Meeting the Other by Creating My "Self"

Harriet Malinowitz has noted that "unlike adolescence, which has received copious treatment in the humanities, social science, and natural science literatures, and unlike religious, educational, military, matrimonial, reproductive, and other celebrated commencements," the lives and experiences of LGBT people, often demonstrated through the genre of the "coming out" narrative as a significant rite of passage, continue to be "unhonored, unblessed, and confusingly unstructured" (36).[4] Currently, LGBT students must initiate discussions of non-normative sexualities. If they want to discuss their "selvess and how those selves refigure the worlds they live in, they have to be the ones to bring it up. And they have to be the ones to defend themselves and their experiences against peers (and teachers) who do not "honor" or "bless" these discursive transgressions. Since the LGBT students in our writing courses are often only just beginning to "come out," to explore their new senses of selves, such classes often work to keep them silent, not necessarily by explicit intent, but because the teachers and other students do not recognize how difficult it can be to speak a "new" self into existence.

I believe we owe it to our students--both gay and straight--to create spaces that welcome and honor their experiences. Part of that, however, means disrupting spaces that are so easily taken for granted. To that end, while working on my dissertation--an investigation of how student writers perform "selves" in their writings--I developed a assignment that asked students to write a short (2- to 3-page) personal narrative in which they reconstructed their ethos (the self in the text) as "not me."

My ultimate goal involved having students walk through the concept of "coming out" in various ways, starting with making up a story that used the tropes and metaphors we'd discussed in our readings, then moving on to an exploration of how kairos functions in "coming out"/"coming in," and ending with an analysis of how three "coming out" narratives manifested the rhetorical concepts of ethos, pathos, and kairos.

Even before I could get to the academic analysis project, however, I realized that the students had done something in their narratives that they'd probably not consciously done before. As a reader and teacher, I was drawn into these narratives, particularly to the fissures that were created by such texts, ruptures in which students' "selves" were utterly fragmented. Unable to rely on commonplace rhetorics for performing selves that students know from various writing projects they have had in the past, these particular students faced a new dilemma: how do I perform the "not me" in a way compelling enough to get a good grade on this assignment, avoid offending my gay-identified instructor (at least, in most cases), and maintain a sense of self distinct from my creation.

[4] Notice in Malinowitz's language that LGBT people and experiences are not "accepted," "tolerated," or "respected"; rather, they are honored and blessed, a very different formulation.

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