Textual orientations
Subtitle: lesbian and gay students and the making of discourse communities
By: Harriet Malinowitz.
Publisher: Boynton/Cook Publishers; Heinemann
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Portsmouth, NH
Language: eng
Number of pages: 294
Subjects: English language -- Rhetoric -- Study and teaching -- Social aspects -- United States.; Report writing -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Social aspects -- United States.; Gay college students -- United States -- Social conditions.; Lesbian college students -- United States -- Social conditions.; English language -- Discourse analysis.; Lesbians -- United States -- Language.; Gays -- United States -- Language.; Rhetoric and psychology.; Group identity.
Description: Textual Orientations examines two emerging, mutually illuminating fields: rhetoric and composition and lesbian and gay studies. It is a thorough, fascinating study of the complex rhetorical features in operation for lesbian and gay students in college writing classes.

The research from which the book evolves centers on an unusual situation: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual writers together in a class for which lesbian and gay experience is the theme. What happens in such a circumstance? What kind of discourse community is formed? What kinds of new work does it enable?

The book illustrates that in an academic environment that is "queercentric," the complexities of lesbian and gay subjectivity can be drawn upon to frame the very acts of composing from which they are usually erased.

Using social construction theory, liberatory pedagogy, feminism, ethnography, and queer theory as frameworks for analysis, the author proposes a pedagogy that uses the vantage point of the social margin - a place that produces not only abject outsiderhood but also acute ways of self-defining, knowing, and acting.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-283) and index.