Writing With the Ghosts: Using Haunted Composing Practices to Recompose Queer Death and Future Justice

• In Event: Composing Just Futures

Abstract

For composition studies, composing practices have long been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests history, imagination, and identity within acts of writing. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally as bound up with death, with ghosts that haunt our composing practices and written communication. This article proposes hauntology as an approach for tracing the haunted composing practices of queer compositionists. A narrative inquiry study into the composing practices of an inquiry community of queer adults, this project foregrounds means by which compositionists can learn to recognize, write with, and conjure ghosts, doing so in order to compose future justice.

Author

• Josh Coleman, San Jose State University