Moving across Differences

Front matter

HOW STUDENTS ENGAGE LGBTQ+ THEM | oe

IN A HIGH SCHOOL LITERATURE CLASS ai SO oa Lf sa

MOLLIE V. BLAC

Index

Figure 1

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

List of Illustrations

Mac's illustration of Felix in Brezenoff’s (2011) Brooklyn, Burning 63

Chart created in the fall 2015 class to characterize traits typically associated with men and women 76

Units and related reading and writing assignments for the spring 2015 course 169

Units and related reading and writing assignments for the fall 2015 course 172

Units and related reading and writing assignments for the spring 2016 course 174

Acknowledgments

I am profoundly grateful for and deeply indebted to so many who have supported me, my work, and my family during the years and across the spaces in which this book came to fruition. I strive to acknowledge you here, knowing I will miss some of you and feeling sorry for that already.

I wish I could name those of you at the school. I can’t. I wont. But still, I offer my gratitude. Thank you to the administrators who trusted me, welcomed me to your school, and accommodated me in your schedule so I could be there every morning. Thank you and apologies to the administrative assistants who dealt with my contextual ignorance. Thank you to the teachers who generously shared your classrooms during your planning periods and patiently waited for me to pack up my recording equipment as your second period students came into your room. You could not have been kinder. There were other teachers around the school who just made me feel welcome by making space for me to interview students, inviting me to lunch, talking to me at extracurricular events, asking me about my project, telling me about their classes, and connecting about shared students. Thank you for making me feel like a part of the school. Of course, I will never be able to convey my gratitude adequately to the students who chose to take the classes we shared, who showed up, day after day, early morning after early morning, as seniors (mostly), even during spring break (I’m talking to that spring 2015 group here). I mean you showed up in all of the ways, all of you, and I count myself lucky. Lucky to have gotten to share the time and space with you, to have had the chance to get to know you, to have taught you and to have learned from you. Lucky, lucky me. Truly. Thank you. I offer unique gratitude to those of you who have stayed in touch and even read drafts of this work, particularly those I call Khalil, Mac, Parker, and Simon. Your insights continue to amaze me.

xi xii | Acknowledgments

Thank you, Rebecca Colesworthy, my editor at SUNY Press, and the anonymous reviewers, for seeing the value in this project and challenging and supporting me as I worked to make it come to the fore.

Thank you for the initial institutional support from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Spencer Foundation, the Ohio State University (OSU), and the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). With respect to NCTE, the funding through the Conference on English Education (CEE), before it was English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), was the first material support I received for this project. I will always appreciate Louann Reid coming up to me and saying, “It really is a good project” I needed those words. This grant was, truly, a seed grant. The Spencer Foundation then offered financial support through the bulk of data collection with a Small Research Grant, which felt big to me in so many ways. Finally, OSU provided faculty leave and CU Boulder provided a “room of one’s own” with a view of the Flatirons so I could have the time and space to analyze the data and write this book into being. For all of this institutional support, I am genuinely grateful.

There also were people who made sure that that room of my own was not too lonely during the semester I spent in Boulder. Thank you, Kathy Schultz, for bringing me there, sharing meals with me, and welcoming me into your home. Thank you, Millie Gort, for being a model hostess, friend, and mom. Thank you, Sara Staley, for showing me a whole new way of being in the classroom. Thank you, Bethy Leonardi, for pizza, beer, data enthusiasm, and letting me know that the arm-wrestling scene needed to go in the book somewhere. Thank you, Elizabeth Dutro, for sharing with me the breakfast spot you used to go to with your kids and thinking this book might be something someday. Thank you, Wendy Glenn, for getting me to a coffee shop quickly so I could keep going back across the semester. Many data were analyzed in that coffee shop. Thank you, Arturo Cortez and José Ramon Lizarraga, for a delightful lunch, for driving Mindi and me to Wendy’s (the colleague, not the fast-food chain), and for laughing so hard with us at our wailing child.

There are also the scholar friends at home who helped me think and feel my way through this project across years. Ryan Schey, thank you for being there every day of the first semester and organizing the data of every day of that semester and the following two semesters. You were always deeply invested in this project, as evidenced by how you felt my pain when the recorder failed, or, more likely, its user failed at recording.

Acknowledgments | xiii

I will always be grateful for your role in this project and for you, more broadly. Dave Bloome, I was taking your Discourse Analysis class while I was analyzing the data for this project, and echoes of your wisdom are throughout the whole; and Michiko, you are the one who got me there, week after week, via Skype, only a few short months before we were all Zooming everywhere. Thank you both. Shannon Winnubst, thank you for thinking I might be onto something by paying attention to the idea of movement. Thank you, Brian Edmiston and Pat Enciso, for gently helping me let go of my weak title and replacing it with a stronger one. (Titles really are hard for me.) Lauren Kenney, Mindi Rhoades, and Noah Demland read an early draft of the whole; that is such hard work that I desperately needed done. Thank you so much for taking that on. I could not be more grateful.

In addition to the scholarly work, there was the familial work. While I was off working on this book, there were people making sure things ran smoothly—well, smooth enough. Mostly, my partner, Mindi. Thank you, Mindi, for allowing me the time and space, in the early mornings when I taught the class and in the semester I spent in Boulder analyzing data. I know that was challenging, and I am grateful for your having accepted the challenge with such grace. I love that, and so much more, about you. Michiko Hikida, Francis Troyan, and the climbing parents also stepped up by hanging with and transporting my kids when I could not, and I am grateful to all of you. And I know it was not easy on you, Blais and Dottie Grey. Thank you for taking one for the team on this one. I'll try to do the same for you when it matters the most to you, over and over again. I love you with all my heart.

Introduction

Theoretical, Empirical, and Contextual

It was the middle of March 2015 in an LGBTQ+-themed literature course at a grassroots charter high school in a midsize city in the Midwestern region of the United States. It was first period, and the students were juniors and seniors—mostly seniors, so one might expect the energy to be low. I was teaching. We were shifting from one novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Saenz, 2012), to another, Brooklyn, Burning (Brezenoff, 2011). Aristotle and Dante follows two Mexican American teenage boys through the end of their high school career in El Paso, Texas, in the late eighties as they come to understand themselves both individually and in relation to and in relationship with each other. Brooklyn, Burning describes a transient teen community and focuses on one teenager’s love, loss, and love again, with a deliberate and consistent evasion of gender markers. Both books were, by spring break, read aloud in class in readers’ theater style, where each student read either a narrator's part or a characters part throughout the reading. For the earlier book, Aristotle and Dante, I really had to pull students to volunteer to read parts, but that was not the case this time, with Brooklyn, Burning.

This time, I had multiple volunteers for multiple roles. One was for Fish, a local bar owner and a matriarch for transient queer youth. Darby and Sherry both wanted this role, so I said, “yall rock-paper-scissors. Best of three” They were sitting on opposite sides of the square in which we had our desks. Sherry stood up first, then Darby stood up and walked over to Sherry. All students were engaged. They were watching. Darby and Sherry began, “One, two, three, shoot. One, two, three, shoot” I said, “Okay, so youre even. This is a tiebreaker.” “One, two, three, shoot.” Sherry won. Darby walked back to her seat. I moved to the next role. Multiple students were interested. The class got quiet, watching me. Darby put her head down on her arms folded on her desk, but her face was up, looking at me, until Sherry said her name.

Sherry said, “You can be Fish. PI be Scout.”

Darby replied, “Are you sure?” Her voice sounded shaky. Sherry nodded. “Yeah, you wanted Fish. You can be Fish” Darby’s voice was undeniably quivering. “Thank you.”

The class as a whole seemed to sigh with relief as some students laughed, others chatted, and gazes moved around, from me to one another. Someone commented on how much Darby wanted to read the role of Fish; Sherry said, “I felt that. I saw the look on her face, and I felt that.” Darby whispered to Sherry across the room, ‘TIl bring you coffee tomorrow.”

I moved to the next role, asking who wanted to read one of the narrators. Three students wanted the role, including Parker and Rhys. They were sitting next to each other, so I told them to “rock-paper-scissors” Parker said, “Cart we just arm wrestle?” Rhys said, “Yeah, lets do that.’ And they both slammed their elbows on their desks and clutched each other’s hand. Several students leaned in to get a better look. One student's jaw dropped. Another student said, “We are arm wrestling now?” She sounded almost appalled. Cobalt, the one whose jaw was dropped, jumped up and ran over to referee. Parker won.

Up until this point, the students competing for roles were queer identifying in various ways. In the next two rounds, however, people who had claimed queer identities and those who had embodied straight ones were competing against one another. In each of these cases, students moved together from across the room. Jokes were made about arm wrestling, but they were friendly, even warm. The students played rock-paper-scissors to determine readers. The final round went past the bell, but no one moved to leave until the round was over; only then did students gather their things to depart for their second-period classes.

In this brief classroom encounter, I saw students using their reading about diverse, LGBTQ+-themed literature to move closer to one another, both physically and interpersonally. I saw queer students moving closer to one another, as Sherry gave Darby the role she wanted most and as Parker and Rhys clutched hands to arm wrestle. But I also saw straight and cisgender students moving closer to queer ones, as Cobalt jumped up to referee the arm wrestling and pairs of students faced off to get the parts they wanted to read. There was competition, no doubt, but there was also so much laughter, even joy. There was agility. Importantly, there was also respect, as evidenced by students waiting until the last game was complete before packing up their things and leaving their seats. I understood this as an ethical classroom encounter.

This book argues that high school students in this course used language and literacy to move ideologically across differences in classroom encounters. By using language and literacy, I mean that students read, discussed, and wrote about LGBTQ+-themed literature as well as their lives more broadly. By moving across differences, I mean that they listened to one another—not all of the time, but sometimes, and when they did, they learned from one another, about one another as well as about themselves. They did not necessarily argue with and persuade one another. Indeed, sometimes they actively rejected one another, and sometimes with very good reason. But they moved. As they did so, the classroom became not a site of mere celebration of differences but rather a site of engaged negotiation and even struggle.

To make this argument, I engage with the work of Sara Ahmed and other queer scholars, some but not all of whom work in the realm of literacy education. Then I contextualize the study in pertinent empirical literature before contextualizing it socially and culturally in both broad terms and those specific to the particular school and classroom. I conclude this introduction by laying out the structure of the remainder of the book.

(Ethical) Encounters

Saying the opening vignette represents an ethical encounter raises the question of what an ethical encounter is. I start by exploring the notion of encounter before reflecting on what makes an encounter ethical. Ahmed (2000) defines an encounter as a face-to-face meeting that is “mediated” (p. 7)—in the case of a classroom, by a teacher and students—and in which there is an “asymmetry of power” (p. 8), which in this case exists between a teacher and students but also among students.

Encounters cannot be understood in isolation from the histories of those who constitute them. Consider classroom encounters in the United States, where there are pronounced histories of heteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and the fallacy of white supremacy, among other sorts of oppression. We see this in classrooms where sex education ignores same-sex desires, where students are organized by gender, and where curricula center white men who are cisgender, heterosexual, and Christian. We also see it when teachers insist that students use English, and, more specifically, a “standard” English, demanding that students conceal or erase their home languages or dialects. Ahmed (2000) says, “The face to face of [any particular] encounter cannot . . . be detached or isolated from such broader relations of antagonism” (p. 9). Encounters, she asserts, “always hesitate between the domain of the particular—the face to face of this encounter—and the general—the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism. The particular encounter hence always carries traces of those broader relationships” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 8). If we think about this in terms of classrooms, this means that a white woman teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to Black students, for example, must acknowledge that she is implicated in the white-savior narrative on which the novel relies. For her to put Atticus Finch, a white lawyer, on a pedestal for trying the case in which Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of rape, is acquitted reveals at least the potential of her seeing herself as one who saves Black students. The teacher positioning herself as a white savior, whether consciously or not, is destined to provoke the righteous anger in at least some of her Black students. Here we see the particular encounter between a teacher and students influenced by “broader relationships of power and antagonism,’ not only in the past, as represented by the novel, but also in the present, by contemporary dynamics in and beyond school.

Not only do encounters hover between the past and present, they also have implications for the future. In their exploration of Ahmed’s encounters, Buys and Marotta (2021) explain, “Historical relations are made up of racialised, gendered, sexualised, and classed encounters and these impact present and, more importantly, future encounters” (p. 103). Indeed, Ahmed (2000) focuses on these future encounters when she asks “not only what made this encounter possible (its historicity), but also what does it make possible, what futures might it open up?” (p. 145). What kinds of futures an encounter might “open up” depends largely on the nature of the encounter. According to Buys and Marotta (2021), “Ahmed’s notion of generous encounters illustrates how relations are not undifferentiated; some relations of proximity are healthier than others” (p. 110). Unethical encounters “can make some of us feel ‘out of place’ or not ‘at home’ where we are brought up” (Ahmed, 2021, p. 8). They can “objectify and marginalise” (Buys & Marotta, 2021, p. 108); they can “appropriat[e]” and “negate” (p. 109); they can “categorise” and “constrain” (p. 109). You can see how a white teacher teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to Black students may make students feel out of place in school, which they are required to attend. That said, healthier relations are possible; Ahmed calls these “ethical encounters.”

An ethical encounter is where people come together, in moments in time, recognizing the “debts that are already accrued” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 154), talking across differences, and forming collectives “through the very work that we need to do in order to get closer to others” (p. 180). Ahmed (2000) argues that “a politics of encountering gets closer in order to allow the differences between us . . . to make a difference to the very encounter itself. The differences between us necessitate the dialogue, rather than disallow it—a dialogue must take place, precisely because we dont speak the same language” (p. 180). When Ahmed talks about dialogue, she is not, as I understand her, talking about what Bryson and de Castell (1993) call “some kind of pluralistic exhortation [to] ‘dialogue across differences” (p. 301). Instead, she means something more like how Aukerman (2021) uses the word: an unorderly exchange of ideas, a “struggle, as students thought with and against each other’s possible meanings” (p. 9), “productive struggles over meaning” (p. 10). The differences she references may be defined by sexuality, gender, race, and religion, as well as those defined by families and many other ideological, social, and cultural constructs.’ In a classroom, this sense of dialogue might mean a teacher naming problematic power dynamics and inviting students to discuss them. Consider a teacher reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) with their students. Together, they might discuss why the N-word is used by the Black author, Mildred D. Taylor, in her representation of the Logans, an African American family living in the rural South in the

1. I will sometimes use the language of identities to refer to these constructs, and when I do, I am talking about identities as multiple and variable; I am talking about identities and the systems that constitute them as interlocking (see the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement in BlackPast, 2012), intersectional (Hill Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 1991), and mutually constitutive (Winnubst, 2006).

1930s. The teacher might also explain that they are going to use the term “the N-word” instead of reading it verbatim during their read-alouds and invite students to discuss this decision. Everyone might not agree on Taylor’s decision to use the word or the teacher's decision not to, but engaging in the dialogue across differences is a conversation that matters beyond the reading of the book.

Alexander (2008) asserts that “our differences—often systematically defined and constructed along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and class—impact our ability to speak for ourselves, tell our truths, and make common cause with others” (p. 8). In other words, our differences impact our ability to communicate and connect. Therefore, I look not only at the that which hinders our ability to communicate and connect but also at the moments in which we overcome those obstacles and do it anyway. Encounters across differences, thus, are “bound up with responsibility” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 180). Those involved must “thin[k] about how we might work with, and speak to, others, or how we might inhabit the world with others” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 180). According to Ahmed, this requires “the ‘painstaking labour’ of getting closer, of speaking to each other, and of working for each other,’ which results in getting “closer to ‘other others ” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 180). It is through such “acts of alignment” that “we can reshape the very bodily form of the community, as a community that is yet to come” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 180). It is not always and everywhere appropriate to do this work. Indeed, Ahmed (2000) states that “we need to pay attention to the shifting conditions in which encounters between others, and between other others, take place” (p. 19). It is only by paying attention to encounters that we can begin to answer Ahmed’s (2000) question: “How can we encounter an other in such a way, in a better way, that allows something to give?” (p. 154).

Thus, in an ethical encounter people listen to one another; they notice what moves them and what fails to move them (Ahmed, 2000). Such listening and noticing requires a degree of proximity, but Ahmed (2000) quotes Iris Marion Young in pointing out that those who have been othered, or minoritized and oppressed, “ ‘would prefer a stance of respectful distance, . . . and thus [others] must listen [to them] carefully across the distance’” (p. 156). In other words, in an ethical encounter, people must be close enough to listen but not so close as to threaten. How close one can be without being threatening depends on the shared histories and the trusted promises of futures. Ahmed (2000) states, “An ethical communication is about a certain way of holding proximity and distance together: one gets close enough to others to be touched by that which cannot be simply got across. In such an encounter, ‘one’ does not stay in place, or one does not stay safely at a distance (there is no space which is not implicated in the encounter). It is through getting closer, rather than remaining at a distance, that the impossibility of pure proximity can be put to work or made to work” (p. 157). An ethical encounter is characterized by one’s “refusal to identify the other as enemy” and commitment to assume “intimate responsibility for the other” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 137). (When she uses the term “the other? Ahmed means people who have been othered, like those who have been minoritized, not just people who are other than you in one way or another, although that might also be the case.) Aukerman (2021) argues that “ethical” defines how “we should be in the world with each other” (p. 12). A teacher striving to foster ethical encounters in a classroom listens to students and notices when something invigorates them and when something deflates them, whether it is an assignment or an interaction with a peer. When a student comes into the class looking angry, the teacher checks in with them but does not pry, offers support or alternatives but does not demand an explanation. The teacher positions themself as an advocate for students in myriad ways. They never “stay in place” but move in response to and with respect for students. Ethical encounters, then, require movement both toward and within encounters.

MOVING TOWARD ENCOUNTERS

We only encounter one another when we move, from one place to another. When we move, there is always, out there, the idea of home, where, in Ahmed’s (2000) words, “one has already been enveloped, inhabited by” (p. 90). Home is often “sentimentalised as a space of belonging” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 89), but home is more complicated than that. Consider, for example, the home of a child who comes to understand themself as something other than straight or cisgender. The child may be ostracized by other family members, in their shared home. Indeed, “if we think of ‘home’ purely as proximity and familiarity, then we fail to recognise the relationships of estrangement and distance within the home” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 139). A home does not mean the absence of strangers, if we rely on Ahmed’s understanding of the stranger: “strangers are under scrutiny by those who consider themselves at home or in place” (Ahmed, 2021, p. 19). Ahmed (2021) offers, as an example, how “people of colour in white organisations are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else’s home” (p. 17). That is to say, they, like some queer youth, are made to feel as strangers in their own homes. Minoritized people need ideological homes where people are “like-minded and understand the danger and the price of such work to sustain themselves” (Gongalves, 2005, p. 15), where people can “work steadily toward understanding [their] own values and the values of others” (p. 13). One can have many ideological homes (Goncalves, 2005), and the boundaries between them and not-home are, according to Ahmed (2000), permeable.

When someone moves away from one person or community, where they move toward depends on what is in their ideological line of vision, according to Ahmed. One cannot move toward a trans community, for example, when they think they are the only one experiencing gender in ways beyond cisnormativity. They must know that other transgender people exist in the world in order to move toward them, and such movement is of immense consequence, and not just for the one moving. When one moves toward a person or community, that person or those people in the community are “touched by what comes near” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 22). People come to understand themselves and one another, and, in doing so, they influence one another (Ahmed, 2000). According to Ahmed (2000), people are thus “perpetually reconstituted” through encounters (p. 7). Relatedly, encounters that result from movement between and among people and communities broaden peoples understanding of the world and the people in it. Waite (2017) reflects on such encounters as “the moment we come into contact with what challenges, affirms, resists, or does not fit in with our prior knowledge of ourselves or others” (p. 134). Waite (2017) argues that “without this movement, this revision of understanding, we would be left with [a] kind of reduction and simplification” (p. 143). Waite (2017) asserts that “to move toward multiplicity is to live in a world with more possibility, which, Waite reminds us, quoting Judith Butler, “‘is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread’” (p. 153). That is to say, broadening understanding matters.

Gongalves (2005) found that students who had more narrow and static understandings of themselves and others saw “differences as impossible obstacles” or “ignore[ed] differences altogether” (p. 12). Either way, according to Goncalves (2005), “leaves in place the customs, norms, and laws that stigmatize” (p. 12). In contrast, when speakers “claim[ed] and name[d] their own multiple, in-flux identities, they [we]re more likely to see all people . . . as complicated and in process rather than as a static enemy image. Likewise, when speakers acknowledge[d] their own multiple and in-process identities, audience members [we]re more likely to see [people] as in-process and complicated rather than as a static pariah image” (Gongalves, 2005, pp. 12-13). By seeing themselves and others as multiple and variable, they came to understand differences “as a source of new perspectives” and thus understand others as potential allies, to whom they could speak more easily (Gongalves, 2005, p. 13). Thus, as Ahmed (2000) asserts, encounters shape worlds (p. 8). Without movement toward encounters, movement within encounters becomes impossible.

MOVING WITHIN ENCOUNTERS

In an effort to explore the notion of movement within an encounter, Ahmed (2000) reflects on encountering a text. She writes about the many tensions in the experience but also how the “narrative moves [her] forward” (p. 159) and how, in her words, “I touch the pages. I am moved. Something gives” (p. 154). This is not physical movement, necessarily, but ideological.

Waite (2017) uses water as a metaphor for understanding ideological movement between and among people and communities. Waite (2017) talks about “becoming liquid” when discussing “ways of moving students, or helping them to move themselves, away from dualistic constructions of body, of argument, and of categorical placement” (p. 25). Waite (2017) tries to understand “what it means to become water, moving water, which, in the end, resists its own freezing up” (p. 25). The alternative, Waite (2017) asserts, is “to become stone, to become the reader who cannot be moved or repositioned” (p. 164). I am not just talking about readers, however; I am talking about people who read among those who engage in many other forms of communication. In doing so, people may either become rigid in their thinking and cold in their feeling or, alternatively, become fluid. Becoming fluid does not mean simply taking the ideological shape of those read or heard. Indeed, Waite reminds us that water cuts canyons. But Waite (2017) also considers turning into liquid like “dissolving” (p. 134), like sugar dissolves in coffee or tea. Waite (2017) contends that dissolving “always involves movement—the kind of movement solids are not capable of” (p. 134). So, when one’s ideas dissolve, they “never, ultimately, disappear, but when they become liquid and fluid as opposed to solid, it makes them movable; it makes them open to evaporation” (Waite, 2017, p. 135). The metaphor is not scientifically perfect, but no metaphor is perfect, by definition. Still, the idea of becoming ideologically water or liquid so that one can read, listen, and learn—so that one can also write, speak, and teach—so that one can move among people and communities is one that I find useful.

Moving among people and communities, however, is not an independent endeavor. Ahmed (2000) talks about being “moved by the other” (p. 156). This raises a question of agency, a question underscored by Gonçalves (2005) and Waite (2017), who study how students learn to move their audiences, whether those are students on a speakers’ bureau talking to their audiences in an effort to move them or writing students striving to move the readers of their writing. Waite also talks about teachers moving students, although this is not Waite’s focus. Thus, in these ways and others, people move themselves and others. Ahmed (2021) further points out that one can even be removed by another. But no one moves in isolation from others.