Blogging Pedagogy - LGBTQ

Self Disclosure in the Classroom

Laura Wallace — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:10:11 +0000

Author:

Laura Wallace

Image Credit:

bighappyfunhouse.com

Full disclosure: this blog post may include some self-disclosure.

Although my Rhetoric 309K course, Rhetoric of Confession, obviously revolved around public self-disclosures, I did not require any public self-disclosures of my students beyond whatever they chose to reveal in their Learning Record self-assessments and self-designed assignments. Nevertheless, when I tell people about the course, usually the first thing they want to know is whether any students confessed "anything weird." They seem to assume, perhaps from reading my academic work and my Tumblr, that my classroom would be a kind of group therapy session with feelings flying and uncomfortable revelations spilling out all over the place. In actuality, only a few students ever made their own confessions, and most of those happened on paper, only seen by myself and a few classmates. I told my Confession students almost nothing about myself.

Returning to the literature classroom this fall after two years of rhetoric, I was assigned to teach E314V: Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture. Talking to professors and other graduate students who have taught identity-based courses, I heard over and over again the idea that "it's all about the text"--that we should discourage discussion of personal experience because student discussions should be grounded in the assigned texts. Focusing on the text is important for a number of reasons, but for me, the most important may be that while the text's accessibility may vary from reader to reader, if everyone in the room has read the same text, it's the object from which the discussion springs (I'll save the literary theory for another day). The text is the closest thing we have to common ground in the literature classroom. I don't want personal experience to be a bar to discussing it, nor do I want anyone to feel put on the spot because of personal experience they do or do not have. We can all read the texts and interpret them: let's start there. This is what I told my students on the first day.

I also told them I would never ask them to declare any identity labels for themselves, and that anyone in the class could be gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or..?, anyone could be trans or cis, etc. etc. and obviously those identities inform our readings, but such disclosures are not required.

Then I told them I was going to break my own rule for two minutes. I acknowledged that, in the LGBTQ studies classroom (and other identity-based classrooms), instructors often don't explicitly identify themselves or their investments, often because they assume students will read them in certain ways. However some things aren't visible and sometimes it feels important to use our words. So I used mine, and came out as bisexual. Then I segued into some jokes and I also told them a bit about my academic work.

When I decided to come out to my students I thought I was doing it for my own comfort. At DWRL orientation, I told a friend/colleague I was planning to do it and she encouraged me, pointing out that probably most of my students have never heard someone in authority come out as bi and that it would mean something if I did. Which made it not (just) about my own comfort or credibility, but about setting a tone and creating a space. Which seems to have worked.

Although quite probably they would have anyway, several students came out in funny ways, in their info sheets on the first day, like the student who wrote "I'm also Jewish :)" or the one who just wrote, in the section where I ask if there's anything else I should know, "LGBT" with an arrow pointing to the G. A few students directly mentioned my statements, stating that they were coming out to me because I had come out to them.

Personal experience/identity has also come up in classroom discussions, with mixed results. A few examples: a student came out as straight in order to excuse her own ignorance of queer politics (and plead for enlightenment). Another student who rarely spoke in class wrote an impassioned blog post about Cherríe Moraga and the student's own experience of being Mexican American, which led her to share in class an anecdote about a friend who she believes is in the closet. Other students had opinions about this (why did she assume he was gay? because he was effeminate? etc.), which led to an interesting discussion about visibility and safety, which led us directly back to Moraga's essay, “La Güera,” which itself is a work of theory that could also be described as confessional. While at times personal anecdotes derail our conversations, and force me to ask the class, "what does this have to do with the reading?," for the most part, I've found that judicious self-disclosures by both instructor and students have made our discussions richer, helping us recognize each other as complex humans and reminding us of why we are in this classroom in the first place.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

Author:

Kevin Bourque

Image Credit:

Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder