Chris Comes Out
For writing instructors who are committed to social justice, figuring out productive ways to get students to rethink their positions vis-à-vis Others is a complicated process, one in which we must balance students' needs for particular curricular outcomes--those promised by the course catalog, for example--and a curriculum that meets those needs in ways that integrate positions we believe central to producing democratic citizens. Such a balance is never easy, particularly for teachers who embody difference, whose ethical performances in the classroom remain utterly tied to this difference, and for whom such difference from the heteronormative causes a great deal of emotional and physical pain.[8] In this section, readers should notice how Chris, through an unnamed protagonist in his "coming out" narrative, combines personal, real-life experiences with imagined experiences in an attempt to tell a convincing story. Such a recognition should point us to several key issues at work here:
For his "coming out" narrative, Chris begins with something he knows (football) in order to tell a story with whose rhetorical structures he is less familiar (coming out). This story opens with the narrator telling us how much he has "always loved to play football" and "as a young boy we all played football to get all the girls." This sentence caught my eye immediately as a space where Chris's own identifiers were overlapping with those of his created protagonist. Quickly, however, his protagonist moves to a space where he claims his reason for playing football was not to "get all the girls" but to "get closer to the guys on the team" and "see them all hot and sweaty." Using the common trope of inversion, Chris "flips the script" on his readers. I should also note that Chris's coming out story is the most sexual of the thirty that students wrote that semester and may speak to one of Chris's real issues with (male) homosexuality: he seems to see gay men as (hyper)sexually predatory. Chris's move is doubly interesting since black males in America have historically been similarly constructed in the Mandingo fantasy. Again, this student demonstrates how easy it can be for writers to draw on unexamined commonplaces that float about in our culture: in this case, the implicit fear of non-normative sexuality.
[8] Although many teachers assume that teaching "controversial" topics/issues can cause mental stresses and strains--intellectual and emotional conflicts that are well-documented--I am suggesting here that such activities also cause bodily stresses and strains that teachers must carefully consider in order to be as effective as possible in the classroom. In a recent College English article, I demonstrate this claim at greater length, noting that headaches, muscle pains, and various sicknesses are often intimately connected to forcing such controversial concepts into the classroom (Banks, "Written on the Body").
In this reading, we can see why a sort of Levinasian ethics in the classroom can be valuable for helping students rethink their assumptions about selves and Others.back || next || home
