Stories as Movable Definitions: Narrating Queer Pedagogies

By the risks of its writing, personal criticism embodies a pact . . . binding writer to reader in the of self-truth, that what is at stake matters also to others: somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is the belief that the writing is worth the risk. In this sense, by turning its authorial voice into spectacle, personal writing theorizes the stakes of its own performance . . . Personal writing opens an inquiry on the cost of writing - critical writing or Theory - and its effects. From Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts by Nancy K Miller Since this year's CCCC conference, where an earlier version of the following essay appeared, have been thinking very much about Miller's notion of fabulation raised in the epigraph to this piece - -fabulation being a kind of invention of tales, the creation of or a kind of wakeful dreaming. And at first, it's difficult to swallow - to think of myself as involved in a constant fantastic invention of myself of my students, of the classes teach. my responsibility to my students quite seriously. care very deeply about why and how teachers represent students. care about the authorial respect and credit given to their writing and care about their privacy. think of this piece (and of my work as a whole as try to represent and learn from my students thinking and writing) both as an inquiry into the intricacies or problems of this fabulation and as opening up of deepening ethical possibilities for this of self-truth or of other-truth. After all, Judith Butler, who is a touchstone for much of my thinking about identity and pedagogy not only points to the importance of these possibilities. She aho points in the direction of fantasy as possibility. She writes: Fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable (28). Perhaps narrative and the telling of the stories of classrooms is one significant way to think through what this kind of fantasy and imagination has to offer composition pedagogies. We can represent and invent our students and our teaching. We can become better teachers and writers in the process - that is, assuming we can accept and honor the both-at-once-ness always looming in the distance of that project. We represent and misrepresent, read and mis-read, speak and mis-speak. To begin always with having already come to terms with these failures is to do justice to the complicated, reflexive and troubling project of narration - narration that conjures up a student who learns, whether that student is a student in my class, or whether myself am the student. Narrative Attempt One had asked my students to read a chapter from Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. Danielle says Butler is impossible. Maria jokes: doesn't she have anything better to do than be completely impenetrable? Johnnie says: This woman does talk in circles, I'll give 'em that. fear this is the start of the coup - the moment where my students forge an everstrengthening uprising to overthrow the queer text they have been given. And by extension they seem to threaten to overthrow me, their queer teacher, and also to leave little room for the possibility of value in queer and difficult texts. feel simultaneously angry and guilty. But need to hurry, to decide what approach to take. There is, of course, the eat your vegetables, they good for you which have to say usually ends with my students rightfully feeding my metaphorical vegetables to the metaphorical dog. There is the therapeutic approach; this is where say are you frustrated by this text? and perhaps make the ever-predictable move of take us to a place in the chapter you found so difficult or frustrating to understand. There also the I hate 'the man' too approach. In this approach, validate their revolution. …