College English - Volume 65, Issue 1, 2002

Explores some queer and performative objections, challenges, and counterproposals to the identity-based pedagogies still dominating composition studies and closely related fields, bringing to the foreground pedagogies that take the instability of identity as a starting point and move toward even greater deconstruction. Proposes a tentative theoretical (re)solution that dis/integrates the binary underlying these “two” approaches to praxis.

Incites inquiry as to how modern American literature reflects on the problem of identity. Spotlights the contribution to modern American writing by Wallace Thurman’s "Harlem" fiction. Endeavors to link a racial imperative to a sexual imperative by means of a current theoretical discourse surrounding notions of city and community life.

Provides a mini-autoethnography of three institutional moments in which the author saw a set of conditions that invited him to speak or write as a gay academic to make political interventions in dominant culture. Explores three important issues that are often unacknowledged in everyday discussions of homosexuality: exposing heteronormativity as heterosexism, moving beyond invisibility, and the trap of "double consciousness."

Analyzes Grendel ("Beowulf"), the Green Knight ("Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"), and the Pardoner ("The Canterbury Tales"). Notes that they are all "queer" characters in that they are not typical men of the time and they all pose a challenge or threat to normative homosocial desire. Suggests that traditional readings of these characters have obscured their disruptive queerness.

Focuses on the way sexual excesses inscribed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oriental discourses served to open up "queer" spaces in Romantic literature, while analyzing the degree to which the master narrative of British colonial domination was in part dependent on narratives of the sexual degeneracy of the Other. Focuses on Byron’s "The Giaour" to illustrate the workings of "homotextuality."