Reading Queer Selfhood: A Collaborative Authoethnography of Queer Time Through Artifactual Literacies

• In Event: What Does Queer Theory Have Yet to Offer Literacy Education Research?

Abstract

Queer studies scholarship in literacy research continues to expand, tirelessly challenging the hydra heads of phobias and normativities that regrow each day (Author A, 2017; Blackburn & Smith, 2010; Boatwright, 2019; Hermann-Wilmarth & Ryan, 2016; Johnson, 2017; McCready, 2012; miller & Rodriquez, 2016; Pritchard, 2017; Ryan & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2018). Often confined to the present, such scholarship has rarely ventured into the queer past to address the realities of growing and living in queer time—What Halberstam (2005), describes as those “alternative temporalities… futures [that] can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markets of life experience” (p. 2). Living outside normative timelines of marriage, reproduction, and more, queer folks have been described as “grow sideways” (Stockton, 2009), doing so in ways that birth unique practices of reading both self and the world (Freeman, 2010).

Taking up the question, “What Does Queer Theory Have Yet to Offer Literacy Education Research?”, we explored how queer literacy practices are structured around queer time, providing unique practices of knowing the self. To do so, we as three queer researchers espousing different racial, gender, and regional identities engaged in a collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2012; Nicolazzo et al., 2020) that centered our queerness. Over the course of one academic year, we engaged in an ongoing dialogue around nine predetermined posts. Rotating bi-weekly, each participant shared one or more artifacts via Google Docs that was, for them, iconographically queer, doing so by positing pictures, links, or a multimodal composition alongside a narrative explaining the significance of that artifact (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). We then engaged in an online discussion drawing upon our intersecting “funds of knowledge” to forward both divergent and resonant interpretations of said artifact (Moll et al., 1992). Taking place nine times (3X/participant), the narratives accompanying our artifacts address the following questions subsequently:

Past, Present, Future Icons:
1) Who were we in relation to queer icons in the past?
2) Who are we in relation to queer icons in the present?
3) Who do we imagine we will be in relation to queer icons in the future?

Following the completion of each of the three cycles, we meet for an online discussion which was recorded and then subsequently transcribed. Data consisted of all written and multimodal data across the nine posts as well as the transcription of three approximately ninety-minute discussions. We then engaged in a collaborative first and second cycle coding process (Patton, 2015) complemented by scheduled meetings to triangulate our interpretations (Ravitch & Carl, 2016).

Answering this session’s titular question, the study provided two primary findings. First, that queer individuals’ literacy practices are intimidate shaped by temporal relations; however, these ways-of-knowing often fall outside frameworks of legibility with contemporary literacy scholarship. Secondly, that collaborative ethnography provides insights into the affordances and limitations of queerness as a constitutive category for reading the self, particularly when sieved through categories of race, transnationality, and class.

Authors

• Josh Coleman, San Jose State University

• Daris McInnis, The University of Pennsylvania

• Ericka Graciela Staufert Reyes, The University of Pennsylvania