Title: Textual orientations
First published: 1995
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.
Subjects: Language, Social aspects, English language, Social conditions, Rhetoric, Study and teaching (Higher), Gay college students, Report writing, Study and teaching, Group identity, Lesbians, Rhetoric and psychology, Gays, Lesbian college students, Discourse analysis, English language, rhetoric, Gay students, English language, discourse analysis, Lesbian students
Places: United States
LC classification: PE1405.U6 M34 1995