Kirjahaku

Speech Acts, Public Performance, and the Question of What Matters in the Teaching of Writing

Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher. Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students (as much work on queer pedagogy has done since the 1990s), this book offers writing and teaching as already queer practices, and contends that the overlap between queer theory and composition presents new possibilities for teaching writing. Teaching Queer argues for and enacts "queer forms"—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing—those that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, and the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms.

Stacey Waite's newest collection of poems interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood. From a genderqueer perspective, the poems set their unflinching gaze on the habits and impacts of masculinity. Poignant, angry, heartfelt, and at times funny, this collection asks us, again and again: What kind of world do we make with gender?

Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint is a study in grief — a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present.Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a “you” who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker’s androgynous self-awareness — and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies — disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation.the lake has no saint will unsettle a reader’s sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately — in its vatic honesty — triumphant.

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ … This is [Waite’s] genius … to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and…”

Reading and writing is difficult, messy work. Ways of Reading embraces this challenge by inviting students into the process and treating them with respect. Based on the concept that texts should be considered in relation to each other, Ways of Reading fosters academic habits of mind as it carefully walks students through analyzing and writing about complicated ideas. With deeply thought-provoking readings from writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Butler, and Anna Tsing, combined with a supporting structure of sequenced questions for rereading, discussion, and writing, Ways of Reading empowers students to engage with complex material and difficult concepts. A robust introduction to critical reading, coverage of writing beyond the traditional essay, and assignment sequences all help instructors make the classroom a place of intellectual exploration. This is a book that asks instructors and students to do more -- to approach difficulty as multi-dimensional, in conceptual, historical, narrative, and practical aspects. And especially in this edition, with new readings on topics such as white rage, ethical relationships, and sexual violence, this work pays off, preparing students to address (as community members, citizens, and future leaders) the urgent problems that cannot be ignored, and that soon will be theirs alone to solve.