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Articles Conference Reviews |
B.37 Meditations on Queer RhetoricsB.37 Out of Line and Different: Meditations on Queer Rhetorics Bret Keeling, Northeastern University: “Consensus and Contingency: Queer(ing) Differences in the Writing Class.” Bret Keeling’s presentation focused on his first year writing class. How, he wondered, might first-year students read and write in ways that are truly transformative? How might composition teachers challenge student writers to create a more habitable world for all? There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions. Further complicating his objectives, Keeling found that when he asked students to engage with the terms gender, sex, and sexuality, they tended to reproduce normative notions of these concepts. Keeling asked students to read Mayra Santos-Febres’ novel Sirena Selena—a story of Caribbean drag queens, transsexuals, and divas. Asked to consider the intersections of sex, sexuality, and gender, students rhetorically positioned themselves between what they saw as a choice concerning sexuality and gender identity and one’s true sex, gender, or sexuality. In brief, students noted that characters in Santos Fabres’ text chose to live a particular sexuality, and had a right to that choice, but that this choice was, in fact, a better reflection of the characters’ true selves. This reliance on choice and true self, according to Keeling, reifies categorization and allows students to align themselves with an “accepting” position in relation to otherness instead of attempting to reconfigure what they know (or believe they know) about gender and sexuality. While the “live and let live” attitude is in some ways commendable, such a frame does not challenge how we come to knowledge in our society. In very concrete ways, such a framework begs the question of action: while many might say that people are free to live their lives however they want, voting patterns based on this notion of “choice” can harm actual people making these “choices.” Kathryn Dunlap, University of Central Florida: “Engaging Bitextuality: Compositing Identity, a Bisexual Aesthetic and the Meditation of Gender.” In her presentation, Kathryn Dunlap investigated digital cross-dressing and the possibilities of bisexuality in the virtual world Second Life. Using an excellent Prezi presentation, Dunlap outlined the multiple possibilities for sexual encounters within this virtual world. Because players’ “real world” gender identities are not revealed, and because a participant can choose to play the game as a male- or a female-identified character, any romantic act between “gender swap” avatars (men who are playing the game as female characters, for example) opens up a variety of sexual possibilities. Paying attention to these aesthetics of identity makes clearer how digital cross-dressing can be both normative and transgressive. Dunlap also noted how bisexuality as a trope can itself be problematic. Bisexuality tends to reference past performance and future possible performance, but not the here and now. Monosexual interest therefore erases bisexuality as the sexuality of the present: it usurps the sexuality that precedes it and assumes that future sexuality is based on assumptions about the present. Such assumptions further alienate bisexuality, marginalizing it in relation to both hetero- and homosexuality. Second Life provides a more complex web of sexual interaction, making this online space queer along axes we currently do not yet recognize in the “real” world. |