Ethos, Ethics, and Performative Writing (cont.)

These "performative" texts create a classroom space in which to engage in a Levinasian pedagogy of ethical engagement with the Other. Suzanne Holland has recently critiqued knee-jerk liberalism's hold on classroom performances regarding the nonnormative, and provided us with a reading of Levinas's work that calls for a prescient concern for ethics, one which requires us and our students to "expose[ourselves] to the encounter with the Other" (165), not just linguistically, but physically, to come face-to-face with the Other. In so doing, Holland argues, we more accurately embody Levinas's philosophy, rejecting tolerance as a "sufficient basis for ethics," one which "may bring about unintended harm" (166). And although I agree with Holland (and Levinas) on many levels, I would note that encounter alone will do little--as I make clear with Chris below. In fact, some teachers might read Levinas and Holland and decide that since the teacher cannot produce X-Other for class, well, best not to engage these issues at all; in short, it could become a method for dismissing the Other or essentializing the Other because the teacher can produce only one or two Others as "encounters."

One thing we must realize, particularly at this moment in history--as many of our students believe that the United States might once have been bad/prejudiced/unfair but now everything is O.K.--is that our students have probably "encountered" an Other, and in this case, an individual who doesn't identify as LGBT. Part of encounter must involve reflection and processing, at least when that encounter is circumscribed by classroom spaces.[3] As my use of Chris's texts below demonstrates, our students have the opportunity to access previous face-to-face encounters in our classes, and the performative writing assignment of the "coming out" narrative--if engaged and reflected upon--can create rhetorical and epistemological spaces for self-refiguring.

[3] I should point out here that Holland's examples are extra-curricular, involve not students in classroom settings but citizens in larger communities stepping outside their comfort zones and encountering the Other. Specifically, Holland discusses her experiences as a "liberal, feminist academic who is also homosexual" coming "face-to-face, with dozens of Conservative Christians in their living rooms, churches, and offices" to discuss "family values" (165). Such a scene would be rather difficult to create in a classroom, restricted as it is by student access to Others and constrained by time.

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