Learning and unlearning historical sexual identities

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by Hugh English

Several years ago I taught a senior writing-intensive seminar for English majors in which we read Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather in the contexts of historically constructed and contested categories of sex/gender and sexuality. While reading varied literary forms, we considered these writers' textual and historical engagements with, evasions of and resistances to identity categories such as woman and "lesbian." On the day that I was being observed by my department chair, in my second semester at Queens College, one student, in his presentation, began a discussion of "butch/femme" gender roles as a way of understanding the characters and the central relationship represented in Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Since no students in the class had identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (nor were any of the students legible as such to me), I was both surprised and impressed with his use of these gender terms, specific enough to lesbian and other queer cultures that I had not anticipated their introduction into our conversation unless I introduced them. Suddenly, another student exploded in anger at the use of these terms, apparently because he thought that he had access to more authentic knowledge: although he, like the other student, he seemed to assume, was "not gay," he "knew" more about these things because his mother, as he defensively stated, was a lesbian. By claiming an inside position based on someone else's perceived sexual identity, one apparently heterosexual male student attacked another apparently heterosexual male student as supposedly homophobic.

This was an uncomfortable moment, not only for me in my second semester with my chair observing me, but for the other students too. In my salvage attempt, I introduced explicitly a discussion of the contexts of naming, offering a brief history of the contest within women's history over "butch/femme" experiences, and making a case for understanding these gendered terms both as related to heterosexual gender terms and as a queer revision of those gender terms.

This difficult teaching moment, which I have narrated and discussed elsewhere, (1) crystallized for me what I, as a teacher of writing, rhetoric and literature, am aiming for in my teaching of sex/gender and sexuality: moments in which words and naming and their contexts take center stage in ways that matter to those participating in the conversation. These are also moments in which our learning about specific and historical identities also involves unlearning identities as fixed, a historical certainties. In this article, I want to suggest some specific classroom strategies for teaching lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) identities (2) as rhetorical and political negotiations of historically changing sexual identities. In suggesting pedagogical and curricular strategies, however, I also want to put into question how our representations of sexual identities convey assumptions about identity itself as either a fluid and historical set of possibilities, or as a set of fixed names for coherent, unchanging types of people. In other words, what interests me, here, are the issues that came up in the classroom incident I narrate above, where one student's stable, coherent version of identity--e.g., "my mother is a lesbian,, -- effectively closed down another student's beginning explorations of how the language for articulating identities is necessarily negotiated in particular ways within different historical contexts.

Before discussing these more general strategies, I want to discuss briefly how issues of naming came up in our reading. In one of the texts we read in the course, Everybody's Autobiography, Stein describes how she wrote every day in an effort to find grammatical, syntactical and semantic forms that express subjectivity, without freezing it into identity:

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. (3)

In much of her work, through rigorous, strategic efforts to avoid the identifications from outside -- "what you or anybody else knows you are -- Stein attempts to claim a space of imaginative self-invention, of subjective process and not identity. Here, Stein chooses second-person pronouns that, while mimicking vernacular usage, address her reader and incorporate herself in a figure of representative experience. Her consistent vague abstraction, achieved with relentless avoidance of concrete substantives in favor of pronouns--"what you are set against "that thing"--represents the possibility of subjectivity as a practice of language. Stein understands, and her language play suggests, that, in one sense, we are whom we are named as, and, in another sense, we are whom we name ourselves. Since only specific contexts can provide referential meaning for pronouns, her language names a process of "finding out what you are" which achieves "living" through the simultaneity of "really not [knowing]" and being, a simult aneity that can end only with the end of living.