C's Program Blurb

Here's the blurb from the C's program:

Session: MW.13 on Apr 2, 2008 from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM	Cluster: n/a) Not Applicable
Type: Workshop: Wednesday Morning	Interest Emphasis: sexuality
Level Emphasis: all	Focus: not applicable
What's Queer Got To Do With It This queer-identified round-table engages and explores how being queer intellectuals impacts our professional identities, our performances as composition teachers, and our memberships in English departments. By examining our queer performances as discursive or theatrical, our intellectual work goals and agendas, and our status as exiles (or not), the panelists will actively encourage discussion among the audience and the panelists. This collective exploration is grounded in the intersections of queer theoretical perspectives on performance and Edward Said's discussions of the role of intellectuals. Edward Said states, “The intellectual's role is dialectically, oppositionally to uncover and elucidate the contest [between the powerful and the less powerful, who are subject to silence, frustration, assimilation, or extinction] ... to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power wherever and whenever possible. For there is a social and intellectual equivalence between this mass of overbearing collective interests and the discourse used to justify, disguise, or mystify its workings while also preventing objects or challenges to it†(Humanism and Democratic Criticism 135). The goal of this panel is to engage in discourse which demystifies the workings of English and Composition as fields and departments. As queer compositionists, we will share, compare, and contrast our experiences, strategies, and insights in the struggle against exile and silence. Panel members will briefly introduce themselves and their locations within the queer, academic, and intellectual communities. Panelists will then describe, discuss, and/or question (for circa 10-20 minutes) what they see as a crucial nexus in the cultural interzone of intellectual, queer, professional, and compositional identities. This may include homophobia, heterosexism, mentoring, horizontal versus hierarchical information exchange, radicalism, the pragmatism of identity groups, and assimilation. After each of the four panel members presents and discusses their nexus of interest and concern, the panelists and the audience will discuss how these concerns are related and impact one another. The panel will consciously focus on identifying and bringing the intersections of Said’s vision of intellectuals and queer performance to the fore. Panel members will intentionally engage the audience to create a dialog about how being queer at these intersections impacts their professional lives. Struggling against silence and creating professional lives also raises issues of assimilation and collaboration with forces and groups who once sought to silence us. Is it possible for us to continue our intellectual and political work when we are no longer exiles? As Said indicates, “Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers; and on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned. The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation†(Representations of the Intellectual 52-3). Panel members will discuss if becoming full and accepted members of our field, of our departments, impacts our ability to be effective and engaged intellectuals. The audience and the panel will discuss if being queer exiles offers us an intellectual and professional edge that more than compensates for our outsider status. Within the discussion of exile or membership, the panelists will consider how queer performance moves us toward our individual intellectual, compositional, and pedagogical goals.