Meeting the Other by Creating My "Self" (cont.)
For my students that semester, there was a tendency toward the heroic; primarily, their lesbian or gay characters [5] overcame any obstacles in their paths, performed with grace and dignity. In short, these characters were fairly stereotypical projections of idealized, self-assured fictional/nonfictional characters, the same kinds we see on popular television shows like "Will & Grace" or "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." [6] At the same time, however, that these students created plot lines and characters that seemed to exemplify these character types, I began to notice the cracks in the surfaces that Pollock notes are indicative of performative writing, spaces where these performances became highly problematic. As we reflected in class on these projects, students began to understand the complex intersections surrounding language, self, performance, and knowledge.
The work of one student, however, exemplifies well the sort of rhetorical and epistemological--and thus highly ethical--work that this assignment (in conjunction with other writing and thinking projects from the semester) began in this class. As such, I offer a brief analysis of this student's writings for two reasons:
[5] Of thirty students who completed the assignment, only one chose to write as bisexual, and no student chose a transgender/transsexual protagonist.
[6] In one exception, the student-writer constructed a protagonist who simply "could not handle it" and killed himself in the bath tub. To this writer's credit, we had watched the short film Trevor, in which the protagonist fakes his death in this manner in the hopes that his family will pay attention to him/take him seriously. It may be that the student, trying to follow my assignment of using tropes/metaphors from class, seized upon this moment from "Trevor." At the time, I assumed no explicit malice from the student, and actually, rather welcomed this intrusion into the other narratives, which I found far too idealized to match my own experiences of being gay.
In short, one minor assignment does little to help teachers enact a pedagogy of social justice; that work requires more sustained thinking and writing.
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