The queer aesthetic imagination in youth speculative composing

• In Event: Justice-Oriented Writing and Composing Through the Speculative

Abstract

Queer literacies scholars have identified spaces where youth engage in ruptures to normativity that may challenge intersectional structural oppressions (Schey & Blackburn, 2019). A next step in this research is to describe the kinds of shared youth compositional moves that help youth to disrupt oppression and reframe their writing toward social justice futures. This study draws on intersectional theories of critical aesthetics and critical imagination (Brimm 2014; Greene, 1995; Muñoz, 2009; Morrison, 1992) to understand youths’ justice-oriented speculative composing.

Data are drawn from an online youth literary salon that met over multiple summers where queer youth of color and allies wrote stories in a wide range of speculative genres (e.g. Regency romance, high fantasy, horror) and forms (graphic novels, prose, poetry, song) that aimed at creatively employing aesthetics (literary form, connotations, figurative meanings, narrative structure) to work toward social justice. Youth met every day on Zoom for three hours each day in the summer over two years. They wrote/composed stories and discussed their writing/compositions together. Data include over 1,000 pages of student writing/composing products as well as process data such as digital chats, literary salon sessions transcripts, and writing conference transcripts.

Using the literacy event as the unit of analysis (Bloome, et al. 2022), I descriptively coding all places in the youth writing/compositions that constituted a rupture to normativity—where the compositions broke from traditional narrative tropes, structure, or aesthetics and simultaneously engaged with social justice content. As a second analytic phase, I conducted close readings of these ruptures and, using process codes (Saldaña, 2021), described participants’ compositional moves. As a way to understand the writing as social practice, I also traced the process data to understand how these ruptures to normativity developed for each writer and to catalog shared community practices.

Findings illustrate how youth created justice-oriented compositions through deconstructions, inversions, expansions, ancestries, and subversions. Deconstructions engaged in critique of social systems. Inversions flipped normative tropes—for example, a participant writing a Regency-era romance novel inverted the damsel in distress trope by flipping traditional genders so as to tell a story of a “dude in distress.” Expansions included added characters with identities not not normatively represented in particular speculative genre traditions. Ancestries drew on the words of ancestral justice-oriented authors largely outside of the speculative genre and remixed their words into youth-composed stories. For example, one participant composed an epic poem in a magical realism genre and remixed phrases from Audre Lorde’s writing into their composition as a way to highlight justice-driven ideologies. Finally, subversions shattered or rejected previous tropes or genres to create new ways of telling justice-driven stories.

Taken together, these practices represent the queer aesthetic imagination in youth literary composing, which made space for youth to create compositions that aesthetically moved toward justice-driven understandings of criticality, equity, and liberation. I argue that the queer aesthetic imagination as pedagogy may be a force against the kinds of standardization and compliance-based discourse that seek to erode rich literacy practice in English language arts classrooms.

Author

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY