Meet Chris (cont.)
Notice how my reading of Chris's ethical performances is forced to change here: before, he was the "angry homophobe"--clearly a type character [7] --and now his ethos has shifted (at least for me) to that of a betrayed friend. Chris's use of the coordinating conjunction and allows us to see that the issue is as much that his "homeboy was interested in men" as it was that this friend kept that information from Chris, which suggests that part of Chris's psychological reaction to homosexuality comes from his sense of betrayal by his friend. Chris lets his readers know that he did the "right" thing and condemned his friend for his behavior.
As a teacher, I was left trying to figure out how to deal with this essay, and my instinct told me not to "fight" Chris's homophobia syllogistically but instead to capitalize on this relationship with Jimmy Wayne as a space for Chris to reflect on how that personal injury may have tainted his feelings about homosexuals in general, but also as a space where he could think through how he might respond differently to Jimmy Wayne after three years of not speaking to him. The method I chose involved letting Chris shelve this particular piece for a while and let him wrestle in different ways with the subject matter of the course. More specifically, I hoped that after Chris had confronted the "face of the Other," he might be better able to revise this piece and focus on his conflicted relationship with Jimmy Wayne.
As Chris's teacher-evaluator, I also had to wonder if
When he was given a chance to engage these ideas--in class discussions, readings, and writings projects--Chris began some of the important work of understanding the complexities of sexualities and experiences, and I would argue, Chris makes significant movement toward being a better citizen in a democratic culture.
All of these are options--in fact, they're options all our students have in all our courses, especially since so many of them believe themselves "wise" to overtly political teachers' motives--but I have chosen to believe that Chris's texts demonstrate something else entirely: I believe Chris's early writings demonstrate the failure of Chris and his previous teachers to provide him with a space to write and think about the importance of our sexualities to our selves and our performances. In short, although our sexualities are intimately and inextricably bound up in our understandings of self and our consequent performances for various audiences, Chris, like so many of our students, had never really been offered a space to make these connections, as discussions and writings about normative and non-normative sexualities remain outside much of our K-12 and college curricula.
[7] In Suzanne Holland's formulation, of course, the "liberal" academic would be forced to reject this ethical performance by Chris. Certainly, if this were the only text Chris wrote that semester that engaged this topic, I, too, would have been rather easily drawn to feel the same way. As I argue later, when we address such complicated issues--many of which are first experiences for our students--we have offer students more sustained thinking and writing experiences so that we can begin to understand our students complex interactions with these ideas.
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