Re/Orienting Writing Studies

Thoughts on In(queer)y

William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas

Research is always about orientation, about how (and why and even to what extent) the researcher turns toward the objects, participants, or contexts of study. To stand in a classroom in front of twenty-five composition students is to stand in relation to others; usually, we stand there as their teachers, people charged with engaging these students in a host of activities intended to teach them about writing. But what if we're there not only as teachers but also as researchers, as teacher-researchers? Then while we might be oriented toward these students in the ways that a teacher typically is, we're also now oriented differently: we're seeing, being, engaging in more than one way, through more than one role. Our orientations as researchers mean we're in that space asking particular questions, looking for evidence to confirm or contradict working hypotheses; our being there as researchers means that we're operating on multiple cognitive levels, observing, yes, but also impacting that space through the ways our focus shifts.

The same would be true of any research site, whether that's the seemingly innocuous space of a nondescript room used for a focus group, the dusty and moldy space of a campus archive, or the bustling workplace we've chosen to observe as part of an office ethnography. When we enter a carefully chosen room to meet the five people who constitute a focus group, we engage that space and those people, we orient ourselves toward those people, as someone there to facilitate a focus group. We alter space by taking a seat near the video camera or the digital recorder; we ask the participants to move if they are not already sitting in the frame of the camera or near enough to the microphone to be heard and recorded. These orientations speak to our assumptions about who is in charge of collecting data, what counts as data, and which objects in the room have value. The same is true of the archive or the boardroom, or any other site where we show up and point ourselves toward objects of study. And we are also oriented from behind, as it were, by the discipline(s) we are part of, by the intellectual traditions and commonplaces out of which our inquiry questions have emerged — and to which we hope our own answers will contribute.

Experienced researchers know these things. We learned about these orientations in graduate seminars focused on research, or as we began to conduct our own research projects. But we also know that the methods and methodologies we studied and practiced in graduate school do not represent fully objective, ideology-free practices for studying objects, people, and spaces. Rather, each represents a way of orienting a researcher toward an object, a people, or a space. Where these practices — surveys, focus groups, observations, rhetorical analyses, and so forth — become commonplace, where they represent normative/unquestioned activities or epistemologies, they demonstrate not only the ways that each has become an active method for orienting a researcher (and thus also preventing other orientations, other views from taking the foreground) but also how each has become a normative orientation for the field, a well-trodden path whose existence actively replicates itself from researcher to researcher, from discipline to discipline.

Reflecting on the "well-trodden path," Sara Ahmed (2006) writes in Queer Phenomenology, "Lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us ... are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition" (16). These lines of motion are also lines of thought, of inquiry, of what is and is not permissible in the activities and frames that surround inquiry. In the intersections of the humanities and social sciences, where we tend to locate writing studies, these well-worn paths provide institutional and disciplinary validity; they become recognizable paths of inquiry and methods of discovery, and in their recognizability, their visibility as systematic processes, we take refuge in having developed (or co-opted) frames of empirical inquiry that lend our work certain kinds of validity as research. While one of the values of empirical research is that others can follow our methods for themselves and, ostensibly, validate our shared discoveries by reaching the same conclusions, Ahmed suggests that one reason other researchers find what we find is that they follow the line we established; our shared discoveries are as much about the lines we follow as they are about the data we collect or the methods we use to analyze them.

While writing studies has traditionally articulated research practices in terms of activities (methods) and frameworks (methodologies) (Harding 1987; Kirsch and Sullivan 1992), this bifurcated approach can make it difficult for scholars doing queer inquiry work to see how best to approach and understand their research. What counts as queer work, after all? Is it the subjects of our research or the contexts in which we conduct research that make our work queer? Is it the way we collect data or the way we frame our collection methods? Or does queer work involve a more nuanced understanding of these concepts, concepts that guide so much of the way our discipline responds to and frames the work we attempt to do?

This collection represents our attempt to address some of these questions and to challenge the heteronormative orientations that have guided inquiry in writing studies since its inception. The scholars included here work to unpack the complex ways that queer scholarship has impacted the field of writing studies by disrupting not only the subjects and contexts of inquiry but also the frames and activities (and activity systems) in which inquiry occurs. In her groundbreaking study of...