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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

LGBT STUDENT NEGOTIATIONS OF ACADEMIC LITERACIES:
THE BUILDING OF DISCIPLINARY AND CAMPUS LITERACY
COMMUNITIES

presented by

BRIAN CHARLES LEWIS

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

Ph.D. degree in ENGLISH

 

 

III/WWI 5/un @ZWULN-v

/I|Vlajor Professor’s Signature

6/ii/ I09

Date

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LGBT STUDENT NEGOTIATIONS OF ACADEMIC LITERACIES: THE BUILDING
OF DISCIPLINARY AND CAMPUS LITERACY COMMUNITIES

By

Brian Charles Lewis

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2004

 

 

ABSTRACT

LGBT STUDENT NEGOTIATIONS OF ACADEMIC LITERACIES: THE BUILDING
OF DISCIPLINARY AND CAMPUS LITERACY COMMUNITIES

By

Brian Charles Lewis

Compared to studies of other under—represented groups, such as people of color,
women, and working classes, very few studies have examined how LGBT students deal
with the constraints of academic literacies. The purpose of this dissertation is twofold:
(l) to investigate how LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) students
negotiate academic literacies and (2) to learn what solutions exist to make LGBT students
feel more included in academic discourse. 105 questionnaires were distributed to LGBT
community college and university students, and then these questionnaires were followed
by 32 interviews with students who completed the questionnaire. The study resulted in
two major findings. To begin with, it reveals that LGBT college students tend to have
negative attitudes towards writing, both in and out of the classroom, when weak,
ephemeral writing communities are present. This negative view of writing also includes
chat room literacy communities, which the students in this study generally want to avoid.
On the other hand, the study also shows that LGBT students, particularly lesbian
students, have a desire to form strong campus communities outside classroom
environments, both in person and in asynchronous online forums. The last chapter of this
dissertation offers a plan for future research which suggests that we must examine the
issue of LGBT student inclusion in academic literacies not just from a classroom

perspective, but from an institutional perspective as well. This plan argues that by

evaluating academic literacy spaces and by engaging in dialogue on inclusion with
specific groups, more inclusion of LGBT issues in disciplinary and campus literacy
spaces can be achieved. Achieving LGBT Student inclusion in these spaces should

involve the entire academic community: students, teachers, and administrators alike.

 

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my dear fiiends, Ronald Herrema and Stephan
Weinberger; to my sister, Alison Lewis; and, most of all, to my mother, Ethel Ackennan

Lewis. I never would have finished without their love and support.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of everyone on my committee,
each of whom contributed something unique to the knowledge I gained during my years
at Michigan State: Kathleen Geissler, for her valuable, constructive criticism that enabled
me to produce higher quality work; Dean Rehberger, for teaching me so much about
effective ways to use technology in education; Marilyn Wilson, for instilling in me an
unwavering faith that I could complete this dissertation and for teaching me how much
students can gain by being actively involved in their own learning; and, most of all, Ellen
Cushman, my committee chair, for giving me so much important feedback on my writing
in the short time we’ve'known each other and for providing me invaluable assistance with
my professional development.

In addition, I want to thank all the students who participated in this project,
especially the interviewees. They took time from their busy schedules to help me out,
and this project would not have been possible without their candor. Thank you so much!

Many thanks also to the following organizations and individuals for helping me
locate students for this study: the MSU LGBT Alliance, RING, SGL Social, the GSA at
Grand Rapids Community College, the GSA at Jackson Community College, Break the
Silence at Albion College, Spectrum at the University of Toledo, Brent Bilodeau, Sean
Shannon, Nat Furrow, Jeff Hartman, Torn Oakley, Erik Green, Mimi Pugh, Erin Roberts,
Ken Powell, and Kevin Leistner.

Finally, I must thank my family, fiiends, and colleagues, who supported me so

much emotionally over the years: Mom, Alison, June Land, Ron, Steve, Nathalie,

 

Heather, Rodney, Carrie, Jayme, Jessica, Monica, Brett, Brandi, Mel, Kirk, Rachel,
Sarha, Chris, Cheryl, Keri, Teresa Purvis, Larry Levy, and Linda Smith. All of you are

special people. Thanks for believing in me.

vi

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ................................................................................. xi
“What’s LGBT?”: An Introduction to the Key Issues ................................. 1
Introduction ....................................................................................... 1
Stuckey, Gee, and My Working Definition of Literacy .................................... 3
What Are “Academic Literacies”? ............................................................ 5
The Violence of Literacy: Research on LGBT Students .................................... 8
K—12 Education Studies ................................................................ 9
College Education Studies .................................. . .......................... 12
Composition Studies .................................................................. 18
Electronic Literacy Studies ........................................................... 22
Conclusion ....................................................................................... 25

“I’ve Never Thought about These Questions Before”: Data Collection

and Analysis ................................................................................... 27
Overview ........................................................................................ 27
Data Collection ................................................................................. 28

The Questionnaire ..................................................................... 28
The Interviews ........ . ................................................................ 3 4
Methodological Complications ...................................................... 40
Data Analysis ........ . ........................................................................... 47
Phenomenological Categorization .................................................. 47
The Usefulness of Performative Theory ........................................... 48
The Usefulness of Discourse Theory: Gee and Bakhtin .................................. 51
Conclusion ....................................................................................... 58
Disabling Writing, Enabling Communities: The Questionnaire Results .......... 60
Overview ........................................................................................ 6O
Trend One: Negative Attitudes towards Writing Activities with Weak
Communities ........................................................................... 63
Writing as an Ineffective Means of Negotiating Academic Literacies ......... 63
Writing as an Ineffective Solution for Facilitating LGBT
Student Inclusion ....................................................................... 68
A Dislike of Writing in Chat Rooms ................................................ 72
Trend Two: A Desire for Campus Literacy Communities ........... _. .................... 76
Forums outside Class ................................................................. 76
Community Solutions ................................................................ 79
Conclusion ...................................................................................... 83

vii

 

“She Didn’t Think It Was Right”: LGBT Student Negative Attitudes

towards Writing; ............................................................................. 87
Overview ........................................................................................ 87
Students’ Attitudes towards Writing: The Research ........................................ 89
General Research on the Attitudes of Writers ...................................... 89
Research on LGBT Students ......................................................... 92

Writing in Class: An Ineffective Means of Negotiating Academic Literacies. . .. 94
Writing outside of Class: Another Ineffective Means of Dealing with

Academic Literacies ........................................................................... 106
Sharing Informal Writing with Others: A Source of Classroom Anxiety .............. 117
“Informal” as “Formal” .............................................................. 118
“Informal” as “Uncomfortable” .................................................... 121
Conclusion ..................................................................................... 123
LGBT Students’ Perceptions of Problems with Online Chat ....................... 126
Overview ........................................................................................ 126
Research on Students’ Attitudes towards Chat ............................................ 128
General Research on Attitudes towards Chat Rooms ........................... 128
Research on LGBT Student Negotiations of Chat Rooms ...................... 129
Infrequency of Chat Room Use .............................................................. 131
Chat Rooms as “Hook Up” Sites ............................................................ 134
Chat Room Use during “Coming Out” Process ........................................... 137
Anonymous Use of Chat Rooms in Courses ............................................... 139
Student Failure to “Take Chat Seriously” ......................................... 139
Dislike of Anonymity ............................................................... 141
Conclusion ...................................................................................... 145

viii

 

LGBT Student Campus Literacy Communities outside the Classroom:

Online and On-Campus ..................................................................... 147
Overview ....................................................................................... 147
Review of the Research: Online and On-Campus Communities ........................ 150
Building Communities Online ...................................................... 150
Building Communities in On-Campus Groups ................................... 152
Connections to My Work ............................................................ 154
Online Communities .......................................................................... 155
E-mail Communities .................................................................. 155
Listserv Communities ............................................................... 157
Blog Communities ................................................................... 159
Forming Communities through On-Campus Groups ..................................... 163
Multiple Group Membership ........................................................ 164
Friendship ............................................................................. 164
Activism ............................................................................... 166
Pride in Identities ..................................................................... 167
Education .............................................................................. 169
Conclusion ...................................................................................... 1 70

“You Just Have to Speak Up”: Lesbians and Campus Literacy

Communities .................................................................................... 172
Overview ....................................................................................... 1 72
“Lesbian” as Outsider ........................................................................ 174
The Language Communities of Gabrielle, Marie, and Lechele ......................... 176
Gabrielle ............................................................................... 176
Marie ................................................................................... 1 80
Lechele ................................................................................. 1 85
Conclusion ..................................................................................... 190

ix

 

 

“More Community, More Literacy”: A Plan for Future

Research ......................................................................................... 192
Overview ........................................................................................ 1 9'.
Step One: Evaluation ......................................................................... 19‘
Classroom Communities: Discipline-Specific Literacies. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 19:
Non-Classroom Communities: Campus Literacies .............................. 19:
Step Two: Dialogue ............................................................................ 20:
Where would it take place? ......................................................... 201
Who would participate? ............................................................. 20!
What would be discussed? .......................................................... 21 1
Conclusion: Summary and Beyond ......................................................... 22(
Chapter Summary .................................................................... 22(
Beyond Dialogue: What’s Next? ................................................... 221
Appendices .................................................................................... 224
Appendix A, ........................................................................... 224
Appendix B ....................................... ' ..................................... 22’.
Appendix C ........................................................................... 222
Works Cited .................................................................................... 22!

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Student Agreement on Different Academic Literacy Statements ................. 64
Figure 2: Student Agreement on Different Statements of Solution ........................... 69
Figure 3: Student Use of Different Literacy Forums ............................................ 73
Figure 4: Student Agreement on Classroom versus Community Solutions ................. 80
Figure 5: Marie’s Blog ............................................................................. 182

xi

“What is LGBT?”: An Introduction to the Key Issues

Introduction

I began my first full-time college teaching job with great enthusiasm, hoping to
make a difference at an institution currently in the process of revamping its English
program. At one of the first department meetings, a discussion ensued on the materials
that should be taught in a new course called “Minority Literature.” Everyone seemed to
agree that African-American literature, Native American literature, and Asian-American
literature should all be covered in this course. I started to notice that the focus of the
discussion seemed to be on visible racial minorities; not one word was said about the
invisible minority of the LGBT community. “Shouldn’t we be teaching LGBT
literature?” I queried. My question was returned with blank stares. The department chair
finally asked, “What is LGBT?” and some of my colleagues snickered. “I’m referring to
materials written by lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people about their
experiences,” I replied. “Gays and lesbians are minorities by choice,” one of my
colleagues sniffed. “We’re only focusing on true minorities here.” Several people
bobbed their heads in agreement. The woman who made the remark also happened to be
the chair of my evaluation committee, so I felt at the time that it would not be safe for me
to pursue the argument further. But I seethed with anger at her ignorance.

This entire circumstance made me think about the role that sexual orientation
plays in people’s literacy development: to what extent are LGBT individuals ousted from
college curricula, especially courses involving intensive reading and writing? The

research indicates that, indeed, links between sexual orientation and literacy are often

ignored, in spite of the fact that some research does indicate that “queering” college
classrooms brings several advantages to students and teachers alike. Such advantages
include the stimulation of critical thinking, the battling of homophobia, and the creation
of a “safe” space for rhetorical performance of gender and sexuality by straight and queer
students alike. Ibegan to wonder: why is the link between sexual orientation and literacy
so. often ignored? This dissertation is a result of my desire to rectify this situation: to
speak of the unspeakable, to give voice to a voiceless community.

My study had two major goals. First of all, I attempted to discover how LGBT
students negotiate academic literacies, which often act as oppressive forces against the
LGBT student population. Secondly, I tried to learn ways in which academic discourse
could be more inclusive of LGBT students. As a result of my findings, I learned that,
like many undergraduate students, LGBT students tend to have negative views on
writing, both in and out of classroom environments. However, their unfavorable
perspectives on writing tend to stem from their frustrations with institutional and
classroom constraints regarding their writing processes rather than from fears of writing
on LGBT concerns. In particular, writing activities lack a sense of community, LGBT
student interest in writing weakens. Consequently, LGBT students desire to form literacy
communities outside classroom spaces within academe, both in person and online, and
see these communities as their key to inclusion in academic discourse. Therefore, this
dissertation argues that working on classroom inclusion is not enough: we can achieve
more inclusion of LGBT issues in academic literacy communities only by developing our
understanding of how LGBT students’ literacy lives emerge as communal events which

take place in a variety of discourse spaces.

To elucidate my position in this study, I shall begin by revealing my working
definitions of both “literacy” and “academic literacies.” My definition of “literacy” here
tends to integrate the approaches of J. Elspeth Stuckey and J arnes Gee, and my
conception of “academic literacies” asks us to consider that many academic literacy
events take place outside classroom spaces.

Stuckey, Gee, a_nd Mv Working Definition of “Literacy”

In her 1992 text The Violence of Literacy, J. Elspeth Stuckey spends a great deal
of time critiquing the specific “subjectivities” of America’s class structure. As the title of
her text indicates, she clearly positions herself as literacy’s antagonist, thus
demonstrating that she rebels against it. The text manifests an angry tone throughout, not
one of acceptance; we do not get the impression from Stuckey that she is trying to work
“within literacy categories,” as Horsman suggests. For Stuckey, literacy is, first and
foremost, anact of “violence.” Even though popular myths about literacy suggest that it
has the power to transform America for the better, and most texts about literacy describe
being “literate” in glowing terms, Stuckey asserts that “The truth is that literacy and
English instruction can hurt you, more clearly and forcefully and permanently than it can
help you, and that schools, like other social institutions, are designed to replicate, or at
least not to disturb, social division and class privilege” (123).

In contrast to Stuckey’s, Gee’s approach to literacy is better classified as a socio-
cultural approach than a Marxist approach. His studies tend to focus on discourse
analysis: Gee asserts that to engage in an act of reading or writing, one must engage in a
discourse. James Gee defines “discourse” as “a socially accepted association among

ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as

..~.:.\--~.

 

a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’” (“Literacy” 537). He
urges us to “Think of a discourse as an ‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the
appropriate costume and instructions on how to act and talk so as to take on a particular
role that others will recognize” (“Literacy” 5 37). The more adept one is at taking on this
role, the more “literate” one is considered to be. Since some individuals may seriously
deviate fi'om this role when engaging in discourse to the point where they are not
understood or accepted by their community at large, I also would argue that we need to
recognize literacy’s potential for the “violence” that may surface when such deviations
occur.

Therefore, in my working definition of “literacy” for this study, I integrate the
tenets of Gee’s discourse theory with Stuckey’s Marxist stance. I concur with Gee’s
view that we must perceive literacy as one’s ability to read and write within one’s
particular culture or community, but I also feel that we need to validate Stuckey’s more
radical view that literacy, particularly academic literacies, may often manifest a “violent”
side. As most sociocultural theorists indicate (Horsman, Giroux, Gee, Freire), those
individuals whose literacy skills vary from people in positions of power, such as racial
and class minorities, are often perceived as lacking literacy skills rather than possessing
different ones. Thus literacy is more than just an ability to read and write; it can be, as
Stuckey suggests, embedded with a political system which varies from one culture to
another, and often reinforces cultural division.

When I was told by my colleagues at my first full-time job that LGBT works did
not belong in a class on minority literature, I was not only being excluded from the

discourse community of my home department, I was also a victim of academic

 

“violence” through the class hierarchy it reinforced. When my department refused to
include LGBT literature in the “Minority Literature” course, I felt that my interests—and,
in fact, my Very identity as a gay man--were shunned as unimportant. I clearly received
the message that “LGBT lives do not have a place here at our university.” As a result of
this incident, I became more aware of the power of bureaucratic institutions to dictate
language and literacy policies: those who employ the discourses of the most powerful in
academe tend to succeed the most, and those who do not tend to be overlooked, even in
academic environments where we often pride ourselves for our “concerns with diversity”
or our “attention to multiculturalism.” This dissertation examines the relationship
between literacy spaces in the academic world and one of those overlooked groups:
LGBT students. Since I oftenrefer to “literacy” in the plural here, I would also like to
explain the rationale behind my working definition of “academic literacies.”

1V_hat Are “Academic Literacies”?

Many teachers want their students to leave their classrooms with an ability to read
and write in the discourse of the academy. If they can do this, then their students have
presumably achieved what is frequently termed “academic literacy.” Edith Peschke
defines “academic literacy” as “instruction that values standard English usage through
logical hierarchies, subordination of one idea over another, rationalizations and
categorizations reached through text-assisted memory, etc.” (1). While this is indeed an
admirable goal, I feel that it needs examination and revision. After all, as Stephen G.
Brown notes, a “growing gap” exists “between the classroom and the community of
students, between their home dialects and Standard English” (5). I would also add that

this gap exists not just between the classroom and home communities, but also between

most academic discursive spaces and more familiar language communities, thus setting
up a dichotomy between the secondary discourses of academe and the primary discourses

of family and fiiends of which James ‘Gée speaks.

Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater makes us more aware of the multiple academic
discursive spaces in her discussion of “academic literacies,” implying that more than one
exist, and her distinction between “literacy” and “literacies” is helpful. And Ann Johns
further reinforces this point in Text, Role, and Context, in which she “prefers ‘literacies’
to ‘literacy,’ and the point is made that literacy is not conceived of as an incremental
process” (Hall 392). Examining “literacy” in the plural allows us to realize the complex
"discourse relationships that make up institutional space. However, Chiseri-Strater, Johns,
and other contemporary scholars tend to refrain from providing examples of “academic
literacies” which may exist on college and university campuses. At times, scholarly
definitions of “academic literacies” are vague. In “Multiple Literacies and the Reading of

CC,

Literature,” Hunter McEwan suggests that academic literacies’ . . . directs one
immediately to the idea that there is one approach to literacy” (54), but he refrains from
providing examples of different “academic literacy” communities. Lea and Street’s
definition of “academic literacies” in “Student Writing and Feedback in Higher
Education” is slightly more specific: they note that “academic literacies” view “literacies
as social practices” and that “An academic literacies approach views the institutions in
which academic practices take place as constituted in, and as sites of, discourse and
power” (35). While Lea and Street do help to define “academic literacies,” they avoid

givin exam les of them, leavinO readers to wonder whether “academic literacies” trul
D

can exist beyond classroom spaces. Elizabeth Hoadley-Maidment acknowledges the

existence of different “academic literacy” communities in her essay “From Personal
Experience to Reflective Practitioner: Academic Literacies and Professional Education.”
In the essay’s section on “Academic Discourse, Academic Literacies, and Professional
Education,” she stresses that “each academic discipline—for example, psychology or
sociology—is an individual discourse community” (166). However, she conflates the
terms “academic literacies” and “academic discourse” in her discussion, and the only

3“

distinction she makes between “discourse communities” is between students academic
discourse” and “occupational discourse”: she acknowledges that the two are separate, and

then claims “we need to examine the commonalities between the writing done by, for

example, nurses and social workers, and undergraduate academic writing” (169).

While Hoadley—Maidment speaks of “academic literacies” mainly in terms of the
discourse communities of different classroom disciplines, Iwould argue that “academic
literacies” involve much more than classroom discourse. These “academic literacies” are
the reading, writing, and speaking activities which occur in a variety of places in
academe. My dissertation adds to contemporary scholarship on “academic literacies” in
that it provides many examples of the wide variety of “academic literacies” that may exist
outside classroom spaces. We need to recognize that “academic literacies” occur in
student groups, in resource fairs, in departmental meetings, in conferences, in
presentations, in committees, and in countless other spaces outside the classroom
environment, including both asynchronous and synchronous online spaces. Increasingly,
these literacies may even be expressed through images, particularly as we increasingly
encounter more technological literacies in the 21St century. This dissertation suggests that

we must think of LGBT student literacies from this complex perspective if we are to firlly

understand these students’ literacy negotiations. The literacy spaces in academe are
many and varied, and reach far beyond classroom boundaries. Therefore, throughout this
dissertation, I will be referring to two different types of “academic literacies”: (1)
disciplinary literacies, which usually occur in classroom spaces and cover specific
classroom subjects, and (2) campus literacies, which take place outside the classroom but
still deal with issues pertinent to students’ personal and professional lives. “Campus
literacies,” as I define them here, include not just the face-to-face literacy activities of on-
campus groups, but also the more nebulous literacy negotiations which occur in
electronic spaces outside of class, in such environments as e-mails, listservs, and blogs.
However, the question still remains: In what ways do LGBT students experience
academic literacies—either the disciplinary literacies or the campus literacies--as

oppressive, constraining forces?

flre Violence of Literacy: Research on LGBT Students

In explaining literacy’s divisive nature, most scholars do note a type of hegemony
or misuse of power which often victimizes women (Wahlstrom, Radway), racial
minorities (Smitherman, 80121 and Bennett, Naidoo, Holmes), and lower/working classes
(Olson, E. Barton, F aigley, Selfe). While some scholars on literacy do come to their
conclusions afier studying particular communities of college or university students, many
of them refer to a more general sample of the population in their discussion (Gee, D.
Barton). However, my research is more particularized. First of all, I narrow my focus
only to college and university students. Secondly, I focus on an often-overlooked group
of minorities: LGBT students. Since I decided to focus on studying a minority

population in particular, I did not wish to include straight, “non-queer” students in the

 

study; most straight students share the hetero-normative values of academic literacies.
Even compared to studies of other under-represented groups, such as people of color,
women, and underclasses, very few studies have examined how the “violence” of literacy
affects LGBT students alone or explored possible methods of rectifying this violence.
Therefore, to fill in this gap in research on LGBT student literacy, my study stresses the
different means of combating the nature of this “Violence,” as I learn how LGBT students
negotiate academic discourse. Research: on LGBT student literacy has taken place in four
major research areas: K—12 education studies, college education studies, composition
studies, and electronic literacy studies. When examining these four areas of study, we
can see that two major gaps exist in this research: (1) the studies which stress that the
“violence” exists tend to ignore possible solutions to the problem at the academic level
and (2) the studies which stress the solutions are usually limited in terms of research
design, scope of coverage, or definitions discussed. My work, on the other hand,
examines both the constraints of academic literacies and the solutions to these constraints
in detail.
K-12 Education Studies

Several studies in K-12 education have made important observations on the
marginalized roles of LGBT K-12 students. Simon Harris, a British professor of English
education, was one of the first to address how the academic world affects young LGBT
students in a book-length study. Harris provides elaborate lesson plans to fight the
oppressiveness that young LGBT students often experience in his 1990 text Lesbian and
Gay Issues in the English Classroom: The Importance of Being Honest. He focuses on

British secondary schools, describing a lesson plan for teaching the children’s novel

Annie on My Mind, which describes the lesbian relationship of two high-school age girls
and the consequences that they must endure as a result of their relationship. To deal with
the issues within the book, Harris suggests that his students write “a dialogue between a
teenager and her/his closest adult relative, in which the young person ‘comes out’” (81).
For Harris, “The dialogue work is intended to make students realize the difficulty
inherent in finding a solution to this problem and also to allow them to articulate their
own feelings and responses to such a situation” (82). Finally, Harris recommends having
the students reenact the book’s trial scene, and ultimately videotape them (85-87). By
reading the novel and engaging in Harris’s activities, students can develop their skill of
predicting words within the text, critique hetero-normative labels, role-play scenarios to
facilitate activities for discussion and writing, and learn about sexuality and gender roles
in the culture in which they live.

After Harris’s study, American educators began to explore similar issues in K-12
contexts. Peter Nardi, a sociologist from Pitzer College who often researches the place of
gay men in American society, mentions in his 1994 article “Gay and Lesbian Issues in the
Classroom” that,'at the high school level, “When . . . proms, yearbook photographs of
school events, language used in official school documents, all ignore gay and lesbian
students, heterosexuality is presented as the only viable pattern, and homosexuality is
communicated as deviant” (“Gay and Lesbian” 128). Gay and lesbian students do not get
the chance to read about themselves in high school; they remain invisible, and so does
their language and/or means of communication (“Gay and Lesbian” 129). Randal
Donelson, Professor in Elementary Education at Ohio State University—Newark, shows us

that the English classroom can serve as a way for gay and lesbian students to see their

10

experiences legitirrrized and for straight students to comprehend what “gay” entails. In
his 1997 Creating a Safe Space for Gay and Lesbian Students in the English/Language
Arts Classroom, he stresses that, for teens especially, the question “What is gay?” needs
to be answered through reading and literature. Like Nardi, James Earl Davis, who studies
educational leadership and policy issues in the department of African—American Studies
at Temple University, also examines a younger age group in his 1999 article “Forbidden
Fruit: Black Males’ Constructions of Transgressive Sexualities in Middle School.” His
article provides important insights into the linguistic significance of the term “gay” for
African-American middle school students. After interviewing several adolescent black
males, Davis concludes that “gay” becomes a term for this group to describe those males
who act in a sissified manner, regardless of the sexual orientation of those particular
individuals. This definition results in “a repressive, largely self-created culture grounded
in hegemonic masculinity that enforces strict gender conformity”; the gay black
adolescent males end up feeling victimized within their own culture (Davis 58).

My work builds upon the trail laid down by all these authors. While Harris’s
lesson plans are valuable suggestions for pedagogical approaches, my pedagogical
suggestions result from more formalized research. Peter Nardi suggests that educators
must “change the sociocultural and institutional arrangements that perpetuate exclusion
of gay people’s lives” (“Gay and Lesbian” 129), and stresses the importance of having
“the clout and legitimacy of larger organizations” when deciding to take action against
oppressive forces (such as media which perpetuate offensive stereotypes) (“Changing
Gay” 440). My work follows up Nardi’s observations by offering specifics as to how one

obtains this “legitimacy.” It also helps us to recognize how, as teachers, we already have

11

a kind of legitimacy that would permit us to address these concerns. Overall, even
though Nardi’s work alludes to the exclusion of LGBT students from high school literacy
events, Nardi stresses oppressiveness in the media against LGBT peOple in general,
whereas my study focuses more on academic literacies in particular. In addition, my
work adds to the work of both Donelson and Davis. Donelson’s study focuses on finding
ways to assuage literacy’s constraints against LGBT students, and Davis’s study,
conVersely, focuses more on merely acknowledging that such restrictions persist. This
dissertation will demonstrate the ways in which academic literacies sometimes act as
oppressive forces against LGBT students, explore how LGBT students negotiate these
forces, and also offer possible ways to rectify the problems that they present.
College Education Studies

In studies in college education in the 19903, two educators on the teaching of
literature, Joseph Cady and Diane Brunner, began to explore the place of queer
sexualities in the college classroom; specifically, both scholars acknowledged that LGBT
students must confront a hetero-nonnative literacies and suggested solutions for helping
LGBT students feel more included in the English classroom. Cady, an author of several
studies of gay literature in the Renaissance, as well as of essays on AIDS literature, wrote
the 1992 essay “Teaching Homosexual Literature as a ‘Subversive’ Act,” was one of the
first to note a hegemony that persists in English classrooms. Cady suggests that
instructors too often apply “new-inventionism” in academic literacies. According to
Cady, this “new-inventionism” wrongly claims that “homosexuality is a late nineteenth-
century ‘invention’”; instead, literature classes should acknowledge that homosexuality

has existed for centuries (103). To combat the constraints of new-inventionism, he

12

 

advocates the teaching of LGBT “material in historical perspective” (97). He would
rather focus on a historical period than do a broad survey course; he stresses the
importance of LGBT people knowing their history. A “new—inventionist” approach, on
the other hand, would examine only contemporary materials on queer culture. Brunner, a
theorist in critical pedagogy and perforrnativity from Michigan State University,
discusses her successes with using collaborative writing and performance in her college
literature classroom in her 1997 essay “Challenging Representations of Sexuality through
Story and Performance.” Her work focuses more on the potential of queer performative
space. Brunner’s students created “autobiographical narratives . . . that seemed especially
important for their own constructions of self” (179). They then “worked in teams to
script portions of each narrative into a play—a collective autobiography,” which “seemed
to uncover—unmask—some of the repressed shadows of both individual and collective
struggles to construct sexual and social identities” (179). Through this collaborative
writing effort, students developed their ability to deal with “sensitive subjects” as well as
their ability (re)articulate their words before an audience (180). Brunner thus concludes
that “The potential for transformative——even revolutionary—moments, then, occurs each
time we create a space for imagining the unimagined” (179).

While Cady does briefly acknowledge the hetero-normative constraints of
academic literacy that LGBT students must encounter, and offers a solution for dealing
with these constraints (a historical curriculum), my dissertation extends his original ideas
further. Cady’s syllabus of readings for his historical survey course includes “only
authors who we know or can reasonably determine were/are homosexual or bisexual and

only writing by such authors that express their homosexual feelings or experiences or that

 

 

 

are in some way responses to or reflections of the homosexual situation” (94). However,
my work suggests that other communities of writers—such as transgendered people and
straight individuals writing from queer perspectives-«also have much to offer LGB
communities, both in and out of classroom spaces. This study emphasizes inclusion,
rather than exclusion: we can find the ultimate solutions to achieving LGBT student
inclusion in academic literacy spaces by working together in language communities,
regardless of our sexual orientations. In addition, Cady seems to assume that a happy
medium between his perspective and “new-inventionism” (the suggestion that
homosexuality is a nineteenth—century invention) cannot be reached, but he does not
really explore any way to mediate the two, even though some students may find some
value in new-inventionism’s focus on contemporary culture. My work, by contrast,
attempts to find a place for “queer-friendly” individuals and for students who would find
some value in a “new-inventionist” approach of having current homosexual literature and
popular culture in the classroom. This solutions, I argue, may be located not just in new,
queer-fiiendly classroom pedagogical approaches, but also within language communities
outside the classroom, in which many individuals, straight and queer, students, faculty,
and administrators, may work together to make the LGBT community feel more included
in academic discourse.

Like Cady’s, Brunner’s work does indeed open up new opportunities for
classroom discourse, and acknowledges that queer voices may be sometimes
marginalized in English classrooms. However, we should keep in mind that Brunner’s
study here is more concerned with showing the liberating potential that performance may

create and the creation of “queer” classroom spaces than it is with providing LGBT

_=—I———-——“‘

students new voices in the classroom. My work resembles Brunner’s in its concern with
discovering transformative, inclusive pedagogies; however, it differs from hers in its
examination of LGBT student voices. Much time is spent in my study recounting the
words of LGBT students, in particular, and revealing their views on academic literacies.
Since my work pays such close attention to students’ direct words, we can develop an
even greater understanding of the identities of these marginalized students and the
literacy communities within which they participate.

Unlike most scholarship from the 19905, 21St century studies of LGBT college
students reveal a desire to examine more complex dimensions of queer academic
presence, such as the role of transgendered people in academe, or intersections between
race and sexual identity. Jody Norton, Lecturer in English Language and Literature and
Women’s Studies at Eastern Michigan University, is only one of select few to focus on
literacy’s violence against transgendered students in her 2000 essay “(Trans)gendering
English Studies.” She rightly points out that “the essentialist sex/gender binary
male/female [sic] remained largely uninterro gated until the 19905, and continues its de
facto dominance over our pedagogies, curricula, and critical writing to this day” (79).
Norton thus claims that those interested in sexuality studies have mostly ignored ways of
examining genders which exist out of this binary (transgenders), partly because this
binary still dictates classroom procedures and politics. Little space exists in academia for
transgendered studies. Both Christina Misa and Lisa Loutzenheiser, on the other hand,
examine intersections between racial concerns and LGBT students in academic literacies.
Misa, a lesbian activist and doctoral student at the University of Illinois, reveals how

Chicana/o students experience much more marginalization than those in the racial

15

majority. Throughout her 2001 essay “Where Have All The Queer Students of Color
Gone?,” she reports on her observations from interviewing three queer Chicana/o
students. Maria Elena, one of her interviewees, tells us that Chicana lesbian women often
lack an identity in academe. For example, when Maria Elena took a “Women of Color”
course, the professor spent five weeks talking about white, straight, middle class women,
and then five weeks on African American and Asian American women. “’The professor
said she forgot to include Chicana/Latina and queer literature’” and that ‘there isn’t
enough stuff out there to use for this course’” (qtd. in Misa 72). Lisa Loutzenheiser’s

9”

2001 essay “’IfI Teach about These Issues They will Burn Down My House also
focuses on the violence against queer literacies. Loutzenheiser, a doctoral candidate in
Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, notes that students often dissociate themselves from queer
perspectiveson purpose. For example, when her Class discussed the work of queer writer

‘65

Lorraine Hansberry, one of her students, Wanda, asserted that There ain’t no black
dykes, besides I think she’s [Lorraine Hansberry] only half black.”’ By saying this,
“[Wanda] left herself an out by saying that Hansberry was not queer, but even if she was,
it was only because she was partially white” (201 ). For African-American Wanda,
“queer” is defined only in white terms that having nothing to do with her culture. In
addition, Loutzenheiser claims that heterosexual students rarely address sexuality issues
in their narratives without prompting. Since her heterosexual students did not have to

think about, discuss, or question their sexuality to the extent that queer students do, they

had no impetus to write about sexuality.

16

Even though Norton effectively heightens her audience’s awareness of the paucity
of transgendered issues in the college classroom, her article contains three major gaps,
which I fill in with my work here. To begin with, her suggested solutions to the
problems she describes are overly general. She explains that “more complex and
sophisticated theories of sex/ gender” are sorely needed in order for us to discuss such
issues outside of the typical male/female dichotomy (85), but she doesn’t explain what
steps we may take to formulate such theories, or offer a theory herself. In this
dissertation, I offer a curricular theory on the basis of my research, which includes
specific activities in which the entire academic community may engage in order to
heighten the presence of the LGBT community in academe. In addition, Norton’s article
doesn’t relate to English classrooms all that much; she provides very few specifics on
how to do transreading in college English classrooms. Instead, she opts for a more
heavily theoretical approach and seems to assume that her reader will know how to apply
these theories. By contrast, my work puts more specific focus on application. This study
includes the development of a pedagogical theory and specific activities for its
implementation.

Misa emphasizes how curricular choices in the English classroom may make
Chicano/a students feel non-existent, but she says very little about how this situation may
be corrected. Even though Misa points out that “Educational researchers, teachers, and
students can benefit fiom using queer Chicana/o and Chicana feminist theoretical works
that challenge the silencing of multiple identities in various social, political, and
economic dynamics” (77), she does not offer educators much guidance as to how this can

be accomplished. For the most part, Misa appears more concerned with showing that the

17

violence of literacy affects LGBT students than she does with suggesting ways to rectify
this violence. My dissertation, on the other hand, deals with both of these concerns.
Chapters 4 through 6 concern the LGBT student negotiations of academic literacies, and
chapters 6 and 7 explain how these students (and lesbians in particular) find these
solutions through the building of language communities, both in person and online.

Loutzenheiser also elaborates on the problems that students have in dealing with
the language of the LGBT community, but does not sufficiently explain how such
problems may be solved. When Loutzenheiser comes out to her class, she notes that her
“actions altered the class dynamic” (204), and her students became more open about
discussion both race and sexuality concerns. Therefore, she implies that LGBT
instructors should be honest about their sexual orientation if they desire to see a change in
their students. However, she ignores the fact that some LGBT teachers may feel
uncomfortable doing this, and she refrains from suggesting what straight instructors may
do to initiate change. My work, on the other hand, suggests not only specific ways to
accomplish this “altering” of “the class dynamic” besides coming out, but also goes into
much more detail about how instructors may contribute to creating LGBT inclusion in
academic literacy spaces, regardless of their sexual or gender orientation.
Composition Studies

In the 19903, Harriet Malinowitz, Professor of English at Long Island University
and Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York, made the
most in-depth, thorough contribution to the field of queer composition studies thus far
with her 1995 book-length study of LGBT writers, Textual Orientations. The data in her

study comes from her lesbian and gay themed writing courses, as well as four case

18

studies of lesbian and gay writing students. She reveals that, unfortunately, all the
students in her study felt the need to either justify or suppress their queer identities in
their writing (Textual Orientations, 257). She learns that, in most writing classes, LGBT
“students will perceive risks which might inadvertently ‘out’ them as foolhardy, and see
the benefits of experimenting with writing as secondary to the need to maintain safety for
themselves” (Textual Orientations, 258). On the other hand, “an overtly gay-positive”
writing class “provides a place in which lesbian and gay students’ rhetorical knowledge
can be utilized, drawn on, and used as a foundation for their development as writers”
(Textual Orientations, 257-5 8).

In spite of Malinowitz’s important suggestion that a “gay—positive” writing class
may provide LGBT students with the rhetorical agency they so strongly crave, she does
not address the need for the subversion of homophobia in the regular composition
classroom until the end of her text, and, when she does, her suggestions are all too brief.
The best suggestion she offers is one that she describes as an “umbrella suggestion . . .
Learn about lesbian and gay people” (Textual Orientations, 25 8). She then goes on to
claim that specific “suggestions wouldn’t work, anyway” (Textual Orientations, 260).
She explains:

questions [on inclusion] are patently unanswerable because, in deferring to
the authority of an “expert,” they divest the asker of the authority to make
the very judgments that are requisite to dealing responsibly with the
subject in the first place. Furthermore, these questions suggest that “gay
students,” “straight students,” and “straight teachers” can be formulated as
generically constituted and manageable sets emptied of all . . . complexity,
heterogeneity, and particularity . . . (Textual Orientations, 260)

Malinowitz’s desire to want her audience to do their own thinking on this issue is

admirable, but she short—changes those who have been “dealing responsibly with the

19

subject” for years and want a carefully articulated curricular theory on LGBT classroom
pedagogy. My dissertation, assumes, by contrast, that the “asker” of whom Malinowitz
speaks here not only wants to learn more about LGBT pedagogical methods, but also
deserves some concrete, elaborate answers to his or her questions. Afier all, “learning
about lesbian and gay people” is not something that one should have to do in isolation; as
scholars, we can all help each other out in accomplishing this task, and we owe it to each
other to talk about LGBT inclusion in academic literacies in a less general way.

Three years later, compositionist Pamela Olano employed interviews of LGBT
students and faculty to stress how LGBT individuals often battle literacy’s violence.
After interviewing several gay and lesbian undergrads, graduate students, and instructors
in her 1998 article “The Unclaimed Self: Valuing Lesbian and Gay Diversity in the
Writing Environment,” Olano concludes that, in writing classrooms, queer students are
often forced to take on different types of queer identities, as out writers and as writers
still in the closet. She stresses that most LGBT individuals in writing classrooms are
NOT out writers; instead, they choose to hide their identities and assume false, straight
identities in their writings. For Olano, the academic writing environment has the
potential to serve as a stepping stone for real changes which challenge hetero-
normativity. She argues that students need to be given the freedom to write what they
want, and even lists some questions that writing instructors could consider when creating
their courses (87-89).

Olano’s work raises two, more major issues that my dissertation considers. First
of all, Olano’s article appears to assume that if students have the freedom to write what

they like, they will be more likely to write on LGBT issues. But when most students are

20

given the freedom to write what they want, most of them will not write about LGBT
concerns, because they do not see the issues as pertinent to their lives. Secondly, Olano’s
work forces me to query: what motivation will the resistant teacher have to address
LGBT concerns to an equally resistant group of students? Straight instructors may not
see the inclusion of LGBT issues as part of their social or curricular “responsibility” to
address, even in classes on multicultural issues. My dissertation concerns issues
involving both resistant students and resistant instructors. Throughout this study, we
shall see ways in which hetero-normative students and instructors often do resist student
engagement on LGBT concerns, and, consequently, LGBT students often develop
negative attitudes towards writing.

Richard Miller, whose 2000 article “Fault Lines in the Contact Zones” builds
upon the work of Mary Louise Pratt and Patricia Bizzell, reveals that some students will
even go out of their way to mock queer topics. He spends much time discussing a student

‘6,

essay called Queers, Burns, and Magic’”; in fact, “an entire panel” was devoted to this

essay at the 1992 4Cs conference (236). The student writer defines “’fags and bums’” as
“’the lowest class,”’ discusses surveying a man on Polk Street and asking him if he is “’a
fag,’” and describes. “urinating on a homeless person” (236). The faculty responses to the
essay at the 4Cs conference were strongly divided: they “fell into . . . three categories:
read the essay as factual and respond accordingly; read the essay as fictional and respond
accordingly; momentarily suspend the question of the essay’s factual or fictional status

and respond accordingly” (237). But instead of favoring one of these three suggested

solutions, Miller concludes his discussion by noting that instructors need to learn “how to

21

read, understand, and respond to the strange, sometimes threatening, multivocal texts
[students] produce while writing in the contact zone” (252).

As we can see, Miller focuses on explaining how literacy may oppress the LGBT
community (in this case, in the form of the student essay) rather on solving the violence
literacy presents. He heightens our awareness of the problem, but he refrains from taking
a firm stand on any solutions for addressing it. My dissertation, on the other hand,
accomplishes both these goals in more detail. It thoroughly explores different ways in
which LGBT students must negotiate academic literacies, and offers several solutions
which may make LGBT students feel more comfortable within academic literacy spaces.
In addition, my study also follows up on Miller’s work in that it examines other ways in
which student “contact zones” manifest themselves and even suggests ways in which
these contact zones may benefit students. Chapter 6 will reveal in more detail how
students may use these “contact zones” to establish a sense of community, which lesbian
students, in particular, find beneficial.

Electronic Literacy Studies

Other recent approaches to queer composition studies have examined how LGBT
students negotiate electronic literacies. The August 1997 special issue of Computers and
Composition included three major articles on LGBT student interactions with CMC
(Computer~Mediated Communication). Jonathon Alexander’s “Out of the Closet and
into the Classroom” suggests that gay and straight students alike can successfully use
CMC to talk about issues involving sexual orientation (207-16). He argues:

“ . . networked classrooms offer an unparalleled opportunity for students and teachers

to address issues of sexual orientation in powerful and unprecedented ways” (208).

22

Then, Scott DeWitt’s “Out There on the Web” examines how the World Wide Web helps
to shape the identities of LGBT students (229-44), and Michelle Comstock and Joanne
Addison’s “Virtual Complexities” encourages readers to examine the literacy
“cyberculture” that is beginning to emerge among young LGBT students. Comstock and
Addison also suggest that a relationship exists “between academic literacy and the literate
activities of this les-bi-gay youth cyberculture as well as how the discursive practices
enacted in such contexts can inform our classroom teaching” (248). Randal Woodland,
Director of the Writing Program at University of Michigan—Dearbom, also appears to
offer a viable solution to LGBT silences in revealing the queer potential of CMC for
writing and assessment purposes in his 2002 article “1 Plan to Be a 10: Online Literacy
for Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and Transgender Students.” After distributing questionnaires and
free response questions to many young LGBT people, Woodland. concludes that “The
results so far suggest that people coming out and coming into the larger community use
online resources in three major ways: to get information, to explore their identity, and to
find an audience” (7). He notes that CMC “creates a ‘safe space’ that seems free of most
of the oppressive forces that threaten people’s jobs, friendships, personal safety and even
their lives in real, physical communities” (8).

Most of these studies on electronic literacies tend to take a largely positive
approach to CMC: they see it as a liberatory pedagogy which assists LGBT students in
discussing issues which matter most to them. Anderson views CMC as “powerful,” and
both DeWitt and Woodland similarly insist that electronic discourse has a transformative
effect on the identities of LGBT students. And all of these studies focus exclusively on

students under 30 in the research samples, leaving readers Wonder how those over 30 feel

23

about the Internet. They also ignore other identity variables, such as race or ethnicity. In

 

addition, the brevity of these articles leaves much room for more work to be done, and
my dissertation attempts to fill in some of these gaps.

To begin with, my study indicates that LGBT student negotiations of electronic
pedagogies are more complex than some recent studies suggest. For example, I concur
with the aforementioned authors that some electronic literacies do indeed create an
important means for LGBT students to negotiate academic discourse. However, unlike
these authors, my focus here is on e-mail, listservs, and blogs (online journals), rather
than electronic chat: the students in this study found the asynchronous online
conversations—the ones in which they could form the strongest discourse communities--
to be the moSt valuable. By contrast,.my findings on synchronous chat are much less
positive than Anderson, DeWitt, and Woodland indicate. For the most part, the LGBT
interviewees in my study found electronic chat to be neither an important means of
negotiating academic discourse nor an effective means of assuaging the hegemony of
academic literacies. In addition, because of its depth, my dissertation better represents
the diversity of academic student populations than the aforementioned articles. It
includes students from ages 17-55, including several graduate students, and over twenty _
percent of both my questionnaire and interview samples include students of color.
Comstock and Addison’s willingness to explore the relationship between the disciplinary
literacies of the classroom and other literacy communities outside of class is indeed
admirable, and my dissertation follows up on their suggestion that we need to examine
LGBT student literacies—including electronic ones--outside classroom environments in

much more detail. It asks us to look more closely at LGBT literacies beyond the

24

 

classroom, the relationship between LGBT student language and the institutions which
determine academic language policies, and the discourse communities that students form
both online and on campus.
Conclusion

Overall, two major gaps exist in research on LGBT student literacy. The studies
which stress that “violence” exists in academic diScourse tend to ignore possible solutions
to the problem at the academic level. And, by contrast, the solution-oriented works tend
to refrain from detailing the nature of this “violence.” Very few studies have been done
on LGBT students and academic discourse, so my dissertation attempts to fill in gaps left
by these other works. It is much broader in scope than most other studies which have
examined this t0pic, so it allows me to examine both manifestations of academic
hegemony against LGBT students and the possible solutions to it. The major questions
of my dissertation are as follows: How do LGBT students negotiate academic literacies?
And what solutions exist to make LGBT students feel more included in academic literacy
spaces? To find the answers to these questions, I distributed over 100 questionnaires to
LGBT college students, and then held over 50 hours of interviews with them. My study
has two major findings. To begin with, I found that LGBT students tend shun writing
activities in which they feel they cannot build strong language communities. When the
sense of community is weak, LGBT students have negative attitudes towards writing,
both in and out of the classroom. This negative view of writing also includes chat room
discourse, which the students in this study view as ephemeral and fragmentary. On the
other hand, my study also shows that LGBT students, particularly lesbian students, have a

strong desire to form language communities outside classroom environments, both in

25

person and in non-synchronous online forums. In the last chapter of this dissertation, on
the basis of my findings, I offer a research plan which suggests that we must examine the
issue of LGBT student inclusion in academic literacies not just from a classroom
perspective, but from an institutional perspective as well. Assuaging the hetero-
norrnative constraints of these literacies should involve the entire academic community:

students, teachers, and administrators alike.

26

“I’ve Never Thought about These Questions Before”: Data Collection and Analysis
Overview

When I interviewed Kadij ah, an African-American bisexual student, at a local
coffee shop, I noticed that she seemed thrilled to be there. She was extremely
personable: she talked a lot during the interview, asked me questions as well, and smiled
constantly. Near the end of the interview, she noted that she had to get to class soon. But
she kept talking. And talking. Eventually, she said, “Oh, it’s ok if I miss some of this
class. I can get it on tape anyway.” By the end of the interview, she said, “You know, I
love doing this. I’ve never thought about these questions before.” About a week later, I
received an e-mail from her, claiming that she “really enjoyed” the interview, and she
signed it with “much love.”

I, of course, was ecstatic that Kadijah was so pleased to be asked questions about
how her sexual identity relates to academic literacies. However, I was also sad that she
hadn’t considered these questions before. Judging from her beaming smile throughout
the interview, it didn’t seem as if she didn’t care about them. Had she not had the
opportunities? If not, why not? My experience with Kadijah made me think even more
about LGBT students and. the ways in which they'deal with hetero-normativity in
academic literacies. It also reminded me of the many gaps that still exist in the current
research on this topic. Our language, after all, is hetero-normative, so many teachers and
scholars perceive this as normal and natural, and do not see a need to explore how
language’s hetero-normativity affects LGBT students. Harriet Malinowitz suggests two
important questions that college educators need to explore: “Are the conditions that

produced lesbian and gay students’ rhetorical self-consciousness reproduced or altered in

27

. . . class? And, as a result, is their language subverted, or supported?” (Textual
Orientations, 25 8). If LGBT students do suppress their queer identities in class, where,
indeed, do LGBT identities belong in academe? To help answer such questions, this
dissertation focuses not only on exploring the nature of academic hetero-normativity in
more detail, but also on the best solutions to assuage the discursive constraints which
hetero-normativity presents to LGBT students in academic communities. My key
research questions here are as follows: How do LGBT students negotiate their way
through academic language communities? And what can be done to make them feel
more included within these communities? To answer these questions, I collected data
through both questionnaires and interviews and then analyzed it through the lenses of
both perfonnative and discourse theory. This section explains the ways in which the
questionnaires and interviews were designed and the reasons behind my methodological
choices. I then go on to explain why perforrnative and discourse theory were particularly
helpful to me in analyzingmy data fiom this study.
Data Collection
The Questionnaire

I began the research by designing a questionnaire. 1 divided the questionnaire into
four sections (See Appendix A), and I employed a Likert scale on its first three sections.
This Likert scale enabled me to assign single numbers to individual students’ attitudes
and beliefs, and this allowed for simple, straightforward measuring. And since students
only needed to select a number from 1 to 5 for most of the questions, they were able to
complete the questionnaire quickly, which provided an impetus for them to do the

questionnaire in the first place.

28

 

In section one of the questionnaire, I attempted to discover how LGBT college
students negotiate academic literacies. I wanted to investigate major ways through which
students might encounter the constraints of academic literacy, so I included reading,
writing, speaking, and public actions here. I purposely placed similar types of questions
next to each other in the questionnaire for ease of comparison: questions one and two
focus on reading; questions three through five focus on writing; questions six and seven
focus on speaking; and questions eight through ten focus on public actions taken by the
students to negotiate academic literacies. Placing questions dealing with similar tOpics
adjacent to each other on the questionnaire enabled me to see comparisons and contrasts
within categories (reading, writing, speaking, and public actions) at a glance.

Since the placesfin which these literacy negotiations take place as well as the
frequency with which they occur may have some influence on student attitudes, I thought
it was important to learn where and. how often students engaged in literacy activities as
well. Therefore, section two of the questionnaire focuses on the literacy forums that
students most often use to discuss LGBT issues, and the frequency with which they do so
(see Appendix A, Section 11). As with section one, I placed similar types together here,
again, for ease of comparison; this organizational method helped me to categorize the
different types of literacy forums which exist in academe. Statements one and two
investigate students’ use of electronic forums; statements three through five focus on
students’ use of campus literacy forums; and statements six through eight stress students’

use of social settings as literacy forums for LGBT issues.

Next, I wanted to focus more on ways to rectify the problems that academic

literacy presents for LGBT students, so section three of the questionnaire attempted to

29

discover the solutions that students perceived as the most feasible ones for assuaging the
“violence” of academic literacies (see Appendix A, Section III). Statements one through
nine from Part IH deal with solutions that may take place in the classroom, whereas
statements ten through fifteen concern possible solutions outside the classroom
environment. I included more here on solutions in the classroom than outside the
classroom because I originally assumed that most of the solutions would be found in
classroom spaces. However, I eventually learned that most students perceive inclusion of

LGBT student literacies as an institutional concern.

In section four of the study, students wrote in responses to some demographic
questions (see Appendix A, Section IV). I wanted to measure demographics to add some
complexity to the study; these demographics would enable me to learn if certain types of
students were more likely to engage in certain activities more than others. This
demographic section proved to be particularly helpful for my discussion in Chapter 7 on
lesbians and their attitudes toward the building of language communities. I had the
students write in responses here rather than provide scaled responses for two reasons.
First of all, Iwanted to give them some agency in describing themselves for the study.
Secondly, LGBT/queer students tend to be particularly sensitive about labels. For
example, if I had presented a scale which read, “What is your gender? Circle 1 for male
and 2 for female,” the transgendered students would have felt excluded. Even if I had
included a “3 for transgendered,” many of the students still would have felt annoyed, for
several of them explained to me that they see gender as a much more complex system

than two or three categories. Similarly, students’ sexualities, majors, and even class rank

30

are often perceived by the students in ambiguous ways, and I wanted to leave some room
for this ambiguity in my study.

I then began my data collection by sending out e-mail requests for research
participants to over 75 LGBT student organizations around the country. Most of the
organizations were located in the mid-Michigan area, but I also sent my request to places
as geographically diverse as New York University, University of California at Berkeley,
and the University of Alabama. Several LGBT student organizations then invited me to
come to their student organizational meetings, including organizations at Michigan State
University, Jackson Community College, University of Toledo, and Grand Rapids
Community College. Some asked to see copies of the questionnaire beforehand, so I
would send copies of it via e-mail. Most questionnaires were distributed and filled out at
these LGBT student organizational meetings, but some students preferred to mail their
responses to me individually. All students who received the questionnaire were asked to
sign and return a consent document along with the questionnaire. This document let
them know that their responses were confidential, explained to them that their words will
be used for my research purposes only, and reminded them that their participation was
strictly voluntary.

The students for the study came from three different sources: (1) LGBT student
organizations (including the Alliance, RING, and SGL Students of Color at Michigan
State; the Gay-Straight Alliance at Grand Rapids Community College; and Spectrum at
the University of Toledo); (2) an LGBT student resource fair at Michigan State
University; and (3) my LGBT friends and acquaintances. Overall, 105 LGBT college

students completed the questionnaire. The numerical breakdown by college and

31

 

university is as follows: 52 from Michigan State University; 14 each from the University
of Toledo and Grand Valley State University; 12 from Grand Rapids Community
College; 5 from Albion College; 2 each from Lansing Community College and Jackson
Community College; and 1 each from University of California at Berkeley, Western
Michigan University, Central Michigan University, and Texas (College/University
unknown).

I want to stress here that I did not always hand the questionnaire to the participant
directly; sometimes, the participants received the questionnaire from other sources and
then it was delivered to me. For example, unbeknownst to me, the advisor of the Gay-
Straight Alliance at Grand Rapids Community College copied my questionnaire off e-
mail and then distributed it at- Grand Valley State University. He collected the
questionnaires and then returned. them to me. The questionnaire from Berkeley was
forwarded to a student, who mailed his responses to me. I also received one
questionnaire from a graduate student in Texas who did not identify his university or
college affiliation. Since I sent no questionnaires or calls for research participants to
Texas, I have no idea how this student received it. Consequently, I began to understand
that because the students’ responses were self-reported and not random, they lend
themselves to descriptive statistical analysis rather than inferential.

Sometimes in Section Four (“Demographics”), students wrote down more than
one response to a question, because they perceived certain aspects of their identities as
dualities. For example, some would. identify their “race’ as “Caucasian/Native
American” or their sexual identity as “gay/queer.” Because I counted all written

responses in tabulating my demographic results, I have more than 105 responses in some

32

demographic categories. Appendix B indicates some of the demographic breakdowns for
the questionnaire. The tables in Appendix B reveal that the majority of participants in the
questionnaire portion of the study were between the ages of 18 and 21 (63 out of 105).
The median age for questionnaire participants was 22.79, and the age range was from 17
to 50. Furthermore, the table on ethnic background shows that 22.0% (24 out of 109) of
the questionnaire participants’ responses to the “ethnicity” question indicated racial
minority status. African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Arab-Americans, and
Asians were all a part of the questionnaire’s racial demographic. We can also see that a
slight majority of the questionnaire participants self-identified as female (53 out of 105).
The study also included 46 males, three transgendered students, and an intersexed student
(who has both male and female genitals). In terms of sexual orientation, most of the
students who filled out the questionnaire identified themselves as “gay” or “homosexual”
(38 out-of 111). The questionnaire participants also included 27 who self-identified as
“lesbian” or “dyke”; 24 who identified themselves as “bisexual”; 10 “queer” students; 6
“straight”; and 6 other responses. We might wonder why “gay” was the most prevalent
sexual orientation when the questionnaire study mostly consisted of women. This is
partially explained by the fact that, out of the 24 individuals who identified as bisexual,
18 of them also self-identified as female. We might assume that this occurred because
“gay” is traditionally used as an umbrella term for both “lesbians” and “gays,” much the
way that traditional Western discourse referring to “men” is often meant to include
“women” as well. However, no questionnaire respondents in this study identified
themselves as both “gay” and “female,” which indicates that the common practice of

lesbians referring to themselves as “gay” is apparently changing.

33

The questionnaire demographics also indicate that a majority of the participants in
the study were humanities or social science majors (58 out of 114). For the purpose of
fornring “major” categories, I defined “humanities major” as anyone majoring in English,
Art, History, Philosophy, Religion, Dance, Theatre, or other similar fields. Anyone
majoring in Political Science, Urban Planning, Pre-Law, Psychology, Sociology,
Anthropology, or other like fields was defined as a “social sciences major” in this study.
13 out of 114 declared majors were from medicine/health care fields, such as Pre-Med,
Pre-Vet, Pharmacy, or Radiation Technology. In addition, Appendix B indicates that the
four most popular career goals for questionnaire participants were teaching (19 out of
114), undecided (14 out of 114), medicine/health care (13 out of 114), and a graduate
degree (11 out of 1 14).
The Interviews

Once the students’ answers to these questions were obtained, 1 followed up the
questionnaire with 32 one-time interviews with a select group of students who completed
the questionnaire. Students indicated on the questionnaire that they were willing to be
interviewed, and then I contacted them by e-mail or phone to arrange for the interview.
All interviews were recorded in their entirety, so the students interviewed were asked to
sign an additional line on the consent document indicating their willingness to be tape-
recorded. The interviewees came from the following institutions: 18 from Michigan
State University; 4 from Grand Rapids Community College; 3 from the University of
Toledo; 2 from Lansing Community College; and 1 each from Albion College, Central
Michigan University, Western Michigan University, Jackson Community College, and

the University of California-Berkeley. The interviews for the students from University of

34

 

 

Toledo, as well as the interview with the student at UC-Berkeley, were done by phone.
All other interviews were done in person. Each interview lasted about 80 minutes, on
average: the shortest took only 15 minutes (the student only wanted to tell a brief story),
and the longest took two and a half hours.

These one-time interviews took place during the Fall 2003 semester. Overall,
each interview followed a specific process. During the meeting, the student and I
discussed his or her questionnaire responses and I asked my follow-up questions. I took
copious notes during each meeting, and audio-recorded all student responses. After the
meeting, I looked over my notes, filling in the gaps to clarify my understanding. Usually
I did this in front of the student, so, if I had a question or needed something clarified, I
could ask the student before he or she left.

I began most of the interviews by asking students why they choose to write/not
write on LGBT topics in the classroom and why they choose to write/not write on LGBT
topics outside the classroom. I asked these particular questions to gain some sense of
their writing practices both in and out of classroom environments; I wanted to be able to
see whether their writing habits differed in the two places. Their responses then enabled
me to answer one of the major questions of this study: how do LGBT students negotiate
academic literacies?

Then I asked them if there are other strategies (that are not listed on the
questionnaire) that they use to engage with LGBT issues in the academic world, and, if
so, what are they. I asked this question in order to make sure that we covered issues that
the questionnaire did not. Since student responses here went beyond the areas I had

originally envisioned, I was able to use the question to broaden my understanding of how

35

the students negotiate academic literacies. Including this section enabled me to discover,
for example, more about student online literacies, especially their use of blog
communities.

Next, I asked students which of the proposed solutions on the questionnaire they
feel would work best towards making LGBT students feel more included in academic
literacies and why. I followed this up by asking them what suggestions they would have
for teachers who want to bring these topics into the classroom. Once I completed these
questions, I explored their flip side: I asked the students which of the proposed solutions
on the questionnaire they felt would not work well and why, and what they would warn
teachers against doing when trying to address LGBT issues in the classroom. The
“solutions” question (and its opposite) directly enabled me to answer the second major
question of this study: what are the best means of assuaging the constraints of literacy
against the LGBT student population? And the questions about the teachers asked the
students to think about the “solutions” from a classroom-specific context. The questions
regarding the teachers make the assumption that teachers have the power to affect
language and literacy policy in the classroom, so I asked students these questions to make
them more aware that teachers do have this power. Yet, these questions also afforded
students a sense of power as well: instead of being evaluated by teachers, the students
were put in a position of evaluating their instructors’ work, which gave them a sense of
agency.

I then asked the students if there are other solutions to solve the problem of
ignoring LGBT student voices in the classroom that were not on the questionnaire, and

what they would be. As with the earlier question asking for additional student input that

36

goes beyond the boundaries of the questionnaire, I asked this question in order to make
sure that we covered solutions that the questionnaire did not anticipate. This question
enabled me to broaden my understanding of the solutions to assuaging the hegemony of
academic literacies. Many of the students’ responses, for example, helped me to
understand how inclusion of LGBT students needs to occur within all academic contexts,
not just the classroom. For example, Tim, a transgender student, made me realize that
“residence hall directors” play a role in dictating language policies at any institution, and
this was something I had not anticipated prior to designing my questionnaire.

I concluded the interview by asking them the extent to which they feel it’s
important to include LGBT issues in the classroom, and then followed this question by
asking them about the extent to which they think LGBT issues are related to issues of ’
race, gender, class, and age. I employed the first question to discover their perceptions of
the classroom as a context for learning about their own identities: can the classroom serve
as a literacy community within which they feel comfortable exploring LGBT concerns?
Virtually every student interviewed did indeed feel that classrooms should play at least a
partial role in addressing sexuality issues. The second question focuses more on
intersections of identity, which, in turn, enabled some students to feel more comfortable
talking about themselves and their experiences. In fact, when students seemed
particularly nervous, I often started with this question as an “icebreaker.” When students
reflected upon the intersections between their identities, it enabled me to get a strong
sense of the oppressiveness that they experience in academic literacy contexts. For
example, Hal and Lechele, two African-American interviewees, perceived academic

literacies not just as biased against LGBT students, but as racially biased as well.

37

As the study progressed, I began to realize that my first two questions (on writing
behaviors inside and outside of the classroom) were far too specific and didn’t really get
the students talking much about their own experiences with LGBT issues. Therefore, I
came to discover that a series of follow-up questions proved to be useful for these two
questions in particular. When asking students about their writing behaviors in the
classroom, I often asked many of these follow-up questions:
Tell me about your experiences with LGBT topics in the classroom. Do
you make concerted efforts to bring up LGBT concerns? Why or why
not? If you did, how did your teacher/classmates react? How did they
respond to your writing? Have you done readings on LGBT topics in
class? If so, what were they?

And when I asked the students about their writing outside the classroom, I often

asked many similar questions:
Tell me about your experiences with LGBT topics outside the classroom.
What kind of writing and reading do you do? What do you write about
more, personal or political issues? Do you write articles? Editorials? Do
you keep any kind of j oumal? In what kind of environments? Where do
you tend to engage in LGBT issues the most? Do you use chat or e-mail?
How about student organizations: what’s your involvement with them?
To what extent do you feel comfortable talking about these issues at
friends’ houses/coffee houses/restaurants/community groups?

My goal with these questions was not only to get the students to open up, but also to

develop more detailed, specific responses to my questions. By asking these follow up

questions, I was able to learn a great deal that I would have not have learned if I had

asked just the original, more vague questions.

In addition, I found that my question which asked the students to reflect on
intersections between their identities as LGBT individuals and other aspects of their lives

often resulted in vague responses. Therefore, I often asked two follow-up questions with

this question that required the students to give more personal responses:

38

What was it like for you growing up (e.g., a black lesbian/gay in Jackson,
MI/a Jewish bisexual)? Was there anything that you read or saw in the
media that helped you to come out?
When I asked these follow-up questions, the students were more likely to focus on
specific events in their lives, and therefore started to articulate more clearly their
interactions in literacy communities both in and out of classroom environments. In
addition, the question on the media enabled them to connect their negotiations of their
sexual identities to the major literacy events of their lives.

The demographics of my interview subjects closely resembled those of my
questionnaire participants. As with the questionnaire demographics, if interviewees
wrote down more than one response to a demographic question, I counted all responses in
tabulating my results, which explains why I have more than 32 responses in some
categories. Interview participants ranged in age from 18 to 43, and, as Appendix C
reveals, with the average age of the interviewees 22.81 (almost identical to the average
age of those who participated in the questionnaire—22.79). Similarly, the interview
sample resembled the questionnaire sample in terms of ethnic diversity: 22.0% of the
questionnaire participants’ responses to the “ethnicity” question identified the students as
racial minorities, and 21.2% (7 out of 33) of the interviewees’ responses to this question
also indicated the same. Most of the interviewees (46.9%) self-identified as female; a
majority (50.5%) of the questionnaire participants were female as well. And, as with the
questionnaire, the most common sexual orientation among the interviewees was “gay”

(30.3%). In addition, just like the questionnaire participants, most of the interview

participants were humanities or social science majors (27 out of 41) and defined teaching

39

as their career goal (6 out of 35). Thus the interviewee sample reflects the demographics
of those students who participated in the questionnaire portion of the study.

However, there were two key differences in the demographics of the interviewee
participants. The first was in terms of gender: while only 4 out of 105 questionnaire
participants self-identified as transgendered or intersexed (3.8%), transgendered and
intersexed students were much better represented in the interviews. Fortunately, out of
the four transgendered and intersexed students, three of them completed interviews; thus,
my interview sample had 9.3% trans gendered/intersexed students—a percentage
considerably higher than that in my questionnaire. Additionally, I noticed a second key
difference in terms of career goals. Four out of the five students who defined their career
goal as “law” or something involving social justice (e. g., lobbyist, union organizer) were
also interviewed. Therefore, students with interests in these fields were much better
represented in my interview sample (19%) than in my questionnaire sample (4.4%).
Methodological Complications

Besides these two differences between my questionnaire and interview sample,
there were other unexpected complications with the methodology as well. For example,
with the questionnaires, six students who identified as either “straight” or “ally” filled out
the questionnaire, even though each time I distributed the questionnaire I explained that it
was for LGBT students only. While one of these “straight” individuals also self-
identified as transgender (which qualified him for the survey), most of them did not. I
originally did not intend to include straight students in this study because I assumed that
straight students are more likely to accept (and even help shape) the hetero-nonnative

practices of their literacy communities, and thus are less likely to perceive such practices

40

as “violent” literacies. In fact, they could even be the perpetrators of such “violence”
against LGBT students. However, (four) straight students at Grand Valley went ahead
and filled it out anyway, without realizing that it was intended only for LGBT students.
In addition, one individual wrote on her survey that she was an ally of the community,
but wanted to be counted, just the same. Therefore, I decided that if straight students
identified with the LGBT community so strongly that they wanted to fill out a
questionnaire, then they should be included. I realized the irony of the situation: I was
doing a study to try to make LGBT students feel more included in academic literacy
spaces, yet I was attempting to exclude heterosexual students by doing so. After all, as
allies of the community, these straight individuals may be just as aware of the “violence”
of literacy against the LGBT community as LGBT students themselves are, perhaps even
more so in some cases. Straight students may engage in literacy practices from queer
perspectives that have nothing to do with their sexual orientation. So, even though
inclusion of allies (or queer students with straight sexual orientations) was not my
original intention in this study, I ended up making an effort to count not just the LGBT
individuals, but the allies of the community as well.

Another complication with the questionnaire came with the first statement in Part
I. The statement reads, “When asked to do a research paper, I read as much LGBT-
oriented material as I can,” and then students were asked to circle the number which best
indicates their level of agreement with this statement. However, several times after the
questionnaires were passed out, students came up to me and asked, “What do you mean
by ‘research paper’ ?” I answered this question by telling them, “Any paper that

involves outside research, primary or secondary, rather than just personal experience.”

41

Fortunately, this response was able to clear up the confusion for most of the questionnaire
participants. In spite of this, however, their confusion made me wonder whether the
statement had been phrased correctly. I considered that perhaps I should have written
“For my college classes, I read about LGBT topics as often as possible,” to correspond
with the third statement in Part I, which reads “For my college classes, I write on LGBT
topics as often as possible.” However, I also thought about the fact that, for the most
part, students are often given more freedom in terms of their writing assignments than
their reading assignments in college. In fact, none of my interviewees talked about
having the choice to read certain books for their college classes, but several of them were
given choices or open topics in writing assignments. Typically, college students must
read'required texts in their courses assigned to them by their instructors, and, by and
large, these texts do not concern LGBT issues. Students are given the most choices about
reading, oddly enough, when doing writing assignments that involve outside reading,
such as research papers. Therefore, I feel that the “When asked to do a research paper”
clause is justified in that statement.

In addition, during the interviews, many of the interviewees wanted to share
aspects of their “coming out” stories with me, and several desired discuss the
oppressiveness of religious rhetoric in their lives. Even though I had not originally
anticipated that they would want to address these issues, I allowed them the opportunity
to speak about them as much as they wished. Thus for many of them the interview
became a kind of catharsis, an opportunity for them to vent about the oppressiveness they
felt, and therefore they often approached the interviews as a kind of a therapy session.

Although I knew that I was unlikely to use much of these “vents” in my actual

42

dissertation, I sat back and listened to their stories, giving them the opportunity to express
themselves.

A more difficult problem with the interviews resulted from asking the students
about proposed solutions to making LGBT students feel more included in academic
literacy contexts. When I asked the students “Which of the proposed solutions on the
questionnaire do you feel would not work well? Why?” many of them mentioned the
statement from Part HI which referred to encouraging “performance as a mode of
classroom expression.” Their biggest complaint about it was not that they thought it
would be ineffective, but that they just did not understand what it meant. Quite of few of
them said “I wasn’t sure what you meant by ‘performance.”’ I answered their questions
by saying that I was referring to role-play or acting, as one might see on a stage. Once I
said this, most of them were better able to comprehend the question; in fact, some of
them even changed their minds and said that they would now give that statement a higher
rating, since they now understood what I meant. I did wonder, however, why none of the
questionnaire participants asked me to clarify the meaning of “performance” while they
were doing the questionnaire, as they did for the meaning of “research paper.” After all,
the Likert scales on both parts of the questionnaire allowed the students an option to
indicate uncertainty (3=not sure in both Parts I and HI). Perhaps since the phrase
“research paper” occurred early in the questionnaire, they did not mind interrupting the
flow of their work at that time. However, since the term “performance” shows up when
the students have already completed most of the questionnaire, perhaps they wanted to
hurry up and finish, and did not want to be interrupted. Other than this speculation,

however, no other reason for this disparity is evident.

43

 

Yet another methodological complication concerning both my questionnaire and
my interviews involves the degree to which the students in both samples were open about
their sexual/gender orientation. Since my questionnaires were distributed at on-campus
organizational meetings for LGBT student groups, most of the students surveyed had to
be comfortable enough with their orientation to be seen with Openly LGBT individuals,
and/or to be openly LGBT themselves. I could only distribute the questionnaire,
therefore, to those individuals who were willing to self-identify as LGBT; it quickly
occurred to me that distributing the questionnaire to closeted students would have been a
difficult, if not near impossible, task. So the questionnaire sample was limited in the
sense that it could not include those LGBT students who were too fearful of
discrimination to self-identify as LGBT, or those who had no desire to align themselves
with the LGBT community. I also noticed that most of the students who volunteered for
interviews tended to be the biggest activists; quite often, they were officers in the LGBT
student organizations, and had the strongest feelings about my topics. These students
were most likely to appreciate the social importance of my study; they seemed to
perceive it as a way for the LGBT student community to achieve more recognition.
Students who were less active in the LGBT community, perhaps still with a long way to
go in the “coming out” process, tended to be less likely to volunteer for interviews.
Strangely enough, some of the LGBT student organizational officers tended to keep their
involvement in the LGBT community separate fiom other aspects of their lives. For
example, some male interviewees in particular, who were officers in their LGBT
organizations, told me that very few (if any) people know about their involvement in

these groups—they worried that it might hurt their career if they were found out. They

44

tended to want the door shut during our conversations, or desire to speak in a completely
private environment. Overall, though, my study was characterized by openness: the
questionnaire participants in my study tended to be openly LGBT, and the interview
participants tended not only to be openly LGBT, but also very socially and politically
active in the LGBT community. Because of this, it was difficult for me to obtain
questionnaire and interview participation from both open and closeted LGBT students.
A final methodological complication involves the limited scope of my study.
One might reasonably wonder why I chose not to compare LGBT negotiations of
academic literacies with LGBT negotiations of literacies outside academic spaces. After
all, academic literacies may afford LGBT students literacy privileges that other, non-
college—bound individuals, do not receive. As participants within academic literacies,
LGBT students,like all other students, assimilate themselves, at least to some extent, into
communities which pride themselves on perpetuating “’an ideology of established
authority’” (Aronowitz and Giroux 185; qtd. in Brown 6), thus separating themselves
further from what Gee would call their “primary discourse” communities of their friends
and families. In spite of these differences between academic and non-academic language
communities, however, I decided to focus only on “academic literacies” here for several
reasons. To begin with, most studies on LGBT literacies exarrrine only classroom spaces
and avoid discussions of non-classroom spaces as well. As I described in Chapter 1,
most of these studies either describe the oppressive conditions LGBT students must
endure in classroom spaces, or suggest things that teachers, in particular, can do to make
LGBT individuals feel more included in classrooms; my dissertation, on the other hand,

asserts that a variety of literacy communities compose academe: as I mentioned in

45

Chapter 1, these include disciplinary literacies, such as those in classroom spaces, and
campus literacies, which often concern student negotiations of their personal and
professional lives. Secondly, the few studies which do stress LGBT students’ literacy
lives outside academic spaces focus on K-12 students rather than students in college, thus
rendering comparison between LGBT student literacies and other LGBT adult literacies
difficult. Mollie V. Blackburn, for example, reveals that her work at a “youth-run center”
for “LGBTQ youths” enabled her to understand how, for LGBT students, “Literacy
performances . . . are one way to create opportunities for social change” (“Disrupting”
312; 322). From her experiences at this center, Blackburn learned that young LGBT
students “are able to reveal, interrogate, destabilize, and challenge inequitable power
dynamics through . . . reading and writing . . . reading and writing of words served, in this
case, to reify inequitable power dynamics among queer people” (“Exploring” 487).
Similarly, Lamme and Lamme’s work celebrates how children have “’figured out their
own language’” which helps them to identify their two moms or two dads (Capps H1;
qtd. in Lamme and Lamme 13). Caroll and Serwatka, however, take a more negative
view on LGBT youths’ literacy development in corrrrnunities outside of academe. They
state: “As bad as their school experiences may be, for some GLB youths these
experiences may be no worse than their experiences at home” (162); the same culture of
silence surrounding LGBT issues in academic literacy spaces tends to persist in youths’
home communities as well. Finally, evidence indicates that no major studies exist on
LGBT individuals’ literacy lives outside the academic world, which firrther prevented me
fi‘om doing comparative work between the academic and non-academic literacy

Communities of LGBT people. As Hart explains: “statistics on literacy have never been

46

gathered [on the LGBT population] “ (2). However, many stories of LGBT individuals
reveal “the insatiable desire for reading, the difficult and dangerous search for books
about lesbianism, trips to the library to riffle through the card catalogue looking for the
word homosexuality, letters written to confused and often angry parents . . .” (Hart 7).
Clearly, LGBT people have stories to tell about their experiences with literacy outside
academe, but the importance of the topic merits a much larger, separate study than mine
can hope to pursue here.
Data Analysis
Phenomenological Categorization

Because I gathered a huge quantity of data through the questionnaires and
interviews, it was important for me to make meaningful categories from it. This creation
of meaningful categories can be accomplished through reflective phenemological
analysis, which"‘interpret[s] the aspects of meaning or meaningfulness” from the
collected-data (van Manen, “Methods and Procedures,” par. 2). Additionally, Max van
Manen claims that “Ultimately phenomenological inquiry cannot be separated from the
practice of writing” (“Phenomenological Inquiry,” par. 7). Therefore, a
phenomenological inquiry fits well with my study in literacy negotiations. For this
phenomenological study, I examined each type of data separately. I first looked at the
questionnaire data. I examined each statement of the questionnaire separately. First, I
asked whether the students tend to agree with the statements in. Part I. A mathematical
average of 3.5 or higher on any statement would indicate an inclination to agree with that
statement. Then I asked myself whether students tend to find the suggested solutions in

Part II effective. Again, a 3.5 average would indicate an inclination to view a solution as

47

 

effective. Next, I looked for patterns in the findings, and attempted to discover whether
significant demographic comparisons/contrasts existed. After doing this, I tried to
discover the meanings of these patterns, and then group them into key themes/ideas.
Finally, I integrated the key themes/ideas into a narrative description for my results.

Once the questionnaire analysis was complete, I moved on to my interview data.
As I listened to my interviews and read over my notes, I attempted to learn the patterns in
the words, phrases, and expressions the students use to discuss their self-negotiations and
solutions to the violence of literacy against LGBT students. I also attempted to discover
whether significant demographic comparisons/contrasts existed. The rest of my
phenomenological categorization was identical to that for the questionnaire data: 1
established meanings of the major patterns, grouped these meanings into key
themes/ideas, and then worked these key themes/ideas into a narrative description to use
in describing my results.
The Usefulness of Performative Theory

Performative theory proved helpful to me in my data analysis. The roots of this
theory may be located in J. L. Austin’s 1955 How to Do Things with Words. Here Austin
notes that most of the world perceives speech utterances as either true or false; these are
called “constative” utterances. However, he proposes a second category of utterances
that are not subject to such truth/false conditions. Rather, these utterances are acts in
themselves; Austin calls them performatives. The perforrnative utterance, in contrast to
the constative, is the reality it describes. Examples of perforrnative utterances include the
acts of naming, marrying, bequeathing and betting (5). Richard VanOort explains:

“[W]hen I utter, "I name this ship HMS Hermes," I do not describe a state of affairs in the

4s

real world. Rather I bring a state of affairs into existence by virtue of my utterance. The
act of naming is simultaneously the reference of my statement. The perforrnative is
therefore, in the most rigorous sense, an act and not a representation of something else”
(par. 1). In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler builds upon this idea by relating it to
gender identity. Butler declares: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender; identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to
be its results” (Gender Trouble, 25). Thus Butler reveals that gender is a performance; it
comes into being when we act it out in our society. When we self-identity as “male” in
our culture, for example, we consciously attempt to act out the ways in which we are told
that males behave. In America, traditionally males are expected to wear pants, keep their
hair short, support their families financially, love sports, and refrain fiom displaying too
much emotion. Males therefore perform their male gender through such appearance and
behavior cues of “maleness”; that is how we know they are male. When individuals who
are expected to perform “male” deviate from this performance, they are often referred to
as “queer.”

Therefore, one way this theory has been applied is to analyze the cultural
construction of “queer.” David Halperin, a professor in gay and lesbian studies at the
University of Michigan, defines “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the
legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessary refers. It is
an identity without an essence” (qtd. in Gauntlett, par. 12). Performative theory works
well with queer analysis because the “queer” comes into being through perforrnative
utterances and gestures. If the dominant culture names something as “queer,” it becomes

queer. Katherine Liepe-Levinson uses perforrnative theory to analyze the cultural and

49

 

political significance of strip shows; Sedgwick employs it “to explore techniques for non-
dualistic thought and pedagogy”; and Butler has recently used it to examine pornographic
speech acts and the censorship of homosexual issues in the military (Excitable Speech).
Such pornographic, non-dualistic, and homosexual concerns are all considered “queer” in
Western culture.

Typically, this theory asks the following questions: How is “queer”
culturally performed (Fuchs, Hanson, Rarnbuss)? What functions do “queer”
performances serve in our culture (Liepe-Levinson, Butler)? How do we define deviant
sexual or gender identities, and where do they belong in our society (Butler, Bomstein,
Brunner)? The examination of such questions helped me to understand my data because,
like perforrnative theory, my data concerned notions of queer (particularly LGBT) self-
expression and self—negotiation. It explored the extent to which LGBT students perform
their queer sexualities or gender identities, their forums for such expression, and possible
solutions to prevent the “violence” against LGBT expressions in the academic world.
My study shows that, in classroom environments, where students engage in literacy
practices, they often choose to perform straight sexualities which conform more to
traditional gender identities in order to achieve greater acceptance into their classroom
literacy communities. Otherwise, “Lesbian and gay men . . . even when out, are
Constantly confronted . . . with having to repeat the act of coming out” in their classrooms
through their writing or speech (Malinowitz, Textual Orientations 257). On the other
hand, my study also shows that communities outside the classroom, such as on-carnpus
groups and online “blogs,” serve as safe perforrnative space for these students. In such

spaces, they come to terms with their sexual and gender identities, and develop a greater

50

understanding of what they entail. The literacy communities in which they engage
themselves help facilitate the ease of these performances.
The Usefulness of Discourse Theory: Gee and Bakhtin

Clearly, the nature of a perforrnative act depends upon the nature of a discourse
community. In fact, in Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler claims that any perforrnative ac
is also “an act of discourse.” After noticing that the students’ responses to Parts I and II
of the questionnaire tended to center on talking and speech, I decided that discourse
theory would definitely provide a useful lens for examining the reasons behind this resul

James Gee’s work on discourse proves helpful for this study. First of all, Gee’s
distinctions between primary and secondary discourses shed some valuable insights on
my results. Gee believes that “primary discourses” are-developed “in the primary proces
of enculturation . . . According to Gee, the primary discourse corresponds roughly to the
oral mode of communication in Which the familiar sphere of living plays a central role”
(Gee, “What is Literacy”; Crane et al., par. 11). Apprenticeship into primary discourses
usually comes early in life, into “particular families within their socio-cultural setting”
(Gee, Social Linguistics 137). By contrast, secondary discourses “are those to which
people are apprenticed as part of their socialisation within various local, state and
national groups and institutions outside early and peer group socialisation, for example,
churches, schools, etc.” (Gee, Social Linguistics 133). In short, these secondary
discourses involve the social institutions beyond the family, including classroom setting:
Within secondary discourses, we “build on and extend the uses of languages we acquirer
as part of the primary discourse” (Gee, “What is Literacy?”). Students may also, for

example, acquire language from their secondary discourse and add it to their primary

51

discourse. One’s discourse becomes more complex and acquires more layers the older
one becomes. “Additionally, primary discourses influence the secondary discourses upon
which they are drawn” (Crane et al., par. 11).

Through Gee’s discourse theory, I can better understand the distinction between
students’ desire to speak with friends on LGBT issues outside of class and their tendency
to avoid these issues in the classroom. When students talk with friends outside of class
about LGBT issues, or even when they read about LGBT topics, they are engaging in
their primary discourse; by contrast, when negotiating academic discourse in a college or
university setting, they may have opportunities to apply what they’ve learned in the
primary discourse community to-this secondary discourse environment, but they still lack
familiarity with this secondary discourse. They are‘socialized into the secondary
discourse of the classroom, but classroom discourse is not often synonymous with the
primary discourse engaged in with family or friends. Communication with intimate
friends and family fiiends will be easier for the students than being forced to engage in
dialogue with non-intimates, as the classroom environment often requires. Gee thus
explains: “[Discourses] crucially‘involve a set of values and vieWpoints in terms of which
one must speak and act, at least while being in the discourse; otherwise one doesn’t count
as being in it” (Gee, “What is Literacy?” 538). When students take on the role of
“student” in classroom discourse, they must (at least temporarily) adhere to the rules for
the discourse in that more formal setting; if they do not, they will be considered
ineffective communicators. Among their fellow LGBT peers outside of class, however,
students understand that discourse on LGBT issues is more acceptable, so they switch

their “’identity kit’” in order to be recognized and accepted by their LGBT friends (Gee,

52

 

 

“What is Literacy?” 537). A key finding of my study is that, in communities outside of
class (such as on-campus groups, listservs, and blog communities), LGBT students are
more likely to engage in discourse which allows for open expression of their queer
identities. Clearly, through Gee’s work I can more easily see that my study is not only a
study of academic literacies, but of academic discourse communities as well: different
types of discourses take place in academic literacy’communities.

Additionally, Gee’s distinctions between dominant and non-dominant discourses
provide a useful theoretical perspective for my work. Gee notes that conflict often
emerges between those who possess the dominant discourses and those who lack them.
“Very often dominant groups in a society apply rather constant ‘tests’ of the fluency of
the dominant Discourses in which their power is symbolized. These tests take on two
functions: they are tests of ‘natives’ or, at least, ‘fluent users’ of the Discourse, and they
are gates [sic] to exclude ‘non-natives’ (people whose very conflicts with the dominant
Discourses show they were not, in fact, ‘born’ to them)” (Gee, “What is Literacy?” 528).
Such tests serve to marginalize the discourses of the non-dominant groups, ensuring a
linguistic hegemony, stripping away all chances that minority groups may have to have
their non-dominant discourses validated by the larger, more dominant society. Kadij ah,
whom I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, reacted so positively to my interview
because it was not part of this dominant Discourse. To compensate for the lack of
attention to LGBT concerns in the discipline-specific, dominant Discourses of academe,
Kadij ah told me that she often goes to a coffee house for queer women in Detroit. This
coffee house has women sharing their writing with each other through such activities as

poetry readings; it also helps instill in Kadijah some pride in her female, Afiican-

53

American, and bisexual identities. In this primary discourse environment, Kadijah can at

 

least temporarily escape the constraints of the dominant academic Discourse.

To be “literate” at the academic level means to be able to communicate
effectively in this dominant Discourse. However, it must be kept in mind that this
dominant Discourse is also a hetero-normative Discourse, which adheres to the rules,
values, and mores of the heterosexual community. Therefore, deviations from this
dominant Discourse, such as discourse involving the LGBT community, is much less
acceptable. When LGBT discourse is introduced into the classroom, even today, it is
threatened and challenged. Take David Halperin’s recent “How to be Gay” course at the
University of Michigan, for example: Halperin received national attention for his
attempts to heighten academic awareness of LGBT concems when the need for the class
was habitually questioned by individuals whom the dominant Discourse serves to protect,
such as Gary Glenn of the American Family Association. Glenn claims that Halperin and
the University “’are guilty. of perpetrating a fraud against UM students and the people of
Michigan [with] propaganda statements about so-called cultural studies and academic
freedom’ as they promote ‘queer studies’ at taxpayer expense” (Archibald, par. 3).
However, Halperin responded that the course “does not teach students to be
homosexual . . . Rather, it exammes critically the odd notion that there are right and
wrong ways to be gay, that homosexuality is not just a sexual practice or desire but a set
of specific tastes in music, movies, and other cultural forms — a notion which is shared
by straight and gay people alike” (Archibald, par. 7). The media controversy surrounding
Halperin’s course reveals the tension between non-dominant and dominant Discourses.

Glenn’s habitual questioning of the purpose of Halperin’s course is identical to the series

54

of “’tests’” of which Gee speaks. Since Halperin’s agenda does not conform to dominant
ideologies, it must be challenged by those in power, in an attempt to destroy it. Glenn’s
purposes are served by the perpetuation of a linguistic hegemony and an exclusion of
LGBT issues from the classroom. As we can see, Gee’s distinction between dominant
and non-dominant discourses proves helpful for examining how LGBT students negotiate
academic literacy spaces, since the literacy spaces in which LGBT community members
often participate are also often non-dominant discourses, as opposed to the institutional,
dominant forces of academe.

In addition to Gee, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is useful for my study on two
different levels. To begin with, Bakhtin’s notion of “carnivalesque” speech enabled me
to better understand the playful nature of electronic chat room communities (which
became an integral part of my study, particularly in Chapter 5). Bakhtin’s discussion of
“carnivalesque” discourse also helps complicate Gee’s rather simplistic binary between
primary and secondary discourse; it adds another dimension to my work on discourse
theory. Carnivalesque discourse, as Holquist explains, serves “as a means for displaying
otherness: carnival makes familiar relations strange” (89). This discourse also heightens
our awareness that “social relations determined by class are made not given, culturally
produced rather than naturally mandated” (Holquist 89). Similarly, chat room discourse
thrives on “otherness”: people often construct new social personae through which to
speak and chat room community relations are often ephemeral in nature. LGBT students,
in particular, employ chat rooms to negotiate their gender and sexual identities; quite
often, it serves as a place of exploration for them before they “try out” their queer selves

in the real world. For many LGBT individuals, chat rooms are a place of performing

55

another social self, a self which enables them to explore their “otherness” without
experiencing the negative social repercussions that they would endure in hetero—
nomrative, face-to-face discourse communities. Thus Bakhtin’s conception of the
camivalesque assists me in understanding the fragmentary, playful nature of chat room
communities, in which the “otherness” of queer gender and sexual identities is not only
displayed, as Holquist suggests, but also constructed and developed.

Secondly, I found Bakhtin’s notion of “heteroglossia” a particularly helpful
means of comprehending the nature of literacy community interaction. For Bakhtin, all
speech is dialogic, and it is useful to look at speech as heteroglossia: “the collection of all
the forms of social speech, or rhetorical modes, that people use in the course of their daily
lives. You talk to your friends in one way, to your professor in another way, to your
parents in a third way, to a waiter in a restaurant in a fourth way” (Klages, par. 13).

Since Part I and H of my questionnaire indicate that LGBT students are much more likely
to discuss LGBT issues outside of class with fiiends than in classroom environments with
classmates or faculty, we can see Bakhtin’s heteroglossia at work. Their speech on LGBT
issues with their friends is one type of hetero glossia which “shows a fundamentally
DIALOGIC utterance--one oriented toward a particular kind of listener/audience, and
implying a particular relationship between the speaker and the listeners” (Klages, par.

14). It shows how, during the course of their lives, students will employ different
rhetorical strategies at different times. They sense that speaking/writing/reading about
LGBT issues in the classroom is not acceptable on some level, but, with friends who

share a similar interest on LGBT-oriented topics, LGBT speech becomes transformed: it

56

 

leaves the realm of marginalized discourse and becomes a rhetorically acceptable means
of communication.

This proved to be true for the online “blogging” efforts of LGBT students: I
discovered over the course of my research that many of my interviewees write about
personal and political LGBT issues in elaborate online journals, called “blogs.” While
most of them publish their words in a public space which technically may be seen by
anyone online, for the most part the blog serves as a means of communication between
the blogger and his or her fiiend; the students told me that they will not generally release
blog addresses, in fact, to anyone but their friends, and that they sometimes censor their
entries such that only certain online “fiiends” can read them. However, it is interesting to
note that, in an online environment, the definition of “fiiend” shifts drastically for these
students: In the world of online blogging, “friends” are often accumulated by reading the
“blogs” of others and then making the conscious choice to add an individual to an online
list of “friends.” Those “friends” help to form the audience for the “blogs.” Thus we can
see that online discourse further reveals the complex nature of literacy; while students in
the questionnaire reveal a desire to “talk” about LGBT issues with “friends,” we must
consider that, given the increased use of reading, writing, and speaking in electronic
environments, the meaning of “talking with friends” may differ dramatically in this type
of discourse community, adding yet another new dimension to consider when thinking
about Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia.” The language of the blog may be very different from
the language of face-to-face speech.

Furthermore, Bakhtin’s hetero glossia also enables us to better understand student

writing inside classroom environments. In her study of the heteroglossic features of

57

 

 

student writing, Joan Navarre suggests that heteroglossia “is not only conceptually, but
also pedagogically, useful” (1), and then proceeds to describe the heteroglossic features
of one student’s essay. In analyzing the essay of “Sean,” one of her freshman
composition students, Navarre stresses that heterglossia “consists of a cacophony of
voices . . . we hear social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons,
generic languages, languages of generations and age groups . . . languages that serve the
specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour” (3-4). From Navarre’s
observation here, we learn that heteroglossia helps us to comprehend not just discourse in
general, but also student writing in particular. Since much of this dissertation deals with
how LGBT students negotiate literacy communities which involve writing, viewing their
classroom writing as heteroglossic assisted me in understanding their varying rhetorical
positions in different writing situations.
Conclusion

In this chapter, I have attempted to explain the collection and analysis of my data.
This entailed descriptions of my questionnaires and interviews, the study’s primary
methodological complications, and the phenomenological nature of my methodology.
Furthermore, it revealed how perfonnative theory, Gee’s distinctions between primary
and secondary discourses and between dominant and non-dominant discourses, and
Bakhtin’s work on the camivalesque, the dialogic, and heteroglossia all prove useful for
explaining the results of my study. My next section describes the questionnaire results in
detail: here I shall contrast LGBT students’ negative attitudes towards writing in weak
community contexts with their positive attitudes towards language in situations which

build solid community structures. From these results I shall begin to show, for these

58

students, the building of language communities contributes invaluably to their

educational process.

59

Disabling Writing, Enabling Communities: The Questionnaire Results
Overview
When I interviewed Lauren, a transsexual lesbian, I realized that quite a disparity
existed between her writing life in classrooms and her involvement in language
communities outside of class. She claimed that she has had virtually “no experience” in
writing on LGBT issues for her courses, and that she is “in the closet” in her classes.
However, her community involvement in language activities outside of class is quite
impressive. She corresponds on e-mail and Yahoo Instant Messanger with her fiiends on
personal and political LGBT issues, belongs to the TRIANG-L listserv, attends meetings
and speeches on LGBT issues, keeps an elaborate blog on LGBT issues which offers her
the chance to “sound off” as “a form of release,” and edits a local newsletter on the arts.
When I asked her to explain thisdisparity between her lack of classroom literacy
expression and her proliferation of literacy activities outside of class, she asserted that
society puts too much pressure on people to be heterosexual, and classrooms reinforce
this pressure. She clearly feels that, in classroom environments, she does not feel safe
revealing either her queer identity:
When I’m outside class, if I’m not: on the Internet, I’m with my fiiends.
My friends know me, they know everything about me, I know that they’re
cool, I know that they use their heads and think, and they’re not going to
prejudge me. I can sound off online because of the anonymity of the
Internet, the relative anonymity. In a classroom, on the other hand, I’m in
a room with a bunch of other people who don’t know me very well, whom
I don’t really know, and, who, as far as I know, could be conservative
Christians, could be Neo-Nazis, I have no idea who they might be . . .
we’re going to class together, and I have to deal with the fact that they’re
going to be there whether I like it or not. If we have some kind of falling
out because of my sexuality or my gender identity, I still have to deal with

them in class for the rest of the semester . . . so I’m not going to open up to
them about that information.

60

 

It is clear that Lauren finds the disciplinary literacy communities of the classroom
stifling, yet she desires to form literacy communities outside of class. Her expression is
consistent with the literacy behaviors of most LGBT students in that she notices a
problem with academic literacies, yet she also manages to find a personal solution to this
problem that works for her. Similarly, my study concerns both acknowledging the
problems that LGBT students experience with academic literacies and coming up with
possible solutions. The two major purposes of this study are to examine the ways in
which LGBT students negotiate acadenric literacies and to learn the most effective ways
for including LGBT concerns in academic literacy communities. Therefore, the
questionnaire for this project was developed with these goals in mind. Part I of the
questionnaire asked the students to evaluate the most effective means of dealing with
hetero-normative literacy activities in. the academic world. In Part II, the students were to
indicate the places in which they most often engage in these activities. The final part of
the questionnaire, Part III, asked students to rank a series of statements in order to judge
the extent to which each activity makes them feel more included in academe.

Lauren’s experience reveals the two major trends indicated by the questionnaire
data. The first trend concerns writing: the LGBT students surveyed tend to view writing
situations with a weak sense of community, both inside and outside classroom spaces,
negatively. In fact, they tend to avoid writing on LGBT-oriented topics both inside and
outside classroom environments. In addition, they believe that sharing informal writing
in class will not help to achieve inclusion of the LGBT community in academic
discourse. And finally, the data shoWs that the students dislike electronic chat. They do

not use chat rooms that often, and they do not see anonymous chat as a way to achieve

61

greater inclusion of the LGBT community in the classroom. Many of their negative
views on writing, like Lauren’s, were expressed within the context of classroom
experiences.

As. far as traditional writing situations are concerned, these findings on student
attitudes towards writing corroborate much of the existing, more generalized research.
Studies by Mahaffey, Royer and Gilles, Brandt, and Sidey, as well as a recent paper
delivered by Conway at the 2004 CCCC convention, all discuss college students’
negative attitudes towards traditional writing situations. One common thread between all
these studies is that they reveal how student attitudes toward writing reach their nadir
when their writing efforts lack support from their communities of peers, administrators,
and faculty members. They also all recommend the building of language communities as
the solution to problems which persist in academic literacy spaces. While the research on
students’ attitudes towards chat rooms tends to be more positive in tone, due to the
common propensity in composition scholarship to view electronic discourse in general as
a series of liberating communities which exist beyond the constraints of typical linguistic
conventions (Bentley, LaGrandeur, Riley), this research also acknowledges that negative
dimensions to chat room discourse continue to problematize classroom pedagogies
(Berzsenyi, Catalano, Hum). I will explore the revelations from all these studies in more
detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

The second data trend reveals that students desire to be involved in campus
communities outside the classroom. Students, like Lauren, enjoy participating in e-mail
discussions, listservs, blogs, and campus groups. And, according to the students,

administrators and teachers must play a key role in bridging the gap between academic

62

literacies and LGBT concerns. The data reveals that students want more training of
administrators and teachers on LGBT issues, more course offerings on the LGBT
community, and more on-campus resources for LGBT students. These students’ desires
help will to shape my plan for more inclusion of LGBT issues in academe, which I shall
explain further in Chapter 8.

Both of these trends indicate several patterns that the interview data will
illuminate in Chapters 4 through 7. Together, these two trends show that LGBT students
perceive the importance of literacy events on the institutional level. They clearly
understand that entire academic institutions need to help assuage the constraints of
literacy; expecting teachers in the classroom to do this is not enough. Therefore, this
study moves beyond earlier research in suggesting that we must examine LGBT student
negotiations with academic literacies from a much. larger perspective than the classroom
alone. Secondly, the trends. indicate that, contrary to prior research on LGBT student use
of chat room conversation, LGBT students do not see synchronous chat in the classroom
as helpful or liberating, most likely due to the ephemeral nature of chat room
communities. Instead, it suggests that we look more at synchronous online literacies, and
study more carefully the communities that students form through e-mail, listservs, and
blogs.

Trend Or_1e: Negative Attitudes towards Writing Activities
Writing as an Ineffective Means of Negotiating Academic Literacies

In Part I of the questionnaire, students were asked to rank a series of ten

statements of activities on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) in order to

evaluate the extent to which each activity enables them to deal with the demands of

63

academic discourse. The results suggest that the students do not see writing activities
with a weak sense of community as a meaningful way for them to negotiate academic
literacies. On the other hand, they seem to view activities involving reading, speaking, or
public actions much more positively, particularly when those actions take place outside
of class, and involve activities in which solid communal ties can be established.

As Figure 1 indicates, students were much less likely to provide a ranking of 4
(agree) or 5 (strongly agree) to writing activities than they were to activities involving
reading, speaking, or public actions.

Figure 1: Student Agreement on Different Academic Literacy Statements

The numbers l-lO on the scale correspond with the statement numbers on
Part I of the questionnaire (see Appendix A for copy of questionnaire).

(Note: All images in this dissertation are presented in color.)

 

 

 

I 1
Percentage of I 2
Students D 3
"Agreeing" or E14
"Strongly
Agreeing" with I 5
Statement I 5
I 7
Reading Writing Speaking Public El 8
Actions
I 9
Type of Academic Literacy I 10

From the figure above, we can see that students view all activities involving
reading and public actions much more favorably than writing-oriented activities. And
even though the student ranking of statement six (“I bring up LGBT issues during class
discussion as often possible”) is comparable with those of the writing activities, students

gave the other listed activity involving speaking (statement seven, “1 do a lot of talking

64

about LGBT issues outside the classroom”) the highest ranking on this part of the
questionnaire. It is evident that, on average, writing activities ranked lowest overall: the
graph shows that three out of the lowest four graphed percentages involve statements
dealing specifically with writing.

These results thus provoke several questions. To begin with, what is it about
writing, in particular, that makes students perceive it as an activity that’s not particularly
helpful to them, either in or out of the classroom? Also, the students indicated that they
feel more comfortable with group projects, talking and reading about LGBT concerns,
and even LGBT community activism. However, these sorts of activities and writing
activities are far from mutually exclusive. People often write as they work on group
projects, write as they talk, write as they read, or write in the midst of community
activism. Therefore, we should wonder to what extent students are writing as they do
these activities; perhaps they are not aware of the ‘eriting” they are doing when they are
involved in academic literacy communities. Many students, after all, are used to defining
writing as the typical five-paragraph paper, and may often dismiss other sorts of writing
activities as unimportant. Thus we have to consider how the students are defining
“writing”: what does this mean to them?

To address some of these concerns, let us turn for a moment to statement three on
Part I of the questionnaire (“For my college classes, I write on LGBT-oriented topics as
often as possible”). While we might believe that this data indicates that LGBT students
may be disinterested or fearful of writing on LGBT concerns in the classroom, the
interview data suggests that students do not write about these topics “as often as possible”

because they feel their teachers do not care about these issues. Many times, the students

65

 

noted that they have never had the opportunity to write on LGBT issues, that their

 

professors aren’t interested in queer topics, and that their professors don’t bring them up.
They see themselves as lacking agency in the classroom; if they are fearful of anything, it
is the power of the teacher, not their personal expression of LGBT concerns. Because
students mainly involve themselves in discipline—specific, secondary discourse
communities at the classroom level, they have not built trusting, lasting relationships with
their peers or professors that would facilitate dialogue on LGBT-oriented topics. During
the interviews, many students were critical of teachers who refrain from providing
helpful evaluative comments on LGBT-oriented prose, who fear confronting sensitive
topics, and who provide exceptionally negative written feedback on student essays with
LGBT-oriented topics. We shall. see in Chapter 4 that the students see their lack of
writing as a problem stemming from those who hold power in academe, both teachers
and administrators. When teachers demonstrate apathy towards LGBT issues, and when
administrators refrain from offering courses dealing with such issues, students lose their
impetus to write on them. They learn quickly that LGBT topics, which are part of what
James Gee would call their “primary discourse,” do not fit into the disciplinary literacy
communities of academe, and thus they adjust their writing habits accordingly to fit the
demands of a new discourse. As Gee would argue, they develop a new “identity kit” for
the college classroom through which they mask their LGBT identities in order to cope
with the hetero-normative hegemony of the classroom environment (“What is
Literacy?”).

However, when we examine student responses statement five of Part I (“I do a lot

of writing on LGBT issues outside the classroom”), we see that students also tend to

66

avoid writing outside of class. In this situation, teachers and administrators cannot be
blamed (or at least not to the same extent as with classroom discourse), and one rrright
think that, outside of class, the students would have more chances to engage in their
primary discourses, and thus engage more in LGBT concerns. Oddly enough, though, the
results indicate that students are slightly more likely to write on LGBT concerns in class
than out of class (an average agreement of 2.72 for writing outside of class compared to
an average agreement of 2.90 for writing in class). So what sorts of experiences have
students had with writing on LGBT issues outside of class? In the interviews, students
described several incidents in which they posted flyers, projects, or signs concerning
LGBT issues on campus only to have them defaced with hate speech. Many other
students don’t wish to write on LGBT issues outside of class due to lack of time or a
conscious effort to remain uninvolved in LGBT community literacies. And some
students equate any sort of “writing” with “formal writing," such as the discipline-
specific writing they would do for class, and therefore want no part of so-called class
work outside the classroom enviromnent. Unlike with the classroom writing situations,
the students indicated more apathy about writing outside of class. Some lacked
confidence in their writing, and others wished to avoid drawing attention to their
viewpoints in public. Chapters 4 and 5 will further explore the trials that LGBT students
have endured in attempting to negotiate academic literacies outside of class, thus
inhibiting the building of literacy communities between groups. We will look at specific
examples of how the written word has the power to perpetrate hate crimes against LGBT
students as they attempt to negotiate their way through the literacy communities of

academe. When they try to fit LGBT concerns in a public academic forum, they are

67

sometimes degraded by both students and administrators for expressing their views.
This chapter will also examine in more detail whether LGBT students resist and/or
demonstrate apathy regarding outside-of-class writing situations because they have been
taught that their words cannot make a difference.

So far, we have seen that the students believe that writing on LGBT issues is an
ineffective means of negotiating academic literacy communities both inside and outside
classroom settings. Similarly, in the next section, we will notice that students do not
perceive classroom activities involving writing as an effective means of including LGBT
concerns in academic discourse. In particular, the next section will stress how students
fail to see how sharing their writing on LGBT issues will give them more of a voice in
academe.

Writing as an Ineflective Solution for Facilitating LGBT Student Inclusion

In Part III'of the questionnaire, students were asked to rank fifteen different
proposed solutions for achieving LGBT student inclusiveness in academic discourse on a
scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), just as with Part I. Three of those
solutions dealt specifically with classroom writing activities: “Require students to write
on LGBT-oriented topics” (statement 1); “Encourage the classroom use of anonymous
electronic chat to discuss LGBT issues” (statement 6); and “Encourage more sharing in
class of informal writing (such as journals)” (statement 8). These three statements
received three of the lowest rankings on Part III of the questionnaire. “Require students
to write on LGBT-oriented topics” ranked 13th out of 15th with an average agreement of
3.39; “Encourage the classroom use of anonymous electronic chat to discuss LGBT

issues” ranked 14th out of 15th with an average agreement of 3.23; and “Encourage more

68

sharing in class of informal writing (such as journals)” ranked 12th out of 151h with an
average agreement of 3.40.

Figure 2 graphically displays how these results contrast with the three most
popular statements in Part III. The three most popular statements all happen to deal with
public actions: statement eleven, “Develop more courses on LGBT-oriented topics”
(average agreement 4.33); statement twelve, “Require teachers to receive more training
on LGBT issues (average agreement 4.38); and statement thirteen, “Require
administrators to receive more training on LGBT issues (average agreement 4.4).

As with Figure 1, the percentage of students who either “agreed” (provided a
ranking of 4) or “strongly agreed” (provided a ranking of 5) are graphed here:

Figure 2: Student Agreement on Different Statements of Solution

The numbers on right hand side of the scale correspond with the statement
numbers on Part III of the questionnaire (see Appendix A for copy of

questionnaire).

Percentage of

   

Students
"Agreeing" or
"Strongly
Agreeing" with
Solution
Writing Public
Actions

Type of Solution
As we can see from Figure 2, agreement in Part III for activities involving writing
was much lower than for those involving direct, public actions on LGBT concerns. For
writing activities, the agreement tended to hover between 39-57%, whereas all of the

public actions had an agreement which ranked over 80%. Along with Part 1, these results

69

support the conclusion that LGBT students do not view most of their writing tasks very
highly. While Part I examines student use of academic writing both in and out of the
classroom, Part III focuses on classroom writing in particular. From the low rankings—
12th through 14th out of 15 statements—we can see that LGBT students fail to see how
their classroom writing activities can be an empowering means of achieving LGBT
student inclusion. They do not see their writing as a public performance or social action.
Such results must further cause us to wonder whether LGBT students have the agency in
writing classrooms that they need to pursue those concerns which matter most to them.
Are LGBT students being given the opportunity to engage in written discourse on topics
to which they can relate? Or, even worse, are they being discouraged from doing so?
The interview data reveals that students are given opportunities to write on LGBT topics
only when the assignments are broad enough such that the students are allowed to choose
their own focus. Only in courses Which deal specifically with LGBT concerns are
students given specific LGBT topics-to focus on inwriting assignments. And instances
do exist in which studentsare indeed discouraged—and even shamed—by their teachers
for writing on LGBT issues, so they lack the impetus to perceive their writing as a means
of social empowerment. Unfortunately, these writing situations reveal a lack of solid,
lasting literacy communities with shared values: students, administrators, and teachers all
have different ideas as to what academic literacies entail, thus preventing writing from
being seen as a viable solution to LGBT student inclusiveness. These issues will be
explored in more detail in Chapter 4.

One possible solution to the problem of LGBT student inclusion was “Encourage

more sharing in class of informal writing (such as journals)” We might originally

70

predict that, when LGBT students write informally about their concerns or experiences,
and then share those writings in class, this would provide them with some much-needed
agency in the classroom, and thus assuage the hetero-normativity with which they
contend. However, the results indicate that students fail to see the sharing of writing as a
means of providing them with they voice they crave. Thus this result raises an important
question: Are the students too shy to share their writing with others, or do they perceive
informal writing as unnecessary? The interview data suggests that, for the students, it is
mainly an issue of comfort. These complaints about “comfort” tended to take two
different forms. Some believe that sharing “informal” writing places that writing into the
realm of the “formal”: once that writing is shared with students and/or teachers, it
becomes public discourse, and therefore more likely to be judged and criticized. Others
asserted that sharing informal writing would make them (or others in their class)
“uncomfortable”; for that reason alone, they would avoid sharing their work. Chapter 4
examines this finding in greater detail through the perspective of discourse analysis. It
explores how LGBT students’ reluctance to share informal writing in groups exemplifies
Gee’s distinction between primary and secondary discourses. We are reminded that, once
these students find themselves in a classroom, they must take on a new identity in order
to adapt to the demands of a disciplinary literacy community, because it also serves as a
secondary discourse community for these students. Unfortunately, they come to
understand that, in the classroom, playing this new role involves hiding their interests in
LGBT issues.

This chapter has indicated that students perceive writing activities which lack a

strong sense of community as neither helpful means of negotiating academic literacies

71

nor viable solutions to problems of LGBT student inclusiveness in acaderrric literacy
spaces. When we consider the questionnaire results in light of different types of literacy
communities, they suggest that students have a particular dislike for writing in electronic
chat rooms. The next section will explore how this dislike manifests itself and examine
some of the reasons behind the students’ negative views of chat room environments.
A Dislike of Writing in Chat Rooms

Since the results reveal that many LGBT students have negative views on writing
activities as they pertain to academic discourse, we should wonder whether the forums in
which these activities take place affect the students’ views. Parts II and III of this
questionnaire indicate that LGBT students have low opinions of writing in electronic chat
rooms. Out of the eight listed forums in Part II, “Electronic Chat Rooms” ranked as the
second least popular forum for discussion of LGBT issues (the least popular was “Faculty
Offices”). The results suggest that students are twice as likely to use e-mail, classrooms,
coffee houses/restaurants or community groups to discuss such issues, and about four
times as likely to talk about such issues in campus groups or at friends’~ houses. In this
section, students ranked their use of the forums on a scale of 0 (never) to 5 (every day).
The average score for “Electronic Chat Rooms” was only 1.29 (about once a month),
whereas for the rankings for e—mail, classrooms, coffee houses/restaurants and
community groups ranged from 1.62-2.48 (once every two weeks). The ranking for
“Campus Groups” was 2.87 (about once a week), and the ranking for “Friends’ Houses”
was 3.42 (over once a week).

Figure 3 graphically reveals the distinctions between their frequency of use in

three different types of literacy communities—Electronic, Campus, and Community

72

forums (Community forums include numbers six through eight on Part II of the
questionnaire: “Community Groups,” “Friends’ Houses,” “Coffee Houses/Restaurants”—
See Appendix A):
Figure 3: Student Use of Different Literacy Forums
The numbers on right hand side of the scale correspond with the numbers
of the listed forums on Part II of the questionnaire (see Appendix A for

copy of questionnaire).

Percentage of
Students who
Use Forum
"Three Times a
Week" or "Every
Day"

 

Electronic Campus Community

 

Type of Forum

Figure 3 helps us to understand which forums have high frequencies of use; that
is, it enables us to learn which ones are used “three times a week” or “every day.” It
shows that over half (53.3%) of the students frequently talk about LGBT issues at
friends’ houses (forum seven), but only 14.3% of them do the same in chat rooms (forum
one). The graph also indicates that about 30% of students frequently use e-mail/listservs
(forum two) and campus groups (forum four) to discuss LGBT concerns; this is twice the
percentage of students who use chat to do the same. The graph indicates that two of the
three “Campus” categories (“Classrooms,” forum three, and “Faculty Offices,” forum
five) also lacked a high frequency of use comparable to the infrequent chat room usage;

students instead preferred to interact in asynchronous online environments and in on-

73

campus groups. However, out of all the five listed forums in Part H for discourse on
LGBT issues outside campus settings, chat room rooms ranked the lowest of the five.

As I indicated in the previous section of this chapter, in Part III of the
questionnaire, “Encourage the classroom use of anonymous electronic chat to discuss
LGBT issues” (statement six) was the second least popular solution to making LGBT
students feel more included in academic discourse. Figure 2 (see page 69) visually
displays the disparity between this solution and the most popular ones. This result,
combined with the infrequency of use of chat rooms shown in Part H of the questionnaire,
leads us to believe that students-fail to see chat rooms as a helpful means of achieving
inclusion of LGBT students in the academic community.

These negative'views of online chat communities are explained in the interview
portion of the study. To begin with, students explain that they use chat infrequently
because they perceive that most individuals who use chat rooms only use them to set up
romantic or sexual trysts. They further used such words as “impersonal,” “phony,” and
“confusing” to describe the chat rooms. However, the interview data also indicate that
many of the students claim that they used to frequent chat rooms during their “coming
out” process. But many of them now feel that they’ve moved “beyond” the chat rooms
and are now ready for face-to-face interactions in the queer community. Chapter 5 will
explore this issue in greater length through the lens of discourse analysis. It will
demonstrate how some LGBT students use electronic chat rooms as a conduit through
which they develop a sense of the discourse of the LGBT community, and then, once
they’ve learned how to blend its language into their own primary discourse, they feel

more comfortable venturing out into face-to-face conversations, and joining a new

74

community. However, in this process, the chat room communities .are abandoned, and
often criticized. So in spite of the fact that some students initially use chat rooms to
educate themselves on the discourse of the LGBT community, they do not continue to
use the rooms after these initial introductions, mostly due to negative experiences with
meeting people or a growing disenchantment with the nature of chat room conversation.

The interview data confirms that most students seem to perceive use of chat
rooms in the classroom—even anonymous ones—as flawed in two distinct ways. First of
all, many claim that the nature of chat results in a lack of focus in class discussion.
People get distracted and fail to remain on topic. Secondly, other students see anonymous
chat on LGBT issues as merely another means to perpetuate the idea that discourse on
LGBT concerns should be shame-based. For these students, the chat room serves as yet
another closet in which they must hide. And they don’t want to holler from this
electronic closet to get noticed; they’d much prefer to deal with LGBT issues face to face.
Chapter 5 will explain in more detail the different ways in which students see chat room
discussions as lacking focus and anonymous electronic classroom chat as shame-based.
It will also examine the complexities involved in chat: interacting in chat, after all,
involves reading, writing, and (at times) relying images or emoticons to substitute for
non-verbal language. Thus we shall see how LGBT students negotiate these
complexities. Overall, their experiences in chat have lead them to view it as a
fragmentary discourse that may perpetuate stereotypes more than assuage them;
therefore, it fails to contribute to the inclusion of the LGBT community in academe.

The first half of this chapter has shown that students fail to see writing as a means

of achieving agency in academe. Classroom writing, writing outside of class, sharing

75

informal writing, and writing in electronic chat rooms are all either ineffective means of
dealing with academic literacies or unhelpful steps towards including LGBT students in
these literacy communities. These writing situations often result in weak, ephemeral
writing communities, within which very little trust exists. The next section, however,
stresses that when LGBT students belong to campus communities outside of class, they
facilitate their negotiation with acaderrric discourse and their inclusion in academic life.
Md Two: A Desire for Campus Communities
Forums outside Class

According to Part II of the questionnaire, the four most pOpular forums for
discourse on LGBT issues all exist outside the classroom. The most p0pular forum for
discussing such issues is fiiends’ houses: the numerical average for this forum is 3.42, or
over once a week. Campus groups (2.86, or once a week) are the second most popular,
followed by eI-mail/listservs (2.48, almost once a week) and coffee houses/restaurants
(also at about 2.48). The least popular forums are those which involve the least amount
of face—to-face interaction and the weakest sense of community. Faculty offices are the
least popular (1.20, or once a month) and electronic chat rooms, as discussed previously,
ranked as the second least popular choice (1.29, also'about once a month).

Figure 3 (see page 73) reveals that students were at least twice as likely to discuss
LGBT issues frequently at fiiends’ houses (forum seven), in campus groups (forum four),
and over e-mail/listservs (forum two) than in chat rooms (forum one), classrooms (forum
three), or faculty offices (forum five). Less than 15% of all students reported a high
frequency of use of chat, classrooms, and faculty offices for discussion of LGBT

concerns, whereas 29-53% of the students reported a high use of fiiends’ houses, campus

76

groups, and e—mail/listservs to discuss these issues. This result suggests that the students
prefer being a part of face-to-face literacy communities outside of class to brief one-on-
one conversations. In faculty offices, students are likely only to interact with their
professors about these issues, if they discuss them with their professors at all. And, in
online chat, students may often chat with only one person at a time, and the nature of this
conversation is often brief and fragmentary: it is difficult to develop extended ideas in a
chat room. Most classrooms consist mainly of secondary discourse communities, and
usually very little group work, so LGBT students lack opportunities in these
environments to engage in their primary discourses, which include LGBT concerns. We
should notice, however, that when a strong sense of community is developed among the
discussion participants, as is often the casevon non-classroom campus communities, the
LGBT students are more likely to bring up t0pics of interest to them.

The interview data corroborates this finding on two different levels. To begin
with, it shows that many LGBT students do use e-mail and listservs on a regular basis.
They use this medium of communication to write e-mails to fiiends and to take part in
discussions on LGBT listservs. In addition, Chapter 6 will reveal that about 40% of the
interview participants keep elaborate “blogs,” or online journals, which often discuss
their personal lives as students and their political involvement in on-campus events.
These blogs combine the best elements of e-mails and listservs: instead of just e-mailing
one person, or sticking to one subject on a listserv, they end up posting their thoughts on
anything they like to a global audience, so anyone in the world may find their discussion

”

board postings on their “blogs” and addthem to their “list of friends. This chapter will

further elucidate the distinction between e-mail/listserv communication and blogs and

77

explain how LGBT students often use blogs as peforrnative space. The term

 

“perforrnative,” coined by Judith Butler, asks us to consider gender as “a relation among
socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts” (Gender Trouble, 1999). Therefore,
gender is a performance that is determined not by the biological sex one is, but by what
one does in specific social contexts. The chapter will show that, through their blogs, the
students create space for themselves to “perform” not only gender, but also sexual
orientation.

Not only do LGBT students form campus communities in online environments,
the interview data also confirms that they fOrm these communities in face-to-face campus
groups as well. It shows that students often belong to several LGBT groups at once, and
use the groups to develop‘friendships. Some use their groups for activism opportunities,
yet lack an activist life outside the group. The findings also indicate that the groups
instill a’sense of pride in the students; several proudly discussed their accomplishments as
members of groups, most of which involved successfully challenging the hetero-
norrnative dictates or stereotypes of their campus communities. With these campus
groups, students have the Opportunity to formulate a primary discourse community within
a world of secondary discourse (academic life). In fact, these groups help them to learn
how to blend the two discourses together. Many students interviewed spoke of bringing
the concerns of their groups into their classrooms or to on-campus meetings with
administrators: thus we see Bakhtin’s heteroglossia exemplified here, as students learn to
speak differently for different types of audiences: their disciplinary literacy communities
and their campus literacy communities require different kinds of language involvement.

On the whole, the groups appear to educate their members on how to use language to

78

serve the purposes of the LGBT community; those heavily involved in campus groups
have a political and social awareness of the power of language that the non-activist
students lack. Chapter 6 will further explore the benefits that campus groups have for
these students: by reading, writing, and speaking in activities on behalf of their campus
group(s), students enhance their awareness of literacy as an agent of social change.

In this section, we have seen that the questionnaire results suggest that LGBT
students desire to form language communities over e-mail and through campus groups.
These findings are corroborated by the interview data. The next section will reveal the
ways in which students believe that the most viable solutions towards achieving LGBT
student inclusion in academic discourse are achieved by getting teachers, administrators,
and students to work together towards this goal.

Community Solutions

Statements one through nine in Part III of the questionnaire focus on activities
inside the classroom, whereas statements ten through fifteen in focus more on possible
solutions that existing outside of class (see Appendix A). The statements receiving the
four highest agreement rankings (eleven through fourteen) all dealt with solutions outside
the classroom involving a variety of individuals in academe, whereas the statements
receiving the four lowest agreement rankings (one, five, six, and eight) all dealt with
classroom solutions.

Figure 4 elucidates the contrast between the classroom solutions and the solutions

involving the academic community outside of class:

79

 

Figure 4: Student Agreement on Classroom versus Community Solutions

The numbers on the scale correspond with the statement numbers on Part III of

the questionnaire (see Appendix A for copy of questionnaire).

Percentage of
Students
"Agreeing" or
"Strongly
Agreeing" with
Solution

 

Classroom Community
Solutions Solutions

 

Type of Solution

Figure 4 indicates that, while the lowest—ranking, classroom-oriented solutions to LGBT
student inclusion received a score of “agree” or “strongly agree” from only 30-56%
percent of the students, all the highest-ranking, community-oriented ones received
agreement rates of 80% or higher. From this evidence, we may infer that LGBT students
see the inclusion of LGBT concerns in academic discourse as an issue that should involve
the entire academic community.

The results indicate that students want administrators and teachers to get training
in LGBT issues and desire that these individuals use their positions of power to assist in
the creation of more LGBT courses as well. This result should make us question the
extent to which LGBT students perceive themselves as having power/agency to make a
difference in changing institutionalized academic literacy communities. The interview
data suggests that they perceive that the best solutions to the problem of LGBT student
inclusion are in the hands of administrators and teachers, because they view themselves

as lacking power within the institutional setting. They often do not feel that they can

80

make a difference within the bureaucratic power structure of a college or university, so
they look to LGBT-friendly administrators and teachers to support their positions. Most
of the students tend to believe in a “top-down” approach to power distribution in
academe: they feel that if the administrators and teachers are educated on LGBT
concerns, then the students will be as well. Chapter 8 will articulate a research plan
which suggests that students, teachers, and administrators may work together to make
LGBT student inclusion in academic literacy spaces a reality.

Positive student responses to “Increase the number of on-campus LGBT student
resources,” along with corroborating interview data, allow us to conclude that LGBT
students see themselves as having a role in the formation of academic discourse. Many
students are aware that they can often work together with faculty, staff, and
administrators to increase LGBT student resources; they see themselves as playing
pivotal roles in such concerns. In other words, while students may see the most
important decisions resting in the collective hands of the administration and teachers, it is
also possible to infer from these results that LGBT students do see themselves as part of
' important literacy communities: ones that exist outside the classroom setting, in which
students read, write, and discuss LGBT topics for academic audiences in order to achieve
their desired goals. Chapters 6 through 8 clarify the ways in which students see
themselves working together in language communities to reach their objectives. Chapter
8, in particular, suggests that LGBT students may work with administrators to achieve
their desired resources. It also offers a variety of suggestions for individuals who wish to

integrate LGBT-oriented resources into their classrooms or other academic spaces. These

81

important resources include panel discussions, speakers, on-campus groups, the Internet, ~
and films.

Student responses to statements eleven, twelve, and fourteen reveal a key
demographic difference in the study: lesbians are more likely than gays or bisexuals to
view literacy activities involving a broad range of the acaderrric community exceptionally
positively. Here we see that while most students tended to rank their agreement with the
aforementioned statements around the 4.2-4.3 range, lesbians usually ranked them around
the 4.5-4.6 range, indicated that they strongly agreed that solutions involving community
involvement in literacy activities would be very effective for achieving LGBT student
inclusion in academic literacies.

Both perforrnative theory and discourse theory raise interesting questions for
analysis regarding this result. The interview data suggests that performing the role of
“lesbian” in our culture involves participation in community discourse. The lesbian
students see a clear need for more resources, meetings, teacher training, and courses on
LGBT concems—they want everyone in academe to get involved, as a community, to
hone their awareness of LGBT issues. They are more likely than either gay men or
bisexuals to challenge the wrongs that they perceive in the academic system; they
accomplish this task by identifying the problems and then using written and oral language
to correct them. From the perspective of discourse analysis, we might conclude that
lesbians draw upon community linguistic resources more than gays to form their primary
discourse community; this idea will be explored further in Chapter 7. This chapter also
suggests that a connection may exist between the performance of lesbian identity and

lesbians’ involvement in community discourse: I argue that lesbians’ stress on

82

community involvement may stem from the fact that they exist as a minority within a
minority community, and thus have a stronger desire than either gays or bisexuals to
reach out to other lesbians to feel less alone.
Conclusion

The questionnaire data points toward two major trends. First of all, it suggests
that, out of all literacy activities, LGBT students appear to feel the least comfortable with
those involving weak, secondary writing communities. In particular, the data reveals that
LGBT students often view writing as neither an effective means of negotiating academic
literacies nor an effective solution towards the inclusiveness of LGBT student concerns in
academic literacy spaces. The questionnaire datashows that LGBT students tend to
avoid writing situations both in and out of the classroom, particularly those writing
situations with a weak sense of community. It also reveals that students fail to see either
sharing informal writing in class or using anonymous electronic chat as effective means
of assuaging the hetero-normative hegemony of academic literacy communities. This
information is corroborated by the interview data in Chapters 4 and 5 of the study, which
further details the reasons behind the students’ views on writing. Chapter 4 will indicate,
for example, that LGBT students avoid writing on LGBT issues in the classroom because
their teachers and classes do not provide the Opportunities to write on such issues. It
further shows that many LGBT students do not wish to share their writing on LGBT
issues because doing so makes them uncomfortable. We will also see the students’ chat
room behavior discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 5. The chapter suggests that LGBT

students often do use chat rooms as part of their “coming out” process, but that they

83

abandon these chat rooms once they become more comfortable with the discourse of the
LGBT community or begin to have negative experiences with particular individuals.

These findings add much to our understanding of LGBT student attitudes towards
writing. Most studies on LGBT issues examine how to fit LGBT topics into classrooms,
but refrain from looking at how LGBT students, in particular, feel about writing.

Several scholars do acknowledge the discomfort that LGBT students feel in acaderm'c
writing situations (Davis, Malinowitz, Olano), but these individuals do not investigate
whether writing activities are possible solutions for facilitating LGBT student
inclusiveness. Moreover, few scholars note LGBT student attitudes towards chat room
writing. Therefore, my findings on LGBT student attitudes towards writing make three
major contributions to the field of composition-rhetoric: (1) they enable us to understand
more clearly why LGBT students feel that writing activities inside and outside the
classroom provide ineffective means of negotiating academic literacies; (2) they help us
realize that many classroom writing activities are not an effective means of achieving
LGBT student inclusion in academic discourse; and (3) they teach us more LGBT student
attitudes towards electronic chat rooms in- campus literacy communities.

The second major trend revealed by the questionnaire data suggests that students
see a need to establish language communities outside the classroom environment. The
most popular literacy forums all exist outside of class, and they include e-mail/listservs
and campus groups. The results further indicate that students see the most effective
solutions to heighten LGBT inclusiveness involve a broad range of the academic
community. Teachers, administrators, and students all need to be involved to make this

goal happen. The students see three key issues as central to achieving this inclusiveness:

84

the training of administrators and teachers, the creation of more courses which include
LGBT concerns, and the increase in availability of LGBT resources on campus. The
results further indicate that lesbians, in particular, view corrnnurrity literacy activities
much more positively than most other students: from their perspective, involvement of
the academic community is essential for achieving LGBT student inclusion. Chapters 6
and 7 of this dissertation will explore the complexities of this second trend in much more
detail. Chapter 6 will show, for instance, that much of the students’ electronic
communication in campus literacy communities takes the form of “blogging,” or online
joumaling rather than just traditional e-mail or listservs. In addition, Chapter 6 will show
that LGBT students often involve themselves in on-campus group activities to instill a
sense of pride in themselves while negotiating hetero-normative academic literacies.
Towards the end of Chapter 7, we will examine the relationship between performing
“lesbian” in our culture and involvement in the academic community. In Chapter 8, on
the basis of my research, and after analyzing the viability of the students’ perspectives, I
suggest a research plan for future research to create more inclusiveness of the LGBT
community in academic discourse. This plan asks as to consider literacy from
institutional perspective rather than just a classroom one; it focuses on how literacy
operates on a variety of levels outside classroom spaces. We shall see how students
desire to work with the campus literacy communities outside classrooms to achieve their
goals, and we will explore the process for achieving inclusion of LGBT issues in
academic discourses. All individuals within the academic community—students,
teachers, and administrators alike—need to work towards inclusion of LGBT people in

order to create substantive change.

85

 

These findings on LGBT students’ desires for language communities outside the
classroom contribute much to the discussion of LGBT studies in composition-rhetoric.
Most studies on LGBT students which stress solutions to problems of inclusion are brief
in terms of scope of coverage (McConnell-Celi, Cahill and Theilheirner, Harris),
definitions discussed (Cady), or focus just on classrooms (Donelson, Brunner).

None of these discussions stress the role that campus communities outside classrooms
may play in facilitating LGBT student inclusiveness in academe, and most of them do not
draw their conclusions from primary research on college student populations. In
addition, no recent scholarly work has been done on how LGBT students use “blogging”
as a means of forming language communities outside of class, or on how lesbians, in
particular, formulate language communities outside classroom environments. My study,
on the other hand, elucidates the following findings on LGBT student disciplinary
literacy-and campus literacy communities: (1) it clarifies the central role that primary
discourse communities outside of classrooms play in LGBT student language
development; (2) it focuses on how LGET students “blog” as a means of performing
gender and sexual orientation; and (3) it explores further how lesbians negotiate the

literacy communities of academe, both in and out of classroom environments.

86

 

“She Didn’t Think It Was Right”: LGBT Student Negative Attitudes
towards Writing
Overview

In my English 102 class . . . I had let my professor know that I would not
be speaking [on the 2003 National Day of Silence], and she said that was
fine . . . on the Day of Silence, she announced to the class that one of the
classmates would not be speaking . . . that we would still be discussing
Matthew Shepherd, but first we were going to do a reflective writing to
open people up. After the reflective writing, I basically sat there and
listened to 30 other students talk about how Matthew Shepherd deserved
everything that he got because he had tried to flirt with someone out of a
gay-designated area . . . the professor said that she didn’t believe that
anyone deserved to die because they were gay, but she didn’t think it was
right. And, at the end of the class period, she thanked the entire class,
praising their critical thinking skills in saying that Matthew Shepherd
deserved to die and they would kill any gay person that hit on them.

--Lisa, a bisexual interviewee
from my study

Even though the freewriting activity Lisa’s teacher introduced to her class had the
purpose of “openingpeople up” to discuss Matthew Shepherd, Lisa feels that she was
chastised for remaining closed. She had chosen to give up her voice for that day to honor
Matthew Shepherd, a young man from Wyoming brutally murdered for his gay sexual
orientation, so she could not defend the LGBT community in general or Matthew
Shepherd in particular, and she felt that the teacher and students decided to take
advantage of her voicelessness. It is possible that Lisa might have overreacted; after all,
the teacher may have originally intended to deal with the Matthew Shepherd issue in a
positive way by including his memorial as part of the classroom’s activities. However,
we must also note that Lisa still had to endure listening to homophobic remarks about

someone whose memory she wanted to honor, and, regardless of her intentions or

87

personal views, the teacher could have played a more objective role in the discussion,
challenging the students’ opinions instead of merely agreeing with their. viewpoints.

Unfortunately, Lisa’s experience with the writing prompt is not uncommon. As
noted in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, many LGBT students surveyed revealed negative
attitudes towards activities involving writing, both inside and outside classroom
environments. This chapter will explore the reasons behind these negative attitudes,
which were learned from a series of 32 interviews with LGBT students. During the
interviews, the students were asked seVeral questions about their negotiations of
academic discourse and their views on solutions for facilitating inclusion of LGBT
concerns in academic literacy communities. The questions asked that pertained the most
to writing activities were “Why do you choose to write/not write on LGBT topics in the
classroom?” and “Why do you choose to write/not write on LGBT topics outside the
classroom?” The question “Which of the proposed solutions on the questionnaire do you
feel would work well/not well [towards achieving LGBT student inclusion]? Why?” also
resulted in some in-depth responses about writing activities. The results of the interviews
indicate that, in the secondary discourse spaces of academe, where students, teachers, and
administrators interact, weak writing communities exist. We shall see that teachers and
LGBT students often have polarized values about what matters in a classroom, LGBT
students generally do not trust their peers to provide them valuable feedback on their
writing, and administrators sometimes ignore students’ written concerns. (All students’
names in this chapter have been changed to conceal their identities.)

Overall, this chapter helps us understand the argument of this dissertation that

stronger language communities need to be built to heighten the presence of LGBT issues

88

inacadernic literacy communities both in classroom-oriented, discipline-specific contexts
and in campus contexts outside the classroom. Along with Chapter 5, it makes us aware
of ways in which academic literacy cormnunities often fail LGBT students. It stresses the
point that, when writing communities have only tenuous, fragile bonds, as they often do
in the secondary discourse environments of academe, they cannot assist LGBT students
in negotiating the literacy demands of academe. Chapters 6 through 8, on the other hand,
are more solution-oriented: instead of pointing out the ways in which writing
communities do not work or are not formed, as Chapters 4 and 5 do, they explore the
ways in which LGBT student inclusion in academic literacy spaces can be accomplished
through the forming of campus communities outside the classroom involving writing,
reading, and speech. However, let us now turn our attention to Chapter 4, which shall
begin with an exploration of some of the research on students’ attitudes towards writing,
much of Which corroborates my findings here.
Students’ Attitudes towards WriLirrg: The Research
General Research on the Attitudesof Writers

Much of the research shows that students tend to have negative attitudes towards
their college writing experiences. Many students loathe their first-year writing courses,
since they perceive them as merely another requirement that they must endure to
graduate. Cynthia Mahaffey explains that such students who take first-year composition
courses can be classified as “’writing resisters,’” since they enact their resistance to
classroom writing in a variety of ways, such as by becoming “needy” students who
expect their teachers to answer all their questions or by giving their teachers the

impression that they are “students for whom writing seems truly irrelevant” (4). And

89

Mark Sidey notes in his study on workplace writers that, even after graduation, students
tend not to see the relevance of their first-year writing courses to their lives. Sidey
explains: “The participants could not relate what they did in their freshman writing
classes to the writing they do in the workplace” (16). Most of the students in Sidey’s
study hated first-year writing when they took it, and they still hate it to this day.
Students’ negative views on writing applies to their placement into writing courses as
well: Royer and Gilles note that, until the implementation of Grand Valley State
University’s directed self-placement system, students placed into the developmental
writing course “started the class with a chip on their shoulder after having been told
during orientation that, despite their ‘B’ average in high school, they were required to
take a no-credit class” (59).

Other studies reveal negative attitudes not just about first-year writing, but also
about writing in general. In Literacy in American Lives, Deborah Brandt reveals that
writing was a shameful experience for many of the interviewees in her study. She claims
that they remembered their writing “as occurring out of the eye of adult supervision and,
often, involving feelings of loneliness, secrecy, and resistance” (149-50). Furthermore,
many of Brandt’s interviewees did not view themselves as writers. She asserts that, when
she spoke with them about writing, “many. . . assumed the topic was handwriting,
whereas others equated writing exclusively with literary or creative composition. Many
of the latter group initially reported that they did no writing, when, in fact, with more
probing, they reported using writing for an array of purposes” (156). Similarly, at the
2004 CCCC conference in San Antonio, Glenda Conway explained in her paper entitled

“Making Composition Matter to Students” that, due to their negative experiences with

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writing throughout their lives, most students experience a “disengagement” with writing.
' Hence, students come to writing classrooms with the attitude “that papers are stupid,
boring, a waste.”

Interestingly enough, all of these studies recommend the building of language
communities as solutions to making students feel more included. Mahaffey, for example,
notes that teachers need to “acknowledge to trusted colleagues the actions of students
which enrage, aggravate, and fi'ustrate” them (4). By talking about the issues with others,
teachers will become better equipped to deal with their students’ resistance. Sidey
suggests that, to make students feel that writing is worthwhile to learn, teachers should
“teach writing as a process—now we need to teach students to recognize various genres,
the conventions of these genres, and to apply the appropriate processes to various genres
as they draft and revise” (18). This approach enhances students’ understanding of the
social nature of writing and their recognition that different writing situations require
different rhetorical standards. By learning the process approach, students learn how to
become more linguistically fluent in different discourse communities. To assuage student
resentment regarding their placement into writing courses, Royer and Gilles recommend
that universities develop a system of directed self-placement, in which they ask students
to consider a series of questions about their own reading and writing, but ultimately
require them to make their own decisions about their own writing. This allows students
to be trusted with a decision that faculty and administrators normally make, thus
lessening the power disparity between these new students and those who normally have
the most influence over campus policies. Brandt also calls for lessening of the power

disparity between students and faculty in her study on attitudes towards literacy. Calling

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for the democratization of literacy practices on the institutional level, Brandt recommends
the building of communities through the “management of resources, including
curriculum, staff, equipment materials, time, space, and other forms of subsidy, to
compensate within the school for economy equality beyond the school” (186). Thus
Brandt envisions schools as possible levelers of inequality, through which literacy gaps
may be bridged. Conway suggests that we “Validate student voices . . . respond with
warmth and concern . . . [and] respond to students as we would our colleagues.” All of
the actions to which Conway refers would assist in creating a bond between students and
teachers that would make students feel less threatened, and more like they have a sense of
agency in the classroom. '

In spite of the valuable contributions of all these studies to our understanding of
students’ attitudes towards writing, it is worthy to note that none of them examine how
LGBT students, in particular, negotiate literacies in and out of the classroom. And, as we
shall see, most of the articles which do explore this topic tend to do so only briefly.
Research on LGBT Students

Many studies on LGBT students and literacy have offered ideas as to how
integrate LGBT topics in the general classroom setting (Harris, Brunner, Misa, Norton),
but very few have examined LGBT student populations in particular, nor have they
considered in-depth the role that institutions play in determining LGBT student attitudes
towards writing. The works of Joseph Cady, Pamela Olano, and Harriet Malinowitz,
however, do reveal a particular interest in LGBT student negotiations of literacy. Cady’s
primary interest, though, does not lie in individual LGBT student voices; his primary

concern is how to construct a historically-contextualized course on gay and lesbian topics

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to appeal to LGBT students and their allies. And while Olano does discuss the place of
gay and lesbian students in writing classrooms in particular in her 1998 article “The
Unclaimed Self,” she stresses student writing performance from a classroom context
rather than an institutional context. In addition, due to the brevity of her article, we do
not learn a great deal about LGBT student attitudes towards writing. Malinowitz’s
Textual Orientations, in which she interviews gay and lesbian students from her writing
course on gay and lesbian issues, discusses findings which most closely corroborate my
work here. She notes that, in rhetorical situations, LGBT students often most deal with
issues of “secrecy, conceahnent, and disclosure, as well as anticipating the consequences
of disclosure . . . all of these things have produced a form of rhetorical self-
consciousness” (254). Thus she rightly acknowledges the complexity within gay and
lesbian rhetorics. My work differs from Malinowitz’s in that it notes more of a student
dislike ’of writing, in particular, not just complex attitudes towards various rhetorical acts.
Secondly, while Malinowitz habitually refers to “gays and lesbians” in her study, mine
includes lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals.

My study builds upon. the work of other scholars on LGBT student literacies by
focusing in much more detail on LGBT students’ attitudes towards writing and looking at
these views within the context of institutionalized literacy communities beyond the
classroom, such as LGBT student interactions with administrators or with hetero-
normative peers. I have noticed that LGBT students’ negative views of writing express
themselves in three different ways: writing in class as an ineffective means of negotiating
academic literacies; writing outside of class as an inadequate means of dealing with

academic discourse; and sharing informal writing in groups as an ineffectual solution to

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achieving LGBT student inclusion in academe. These findings often mirror those

 

discussed earlier regarding students’ attitudes towards writing overall. Let us begin our
look at the interview data by examining the first of these three observations: the
perception of the students that writing in class is not an effective means of dealing with
academic literacies.
Writing in Class: An Ineffective Means of NegotiatingAcademic Literacies

The students interviewed do not perceive writing activities in the classroom as
effective means of negotiating the literacy communities of academe. I came to this
conclusion mainly through student answers to the question “Why do you choose to
write/not write on LGBT topics in the classroom?” Out of all the interview questions,
students tended to give the most full, detailed responses to this one. Many of them had
stories about their experiences with LGBT issues in the classroom that they wanted to
share. Consequently, students provided a wide variety of responses to this query.

Interestingly enough, all of the students interviewed cared about LGBT topics to
at least some extent. Some students commented that they did not write on LGBT issues
because there was no place for these issues in their classrooms. However, even these
students tended to base their views on concerns external to LGBT—oriented subject
matter, and many stated that they often find their own ways to involve themselves in
LGBT issues (in or out of class) to compensate for the lack of attention to these concerns
in the classroom.

Taylor, an intersexed student who prefers a male name and a female pronoun in
describing herself, remarked that, in her Hotel Restaurant Management Program, LGBT

topics are not appropriate in the cooking classes she takes. She explained that this is due

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to “money, mostly. I just take the classes that I need to graduate and that’s really about it
. . . I don’t have the funds,” but that she would take LGBT-oriented classes otherwise.
Outside of class, Taylor is very involved in LGBT communities. She declared: “In terms
of writing . . .-I’m working on a couple different things right now. I’ve written, we do
transgender monologues so I’ve done that a couple times and I’m working on creating a
new one . . . I write a lot of poetry for myself, and also I’m working on a article for [a
university publication] on intersex . . She created a gay—straight alliance group, and is
involved in several university and state-wide groups which concern gender and sexual
orientation issues. She explained that she sees her extra-curricular activities as an
integral part of her community involvement: “1 have a lot of friends, and I’m involved in
a lot of communities. A lot of community projects related to LGBT issues. It’s
something I do for myself.”

Herman, a gay graduate student in agronomy, similarly claimed that LGBT
concerns are “not an issue” in his classes. Yet, interestingly enough, he plans to make
concerted efforts to compensate for this in his research: he hOpes to bring up genetic and
international developmental issues in his work that unveil the concerns of the LGBT
community. He explained: “There are a lot of gender issues in international development
[and] . . . they pretty much ignore gays and lesbians and transgendered and intersex
people.” It is important to him that stereotypes are combated in scientific discourse, and
one way in which he plans to combat these stereotypes is to research Latino attitudes
towards gay people in his research on the bean population in Honduras. He revealed that
“A lot of traditional societies believe that [the presence of] gay people can make their

crop less fertile or . . . can make an animal less likely to conceive . . . that’s an issue for

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me . . . because, when I’m working in Honduras, I’m not out, because I don’t want that
to be a factor in my research, basically.” Even though Herman is not currently out when
doing his research in Honduras, he still desires to make people more aware of the
stereotypes against LGBT people that do exist there by writing articles on this topic; he
wants to address issues of sexual orientation by entering into a community of scholars
who will read his work. Through this written work, he h0pes that he can help change
international views on the role of LGBT peOple in agriculture and will therefore feel less
inclined to hide his sexual identity.

Erica, a self-described “dyke,” also compensates for the lack of attention to queer
concerns in her classes. She noted that she hasn’t taken classes where she’s been able to
discuss those topics; even her Women’s Studies classes did not sufficiently address
LGBT concerns. For example, she revealed that “In my Psychology of Women class, the
textbook tries to address LGBT issues and concerns of lesbian and bi women but I think
that it’s sort just of a generalization.” Therefore, to compensate for these concerns in her
classes, she brings up issues dealing with lesbian feminism as often as she can in her
disciplinary literacy communities, such as in her personal responses to class writing
assignments. When one of her Women’s Studies classes was taking about feminism,
lesbian feminism was not brought up in class, so she made sure to bring up lesbian
feminism in her journal entry. And to deal with the generalizations in her textbook, for
example, she reminded her classmates during class discussion that the experiences
represented there are “not the experiences of everyone . . . think about the different

communities in all areas.”

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Lechele, an African-American lesbian activist at her university, also noted during
her interview that, much to her dismay, her classes don’t address LGBT issues at all. She
explained: “The classes that I’m in, they don’t talk about LGBT topics. I’m not in
English classes, I’m not in writing classes, so I guess that’s why, but I don’t think they’d
bring it up anyway.” She thought that the issues might have appeared in her course on
substance abuse problems or in her interdisciplinary arts and humanities course; however,
she found that LGBT issues never came up. She finds that many of her arts and
humanities classes generally “[don’t] allow those topics”; consequently, she feels
strongly that her university “discrirrrinates against race, and discriminates against sexual
orientation also.” When I asked her if it was possible to work LGBT issues into classes
on her own, she replied “It’s really not possible. Because if I have a paper to write, it’s
on a certain topic, and it has to be on that topic. And they don’t give you choices. So
they say . . . you have to write this, and if you don’t write this, well, then you’re not doing
it right.” Clearly, Lechele perceives the demands of discipline-specific classroom
literacies as constraining. However, through heron-campus activism, her involvement in
a local AIDS network, and her online petition drive to memorialize lS-year-old Sakia
Gunn (who was murdered for being a lesbian), Lechele involves herself in campus
literacy communities which do discuss LGBT concerns. Regarding her involved
campaign to establish a moment of silence and a community center in Sakia’s honor,
Lechele stated, “I’m not just going to send a letter and be like, ok, that’s it, no. I want
something done. I won’t stop until she gets recognized, because I didn’t do that for

nothing. It’s a lot of hard work.” Lechele took up this project on Sakia on her own,

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without any prompting from a class assignment, because she wants so badly to engage in
LGBT issues, and her classes, she feels, do not provide this engagement for her.

From this data, we can conclude that, even when students note that LGBT
concerns do not belong in their classes, they tend to say this not because they themselves
feel apathetic towards LGBT issues, but because they feel powerless to overcome this
decision which, in their view, has already been made for them. After assimilating
themselves into academic discourse communities, they come to understand that one of
the pervading ideologies of academe is that LGBT topics should not be a part of
classrooms. However, insteadof agreeing with the academic bureaucracies which deem
that LGBT tOpics are inappropriate at the classroom level, most LGBT students do create
strategies to compensate for the lack of attention to these concerns, either in their own
research and classroom study (as in the cases of Herman and Erica) or in their activism
(as in the cases of Taylor and Lechele). Perhaps we as instructors need to join our
students in making concerted efforts to challenge the boundaries of institutional
structures. As Porter et al. argue, “Institutions are hard to change . . . But they can be
rewritten . . . through rhetorical action” (610). If teachers of writing “reconceived
[them]selves as ‘writing experts’ working in the public realm instead of ‘composition
teachers’ working in the university” (Porter et al. 632), we could begin to initiate this
kind of change.

Other students, instead of saying that LGBT concerns “don’t belong” in certain
classes, noted a lack of assignments on LGBT topics. Donna, a Jewish bisexual student,
remarked that, even though she is a women’s studies major and is ostensibly supposed to

deal with gender and sexuality issues in many of her classes, she has only been given an

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assignment on an LGBT-oriented topic once in her college career (on Adrienne Rich’s
“Compulsory Heterosexuality”). When asked what she thought accounted for the lack of
LGBT-oriented assignments in her classes, she replied: “Instructors don’t want to discuss
LGBT issues unless they have [a] personal interest” in LGBT topics. So unless the
covering of LGBT concerns interests the instructor, the issues are not addressed in her
courses; LGBT-inclusive communities are absent from her classrooms.

Rena, a lesbian first-year student, also expressed a desire to know more about
LGBT culture, but feels that, in her classes, she hasn’t had assignments dealing with
these issues. She stated: “I would like . . . to educate myself, to know more about the
culture and issues that go on in gay and lesbian society. That kind of stuff, from day to
day. And I think it’s important to educate others, teachers and other people, about it. It’s
part of our culture and needs to be talked about, just like anything else.” However, she
also noted that she has not been asked to deal with issues concerning gay and lesbian
society in her classes. She claimed that she once had a sociology teacher who asked the
class to write on a “political or social issue,” but this instructor did not ever ask the class
to write on LGBT concerns. Rena took advantage of this open topic to write on an LGBT
issue, but she also noted, “It wasn’t like I was asked to do it, I wanted to do it.”
Consequently, some of her peers “made some comments against her paper,” and she felt
that they did so because the topic was LGBT-oriented. While it is possible that the
“some comments against” Rena’s paper were made for other reasons, such as weak
organization, or poor description, we should also realize that her peers could have given
Rena a more affirming response, describing the paper’s strengths as well as its flaws. If

they had done so, perhaps Rena would have taken the criticism less personally.

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Similarly, Kate, a lesbian junior, noted that she never had a teacher specifically
ask students to address LGBT issues in a writing assignment. Instead, she revealed that
in her composition class, for example, she would receive broad, ostensibly simple journal
assignments which would make her panic:

KATE: We had to do, basically, she asked us questions, and we had to answer

them . . .

BRIAN: About?

KATE: It was just . . . stupid questions, like “Who’s your best friend,” and things

like that . . . I had problems with that whole thing, as far as lesbian and gay issues

go.

BRIAN: Why did the writing prompt, “Who’s your best friend,” cause you

anxiety like that?

KATE: Because I was in love with her [laughs].

Kate was therefore confronted with the choice of whether to “out” herself to her teacher
or to make something up. She did decide to write on the topic, but, according to Kate, the
teacher decided that it would be best if Kate did not share her work with others in the
class, to “protect” Kate from other students’ vindictiveness. While Kate was happy that
she “never had any trouble with anyone reading [her] papers” in this class, the instructor
also denied her the opportunity to receive feedback on her work or engage others in
dialogue on LGBT concerns. If the instructor had at least on occasion acknowledged the
possibility of love between LGBT individuals in her journal assignments, perhaps Kate
would have felt more comfortable addressing her feelings toward her friend.

And, oddly enough, Todd, a gay student at a prestigious northern California
institution, remarked that he is currently taking an interdisciplinary studies course called
“Interpreting a Queer Past,” but it seems to emphasize other minorities besides the LGBT

population. Instead of looking at the LGBT population in particular, Todd claimed that

the course stresses how “passing” for straight affects other minority groups. Similarly,

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his “Minority Public Health” course and “Sociology of Gender” courses at his school
completely ignored LGBT concerns. From his stay at his school, Todd has concluded
that, even in this ostensibly liberal environment, “Everyone is presumed to be
heterosexual.”

Overall, the interviews reveal that teachers only allow students to write on LGBT
topics under two different circumstances. The first circumstance occurs when the course
itself specifically deals with queer concerns. This most often takes place in graduate-
level courses or specialized undergraduate programs (in Jason’s courses at a prestigious
college within a Midwestern university, for example, he is encouraged to explore his own
areas of interest). However, as we saw in Todd’s case, sometimes the titles of courses
indicate that they will cover LGBT issues, but the content of the courses differs
dramatically from the way it was originally advertised.

The second circumstance under which writing on LGBT issues takes place
happens when teachers allow for open topics. On the few occasions in which students
wrote on LGBT issues in the classroom, they remarked that they did so because their
teachers left the topics for their writing assignments open (as in the cases of Rena and
Kate). Journals, in particular, seem to serve as a particularly popular space for the
exploration of LGBT concerns. Julie, a bisexual student, revealed in her interview that
being allowed to keep an online journal in her Writing about Literature class enabled her
to open up on LGBT topics in ways that she never had previously. She felt “excited” to
write on LGBT topics for this class. Even though it was at first “scary” for her to write
about such issues, it made her feel more comfortable knowing that her instructor

encouraged her to write on these concerns. For the most part, though, the interviewees

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claimed that opportunities to write on LGBT topics in the classroom have not been
present for them because their teachers have chosen to ignore these topics. In all
likelihood, this has occurred because many teachers have chosen conduct their
classrooms within a “complex web of signification forged by homophobic discourse”
thereby ignoring the concerns of LGBT students (Malinowitz, “Construing” 47). But it is
the responsibility of writing teachers to help LGBT students “clarify the complex
intentions, possible interpretations and reader-responses, and consequences that they will
have to negotiate,” and this can only be done by “establishing a counter-homophobic
discourse” in the classroom (Malinowitz, “Construing,” 47).

Some students told stories in which their teachers not only ignored LGBT topics
in the classroom, but even went so far as to discourage their students from writing on
such issues. Donna mentioned that her teaching assistant for her “Sex and Gender” class
wrote disparaging remarks on student essays whenever the students attempted to write on
LGBT issues. This TA told. one student in Donna’s class that she wrote “’too much about

9”

lesbians. In addition, Donna herself habitually received exceptionally rude comments
from her TA on her papers such whenever she wrote on queer issues. Donna explained:
“She was pretty negative. She would pick out the parts about queer issues and circle
them and write nasty comments [like] ‘not well written’ or ‘poorly phrased’ or something
. . . She would sort of pretend that they were mechanical things, but they really weren’t .
. .It was a pretty hideous experience.” One might reasonably assume that a teaching
assistant of a “Sex and Gender” class would be reasonably open to queer concerns, but

Donna informed me that her TA refused to use the word “trans gender” in class and

instead referred to transgendered people as “God’s experiments.” While we should

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acknowledge the possibility that Donna received negative comments on her essay
because her essay was indeed lacking in quality, the fact that Donna made three different
types of negative comments regarding this TA’s treatment of LGBT individuals should
lead us to at least question whether this TA could have been more sensitive to the
treatment of her LGBT students.

And when Kaleb, a gay student at a rural community college, wrote a paper for
his Composition 1 course on coming out issues, he received a “mildly disturbed”
response from his teacher. His teacher not only expressed surprise that Kaleb would
write on an LGBT-oriented topic, he did not allow it to be discussed in the classroom.
Consequently, Kaleb’s paper was ignored by his peer review group, and he had to seek
out non-traditional students in the class to give him some feedback. While his instructor
gave him a 4.0 on the paper, the instructor warned him against submitting the paper for
outside evaluation in the final class portfolio for “’it may not be received well.”’
Ultimately, an anonymous outside reader gave Kaleb’s portfolio a grade of 3.5, and
claimed that he or she lowered Kaleb’s grade because the “coming out” paper was “’too
controversial.”’ On another paper Kaleb Wrote for the same class, on gay marriages, the
teacher again chastised the “’controversial’” nature of the subject matter and disagreed
with some of his arguments. Disgusted with his instructor’s reaction, Kaleb decided to
show the essay to other professors he knew, who concurred that it was 4.0 work. Perhaps
Kaleb’s instructor was only trying to protect him by warning him that his work might be
received poorly by outside readers, and there may have been other reasons for the 3.5 on

Kaleb’s portfolio other than its controversial content. However, the teacher could have

made more affirming comments to Kaleb throughout the class, explaining what he did

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like about his work, instead of habitually commenting on the wor ’s “controversial”
nature. If he had done so, then perhaps Kaleb would not have seen the negative
comments as a personal attack, and a greater sense of unity would have been established
between student and instructor.

So far in this chapter we have seen that LGBT students avoid writing in class for
several different reasons. Some of them refrain from writing on LGBT issues in their
classes because they felt that the issues did not serve a purpose in their discipline-specific
classes. However, these same students also tend to view LGBT topics as important, and
they attempt to seek alternate ways for involving themselves in LGBT-oriented literacy
communities both inside and outside the classroom, in both disciplinary literacy
communities in class and campus literacy communities outside of class. Other students
commented that they do not write on LGBT issues in the classroom because they lack
opportunities to do so. Their instructors never present them with such opportunities, and
they are given writing assignments on LGBT-oriented topics only in special
circumstances. Finally, other interviewees remarked that the negative feedback they
received from their teachers discourages them from writing on LGBT-oriented topics in
the classroom.

In all three of these situations, we are reminded of the influence that teachers have
over the classroom setting. The discipline-specific literacy community of the college
classroom can either setup power disparities between teacher and student or acknowledge
multiple student voices; the teacher’s attitude towards that community sets the standard
for the term. When students come into the college classroom, they feel that it is

necessary to take on a new identity in'their new community to please their teacher and

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peers. If the members of their new discourse community refrain from acknowledging
LGBT concerns, then they learn that LGBT issues are not valued in this secondary
discourse environment, so they feel uncomfortable writing on these topics for their
teachers and peers. As Gee would argue, the students “bring out [a new] store of
videotapes”—the ones that “are most relevant to understanding” the classroom context
(“Reading,” 716). The interviewees in this study tended to conclude that writing on
LGBT issues in classroom setting is, for the most part, ignored or discouraged by the
teachers who create the classroom community. Lauren noted that she will not out herself
in her classes because, in academic settings, “[the] teacher has too much power.” She
worries that if people discover that she’s transgendered, “their view changes completely,”
and this would adversely affect her course grade. Kadijah, an Afiican-American bisexual
at a Midwestern university, noted the importance of paying attention to links between
race and sexuality. She claimed that because “Teachers are generally white, middle-
aged, upper-class males . . . [they] haven’t evaluated the privilege within themselves
[and] are uncomfortable viewing other people’s empowerment.” Thus Kadijah rightly
points out that most college and university teachers, who are in positions of power in
their classrooms because their race, gender, age, and sexuality all fit within the accepted
social norms, do not want to spend time considering that those individuals different from
themselves have that right to empowerment. If they were to “evaluate the privilege
within themselves,” then they might start to question whether their empowerment is
deserved. Instead, LGBT students in the classroom are too often “distracted from the
possibility of intervening in the making and remaking of reality. This serves the needs of

the oppressive class, in that it retains control over [hetero-normative] descriptions of

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reality and the hegemonic social structures that are legitimated and locked in place by
those descriptions” (Malinowitz, Textual Orientations 96).

I will now shift the focus to student writing outside the classroom. This section
reveals that, even outside of class, LGBT students tend to view writing activities as
ineffective means of negotiating academic literacies.

Writing outside of Class: Anotherigeffective Meaflf Dealigg with Acadgmic
Literacies

Just as LGBT students fail to see writing in class as an effective means of
negotiating academic literacies, they also tend to perceive writing outside of class as an
equally ineffective means of dealing with academic literacies’ constraints. When
considering student responses to the interview question “Why do you choose to write/not
write on LGBT tOpics outside the classroom?,”

Having no time to write on LGBT topics was a frequent complaint of many
interviewees, particularly graduate students. J acinda, a bisexual medical student who is
also working on a Ph.D. in neuroscience, cited lack of time as her most common reason
for not writing on LGBT tOpics outside of class. “I don’t have that much time . . . I like
to read about it, learn about it . . . [but] talking is more within my community.” She also
claimed that reading, unlike writing, helps her “connect with others.” J acinda explains:
“I’ll discuss these things with new people that I meet just because, especially if they don’t
seem comfortable with LGBT issues, I sort of discuss it with them, and I feel like having
reading material helps me understand myself and it also helps me discuss it with new
people.” For Jacinda, reading, not writing, helps facilitate interaction in her campus

literacy communities.

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In addition, Esther, a lesbian graduate student who also is a graduate assistant in
the LGBT concerns programs office at her university, remarked that she preferred “verbal
expression to reading or writing.” Esther declared: “I’m not a writer . . . it frustrates me
to do it. I hate to type [a paper] out or write it out . . . it’s time-consuming.” She mostly
reads “what [she] has to,” and would “rather attend a conference on LGBT issues” than
write or read about them. She explained that both reading and writing frustrate her
because they “take . . . too much time . . . Verbal expression is more efficient.”

Therefore, as with the students mentioned in the earlier section who commented
that LGBT issues do not belong in their courses, it is not that the interviewees refrain
fiom writing on LGBT concerns because they feel apathetic towards these concerns.
Instead, they avoid writing on these topics because they often perceive the act of writing
itself as a time-consuming source of fiustration. They want their communication to be
fast, and, in their view, most traditional writing situations cannot meet that requirement
because they do not assist them in developing a sense of community with other LGBT
individuals.

Other interviewees explained that they do not write outside of class because they
do not want to share their writing with others; oddly enough, however, these same
individuals often have writing lives outside of class. Erica mentioned that she does not
write papers or journals outside of class because she doesn’t see herself as a good writer.
However, she did mention that she is actively involved in writing flyers for the Women’s
Council group at Michigan State and that she discusses political and personal LGBT
issues with her friends over e-mail. She also talked about forming a coalition with other

on-campus groups, in which she helped pen a list of fourteen issues concerning LGBT

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students to bring to the administration. Clearly, Erica has a writing life outside of class;

yet, still she habitually insisted that she was “not a good writer.” When I asked her why

she didn’t see herself as a writer outside of class, she explained that she felt that her

words were not having any effect on the campus’s administration. She chastised the

President and Board of Trustees for being “not educated on gender identity issues,” and

explained that the Board of Trustees “admitted to not reading gender identity pamphlets”

given to them by the students within Erica’s coalition. In addition, she revealed that no

members of the Michigan State administration showed up when invited to gender identity

forums on campus, which help to educate the MSU community on gender identity

concerns. Still, Erica feels a strong need “to react to [the] unfairness” that she perceives

on campus:

BRIAN: Tell me about why it’s so important to you to be involved in
these kinds of issues outside the classroom.

ERICA: It’s something that I’m passionate about . . . I guess it’s

personal . . . I’ve seen where things aren’t right, how they’ve affected me,
and how they affect others, as far as just, I mean, the oppression, and, the
unfairness, I guess, in the world. I want to try and change that . . . I don’t
think that anyone should have to be afraid, or be alone, or be oppressed, or
made to feel like they are less than someone else.

Erica diminished her writing abilities mainly because she felt that she did not have an

audience who cared about her concems. Since the administrators did not take her

coalition seriously, she did not take her own involvement as a writer seriously, either.

When asked about her writing involvement outside the classroom, Erica replied:

ERICA: I don’t really write.

BRIAN: Why is that?

ERICA: I don’t consider myself a very good writer. I don’t think that’s
one of my strong points. I don’t do a lot of writing.

BRIAN: How are you defining writing, though?

ERICA: I guess I don’t write papers or essays, or even a journal about
anything.

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When I asked her whether she felt her varied flyers and brochures for the Women’s
Council were considered “writing,” she reluctantly responded, “Yeah, I suppose.” As a
consequence of the administration’s ignoring her coalition’s work, Erica seems uncertain
that her very political, purposeful writing for a student organization outside of class is
meaningful. From Erica’s perspective, the definition of “meaningful” writing is
determined by those in positions of power in academe, those who shape the definition of
“real” academic writing by assigning only traditional essays and who largely ignore the
relationship between in-class writing and student social activism through literacy which
takes place in campus communities outside the classroom.

Devin also fears judgment from others when he writes outside of class. He told
me that he doesn’t feel that he has many outlets to express his opinions on LGBT issues.
It is important to Devin that peOple not “criticize [his] opinions.” Additionally, he does
not want his words to generate “talk” about his sexuality; he feels that this will “create
drama” that he wants to avoid. On his personal website, he avoids any reference to his
sexuality because he “doesn’t want. to start conflict.” Part of Devin’s suspicious nature
stems from the fact that, in the past, he has had people in his life “gossip” about his
relationships. Oddly enough, however, Devin is not completely “in the closet.” He
regularly attends one of his university’s caucuses for LGBT students, and even serves as
the group’s secretary. And he often uses the HRC (Human Rights Campaign) website to
fax and send letters to people in Congress on such issues as the Defense of Marriage Act,
hate crime legislation, and workplace discrimination against LGBT people. He does
sign his name to these letters, and often gets positive responses from many Democratic

senators and representatives. Apparently, using the Internet to express his political

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viewpoints creates for Devin a level of anonymity with which he is comfortable. He will
express his views in writing as long as the writings concern national political issues rather
than local ones, and as long as he can use the Internet as a conduit for his written
expression. Comstock and Addison suggest that LGBT student Internet involvement such
as Devin’s may best be referred to as a “cyberculture” instead of a “discourse
community”: “[This] is a naming that respects the ways this group has positioned itself in
resistance to a more dominant . . . heterosexist culture” (248). From their participation
within this “cyberculture,” students like Devin “may more readily be able to engage in
[sexuality] issues in less safe spaces, such as our classrooms” (Comstock and Addison
252)

Clearly, some LGBT students make conscious efforts to isolate themselves fiom
public discourse and see themselves as weak or unwilling participants within it, yet,
paradoxically, they-simultaneously engage in literacy activities in campus communities,
most of which they perceive as invalid due to their unresponsive audiences. Therefore,
we may conclude that these students do not isolate because they naturally hate writing;
they degrade their own writing lives because the audiences for whom they have written
have expressed apathy and derision towards their written expressions on LGBT concerns.
We will see in Chapters 6 and 7, however, that when LGBT students can establish a
strong sense of community through their writing processes, they are much more likely to
view them as empowering.

In addition, students who participate frequently in the literacy communities of
their institutions have become victims of hate crimes through the written word. The word

“fag” serves as the most common invective used against the gay community, and the

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results of this study indicate that this word is invoked in both oral and written forms to
discourage the presence of gay students on college campuses. Ed, a gay activist, serves
as president of an LGBT student caucus at a midwestem university. To facilitate
communication between himself and his peers, he keeps a message board on the door of
his dorm room. One day, someone scrawled the word “FAG” in permanent marker on
Ed’s message board, yelled the word, and then took off. When Ed filed a complaint to
report the incident, nothing was done; his message board was ruined. Similarly, last
year, when Dan, the former president of his LGBT support group at his university,
worked on a collaborative project on LGBT concerns for one of his courses, students
literally wrote demeaning messages on the project when it was posted for public display.
One person wrote “Fags—we don’t want to see this crap.” These situations reveal that,
ironically, sites that are ostensibly used to facilitate communication and understanding
between homosexuals and heterosexuals—a message board on a dorm room door and an
educational project—become sites to reinforce hetero-normative literacy standards. By
writing the word “fag” on the possessions of these gay students, heterosexual students
reveal their resistance to any subversion of power. The words “we don’t want to see this

crap” on Dan’s project suggest that “we” the heterosexual students whose views

 

dominate the campus climate—do not wish to view the project because it reminds “us”
that there many be other, valid ways of knowing the world that differ fiom the hetero-
norrnative majority. If it were not visible, then the LGBT community can remain
invisible, and hetero-normative power is not threatened. The project is “crap” to these

students because it challenges their own vieWpoints in ways that cause them discomfort.

lll

 

The reactions that Raya, a transgender student activist, received to posting flyers
advertising her campus group reveal how the written “violence” of literacy against LGBT
students is multi-layered. The flyer, which she designed, showed pe0ple from a Gap
clothing ad in provocative poses. The word “Gap” on the original ad was changed to
“gay” for the purpose of advertising her campus’s LGBT group. The intent of the ad was
to get the students’ attention in an offbeat, humorous way. But as a consequence of her

posting this ad all over campus, peOple shouted “’You fucking queer, we don’t want you

9” 9” ’9’

here at her, and wrote such expressions as “’faggot, queer,”’ and “’You need to get
out of here’” on the Gap parody flyers. Ironically, the purpose of the flyer was to
encourage students to come to an on-campus group discussion on heterosexism. But most
students reacted negatively to its message. .One on-carnpus Christian group began to put
posters directly over Raya’s flyers advertising their group meeting. Other students ripped
down the flyer; when they did so, they found a smaller one beneath that calmly stated
“You have just committed a hate crime.” Typically, her original Gap parody postings
“would be gone less than a half hour” after she put them up, so many students saw the
smaller flyer as well. This new flyer produced an even stronger reaction fi'om the
students, who often replied to it by writing detailed messages underneath, in which they
vehemently denied any “hate crime” wrongdoings. According to Raya, one message
read: “’You don’t need to be here. I didn’t commit a hate crime. I’m just trying to teach
you guys a lesson.”’

With this example, we see LGBT student literacy used to perpetuate hatred and

division between hetero-normative and LGBT groups. When Raya took an idolized,

commodified symbol of heterosexual sexuality/culture/economics (the Gap ads) and

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subverted its meaning for a predominately heterosexual audience (university students)
through the change of one letter (“Gap” to “Gay”), she threatened the hetero-normative
dominance of her university’s culture. The cultural myth of heterosexual desirability
displayed in the Gap ad was subverted. As Barthes would argue, this is a challenge to the
notion of “myth as depoliticized speech.” Barthes claims: “If I state the fact of [a myth],
I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured [sic]”
(143). The ad’s original underlying message—that heterosexual desire is natural and
norrnal--also “goes without saying” in our culture, but Raya’s change to the ad
complicated this idea. Her intent was not to produce this threatening feeling within the
students, but to extend an invitation to a discussion on heterosexism, to create an alliance
of understanding between the LGBT and straight communities. Oddly enough, she
produced the flyers'as part of an assignment for her Women’s Studies class on activism
rather than of her own volition. However, even though her teacher sanctioned the
project, other individuals within the university repudiated her work. Even when she
reported the defaced flyers to her Residence Hall Director, the Director’s reaction was
“’Oh, well, tough shit.”’

When the Christian group placed its flyers over Raya’s, they were asserting their
power over LGBT issues on both a literal and metaphorical level. By deliberately
placing its message perpetuating dominant religious ideologies on top of Raya’s flyer,
this group symbolically reinforced its power over those viewpoints, such as Raya’s,
which differ from the social norm. As far as the Christian group was concerned, the
possibility that “heterosexism” exists is best kept hidden from society, and should instead

be replaced with a reminder of dominant Christian ideologies. Thus we see the Christian

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group using literacy as an agent of power and control. However, by reminding those who

 

ripped down her Gap flyer that they had just created a “hate crime,” Raya was able to use
a popular, recognizable phrase to infuriate those who were suppressing her message. At
the suggestion that they might be prejudiced, many students were driven into a fury that
far surpassed their response to the original flyer, writing full response paragraphs denying
their wrongdoing, thus revealing that messages expressed through written literacies can
serve as a public battleground. The literacy statements from both sides became
increasingly volatile: Raya’s flyer was followed by some students’ angry words, which
were followed by Raya’s public “hate crime” accusation, which were followed by the
students’ written rants. It is worthy to note that the students who objected to Raya’s
second set of flyers did not rip them down, ignore them, or cross them out; instead, they
wrote their own messages. As Raya wryly explained, “They would take the time to find
a pen and write a full-length message. And that’s a lot of effort for most college
students.” They preferred to use literacy as a means to express their indignation against
the LGBT community and its views that “heterosexism” and “hate crimes” exist; a
conflict of performances therefore resulted.

The debate in which Raya engages herself is an example of what Miller calls the

‘6’ 9”

textual corridors. Campus walkways, mailboxes, and lamp posts serve as texts on
which debates between student groups reveal themselves in ambiguous contexts. He thus
explains: “In these spaces, all well away from the classrooms, one or more students or
perhaps competing groups of students have been carrying out a heated, accusatory, and

highly coded discussion [about sexual issues on campus]” (401). Miller cites one poster

that he found on campus as an example of “textual corridor” writing. It blared in capital

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letters, “DON’T MAKE YOUR MOTHER HAVE TO TELL HER FRIENDS THAT
YOU’RE A RAPIST.” One student responded to this poster by writing, “’What are you,
a feminist?”’ at the bottom of the poster (400). The context for this corridor debate
cannot be fully understood by the passerby: no one knows wrote these words, nor do we
know precisely why they were written. Similarly, a student walking by the flyers posted
by Raya and the Christian groups would not fully understand the context of their debate.
However, this “textual corridor” debate reinforces the notion that complex, conflict
literacy worlds do indeed exist outside classroom environments. We can see that
“contact zones” (as Pratt calls them) are formed in which students use written literacy as
a means of expressing animosity towards each other. So a key question remains: Can
these “contact zones” be regulated such that the hetero-normative power expressed
through literacy is assuaged in on-carnpus environments? If they can, then much work
still needs to be done. Raya told me that, as a result of her experience with the flyers, she
now feels more unsafe expressing her views on campus, and she has not tried to post
similar flyers since. She stated: “I just didn’t feel safe. Hall directors didn’t give a

shit . . . All of them were like, ‘We don’t want you here’ or ‘Tough shit.’ I was definitely

99

contemplating moving out of the dorm complex. The reactions to the flyers clearly
made Raya feel unwelcome in her academic community.

In this section of the chapter, we have seen how written expression outside of
class is not an effective means of negotiating academic literacies for LGBT students.
Some view themselves as lacking time to write about LGBT concerns; however, they do

desire to participate in LGBT discourse communities through other means, such as

through talking or reading. Others tend to view their participation in campus literacy

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communities through the written word as ineffective, and therefore see their written
participation with LGBT concerns as unimportant. It is important to note, however, that
responses from their audiences to their words have provoked their feelings of self-doubt.
Even students who are actively involved in promoting LGBT discourse on campus have
paid a price for their involvement: they tend to be victims of hate crimes through the
written word. In Raya’s case, in particular, we have seen how the “violence” of literacy
is multilayered on both literal and metaphorical levels. As one flyer covers another, a
battlefield of writing takes shape, thus reinforcing a division between heterosexual and
LGBT students, and forcing Raya to fear for her safety on campus.

Therefore, while none of these students expressed an apathy towards LGBT
concerns, all of them perceive writing as an ineffective means of expression on some
level. To help students move past their negative perspectives on writing situations
outside of class, teachers and administrators can help create situations both in and out of
classroom settings to (1) give students plenty of time to express their interests in LGBT
concerns through writing and (2) encourage the social activism in their written
expression. Teachers may encourage this activism by serving as models for community
involvement for their students. As Cushman suggests, “One way to increase our
participation in public discourse is to bridge the university and community through
activism” (7). If teachers can accomplish these tasks, LGBT students will likely see their
out-of-class written expressions on LGBT issues in a more positive light. A stronger
sense of community, with a greater sense of respect and trust between students and
teachers, must be a part of academic discourse if LGBT students are going to feel

included within it.

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The next section of this chapter examines one aspect of writing pedagogy in more
detail: sharing informal writing with others. We shall see the ways in which LGBT
students perceive this task as a source of anxiety; unfortunately, most students do not
trust their peers and professors enough to share their writing with them.

Sharing Informal Writing withr Others: A Source of Classroom Aggy

When asked “Which of the proposed solutions on the questionnaire do you feel
would not work well?” the interviewees in this study answered by explaining that the
sharing informal writing with others in a classroom setting is an ineffective means of
increasing LGBT studentinclusion in academe. Their views on this topic tended to fall
into two categories: (1) informal writing perceived as formal writing and (2) informal
writing as a source of discomfort. Some students claimed that, if they shared their
informal writing with students in the classroom, that writing automatically becomes
“formal,” and thus- they did not wish to have their informal writing subjected to criticism
in a formalized context. Other students used the word “uncomfortable” in describing
their feelings toward sharing their informal writing. Some claimed that they did not want
to make themselves uncomfortable, while others asserted that they did not wish to subject
their heterosexual peers to discomfort either. LGBT students’ reluctance to share
informal writing in groups exemplifies Gee’s distinction between primary and secondary
discourses. Once LGBT students are in a classroom setting, they must take on a different
identity in order to adapt to the demands of a secondary discourse community. Hence,
their informal writing becomes formal, and they become more reluctant to share their

views on LGBT concerns with others.

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“Informal ” as “Formal ”

Some of the students took issue with the word “informal” used on the
questionnaire to describe their classroom writing. These individuals seemed to equate all
classroom writing with “formal” writing. For example, Jason claimed that, in the
classroom, informal writing automatically becomes “formal” because students typically
are writing for a “mass audience.” He does not feel informal classroom writing should be
shared; journals, for example, should be “private.” For Jason, classroom space

just discourages informal writing. If I had to share what I write in my
journal, if I was encouraged to share, in the sense that I would either
receive academic credit for it, or something like that, it becomes coercive
in the sense that, “Well, I want to do better in the class, I rrright as well
read this,” I think it becomes less genuine than my own informal
writing . . . in most situations where I’ve been in, it’s been like, “We’re
going to have so-and-so day, you can share what you want to, and if you
read you get five extra credit points,” and at that point it becomes
coercive.
In fact, Jason resists any sort of performance of gender or sexuality through role-play or
sharing writing in the disciplinary literacy community of the classroom; he worries that
such perforrnative behavior “may reinforce stereotypes,” and he mentioned that he has
had “poor experiences” involving the performance of gender and sexuality issues in the
classroom. Oddly enough, however, outside the classroom setting, Jason is a campus
activist for LGBT concerns, and readily takes part in campus literacy activities, such as
editing a campus queer newspaper. He is also Vice-President of the main LGBT student
group on campus and President of a student LGBT caucus. In spite of his involvement,
though, he perceives classroom space as an unsafe space for LGBT students, and feels

much more uncomfortable dealing with sexuality concerns in classroom environments

that are discipline-specific.

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Similarly, Ed explained that he dislikes the sharing of informal writing because it
becomes more formal in the classroom context. In fact, he also equated sharing informal
writing with “performance” in his response, explaining that both performance and sharing
writing require students to speak their mind in the classroom, and this “might make them
feel more withdrawn.” In particular, Ed mentioned the example of “informal writing”
cited on the questionnaire—joumal writing—as a type of writing that becomes more
formal if it’s shared with peers. Ed explained:

The whole wording of [”sharing informal writing” on the questionnaire]
makes it seem contradictory. . . I see informal writing such as journals as
a very personal thing, and to say that “Well, you’re going to write this
journal, and then you’re going to share it with other people,” it’s kind of
saying it’s not informal. It becomes formal writing then.
For Ed, there is not enough trust in classroom writing communities for him to feel
comfortable sharing his informal writing. Even though his classmates are his “peers,” he
still perceives sharing his views with them as a “formal” situation.

In addition, Todd also wondered why informal writing would be shared, and
seemed very uncertain about the purpose of such an activity. He stated: “I don’t really
know what exactly that’s going to do. I don’t really see the end goal of that. That’s I why
I guess I put ‘not sure’ [on the questionnaire]. . . Why would you be sharing informal
writing? . . . I can’t really see that as being really effective.” He acknowledged that
sharing informal writing “may create community” in the classroom, but he does not feel
that such a community would be an effective one in the classroom. For Todd, “informal”

writing, by definition, is not to be shared with others in the classroom setting; only

“formal” writing should undergo that sort of scrutiny.

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It is interesting to note that, in their responses, none of the interviewees stressed
the subject matter being shared—writing on LGBT issues—but instead emphasized the
sharing of writing in general. For them, “informal” writing is also “personal” writing,
and, in their perception, personal writing should not be shared with others. The sharing
of “personal” writing, in Ed and Jason’s view, is also a “performance”—one that might
make students feel more excluded than included in classroom discourse. In Bodies that
Matter, Butler reminds us that any act within a discourse community is also “a ritualized
production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force
of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlled and
compelling the shape of the production” (95). For the words of LGBT students to have
an impact in the classroom, the students “must break apart the usual ideologies that have
accrued [within that community] as ‘the effect of fixity’” (Wallace 53; Butler, Bodies
95). However, most LGBT students do not wish to make this kind of transforrnative
effort; they would rather adapt to the classroom community’s discourse demands than
resist them. Therefore, to adapt to the secondary discourse of the classroom environment,
LGBT students are more likely to perform a heterosexual self to make themselves less
“withdrawn” from their new environment. When they reveal their true, queer selves
while participating within the disciplinary literacy communities of the classroom, they are
sometimes ostracized by their secondary group. For example, when Kaleb tried to
discuss a draft of his paper on coming out issues with his peer review group, one student
told him he was going to hell, one got up and left, and one made what Kaleb referred to
as “smart-ass comments” such as “If two guys are together, which one’s the woman?”

Since Kaleb risked writing on a topic that his peer review group viewed as unacceptable,

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Kaleb could not get the feedback that he needed on his writing. Therefore, from Kaleb’s
situation, we see that, even when student writing on LGBT issues is more formalized
(such as the draft of Kaleb’s essay), it is still unacceptable within a disciplinary literacy
community due to the nature of its subject matter.

“Informal ” as “Uncomfortable ”

Several interviewees mentioned that they would be “uncomfortable” sharing their
informal writing in class. Tim, a transgender graduate student, remarked that it would be
nice if LGBT students could feel free to share their informal writing, and that this is a
“goal” to strive for. (He prefers the term “transgender” to “transgendered” because he
feels “transgendered” implies that challenging gender identity boundaries happens only
once.) Tim remarked that it would be nice if LGBT students could feel free to share their
informal writing, and that this is “a great goal” to strive for. However, according to Tim,
the on-campus hostility towards the LGBT community needs to be assuaged before this
goal can become a reality- He explained: “First, the classroom setting needs to be non-
hostile. Other things need to happen to make those [heterosexual] students feel
comfortable and say [to LGBT-students] ‘Yes, I want to hear your story’ and ‘Yes, you
are welcome in this classroom’ . . . and then ask for experience sharing.” Tim believes
that when teachers start “putting [LGBT issues] in the curriculum,” then this classroom
hostility towards LGBT students will be eased. In the meantime, Tim asserted that
people don’t need to be placed “in a fishbowl,” exposed to the scrutiny of the
heterosexual peers. In other words, Tim could sense the discomfort that LGBT students
might feel when sharing their writing with others in the class: they would feel like fish in

a bowl to be stared and gawked at, but not helped. Unlike Tim, Donna objected to

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journals in particular, on the grounds that “they may make students uncomfortable to
have to address themselves . . . [and] I also don’t necessarily care what’s in other
people’s journals . . . I do want to hear about other people’s experiences, but I think that
journals aren’t necessarily very interesting” and she added that they “don’t require much
thought.” When asked how she believed students would respond if asked to share their
work in groups, Donna claimed that “group work is ineffective . . . only one or two
people end of doing the work.” Like Donna, Kaleb brought up the “comfort” issue in his
discussion of informal writing. He mentioned that students have a hard time sharing their
informal writing because “for students to learn, they need comfort,” and this activity
would not contribute to that. Unlike Donna, however, and in spite of his negative
experiences in groups, Kaleb suggested such activities as “group work . . . peer review,
introductions, and icebreakers” to increase student comfort level in the disciplinary
literacy communities of the classroom. He asserted that “comfort” in the classroom is
established when students “get . . . to know one another,” and this can best be done
through communal classroom activities. Thus teachers must consider how they want
students to present their informal writing. If they have students read their work in front
of the entire class, the students will feel more like they are in the “fishbowl” that Tim
mentioned. Within groups, on a smaller level, however, students might feel more
comfortable sharing their writing. Anne Gere argues that such groups work best when
“groups are sufficiently prepared and committed, when appropriate tasks are clear and/or
agreed upon by all participants, and when debriefing or evaluation is built into the life of
the group” (112). Therefore, if teachers are going to employ groups in their writing

classrooms, they need to make sure that students clearly understand the directions given

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to them, and use activities such as group self-evaluation forms to ensure that everyone
does his or her part.
Conclusion

This chapter has shown that LGBT students possess negative attitudes towards
traditional writing activities that involve little or no sense of community-building. To
begin with, the chapter reveals that students do not see writing in class, in discipline-
specific literacy communities, as an effective means of dealing with academic literacies.
They feel this way not because they are apathetic towards LGBT subject matter; on the
contrary, many students make concerted efforts on their own to include LGBT issues in
their own studies. However, the students feel that they lack opportunities to write on
LGBT topics in the classroom: they have few assignments that deal specifically with
LGBT concerns, their professors lack interest in LGBT tOpics, and at times they are given
exceptionally negative feedback from their instructors when they attempt to address
LGBT issues. Similarly, the interviewees also feel that writing outside of class in campus
literacy communities is often an ineffective means of negotiating academic literacies.
Some students feel that they lack time to write on LGBT concerns; others do not actively
engage in public discourse due to the negative feedback that they have received from
others; whereas others are sometimes discouraged by the hate crimes perpetrated against
them through the written word.

The students also perceive sharing informal writing with others as a fruitless
exercise on two different levels. Some students claimed that any writing that is
ostensibly “informal” automatically becomes “formal” in the discipline-specific literacy

community of the classroom, and they did not wish to expose their writing to criticism in

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a formalized context. Secondly, many students asserted that sharing their writing would
make them (as well as their classmates) “too uncomfortable”; they would rather conform
to the dictates of the classroom environment than subject themselves to ridicule.

Overall, we can already see that the interviewees’ views on writing add to our
understanding of minority discourses in ways previously unexplored; this will become
even more apparent in the next chapter of this study. From this chapter, we can begin to
develop an increased understanding of the perforrnative nature of discourse; the political
nature of academic language and the disparity which exists between empowered and
disempowered groups; the importance of inclusiveness of minority concerns; and the
identity politics involved in minority assimilation into primary and secondary discourse
communities. This chapter thoroughly reinforces the idea that LGBT students’ views on
writing are heavily influenced by their interactions with others. The students do not
dislike writing on LGBT concerns because they have internalized homophobia or because
they are lazy and do not want to write; their negative opinions tend to be influenced by
the lack of community-building in the social and cultural contexts in which they have
interacted. In the classroom, their teachers have ignored the issues. In public forums,
their peers have degraded their desire to stray from hetero-normative literacy standards.
Many of the LGBT students see themselves being placed in situations by their institutions
in which they are made to feel that their identities are not “right”; hence, I named the
chapter after Lisa’s remark that her teacher didn’t think homosexuality “was right.” But
students such as Lisa do not need to despair that they will remain forever voiceless. In its
exploration of LGBT student negotiations with electronic literacies, the next chapter will

reveal how, in spite of their negative views on the tenuous nature of chat room

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communities, many students still do manage to form communities in these chat rooms
with individuals who assist them, at least temporarily, in the “coming out” process.
Then, Chapters 6 through 8 shall reinforce the argument that LGBT students can most
easily negotiate academic literacies and feel included within them when they participate

in strong language communities, particularly those outside classroom spaces on campus.

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LGBT Students’ Perceptions of Problems with Online Chat
Overview
Mike, a gay university student, expressed many negative views on synchronous
online chat during his interview. He claimed: “I haven’t really chatted in chat rooms,
really, in years . . . once in a while, a long time ago, I would go to like gay.com or
something. But it wasn’t like really high quality chat . . . it was like those [trashy]
magazines and other publications, so I tend to stay away from those.” Furthermore, he

noted that, in the classroom, that anonymous chat

allows for closed-mindedness to prevail. It doesn’t necessarily force
[students] to read others’ posts as well or to look into [LGBT] issues as
well as they should . . . because they can choose just to post there one time
. . . [students write] “I agree” or “I disagree” without any further
elaboration. A lot of responsibility lies in the teacher’s hands to push for
productive responses.

Like Mike, most students in this study view chat rooms as both an ineffective way
to negotiate academic literacies and an unproductive solution for facilitating LGBT
student inclusion in academe. They claim that they infrequently use chat rooms and they
complain that too many people use them as conduits for sexual trysts, so they often
dismiss chat rooms as “phony.” However, the interview data also indicate that many of
the students claim that they frequented chat rooms at some point during their “coming
out” process. But once students learn how to blend the language of the LGBT
community into their own primary discourse, they feel more comfortable venturing out
into face-to-face conversations. They also see chat rooms as an ineffective means of

including LGBT issues in classroom environments and claim that anonymous chat in the

classroom contributes to fragmentary, non-focused discussion which may make students

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uncomfortable, or even ashamed, of their identities. The students would rather deal with
LGBT issues face to face in the classroom than use classroom chat to address them.

Like Chapter 4, this chapter reveals another way in which LGBT students find
themselves inhibited by writing situations which lack a sense of strong community.
While Chapter 4 explored this topic regarding traditional writing situations both in and
out of classroom environments, Chapter 5 considers LGBT student interactions with
synchronous chat communities. In considering Chapters 4 and 5 together, we can more
easily see that secondary discourse communities—often ephemeral in nature, and lacking
trust among their members—fail to enhance LGBT student literacy development. By
contrast, Chapters 6 through 8 stress how the building of strong literacy communities on
campus—both in person and online—facilitates LGBT student negotiation of academic
literacy barriers and contributes to the greater inclusion of LGBT student learners in
academic literacy communities both inside and outside the classroom.

Before venturing too far into Chapter 5, let us review the current research on
students’ negotiations of electronic chat rooms. As we shall see, there does not seem to
be a clear consensus on this topic. While most research on students’ attitudes towards
chat reveals that students respond to chat room literacies positively, it also reveals that
chat room expression does have its limitations. On the other hand, research on LGBT
student negotiations of chat rooms, in particular, tends to stress how LGBT students see
chat rooms as liberating means of expressing their queer identities. My research, in
contrast to most research on LGBT students’ use of chat rooms, tends to corroborate the

overall findings on student views of chat rooms: it indicates that chat is at least

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somewhat helpful for LGBT students during the “coming out” process, but cannot sustain
the building of long-lasting literacy communities.
Research on Students’ Attitudes towards CM
General Research on Attitudes towards Chat Rooms

Many articles on student views on chat rooms tend to stress both the positive and
negative aspects of electronic chat room communities. In his article “Teaching Science
Online,” Michael Bentley notes that his use of chat in his graduate courses at the
University of Toledo has “works very well and student feedback has been positive” (4).
However, Bentley also notes that the chat did not seem to work as well in larger groups.
He states: “The chat sessions with twenty-some participants were, to me, only somewhat
worthwhile. I found it difficult to trace and respond to multiple conversations that
inevitably erupted with so many participants” (4). Similarly, Kevin LaGrandeur claims
that he has seen “more participation by women and ethnic minorities in electronic
discussions than oral discussions” (2) in his composition courses, but students also often
use chat room space for “personal insults and off-topic discussion” (1). And while Tim
Catalano suggests that chat “creates a strong sense of community between not only
students, but also students and instructors” (1), he focuses primarily on the “offensive and
oppressive discourse that is likely to occur” in chat rooms” (2). He reminds us that the
“networked classroom,” in which synchronous chat takes place, “asks students to respond
quickly into a network in which there is no readily visible audience” (7). Consequently,
students develop the perception that “what they say on-line has no permanence or lasting
consequences” (Catalano 7; Hawisher and Moran). Similarly, Berzsenyi asserts that chat

enables students to “experience the rhetoricity of writing . . . they realize that their

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audience have thoughts, aims, and feelings” (15). Nevertheless, she explains that even
though chat is a “mutually interactive, interpersonal medium of communication,” it also
presents “the tremendous opportunity to emotionally injure participants through rudeness,
hostility and silence” (15). To support her point, Berzsenyi cites a short excerpt from her

(‘9

technical writing class in which one student, Tad, writes that no one has any feelings
behind a monitor’” and then another student, Ray, responds by saying “’I think it is cool
to piss people off on-line <g> [grin]”’ (2).
Research on LGBT Student Negotiations of Chat Rooms

Unlike most general discussions of student use of chat rooms, which often
provide balanced commentary on students’ views on chat, the few articles on LGBT
student dealings with electronic chat rooms tend to view chat spaces as transforrnative
spaces for the negotiation of queer sexual identity. Jonathon Alexander claims that
synchronous chat enables “powerfirl” conversations to take place between heterosexual
and homosexual students, thus facilitating understanding between diSparate groups (208).
Similarly, Randal Woodland describes CMC as “free of the oppressive forces” that
LGBT students typically must encounter (8); he sees it as a means of building community
among LGBT people. In fact, articles which address LGBT student interactions with the
World Wide Web in general tend to be overwhelmingly positive in tone (DeWitt,
Comstock and Addison). And while LaGrandeur does not discuss LGBT students in
particular in his article “Splicing Ourselves into the Machine,” he does mention that

Classroom chat rooms allow “those members of the class . . . who are traditionally

marginalized . . . to talk more” (1-2); presumably, this group would include LGBT

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students. In short, when scholars do discuss the role of minority students in chat rooms,
including LGBT students, they stress its liberating potential over its capacity for injury.
However, this dissertation differs fiom most studies on LGBT students’
negotiations of chat room discourse in that it argues that students perceive online chat as
neither a helpful means of dealing with the constraints of academic literacies nor an
effective solution for achieving inclusion of LGBT students. In this sense, it conforms
more to the general scholarship on student chat room writing, which tends to stress both
the positive and negative aspects of student negotiations with synchronous chat. For the
most part, though, the interviewees in this study reacted negatively to their experiences
with chat room literacy communities. This could be due in part to the “misperceptions of
homosexuals” that are often perpetuated in chat room discourse, both in and out of the
classroom, which reveal “a cultural bias . . . in the language that our society uses to frame
most discussions of homosexuality” (Catalano 8). Alison Regan notes that when the
subject of homosexuality is presented in the classroom, it is often flamed in the context of
“a limited pro/con approach,” and synchronous chat on this topic may actually “reinforce
- . . the marginalized status of lesbians and gays” (7). But are LGBT students always
marginalized in chat rooms? And does this marginalization occur in chat rooms both
inside and outside the classroom? A need exists to explore further the purposes that chat
rooms serve for LGBT students. We shall see that, while most of those I studied view
the chat rooms as neither an important part of their campus literacy communities nor their
disciplinary literacy communities in the classroom, many of them do see the chat rooms
as providing helpfirl assistance during their “coming out” process. Let us begin our

exploration of LGBT student use of chat rooms, however, by examining the reasons

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behind their negative opinions: the first one we shall explore involves infrequent use of

chat rooms.

Infreguency of Cl_1at Room Use

Many of the students interviewed claimed that they infrequently use chat rooms
for a variety of reasons, yet they also revealed that they do use Instant Message software,
such as Yahoo Instant Messanger. When asked if there are other strategies besides the
ones listed on the questionnaire that she uses to engage with LGBT issues in the
academic world, Donna replied, “No, not really. I don’t have Internet access at home,
and I don’t find chat interesting.” She added that she finds chat conversation “shallow,”
and that she much prefers face—to-face conversation. However, Donna also admitted that
she uses Instant Message software on occasion to talk with friends about people they’re
dating or what’s going on in school. Sam, a gay undergraduate, similarly avoids chat
rooms because they “are too impersonal, and, in a sense, too phony. You never really
know who you’re talking to. And you can’t get the feeling of emotion
and . . . that’s the big thing, you can’t get emotion . . . chat rooms tend to be [full of]
strangers.” However, like Donna, Sam also uses Instant Message software to discuss

personal or political LGBT issues at least once a week. He enjoys having “in-depth
Conversations online with the people who mean the most to [him].”
We must consider why LGBT students would perceive chat rooms as “shallow”
and “impersonal,” yet readily admit that they use Instant Message software. With chat
rooms, several people often speak at the same time, and it becomes difficult to follow
Who said what. However, when pe0ple communicate through “instant messages,” a

different communication dynamic takes shape: one that simulates face-to-face, one—on-

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one conversation. Even though the speakers cannot (usually) see each other, the
discourse pattern more closely replicates that of one-on-one conversation: person A
types, person B responds, person A responds back, and so forth. Therefore, we cannot
conclude from Donna and Sam’s reSponses that they loathe writing with technology; in
fact, both indicated that they are comfortable using it, but their preference is to employ
software that more closely simulates the oneeon-one conversation of their primary
discourse communities. In chat rooms, on the other hand, the contributions of individuals
are more likely to be ignored, and, instead of listening to words, people have to read a
screen to discover the speaker and content of the conversation: these features differ
dramatically from most individuals’ primary discourses. Since chat rooms are secondary
discourse communities for these students, they may seek out Instant Message software. as
a way to incorporate some of the advantages of primary, face-to-face discourse into
secondary, online chat communities. Michael J ohanyak suggests that, when we evaluate
different forms of CMC, we need to consider how CMC users “negotiate and establish
new discourse genres through their own cognitive, social, and contextual experiences,
experiences constructed at least partially by culture.” In other words, the CMC
technology alone does not determine the users’ responses; instead, we need to look at
how the users approach different CMC methods in “different yet familiar” ways which
are socially and culturally determined by the users’ prior experiences (J ohanyak 106).
So, the students in this study may be viewing Instant Messanger more positively because
they are coming to it with much prior experience in one-on-one communication. Chat
Conversation, on the other hand, is a camivalesque form of speech with which they are

1 685 familiar, particularly in academic settings. Rouzie suggests that chat room literacy

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is “rife with contradictions, abrupt shifts in register, ambivalence over juxtaposed
positions, and laughter at all targets including the laugher . . . [this] stands in sharp
distinction to the solemn, rational diction of academic culture” (256).

While neither Jacinda nor Lauren discussed using Instant Messanger, both use
other writing technologies besides online chat. J acinda claims that she “doesn’t use chat
rooms” because she “can’t type fast,” and she feels that she needs to in order to keep up
with the ongoing chat room conversation. However, J acinda very much enjoys using e-_‘
mail to talk to her friends: she sees e-mail as “comfortable and convenient.” She likes to
write long e-mails about LGBT concerns to her friends—this process, unlike chat, helps
her to think through her ideas, “like an online journal.” Like J acinda, Lauren also
dislikes chat rooms. She avoids them because they are “too confusing” and she “can’t
chat with one or two people at a time.” And, similar to J acinda, the idea of a journal

appeals to Lauren; in fact, she keeps a blog—an online writing journal—-as “a place to
sound of .” She deliberately narrows her audience for her blog; she explained that “the
only people who know it’s there are fiiends and members of the blog community.”

Like Donna and Sam, J acinda and Lauren see the value of electronic writing and
enjoy expressing themselves in online environments. However, all of them want to write
for more limited audiences that more closely simulate those of their strongest discourse
Communities. Just as Donna and Sam enjoy using Instant Message software to simulate

One-on-one conversation, J acinda and Lauren would rather talk only to specific people,
and have one-on-one relationships with those individuals. Jacinda’s preference for e-mail
Shows that she would rather write for one individual at a time, and Lauren limits the

alldi ence for her written words to those who have invited to participate within her blo g

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community. Clearly, personal, private discourse is valued by all of these students, and
they cannot take part in private discourse in a public chat room. Therefore, when
participating in electronic literacy communities, they devise other strategies to privatize
their words as much as possible, to simulate that of their primary discourses, thereby
engaging in strategies to strengthen their sense of community in electronic writing
spaces. In fact, many LGBT students are even developing their own e-zines as a way of
establishing more personal, private relationships with others in the LGBT community.
Comstock and Addison indicate that, in these e-zines, LGBT students will write personal
narratives, offer advice to each other about “coming out,” and negotiate the political
concerns of their community (248-49). One young man best summed up this turn of
events in the May 1995 issue of the LGBT e—zine Oasis: “’Now, via the youth-dominated
technology of the future, young gay people are finding one another online and staking
their claim for attention and recognition’” (qtd. in Comstock and Addison 248). Through
the e-zines’ articles and discussion boards, voices are heard individually and one-on-one
conversations occur; the ambiguity of chat room discourse is avoided, and stronger
campus literacy communities may be formulated.
Qhat Roorn_s as “Hog Up” Sites
The most frequent complaint about chat rooms by far was that the students
perceive them as places for sexual or romantic trysts. In describing these trysts, all of
them used the expression “hook up” in a derisive way. Lechele mentioned that she
avoids chat rooms because of the anonymity and the sexual atmosphere. She declared: “I
don’t like to go into chat rooms because there are all different kinds of people in there,

and it’s basically a hook up scene.” Julie longs to find a community of LGBT students

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on the Central Michigan campus, but she claimed that her efforts brought her little
success. Therefore, she began to explore the chat rooms in Yahoo. But she explained
that she has been disappointed with her experiences there: “Every so often I’ll go on a
Yahoo chat room to try to find different people to talk to . . . normally it doesn’t last very
long . . . [people] are just looking to hook up, and that’s not what I’m there for, so
normally it doesn’t really work.” Similarly, in her discussion of chat rooms, Lauren
agreed that “most people [in chat rooms] are looking to hook up.” In elaborating on her
views, she stated: “In general, the chat rooms I’ve been to, I find them really confusing
because you’re talking to a lot of people at once . . . And I like to have substantial
conversations and that generally entails one or two people talking . . Quite frankly, most
of the people in the chat rooms are not interested in electronic discourse.” All of these
students saw chat rooms as electronic cruising spots; to them, chat rooms serve as the 21St
century. equivalent of gay bars, where people cruise for sex and/or look for significant
others.

From these students’ comments, we can see that students talked about “hooking
up” in negative contexts. For them, “hooking up” does not just mean “meet,” but “meet
for sex or dating.” Their discussion about “hooking up” in a pejorative context

repudiates one of the major stereotypes about the LGBT community: that LGBT people
are promiscuous. Clearly, LGBT students want something more from chat rooms than
j ust sex or dating. But why do chat rooms within the LGBT community become “hook
up” spots rather than centers for conversation on topical issues? Rouzie suggests this
might be the case because chat discourse “is set off from official reality, allowing

exploration of ‘latent sides of human nature’” (256). In American culture, speech on

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LGBT issues largely remains an anathema. Only in LGBT-specific contexts do we see
same-sex displays of affection or any non-judgrnental discussion of LGBT-concems.
Therefore, chat rooms serve as one of these social contexts for the LGBT community.
Since it is not socially acceptable for LGBT people to Openly seek out same-sex
partnerships, they must do so in more clandestine ways. Chat rooms specifically
designated for LGBT individuals, therefore, become the equivalent of electronic gay bars
(or, some might argue, electronic whorehouses). Repressed due to their sexuality for so
long, many LGBT people use these environments to express their sexual desires. This
becomes a camivalesque atmosphere, as Bakhtin would argue, in which “’a new mode of
interrelationship between individuals’” manifests itself in “’a consciously sensuous half-
real and half play—acted form’” (qtd. in Rouzie 256). Since LGBT individuals have so
few outlets to perform their sexuality, oftentimes in these environments chat speech
becomes highly sexualized: some people clearly express their sexual desires in their
online chat profiles and even include nude pictures of themselves. With the nudity and
emphasis on sex, LGBT chat rooms become more like cruising areas than centers for
conversation. LGBT individuals who want to take part in substantive conversations are
forced to seek out chat rooms which prize hetero-normative speech. So, due to the
sexualization of LGBT concerns in electronic environments, chat rooms do not serve as
Viable resources for conversation on non-sexual personal and political issues that involve
the LGBT community; for the most part, only those LGBT people seeking sex or

romance find LGBT chat room communities serve their needs.

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Chat Room Use during “Coming Out” Process

In spite of the students’ views that chat rooms mainly serve as “hook up” sites,
many of the interviewees admitted that they did at one time in their lives heavily use chat
room communities to meet people, but now rely more on face-to-face communication
within the LGBT community. Consequently, the students view chat rooms as “training
wheels” for their rides into LGBT discourse communities. Tim, for example, used to
frequent chat rooms, but since he met his current partner he has “no use for them.” When
asked whether he still uses chat rooms, Tim replied:

I used to, especially back home [in Cyprus]. The Internet was my only
source of anything non-straight, non-traditionally- gendered . .' . I would
put up my profile and see what kind of interest I would generate . . . My
first half-semester or so [in college], I wasn’t out, and I kept on doing the
whole chat thing . . . any time I started dating, I would stop using profiles,
or chat rooms, or whatever. And with my current partner, I’m done. I
found what I’m looking for.

Similarly, when Esther first began’to come out, she explored Internet chat rooms. Doing
so helped her to connect with others. She stated: “When I was online, and chatting with
another woman [who] talked to me about the many different ways that lesbians can reach
out to each other, I realized that [lesbians] were everywhere. I then started to become

more comfortable with my lesbian identity.” Now, however, she “no longer talks in chat
rooms,” but, like Donna and Sam, she sends her fiiends instant messages on occasion. In
fact, she has not used chat rooms in “about three years”; once she got involved with “end-
0 f—semester activities [on campus] . . . junior year,” she discontinued her chat room use.
In addition, early in his coming out experience, Sam revealed that he had

‘ ‘negative experiences with online chat.” In particular, he “talked to one person online

13111‘0u gh chat for six months,” but their chatting came to an end when he discovered that

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this person often lied to him. Tina, a bisexual student at Grand Rapids Community
College, also revealed that she liked to chat online when she first came out. She claimed,
“Chatting with people about my sexuality increased my comfort level with it.” Chatting
enabled her to get “to know people. Sometimes they’d discuss whether [their] parents
knew about their orientation, and how to tell them.” Now, she only uses chat rooms
about twice a month, and prefers e-mail and listserv use to chatting.

The students’ use of chat rooms clearly reveal a pattern. To become engaged
within the discourse of the LGBT community during the “coming out” process, many of
them used chat rooms. As Randal Woodland indicates, there is often a “’trying out’” of
one’s gay identity online before one ventures into other discourse communities as a
LGBT individual (par. 11). Woodland explains: “In these online spaces, on topics deeply
meaningful to them, [students] ask questions, form hypotheses, test evidence, develop a
personal voice and discourse style, see themselves as members of a community, and form
themselves into thinking, writing, acting selves that they may (or may not) transfer to
their lives offline” (par. 27). However, they tired of the chat rooms once they found a
partner (as in Tim’s case), learned how to integrate better into LGBT culture (as in the
cases of Esther and Tina), or simply became disgusted with how people lie (as in Sam’s
case). Now, none of them use chat rooms as often as they used to. Therefore, for LGBT
students, we can see that chat rooms serve as a common step in the “coming out” process,

but the students’ involvement in chat rooms does not continue. As a campus literacy, the
Chat room serves as a nexus for practicing discourse with the LGBT community, but
eventually the students move away from these practice areas and start building literacy

Communities with LGBT individuals face to face.

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Anonymous Use of ChatRooms ir_r Courses

The interviewees had two primary objections to the use of anonymous electronic
chat rooms in their courses: (1) the inability of students to use chat as a serious learning
tool and (2) discussing LGBT issues anonymously makes students uncomfortable.
Student Failure to “Take Chat Seriously ”

First of all, they complained that their peers did not take chat seriously. Mike, a
gay Michigan State undergraduate, complained that students don’t get engaged with
classroom chat. Kaleb provided some insights as to why this might be the case when he
described one experience he had chatting on LGBT issues in class. He revealed: “When
we were told in class . . . <to> stay on topic. Because it was anonymous, people would
write absurd things like ‘who’s the man’ and ‘yvho’s the woman.”’ Similarly, Raya
noted that, in chat rooms, “people can multitask” and avoid putting “in a full effort” to
their work. Furthermore, she suggested that a problem with chat anonymity is that people
would be “more likely not to listen to others.” The research supports these students’
claims: Abraharns notes that, in chat rooms, students are “exempted from full moral
judgment” (30). And Rouzie suggests that students will often write “outrageous
comments in synchronous conferences followed with the ‘this is humor or play’ flaming
device: ‘just kidding! ’” (265).

Kadij ah and Lauren, however, expressed positive views on the anonymous nature
of chat room conversation. Kadijah claimed that she is “not into computers” and that
“face to face conversation is more valuable”; in fact, she first stated that chat has “too

much anonymity.” However, later in the interview, she also claimed that anonymity

Could also be valuable, for it makes people “more expressive and open.” Lauren echoed

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Kadijah’s thoughts; she believes that classroom chat would be better if it were
anonymous. However, she feels it would work best only in a strictly online class, where
the students do not see each other on a regular basis; otherwise she fears that her own
transsexual identity would be discovered. She claimed: “[Anonymous chat] would
encourage people to be more Open about their sexual identity. Particularly, for example,
with an online class, it would be most useful because I feel that in a regular class, it
would kind of encourage people to be suspicious, like ‘Who’s‘ the tranny here?’”

As we can see flom the students’ comments, the students tended to object to the
nature of chat discourse itself rather than any LGBT content discussed in the chat rooms.
They tend to perceive chat as fragmentary in nature, and they feel that it prevents students
flom staying focused. On the issue of anonymity, these students seem divided: Kaleb felt
chat encouraged students to have “too much” fleedom to say what they like, whereas
Lauren and Kadijah both made positive remarks about the anonymity that chat could
provide when discussing LGBT concerns in the classroom (even though Lauren did
qualify her statement by asserting that it would work best for an online class). The
comments flom the students here should force us as instructors to consider some key
questions concerning how we want to use chat room in the discipline-specific literacy
events of the classroom. Is chat a distraction that keeps students flom being focused, or
are there ways in which it can be used as a viable learning tool? Do students have too
much fleedom with chat? And how do we decide how much freedom is “too much,”

particularly when dealing with controversial topics, such as LGBT concerns? In the
secondary discourse environment of the classroom, many of the interviewees perceive

Chat as a threat to “official versions of language and the marketplace [they] will enter”

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(Rouzie 256). They know that, to succeed professionally, they must master Standard
English, hetero-normative discourses that do not allow for camivalesque play. However,
judging flom the students’ more positive responses to Instant Messaging, perhaps
integrating chat discourse into classroom pedagogical practices should involve more one-
on—one or small group work than full class involvement. After all, a chat of twenty
students would be difficult for anyone to follow, whereas small group or individual
conversation more closely simulates student speech in their primary discourse
cormnunities, thereby assuaging the flagmentary dynamics of chat room expression.
Dislike of Anonymity
In spite of Kadijah and Lauren’s affirming comments on the anonymous nature of
chat room conversation, some of the students in this study did object to using chat
anonymously to discuss LGBT issues in the classroom. Unlike the students who
complained about the ephemeral, unfocused nature of chat room conversation in
particular, these students tended to focus more on the content of the chat and their rights
to make their voices heard as LGBT individuals. Taylor suggested that, regardless of
whether the chat rooms were anonymous, the students would still be expressing their
views in public, and the chat would still cause discomfort for the LGBT students trying to
get their points across and for the heterosexual students as well. In other words, Taylor
noted that the artificiality of the classroom environment would still affect the ways in
which the students use chat room conversation in the classroom, even if the chat were
anonymous. She declared: “Sometimes it can be really uncomfortable for people . . . It
would be really hard to make it completely anonymous because I know people who can

go into computers and figure out who said things and whatnot.” She further added that

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“someone can look over your shoulder [in a public place] . . . if you’re a straight person,
that can make you a little bit scared about ‘Oh, they’re gonna think I’m this way,’ and
I’m really not.” Taylor clearly does not trust the anonymity of the chat to heighten the
comfort level of discussion on LGBT concems, and she firrther feels that straight students
engaging in chat on LGBT concerns in the classroom might fear being labeled as queer,
so they will not be honest in how they feel.

Sam, on the other hand, argued even more strongly against anonymity during his
interview. He asserted that he had a “lack of respect” for chat rooms, and suggested that
they need to be more heavily moderated. He strongly feels that there is too much
inappropriate language, even in classroom chat, and that there is “nothing to stop one
flom going overboard.” For Sam, the chat anonymity represents a loss of control of the
discourse: he wants to be able to understand and appreciate what his classmates are
saying,and anonymity would not enable him to do this. Additionally, Sam doesn’t “want
to have to see the words”; he would rather hear what people are saying than read their

anonymous comments on a screen. He declared:

You really don’t know who’s on the other end. It can’t be monitored at all
times . . . Instead of a chat, the way I almost see it being done is a forum
of some sort where people can express their opinions beforehand maybe
on paper. . . and somebody moderates it, somebody looks at these
opinions, and if there’s inappropriate language used then they throw out
those opinions.

Sam is clearly aflaid that “inappropriate” opinions will be expressed in the classroom
context against LGBT people, and he sees a need for the expression of those opinions to
be moderated in some way. He also seems to believe that the more traditional method of
having students express their opinions on paper would be preferable; that way, a

moderator, such as a teacher, can more easily decide whether such opinions should be

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~

expressed in a classroom context. Sam’s remark also should make us wonder: in
classroom chat, who should be the moderator? Should it always be the teacher? And
who decides which opinions should get “thrown out”? Perhaps one way to provide a
sense of moderation to classroom chat is to have individual students evaluate the
performances of their groups and their own individual performances within those groups.
This type of self-assessment will assist both students and teachers in understanding
whether the course’s learning objectives are being accomplished in chat room discourse.
It is a reflective exercise that should enable all members of the class to decide, as a
community, what constitutes “acceptable” classroom literacies.

Esther claimed that she felt that chat was not an effective solution towards
achieving LGBT student inclusiveness because it makes LGBT students more ashamed
of their transgressive sexual and gender identities. In Esther’s view, therefore, the chat
perpetuates what she defines as “the shame factor” surrounding discourse on LGBT
topics:

ESTHER: Society already makes us feel like you can’t talk about it, you
can’t be with your partner in public, you can’t do this and that, so if you’re
only going to open up in the avenue of talking about it in an anonymous
way to a screen, that’s just like, the Intemet’s already there for people to
go ahead and do that in chat rooms . . .
BRthN: So if you’re only going to open up online it increases that “shame
factor”?
ESTHER: I just think it just . . . to me, what I would feel, what I perceive
it as, is that it would be a perpetuation of the shame factor in that, you
know, once again, we have to do it behind closed doors. You know, once
again, it’s a discussion you have to be shamed, you have to feel shameful
enough that you won’t put your name on it.

Clearly, Esther believes that if LGBT students are asked to express the concerns of their

Community only anonymously in online environments, then this practice perpetuates the

ideology that LGBT issues should be shrouded in a veil of secrecy, and that students

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~ _

 

should feel ashamed to self-identify as LGBT. She also concurred with Sam that students
have “too muchqfleedom” in expressing themselves in classroom chat. Instead of chat,
she argued that “conservative people,” in particular, “need to have the face-to-face
impact” of conversation on LGBT issues. Ifconservative, homophobic students are
forced to see and hear LGBT students expressing their views on LGBT issues, then the
experiences and concerns of LGBT students are more likely to be perceived as legitimate
and real by the class as a whole.

In our culture, when we allow for anonymous discourse, we like to believe that
we are allowing more fleedom for people to express their views without fear of
repercussions. However, some students in the LGBT community believe that chat
anonymity may hinder expression on LGBT issues more than it helps. Taylor, Sam, and
Esther all expressed some level of discomfort about using anonymity in online classroom
chat: Taylor feels that the classroom space would prevent people flom being honest
regardless of whether the chat is anonymous; Sam worries that people expressing
themselves in classroom chat might hide behind their anonymity and hurt people’s
feelings; and Esther thinks that anonymous chat on LGBT concerns reinforces the
stereotypical notion that LGBT people should be ashamed to discuss the concerns of their
community. In considering these students’ remarks, we must conclude that anonymity in
the classroom really does not assist students in discussing LGBT concerns. As Esther
pointed out, if we perpetuate the “shame factor” by only discussing LGBT issues in the
classroom anonymously, we fail to dignify LGBT student experiences. Instead, we send
the message to students that LGBT issues are “too sensitive” to be dealt with face to face.

Perhaps honest, face-to-face collaboration and discussion between LGBT students and

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heterosexual students on LGBT concerns would be a better alternative to enhance the
classroom presence of the LGBT community. Jonathon Alexander points out that LGBT
issues have a “contemporary socio-political relevance” that may “excite class
discussion . . . sexual orientation is a subject that engages many students’ interest at more
personal levels” (208). Today, “acquiring cultural literacy—as one is supposed to do in
school [means] . . . acquiring sexual literacy . . . learning how to read the private as it is
everywhere obliged to manifest itself in public” (Litvak 20). Therefore, discussion of
LGBT concerns should be integrated not just into chat, but into the entire classroom
experience. The electronic conversations could still become part of the students’
discipline-specific literacy communities in academe, but only once students have formed
a sense of community with each other and have better learned to validate the experiences
of LGBT students both in and out of the classroom.
Conclusion

For the most part, LGBT students view their chat room experiences as neither
effective means of negotiating academic literacy spaces nor as solutions for LGBT
student inclusion in academe. They use chat rooms inflequently because they find them
impersonal, fragmentary, and phony. Furthermore, many commented on the salacious
reputations of public LGBT chat rooms, and asserted they are used only to perpetuate the
stereotypes of the promiscuous queer. However, several students did note that they did at
once time flequent chat rooms during their “coming out” process, but now reflain flom
doing so because they have more thoroughly assimilated themselves into the LGBT
community. Several students also objected to the anonymous use of chat rooms in

college classes. Some objected due to the fragmentary nature of the chat room

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encouraging unfocused discourse, whereas others stressed that electronic chat’s
anonymity gives students too much fleedom to criticize the LGBT community, and
perpetuates the idea that LGBT students should be ashamed of their identities.

In the last two chapters, we’ve examined what doesn’t work for students in
negotiating the discourse of academe. In general, they have negative attitudes towards
writing in general, and electronic chat room writing in particular. With the next chapter,
however, we will begin to look more at the solutions that promote LGBT student
inclusion in academic discourse: what does work for the students? In an attempt to
answer this question, Chapter 6 examines how LGBT students form strong literacy
communities on campus, both in online and face-to-face environments, to achieve
inclusion in academic spaces. We shall see that, in spite of students’ dislike of electronic
chat room use, students do use electronic technologies to form online communities
through e-mails, listservs, and blogs (online journals) which they view as important
solutions to achieving LGBT student inclusiveness. The chapter will also explore how
students’ interactions in on-carnpus groups help them to feel included as well. It will
help us to see, along with Chapters 7 and 8, the impact of community-building on LGBT

student literacy development.

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LGBT Student Campus Literacy Communities outside the Classroom:
Online and On-Campus
Overview

In addition to revealing LGBT students’ negative attitudes towards writing
activities that lack a strong sense of community, the questionnaire data in this study also
suggests that LGBT students see a need to establish strong campus literacy communities
outside the classroom. Let us begin this chapter by re-considering Mike, the student with
whose chat room experience I opened the last chapter. In contrast to his chat experience,
Mike seemed very excited about how he can use his online blog to discuss LGBT
concerns, in spite of his mother’s concerns that Mike is “outing” himself online:

If I do [write on LGBT issues], it’s in a personal journal. I have a
LiveJournal, and my fliends all read my LiveJoumal, and I do
occasionally write about . . . civil unions and things like that . . . It’s an
online j ournaling site where you can add friends to your website and read
their joumals as they update . . . My mom reads my LiveJournal and she
still doesn’t want me putting lesbian and gay issues on my LiveJournal
because she’s pretty conservative. I still do sneak them in there [for a
public audience] every once in awhile, like I did last night, but I make a
lot of [entries] “fliends only?’ because of that.

Unlike chat rooms, Mike perceives his blog site as place for him to establish a
sense of community with others. Since he can control whether his mother or other family
members read blog entries, he is able to engage in multiple rhetorics. With Mike’s online
blog, we see Bakhtin’s heterglossia at work: Mike clearly wants to provide information
on his gay identity for some, but not for others, such as his mother, who are more critical

of his performance of a gay identity.- He is able to write in different voices for his

different blo g audiences.

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However, Mike’s interest in asynchronous online communities also typifies that
of most students interviewed. This study shows that most LGBT students use e-mail and
listservs on a regular basis, mostly to communicate with friends and to take part in
discussions on LGBT listservs. In addition, almost half of the interview participants keep
elaborate “blogs,” or online journals of their personal and political lives. The students
tend to use these blo gs in two different ways: (1) as confessional space to negotiate very
personal topics and (2) as perforrnative space for the development of their gender and
sexual identities. Instead, we need to look more at the other, asynchronous online spaces
in which students involve themselves outside the classroom, as Comstock and Addison
suggest. Students are e-mailing each other, participating in listservs, writing blogs, and
even creating LGBT e-zines online; we see that they desire to form literacy communities
online outside 'of class. So, this chapter will investigate the online campus literacy
communities which students form that they perceive as viable solutions to negotiating the
constraints of academic literacies in general.

The interview data also shows that students form communities in face—to-face
campus groups. It shows that students often belong to several LGBT groups at once and
use the groups to develop fliendships. Some students interviewed reveal that these
groups serve as their activist lives; outside these groups, though, in hetero—normative
discourse communities, their activism sometimes disappears. The face-to-face groups
give the students a sense of pride in their identities and assist them greatly in assimilating
into academic literacies. These groups also educate their members on how to use

language to serve the LGBT community; by employing their literacy skills in activities

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which support their group, students increase their awareness of literacy as an agent of
institutional change.

Overall, this chapter focuses on the corroborating interview data for the second
questionnaire finding, which reveals the reasons behind the students’ need to establish
such communities. Over the course of the interviews, the 32 interviewees responded to
many questions pertaining to their negotiation of academic literacies and possible means
of achieving LGBT student inclusiveness in academic discourse communities. Two of
the questions flom the questionnaire, in particular, tended to result in discussions on
literacy communities outside classroom. environments: “Why do you choose to write/not
write on LGBT topics outside the classroom?” and “Which of the prOposed solutions on
the questionnaire do you feel would work well/not well [towards achieving LGBT
student inclusion in academic literacy communities]?”

In Chapters 4 and 5, I revealed that LGBT students have negative views of
writing when they participate in writing activities as members of weak literacy
communities, which lacktrust among their members and consist of ephemeral
relationships. The primary purpose of this chapter, however, is to reveal the types of
literacy communities which LGBT students find most valuable for negotiating the
discourse of academe and for including themselves in the academic world. It serves as
the place in this dissertation for me to begin an exploration of LGBT students’ primary
discourse spaces in on-campus spaces. While Chapter 7 examines how lesbian students,
in particular, build strong campus literacy communities, and Chapter 8 offers a research
plan for the promotion of LGBT student inclusion in academic literacy communities, this

chapter identifies some of the strongest literacy communities that LGBT students build

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on campus, and it is worthy to note that all of these communities exist outside classroom
spaces. This finding has tremendous implications for the research plan that I describe in
Chapter 8, because it helps us to realize that achieving solutions to LGBT student
inclusion in “academic literacies” involves the examination of academic literacies both in
and out of classroom environments. Before revealing the findings of this chapter, though,
let us review some of the research on community-building as it applies to online
environments and on-campus organizations, most of which corroborates my findings in
this chapter.

Review of the Research: Online and On-Campus Communities

Building Communities Online

While no major studies have been conducted which examine LGBT student use of
e-mails, listservs, or blogs in particular, several have asserted that these new technologies
help to build new language communities, both in and out of classroom environments.
O’Connor and Kellerrnan discuss how such asynchronous online communication brings
“new meaning to the word ‘community’” (9), and they assert that “An online community
is a terrific place to find like-minded people and share experiences” (28). Email, in
particular, may even be integrated into academic literacies through such activities as e-
tutoring. Eric Buswell notes that, during his e-conferences with students, he was able to
follow “the same strategies of questioning that a face-to-face conference often reflects”
(Tarvers and Buswell 6), thus simulating the rhetorical pattern of literacy communities
more familiar to student writers. Similarly, in her analysis of a series of e-mails on the
September 1 1th tragedy, Laura K. Smith notes that people are often able to approach e-

mail discourse in ways which resemble the rhetorical patterns of more common writing

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situations. She states: “Many argue their points in a way that parallels much of what we
know about rhetorical theory [and] rhetorical genre” (273). Since the individuals within
Smith’s study were able to write their e-mails by drawing upon their knowledge of
accepted written argument patterns, they were able to establish a sense of community in
their discussion.

Like e-mails, research indicates that listservs also may help to establish a stronger
sense of literacy community than a synchronous chat room environment. Randy J.
McGinnis’s students in his elementary science education course, for example, saw their
class listserv as a helpful way to establish a sense of community in the classroom, even
though much of the discussion took place outside of class. One student commented, “I
believe the e—mail [listServ] encouraged a stronger camaraderie in the class. It was an
extra way to communicate with and support each other,” while another student remarked
“Using LISTSERV to communicate is a wonderful idea. We can transmit messages
without meeting each other .” (12). And LuJean Baab asserts that both e-mail and
listservs can be used to establish a sense of connection among participants in online
literacy communities. In this asynchronous environment, teachers “can encourage
sidebar conversations and email between students to help establish connections and
encourage discussion. Many students are more open in the online environment than they
would be in a traditional classroom setting and, despite concerns to the contrary, can be
even more connected to their classmates” (6). Kathryn J ansak makes similar comments
in her article “Building a Supportive Online Instructional Environment”: she asserts that
effective online teaching involves sending e-mails, setting up asynchronous discussion,

and using collaborative groups (8-9).

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Similarly, in his article “Mad Blogs and Englishmen,” Jim Duber suggests some
reasons why blogs, in particular, are becoming increasingly popular as online writing
communities. He comments that their universal use “should not be surprising at all.
They are, after all, exceptionally easy to use and there are many no-cost hosting service
available” (1). Even though Jesse James Garrett, the editor of Infosift, noted only “23
known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999,” the proliferation of blogs began
shortly after the mass distribution online of Garrett’s list (Blood 1). Now blogs have

‘6)

become a ubiquitous training ground for writers . . . They are platforms of intelligent
reaction to current events’” (Blood; qtd. in Duber 1). Since Duber himself was able to set
up a flee blogging account in “under 2 minutes” and had published his first blog entries
“Only 20 minutes later,” he became convinced that “anyone can master the basics of
blogging in no time” (2). The blog’s ease of use and low cost ensure greater inclusion
within its online community; it is not just for the technology-savvy or the wealthy but for
anyone with computer access. Clearly, blogs create functional writing communities with
a greater number of people. As Bob Godwin-Jones-notes, “Blogs are easily linked and
cross-linked, to Create larger on-line communities. That is now the case with technology-
related blogs, which form what is essentially one, large, loosely interwoven net of
information, as blog entries are linked, referenced, and debated” (2).
Building Communities in On-Campus Groups

Unlike research on electronic literacy communities, research on the forming of
academic literacy communities through on-campus groups often refers to LGBT

individuals. Andre Grace notes that his on-campus group for queer students at the

University of Alberta served a variety of purposes in bringing “students, faculty, and

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staff” together; the meetings of Agape (the group’s name) serve such purposes as
building educational practices to “counter heterosexism and homophobia” and using “role
plays and other forms of drama as pedagogy to explore queer issues and concerns in
relation to education” (Grace 5). Similarly, Dick Scott notes that gay and lesbian student
organizations serve a wide range of community-building purposes. The groups “organize
social activities, act as political action groups, provide emotional support, run services,
and organize educational programs. Such activities may be provided for their members,
for gay and lesbian students in general . . . or for the campus community as a whole”
(118). Croteau et al. focus their work on one community-building activity in particular:
they examine how an LGBT group may work with other student organizations in the
academic community to educate themselves on HIV/AIDS issues. Participants within the
activity were able to examine such topics as “how oppression operates in our culture” and
explore their feelings about being members of minority groups without feeling judged or
shunned for their. minority status (Croteau et. al. 170-71; 179).

Several book-length texts which devote themselves to the amelioration of the
queer climate in college settings also explore the role of LGBT on-campus groups in
bringing about change for students. These books include Working with Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual and T ransgender College Students, which has several articles on LGBT
organizations. Within this volume, Sherry Mallory enumerates several activities which
could contribute to the inclusion of LGBT students in academic discourse: “Speakers,
film series, panel discussions, art exhibits, workshops, conferences, safe zone programs,
and awareness weeks” (323). And Charles Outcalt suggests some ways in which LGBT

student organizations can last over time, in spite of students flequently leaving academic

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communities; these include sharing a common vision and appreciating all the group’s
participants (333-34). The text Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and T ransgender Campus
Organizing suggests several reasons for LGBT students to create literacy communities
on-carnpus. These include organizing against hate (175-190), responding to AIDS (191-

198), establishing an LGBT resource center (213-23 8), and organizing floors in residence

halls (289-293).

Connections to My Work

As we can see flom the research discussed above, scholars tend to view both
asynchronous online discourses and on-campus LGBT student organizations as means of
building strong communities through literacy events. The research on online discourses
reveals how new types of literacy communities are increasingly being established in
electronic spaces, and the scholarship on LGBT campus groups indicates how students
build communities through a variety of literacy events outside the classroom, many of
which involve speaking. My‘findings in this chapter tend to corroborate the positive
impressions that many researchers have of these communities. It shows that, like their
heterosexual peers, LGBT students view asynchronous online writing communities as
helpful alternatives to negotiating the literacy demands of the classroom. And it
underscores the positive value that on-campus organizations have on student literacy
development. Unlike previous research, however, my dissertation paints a clearer picture
of how LGBT students, in particular, interact in asynchronous online spaces; because it
does so, we learn more about how LGBT students often use online spaces for the

performance of their gender and sexual identities. And, in contrast to most research on

LGBT student groups, my work pays more attention to student voices, allowing them to

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self-identify the ways in which they perceive the building of their own academic literacy
communities. Let us begin our exploration of LGBT student communities by examining
how the students form campus literacy communities online.

Online Communities

This study reveals that LGBT students form strong campus literacy communities
online in three different ways: through e-mails, through listservs, and through “blo gs,” or
online journals. We shall begin here by examining student use of e-mail.

Email Communities

In spite of the LGBT student dislike of chat room communities revealed in the
previous chapter, the data show that most LGBT students enjoy establishing communities
online over email. Taylor, in fact, went so far as to call e-mail her “main form of
communication.” She claims that it “works well” because most people are “difficult to
get a hold of.” For Taylor, e-mail is a way of establishing contact with individuals on a
daily basis. Tina has used e-mail for a more political purpose: she once did an online
interview with a woman over e-mail on step-parenting in alternative families (a topic
which has personal relevance for Tina, since her girlfliend has two children).

Other LGBT students often use e-mail for the sole purpose of developing their
relationships with fliends. Kate, for example, claims that she often uses e-mail to keep in
touch with fliends, and she mostly discusses romantic t0pics. As she explained, “[When]
e-mailing, I talk to my fliends about different things, for instance, ‘Ooh, I met a nice girl
today’ or something like that. But other than that I’m not much of a writer.” Erica also
discusses political and personal issues with friends over e-mail. In these e-mails, she

addresses such topics as gender identity and feminism. Even though she’s addressing

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political topics with her fliends, she simultaneously perceives e-mail as a form of
“personal writing” that “is easier” for her to facilitate.

J acinda’s views on e-mail as a means of communicating with fliends, in
particular, are exceptionally positive. Her “long e-mails” to fliends are a convenient
means of communicating with people all over the world. Even though J acinda is a
medical student stressed for time, she views writing e-mails as a way to “help [her] think
through” her life and her bisexual identity. For J acinda, e-mails are “like an online
journal.” They enable her to express her views openly on personal and political topics.
She claims that she often “writes on sex” and “exchanges information on bisexuality with
a friend in London.” Her conversations with her London fliend serve as a way for her to
negotiate the bias against bisexual communities: she feels that bisexuality is often left out
as a topic of conversation both in and out of classroom environments—flom her
perspective, the “B” in “LGBT” is too often dismissed.

Evidently, LGBT students value the convenience of e-mail, and they also treat it
as perforrnative space. Taylor sees e-mail as the main way in which she can contact
people in a busy world, and J acinda views it as an important method of keeping in touch
with her fliends flom all over the world. Many other students, such as Kate, Erica, and
Lechele, also see e-mail as a convenient way for them to develop friendships, in
particular. By communicating with individuals one-on-one, these students manage to
nurture valuable relationships with pe0ple who share their interests both on and off
campus. However, it is also interesting to note that several students, such as J acinda,
Erica, Tina, and Lechele, are also employing e-mail space to negotiate their gender and

sexual identities. For them, e-mail provides a forum to discuss issues that are not allowed

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as part of classroom discourse, such as sex, alternative marriage, bisexuality, and
feminism. The political subjects that these students discuss reveal that, from their
perspective, the political and personal intertwine. Since e-mail serves as a “journal” for
J acinda and a key means of “personal writing” for Erica, and both use e-mail as a means
of addressing the political concerns of the LGBT community, we can see how closely
tied political and personal spaces are for LGBT students. Through e-mail, they obtain an
outlet to perform their queer identities; it becomes a primary discourse community for
them, even though they are not seeing the people with whom they converse face-to—face.
Listserv Communities

By contrast, the students avoid using campus LGBT listservs as sites for
perfomring gender and sexual identity, but do integrate them into their primary
discourse(s). As part of her job as an LGBT on—campus student advisor, Esther often
posts to her university’s LGBT listserv as part of her job duties. Even though she
normally dislikes any kind of writing, Esther declared: “With my job, I have to be on that
listserv, and I have to read and I have to post. And I have to communicate. So I guess I
do [use] it about every day because of my job.” Todd often reads things flom listservs
flom various groups on his campus. Tina belongs to several listservs, including ones for
a local gay bar, the e-mail list for her GSA (Gay—Straight Alliance), and one which
discusses alternative families. On these lists, she recently posted information about Sakia
Gunn, a murdered African-American lesbian flom New Jersey, to inform people of the
hate crimes that are still being perpetrated against the LGBT community. She attempted
to encourage people to sign a petition (created by Lechele, another interviewee) which

asks the principal of Sakia’s high school to give Sakia a moment of silence, honoring her

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memory. Tina feels that it is “important to sign the petition . . . to show people that
lesbianism is a way of life . . . to show [Sakia’s] farmly that people care.”

As we can see, listserv membership is an important part of the LGBT student
campus community for the sense of belonging it provides to the students. Student
involvement in these listserv communities tends to take two forms: “lurking” and
“posting.” Some students, like Todd, are silent “lurkers” of the listserv community: they
sign up for the listservs, and read the postings, but they never contribute postings of their
own or participate in discussion. In fact, because they never make any postings to it,
other members of the listServ community may not even be aware that lurkers like Todd
are on the listserv. However, these “lurkers” are proud of their listserv membership, and
do feel that these listservs provide an Opportunity for them to gain knowledge of
happenings of LGBT events on their college and university campuses. Simply belonging
to a listserv community provides a sense of validation of their queer identities that they
would ordinarily not receive in a discipline-Specific classroom environment. Most of the
interviewees in this study, however, indicate that they do often post to listservs. Overall,
their postings consist of informational announcements rather than discussion on political
issues. While the listservs serve as conduits for the transmission of information on
political topics, and, in this sense, they allow students to perform identities that they hide
flom their disciplinary literacy communities (such as classroom environments), they tend
not to use listservs for personal writing, as they do with e-mails or, as we shall see, blogs.
On occasion, usually once or twice each year, issues will come along that encourage
commentary flom almost everyone on the listserv, such as last year’s discussion on a

university LGBT listserv of whether drag queens were anti-feminist. However, by and

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large, such intense discussions on these listservs are non-existent, and are more often
used to promote events or announce meetings. Unlike e-mails, which students treat as
more personal, perforrnative space, listservs are mainly employed for the exchange of
information. Perhaps this occurs because, while the listserv is a “community” for LGBT
students, they do not know who all the members are, and thus feel less comfortable
imparting personal information than they do in a one—on-one e-mail to a fliend. Most
interviewees, however, spoke very positively of the campus listservs they belonged to:
since many learn about the LGBT community by reading postings and/or exchanging
information, the listservs enable them to feel more strongly tied to the LGBT world.
And, for students like Tina, the listservs can serve as a way to get peOple involved in
important issues: listservs may bring LGBT communities closer together by encouraging
students to support activist causes. In this sense, the students are learning a great deal
about not just the social nature of writing, but of the impact of the Internet on acts of
writing as well.
Blog Communities

The most serendipitous finding of this study involved the discovery of “blog”
communities among LGBT students. These “blo g” communities serve as interactive
online journals for students. While I did not originally begin this study with the intention
to ask students about “blogging,” I learned that, for them, it is a popular mode of self-
expression. Out of the 32 students interviewed, I discovered that 12 of them (38%) have
at least attempted an online blog, and, with the exception of two students, all write in
their blogs on a regular basis (at least once a month). As some of the first students I

interviewed volunteered that they kept online blogs, I was excited to realize that, with

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blogs, we have a largely unexplored literacy community, a hidden literacy that most
members of academe would normally not consider as a part of students’ everyday writing
lives.

By learning about the students’ blogs, I learned that blogs tend to complicate
traditional definitions of audience. While most students publish their blogs in a public
space which technically may be seen by anyone online, the blog mainly, acts as a means
of communication between the student blogger and his or her friends. Those who keep
blogs told me that they will usually only release the URLs of their blogs to their “friends”
whom they “know” online (or in person) and that they sometimes censor certain entries
such that only certain online “friends” can read them. In the world of online blogging,
one often chooses to read the blogs of others and then chooses to add individuals to an
online list of “fliends.” Those “friends” help to form the primary audience for the
“blo gs.” However, in spite of the privatized nature of this literacy community, all the
students except one in this study willingly gave out their blog URLs to me so I could
examine them further. Thus with these blo g communities, we see Bakhtin’s heteroglossia
at work here: multiple voices, multiple interactions, varied audiences. “Talking to
friends” has an entirely different meaning in blog communities than in face-to-face
settings, and blog discourse empowers bloggers a great deal in the sense that messages
sent may appear and disappear at the blogger’s will. The writer may choose to limit his
or her words to certain audiences, and then change his or her mind, and make that written
discourse available to all, and then decide to limit the audience again, and so forth.

. Students’ blogs tend to serve two different purposes: confessional space and

performative space. At times, it seems as if these two purposes intertwine. Moira, a

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lesbian flom the University of Toledo, named her blog “The Diary of a Lesbian(hehehe)!
[sic].” By giving her blog this title, it is already clear that she is using the blog to
perform her sexual identity (lesbian). And since Moira writes “(hehehe)!” after the word
“Lesbian,” it is equally apparent that she knows that she is using this online space to
share a secret with her global audience. We can ahnost hear her snicker with glee as she
announces her sexuality to the world. Her blo gs are confessional, in that she writes at
length about the various women in her life, yet they she also uses them to perform her
sexual identity, on several different levels. Part of the URL of her blog is named
“lesbodyke,” thus combining two popular labels of the LGBT community to formulate
her own online presence. Moira uses her blog almost exclusively to write about her
romantic relationships with women (or lack thereof): she uses very public Space to write
about very personal topics. Finally, Moira’s main audience consists of two on-campus
peers: her ex-girlfliend and (oddly enough) her ex-girlfliend’s ex. She is writing for
people who know her and who can appreciate the negotiations of her lesbian identity.
However, she also told me that she “doesn’t get too personal because [she doesn’t] know
who’s reading it.” Yet, Moira’s blog often reads like a personal diary. One entry
declares:
well, as many would imagine. the fiiends w/ benefits thing isn't working
out. but the fiiends part is so i guess its all good. i am still kind of lost
however. i am still in love with her. i don't really know what to do about it.
she wants to move out of town and wants me to move too. i don't want to.
i have just started to get my life in order. going to college, got a job, and
moving into a house (w/o the parents). if she wants to move out of town,
thats fine but i don't need to ruin my life for it. damn emotions and having

a conscience. (i know its a good thing)
~me

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As we can see flom this entry, in spite of her assertions that she’s trying to avoid being
personal, Moira uses her blog here both as a Space for the negotiation of her feelings
toward her ex-girlfriend, and, simultaneously a negotiation of her newly-forming identity
as a lesbian college student. It is also worthy to note here that, even though Moira claims
that her ex-girlfliend (of whom she writes here) is part of the primary audience for her
blog, she chooses to address this entry in the first person rather than the second person.
Hence, the entry reads more like a personal, confessional diary entry, a cathartic display
of private feelings.
Similarly, Herman’s blog mingles the confessional with the perfonnative. For
example, Herman often writes heart—wrenching accounts of how he was sexually abused
as a child. In this entry, he talks about how he and his therapist are working through the
relationship between his sexual abuse and his homosexual identity:
We talked today about my episode of childhood sexual abuse, and it hit
home that it wasn’t really about sex for the man who abused me; it was
about power. I have always associated this abuse with sex in my head, and
grew on some level to believe that sex was bad because my first
experience with a homosexual was also bad. And it followed in my head
that since sex was bad, that l was also bad because I have those “bad”
sexual feelings. Now I see that it wasn’t the sexual part of this episode that
was bad, it was that this man took advantage of me, that he abused the
power that adults have over Children to fulfill one of his needs in a very
inappropriate way.

Interestingly enough, Herman claimed that he keeps the blo g “mostly for friends” within

his campus community, but he does not censor his entries in any way. Since he so

readily allowed this very personal entry to be made available to me, for example, I

inferred that he is unquestionably using online, public space not only to let go of his

personal shame, but also to negotiate his identity as a gay man on a college campus. The

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act of writing in this blog is helping him learn not to equate homosexuality with “bad”
sexual feelings simply because his first sexual experience with a man was abusive.

Moira and Herman’s willingness to write on such intensely personal topics for
online audiences outside of class should make us as teachers question the extent to
whether this kind of confessional, perforrnative campus literacy may be used in the
disciplinary literacy communities of classroom settings. Because so many of these
LGBT students are creating these blogs on their own, it shows that they are clearly
longing for a literacy outlet outside the disciplinary literacies of the classroom. They
desire to form communities with others on campus and beyond, and they want people to
listen to what they have to say. Chapter eight will explore in further detail the extent to
which Internet literacies may be used to enhance LGBT student presence in classroom
pedagogy.
Forming Communities through On-Campus Groups

Not only do students form online campus literacy communities, they also form
them by establishing face-to-face campus communities outside the classroom. Campus
groups provide ample opportunities for LGBT students to negotiate academic discourse
face-to-face. The interviewees in this study tend to see these groups as a very positive
force in their lives. This is evidenced by their memberships in multiple LGBT campus
literacy communities; the friendships that they form in these groups; the activist lives
they develop within the groups’ contexts; the pride in their identities that they gain flom

the groups; and the source of education that the groups provide.

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Multiple Group Membership

Many of the interviewees, to begin with, are involved in several on-campus
groups simultaneously. Taylor, for example, attends meetings of a transgender group, a
Gay-Straight Alliance, a university LGBT Alliance, and university caucus group. She is
also the president of a state-wide group on intersex issues. Raya participates in a meeting
for students with disabilities, a “womyn’s” group, and the black caucus on campus.
Kadijah is a member of her university’s LGBT Alliance, SGL (Same-Gender Loving)
Social, and a progressive co-op on her campus. And Jason is the editor of a queer
magazine on campus, an officer in his university Alliance, and member of one of his
university’s caucus groups. For these students, joining multiple campus literacy
communities provides them an opportunity to engage in multiple discourses. It is also a
means of establishing a queer presence in multiple campus environments. Raya, for
example, attends the disability group and black caucus meetings in order to “be a
supportive ally” of other minority groups and to extend LGBT presence beyond the norm.
She declared: “The LGBT community tends to be .very, very white, very sexist, very
ableist [sic]. I personally try to combat that every day . . . it’s really hard for peOple to
understand two different oppressions unless there are two different groups [to attend].”
SO, to enhance her understanding of the special oppressions that other minorities endure,
Raya attends multiple on-carnpus meetings of these groups, thereby developing a better
comprehension of their unique experiences.
Friendship

Some students perceive these groups as a source of friendship, as a way of fitting

in. Jim, a gay MSU senior, mentioned that, while is not currently active in the gay

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community, he is trying to muster up the courage to attend on-campus groups and their
events as a way of “meeting people.” Julie also tries to find different groups to fit into on
the rural campus. She asserted that this is a difficult task: “It’s hard to start a community
when you don’t know where to look,” she sighed. Still, like Jim, she is convinced that
on-carnpus group membership is the key to belonging; her search continues to try to find
different groups into which she may fit. And, even though Kate currently attends
Western Michigan, she still attends meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance at her rural
college because her “fiiends are there,” and the group presents “opportunity for
involvement.” For Kate, even talking about political issues important to the gay
community represents “involvement.” However, when the gay marriage issue was
brought up in her business class, she felt antagonized. “I felt it was me against everyone
in the classroom,” she declared. However, whenever she goes to her group at her
community college, she often “talks about gay marriage issues” with others in a way that
enables her to feel comfortable about her own identity, since most everyone in her group
shares her views. This example reveals that, in contrast to the disciplinary literacy
communities of the classroom, campus literacy communities serve as primary discourse
communities for LGBT students within which they feel comfortable talking about the
issues that matter to them the most. A majority of the LGBT students interviewed, like
Jim, Julie, and Kate, all desire to seek out opportunities in which they can engage in
conversation on LGBT topics in campus literacy communities; they want opportmrities in

which they can nurture their identities as LGBT individuals.

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Activism

Part of the process of nurturing LGBT student identity comes flom the
opportunity to take part in activist lives. At the time of our interview, Lechele was
running for External Vice-Chair of her LGBT group on campus. Her job, she explained,
would be to “attend all caucus meetings” and “attend every ethnic and multi-cultural
group meeting. She wants the job because she hopes to have the opportunity to “bridge
gaps between LGBT students and students of color.” Lechele feels that most LGBT
African-Americans on her university’s campus, for example, “are hiding” because they
fear that “their fiiends won’t talk to them” if they were to come out. Her involvement
stems flom her desire to help minority students feel that they have voices and to enable
conversations across different social and ethnic groups. Similarly, Marie, an on-campus
lesbian activist at her community college, relishes the Opportunity “to organize things,”
and she “jumped in head first” when she was given the Opportunity to serve as the Vice-
President of her college’s Gay-Straight Alliance. For Marie, activism serves as an
opportunity “to learn” as well as “a comfort thing.” And even though Tina is normally a
very quiet, shy individual, she serves the role of secretary in Marie’s organization
because she also values opportunities to be involved. By taking notes at meetings, she
does not have to speak a lot, but she remains involved by carefirlly listening to what’s
going on around her. Overall, LGBT student activism in on-campus groups affords
students several opportunities that they do not normally receive in classroom
environments. By bridging gaps between literacy communities, learning about the
discourse of their own community, achieving their comfort level with themselves, and

actively listening to LGBT speech, the students become assimilated simultaneously into

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the LGBT community and the literacy communities of the academic world. Hence, the
groups serve as bridges between their primary discourses and the secondary discourses of
academe.
Pride in Identities

In addition, the on-campus literacy communities provide the students a chance to
earn pride in their identities as LGBT individuals. Devin enjoyed participating in the
2002 “Fruit Bowl” on his university campus, a football game played by LGBT students,
because it gave him a sense of “community involvement.” This event empowers LGBT
students on two different levels. To begin with, the name of the event itself, the “Fruit
Bowl” reveals an example of the LGBT community reclaiming hostile language as their
own, as with the term “queer.” Both “fluit” and “queer” are often shouted at the LGBT
community as invectives, but recently LGBT college students have begun to take back
such terms in order to integrate them in a positive way into their own literacy
communities. Secondly, the event enables LGBT students to conquer a stereotype. By
having fun playing football, the LGBT students deliberately subvert the pervading
ideology which asserts that “queers” shouldn’t play sports. Thus through this event,
Devin could gain pride in his own identity as a “fluit” playing football, challenging a
hurtful name and harmful stereotype that individuals often use to ridicule the LGBT
community. The Pi Kappa Phi incident at his school also provided Devin with pride in
his identity as a gay man. During this 2002 incident, flatemity brothers flom Pi Kappa
Phi, as part of the “hazing” process, strolled his campus wearing T-shirts with such
slogans as “FAG HAIRSTYLIST” and “CAPTAIN OF GAY SEX.” They also ran

through his dorm screaming that it was “a fag hall.” His on-campus LGBT caucus played

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a pivotal role in making sure that those directly participating in the incident were kicked
out of the flaternity. Consequently, Devin “developed respect” for this organization, and
became more involved within it. He took on the role of treasurer, thus enhancing his
willingness to being labeled as “gay” on campus. So, as we can see, after some
association with this caucus’s community, Devin learned to admire them, and thus
became more comfortable with his homosexual identity in the process. He stated:
I’ve seen [the caucus] struggle in the past through very low attendance and
low interest, but I think it’s a positive thing we can have in the complex,
and it’s a good way to show that we’re out there, to show we have a place.
A lot of people don’t see me as a gay person . . . I don’t want to be the sole
[gay] representative . . . but I would be . . . as a part of [the caucus].
Clearly, Devin’s willingness to associate himself with his university’s caucus enabled
him to become more comfortable self-identifying as a gay male on campus.

Hal, a gay Afiican-American graduate student, learned to use his membership in
his SGL (Same-Gender Loving) Social group to become comfortable with his conflicting
minority identities: his gay identity and his African-American identity. Unlike some
students on campus, who involve themselves in multiple LGBT literacy communities,
Hal insists on participating only in SGL Social because he feels that his university’s
Alliance “has not dealt with people of color.” In other words, he perceives the main on-
campus LGBT group as exclusionary, and predominately composed of white, middle-
class undergraduates. However, he feels that more organizations on campus need to
concern themselves more with the particular needs of the African-American community.
According to Hal, the black community likes to pretend that “there’s no homosexuality”;

many African-American men, for example, present themselves as “bi” to avoid the “gay”

stigma. Both he and Roger, my other male African-American interviewee complained

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about how, in African-American culture, LGBT men feel they must keep their queer
identities on the “DL,” or “down low,” which means that they have added pressure to
hide their identities, creating an atmosphere of secrecy and tension. Consequently, Hal
asserted that Afiican-Americans want to avoid labels altogether. “’SGL’ is a way of
avoiding ‘white’ labels of ‘gay, lesbian,’ etc.,” Hal claimed. He explained that to be an
Afiican-American “gay” man is to be a “traitor” to the “white man’s culture.” As Kevin
Kumashiro reveals, “Aflocentric discourses have defined ‘Black’ as ‘straight”’ (12).

Therefore, for Hal, the SGL group provides the alternative that he needs to
become comfortable with the intersections of his minority identities, since issues such as
the disjunctions between a queer identity and an Aflican-American identity are often
brought up during SGL’s discussions. The group primarily consists of racial minority
students, many of whom can empathize with Hal’s feelings about the Alliance.
Education

Finally, the on-campus groups also serve an educational purpose for their

members. Erica’s membership in the Womyn’s Council and her university’s Alliance,
for example, affords her the opportunity to get engaged in discussions “on gender and
identity, domestic partner benefits, and connections of multiple identities.” These
campus groups provide her a linguistic space to engage in tOpics that she finds politically
and socially relevant; she has been surprised that, thus far in her college career, she has
not been given opportunities to address queer issues in her gender studies courses. Moira
mentioned that, at her last LGBT group meeting, an HIV+ gay man talked about his
experiences living with AIDS. She felt she learned a lot from his presentation, and she

was also pleased to see so many straight people in the audience. The presence of straight

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people enabled her to understand that “LGBT issues were impacting the straight
community”; she learned that AIDS was not just an issue for the LGBT population to
conflont. Roger, a bisexual African-American student, purposely attends SGL meetings
“to combat stereotypes.” He does public relations work for the group. However, since
Roger is not completely out on campus, and fears “strange reactions” flom his peers
(particularly the male ones), he employs clandestine methods for the group’s publicity,
and avoids more public actions, such as giving speeches. For example, he claimed:
“Instead of dealing with [people’s negative] reactions up flont, I’ll put this stuff up
passively, like I’ll put out a flyer [advertising one of the group’s on-campus events] . . .
If they decide to go, then they go, but I’m not gonna force nobody or throw it in
anybody’s face.” For Roger, “SGL is about it” in terms of his LGBT on-campus
involvement, because he leads a life completely separate flom his LGBT activism. As a
resident hall mentor on campus, he feels that he must shield his bisexual identity flom the
students he mentors. Because of this, he insisted that our interview take place in a
completely private environment within the dorm; he did not feel safe talking about his
sexuality in his own dorm room.
Conclusion

To assuage the demands of academic literacies, LGBT students form lasting
language communities outside classroom spaces both in asynchronous online and face-to-
face campus literacy communities. They see e-mails, listservs, and blogs as ways for
them to connect with other LGBT people. In addition, on-campus groups provide many
benefits for them, including opportunities for activism, ways to develop fliendships, and

pride in their identities. The next chapter will focus on one group of individuals in

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particular—lesbian students—and explore the reasons why they so highly value their
experiences in these campus literacy communities. By exploring the definition of
“lesbian” and relating its components to the literacy lives of three lesbian interviewees, I
shall offer a theory as to why lesbians tend to value their involvement in literacy

communities even more than their gay male and bisexual peers do.

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“You Just Have to Speak Up”: Lesbians and Campus Literacy
Communities

Overview

As we learned previously in Chapter 4, Erica, a lesbian university student, feels
that even though she makes concerted attempts to take classes in gender studies and
women’s studies, she Often finds herself disappointed with the way that LGBT-oriented
subjects are approached in these courses. In one of her women’s studies courses, for
example, she was asked to take a test to determine her “masculinity” or “femininity.”
Her instructor expressed surprise when Erica’s gender score indicated a predisposition
towards femininity; she told Erica that, because Erica was a lesbian, her score should
have indicated a predilection for masculine behavior. Outside the classroom, however,
Erica, like many lesbians in this study, is able to use campus literacy communities to
combat such stereotypical views. She involves herself in several on-campus groups,
including a women’s group and the LGBT Student Alliance on her campus. These
groups often discuss issues concerning the LGBT community, such as gay marriage and
definitions of gender identity. In fact, due to her involvement with these groups, she
participated in an activity in which her groups formed a coalition with racial and ethnic
student groups on campus to educate both the President and Board of Trustees at her
university on gender identity issues. When asked why she felt it was important for a
broad range of the academic community to be involved in making LGBT students feel
more included, she replied: “There needs to be education at all levels about the issues
and, with the education, make people realize that there is a need for change. I don’t think

it’s the responsibility of the oppressed to educate the oppressor, but sometimes I think

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that’s the only way to start the ball rolling . . . You just have to speak up, you just have to
be loud about it.” From Erica’s perspective, institutional “oppressors,” such as
administrators and faculty, need to listen to the voices of the “Oppressed” student
populations when they “speak up,” including those of LGBT students. Judging from her
involvement in several on-campus groups, Erica believes that bridging the gap in this
institutional divide comes from the building of campus literacy communities.

In the last chapter, we examined some reasons why LGBT students negotiate
academic literacies by establishing both online corrnnunities (through e-mail, listservs,
and blogs) and face-to-face communities (on-campus groups) on campus. But the need
still exists for us to examine more in-depth why the students seemed to value these
literacy communities as much as they did. Therefore, this chapter attempts to fulfill that
objective. To this end, I would like to focus on the lesbians in this study in particular
here, because, according to the questionnaire results, they seemed to value these
communities more than either the gay or bisexual students did. After doing some review
Of contemporary definitions of “lesbianism,” I realized that cultural perceptions of the
term “lesbian” as a consummate outsider could possibly strengthen the lesbian student’s
desire to form language communities outside the classroom. So, as I discuss the literacy
communities of three lesbian students (Gabrielle, Marie, and Lechele), I will attempt to
explain how the communities that they form (or desire to form) with other students,
faculty, and administrators in campus spaces outside the classroom may lessen their
“outsider” status. The discussion of lesbian communities here will provide us some
perspectives upon which a research plan to promote LGBT student inclusion in academic

literacies will be built in Chapter 8.

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“Lesbian” as Outsider

Contemporary definitions of “lesbian” in our culture stress the role of a lesbian as
a social outsider. I suggest in this dissertation that, as a consequence of her status as a
minority within a minority group, the lesbian may seek out ways to form communities
with others. For her, communities provide a sense of voice, a sense of individuality
which she is otherwise denied. Before exploring the ways in which lesbians fonrr
communities, however, and their reasons for doing so, let us examine some current
definitions of “lesbian” which stress the lesbian’s role outside the norms of society.

6‘,

Monique Wittig claims that a lesbian is not a woman. A woman . . . only
exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a 1
man; that relation . . . is heterosexuality’” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 143). A lesbian, on
the other hand, is outside that binary. She cannot be a part of it because “a lesbian has no
sex; she is beyond the categories of sex” (144). Teresa de Lauretis similarly asserts that
the lesbian exists outside of traditional sexual boundaries. In The Practice of Love:
Lesbian Sexuality, de Lauretis claims that our culture defines “lesbian” as a dualism. She
states:
I have asserted that it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian . . .
Whatever other affective or social ties may be involved in a lesbian
relationship—ties that may also exist in other relations between and
among women, flom fiiendship to rivalry, political sisterhood to class or
racial antagonism, ambivalence to love, and so on—the term lesbian [sic]
refers to a sexual relation, for better or for worse. (283-84)
de Lauretis makes a good point here: the term “lesbian” connotes only a sexual practice,

and fails to acknowledge the love that two women may have for each other. In doing so,

the term ignores other, less sexual aspects of the individual woman. Just as the

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heterosexual female is often defined in terms of her husband (for example, by her
husband’s last name), the lesbian woman is defined in terms of her partner simply by
being called a “lesbian”: she becomes, for the purpose of her culture, “one who has sex
with women.” And in her article “Ourself behind Ourself: A Theory for Lesbian
Readers,” Jean E. Kennard suggests that the lesbian’s flequent absence flom literature
exists because people habitually question the origins of her identity, and therefore its very
social existence. Much of the discussion on lesbian identity, she notes, is flamed within a
discussion “between choice and no choice” (64). And since some feel that the lesbian
can “choose” who she is (Reid, Soloman, F adennan), this makes her identity as a whole
individual less valid. Furthermore, historically, J. Davidson Porter suggests that the
lesbian has endured a historical and cultural invisibility due to a lack of opportunities to
live a life “independently of traditional society due to economic implications” (313;
D’Errrilio). And Kate Clinton points out that, because the contemporary gay liberation
movement is so male-dominated, lesbians really do not have a place within it (63).

All these definitions paint a picture of a “lesbian” as the consummate cultural
outsider existing outside traditional cultural and linguistic categories. Unlike “gay” and
“bisexual,” her self-definition is rarely associated with either “man” or “woman”; as a
culture, we tend to believe that she reflains flom identifying herself with patriarchy and
hetero-normativity on all levels. In fact, due to our patriarchal language structure, the
lesbian in our society often gets described as “gay,” a common blanket term for all LGBT
peOple. And while those who define themselves as “gay,” “bisexual,” and even
“transgendered” individuals do so in relation to or against patriarchal system of

categorization (specifically, the category of “man”), the lesbian, by the very nature of her

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identity, is often perceived as a political and social entity which exists outside this
system, either naturally or by “choice.”

By looking at the lives of three lesbian interviewees in some detail, we can see
how these lesbian students may be using campus literacy communities outside classroom
environments to provide them with a much-needed sense of agency in negotiating
academic literacies as a whole, thus enabling them to feel much less like outsiders within
their culture. For these lesbians, these communities may also provide a viable solution
towards achieving LGBT inclusion in academic literacy spaces, therefore allowing them
to establish what de Lauretis calls “ties that may exist in other relations” (283).

The Language Communities of Gabrielle, Marie, and Lechele
Gabrielle

The majority (five out of nine) of the lesbian interviewees in this study were
social science majors, and Gabrielle was no exception. A graduate student in community
psychology, Gabrielle’s research interests include the “social construction of gender” and
“power and gender.” However, she finds that women’s studies, her major concentration,
is largely “heterosexual,” and ignores LGBT concerns. To compensate for this, Gabrielle
forms communities with other LGBT individuals outside her classroom discourses. Her
preference is to surround herself with LGBT-friendly people; for example, her recent ad
for a roommate, which she posted on her community’s TRIANG-L listserv, specifically
asks for an LGBT—friendly person. In addition, Gabrielle makes efforts to attend talks on
LGBT issues, and she sometimes does research on same-sex couples. When I asked her
about her writing life, she seemed surprised when I asked her about her personal writing.

“For me,” she declared, “writing is the same thing as public writing.” She clearly

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envisions herself as writing for a public audience; she senses that an act of literacy is an
act of community-building.

Unlike many LGBT undergraduate students, Gabrielle does not keep a blo g, nor
does she belong to any on-campus student organizations. However, it is clear that she
does make concerted efforts to involve herself in campus literacy communities with other
lesbians outside classroom environments. It is possible that, because of society’s
perception that “a lesbian is not a woman,” as Wittig asserts, Gabrielle may be making
concerted efforts to include herself in the category of “women” (through her work in
women’s studies) and in the category of “lesbians” (through TRIANG-L listserv
membership and attendance at queer campus events). The social definition of a lesbian
as “not a woman” may also account for Gabrielle’s view of “writing” as “public writing”;
as a lesbian, she may have a particular need for her words to be validated by others in
society. Hence, for Gabrielle, an act of writing is an act of desire for recognition by
others; she seems exceptionally aware that, as a minority, she must make concerted,
public efforts for her words to be noticed.

Not only do Gabrielle’s memberships in campus literacy communities enable her
to negotiate academic literacies, she also feels that these communities provide important
means of making LGBT students feel more included in academe. She strongly feels that
students, faculty, and the administration all need to be involved in creating this
atmosphere of inclusion. Students, for example, need to “enhance the level of visible
activism” on campus. “We need more chalk writing,” she asserted, claiming that students
need to write more chalk messages to each other on campus sidewalks which advertise

meetings; in this sense, the LGBT community can enhance its visibility. If this were to

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occur, another form of the “textual conidors” described in Chapter Four would be
created. But instead of using walking space to trade antagonistic messages, students
could instead use it to exchange information and thereby heighten campus awareness of
minority concerns. Once again, we see that Gabrielle has a particular interest in forming
a sense of campus community, not just with other lesbians, but with other students, both
queer and straight. If students were to communicate with each other more, even in the
informal spaces of campus sidewalks, they could develop a greater sense of awareness of
the lesbian community, thus bridging the gap between a community existing “beyond the
categories of sex,” as Wittig claims, and the hetero-normative communities, which exist
within those categories.

Gabrielle feels that faculty may play an important role in this process as well. For
example, she suggested that faculty make announcements of LGBT activities in their
classes. In her View, teachers need to remind their students of the relationship between
the classroom and the campus community at large:

It shows students that not only are faculty aware of what’s going on, it’s
something that students need to be aware of, too. And awareness is where
you start: before you get involved, you have to know that it’s happening. I
think that’s how the classroom and campus community can come together.
Cause they’re related, it’s not separate. I think education, especially on a
college campus, is so much related to in-between class time.
As educators, faculty need to remind students that literacy communities do exist outside
classroom environments; primary discourses for LGBT students occur outside of
classroom space. If students miss out on these extra-curricular conversations, they may
miss out on opportunities to engage their peers in primary discourse settings. In

particular, these communities can serve to help us understand the nature of the lesbian

identity in our culture. As Kennard suggests, lesbian invisibility in popular culture and

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literature has given most people the impression that lesbians do not exist, so faculty can
help to educate their students on the existence of the contributions of the lesbian
community (or other queer communities as well).

Mostly, Gabrielle emphasized the need for administrators to initiate institutional
change. Unlike many students, Gabrielle feels that administrators should require writings
and readings on LGBT-oriented topics, in order to bridge the gap between administrative
values and the concerns of LGBT students. “Almost every class should be using applied
examples [of the LGBT community],” Gabrielle claimed. This can only happen if
minority issues are seen as institutionally legitimate. Therefore, Gabrielle advocates
training for both teachers and administrators on LGBT concerns. In her view, it is
important to “start where people are” and then “find out their values, [and] work flom
there. Help them to be more inclusive.” She stated that teachers and administrators need
to be shown how to use examples of the LGBT community in classroom discourse;
employ inclusive language in their daily speech (the word “gay” as a pejorative term, in
particular, needs to be rectified); and revise classroom textbooks to include more
examples of LGBT individuals. Such gargantuan tasks, she feels, can only be
accomplished by community-building outside the classroom. Students can work with
teachers and administrators to educate them, and heighten their awareness Of these issues.

As a lesbian who habitually conflonts social issues on a daily basis in her research
work, Gabrielle clearly sees the relationship between academic institutions and campus
literacy communities. To enhance its visibility within academic discourse, the LGBT
community must start building discourse communities outside the classroom, with other

members of academe, who have the power to change language and literacy policies.

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Furthermore, theories on lesbianism (Wittig, Kennard) suggest that Gabrielle’s self-
identification as a lesbian may be enabling her to be more sensitive to issues of power
and inclusiveness in our culture. By stressing the importance of LGBT students forming
campus communities with administrators in her response, we can see that she wishes to
thwart the cultural “invisibility” of the lesbian community to which J. Davidson Porter
refers.
Marie

A community college student, Marie, like Gabrielle, strongly believes in the
effectiveness of campus literacy communities outside the classroom as a means of
negotiating the barriers of academic literacies and as a means of enhancing LGBT
presence in academe. To begin with, Marie belongs to several communities which enable
her to engage in issues that her classes have largely failed to address. She attends every
possible meeting of the Gay-Straight Alliance at her college; in fact, she holds the office
of Vice-President. She also belongs to several online communities: a lesbian
community, a gay maniage one, and several dealing with women’s rights issues. These
communities compensate her for the political agency she feels she lacks in classroom
language spaces. As deLauretis suggests, the very nature of the term “lesbian” suggests a
relationship, but only a sexual one. Marie reveals through her various community
activities, both in person and online, that her lesbian self may actually take on multiple
roles within our culture: Marie’s roles as queer activist and as advocate of women’s
rights attempt to transcend the limited role ascribed to lesbians. As Marie forms
communities with these other groups, she may help herself to feel less limited within her

socially defined role. NO longer must she feel defined solely in terms of her sexuality;

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instead, she can View herself as a contributor to the social and political objectives of
multiple cultural groups.
Her online blog also provides this agency. One of Marie’s recent blog entries
reads:
A (not so) quick side bar: why do people get so hung up over the word
'marriage'? I know a lot of people who are in favour of civil unions that
give homosexual couples all (the same rights as their heterosexual
counterparts... as long as they don't call it a 'marriage' that is. What is the
big deal? I even had someone tell me that the only reason homosexuals
want to call their relationships marriages is because they want to try to
convince the straight population that their partnerships are equal to
traditional ones. What a bunch of shit...
From this entry, we can see that Marie does indeed use her blog to vent her opinions on
political issues. It is a “safe space” in which she can express her minority viewpoints;
she does not feel the need to conform her writing to the formal dictates of the classroom
in this electronic space, and can openly express herself, transcending the societal
ideology of lesbian as cultural outsider. Marie’s blog serves additional community-
building purposes as well. She uses it to keep in touch with others, and for writing what
she describes as “informal essays.” Overall, she perceives her blog not just as a conduit
for political musings, but also as a way for her to have “fun.” She claims that she “makes
friends” with those who read her posts and then e-mail her, even though she has never
seen most of these people. Her primary audience consists both of these virtual “fliends”
and her real-life “cousins,” but it may also include anyone on her campus to whom she
chooses to make her blog available. By building a sense of community with fliends,
relatives, and the campus community at large online through her blo g, Marie may be

attempting here to claim discursive space in what Kate Clinton terms “the gay liberation

movement,” which, Clinton argues, is largely a patriarchal construction. The fliendships

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which she forms on her blog allow Marie a sense of historical and political agency to
which lesbians have traditionally been denied.

Marie’s blog also challenges traditional notions of literacy through its visual
appeal, but simultaneously employs these visual literacies to heighten her sense of
identity, thus thwarting the negative cultural associations of a “lesbian” identity to
participate in an online community. In this environment, Marie appears to embrace the
“otherness” of her identity. The prominently displayed title of Marie’s blog, “An Altered
State of Consciousness,” suggests to the readers that, within the context of her blog,

something ethereal, or other-worldly, is taking place (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Marie’s Blog

[lam-I] abla Beat Science [I

 

In addition, dark purple and black colors dominate the blog, reinforcing the notion that
the readers, upon reading the blog, are entering into a numinous realm of dark spirits.
And instead of showing a picture of herself, we can see from Figure 5 that Marie displays

a picture of a character who appears gender-ambiguous, again suggesting that the blog

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crosses both linguistic and gender boundaries. Marie thus positions herself, as Wittig
claims, as not a traditional woman, and thus a cultural outsider. In this online
environment, however, Marie can more easily negotiate her lesbian identity and create a
campus literacy community with other queer individuals. The little cartoon characters
which define her “mood” and “music” for each day help her to establish a communicative
online persona. By including this information, Marie attempts to convey verbally what
online writing spaces typically make difficult: the communication of feelings,
background, and emotions. She wisely attempts to give her readers additional context for
the unique rhetorical situation in which they now find themselves, thus enhancing the
blog as a sense of communal space. In fact, all of the blog’s visual literacies, such as the
title, the gothic/spiritual themes, the colors, and the animated cartoons, all help to reveal
Marie’s personality andiidentity. This, in turn, enables Marie to become a member of
the blog community and thwart her cultural outsider status to at least some extent.

Like Gabrielle, Marie sees the need for students and administrators to all get
involved in creating a more welcoming climate for LGBT students on college campuses.
To begin with, LGBT students and their allies can support the community by providing
symbolic clues of this support to those with whom they interact on campus. Marie, for
example, sometimes sports a red ribbon on her shirt to show support of AIDS awareness,
and has rainbow buttons on her backpack. Using these clues to her identity, she hOpes
can initiate dialogue between individuals who might otherwise shy away flom each other.
She explains:

People might even say, “Oh, does [the button or pin] mean you’re gay?,”
or something . . . My first response is usually “Well, it just basically

means that I’m a gay rights supporter.” And I usually try not to say that
I’m gay, not usually because I’m afraid, [but] a lot of times there’s this

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stereotype that only gay people can be gay rights activists, and I’m trying
to break that stereotype.

Thus we see another example here in which Marie employs non-verbal language, such as
the elaborate visuals in her blog, to perform a queer identity. For Marie, her face-to-face
performance of “queer” lasts up to a point: she will only self-identity as “gay” or (more

accurately) “lesbian” if someone asks her directly if she self-identifies that way. Her

9

 

performance as “gay/lesbian’ the identity which comes into being through her own
verbal affirmation—is deliberately ambiguous in the hopes that those who support LGBT
rights can willingly view her as an ally, and those who do not can initiate a conversation.
Julia Brosnan suggests that “the lesbian body in performance presents itself as an arena of
great tension . . . for she is viewed both as a woman and as a ‘homosexual’” (80). The
ambiguity of Marie’s socially constructed lesbian self—both in the blog and her
interactions with her peers thrOugh the ribbons and buttons—reflects this tension to
which Brosnan refers. As a lesbian, Marie may also be an outsider in queer culture. She
attempts to establish communities of discourse on queer issues through symbolic
language, but she simultaneously reflains flom presenting herself as “lesbian” to those
with whom she wishes to establish contact, either online or face to face.

Marie also suggested that the identification of “Safe Zones” on campus could help
LGBT students feel more included in academic discourse. She stressed the need for
teachers and administrators, in particular, to establish such zones by posting white cards
with triangles with a line that read “LGBT Safe Zone”. She further elucidated the
firnction of these “Safe Zones”: “LGBT people in the dorms could see that . . . ‘I could go

to this person if I need a safe place . . . sometimes you just don’t know who you can bring

[LGBT issues] up to.”’ She emphasized the need for this in part because students at her

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former university had had insulting letters posted to their dorm doors, and roommate

 

complications resulting from their sexuality. Again, we see that non-verbal
communication—a “Safe Zone” sticker—can enable LGBT students to feel more
comfortable addressing their concerns in faculty and administrative offices, thus creating
a sense of stronger sense of community between students, faculty, and administrators.
The stickers facilitate dialogue, thus increasing the possibility that the campus literacy
communities between students and teachers or students and administrators might very
well evolve into primary discourse communities for LGBT students. This may assuage
the “arena of tension” created by the performance of the lesbian body, to which Brosnan
refers.
Lechele

While she does not keep a blog like Marie, Lechele often uses technology in her
writings. She e-mails “fiiends all over the country,” and she often discusses LGBT issues
with her friends during her conversations. Overall, she agreed that e-mail was her main
mode of communication. Much of Lechele’s e-mail communication also manifests itself
via her listserv involvement. She belongs both to the TRIANG-L listserv (which
discusses and announces LGBT tOpics) and one for her sorority, which consists of lesbian
students of color. From her perspective, the sorority is “a community service
organization.” Lechele may see a need for the establishment of strong campus literacy
communities because, as William F. Pinar points out, lesbians like herself “are perceived
as sharing gender identity with heterosexual women, and are oppressed both as women
and as lesbians” (33). For Lechele, the Oppression to which Pinar refers also takes a third

form: she is African-American. The establishment of communities, both online and in

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person, helps Lechele feel more included within academic events and less victimized by
social and cultural stereotypes.

Lechele’s most impressive use of listserv communication to date came with her
ability to use listserv to promote an online petition which she created. She was originally
inspired to design the petition when she read the story of 15-year-old Sakia Gunn in
Between the Lines, a local LGBT newspaper. Lechele was outraged to learn that even
though Sakia was murdered for being a lesbian, Sakia’s school principal refused to honor

3”

her with a moment of silence, saying that people who lived Sakia’s “’lifestyle must

9”

“’pay a price. After reading about Sakia, Lechele did research on online petitions on
Yahoo, and then promoted the petitions on local listservs. She seemed giddy when asked
about the results that she achieved:
It was flustrating at times, because I felt like I would never reach 500
[signatures]. I thought that, that was just not going to happen. And now
it’s like 719 or something. And it’s crazy (laughs) . . . I’m shocked . . . the
Internet is really, really crazy . . . I didn’t know they had the Internet in
Germany (laughs). I mean, I don’t know how that got to Germany . . . It’s
just really, really cool that I’ve gotten such a great response flom peOple
all over the world.
She plans to mail the petition to the principal of Sakia’s school and the Board of
Directors of the Newark School District. The petition has also encouraged her to do a
letter-writing campaign: she was upset that the mayor of Newark said that he’d start a
LGBT community center in Sakia’s honor, but he has not yet followed through.
For Lechele, creating and distributing the online petition throughout her campus
community was an empowering experience. It helped her understand the power of the

Internet as a conduit of communication and it enabled her to see how her writing could

make a difference to accomplish goals that matter to her. She learned how campus

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literacy communities can form online to work towards a common goal, and she also
begin to see that her other goal involving community—the establishment of a community
center in Sakia’s name—is shared by many people. In this case, Lechele is helping to
establish a community (the center) through her online community involvement.
Consequently, she is starting another petition on gay maniage, and, as with the Sakia
Gunn petition, she is advertising this position on listservs. In her 1980 study entitled The
Lesbian Community, Deborah Wolf habitually refers to lesbians as “lesbian-feminists”
and describes lesbian communities as “lesbian-feminist communities” (1 8, 71-105).
Through her actions to honor Sakia, Lechele has not only established a “lesbian-feminist”
community by supporting both lesbians’ and women’s rights, she reveals the many
different levels upon which lesbians may self-identify through the creation of
communities. Lechele is not just a lesbian supporting a lesbian, she is a woman
supporting a woman, an African-American supporting an African-American, and a
college student supporting the rights of children. Therefore, Lechele’s creation of an
online petition of support for Sakia reveals the many different ways in which a lesbian
may achieve inclusion within communities by acknowledging her own multiple roles
within academic discourse.

I also noticed Lechele acknowledging her multiple social identities when she
talked at length about her involvement in on-campus groups. She belongs to several
LGBT groups on her university campus, and, at the time of the interview, was running for
an officer position in her university’s Alliance group. She explained that she wants her
involvement to inspire other LGBT students to feel safe, particularly LGBT students of

color:

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LECI-IELE: [My involvement] will bridge the gap between LGBT
students and also ethnic and other cultural groups on campus, and that’s
what needs to be done.
BRIAN: What kind of gaps do you perceive between LGBT students and
students of color?
LECHELE: Well, I honestly feel . . . people [of color] are scared to come
out . . . if their fiiends found out they are gay or lesbian, they probably
wouldn’t talk to them . . . I want to show people that you shouldn’t be
scared of who you are. You shouldn’t be scared to go to the meetings,
because no one’s going to beat you up, no one’s going to say, “Ooh, she’s
gay, don’t talk to her.” I mean, but I feel that’s why we don’t see a lot of
people at [SGL] Social.
Through her interest in promoting the involvement of LGBT students of color on her
university’s campus, Lechele acknowledges the complex intersections of her peers’ dual
identities. Since these students are not only LGBT students but also LGBT students of
color, she is able to perceive that these students deal with special problems as minorities.
In their communities, being “queer” is often perceived as being “white” (Kumashiro l-
25). Students of color who perform queer identities in public are often seen by their
family and fiiends as not only sexual deviants, but also race traitors. Consequently,
“queers of color have engaged in a number of efforts to redefine themselves and to create
communities and cultures that embrace them” (Kumashiro 7). Lechele desires to
establish the type of campus literacy community of which Kumashiro speaks by
welcoming students of color into the community of “SGL Social,” which concerns itself
with helping queer students of color in particular. She herself knows the difficulties of
enduring conflicting minority identities, so she hopes to help others transcend this
difficulty. To “bridge the gap,” Lechele feels that LGBT students of color need to come
together at SGL Social and talk. Like Audre Lorde, she hopes to celebrate diversity

between communities as “’this raw and powerful connection flom which our personal

power forged’” (“Tribute to Audre,” p. 2).

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Like Gabrielle and Marie, Lechele talked at length about the importance of
establishing more LGBT-oriented academic literacy communities on campus. In spite of
her involvement in her on campus groups and with the Sakia Gunn petition, Lechele
largely perceives the academic world as a place in which minority voices are stifled. She
explained:

They have two gay and lesbian classes on this campus, and I think that’s
the only place they talk about LGBT topics . . . This school talks about
diversity a lot, but I really don’t see it, I don’t see it at all . . . People need
to stop being scared of who they are, and faculty need to be more Open to
all of their students . . . There are all kinds of people at this school . . . so I
think professors and faculty need to cater to that.
Clearly, Lechele is flustrated that most LGBT students desire to remain closeted and
avoid building communities with other LGBT students. In addition, she strongly feels ‘
that faculty and administrators need to encourage open dialogue on these topics, both in
and out of the classroOm. Over the course of her interview, Lechele habitually mentioned
the importance of “being open” to dialogue. “It’s 2003!,” she often said during the
interview, expressing her flustration that many individuals have not dropped their
prejudices of the past, which she still feels both as an African-American and as a lesbian.
To get themselves “up to date,”.she sees a strong need for administrators to establish
more LGBT-oriented classes, for faculty to provide students the options to write on
LGBT-oriented topics, and for students to gain support flom each other in groups on
campus in which minority issues are often discussed. In Lechele’s view, only when

students, faculty, and administrators engage in dialogue with each other will such

desirable results be achieved.

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Conclusion

This chapter argues that, since lesbians in our culture are often defined as social
and cultural outsiders who often experience oppression on many different levels, they
have an exceptionally strong desire to form lasting campus literacy communities with
other individuals. The formation of these communities often helps them to negotiate
academic discourse and to feel more included within it. By reading about the literacy
lives of Gabrielle, Marie, and Lechele, we may more strongly see the possibility that all
three of these lesbian students build campus literacy communities both online and in
person, or aspire to do so, to transcend their status as “outsiders” in both society in
general and in academe in particular.

These lesbians’ flequent mentions of the rOles of teachers and administrators in
the community-building process have particular significance for the final chapter of this
dissertation. My last chapter identifies the various ways in which LGBT students may be
included in academic discourse, and many of the methods discussed involve the actions
of teachers and administrators outside classroom spaces. Thus we shall soon see why
“academic literacies” need to be seen not just as “disciplinary literacies” in the classroom
but also as “campus literacies.” If we overlook the campus literacy communities formed
among students, teachers, and administrators outside the classroom, we ignore possible

places to establish LGBT student inclusion within the academic community.

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“More Community, More Literacy”: A Plan for Future Research
Overview
Early in my interview with Jason, he stressed the relationship between literacy
and the building of communities in the academic world. He declared:
I think literacy and community move together . . .the quality of literacy
that’s going to be in scholarly material produced is going to be improved
when there’s the administrative resources or academic resources to
encourage that. More support through . . . an office or through queer-
friendly classes is going to encourage that . . . both of those feed together.
More literacy, more community. More community, more literacy.

Jason’s perspective typifies that of most LGBT interviewees in this study: most of them

suggest that, in order for LGBT students to be included in academic literacy spaces, many

communities, both inside and outside the classroom, must be built.

My two goals for this dissertation have been to discover how LGBT students
negotiate academic literacies and to learn how make LGBT students feel more included
in these literacy communities. Chapters 4 and 5 have shown that the interviewees in this
study believe that writing situations which lack a strong sense of community, in and out
of the classroom, do not provide them the agency that they need to deal with the literacy
demands of academe. This is particularly true for writing involving electronic chat.
However, in Chapters 6 and 7, we saw that these students do build lasting campus
literacy communities outside the classroom, such as on-campus groups and asynchronous
online conversations, to attain a sense of inclusion in academic literacies. We learned
that lesbian students, in particular, value the building of literacy communities as a means

of both negotiating academic literacies and of finding solutions to achieve LGBT student

inclusion in academic literacy spaces.

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In this final chapter, I will explore a plan for researching the inclusion of LGBT
students in academic literacies. When interviewees were asked the questions “Which of
the proposed solutions on the questionnaire do you feel would work best [towards
achieving inclusion]?” and “What suggestions do you have for teachers who want to
bring these topics into the classroom?,” they ended up talking about getting the entire
academic community involved in achieving LGBT student inclusion. In their View,
students, administrators, and teachers need to work together to achieve LGBT student
inclusion in academic literacy communities. Since many of these students’ responses
deal with changing institutional policies, I have learned that arguing for the inclusion of
LGBT students in academic literacies involves much more than the examination of the
disciplinary literacy communities of classroom spaces. On the contrary, to develop a
plan for researching LGBT student inclusion in the academic world, we need to examine
all spaces of academic literacies, both inside and outside the classroom: both classroom-
specific disciplinary literacies and campus literacies should be included in this
examination. Since an overwhelming number of the students in this study perceive most
academic literacies as taking place outside classroom environments, it is imperative to
examine the issue of LGBT student inclusion flom an institutional perspective. We need
to take a closer look at the variety of literacy communities on campus in which language
and literacy policies are made, critically examining the language policies and practices -
both inside and outside classroom spaces.

As Porter et al. point out in the 2000 article “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical
Methodology for Change,” most discussions of institutional theory tend to be broad and

lacking in empiricism (Giroux, Sosnoski, Foucault). However, Porter et al. claim, “We

192

 

are not interested in simply reporting how evil institutions are; we think that critique
needs an action plan” (613). “An action plan” is what I offer through this theory of
LGBT inclusion of academic literacies: on the basis of my interviewees’ comments, I will
articulate here a specific process that firture researchers may use to work towards this
inclusion.

Most studies of LGBT student communities have lacked such specificity. I
mentioned in Chapter 1 that Harriet Malinowitz suggests that the best solution for
achieving the inclusion of lesbian and gay students is an the “umbrella suggestion . . .
Learn about lesbian and gay people” (Textual Orientations, 25 8). While I concur with
Malinowitz that learning about lesbians and gays is important, and learning helps bring
about change, I also feel that administrators, teachers, and students could all benefit flom
“an action plan.” As we have seen, “Attacking institutional problems only at a global
and disciplinary level doesn’t wor ” (Porter et al. 626); Porter et a1. note that some
rhetorical studies do exist which “attempt some form of institutional revision” (626).
These include Grabill’s study reflecting on bureaucratic practices within literacies
communities (Situating Literacies); Blythe’s “Institutional Critique,” which elucidates
the relationship between physical structures and discursive practices; and Cushman’s The
Struggle and the Tools, which articulates the importance of observing institutional
practices first-hand (Porter et al. 626-628). But in spite of these important efforts, we
need to look even more at the specific strategies we can enact to help bring about change
in academic literacy communities. In articulating my research plan, I am interested in the
notion of applying institutional critique to benefit LGBT students in particular. My

interviewees have helped me identify places within academe where resistance and change

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are possible, and I have therefore developed my research plan based on their feelings,
thoughts, and Observations. However, it is a plan within which students, teachers, and
administrators may all participate on equal ground as members of the academic
community. These suggestions for future research have two major components: (1)
further evaluate how well the communities within academic literacy communities create
LGBT student inclusion and (2) dialogue on some possible ways to create more inclusive
academic literacies. While this plan is only a beginning in the process of creating
change, it could provide us a viable means of working towards LGBT-inclusive
discursive spaces.
Step On : Evaluation

The first step involved in creating LGBT student inclusion in academic literacies
involves the evaluation of both disciplinary and campus literacies within academe.
Researchers consisting of student groups or faculty/administrative committees can
examine several different literacy communities within academe, and attempt to discOver
the extent to which LGBT concerns are being dealt with in those Spaces. Ideally, this
research would be done by teams of students, faculty, and administrators, but I think they
can be effective for any group of individuals who desires to initiate change. Student-run
Gay-Straight Alliances, for example, or faculty/administrative committees dedicated to
incorporating diversity in academe (such as a Diversity in Action Committee) might wish
to form groups that work toward LGBT student inclusion. On the basis of what I have
found in this study, I would recommend that researchers examine a wide variety of

academic environments, both inside and outside the classroom. Judging flom my

194

findings in Chapters 4 and 5 of this study, discipline-specific classroom writing
communities might be a good place to start.
Classroom Communities: Discipline—Specific Literacies

In Chapter 4, we saw that weak writing communities are often established
between LGBT students and their teachers. From Chapter 4, we learned that LGBT
students are rarely given specific assignments dealing with LGBT issues, that professOrs
lack interest in addressing LGBT concerns, and that students often receive negative
feedback flom professors when they address LGBT issues. In that chapter, Kadijah
suggested that disciplinary literacy communities between faculty and students are not
built because teachers are “uncomfortable viewing other people’s empowerment.”
However, we must wonder whether these communities lack strong ties only because of
teacher discomfort. After all, we also saw in Chapter 4 that, in general, students have
negative attitudes towards classroom writing situations for a variety of reasons. Thus I
would suggest that researchers evaluate the classroom interaction between students and
teachers. Such study could involve such actions as Observing classrooms, evaluating
teacher assignments and syllabi, and surveying LGBT students on their overall attitudes
towards writing.

In studying teacher—student disciplinary literacy communities, the researchers
could consider several different questions. First of all, they could ask, “In what ways do
teachers use inclusive language in their classroom practices?” During her interview,
Erica stressed the need for teachers to use inclusive language in their classroom speech.
She asked teachers to recognize that “Language is an issue. . .instead of saying, ‘your

husband’ or ‘wife,’ say, ‘your partner’ . . . instead of having a hetero-normative View, be

195

inclusive of all . . . instead of saying ‘men and women,’ say ‘all people.’ Pull away flom
a binary gender system and recognize that there’s more than biology [involved in
determining] gender.” Therefore, researchers could examine the extent to which teachers
do incorporate such expression into their classroom lexicon. I would even go one step
beyond Erica’s suggestion to say that researchers need to investigate the extent to which
inclusive language could also be used in classroom assignments and syllabi. In Chapter
4, Lechele complained that teachers “don’t give [students] choices” in the assignments
that they create; researchers may want to test this assertion. Examining teacher use of
inclusive language would enable researchers to better understand whether LGBT student
experiences are truly being discussed in the disciplinary literacies of the classroom.

Secondly, researchers could ask: “What role do students play, if any, in
contributing to the antagonistic relationship that often exists between LGBT students and
their writing teachers?” When Donna complained about the excessive criticism on her
paper on lesbian issues in Chapter 4, she assumed that it was because her teacher was not
open to queer topics. However, as I pointed out, we must also wonder whether Donna
earned those negative comments due to other reasons, such as poorly organized writing or
writing with faculty mechanical structure. As I indicated in Chapter 4, students can have
poor attitudes towards writing Situations for several different reasons. Therefore, it
would be helpful for researchers to survey LGBT students’ attitudes towards writing,
perhaps once at the beginning of a writing-intensive course and once at the end, to better
evaluate the extent to which the course affected the student writer. This survey would
help researchers get a better sense of whether LGBT student resentment of writing

activities is due to classroom exclusion of LGBT issues, or whether the students’ current

196

attitudes towards classroom writing is affected by past classroom exclusion of LGBT
concerns.

Researchers also could examine the communities that students form with each
other in classroom environments. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, a lack of trust exists in
the writing communities that students form inside classrooms. The students expressed a
discomfort in sharing their writing with other students, and they also admonished their

9

peers for failing to take chat room activities “seriously.’ Therefore, researchers could
consider such student groups as peer review groups and synchronous chat rooms in their
study of LGBT student inclusion. The researchers will need to consider the extent to
which students include or exclude each other in building classroom language
communities. Such study would enable researchers to better reconcile the seemingly
contradictory statements of Kaleb in Chapter 4. Kaleb noted that, after reading his paper
on a gay-oriented topic to his peer review group, one student told him he was going to
hell and another student queried “’which one’s the woman’” in a gay sex act. However,
Kaleb also suggested that peer review can be effective. Therefore, researchers might
wonder how this can be the case. Why would students like Kaleb View peer review as
effective after having such negative experiences with it? Studying the role of LGBT
students in the peer review process could assist researchers in understanding the
particular problems that LGBT students conflont by “outing” themselves to their
classroom peers in discipline-specific literacy contexts.

Not only could researchers explore how peer review groups fimction for LGBT

students, they may want to examine LGBT students’ roles in classroom chats. In Chapter

5, Sam suggested that someone needs to monitor student chats to make sure that they

197

serve their pedagogical purposes. While many may assume that a teacher could play this
role, perhaps it would be one better served by a student. As worlds which disrupt
conventional notions of power and authority, classroom chats are often regarded by
students as “playtime” during which they do not need to make important contributions to
class discussions—particularly if their contributions are anonymous. Therefore, with
chat used in the classroom, researchers could consider the ways in which traditional
conceptions of classroom power may be subverted for the benefit of LGBT students. In
the position of chat monitors, for example, LGBT students get a chance to respond to
their peers’ negative perceptions of the LGBT community.
Non-Classroom Communities: Campus Literacies

After evaluating several different disciplinary literacies in classroom contexts, the
researchers must move their work outside the classroom to examine three types of
campus literacy communities outside of class: student communities,
faculty/administrative communities, and “mixed” communities, consisting of students,
faculty and/or administrators.

Let us begin by considering the role of student on-carnpus groups. From Chapter
6, we learned that LGBT student organizations, in particular, serve as important literacy
communities to promote the inclusion of LGBT students; therefore, flom this finding, we
can safely assume that these organizations do serve as primary discourse space for most
LGBT students on campus. This study suggests that LGBT on-campus groups can
provide valuable resources to academic communities both inside and outside the
classroom. Therefore, researchers could sit in on several student organizational meetings

and then take notes on several different issues.

198

To begin with, researchers could take notes on the group’s key literacy activities.
The researchers need to listen carefully to how the student organization uses reading,
writing, and speaking activities to support its purposes. Such findings might include the
distribution of flyers, the use of a listserv to communicate, the development of a
webpage, the drafting of letters to administrators, or the participation in demonstrations.
By learning about the group’s literacy activities, researchers could develop a sense of
how students develop literacy lives outside the classroom, and thus acquire a more
advanced understanding of how LGBT students communicate within academic literacies
overall.

Once the researchers have a sense of the group’s literacy activities, they need to
consider how well these activities promote the inclusion of LGBT students in academic
literacies. Do the literacy events, for example, seem to have a limited audience,
addressing only the “popular,” most involved LGBT students, or do they employ
rhetorical strategies to reach out to a greater number of individuals within the LGBT
community? By asking this question, researchers will learn the extent to which the group
promotes the inclusion of all LGBT students—and perhaps even the heterosexual
students as well.

After this, researchers could consider which activities within the group could be
incorporated into the classroom or other discipline-specific literacy communities. From
their study of on-campus groups, for example, they may be able to develop training
materials for faculty and administrators. One interviewee, Hal, recommended that
student groups may help build training manuals for faculty and administrators, and I feel

his suggestion is worth examining fruther. When students, administrators, and teachers

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work together to increase the presence of LGBT students in academic literacy
communities, increased tolerance and understanding may result. This suggestion furthers
the work of Peter Nardi, who points out in “Gay and Lesbian Issues in the Classroom”
the prevalence of hetero-normative literacies in education, and asserts that this needs to
be changed. Nardi asks his audience to “Imagine what it must be like when every image,
every sentence, every book, every media event, every cultural ceremony or ritual . . .
deny the existence of gay youth” and then claims that, because of this hetero-normative
dominance, we must “change the sociocultural and institutional arrangements” that
exclude gay people (129). Due to the brevity of his article, Nardi reflains flom
elaborating upon the form that this “change” should take. However, I am suggesting here
that studying on-campus groups as a basis for training teachers and administrators on the
treatment of LGBT students in academic literacy Spaces is one specific way of bringing
about this “change.”

Researchers could also examine online student communities outside of classroom
spaces in their evaluation. Chapters 6 and 7 of this dissertation, in particular, have shown
us the ways in which LGBT students feel more included within academic literacies by
participating in online communities such as e-mail discussions, listservs, and blogs; thus,
researchers need to give particular attention to online student communities in their work
to build inclusiveness within academic literacies. In Chapter 6, Taylor referred to e-mail
as her “main form of communication,” and, in Chapter 7, we learned how Lechele used a
listserv available within her university community to circulate an online petition to
support a memorial for Sakia Gunn. Due to students’ increasingly flequent

establishment of online communities in campus literacies, it would make sense for

200

researchers to exarrrine such communities in their study. This would involve reading 6-
mail, listserv, and blog postings, and considering the ways in which these literacy
communities work.

The teams might begin their evaluation of online student campus communities by
considering whether asynchronous communities provide a stronger sense of community
than synchronous communities, such as chat rooms. The results of this dissertation
indicate that LGBT students tend to view asynchronous online communities much more
positively than chat room communities, which they perceive as ephemeral and
flagmentary. In fact, in Chapter 6, we saw hOw two students, Moira and Herman, even
feel flee to use blogs not just for the exchange of information, but also for the
performance of their sexual identities. Even when Lechele used the listserv to circulate
her Sakia Gunn petition, as we learned in Chapter 7, she told me that She did so for very
personal reasons: she could identify Strongly with Sakia’s identity as a young Afiican-
American lesbian. On some level, these students feel flee to write about very personal
concems in very public environments on campus, and they had no qualms about sharing
this information with me. This could make researchers consider: What is it about online
space—particularly asynchronous online conversations—that makes LGBT students
more likely to publish their personal experiences or concerns online? And how or why
does this asynchronous literacy differ flom synchronous online chat? By answering these
questions, researchers can better understand the extent to which LGBT students are
comfortable writing in various online spaces, both in and out of the classroom.

In addition, researchers could learn the different ways in which these online

campus literacy communities include or exclude their members. In discussing the nature

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of blogs in Chapter 6, I mentioned that while blogs may technically include a wide range
of viewers online, they usually act as a means of communication between a blogger and

’9

his or her online “fliends. The bloggers in this study told me that they will only release
the URLs of their blogs to their “fiiends” whom they “know” online (or in person), and
sometimes they will censor their entries so that only their “fliends” can read them. But in
spite of the bloggers’ efforts to maintain a sense of “privacy” online, many of them acted
as if they had nothing to hide: except for one, all of the students in this study gave me
unrestricted permission to read their blogs, even though they often wrote on such weighty
topics as fetishism, queer romance, and sexual abuse. Therefore, due to the ambiguous
nature of the blog audience, researchers might wish to consider the ways in which blog
audiences (and other aSynchronous online audiences) include and exclude LGBT
‘ individuals on and off campus. My study suggests that students do form strong
communities in asynchronous online groups, but furtherexploration of this issue is
needed.

Itis important that researchers also examine faculty/administrative groups in their
work, since many students interviewed viewed faculty and administrative involvement
as vital to the success of LGBT student inclusion in academic literacies. Kate, for
instance, feels that because teachers and administrators are in “leadership” positions,
“people will listen to authorities.” Unquestionably, a “top-down” hierarchy does exist in
academe: administrators dictate policy to teachers, and both administrators and teachers
do the same to students. While the interviewees do feel that they have some agency in

shaping academic language policies, they did not try to deny that administrators and

teachers have the most power to determine the nature of academic literacies. David

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Bartholomae elucidates how faculty and administrators hold university students
responsible for conforming to the dictates of discipline-specific literacy communities in
“Inventing the University”:
Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the
university for the occasion--invent the university, that is, or a branch of it,
like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to
learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways
of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that
define the literacies of our community. Or perhaps I could say the various
literacies of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts
education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a
variety of voices and interpretive schemes . . . (589-90)
To succeed in college, the university student must conform to the policies of disciplinary
literacies. For LGBT students, this can be exceptionally troubling, for often the
disciplinary literacy policies that they encounter as they negotiate academic literacies I
neglect the validation, of queer experiences.

Therefore, it makes sense to examine the literacy communities of faculty and
administrators in the evaluation process. Most assuredly, the extent to which faculty and
administrators involve themselves in the inclusion of LGBT issues depends on their own
personal commitment to the issues. To consider the extent to which LGBT concerns are
being addressed in faculty/ administrative communities, researchers could explore this
issue through several different methods. To begin with, they could speak informally with
individual faculty and administrators about what happens at specific meetings or events.
Additionally, researchers may obtain permission to attend faculty/administrative events,

or read transcripts flom asynchronous online faculty discussions. And, finally,

researchers can examine materials produced from these events, such as notes flom

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meetings, or conference agenda programs, to discover the extent to which LGBT
concerns are being discussed.

The interviewees in this study believed that faculty training sessions, in particular,
could work exceptionally well in promoting the inclusion of the LGBT population on
campus. Raya suggested that students can help in ensuring that such training works. She
feels that, not only could teachers receive sensitivity training on rhetorical choices in the
classroom, she recommended that “students listen to [faculty classes] to see if they’re
applying training.” For example, students could “surprise [instructors] twice randomly”
during the year to see whether they are applying the principles they’ve learned. In this
sense, students and faculty could work together to secure inclusion for LGBT individuals.
However, Raya’s comments assume that such sensitivity training can easily take place on
college and university campuses. While Raya’s ideas might very well work in some
ways, we also need to examine the ways in which such training needs to be established or
modified in the first place. And even though Raya’s point that students could play an
important role in this training is one worth considering, it is even more important to
evaluate the current status of sensitivity training at colleges or universities before
thinking about students’ role in the faculty/administrative training process.

While it is important to examine the extent to which faculty/administrative
communities include the concerns of LGBT students in their conversations, perhaps the
most important communities to examine are those which allow teachers, administrators,
and students to attempt to accomplish shared goals. Most research on the inclusion of
LGBT issues in academic literacies tends to focus on teachers alone rather than on how

teachers, students, and administrators can work together to achieve inclusion. For

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example, James Sears berates prospective teachers and counselors for expressing “a
benign neglect . . . [which] reinforces the heterosexual curriculum,” allowing them to
“become silent conspirators in sexual oppression” (74). And Harbeck, Griffin and Sanlo
all interview gay teachers to learn more about their identities in academic literacy
communities. Harbeck concludes that advances for gay and lesbian educators will come
through “education, not litigation” (134), and Pat Griffin describes “the experiences of
thirteen lesbian and gay educators” and attempts to “empower the participants [in her
study] through collective reflection and action” (167). When resources for students are
suggested, they tend to focus less on individual students and more on books or classroom
activities that teachers can assign. Jody Norton talks about the importance of doing
“transreadings” of assigned texts (CITE); Reese advocates the “queer reading” of
classroom texts (134). And many of the authors in McConnell-Celi’s T wenty-F irst
Century Challenge: Lesbians and Gays in Education reveal narrative accounts from
teachers about their difficulties in teaching gay and lesbian issues in the classroom
(Robertson, Boutilier, Uribe, Greenman).

The results of my study indicate, on the other hand, that we as educators need to
stop focusing so much on teachers’ views and the activities that teachers assign, and more
closely examine the role of community-building in the educational process; more
“mixed” communities of teachers, students, and administrators need to be formed in
academic literacy spaces. Most of these studies discuss LGBT concerns as though they
affect only teachers, and that learning happens only in classroom spaces. However, if we
consider the feedback from the interviewees, who argue that panel discussions, speakers,

online blogs, and on-campus groups must be an integral part of solutions to'including

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students in academic literacies, we realize that “acaderrric literacies” need to involve the

 

building of literacy communities both inside and outside classroom spaces. As I shall
reveal in the dialogue section of this chapter, when teachers and administrators form such
communities with LGBT panels, speakers, and student groups, more inclusion of LGBT
concerns in all academic literacy spaces could result. Therefore, future studies on LGBT
students in education need to regard the issue of inclusive pedagogy not flom just a
classroom perspective, or flom the perspective of teachers. Instead, they could keep in
mind the words of Ted, who recently said at his university’s vigil for Sakia Gunn, “Much
of my education has taken place outside the classroom.” Once we begin to explore more
closely how community-building with students, faculty, administrators, and community
organizations can occur in a variety of academic literacies, we will then gain some
insights as to how inclusion of LGBT students in academe can be achieved.

During his interview, Kevin, a gay university student, explained that one “mixed”
community may be formed when administrators and student RAs (Resident Assistants)
go through a “Safe Place” training together. At his university, in the past, this involved
“having residence hall directors and [student] resident assistants” come together to learn
how to establish safe residences for on-campus students. If administrators were to go
through this training, LGBT students would learn that they “can go to [their] resident
assistant, [or] someone with administrative power” for help with their LGBT concerns.
Administrators, he argued, “structure the residential life experience,” so it is important
for them to learn how to provide safe literacy communities for students on campus.
When asked what “Safe Place” training could involve, Kevin replied: “letting

[administrators and RAs] know that there are LGBT students that will be living within

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their dorms, and they need to be sensitive to that.” Kevin feels that both administrators
and student RAs have an obligation to make LGBT students feel safe on campus.
Therefore, they need to come together to firlly understand that the diverse nature of the
residential population includes LGBT individuals, and they must learn not to force
individuals to self-identify as LGBT to get assistance with LGBT concerns.

To this end, in examining these mixed communities, researchers need to think
about the ways in which these communities succeed or fail. This would involve an
examination of a community’s membership, an assessment of who contributes what to
the community, and an evaluation of the ways in which seemingly disparate groups—
such as students and administrators—manage to work together. Such an evaluation
would involve noting the failures as well as the triumphs. For example, in Chapter 4,
Erica recalled, that, as a member of her university’s Women’s Council, she helped write a
list of fourteen issues concerning LGBT students to bring to the administration, but she
explained that she felt that her words were not having any effect on the campus’s
administration, because the Board of Trustees admitted to not having even read the
gender identity pamphlets which the Women’s Council gave them to consider. However,
we must also note Ken’s excitement over the successful “Safe Place” training with
administrators and students. And teachers and students may often build communities as
well. Kaleb spoke of being involved on panels both inside and outside classroom spaces,
and Gary mentioned that he would like to get involved in the LGBT panel program that
his community college had just initiated. Such panel programs involve LGBT students
coming into classroom space, or Speaking on campus, about their experiences in coming

to terms with their queer identities, both in and out of academe. The events which Kaleb

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and Gary described can help to build understanding between teachers and students, both
queer and straight, enabling everyone involved to see the importance of creating
tolerance in different academic literacy contexts. Overall, researchers may wish to learn
the ways in which these mixed communities work well and the ways in which they fall
apart, in both face-to-face and online environments.

Step Two: Dialogue

Once researchers have constructed their evaluations, the dialogue on LGBT
student inclusion is nearly ready to take place. But prior to participating within the
dialogue, researchers should spend some time considering where the dialogue would take
place and who would participate. Then, they can move on to consider the content of the
actual dialogue itself; I will make some recommendations for dialogue content in detail at
the end of this section. |
Where would the dialogue take place?

I envision several different possible forums for the discussion of LGBT student
inclusion. Considering the positive opinions that students expressed on asynchronOus
online forums in Chapters 6 and 7, online discussion spaces such as listservs and blogs
might to be a good place to start. These environments might be a good place to hold
some preliminary discussion on some key issues prior to an actual face—to-face meeting,
and also serve as a conversational space for ongoing discussion on the topic. So, setting
up a listserv or blog for the dialogue participants prior to an actual face-to-face meeting
could work well.

However, researchers could eventually insist upon having face-to-face dialogue

with the individuals to whom their argument is addressed. This insistence should result

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in recognition of the complexity of the topics involved. Initial dialogues may be
informal, and take place in small groups, such’as two or three students visiting a .
professor during her office hours. Such dialogue may also take place informally in small
groups during classroom sessions. The primary purpose of these informal sessions would
be to generate ideas: to discuss some pertinent issues or perhaps brainstorm some key
questions. These informal meetings, therefore, could be used as a springboard for more
formal discussions.

' These more formal discussions could occur in several different ways. To begin
with, researchers might want to suggest the formation of ad-hoc committees on LGBT
student inclusion to their university provosts. These committees would then be able to
meet on a regular basis, and thus reshape and revise their ideas over time. However, even
formal presentations, such as those at conferences, may also provide effective exposure to
issues of LGBT student inclusion. To this end, the NCTE Queer Caucus (formerly the
Gay-Lesbian Caucus) will be developing a workshop on LGBT student inclusion at the
2005 CCCC Convention in San Francisco, and several panels will present papers on this
topic as well (my panel, for example, is focusing on LGBT student negotiations of
electronic literacies). Thus the format for formal discussions may vary, as long as it is
comfortable for everyone involved, and promotes dialogue.

Who would participate?

The participants within each dialogue would depend on the goals of individual
researchers: some teams may wish to address administrators, whereas others may Wish to
include only students. Judging flom the comments of the students in my study, the best

sort of dialogue would involve a variety of participants. The interviewees firmly believe

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that when students, teachers, and administrators work together to build language
communities, we can achieve more inclusion of LGBT students in academic literacies.
Randal L. Donelson suggested in his article “Creating a Safe Space for Gay and Lesbian
Students in the English/Language Arts Classroom” that “It is not only possible but
imperative that we as educators develop environments which are places for a non-
threatening exchange of ideas and learning which will contribute to the positive identity
of all students” (2). To illustrate the importance of creating a safe space in the
classroom, Donelson recounts an example flom his own teaching experience where a
student labels one classroom activity as “gay.” Donelson reveals his frustration at himself
for failing to diffuse the situation properly and for not promoting a more positive example
for his ninth-graders of what “gay” means. He explains that he was worried about rumOrs
circulating about his own sexual orientation, so he merely told the boy that his remark
was “inappropriate” (1). While Donelson’s point that teachers need to do more to create
“safe spaces” for LGBT students than briefly admonish those who insult them is well-
taken, he leaves room in his scholarship for others to suggest how such spaces may be
created. I am suggesting here, contrary to Donelson’s suggestion, participation in
education dialogues could not be the task of teachers and administrators alone. My
results indicate that students want to play a role in the education of faculty and
administrators on LGBT concerns; their responses during my interview suggested that
they are very willing to form communities with teachers and administrators to assist them
in creating inclusion. Students want to help faculty and administrators understand the

importance of making appropriate rhetorical choices, creating “safe spaces,” and

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developing courses which include references to LGBT issues; therefore, mixed
communities of students, faculty, and administrators could give voices to all three groups.
What would be discussed?

The conversation would need to address both the weaknesses and strengths of
academic literacies in addressing LGBT concerns. The dialogue could focus on these
two questions: (1) What changes need to be made to promote inclusion in academic
literacies? (2) And how can these changes best be accomplished? Before getting into
the specific actions that may be taken, it might be helpful to have a brief discussion on
the importance of LGBT student inclusion, to remind everyone of the purpose of the
conversation. Once that has finished, those engaging in the dialogue can talk more
specifically about specific ways in which inclusion may be promoted. Over the course of
my student interviews, I was able to identify five major resources that the students
viewed as important tools for increasing LGBT presence in the spaces of academic
literacies: panels, speakers, on-campus groups, Internet literacies, and films. All of these
literacy events work towards building stronger language communities in academic
literacies spaces. 1 recommend that researchers engaging in dialogue, therefore, be
willing to address each of these topics. But I shall begin here by addressing the issue of
LGBT inclusion in general.

0 Why Inclusion?

The inclusion of LGBT issues into traditional curriculum would fulfill, at least in
part, James Sears’s ideal of a “queer education” for students. In defining “queer
education,” Sears stresses that students learn about the world through binary oppositions,

and a “queer education” would challenge such overbearing structures. He claims:

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“ . . . when it comes to sexuality and gender, many educators mold children into

 

curriculum cookie-cutter identities. Students are socialized into this make-believe world
of self and the other: male/female (biological sex), heterosexual/homosexual (sexual
orientation), man/woman (gender identity) . . . “ (5). However, concepts of sex, gender,
and orientation are much more complex than the strict dichotomies that people Often
learn. In his work, like many other educators who write about LGBT issues in the
classroom (Bickrnore, Cahill and Theilheirner, Harris), Sears focuses on K-12 learning.
However, more socialization of individuals to view sex, gender, and orientation beyond
binary dichotomies is also needed at the college level, as we can see flom the students’
responses in this study. If more academic literacy communities took time to include
LGBT topics, or even to define LGBT students may begin to conceive their worlds in
increasingly complex ways: ways that reach beyond the boundaries of traditional hetero-
normative perspectives. Classroom or campus panels may help to achieve this goal.
- Panels on Campus and in Class

Bringing in panels to campus or classroom literacy spaces involves introducing a
group of individuals, either to the classroom or to on-carnpus meetings, to discuss LGBT
concerns. In Taylor’s view, these panels can be used to introduce important questions to
students, such as “’Do you know someone who is LGBT?”’ Such questions initiate
conversation on such tOpics, and get students thinking in different ways about peoples’
life experiences. Having a group of outsiders ask such questions in classroom space, in
particular, makes it seem less that the instructor alone is forcing the issue on the students;
instead, a panel reveals to students a group of individuals who are willing to bring a new

educational dimension to the classroom. And students can play a key role in the shaping

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of these panels. When Dan argued for the importance of panels of individuals on LGBT
issues in the classroom, he suggested that these panels be'composed of students, and
further recommended that the panels “talk with the professors outside of class” about
their topics for discussion. This would allow students and faculty to establish a dialogue
outside the classroom before bringing LGBT concerns into the classroom space: by
engaging in this dialogue, the students on the panel could learn what unique perspectives
they could offer individual classes, and the faculty could decide what kinds of
contributions would benefit their classes the most. Many of the students I spoke with
strongly desire to serve on panels, to impart information on LGBT issues in classroom
spaces. Overall, then, researchers could consider the possibility of setting up panels to

create a greater atmosphere of LGBT student inclusion in academic literacies.

 

0 Speakers on Campus andin Class

Just as panel discussions can serve as effective resources, several students noted
that individual speakers on LGBT issues could also play important roles in classroom
literacies as well, so teams engaging in dialogue need to also consider this suggestion.
Donna remarked, “I find that bringing in speakers is usually pretty good . . . Students like
, having a break flom their professors.” She then recalled once Specific incident in which a
speaker was used effectively in one of her classes: she mentioned that this woman came
to her class “to talk about women’s health issues and she mentioned something about
lesbian health issues.” It pleased Donna that the speaker accounted for the sexual
diversity of the female population; instead of assuming that all women are heterosexual,
the speaker wisely pointed out that lesbians may have their own particular health

concerns. Similarly, Rena mentioned that individuals who affiliate themselves with

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particular LGBT-supportive national organizations, such as PFLAG (Parents and Friends
of Lesbians and Gays) or GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) could
come into classes or to on-carnpus groups. This introduction of LGBT-supportive
corrrrnunity organizations into academic literacies either inside or outside the classroom
could help to bridge the gap between the discourse which occurs in LGBT communities
outside the classroom and the predominately hetero-normative discourse which occurs in
classroom spaces.

Lauren wisely noted that the speakers could be present in the classroom not just
to impart knowledge, but also to take questions flom the students. In fact, like Dan,
Kaleb, and Gary, who want to participate in student panels, Lauren feels strongly that she
herself can speak to classrooms about her experiences as a transsexual lesbian. She thus
described her experiences in speaking to high school classrooms:

I’ve gone to high school classrooms to talk about transgender issues, and
the students typically are very receptive. You know, you’re going to have
a couple of teenage boys snickering in the background, in the back of the
room, passing notes to their friends, but a lot of peOple are going to be
really educated by seeing a real person and by being able to ask them
questions and really flesh out what it’s like to be LGBT and realize that
it’s not just some . . . caricature out of a newspaper article or a‘movie.
Lauren’s experience in the high school classroom could prove valuable at the college
level as well. While some students might tune her out, most would welcome the
opportunity to ask questions Of a transgendered individual, particularly if they have
lacked opportunities to interact with the LGBT community previously. With the
appearance of a transsexual speaker in the classroom who welcomes questions, thus

creating a conversational, informal space, the disparity between discipline-specific

classroom literacies and on-campus queer literacies is at least partially assuaged. So, part

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of the dialogue that researchers engage in on LGBT inclusion could consider the
importance of introducing more speakers within academic literacies.

0 On-Campus Groups

Students and administrators, queer and straight, can use these on-carnpus groups

as resources as part of their educational process; the groups do not exist solely for
teachers. After all, while they may help teachers to engage in a more inclusive pedagogy,
the organizations’ primary purpose is to make students feel more included in academic
literacies. During her interview, Kadijah expressed flustration at trying to create
communities of LGBT students on campus. She mentioned that, when she arrived on
campus, She was immediately recruited for the Black Caucus and women’s groups on her
campus, since people could see that she was a black woman. However, she noted that the
invisible minority status of LGBT students presents a problem: “The thing about [being]
LGBT . . . people don’t look at you at say, ‘Oh, you’re queer, go to this.’ If [LGBT
students] don’t come out and tell you who they are, you don’t know who they are . . .
People have to come to you . . . So you have to be more visible.” Therefore, to create
communities of LGBT students on campus, more LGBT-oriented resources must be
disseminated in campus literacies outside the classroom, such as the dorms, the hallways,
and e-mail announcements. When such resources become more readily available, LGBT
students become more likely to seek out their LGBT peers, and thus form communities
with them on campus. Therefore, while engaging in dialogue on the importance of on-
campus groups, researchers need to consider how the promotion of these groups could

occur in academic literacies, so they can make such resources known to all.

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0- Internet Literacies
Many of the interviewees who discussed the Internet as an important resource in
academic literacies stressed how it provides many important readings for both teachers
and students, so individuals engaging in dialogue on LGBT student inclusion need to
consider what the Internet has to offer. J irn stressed how the Internet can be a valuable
resource for teachers: he feels that “teachers could check out Internet resourceS” which
“highlight sexuality” and then integrate these resources into classroom conversation.
Gary, on the other hand, talked about how readings online enabled him to become
comfortable enough with himself to come out at his college:
GARY: I read coming out stories, I read a lot of prose . . . I read

information about why it’s healthy to come out. I knew I was going to
have to come out sometime . . .

BRIAN: Where did you get this info?

GARY: A website . . . I remember there is the one that talks about

National Coming Out Day . . . Ijust stumbled upon that by doing Google

and Yahoo searches . . . [these stories] gave me an idea of what to expect.
The Internet thus gave Gary an understanding of how he might integrate himself into both
academic and community literacy spaces. The stories that he read—particularly the
narrative coming-out accounts—helped him feel that he could express his bisexual
identity openly at his college; consequently, he now regularly attends his college’s Gay-
Straight Alliance meetings and plans to participate in a panel discussion on LGBT issues
for classrooms.

Unlike Jim and Gary, Jason stressed how the Internet not only serves as a

resource of readings, it also may serve as a place for written expression for both teachers

and students. During his interview, he discussed the possibility of creating two different

types of online communities in academic literacies: an online e-zine which could serve as

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a “place for queer expression” and a blog for his LGBT student caucus. The e-zine could
get everyone in the community involved “at the local level” in expressing their
viewpoints on LGBT concerns. The blog for the student caucus group, on the other hand,
would work as a means of solidifying a sense of community between students on campus,
enabling them to address issues that perhaps their group could build on in face-to-face
conversations. Since the e-zine could allow contributors inside and outside of academic
spaces to engage each other in written literacies, bridges could be built between academe
and communities in the outside world. And the blog for students in the LGBT caucus
enables them to understand that it is indeed possible for LGBT individuals to have a
voice in academic literacies. Clearly, due to the experiences of students such as Jim,
Gary, and Jason, researchers need to talk about how both teachers and students can use
the Internet as a literacy resource to make LGBT students feel more included.
0 film

In addition to discussing the Internet, several students suggested that films dealing
with LGBT life be integrated into classrooms as educational tools, thereby further
bridging the gap between popular culture and academic space. So, researchers could
address the integration of film into both disciplinary literacy communities and campus
literacy communities as a means of establishing LGBT student inclusion. Lauren
recommended that teachers use “audio-visual [materials] . . . things that stand out on
their own regardless of their LGBT content.” She then went on to discuss several films
that provide “a fair and balanced vision” of LGBT peOple. She mentioned that Ma Vie en
Rose (My Life in Pink) reveals a “sensitive, beautiful” portrayal of a young boy who

desires to dress up in a wedding gown and marry his best friend. Furthermore, she also

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suggested the film Boys Don’t Cry as a film that managed to transcend the stereotypes
that transgendered characters often endure. She explained that most transgendered
characters are normally “marginalized” and “not very sensitively treated.” Boys Don ’t
Cry, on the other hand, uses Brandon Teena’s life to Show that transgendered individuals
are indeed human beings, who may blend into society, fall in love, yet are often
victimized by heinous crimes of hate. Similarly, the film But I ’m a Cheerleader, about a
pretty lesbian named Megan whose parents send her to a special “camp” to make her
straight, helps to expose stereotypes against LGB individuals. Lauren declared: “It’s
funny . . . it’s campy. . . It very effectively exposes how stupid the anti-gay movement is
. . . and the artificiality of a lot of [gender roles]. It really kind of brings right across, in
more simple terms, that a lot of us really are born with [their sexuality], which I think is
true of a lot of people.” Since these three films, in particular, manage to subvert common
stereotypes about the LGBT community, they distinguish themselves as tools worthy for
education in the classroom or other on-campus spaces. Offering such films in classroom
and campus spaces would allow hetero-normative discursive Spaces in academe to
become more inclusive of queer experiences.

Gabrielle went so far as to suggest specific activities that could be done with films
in the classroom. Like Lauren, She values the use of film in the classroom because films
“capture people’s attention” in ways that non-visual media cannot. But she also
mentioned a specific plan for using the films in class:

It depends on the class . . . sometimes there is a time for shock value. You
don’t introduce it, you just show it. And then get people’s reaction. I
definitely think there could be a reaction period afterwards . . . and people
could feel safe to write their reactions if they don’t get expressed in class.

So . . . a discussion period . . . as well as a writing assignment would be
good.

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Regardless of whether students support the viewpoints expressed in an LGBT-oriented
film, a fihn on an LGBT-oriented subject could be worked into an instructor’s critical
pedagogy, particularly if the content of the class concerns diversity issues. As Gabrielle
points out, it can be used as an opportunity to engage in dialogue and/or written
expression on LGBT concerns, thus heightening the visibility of the LGBT community in
the classroom. In terms of specific films, Gabrielle felt that documentaries, in particular,
would effectively portray the realities of LGBT existence. She cited The Celluloid
Closet, the film version of Vito Russo’s seminal text on the treatment of the LGBT
community in 20th century film, and Southern Comfort, about two transgendered
individuals who fall in love with each other, as two examples of documentaries that
would help to initiate necessary classroom dialogue. Through such films, students and
teachers “[become more] aware of the presence of ideology in their lives . . . enable their
reading and writing of powerful cultural texts, and . . . flag these texts as constructed, as
not a part of the natural world, and therefore as susceptible to being reconstructed” (Pitts
and France ix). Visual media, therefore, heighten both student and faculty awareness of
the possibility of social change.

In contrast to Lauren and Gabrielle, Gary was able to speak flom experience: his
instructor had incorporated a film dealing with gay sexual repression (American Beauty)
in his Popular Literature course, and, as a result, he felt more open to contribute to class
discussion. Gary was able to use the male-male kiss shown near the end of the film to
address issues of homophobia in American society:

Some students were having trouble with the gay kiss between an angry,

confused man and a parent . . . and [flom] the people in the classroom,
there was this big gasp when it happened. And I laughed. And it took me

219

 

a second to realize why they gasped. After the movie, people raised some
questions [about] whether [the confused man] was really gay or not, or
whether it was just a weird thing that happened in the movie . . . I brought
up the issue of the kiss and how it’s still o.k. in America today to bash
homosexuals . . .and it’s still o.k. to describe gay people on negative
terms . . . and I kind of related that to the movie a little bit.
The introduction of the film into the classroom enabled Gary to feel safe enough to bring
up an issue related to queer sexuality. He did not have to out himself, yet he was still
able to mention important points to others in the class If more teachers were to bring in
representations of LGBT culture in film, this would allow more LGBT students to feel
that their concerns are addressed in classroom literacies. Since this activity would be a
strong sense of teacher-student community, it is one which must be addressed in work by
researchers in the future.
Conclusion: Summary and Beyond
Chapter Summary
This chapter has attempted to suggest a viable plan for researching ways to create
more LGBT-inclusive spaces in academic literacies. The “evaluation” stage of the plan
asks researchers to ask a wide variety of questions about the inclusion of LGBT concerns
in academic discursive spaces both in and out of classroom environments. Then, in the
“dialogue” stage, researchers could talk with others within the academic community
about possible solutions to achieve inclusion in both disciplinary and campus literacy
communities. Judging flom the results of my interviews, I recommend that researchers
discuss literacy events which promote a strong sense of community, such as panel

discussions, campus/classroom speakers, Internet literacies, on-carnpus groups, and the

viewing of fihns as possible means of achieving LGBT student inclusion in academe.

220

In this dissertation, I have attempted to follow the suggestion of Porter et al. that
“an action plan” is needed to solve problems of LGBT student inclusion. As a result of
this study, I have learned that academic literacies must be examined flom an institutional
perspective, as Porter et al. suggest. We have seen flom Chapters 4 and 5 of this study
the weaknesses that often exist in classroom writing communities. But Chapters 6 and 7
reveal how important academic literacies exist in the world outside the classroom, both in
person and online. In fact, in the world of academe, much education occurs in spaces
outside the classroom: strong campus literacy communities are formed in student
organizations, faculty meetings, or administrative committees. This study suggests that
strong cross-community interaction may be a key to solving the problem of LGBT
student inclusion: students, faculty, and administrators need to communicate with each
other in a variety of academic literacy spaces for more inclusion to be achieved.
Beyond Dialogue: What ’5 Next?

In outlining my plan for inclusion, I did not presume to suggest that the
research plan ends with dialogue. I stopped at dialogue mainly because I understand that
the process of getting others to agree to dialogue may take months, even years, to
accomplish, and I wanted to articulate a workable goal here. Clearly, getting groups with
disparate values and interests to have a dialogue on LGBT student inclusion is a good
start, but where do we go flom here? How can we ensure that such change becomes
permanent within academe? Due to constraints of time and space here, 1 will leave these
questions for other scholars to examine. My work is a springboard for more “institutional
critique,” and much work needs to be done to ensure that the inclusion can continue.

What can we do to keep the dialogue going?

221

Part of the answer to this question could result in the further examination of
online literacy spaces in academe. As I noted in Chapter 1 of this dissertation, several
studies have begun to examine how LGBT students build online literacy communities
(Woodland, Comstock and Addison, Alexander, DeWitt). However, these studies tend to
stress how students build online communities outside academic spaces (Woodland,
Comstock and Addison, DeWitt) or how students build online communities in the
classroom with each other (Alexander). This study, on the other hand, suggests that
online campus communities may exist; in many different types of academic literacy
environments, including blogs, college listservs, and e-mail discussions; hence, with the
proliferation of online communities, we need to ask, “How can we facilitate the creation
of online literacy communities in academic literacies, both in and out of classroom
spaces?” Examining the issue of inclusion flom an institutional perspective rather than
only a discipline-specific classroom one will enable us to understand better how to create
more campus literacy communities within academic settings for LGBT students.

It occurs to me that my work here could also provide a tenable plan for those with
other interests in diversity in education as well. Not only could my process of evaluation,
argumentation, and dialogue work for LGBT students, it could also work for students of
color, physically challenged students, or other under-represented groups who desire to
have their interests acknowledged more often in academic contexts. Such studies of other
groups would firrther our understanding of identity politics at the college and university
level, enhance our knowledge of the perfonnative nature of literacies, and assist us in
understanding how minority groups on college and university campuses form literacy

communities. By applying my findings here to other minority groups, we might come

222

closer to understanding Herbert Brun’s claim that "’Strong relationships are generated by

turning the tensions of diversity into mutually complementing differences’" (par. 2).

223

Appendix A: The Questionnaire

Part 1: Strategies for Dealing with Academic Literacies

These questions deal with how Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (henceforth
LGBT) people deal with academic literacy. Circle the number which indicates the extent
to which you agree or disagree with the following statements. (l=strong1y disagree,
2=disagree, 3=not sure, 4=agree, and 5=strongly agree)

1. When asked to do a research paper, I read as much LGBT-oriented material as
I can.
1 2 3 4 5

2. I do. a lot of reading on LGBT issues outside the classroom.
1 2 3 4 5

3. For my college classes, I write on LGBT-oriented topics as often as possible.
1 2 3 4 5

4. I share my writing on LGBT-oriented topics with my classmates and teachers
as often as possible. -
1 2 3 4 5

5. I do a lot of writing on LGBT issues outside the classroom.
1 2 3 4 5

6. I bring up LGBT issues during class discussion as often as possible.
1 2 3 4 5

7. I do a lot of talking about LGBT issues outside the classroom.
1 2 3 4 5

8. I participate in classroom group projects which cover LGBT issues whenever
possible.
1 2 3 4 5

9. I deliberately try to take courses which cover LGBT issues.
1 2 3 4 5

10. I would describe myself as an LGBT activist in my college community.
1 2 3 4 5

Part II: Literacy Forums for LGBT Students

Approximately how often do you discuss LGBT issues in the following forums?
Circle the number which best indicates the flequency with which you discuss these
issues. (0=never, l=once a month, 2=once every two weeks, 3=once a week, 4mhree
times a week, and 5=every day)

1. Electronic Chat Rooms

0 1 2 3 4 5
2. E-Mail/Listservs

0 1 2 3 4 5

224

3. Classrooms

 

0 l 2 3 4 5
4. Campus Groups

0 l 2 3 4 5
5. Faculty Offices

0 1 2 3 4 5
6. Community Groups

0 1 2 3 4 5
7. Friends’ Houses

0 '1 2 3 4 5
8. Coffee Houses/Restaurants

0 1 2 3 4 5

Part III: Possible Solutions

How effective would each of the following activities be for making LGBT students feel
more included in academic discourse? Circle the number which best indicates the
effectiveness of each proposed solution. (lmot effective, 2=somewhat effective, 3=not
sure, 4=effective, 5=very effective).

1. Require students to write on LGBT-oriented topics.
1 2 3 4 5
2. Require students to read LGBT-oriented topics.
1 i 2 3 4 5
3. Introduce more queer theory and pedagogy into classrooms.
l 2 3 4 5
4. Introduce more feminist theory and pedagogy into classrooms.
l 2 ' 3 -4 5
5. Encourage performance as a mode of classroom expression.
1 2 ‘ 3 4 5
6. Encourage the classroom use of anonymous electronic chat to discuss LGBT
issues.
1 2 3 4 5
7. Develop creative collaborative projects for students which center on sexuality
issues.
1 2 3 4 5
8. Encourage more sharing in class of informal writing (such as journals).
1 2 3 4 5
9. Encourage students to lead class discussion in groups.
1 2 3 4 5
10. Require students to take a course on the LGBT community.
1 2 3 ' 4 5
11. Develop more courses on LGBT-oriented topics.
1 2 3 4 5

225

12. Require teachers to receive more training on LGBT issues.

1 2 3 4 5
13. Require administrators to receive more training on LGBT issues.
1 2 3 4 5
14. Increase the number of on-campus LGBT student resources.
1 2 3 4 5
15. Hold more open, on-carnpus meetings on LGBT concerns.
1 2 3 4 5

Part IV: Demographic Questions:

Please write in an answer to each of these questions:
1. What is your age?

2. What is your ethnicity?

3. What is your gender?

4. What is your sexual orientation?

5. What is your major?

6. What are your career goals?

7. What educational level have you attained?

8. Are you willing to participate on a one hour follow-up interview? Yes No

9. If you are willing to participate in an interview, could you please provide a phone

number or e-mail address at which you may be contacted?

226

Appendix B: Questionnaire Participant Demographics
(The numbers represent the # of students who fit in each category.)

Age
under18
18-19

20-21

22-25

26-30

31 or over
Average Age

Ethnicity
White/European
Black/African-American
Hispanic

Native Am

Arab Am

Asian

Sexual Orientation
gay/homosexual
lesbian/dyke

bi

queen

other

straight/ally

Career Goals

Teaching

Undecided

Medicine

Graduate Degree/Grad
School

Community Development
Business

Other

Social Science
Communication
Psychologist/Counseling
Law/Social Justice

Arts

Research

5

30

33

19

12

6
22.79

ANOOCD-K

19
14

hOTCflOOVODmOO—‘t

Gender
Male/Man
FemaleNVoman
Trans

Other

lntersex

Major

Soc Sci
Humanities
Medicine
Business

Nat Sci
Engineer
Educafion
Undecided
Communication
Other
Advertising
Agriculture/Nat. Resources

Education Level
Fr-Soph

Jun-Sen

Some College

Bachelor's
Master's
HS/College Dual Enrollment

46
53

ANOO

Amwworororcocow

42
33
10

NO

 

Appendix C: Interviewee Demographics

(The numbers represent the # of students who fit in each category.)

Age
under18

1 8-1 9

20—21

22-25

26-30

31 or over
Average Age

Gender
FemaleNVoman
Male/Man
Trans

lntersex

Major

Soc. Sci
Humanities
Business
Communications
Medicine

Undecided
Other
Agric/Natural
Resources
Nat. Sci.
Educafion

Education Level
Fr-Soph

Jun-Sen

Some College
Bachelor's
Master's

ANVNCONO

22.8

15
14

00010100

Ethnicity
White/European
Black/African-American
Hispanic

Arab Am

Native Am

Sexual Orientation
gay/homosexual
lesbian/dyke

bi

queer

straight/ally

Career Goals

Teaching

Undecided

Law/Social Justice
Graduate School/Degree
Community
Development

Other

Social Science
Medicine/Health Care

Psychologist/Counseling

Business
Research

228

_s_s_L.pO)

Amoocoo

(Jab-5450)

030300

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