Ethos, Ethics, and Performative Writing (cont.)

As a teacher-scholar, I'm much more concerned with my students as individuals embedded within various competing cultures, a psychologically exhausting experience for all concerned, and one only exacerbated by the experience of being at college and in classrooms that students tend to assume are presided over by left-wing Ph.D.s. In this space, students have to figure out how to perform self for themselves, their peers, and their teachers. In my own classrooms, I foreground the rhetorical concept of ethos in order to capitalize on the constant self-refigurings at work in/on my students. Partly, this move is an attempt to give students a language for discussing the often complex ways in which they manifest "self" in their texts. But I also do it because the moment seems kairotic for pulling at our assumptions and queering them a bit, and it seems as good a time as any to require my students to process some of their privileges and heterosexist assumptions about the world.

One method I have used to underscore the performativity of writing (and self), and to enact a queer(ed) pedagogy, is to have heterosexually identified students write "coming out" narratives. In these texts, they must write a convincing story from the first-person point of view, develop an ethos as an LGBT person that seems "real." To help them, we spend some time reading such stories and discussing the rhetorical moves those writers have made, the tropes that seem most common, for example, and the typical and atypical plot lines.

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