Queering the Crip Time of Not-Becoming Fluent in Phonics: A Close Reading of Drawn Spelling Lists

• In Event: Trans-Queering the Repair Train: Performing Research as Remedy

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: This research aims to perform a close reading of a collection of drawn spelling lists created by Sage, a young person with dyslexia, during her primary school years. The broader objective is to queer the crip time (Kafer, 2013) of the English curriculum, exploring and exploding the event of not-becoming fluent in phonics.

Theoretical Framework: The study draws on feminist crip theory (Kafer, 2013) and neuroqueering theory (Walker, 2021) to queer the linear temporalities (Freedman, 2007) enforced by the English curriculum and its practices of inclusion. Such practices assume that there is a standard for phonetic decoding and reading speed, leading young people with dyslexia to undergo intensive training in sensory approaches to phonics to correct their deviation from this standard (Kelly & Phillips, 2016). From a perspective of crip time the fact that the English curriculum's envisions phonics as the sole path to word competence is questionable, since it limits the future of young people, embedding them in imaginaries of compulsory neurotypicality, and making it difficult to recognize themselves outside these temporalities (Kafer, 2013). To queer the straight time of phonics fluency, the research performs a close reading of the drawn spelling lists with feminist theory (Ahmed, 2017) and mad studies (Bruce, 2021) as ways to mobilise a desire for joining the messy artful movements of the drawn spelling lists while approximating neurodiverse ways of knowing, living and doing stuff with words.
Methodology: The drawn spelling lists are part of vernacular forms of homemaking, emerging and evolving organically through practices of being alongside Sage (Baraister, 2017). I have conceptualized them as a form of feminist homework (Ahmed, 2017), a self-assigned task to work out with Sage possible ways of carving a home in the inhospitable world of the English curriculum. The paper’s performative component draws on dyslexia scholarship’s engagement with art-based practices (Cosenza, 2010, 2014; Espi, 2014; Granger, 2010), which challenge normative intelligibility by embodying dyslexia's capacity to interpret words contextually, playfully, fragmentarily, and texturally. It also draws on contemporary comics (Banita, 2010; Cates, 2010; Kuhlman & Hall, 2010), paralleling this art form with Sage’s drawn spelling lists, which disrupt and saturate time, stalling temporal flow and bending the straight-line of text.

Sources of Data: The primary sources of data are the drawn spelling lists that Sage generated through her primary years and the ethnographic annotations that I wrote in parallel.

Significance: Queering, crip, and mad approaches to literacy advocate for living with unReasonable others, offering activist philosophies and practices to recognize and value embodied differences in language practices. These approaches promote creative literacies where comics, flights of fancy, and playful ways of losing one’s mind are valued as subaltern knowledges (Bruce, 2021). Sage’s drawn spelling lists express both the struggle and liberation that such forms of knowledge articulate, revealing how the roots of (educational) Reason remain entangled in White, ableist and straight ideologies.

Author

• Laura Trafi-Prats, Manchester Metropolitan University