularly: how a very close friend who you are not dating or having sex with can still be your Significant Other that you primarily structure your life around, the role of jealousy and how to deal with it with a loved one, etc.

I have already lent my copy to friends.

It’s been awhile since I read a book that is for adult audiences, primarily text, but also illustrated. I think there should be more books like that. The last one I read was To Timbuktu, which was also a memoir, this one co-written by a couple (one who is a writer and one who is an artist).

History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Foucault)

I put this on my list because it’s the foundation of so much of modern sexuality studies that I thought it was important to actually read the text instead of just others’ citations and interpretations of key parts (mostly the scientia sexualis part). Unfortunately, I feel like the parts I already knew through quotations were the only parts (with only minimal hyperbole) that are going to be useful to me.

For a “history of ____” book, I definitely expected there to be more historical examples and evidence cited. There’s the Jouy case (highly contentious in its own right), but not much else. Since the “we inherited sexual repression from the Victorians” idea is so commonly agreed upon, I don’t mind there not being evidence for that, because the whole point is that it’s an idea NOT grounded in evidence, but Foucault makes pretty sweeping claims about all of Western civilization after the 18th century that I would like more examples of.

I wondered if perhaps I ought to have added additional Volumes to my list— maybe what I was looking for was simply in those volumes! But it seems that the other volumes are about antiquity, not the modern era that Volume 1 mostly deals with.

Other ideas that stuck with me/seem useful:

• Sex is a topic that happens to be particularly discursively dense/able to be manipulated in lots of different ways

• Movements of power always have a purpose, even if no individual person or group consciously planned it. There is always something GAINED from a particular mobilization of discourse. Like water flowing downwards. This seems vaguely materialist to me (and Foucault was a former Communist so that makes sense), but he doesn’t really talk about what factors might shape the path— this kinda makes it sound like the flows of power are more or less evenly distributed, which is ofc not the case.

I highlighted and then re-read Foucault’s definition of Power several times and I still don’t understand what he is actually saying power is.

Also even though he does clarify that he’s talking about Western society several times instead of just saying “society” and erasing all other traditions, it seems racist to suggest that all other societies have a mystical sexual tradition that’s just about pleasure and technique and cultivation, and that it’s all so uniform that you can just say ars erotica, when he’s so clear that in Western civ, every individual situation must be locally analyzed.

In skimming some summaries of criticism of the book online, it seems like a lot of the positive comments are crediting the book with a) criticizing the repressive hypothesis and b) arguing for how sex and sexuality are not universals but are culturally dependent. I guess it speaks to the ubiquity of that influence that my reaction to the text was “Well, yeah” — my education has taken place entirely post-Foucault, so of course this doesn’t feel new or revolutionary to me. I’m glad to have read it, because it IS a big deal in the field, but I think its utility to me is primarily in the broader effects it’s had on sexuality studies and not any particular argument or theoretical tool. I don’t see myself utilizing his definitions, for example, to make my own arguments.

Times Square Red Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany

TSR/TSB is actually two separate essays on similar topics published in one binding. The first (Times Square Blue, despite the order in the title) is primarily Delany’s reminisces on the many men he met and conversations and experiences he had in the porn theaters in the Times Square neighborhood in the 1960s-1990s. He’s very clear that he does not claim to offer an all-encompassing picture— or even, necessarily, an accurate one— of the happenings in that area at that time, but he will do his best to choose anecdotes that will give the reader a comprehensive sense of his own impressions. He also takes care to note that while he is saddened by the changes to the neighborhood, he doesn’t want to— or think it’s possible to— return to those times. Instead, he wishes for institutions that can serve the same social functions in a more inclusive way— such as providing opportunities for safe, consensual heterosexual and lesbian sex. These notes surprised me.

In my readings about mid 20th century gay culture up to this point (not limited to my exam texts), I’ve gotten a very strong sense of nostalgia and longing, as if the best days of being gay are over, ruined by AIDS and gentrification. Where were the corresponding places and what were the corresponding subcultures for women? i’ve kept asking myself. Has being gay ever been fun for women, in the same way gay men seem to fondly remember the pre-AIDS sexual arena of NYC? Delany is the first writer I’ve read on this topic who is more willing to admit that while he had a lot of fun and misses that scene, it also had a lot of bad parts (crack being by far the worst), and that women of all sexualities were largely left out.

When reading a series of memories about conversations and sexual experiences had in and near porn theaters, it’s easy to imagine Delany’s life as largely centering around the pursuit and acquisition of casual sex. But he regularly reminds us: while casual sex plays a role in his ideal sexual life, and while he had meaningful friendships/acquaintanceships with many of the men he met, just because this essay is about Times Square sex cultures doesn’t mean he wasn’t doing an awful lot of other important, meaningful things at the same time. He writes with fondness without romanticization.

In “Times Square Red,” which is the more “academic” piece of the two, Delany examines the socioeconomic forces working upon Times Square and theorizes the exact nature and value of what has been lost. He presents a dichotomy of contact-relations versus networking-relations. Contact relations are inter-class, casual, and more unpredictable. Networking relations are intra-class, competitive and often formal, and highly planned. Both function as stabilizing influences on class tensions and conflicts, but contact is more socially and personally beneficial, with higher potential rewards. His main examples of networking-relations are at writing conferences, which he uses to explain that the appeal of such conferences comes in many young writers with similar needs hoping for moments that will help them breakthrough and get professional success. This is impossible precisely because there are so many people with the same needs in the same place, and very few people with the ability to grant or facilitate such desires. Additionally, contact relations make things more Pleasant, even if they don’t change underlying material conditions.

I also found his discussions of safety and small town visions of what city life is like to be very compelling. Because most visitors to Times Square are tourists, there is pressure for the neighborhood to conform itself to the tourists’ expected image. But the kinds of things that seem safe to tourists create some of the least safe conditions for city living, at least for those who aren’t familiar with the area. Safe neighborhoods have a lot of contact-relations— many different activities and businesses are all interspersed with one another. There is a lot of local traffic. The space is designed to be used by the public, instead of just to funnel the public from one private space to another. I definitely relate to his analysis on a personal level, as someone who was nervous about and intimidated by not just NYC but my own neighborhood only 2 years ago, and whose parents still have a lot of worry about “their little girl’s safety in the big city,” but now I feel very comfortable in my immediate neighborhood, even late at night, even alone.

Delany and I disagree on the political conclusions of his analysis, however. His argument, if I’m understanding it correctly, is that contact is good in part because it smooths over class relations and makes life better. He is “marxian, not Marxist” (in his words). I agree that some things can make class conflict smoother, but I take the position that while smoothness is more pleasant, it doesn’t change the material conditions, it doesn’t change capitalist oppression, and the solution is not to have more inter-class fraternizing, but to overthrow the system entirely. And then we can have mixed-use zoning. Which probably really will be more pleasant.

I also like his implicitly-proposed method of first observing changes in discourse and then searching for the material changes that they were in response to. It’s a nice blend of poststructuralist and materialist theories/approaches that I feel lets the methods live together.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Charles M. Blow

I liked this book a lot until the very end. It begins with a prologue in which Blow, in college, is driving with a gun to his mother’s house with the intention of killing his cousin, who molested him as a child. The prologue ends before he gets there. The rest of the book tells the story of his life from childhood up until that moment, ending with some reflections on his moral and existential crisis in that moment and how his identity and relationship with his bisexuality have evolved since then.

__Spoilers Below__

Blow decides in a split second not to kill his cousin, to take the exit off the highway and go back to college instead. In that moment, he realizes he can’t allow his trauma to affect his life so completely— he is an adult, and he needs to exert adult control over his emotions and not throw away his future with a murder charge.

However, the way the narrative of his decision on the highway flows into more general reflections on Blow’s subsequent emotional growth makes it sound like he had all of those revelations immediately. We don’t get to see the journey from that first moment of self-realization to where he is now— it’s all stuffed into a meditative summary that goes much, much faster than the rest of the book, which takes its time in tracing significant moments in his life. He stops showing and starts telling.

His actual words are very clear that his journey was not over in that moment and he still had decades of figuring stuff out and healing from his traumatic past left to go. However, the way the book is structured makes the arc become, to oversimplify, “Once I decided to get over my molestation, then I was happy and suddenly ok with being attracted to men.” Which is explicitly not the case, but rushing the rest of that development into only a handful of pages after two hundred-ish about how the trauma shaped his life still implicitly carries that message. This book falls into the kind of arc that other memoirs I’ve read, like those by Jacob Tobia and Juliet Jacques, actively tried to resist. The “being lgbtq is terrible, and you will be miserable, until you decide to get over it” implication is dangerous, even though I don’t think that message is his intention, and even though in this case it’s embedded in a relatively unrepresented story of a bisexual man, and a bisexual Black man at that. The only other bi man memoirs I can think of off the top of my head are white celebrity memoirs, of John Barrowman and Alan Cumming.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde

Here is what I knew about Audre Lorde prior to reading this book; famous Black feminist leftist lesbian poet librarian, affiliated with CUNY, died of breast cancer, wrote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I think that’s all. I thought I knew one of her other poems, one that my grandma had cut out of the newspaper and mailed to me when I was 14, but apparently that was actually by Elizabeth Alexander.

I had read a little of The Cancer Journals in a memoirs of illness seminar, and probably a few other poems across the course of my education. When compiling my reading list, I tried not to include two works by the same author, prioritizing reading as many voices as possible. (I broke this rule once: I’m reading both Fun Home and its sequel, Are You My Mother— I rationalize this because they are both graphic memoirs and therefore faster reads). So, I had to choose between Zami and The Cancer Journals. I chose this one. Partially because I’d read excerpts from The Cancer Journals already, and partially because I hoped Zami would include more lesbian content.

Zami covers Lorde’s life from childhood to around her late twenties/early thirties, and its focus is the many women who were significant in her life up to that point— her mother, her sisters, friends, and lovers. I felt it started slow, but once it got going, it was incredibly gripping. As I remarked to my coworkers recently, I know this is a well-established opinion, but Lorde was a badass.

It’s hard for me to separate my scholarly reading— “reading for exams, reading to understand the history and substance of the genre of queer memoir, reading for criticism” — from my own literary cravings. Like so many of the authors of the books I’ve been reading, I’m a queer woman hungry for role models through books, eager to construct my own canon of intellectual and cultural heritage. Not only in terms of sexuality, but in terms of being a woman, being an academic, living in New York. I’m sure I’d read many books set here before I moved here, but now I’m reading as a resident, trying to make sense of the place I now inhabit and to understand my place in it, and the history of those who were here before me.

The day I read the passage in which Lorde and her sisters walk from Harlem into the Heights to visit a comic book shop, I realized I had climbed that very same hill and walked that very same path earlier in the day, as I came home from running an errand for a friend and visiting another in the same building. I now live only a few blocks north from where Lorde moved as a preteen, in-between the same cross streets. Her New York and her experience of it were both so very very different from mine, yet we have walked along the same streets. As she writes about her visits to the downtown lesbian bars, I know I’ve seen the same buildings she did on my way to my own lesbian bars. Although the socioeconomic makeup and social status of the Village is far, far different now than it was in the 1950s. I treasure her descriptions of her own shitty apartments, her own nights drinking cheap wine with friends, her own commutes to and from various CUNY campuses. I was delighted to learn she lived in Stamford for a little while. A year ago I had never even heard of Stamford, and now I have a friend who regularly visits from there. I was delighted to learn she lived in Mexico City for a little while, studying sociology. I have a friend who used to be a professor of sociology there. My friend is much younger, but I like to imagine she knew some of the same people that Lorde knew there. As I read, I felt the many tiny, tenuous connections between us, and I felt happy.

I also found it valuable to read about Lorde’s experiences of race and racism, since they are somewhat unlike the descriptions of both that I’m more familiar with. I grew up in the South, and mid 20th century NYC racism didn’t always look the same as the racism we learned about in my own community. I also reflected on the differences between Lorde’s description of KyKy dykes (often Black lesbians, lesbians who rejected being either butch or femme, lesbians who were by implication probably prostitutes) with Esther Newton’s description of kiki dykes (spelling and capitalization differences aside, still lesbians who rejected butch and femme roles, but typically upper middle class lesbians who were slumming it downtown or faking attraction to women for attention), and how their respective subject positions inflect their views on the term/the people it applies to.

The parts I’m still pondering are what exactly “biomythography” means, and what, if anything, makes bonds between women special that cross-gender bonds (or same-gender bonds between other genders) cannot have. We’ve moved past political lesbianism and second wave feminism. But what is important for us 21st century women to take with us?

I love the term biomythography. I love how open and ambiguous it is. I love how it makes me think of Lorde’s Significant Women as a pantheon of goddesses who shaped her life. I love how the term implicitly says that not everything in the book might be literally true, but it is how she remembers it, how she tells the story to herself, how she wants to tell the story to her readers, how she wants to pass it along, and that that is Okay, and even Good.

I wanted it to last longer— I wanted the book to cover more of her life, more of her relationships (romantic and not). Particularly, I wanted to read about her marriage, her relationship with her husband and with motherhood and with performing heterosexuality and how they all mixed together for her. In Zami, Lorde thinks Muriel will be her life partner—I want to read about her other life partners. Wikipedia describes two different women as such, and their timelines overlap. What are those stories? Why did she cut off the writing when she did, instead of continuing? I’m left wanting to read so much more of her prose.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story, by Jacob Tobia

I don’t know what the “best” LGBTQ+ memoir I’ve read (or will read) is, but Sissy is definitely my favorite so far. Tobia is from my hometown, and only a few years older than me, so it was SUCH a delight encountering place after place that I knew, or could picture.

Their Toys R Us was my Toys R Us. Their mall is not “my” mall, because it’s on the other side of town, but it’s certainly a mall I’ve been to many times. The coffeeshop they mention writing the end of the book in? The same coffeeshop I treasure my annual visit to when my cousins and I do homework together over Thanksgiving break. Their church and relationship with church is different from mine, but their church is just down the road from the one I grew up in. They’re also definitely one of the people I would have envy-resented in high school, since they went to the special progressive charter schools that were definitely Better Than My Schools, but that I also hated because Charter Schools Are For Rich Preppy Snobs (sorry Jacob). And also Governor’s School, definitely the dream summer program for every middle class North Carolina nerd and NOT one I was accepted into. And also Duke, the school pretty universally hated by public school kids in the Triangle. (As they say, Duke is Puke, Wake is Fake, the One I Hate is NC State. You can’t go to heaven in a red canoe, ‘cause God’s favorite color is Carolina Blue!) (Except if you’re an engineer you go to State and if you’re a rebel you go to literally any other UNC school besides Chapel Hill.) (I went to UNC-Greensboro, formerly the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Once a Spartan, Always a Spartan)

As you can see, I have a lot of local feelings. And certainly have never read anything that better represents my exact brand of race-class-regional background.

I laughed and laughed at all of their Cary jokes, their NC jokes, their Duke jokes. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart when they described their campus organizing around Amendment One, our state’s anti-marriage equality amendment that passed right as I was coming out to myself. I vaguely remember hearing about the campaigns for gender neutral housing at nearby universities that they must have been involved with. I spent a little too much time on their Instagram looking for posts tagged with place I knew.

But all of this made me ask: Who is this book written for? Originally, I intended to recommend it to every nonbinary person I knew from Cary. But as I read, that seemed less and less appropriate. Some of Tobia’s goals in the book seems to be demonstrating to others 1) how deeply pervasive and painful gendering is, 2) how everyone, including cis people, has gender trauma, and 3) that “trans” is much more expansive than binary transitions to the “opposite” sex, that sometimes “passing” is both definitionally impossible and not desirable, and how gender nonconformity poses unique everyday risks and struggles.

It seems like a nonbinary person would not need to be told these things, so while many nonbinary people might enjoy reading the book and be happy to see their community represented in memoir, they are not the intended audience. (What would a nonbinary memoir written for nonbinary people look like? I don’t know.)

As I got further into the book, I thought maybe I would recommend it to my parents instead. They understand that some people use they/them pronouns and reject the gender binary, but they don’t really understand why someone would want to do that or what it really means. I thought a memoir that’s otherwise from a very similar cultural position as them could be an easy way in to greater understanding for them. Certainly, in the afterword, Tobia notes that they hope other parents of gender nonconforming children find the book helpful.

But, it’s not really written for cishet people either. Tobia specifically says they were not interested in writing a Trans 101 book, and it’s not. There’s a lot of gay dialect and colloquialisms that might be alienating or at least unfamiliar to a cishet person. They don’t define terms, or even talk about how they first learned about different identity terms— just how they came to embrace the ones they use now. There are casual references to queer history icons and queer theorists (Sedgwick, Butler) that anyone with a little WGS background will know, but anyone without it will not. Tobia doesn’t explain for those who will not. (I might still recommend it to my parents.)

In the end, I kind of ended up thinking it was written for people like me— queer people who are not themselves nonbinary, who walk and talk in similar circles but can still benefit from an inside view + greater understanding of a particular way of experiencing gender. I have already recommended the book to my sister, who also matches this description.

But that doesn’t seem quite right, either. In the footnotes, the last couple chapters, and in the interview included in the back of my paperback edition, Tobia repeatedly talks about how therapeutic the writing process was, how it brought them closer to their family members, how it helped them unpack and process different experiences and gender traumas. They say they tell all of their friends to write a memoir too, because it’s better for you than years of therapy. So maybe it’s just written for themselves. Which, if true, seems like the best intended audience for a memoir.

At the very beginning, they talk about the typical arc of a trans memoir: always knew you were different, trauma trauma trauma, serious serious serious, big coming out, difficult transition, find acceptance. They reject this arc. They want to write a funny trans memoir, they want to be honest about their many privileges while also simultaneously experiencing oppression, they want to express how coming out is a long process, and parental reactions are complex, not Yes or No, and how they haven’t “solved” the “problem” of their gender. It is ever-unfolding, ever-being-discovered, and while they have found significant professional success in the years since they’ve graduated college, and in many ways get to express themselves in comfortable ways, they still experience nagging self-doubt, confusion, pain, and loneliness. They write about how they have to exclusively try to date bi/pan guys, since just straight or just gay guys aren’t interested in their fluidity. (Which is very sad and frustrating, but also, hell yeah bi and pan guys, who don’t get acknowledged enough.) And they do do all of these things! And it’s great! But they also still kinda do follow the traditional arc— most explicitly in the front matter that introduces and frames the book.

So I’m asking myself, what genre features are “quintessential” of the “typical” trans memoir (to the extent that there are enough for anything to be typical)? Does it really matter that the arc is in some ways similar, if so many other features (like the tone, like the “conclusions,” like the emphasis on fluidity and inbetweenness, like the near-total lack of discussion on hormones/surgery/other physical changes that people may do as part of a transition process). Unlike every other memoir I’ve read so far, they also talk very little about books/other media that was important to their gender and sexuality journey. We don’t learn about how Tobia learned about the concept of being gay, or being trans, or being nonbinary. We even get a relatively small amount of discussion of their activism work (other than the run across the Brooklyn Bridge), although it’s clear that they put a lot of time into many different activist projects.

A lot of queer memoir is full of queer trauma. That’s certainly a difficulty of the genre, that the stories are both true but also send harmful messages about the queer experience. (That it’s always traumatic, or just traumatic, or you need enough trauma to be properly queer.) And this book does have some of that. But this book also has a lot of queer joy in it. Parts that are unabashedly HAPPY and made me feel happy as a reader, even though they are also totally upfront about their pain and many struggles.

I think the end message is fully hopeful: that if parents can be more affirming and encouraging of gender nonconformity in their children, that if people can get more comfortable with people who don’t easily fit into boxes, that if we can change social structures so that there is room—and welcoming room— for all genders, then life doesn’t have to be this way.