Composing while queer

 

In “Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive,” we argue that queer rhetorical practice is not about affirming an identity, but rather disrupting norms for thinking, particularly norms that reinforce heterosexist ways of being (Alexander and Rhodes). We understand queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves. As such, it is a composing that is not a composing, a call in many ways to acts of de- and un- and re-composition.

 

Such "composing" consists of a complex mix of affect and negotiation. On the one hand, queer composing is a demand born out of anger, resentment, pain. Dorothy Allison argues that in the realm of fictional writing about queer people, “we queer and disenfranchised . . . have the right to demand our full, nasty, complicated lives, if only to justify all the times our reality has been stolen, mismade, and dishonored” (165–66). This is a right we take in the full ugly face of how our lives have often been composed in ways that we not only do not recognize but that harm us. At the same time, our “full, nasty, complicated lives” often require acts of de-composition, of un-composing and re-composing dominant narratives of sexuality, gender, and identity. Margaret Breen suggests in Narratives of Queer Desire that representing lesbian desire, for instance, “necessitates the engagement and revision and not simply or solely the dismissal of conventional narrative structures that resonate within the cultural context in which the writer of lesbian fiction finds herself” (4). We work and rework those dominant forms, both to counter and to assert, to say no to the damage done to us but also to use that damage to make livable lives.

 

We understand Techne as a manifestation, however temporary or provisional, of such a countering, such an assertion.