Introduction 

At the beginning of 2023, Oklahoma’s state legislature introduced Senate Bill 129, which would strip access to trans-related care for people under the age of 26. This is just the latest in a wave of bills that strip away access to bodily autonomy for transgender people. Already, Oklahoma bans trans student athletes from sports that correspond with their gender identity in state schools and bans trans people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender. In the classroom, book bans overwhelmingly target texts which deal frankly with gender and sexuality, presenting a threat to education: when LGBTQ+ perspectives are not present in the curriculum, LGBTQ+ students can be further isolated or othered, made to feel as though they do not belong as writers or as students (Harris, Wilson-Daily, & Fuller; Munro, Travers, & Woodford; Kosciw et al; Snapp et al.). In every sense, legislators paint a target on the backs of LGBTQ+ students, presenting unequal treatment as law. 

Oklahoma is also my home.  

While I was presenting my work on LGBTQ+ inclusion at a major writing center conference, a member of the audience raised their hand and described the climate towards LGBTQ+ inclusion at their private university. “We’re not even allowed to show LGBTQ+ flags, let alone an allyship sticker,” they told me. “How can we demonstrate our allyship for students who may be struggling alone?”  

I return to this question in this short essay to ask: in this anti-trans atmosphere, how can educators and allies partner alongside students? In this contact zone, how can we show up for LGBTQ+ students? When we can’t visually signal allyship, how can we make sure that LGBTQ+ students are not isolated, are not struggling alone? 

Drawing from my experience of designing courses in topics from women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the writing classroom, I offer a series of concrete takeaways and reflections for teaching in this environment, from first-year writing to Writing Across the Disciplines. I reflect on using feminist digital archives, along with my experiences in referencing broader concepts of gender and sexuality in writing classrooms.  

Think Outside the Circle 

When I taught for the first time at Oklahoma State University, I knew I would be teaching students who had grown up in rural and conservative areas. I was determined to define the ground rules for my classroom and make sure that all interactions created an atmosphere of shared respect, where students took accountability for their own work and writing. Towards this goal, I allowed all students to introduce themselves. This may seem a small form of resistance, but in providing students with tools to define who they are, we can all be what feminist scholar Sara Ahmed calls “feminist killjoys” (“Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness” 582). Ahmed argues that the apparent “feminist killjoy” exposes the “bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy” (“Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness” 582). In our current exigence, laws which attempt to erase LGBTQ+ students from the university and from public life negate any avenue for LGBTQ+ students to express bad feelings. In effect, these laws attempt to silence feminist killjoys before they even have the chance to articulate themselves. These same laws dissuade teachers from affirming their LGBTQ+ students in the university. If we are to affirm students, we must, in effect, be willing to kill joy by exposing potential bad feelings, exposing how these laws erase and erode complex human experiences. As feminist killjoys, then, it is our role to partner with our students to make sure that they are offered the tools to express themselves.  

At the time, I worked in a front-facing position at the writing center, where I noticed that the forms to schedule a writing center session included a space titled “name you prefer to be called.” This scripted form of prompting allows students to introduce themselves in a manner which may differ from the name on their official registration, offering a more personal form of communication. I drew on this form to create my introduction strategy. 

At the beginning of the first class held on campus, a class on expository writing, I prepared a stack of index cards, which included space for names which students preferred to be called, majors, and current aspiration students hoped to achieve in the class.  I explained that these index cards would serve as an aid for our introductions, and then used the board to fill out my own version of an index card for students to follow: I wrote out my name, my pronouns, my prior major, and my current aspiration for the class (which was to introduce students to the tools of expository writing for the college classroom). I then passed out the stack, gave students time to fill out the cards, and suggested they introduce themselves, first to their fellow students on either side, then to the class. In creating this introduction script, I talked with my fellow writing professional Christina Lane, who suggested the idea of the index card as a means of offering a means for students to assert their own identity. As students introduced themselves, if they included pronouns, I made sure to repeat those pronouns, along with their names, to affirm how they referred to themselves.  

This first class is instrumental in creating an atmosphere of mutual respect between my students: we go over my code of conduct for the class, which is listed in my syllabus and includes the following clause:  

A classroom is a community. Thus, all members of a community should respect the work and dignity of others. A community founded on mutual respect and good faith will be much more conducive to the conversations which we will have throughout the semester. As a community, this space should promote an environment of mutual respect regardless of gender, sexuality, race, disability, etc. 

First, I read this code of conduct aloud to my class. Then, we go through it and define each term, from dignity, to mutual respect, to good faith. We discuss what it might look like to treat one another with respect, especially in evaluating one another’s writing. I usually write out two statements on the board, one as an example which offers respectful criticism, and one which does not engage in good faith. The first statement usually reads something like this:  

“I thought your use of imagery was really effective throughout this essay. However, I had some trouble tracing your argument in your second and third paragraphs, especially your use of evidence.” The second statement usually reads something like this: “I didn’t like your essay because I don’t think you know what you are talking about.” Together, we underline portions of the statements which indicate respect or disrespect.  

So much of our work as writing professionals is based in showing up for our students through our physical outreach, as Eileen Schell argues, “leading through presence as well as understanding” (322). In this way, establishing an inclusive atmosphere affirms the right of students to express themselves, without insulting or disrespecting one another, and works through the presence of the writing professional to provide an example. If forbidden to ask students what their pronouns are, allow all students to introduce themselves, and establish a code of conduct for the class. For transgender students, this provides the opportunity to express their identity. As we face growing backlash towards trans lives and identities, educators can still support their LGBTQ+ students. These activities promote an atmosphere of shared respect, setting the standard for the classroom.  

“Our Life On the Page” 

I wanted to create opportunities for students to encounter diverse voices on the page, including LGBTQ+ voices. Our first assignment was a literacy essay, which asks students to consider a time in their lives in which literacy played a significant role. In this assignment, students reflect on their first experiences with literacy, whether on the page or learning a skill. As writers, this assignment provides students with a means of explaining how their understanding of literacy has changed, and how their identity continues to affect their experiences.  One student commented when we were first discussing what makes an essay a literacy narrative, “It seems like we’re supposed to put our life (sic) on the page.” This is an astute observation, since in this assignment, students often confront their own identities as writers on the page, and how they negotiate that identity while trying on the notion that they might also be writers.  

In introducing this assignment, I was determined to offer students a wide variety of literacy narratives to discuss. I wondered how students would respond to a discussion on the work of Alison Bechdel, whose work as a cartoonist graced the pages of gay and lesbian newspapers in the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For. Today, she is better known for her coming-out story in her graphic memoir Fun Home, now a Broadway musical. I had a particular piece by Bechdel in mind, her short comic “Compulsory Reading,” which deals with the act of reading and writing, especially dealing with what we are supposed to read, versus what we do read and enjoy. I knew students would connect with its themes of feeling guilty over not reading.  

We even had a copy of the comic in our digital textbook, so access would not be a problem. Our textbook had image descriptions of Bechdel’s comic “Compulsory Reading,” intended to contextualize the visual aspect of comics for sight-impaired readers. I was pleased to see this feature, since digital editions of textbooks have unique opportunities to provide accessibility for all students, and image descriptions are underutilized as a means of providing access. However, there was a glaring issue: in the caption, Bechdel’s comic persona was described as a man with spectacles. I knew this presented a conflict, and I would need to explain why the discrepancy existed. As comics scholar Hillary Chute argues, “Comics is largely a hand-drawn form that registers the subjective bodily mark on the page; its marks are an index of the body… Comics works are literally manuscripts: they are written by hand” (112). As a form, comics presents embodiment as a form of manuscript, and here, the caption served to override Bechdel’s queer authorial presence on the page. 

As I flipped to the introductory panel on the projector, the caption stood out in bold font. A student near the front, who never ceased to have questions, raised an eyebrow as he pointed to the caption. “While that’s the caption,” I said, “Alison Bechdel is a woman cartoonist. This just goes to show that fact-checking can always help everyone, no matter how advanced they might be!”   

The students chuckled at this comment. And we moved on. Rather than dwelling on a moment of anxiety or discomfort, the conversation branched into the reasons why the captioner might have assumed that Bechdel was a man, from the short hair of her comic persona to the overwhelming gender discrepancy in comics, a field heavily dominated by men. One student offered the fact when a field is dominated by men, people tend to assume that people within it are all men as well.  

I explained to my students that Alison Bechdel also lent her name to the Bechdel test, which allows critics to evaluate how a piece of media can avoid gender stereotyping of women. As depicted in Bechdel’s 1985 comic “The Rule,” a work which passes the Bechdel test must feature two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. In the comic, Bechdel’s character remarks, “Last movie I was able to see was Alien…the two women in it talk to each other about the monster.”) In naming this visual form of queer complaint in our class, I offer students a means of reading against the grain, reading against intended meanings of a text, which helped to frame our discussion of reviews as critical texts where queer complaint can thrive. 

In this same class, students went on to write literacy narratives on diverse topics. One student described the first time he went duck hunting, while another student described the literacy needed to read a driver’s manual and the experience of learning to drive for the first time. Yet another student described the time she wrote a letter to a traveling member of her family, and described the process of learning how to properly address and send a letter through the mail. In a reflection, one student shared, “I thought writing this [literacy narrative] was going to be difficult, but with the examples and the parts we wrote in class, it wasn’t that hard.”  

In the discussion which unfolded from this stray moment in our first-year writing class, we discussed how different identities can be expressed across media and how such depictions make a difference. When we see our own identities represented, we might also feel empowered to express ourselves as we attain further literacy. As I think back, I wonder how discussions like this one might be halted or stopped altogether, if those in favor of silencing LGBTQ+ voices have their way. 

Digital Archives As Diverse Research 

As I introduce students to methods for academic research, I draw on digital archives as a method of bringing diverse voices into the writing classroom. This assignment was informed by the work of scholar-teachers Jess Enoch and Pamela VanHaitsma, who have argued “it is crucial to pause before asking students to leverage digital archival materials in their writing projects and prompt them first to read these archives carefully and critically” (217). Students should first achieve a basic level of archival literacy to draw on digital archives in an effective manner.  As Charles Morris shows, archives are “dynamic sites of rhetorical power” (115). In understanding archives as a site of critical rhetoric, digital archives can provide potent case studies for students as they understand what research can look like. Moreover, in a mediated encounter with digital archives, students can respond to an ongoing conversation through carefully addressing the rhetorical situation of a chosen archive, understanding its overall rhetorical purpose, and then addressing how a particular archival entry addresses an unfolding conversation. In this way, students situate their own critical voices to express rhetorical purposes and perform research within the exigence of digital archives.  

Informed by Enoch and VanHaitsma’s work, I have found that this assignment is readily adapted for writing classes, as well as classes which focus on introducing students to the basic frameworks of gender and sexuality studies. In providing these resources, I draw from feminist frameworks, such as bodily autonomy and intersectionality, to consider who is included in archives and who is left out. In utilizing digital archives, I focus on a series of outcomes:  

• Students will be able to define and identify digital archives and their rhetorical purpose. 
• Students will be able to navigate a digital archive through either a Boolean search or through a finding aid. 
• Students will be able to identify criteria of organization for a given archive. 
• Students will critically consider questions of curation: whose voices are involved? Whose voices are missing? How are these sources contextualized through text like metadata, keywords, and captions? 
• In class, we will connect feminist frameworks such as intersectionality and bodily autonomy to contextualize archival entries within a larger context of political activism. 

Many of these digital archives fall neatly into Kate Theimer’s definition of a digital archive: “online groupings of digital copies of non-digital original materials, often comprised of materials (many of which are publications) located in different physical repositories or collections, purposefully selected and arranged in order to support a scholarly goal.” Others fall into Enoch and VanHaitsma’s inclusive definition of digital archives: “any digital resource that collects and makes accessible materials for the purposes of research, knowledge building, or memory making” (219). The latter provided the guiding definition for my assignment. After identifying a list of digital archives, I pull up several of these archives onto the projector, and ask students to tell me where to go on the archival page. Through most classes, we examine the “About” page, any contextual menus or navigational aids on the homepage, or any disclosed institutional affiliations, and other explanations provided for the archive’s curation and general archival standard.  

Students particularly liked the Queer Zine Archive Project digital archive, which catalogs zines from the riot grrrl movement, along with contemporary queer and transgender zines. This archive often limits the metadata provided to explain the context of these zines, which offers students a chance to research for themselves. In keeping with K.J. Rawson’s argument that environment and language can obscure portions of archives, providing creative means of imagining archival inquiries, we discuss how this apparent lack of context offers new entryways into research for future projects. In our class, we reference the article “Zines, Art Activism, and The Female Body: What We Learn from Riot Grrrls” by Dr. Rebekah Buchanan (author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics) to offer historical context for this art as a form of activism. Through texts like “Awkward at the Doctor,” a zine which discusses the experiences of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming patients as they negotiate complex interactions with medical practitioners, students read through a mode of archival queer complaint. 

 

In the feminist writing classroom, digital archives can form a gateway for students, as educators demonstrate the research process in class, assessing these archives as sources. In our class, we discussed this archive as a source, considering who assembled the archive and where its limits lie. Whose voices are included, and whose voices are missing? What gaps exist in the archive, and how might research fill in those gaps? In offering diverse voices in the classroom,  educators can offer new methods of introducing students to academic research and analysis.  

Conclusion 

For teachers of writing, especially in fraught times like ours, questions of how to introduce students to diverse identities in the classroom have only become more difficult. As I sit here writing this essay, I learned that The Hill We Climb by poet Amanda Gorman has been banned in Florida, a choice made by a single person (Holpuch). Pictures of shelves stripped of books proliferate, and  teachers are constantly facing obstacles that interfere with the jobs we are hired to perform.  

As educators consider how to ally with LGBTQ+ students and diverse students in the classroom, we can provide opportunities for students to introduce themselves, and thus support their identities. We can still provide opportunities for students to read and learn from diverse voices. And in drawing from diverse digital archives as opportunities for research as feminist killjoys, offering critical means for students to question and assess sources, educators can also engage students in critical thought enriched by feminist frameworks.  

If institutions do not support us as workers, then our work suffers. But dispensing with reliance on institutional support, in the 2019 Peitho Journal: Special Cluster on Gendered Service in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, Jennifer Heinert and Cassandra Phillips, Michelle Payne, and Eileen Schell show how feminist writing program administrators contribute to institutional change, despite its challenges. And as Anicca Cox and Rachel Riedner show, coalition building takes place across national, institutional, gendered differences, tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty, graduate student educators and advanced scholars alike, as we look to our growing labor union movement throughout higher education as a model for coalition building, that is, working towards “horizontal, coalitional practices within institutional structures,” dismantling our hierarchical places within institutions in favor of solidarity (18). Beyond the university, library professionals, like Martha Hickson, fight an onslaught of attempts to limit the right to read (Peters). Through reaching out to supportive communities, these library professionals mobilize public support for free exchange of information, despite efforts to ban books.  

As a means of organizing, coalition building is deeply relational, bridging institutional divisions based on rank or status to create partnerships. I was only able to offer these assignments and activities for students because writing professionals in my graduate program supported me and offered feedback, sharing their own statements of mutual respect and introductory assignments, which served as a model for my own. Similarly, I have partnered with graduate students and professors alike in designing classes on digital archives, which seek to increase visibility of LGBT+ history, the struggle for racial equality in the United States, the history of feminist struggle, and more. Solidarity with one another as educators fosters greater support in the classroom, and in all other aspects of our profession. 

Solidarity also looks like working with, not against, the needs of our students. As bell hooks urges in Teaching To Transgress (1994), we must view our students as “whole human beings with complex lives and experiences” (15). In her retrospective piece on the legacy of bell hooks and the feminist writing classroom, Patti Duncan reflects, “I was also able to bring my full self to our classes. In the process, we were able to care for one another, learn from each other, and create a sense of community and commitment to our shared space” (2). During a recent community dialogue on public education in Rockingham County, Virginia, high-school students expressed that mental health is one of their greatest stressors, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (Hagi). Community dialogues, like the one held in Rockingham County, can bridge seemingly insurmountable gaps between educators and the public, and allow us to work with our students to promote further solidarity. 

As feminists, we as writing professionals can work together to bridge the barriers of homophobia and transphobia, which stifle our students’ ability to meet each other on equal footing, while realizing, with the Combahee River Collective, that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking”: that we all approach our work through intersecting oppression, which we must seek to dismantle (n.p.). We can work together in refining our methods of fostering inclusivity in the classroom, through mentoring emerging scholars in the field, through sharing methods which worked in our classroom, and by being open about the methods which did not work for us. This might look like creating space at conferences for mentorship, or reaching out to graduate students who express interest in establishing a feminist classroom. Beyond support, solidarity must be the driving force for ensuring that students (LGBTQ+ or otherwise) are able to interact as equals within classrooms and meeting rooms alike. We must all be Ahmed’s “feminist killjoys” (“Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness” 582). We must work together to design pedagogy which allows LGBTQ+ students to see themselves in curriculum, even as institutional voices clamor for their closeting, attempting to render them invisible.  

As Sara Ahmed suggests in her lecture “Complaint as Queer Method,” we must attempt to create “a conversation that can open a door, just a little, just enough, so that someone else can enter, can hear something.” In drawing upon queer practices of complaint in the classroom,  we can create critical space for students to engage in rhetorical experimentation as they express critical arguments. These methods may be in our classroom organization, in the texts which we choose, or in our intertextual engagement with archives. By providing students with a critical method of queer complaint as feminist killjoys, we can open the door for our students- and for ourselves.  

Works Cited 

Ahmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs: Journal of Women In Culture And Society, vol. 35, no. 3, 2010, pp. 571–94. https://doi.org/10.1086/648513  

—. “Complaint as a Queer Method.” Feministkilljoys, 24 Mar. 2022, https://feministkilljoys.com/2022/03/24/complaint-as-a-queer-methodb/.  

Bechdel, Alison. “Compulsory Reading.” Edited by Lunsford, Andrea A., et al. Everyone’s an Author with Readings, ebook, second edition, W.W. Norton, 2016. 

—. “The Rule,” Dykes To Watch Out For, vol. 1, Firebrand, 1986, p. 22. 

Busby, Jennifer, Lance Heisler, and Kari Odden. “Awkward At the Doctor.” Queer Zine Archive Project, 2010, https://archive.qzap.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/229.  

Bullard, David, et al. “Oklahoma SB129: 2023: Regular Session.” LegiScan, https://legiscan.com/OK/text/SB129/id/2623314.  

Chute, Hillary. “Comics form and Narrating lives.” Profession, 2011, pp. 107-117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41714112  

Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986. 

Cox, Anicca and Rachel Riedner. “Persistence, Coalition and Power: Institutional Citizenship and the Feminist WPA.” Peitho Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, 2023, pp. 14-28. 

Enoch, Jessica, and Pamela VanHaitsma. “Archival Literacy: Reading the Rhetoric of Digital Archives in the Undergraduate Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, 2015, pp. 216–42. 

Hagi, Randi B. “Rockingham County students weigh in on their needs, pitch solutions.” WMRA, 13 Mar. 2023, https://www.wmra.org/2023-03-14/rockingham-county-students-weigh-in-on-their-needs-pitch-solutions  

Harris, Richard, Ann E. Wilson-Daily, and Georgina Fuller. “‘I just want to feel like I’m part of everyone else’: how schools unintentionally contribute to the isolation of students who identify as LGBT+.” Cambridge Journal of Education, vol. 52 no. 1, 2022, pp. 155-173. 

Heinert, Jennifer and Cassandra Phillips. “Transforming the Value of Gendered Service through Institutional Culture Change.” Peitho Journal: Special Cluster on Gendered Service in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2019, pp. 255-78.   

Holpuch, Amanda. “Florida School Restricts Access to Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem.” The New York Times, 24 May 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/us/biden-inauguration-poem-florida-ban-amanda-gorman.html. 

Kosciw, J. G., Clark, C. M., Truong, N. L., & Zongrone, A. D. “The 2019 National School Climate Survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth in our nation’s schools.” Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), 2020,  https://www.glsen.org/research/2019-national-school-climate-survey.  

Morris, Charles. “The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies; or, The Archive’s Rhetorical (Re)turn.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs vol. 9, no. 1, 2006, pp. 113–15. 

Munro, Lauren, Robb Travers, and Michael R. Woodford. “Overlooked and invisible: Everyday experiences of microaggressions for LGBTQ adolescents.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 66, no. 10, 2019, pp. 1439-1471. 

Payne, Michelle. “Administration, Emotional Labor, and Gendered Discourses of Power: A Feminist Chair’s Mission to Make Service Matter.”  Peitho Journal: Special Cluster on Gendered Service in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, vol, 21, no. 2, 2019, pp. 308-33. 

Peters, Carol. “Rutgers Alumna Who Fought Book Ban as School Librarian Receives National Award.” Rutgers University. www.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-alumna-who-fought-book-ban-school-librarian-receives-national-award  

Queer Zine Archive Project, https://archive.qzap.org//. Rawson, K.J. “Accessing Transgender // Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics”. Archivaria, Vol. 68, Jan. 2010, pp. 123-40, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13234. 

Schell, Eileen. “Is it Worth It to ‘Lean In’ and Lead? On being a Woman Department Chair in Rhetoric and Writing Studies.” Peitho Journal: Special Cluster on Gendered Service in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, vol 21, no. 2, 2019, pp. 308-33.  

Snapp, Shannon D., et al. “LGBTQ-inclusive curricula: Why supportive curricula matter.” Sex Education vol. 15 no. 6, 2015, pp. 580-596. 

Theimer, Kate. “Archives in Context and as Context.” Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1 no. 2, 2012. https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/archives-in-context-and-as-context-by-kate-theimer/