Reviews

Roundtable Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics. Edited by William J. Spurlin. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

Queering Our Classrooms Nikolai Endres

Let me start with three assumptions about a book with the title Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics, published by the National Council of Teachers of English: (1) Despite a theoretical framework, it focuses on pedagogy, specific strategies that help us teach, not preach. (2) It is reasonably free of the academic jargon that continues to plague our field and that is accessible to no one except ivory-tower professors. (3) It offers new, significant, and original insights. Because this is a review for Pedagogy, I will focus on essays that are particularly sound or troubling in terms of their pedagogical approach. In the introduction, William Spurlin (xvi) poses the pregnant question of whether the contemporary cultural debates have really unsettled our pedagogies. Here is his answer: Despite innovative work in lesbian and gay studies and academic queer theory, much scholarship in English and language arts pedagogy organized around the rubric of cultural difference has woefully undertheorized same-sex desire as a viable

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Volume 5, Number 1, © 2005 Duke University Press 1 31

position from which to speak, read, write, and locate oneself in the world. Likewise, it has failed to ask the ways in which heterosexism and homophobia also shape the world of hegemonic power and the extent to which other vectors of domination, as well as new possibilities for cultural production, are obscured in the absence of same-sex desire as a significant axis of pedagogical inquiry.

Convoluted academic jargon aside, this is a rather dire statement; in all fairness, it is also five years old. Many universities now have majors or minors in sexuality studies, and the subject is also making strides in schools across the country. Coupled with this march toward diversity—and there Spurlin is certainly right—is the current backlash against difference and change. Again, the book came out in 2000, so one could couple significant legal advances, including recent Supreme Court decisions (on the federal level and in Massachusetts), with several states frantically enacting antigay marriage legislation; the Episcopal Church’s vote to ordain an openly gay bishop, with intense resistance and a looming schism; or San Francisco’s brave step to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, with certain politicians (including the current president) lobbying to pass a constitutional amendment that limits marriage to a man and a woman. (As I wrote this piece, more and more cities and counties wedded gay couples nearly every day.) And, of course, the virulent polemic against political correctness continues its campaign. The collection seeks to address a range of disciplines: composition, literature, cultural studies, fi lm, education, children’s and young adult texts, and language arts. In terms of audience, the contributors cast their net wide, addressing elementary, secondary, and college-level English teachers. The authors themselves come from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and they address most of the English-speaking (postcolonial) world. Part 1 is titled “Positions.” Here Spurlin alerts the reader to a formidable challenge: “Some of the essays in this section appear to be theoretically complex, but finding a viable position from which to speak and be heard as queer in the classroom is also about finding a language” (xxii). Yes, but we teachers are also about finding an answer, r finding instructional materials and educational equipment. In “Cruising the Libraries,” Lee Lynch presents a moving memory of her quest to come to grips with her sexuality through literary models (for example, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness). Since the piece is rather personal, it offers little help in teaching, but it could be assigned for group presentations. I would have also complemented this chapter with a historical 1 32

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account of how exciting the reading of homoerotic texts (especially Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus) was for many gay men in the nineteenth century: Lord Byron, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Douglas, Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, Lytton Strachey, or E. M. Forster. Edward J. Ingebretsen, S.J., in “When the Cave Is a Closet: Pedagogies of the (Re)Pressed,” introduces himself in several roles: instructor (at a religious school), Catholic, gay, and ordained priest. He teaches a course at Georgetown University called Unspeakable Lives: Gay and Lesbian Narrative. The exigency of his role-plays leads to a startling insight: “In the densely written palimpsest of the classroom, the lesbian or gay teacher easily becomes entangled in a grammar of the pornographic. That is, the teacher performs a skin dance, a public baring of his or her emotional body that is generally not permitted under other conditions” (17). Frankly, I’ve never thought of myself (teacher, gay, brought up Catholic, good looking) as performing such a dance—or maybe my dance card is just too full. Ingebretsen raises other red flags. At the height of his career, “now I see education to be all aboutt closets” (31). How do dangling participles, the German umlaut, the French passé simple, or Latin supines open the door to the closet? Moreover, Ingebretsen seems overly insensitive to one student who, in response to the Miramax release Priest, pointed out to him (with “something of a smile,” he opines): “Father, there is a fi lm out about you,” a comment he dismisses as “aggressively phobic” and “unclear” in terms of “cinematic logic” (29–30). Could the student not simply have meant well? Is everythingg a skeleton in the closet? More helpful is a listing of constraints imposed on the students who decided to sign up for his class: Should the words “gay” and “lesbian” appear on their transcripts? How can they avoid stigmatization by other students for taking the course? Are they supposed to divulge the names of the other students in the class? These are all great questions; unfortunately, the author refuses to tell us how he negotiated them. In “Blame It on the Weatherman: Popular Culture and Pedagogical Praxis in the Lesbian and Gay Studies Classroom,” Jay Kent Lorenz dismisses the academic jargon in queer theory (with special emphasis on Eve Sedgwick). His role is to disturb complacency and intimidation, “to empower students with the tools of resistant reading, that is, to help them achieve cultural literacy by recognizing, and perhaps sabotaging, the representational mirror of the surrounding heterosexual imperative” (39). Because of the nature of the class he is teaching (gay and lesbian fi lm), he prefers student journals (less anxiety ridden) to formal paper writing. Soon enough, though, he is facing problems: Should he simply check that journals were Endres Queering our Classrooms

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being maintained? Should letter grades be assigned? If he collected and read the journals, would the students be more reticent in content and less courageous in exposition? Too, revolutionary as it was, the course was replicating traditional power structures by excluding non–Anglo Saxon movies. Lorenz rectified this oversight by adding to the syllabus Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez-Leal’s Mauvaise conduite, Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives, Black Brit Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, and the fi lms The Wedding Banquet and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. Susan Talburt’s “On Not Coming Out; or, Reimagining Limits” draws our attention to a dilemma: should gay and lesbian teachers of queer literature come out in the classroom, “to combat heterosexism and homophobia, to offer gay and lesbian students role models, and to counter institutionalized silencing of gays and lesbians” (55)? Put like this, coming out seems a good idea, but “the logic of taking a gay or lesbian subject position is linked to oppositional pedagogies that would challenge ideologies of the instructor as universal bearer of truth, knowledge as disinterested, and pedagogy as properly detached from political concerns” (55). She invents Olivia Moran, a white lesbian scholar of national renown who wears many hats, playing out a possible scenario, a second-best version, so to speak. In brief, Olivia is not a “text” in her class but performs the queer slogan “we are everywhere.” Jody Norton, in “(Trans)Gendering English Studies,” reviews theorists, from Aristotle (and earlier) onward to Lacan and Thomas Laqueur, who defined woman as “non-man.” Needless to say, such a classification is reductive. To advance a better understanding of transgendered people, Norton suggests (1) reading transgendered texts (for instance, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure, and Richard McCann’s “My Mother’s Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame”), (2) discussing transgendered persons who struggle for their gender identity because they resist cultural norms, and (3) including literature written by transgendered people. Norton even suggests possible fi lm screenings: Boys Don’t Cry, The Brandon Teena Story, and Ma vie en rose. The essay ends on a personal note, as Norton reveals who he/she is: “a male-to-female transgender—one who identifies more closely with ‘women’ than with ‘men,’ but is neither” (95). This sentence—hyphenated, dashed, positioned with quotation marks, italicized—formidably embodies the struggle ahead. Starting off part 2, “Pedagogies,” Lillian Faderman’s “The Uses of History” is only three pages long and thus of little help. Was it included to enhance the volume’s clout with an essay by one of the foremost scholars in 1 34

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the field? At least she gives examples of a usable past for the gay and lesbian classroom. Claudia Mitchell’s essay, “ ‘What’s Out There?’ Gay and Lesbian Literature for Children and Young Adults,” surveys texts and comments on the role of the teacher (and his or her sexuality). The first section, “Gay and Lesbian Literature for Young Children,” deals with the availability of books for young readers (such as Rosamund Elwin and Michele Paule’s Asha’s Mums, Leslea Newman’s Saturday Is Pattyday and Gloria Goes to Gay Pride, Michael Willhoite’s Uncle What-Is-It Is Coming to Visit, and Marion Dane Bauer’s anthology Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence) and raises provocative questions: How should a teacher react to a student with two daddies? How do we avoid the awkwardness of honoring same-sex parents on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day? What is the effect on students whose lesbian parents break up? The second section, “Gay and Lesbian Themes as Social Change in Young Adult Literature,” offers points of entry for class discussion: “How, for example, might representations of otherness be explored? Where does the idea of voice figure into explorations of the Other? What do certain conflicts in these texts, such as the tensions between progressive and more conservative ways of thinking, contribute to an understanding of the Other?” (120). This is an exemplary essay: short on meaningless lingo, long on specific examples. In “Creating a Place for Lesbian and Gay Readings in Secondary English Classrooms,” Jim Reese plunges into a hotly contested arena: teaching the topic of homosexuality to teenagers, which is often equated with making them gay. In high schools, “institutionalized homophobia usually goes unchallenged” (132). Trained in reader-response theory, Reese wonders: “Don’t lesbian and gay readers locate themselves in a text just as other groups of readers do? . . . When confronted with heterosexist or homophobic bias in the text and subsequently in class discussions, do lesbian and gay adolescents, in order to protect themselves, efface their own identity for the sake of fitting in with ‘accepted’ or ‘traditional’ interpretations which validate those biases?” (134). He uses an unlikely source in his classroom: Strictly Ballroom (1992), the Australian movie by Baz Luhrmann, already a gay cult classic and prime example of camp (like Muriel’s Weddingg and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). After a brief plot summary, Reese crafts a gay reading, but he could have given a more classroom-oriented vantage point, including discussion questions, study guides, fi lm exercises, and writing strategies.

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Mario DiGangi’s “Shakespeare’s Sexuality: Who Needs It?” turns to the Bard, whom traditional scholars are loath to associate with homosexuality. DiGangi reflects a more general trend, most conspicuous at the annual Modern Language Association conventions, of replacing canonical considerations with the “trendy,” exploring the appropriations, celebratory and condemning, of Shakespeare’s sexuality through the ages. In “Coming Out and Creating Queer Awareness in the Classroom: An Approach from the U.S.-Mexican Border,” tatiana de la tierra has a twopronged goal: to help our students become better writers and to enhance their critical thinking skills. For example, she uses Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” to discuss thesis statements; to demonstrate the difference between expressive, informative, and persuasive texts, she refers to Esmeralda Santiago’s “How to Eat a Guava”; a few other essays and stories serve as springboards for the relationship between culture and language. She then describes, in great detail, how in her first semester, on National Coming Out Day, she came out to her students, crucially as a person, not as an agenda or token bearer. She began with a free-writing exercise on what the words gay and lesbian meant to the class, followed by questions on whether the students knew gay and lesbian people in their lives. She then invited students to ask lesbian-related questions. Subsequently, she presented facts, descriptions, classifications, and examples of lesbian life (as pointers for effective introductions for papers). After all that, she returned to her initial exercise about brainstorming about the terms gay and lesbian, with dramatically different results. Her crowning achievement was to sing “Amazon ABC,” a lesbian pride song. In a private evaluation distributed at the end of the year, the comments were overwhelmingly positive. Again, here is a model essay. However, it would be interesting to hear a similar account by a gay teacher, since, by many accounts, male homosexuality is still perceived as more threatening than lesbianism. Karen Lee Osborne, “ ‘Swimming Upstream’: Recovering the Lesbian in Native American Literature,” uses Beth Brant’s stories “Swimming Upstream” in Food and Spirits and “A Long Story” in Mohawk Trail. Osborne proffers helpful strategies to tackle the double taboo of homosexual Native Americans. The two stories “decenter subjectivity, challenge overdetermined stereotypes, and radically revise the narrative expectations of the reader” (207–8). Multicultural pedagogy needs to avoid the danger of reducing difference toward a mistaken idea of universality; instead, it needs to consider identities as transparent, multivoiced, fluid, different. Part 3, “The Politics of Culture,” addresses sex and gender, hate 1 36

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speech, postapartheid politics in South Africa, postcolonial studies and nationalism in India, and the AIDS pandemic. Debbie Epstein, in “Reading Gender, Reading Sexualities: Children and the Negotiation of Meaning in ‘Alternative’ Texts,” discusses a research project in a primary school near London to study sex and gender dynamics among nine- and ten-year-olds. The children, obviously not yet sexually active, had an amazing grasp of gender through (1) imagined future roles as mothers, (2) traditional games and rhymes, often based on television scenarios, (3) running and catching as arenas of sexualized chasing, (4) sexual/sexist harassment between boys and girls, (5) early forays into the world of dating and romance, and (6) gossip. In the wake of group work (a format, as Epstein stresses, in which students are less inhibited than when they face the entire class) on “facts” about boys and girls and while talking with his students about these books, the teacher came out, which proved a nonissue, an “open secret,” and did not even spread around the school. At the same time, “coming out to the class, in a context in which the very term ‘family’ was under consideration, constituted a radical challenge to these children” (231). Richard E. Miller’s “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone: Assessing Homophobic Student Writing” outlines several alternatives to how we should react to a homophobic student paper: dismiss it as a student’s personal opinion, flunk it for political incorrectness, or simply silently disregard it. The author encourages us to consider the cultural forces at work that obviously contribute to students’ perception that gay bashing is right. A personal example: In my writing classes, to introduce students to Aristotle’s types of evidence, I assign controversial issues, including homosexuality and gay marriage. In groups, the students are asked to find one example for each type of evidence, both for and against the issue (for a total of six). When the groups present to the class, it soon becomes clear that ethos (“The Bible says homosexuality is wrong,” “God hates fags”) and pathos (“All homosexuals are pedophiles,” “Gays are sick”) utterly fail to convince in an academic argument. Or, when addressing political correctness, I encourage the class to collect un-PC terms (“faggot,” “dyke,” “homos”), speak out the unspeakable, and explain why and when they are offensive. (“Faggot,” when used by a gay person for a friend, for example, can be a term of endearment.) The specific paper Miller cites, “Queers, Bums, and Magic,” which was widely disseminated at conferences including the Modern Language Association and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, narrated a field trip to “San Fagcisco.” Miller raises a pressing concern: “Why is it that, at a time when almost all of the current major theories on the Endres Queering our Classrooms

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rise celebrate partial readings, multiple subjectivities, marginalized positions, and subjugated knowledges, nearly all student essays remain essentially illegible, offered forth more often than not as the space in which error exercises its full reign, or, as here, the site where some untutored evil shows its face” (240). He goes beyond the suggestion to situate the essay in relation to legal definitions of hate speech and looks at the bigger picture, which involves “articulating, investigating, and questioning the affi liated cultural forces that underwrite the ways of thinking that find expression in this student’s essay—a classroom, in short, that studies the forces that make such thoughts not only permissible but prevalent” (243). In “Queer Pedagogy and Social Change: Teaching and Lesbian Identity in South Africa,” Ann Smith recollects how in 1995, parallel to the emergence of the “new” South Africa, the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg implemented a revolutionary course, The Lesbian in Literature. Smith puts the course in the context of the intense controversy over the constitution’s Equality Clause—“No person shall be unfairly discriminated against on the grounds of race, gender, sex, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth or marital status” (256)—which was not signed into law until May 1996. She was thus fighting two battles, one pedagogic/literary, the other political, as both teacher and activist. But she was making history in another way, too. Her course took advantage of student-centered learning rather than “ ‘transmission-style’ teaching, in which the dominant discussion practices are nonegalitarian and often adversarial” (264), a first in her department. In both form and content, her class thus proved outstanding. Ruth Vanita sounds an alarming note in “The Straight Path to Postcolonial Salvation: Heterosexism and the Teaching of English in India”: “Of all the schools of critical theory that have developed in academic studies in the West over the last few decades, postcolonial studies is the one that has been most eagerly embraced in the Indian academy and lesbian and gay studies the one most systematically avoided” (272). Vanita then turns to two writers. Shobba De has published several novels: Socialite Evenings, Starry Nights, and Strange Obsession, all of which deal with the glamorous rich and their sexual escapades. (“Trashy,” one would say.) Lesbians appear everywhere in her fiction, but their depiction is blatantly homophobic, heterosexist, stereotyped, even “bestial,” yet De is popular and canonical. Suniti Namjoshi, on the other hand, has published more sophisticated and open texts and adheres to “powerful traditions in Indian literatures of using animals as sites for ungendering and for the development of alternative emotional engage1 38

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ments and eroticisms . . . [and] traditions in English literature of animals as stand-ins for the homosexual beloved and for the hunted, persecuted, but innocent woman or homosexual” (277). But Namjoshi has been ignored by the Indian academy. To initiate a revision of the canon and its politics, Vanita and Saleem Kidawi have published an anthology: Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. Marcia Blumberg’s “Rememorating: Quilt Readings” reads the AIDS quilt and examines agendas, approaches, positions, and responses to the quilt display performed on October 11–13, 1996, in Washington, DC. She is interested in how statistics on numbers of deaths can be rendered metaphorically imaginable yet still be finally inexplicable and studies how we “teach” the quilt, a textile text, which demands “an emphasis on political connections of the performance of art—the inextricability of politics in language, iconography, and culture. The structure of these elements is never immutable but rather is contingent upon the spatio-temporal context, the perspective and positioning of the reader/spectator, and the differing sites of struggle” (304). This is a somewhat uneven collection, but overall quite positive. Theory is easy to come by, but I find most helpful the essays that apply the theory, offer detailed explanations, and provide specific teaching strategies. As a teacher rather than a scholar/theorist, I benefited most from the chapters by Mitchell, tierra, Epstein, and Miller and was particularly disappointed by Ingebretsen’s essay; Faderman’s and DiGangi’s works are interesting but hardly original; the pieces by Lorenz, Smith, and Vanita fit in well with our increasingly global society. Based on the three assumptions I outlined above, I thus give Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics a C+ for its focus on pedagogy, a B– for accessibility, and a B+ for originality.

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