Negotiating rhetorics of diversity through performances of propriety: a quare autocritography

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author, a Black queer Mississippian, advances a methodology they term quare autocritography to reflect upon their experiences of precarity, exclusion, and isolation as a graduate student at the University of Dixie. The author particularly focuses on how they use “performances of propriety,” or strategies marginalized people employ to draw on an institution's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as the catalyst for radical liberatory politics and institutional change. Within the context of higher education, these performances help to envision and engender new possibilities and thereby function as avenues of survival for marginalized others.

KEYWORDS:

• Autocritography
• rhetoric
• autoethnography
• quare studies
• performances of propriety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South: An Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

2 Richè Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 10.

3 Richè Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South; Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

4 Third I Vision Stickaveli, "Second Annual Source Awards Full Show 1995 Tupac Biggie Suge Knight, Puff Daddy," August 12, 2020, video, 1:32:18, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EatGY99bH6c.

5 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 33.

6 See E. Patrick Johnson. “‘Quare Studies,’ or (Almost) Everything I know about Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001); Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldùa, “Introduction,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002).

7 Josè Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

8 Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9 Bryant Keith Alexander, “Bordered and Bleeding Identities: An Autocritography of Shifting Academic Life,” in The Black Professoriat: Negotiating a Habitable Space in the Academy, eds. Sandra Jackson & Richard Greggory Johnson, III (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 14–31.

10 Bryan McCann, et al. “When We Come Together, We Build Theory: Working the Second Shift in the Undercommon Enclave,” The Journal of Autoethnography, 2, no. 1 (2021): 113.

11 Bryant Keith Alexander, Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2006).

12 Michael Awkward, Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir (Durham: Duke University Press), 7.

13 Wenshu Lee, “Kuaering Queer Theory: My Autocritography and a Race-Conscious, Womanist, Transnational Turn,” The Journal of Homosexuality 45, no 2/3/4 (2003): 147–70.

14 Bryant Keith Alexander, Performing Black Masculinity.

15 Amber L. Johnson, “Confessions of a Video Vixen: My Autocritography of Sexuality, Desire, and Memory,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2014): 182–200.

16 Amber L. Johnson, “From Academe, to the Theatre, to the Streets: My Autocritography of Aesthetic Cleansing and Canonical Exception in the Wake of Ferguson,” Qualitative Inquiry 24, no. 2 (2017): 89.

17 Amber L. Johnson, “From Academe, to the Theatre, to the Streets,” 89.

18 Robin Boylorn and Tony E. Adams, “Queer and Quare Autoethnography,” in Qualitative Inquiry Through a Critical Lens, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina (London: Routledge, 2016), 85–98.

19 Amber L. Johnson, “From Academe, to the Theatre, to the Streets,” 116 (emphasis mine).

20 Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 5.

21 Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2(2009): 220–26.

22 Lozano-Reich and Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue,” 221.

23 Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and the Racial Politics in Popular Media (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), 4.

24 Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body.

25 D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2019), 16.

26 E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

27 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

28 Alexander, Performing Black Masculinity, xv (emphasis mine).

29 Boylorn and Adams, “Queer and Quare Autoethnography,” 87.

30 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 9.

31 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press: 2013), 3.

32 For further information, see Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Monstrous Femininity: Construction of Women of Color in the Academy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2012): 111–30; Bernadette Marie Calafell, Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture (New York: Peter Lang), 2015; Tamika L. Carey, “A Tightrope of Perfection: The Rhetoric and Risk of Black Women’s Intellectualism on Display in Television and Social Media,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2018): 139–60; Rachel Alicia Griffin, “I Am an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance,” Women’s Studies in Communication 35, no. 2 (2012): 138–57; Angela P. Harris and Carmen G. Gonzalez, introduction to Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections for Race and Class for Women in Academia, ed. Gabriella Gutièrrez y Muhs, et al. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012), 1–16; Koritha Mitchell, “Idenitifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care,” African American Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 253–62; Claudio Moreira and Marcelo Diversi, “Missing Bodies: Troubling the Colonial Landscape of American Academia,” Text and Performance Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2011): 229–48; Gus A. Yep, “Toward the De-Subjugation of Racially Marked Knowledges in Communication,” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 2 (2012): 171–75.

33 Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33(1986).

34 Alexander, Performing Black Masculinity.

35 For examples, see John A. Centra and Noreen B. Gaubatz, “Is There Gender Bias in Student Evaluations of Teaching?,” Journal of Higher Education 71 (2000):17; Pieter Sporeen, Bert Brocx, and Dimitri Mortelmans, “On the Validity of Student Evaluation of Teaching: The State of the Art,” 83 (2013); Sylvia R. Lazos, “Are Student Evaluations of Teaching Holding Back Women and Minorities?: The Perils of ‘Doing’ Gender and Race in the Classroom,” in Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections fo Race and Class for Women in Academia, eds. Gabriella Gutièrrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. Gonzàlez, and Angela P. Harris (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 164–85.

36 Michael Awkward, Scenes of Instruction, 3.

37 E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea, 7.

38 Armond R. Towns, “Against the ‘Vocation of Autopsy’: Blackness and/in US Communication Histories,” History of Media Studies 1 (2021): 3.

39 Towns, “Against the ‘Vocation of Autopsy,’” 3.

40 Kum-Kum Bhavnani, “Women’s Studies and Its Interconnection with ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, and Sexuality,” in Introducing Women’s Studies: Feminist Theory and Practice (2nd ed), eds. Victoria Robinson and Diane Richardson (London: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1997): 27–53.

41 Bryant Keith Alexander, “Bordered and Bleeding Identities,” 20.

42 Nell Derick Debevoise, “Building Bridges for Inlcusion by Simply Showing Up,” B The Change, January 27, 2021, https://bthechange.com/build-bridges-for-inclusion-by-simply-showing-up-69cdc8bb53d9.

43 Robin Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe, Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2014), 15.

44 E. Patrick Johnson. “‘Quare Studies,’” 3.

45 Richè Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South, 10.

46 See Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South and Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

47 Martyn Bone, “Introduction: Old/New/Post/Real/Global/No South: Paradigms and Scales,” in Creating and Consuming the American South, eds. Martyn Bone, Brian Ward, & William Link (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 1–23.

48 Amber L. Johnson & Lore/tta LeMaster, Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography: Embodied Theorizing from the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2020).