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Bi,Butch,And Bar Dyke:Pedagogical Performances of Class,Gender,And Sexuality

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Bi,Butch,And Bar Dyke:Pedagogical Performances of Class,Gender,And Sexuality SEP-CCC1.QXD 8/11/00 8:57 AM Page 69 Michelle Gibson, Martha Marinara, and Deborah Meem Bi,Butch,and Bar Dyke:Pedagogical Performances of Class,Gender,and Sexuality Current theories of radical pedagogy stress the constant undermining, on the part of both professors and students, of fixed essential identities. This article examines the way three feminist, queer teachers of writing experience and perform their gender, class, and sexual identities. We critique both the academy’s tendency to neutralize the political aspects of identity performance and the essentialist identity politics that still inform many academic discussions. Current theories of radical pedagogy stress the constant undermining, on the part of both professors and students, of fixed essential identities. Trinh Minh-Ha, for example, describes an “Inappropriate/d Other who moves about with always at least two/four gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while pointing insistently to the difference; and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at” (8). Elizabeth Ells- worth applies Minh-Ha’s idea to “classroom practices that facilitate such mov- ing about” and the nature of identity that obtains in such classrooms: Identity in this sense becomes a vehicle for multiplying and making more com- plex the subject positions possible, visible, and legitimate at any given historical CCC 52:1 / SEPTEMBER 2000 69 SEP-CCC1.QXD 8/11/00 8:57 AM Page 70 CCC 52:1 / SEPTEMBER 2000 moment, requiring disruptive changes in the way social technologies of gender, race, ability, and so on define Otherness and use it as a vehicle for subordination. (113) In the stories that make up this article, we hope to show our own strategies, partial and varied though they are, for disrupting several assumptions that an- imate the dynamics of the academy: the assumption that the university repre- sents a set of attributes that can be acquired by various Others that will enable them to realize a stereotyped dream of success, the assumption that the pro- cess of acquiring such attributes involves jettisoning undesirable traits and as- sociations that the Other has brought with her, the assumption that power in the academy is consistently associated with a predictable and unchanging set of personal characteristics, and the assumption that professor self-presenta- tion must reflect only those “power” characteristics and no other. Presented as a set of theorized narratives in three voices, this article ex- amines the way three feminist, queer teachers of writing experience and per- form their gender, class, and sexual identities. We hope to critique both the academy’s tendency to neutralize the political aspects of identity performance and the essentialist identity politics that still inform many academic discus- sions of gender, class, and sexuality. Through our “stories,” we hope to compli- cate the notion that identities can be performed in clean, organized, distinct ways by examining and theorizing our own experiences of class, gender, and sexual identity performance. We want to acknowledge the conscious ways we perform our multiple subjectivities and to examine our political/economic/ pedagogical uses of those performances. In short, we want to move beyond the essentialist act of situating ourselves as scholars authorized to speak about specific issues; we want instead to argue for a kind of universal authorization of discourse. We present these three “papers” as one multivoiced article be- cause the narratives seem to us to be alive both with continuity and with con- flict, and we believe that maintaining the integrity of each voice helps highlight its relationship to (and against) the others. Bi: playing with fixed identities Late last Friday afternoon, as I do every Friday after work, I stopped at Kroger to pick up groceries for the weekend. I don’t like the complication of grocery shopping when I’m hungry and tired and thinking about the paper I’m writing or the assignments I need to put together. On this particular Friday, the juice aisle was blocked by a young woman shopping with her daughter. The little girl, 70 SEP-CCC1.QXD 8/11/00 8:57 AM Page 71 GIBSON / MARINARA / MEEM / BI, BUTCH, AND BAR DYKE who couldn’t have been much more than three, sat in the grocery cart while her mother asked her what kind of juice she wanted. Not an unusual scene, except that there were no limits placed on the child’s choices. No “I have a coupon for Ocean Spray Cranapple 64 ounces, the Welch’s White Grape Juice is on sale, and the 28-ounce Kroger Apple Juice is two for one, so you can have one of those.” It’s not that I don’t believe in giving children choices, but there are always fi- nancial limits to the choices my children can make. And time limits as well. This little girl was reveling in the power of her choices and had already changed her mind three times, each time just “Oh,you’re one of those as her mother reached for the juice she had asked for. Be- people that makes up stories.” cause I was in a hurry and becoming annoyed, I said, “Af- ter you change your mind three times, all the juice disappears.” The little girl sat up in the grocery cart seat, looked straight at me for a few long seconds, flexed her little slippered feet, shook out her golden locks, touched her rosy cheek, and said, “Oh, you’re one of those people that makes up stories.” “Yes,” I answered her, “but all my stories come true.” I knew she meant the magic dragon princess secret identity riddle treasure kind of story, not the kind of stories I tell in writ- ing classes. But I had to wonder as I finished my shopping and drove home if the stories I tell don’t at least try to serve the same purpose as the mismatched, mistaken identity fairy tale where all the characters figure out who they really are by the end, where knowing who they really are means they get to live hap- pily ever after. Despite the inability of the storytellers of personal narratives to easily manipulate a happy ending or any ending at all, storytelling is the way we compose our lives; all identity, all social construction, begins with narratives. Although my stories and many fairy tales represent a struggle for identity, the difference between fairy tales and personal narratives comes from autobiogra- phy’s necessary interplay of fiction and reality, the constant dialogue between an emerging identity and social institutions. My stories are different from fairy tales because they represent people and culture in process; there is no fixed identity, no happily ever after. I have to wonder why if I can feel that pea under my mattress, I’m still eating cold porridge. The nexus created by the juxtaposition of that uncomfortable pea and the cold porridge illustrates an important connection between autobiography and social critique; the writing of individual lives actively constructs culture and politics by establishing the narrative codes, the parameters of subject and com- munity. Both our cultural context (the cold porridge) and social identity (feel- ing that hard pea) depend on their reciprocal relationship for structure and definition. The narratives told about social institutions are embedded in or 71 SEP-CCC1.QXD 8/11/00 8:57 AM Page 72 CCC 52:1 / SEPTEMBER 2000 with the narratives of individuals whose lives, whose joys and pains, and whose struggles for survival have been involved with building, manipulating, and re- building the cultural context(s) in which they form their social identities. And these identities give us a critical apparatus, one that enables us to reflect on how and why we tell stories and how we use our stories to produce culture. The stories told by both lesbians and working-class academics help form class consciousness and serve a strategic political purpose. In marking stories “lesbian” or “working class,” the lives contained therein are less invisible and give the narrators—students and faculty—a political site from which to speak and act. Playing with the notion of an “essential voice” allows the storytellers to claim a recognizable, politically engaged identity from a narrative that is al- ready academically codified; however “speakable,” this politicized voice emerges from a self-empowerment that hinges on an appeal to universalities of class and sexuality, a self-empowerment that depends on binary oppositions. We think we tell stories to illustrate the particular, to demarcate culture as marked and shaped by difference. Claims of universalism have given way to the demands of the particular, but the particulars have their own universalisms. Most lesbian and working-class autobiographies, rather than defying the fixity of identity, merely redraw the boundaries and serve to categorize individual subjects as different from those defined as “straight” and “professional.” These stories create a common experience, and the personal narratives suggest that there is something coherently the same about all lesbians, about all working- class persons, and, consequently, something coherently the same about the “straight” or “middle-class” experience that is being resisted. But there are sto- ries that conform to neither category of identification. Using lesbian and working-class experiences to strive for a political identity is both significant and necessary; I have no wish to deny those voices their political direction. But the communal voice that is created tends to erase the differences within those communities and ignore the complex, in- tertwined relationship between public and personal narratives. Consequently, writing students—working class or middle class, gay or straight—either em- brace or resist the collective voice and often find themselves defending a “real me” that is a mix of essentialist beliefs about good and bad thinking, right and wrong behaviors, and inclusion and exclusion.
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