The Queer Turn in Composition Studies: Reviewing and Assessing an
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W300 CCC 61:1 / SEPTEMBER 2009 Jonathan Alexander and David Wallace The Queer Turn in Composition Studies: Reviewing and Assessing an Emerging Scholarship This article surveys and analyzes nearly fifteen years of scholarship situating itself at the intersection of LGBT/queer studies and composition/rhetoric studies. The authors argue that paying attention to queerness provides unique opportunities to engage with students in challenging discussions about how the most seemingly personal parts of our lives are densely and intimately wrapped up in larger sociocultural and political narratives that organize desire and condition how we think of ourselves. Three moves in queer composition scholarship are identified—confronting homophobia, becoming inclusive, and queering the homo/hetero binary—and implications of these moves for composition are discussed. [V]irtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Leaving sexual identity out of the classroom is not an accident; it is an expression of institutionalized homophobia, enacted in class- rooms not randomly but systematically, with legal and religious precedents to bolster it and intimidate both teachers and students. —Harriet Malinowitz
