Queer Continuum

(font:"Dancing Script")[**Queer Continuum**] [[<img id="seduce" src="https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4762/28005800319_00499e1508_z.jpg">|seduce]] [[<img id="dyke" src= "https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4699/28005800099_e432e3807f_z.jpg">|dyke preserve]] [[<img id="fuckyou" src="https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4609/28005800489_96637a7e68_z.jpg"|Fuck You]] [[<img id="clothes" src= "https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4675/28005800169_154f21a1f1_z.jpg"|Clothes]] [[<img id="bodies" src="https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4705/28005800249_a8cdff92a8_z.jpg"|Beginnings]] [[<img id="margins" src="https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4723/28005800369_c549666533_z.jpg"|Margins]] [[<img id="lines" src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/901/27559363148_fdf37b36fd_b.jpg"|Lines]] [[<img id="candle" src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/873/39622570420_9a16e608fa_b.jpg"|Candle]] [[<img id="queercomposing" src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/795/39622576280_653753b707_b.jpg"|QueerComposing]]

=><= (font:"Dancing Script")[#**Fuck the Death Drive**] <== <iframe id="linesvid" width="728" height="409.5" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GUR0PsNxj-Y??rel=0&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe> (font:"Dosis")[ In No Future, Lee Edelman contends that queers should resist society's obsession with children; resisting this temptation is to lean into what he calls the queer death drive. In essence, heteronormative obsession with producing children leaves no room for queer bodies whose "same sex" pairings leave out the possibility for childbearing. Instead, Edelman makes the suggestion that queers, instead of representing the possibility of children ("the future"),] (font:"Special Elite")[[[ queers represent the negative, the opposite of the future, nothingness.|Graves]]] (font:"Dosis")[He writes, "Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it (4). Though the embrace of the negative, the nothingness, the opposite of life (death) "promises absolutely nothing" (5), Edelman contends that there is jouissance in the death drive.] (font:"Dosis")[ I am troubled by this contention to lean into negative space, to quit seeking](font:"Special Elite")[[[ queer futurity.|Beginnings]]](font:"Dosis")[ Conversely, and partially in response, José Esteban Muñoz argues for the potentiality of a queer utopia. He writes, "Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that] (font:"Special Elite")[[[propels us onward,|Rows]]] (font:"Dosis")[beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present" (1). Queerness does not yet exist, Muñoz contends; instead it is becoming. The future belongs to queer. This message of queer futurity and possibility gives me hope; this message drives my call to compose queerly, to resist death through resisting the negative space created by conclusion, the composition death drive. Instead, I want to call for a seeking, dreaming, longing and reaching in our queer work. Life is in this meditation of] (font:"Special Elite") [[[possibility.|QueerComposing]]]

=><= (font:"Dancing Script")[#**Terrific, Radiant, Humble**] <== (font:"Dosis")[In "Cultivating the Scavenger," Stacy Waite writes, I advocate for queer methodologies because I am queer, because queer teenagers all over the world are killing themselves at horrifying rates, because if oppression is really going to change, it’s our civic duty to] (font:"Special Elite") [[[think in queerer ways|dyke preserve]]] (font:"Dosis")[to come up with] (font:"Special Elite")[[[queer kinds of knowledge making|QueerComposing]]] (font:"Dosis")[so that we might know truths that are non-normative, and contradictory,and strange. (64).] [[<svg height="256px" id="Layer_11" style="enable-background:new 0 0 512 512;" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 512 512" width="256px" xml:space="preserve" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><polygon points="160,128.4 192.3,96 352,256 352,256 352,256 192.3,416 160,383.6 287.3,256 "/></svg>|seduce]] <iframe id="candlevid" width="728" height="409.5" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qHHJwX12Rqs?rel=0&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe> [[<svg height="256px" id="Layer_12" style="enable-background:new 0 0 512 512;" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 512 512" width="256px" xml:space="preserve" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><polygon points="160,128.4 192.3,96 352,256 352,256 352,256 192.3,416 160,383.6 287.3,256 "/></svg>|Start]] (font:"Dosis")[Like Waite, I want to spend my career thinking in](font:"Special Elite")[[[ queerer ways,|Bodies]]] (font:"Dosis")[encouraging my colleagues to think in queerer ways, teaching my students to think in queerer ways. Developing and foregrounding the] (font:"Special Elite")[[[queer imagination|Margins]]] (font:"Dosis")[is one way to counteract the normative structures in place that delegitimize and erase queer ways of knowing. For instance, Waite recalls a time in the second grade in which, as an answer to her teacher's question, "what saved Wilbur from being killed in Charlotte's Web?," Waite responded "writing" instead of "Charlotte." "I remember she said my answer was 'kind of out there'"(65), Waite writes. Indeed, how many of us have been told our work, our desires, our thoughts, our hopes and dreams, were 'out there?' How many times can we hear it before we grow to weary to go on? In what ways can writing] (font:"Special Elite")[[[save us,|Rows]]](font:"Dosis")[ as it did for Wilbur?]

=><= (font:"Dancing Script")[#**Tradition**] <== (font:"Dosis")[To move beyond the boundaries of linearity may mean not just to know the rules and ignore them, but rather to acknowledge that we make the] (font:"Special Elite")[[["rules" |Rows]]](font:"Dosis")[in the first place, and every time we sit down to design something, each creation also is affording a new paradigm of thought. Julie Lindquist writes "how the work of research and scholarship happens depends not only on the pull of epistemological traditions . . . but also on the social and material forces that determine how the labor of knowledge production is defined, rewarded, and consumed" (663). Epistemological traditions work recursively: traditions are built by people who believe in a specific tradition.] <iframe id="composingvid" width="946" height="532.35" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1fl_LMjYKHw?rel=0&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe> (font:"Dosis")[While this recursive tradition-building may sometimes feel] (font:"Special Elite")[[[hopeless,|Beginnings]]] (font:"Dosis")[I also believe that what this means for queer composers is that we can build new traditions and valuations of queer composing—we can change the rules because we make the rules.]

(font:"Special Elite")[##Error 404[[^^(purposely)^^|Start]]Not Found]

(font:"Dosis")[At the Cultural Rhetorics Conference in 2016, I sat in on a panel on queer mentorship. A director of a writing center at a women's college told us about her writing center as a queer space. She had multiple students who identified as LGBT and she worked hard to cultivate a welcoming space for them. Still, at one point, as she discussed her students' struggles with self harm and thoughts of suicide, she tearfully asked the group of us:] (font:"Special Elite")[[["My queer students are literally dying. What can I do?"|Graves]]](font:"Dosis")[ We remained silent, blinking at the enormity of the question.] <iframe id="dyingvid" width="728" height="409.5" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Do1WQ9VroWI?rel=0&autoplay=1;loop=1&" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe> [[<svg height="256px" id="Layer_11" style="enable-background:new 0 0 512 512;" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 512 512" width="256px" xml:space="preserve" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><polygon points="160,128.4 192.3,96 352,256 352,256 352,256 192.3,416 160,383.6 287.3,256 "/></svg>|Fuck You]] [[<svg height="256px" id="Layer_12" style="enable-background:new 0 0 512 512;" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 512 512" width="256px" xml:space="preserve" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><polygon points="160,128.4 192.3,96 352,256 352,256 352,256 192.3,416 160,383.6 287.3,256 "/></svg>|NotFound]] (font:"Dosis")[How many of us had asked ourselves this? How many had asked our mentors? Probably everyone in the room. We went on to share some stories of possibility and hope, but the questions stayed with me long after the session. It still sticks with me.] (font:"Special Elite")[[[I want to know what I can do|QueerComposing]]] (font:"Dosis")[as a scholar, a student, a teacher, a practitioner and a mentor to](font:"Special Elite")[[[ defy the deaths|Candle]]](font:"Dosis")[ of my queer siblings, friends, mentors, teachers, and students. Because it is what I am perhaps best at and what I care about most,] (font:"Special Elite")[[[I want to think about how queer work in writing and rhetoric especially can defy death.|Lines]]]

[[<svg id="whitelayer3" width="512" height="512" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> <polygon fill="#ffffff" id="svg_1" points="160,115.4 180.7,96 352,256 180.7,416 160,396.7 310.5,256"/></svg>|NotFound]] <iframe id="rowsvid" width="1120" height="630" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ANW22pFCdOo?rel=0&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

=><= (font:"Dancing Script")[##**Take it to the Grave**] <== (font:"Dosis")[Just as Wysocki likens rows of text to rows of groceries or desks, I think about the rows and rows of gravestones in a graveyard:] (font:"Special Elite") [[[we live and die by (hetero)normativity.|Rows]]] [[<img id="graveyard" src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/979/41115937024_e9dc88608a_b.jpg">|Rows]] (font:"Dosis")[One way to avoid that kind of slow, organized death is to](font:"Special Elite") [[[ move beyond the boundaries.|Beginnings]]](font:"Dosis")[ I mean this both figuratively and literally. Our rows and rows of alphabetic texts are products of Western normative thought, and each neatly concluded seminar paper equates to a little death: a finished product. To avoid these little deaths is to embrace the] (font:"Special Elite") [[[death-defying queer possibilities|Candle]]] (font:"Dosis")[of multimodal composing. A resistance to neat death-like conclusions is a figurative act of defying death. But, at its most literal, an embrace of queer multimodal composing offers up a space in which queer ways of knowing are valued, and an embrace of queer ways of knowing has the potential] (font:"Special Elite") [[[to save queer lives.|Lines]]]

Double-click this passage to edit it.