To that end, I won't pretend that this essay will "fix" things necessarily; nor will it offer the magic cure for disrupting heteronormative classroom spaces. Honestly, I'm not concerned with a Platonic classroom or pedagogy, one in which the "ideal" assignment will create an "ideal" classroom or student. If nothing else, queer theories have pointed out why such simplistic worlds and teaching situations simply do not exist. In any classroom, there are students and teachers whose lived experiences are far more complex and disruptive than we may realize, but tapping into those experiences can create productive spaces for helping both teachers and students rethink their self-performances, all by way of disrupting the sort of heterosexist narratives that students have been exposed to and mimicked for so many years in school.

In this essay, I have chosen to bring my teacher-colleague-readers into one of my classes in which I enacted a queer(ed) pedagogy in order to demonstrate one method for having students write queerly, or perhaps become queer(ed) writers, in order to expose heterosexist discourses and the privileges connected to normative sexualities. I look first at a poignant example excerpted from a larger case study that was part of a teacher-research project I conducted in the Fall of 2001; I use this student's writings to argue that having heterosexual students construct homosexual selves in texts can provide productive spaces for allowing/forcing such students to think through heterosexual privilege and to envision a different sort of world in which to live. To this end, I suggest that though not "properly" Levinasian, as I'll discuss below, this writing project offers students a way to confront the "face" of the Other and thus engage in ethical-rhetorical work in writing and writing-intensive courses.