Introduction: Writing from Absurdity

Recently, I’ve had numerous worried conversations with fellow graduate student educators along these lines: undergraduates are experiencing pandemic-related mental health concerns which, coupled with pressures to succeed amid a flailing job market, have produced resentment toward university education—one consequence of which has been a turn toward generative AI. For those of us who have dedicated years to graduate studies despite our economic precarity, there’s earned anxiety about the future of humanities teaching. Graduate students take on many teaching contracts to make ends meet, so the use of generative AI is disheartening, putting additional pressure on our time and undermining our work.

In this uncanny teaching culture, we must ask: How can we convey the importance of originality? How can we address AI while navigating labour constraints?

And:

How can we teach and do writing in these absurd times?

I propose queering writing pedagogies to curb AI use by motivating students to write personally and artfully. In these notes, I draw from queer composition studies and queer film and media theory to build a writing pedagogy that prioritizes collaboration and creativity over efficiency and “perfection.” Queer pedagogies are not just focused on teaching queer content (though this is also crucial amid today’s culture wars); queer pedagogies think about how we might teach in ways that promote queer methodologies and epistemologies,[1] such as celebrating the excesses of identity, embracing language’s slipperiness, and prioritizing ephemeral experience. For this reason, queer pedagogies are deeply entwined with pedagogies of care and compassion, which reinvest the bifurcated student/teacher, instructed/instructor dyad with the reciprocal flow of conversation. ^[2] Queer pedagogy is a pedagogy of care, telling students: I care about what you have to say, over and beyond how what you say fits (or doesn’t) into a grading scheme. Though these notes do not suggest there is a “fix-all” solution to undergraduates’ generative AI use, queer writing pedagogies remind students of the power of original thought, even – especially – when uncontainable and imperfect.

Our Bodies, Our (Excess) Selves

Essay-based assignments often assume we can contain ideas and arguments within a streamlined form—that our thoughts and selves can be contained. Queerness, on the other hand, “exceeds the composed self.”[3] Queerness privileges fluidity, defying containment. Queerness cannot be composed. By extension, queer writing pedagogies celebrate decomposition, reminding us that the writer always exceeds their writing—a useful reminder for anxious students seeking to confirm their self-worth through institutional success. A queer approach to writing puts the writer back into their body, with its ever-evolving relationship to the self, resisting the traditional university essay’s requirement of “a cleansed, emotion-free form of identity.”[4]

Now, I’m writing from the perspective of an educator who has only ever taught courses as a precariously employed graduate student. Given this perspective, I know that it can be difficult (perhaps impossible) to carry out experimental teaching without professional stability. How, without this security, can we queer writing in our classrooms? Through self-reflection and my work as an Educational Developer with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation, I’ve developed strategies that help fellow precarious educators reinvest their writing instruction with queer pedagogy’s playful excesses. These suggestions are best captured through three concepts—body, failure, and fragment—which remind students of the importance of originality, emphasizing that we, their educators, want to engage directly with our students’ ideas, and that we see our students as unduplicatable individuals, hereby hopefully sidelining AI’s tantalizing promise of regurgitated, deindividualized content.

BODY

In my teaching, I remind students that bodies feel a range of emotions flow through them when writing about certain topics. Sometimes I’ll begin a discussion on writing by asking students to complete a private self-reflection exercise, drawing from Shelton’s description of pre-writing meditations as a form of queer writing pedagogy.[5] I’ll ask: How do you feel when you think about your current writing topic?

And importantly: Why are you writing what you’re writing?

These pre-writing questions gently help students think about why they’ve entered the writing classroom. Perhaps it’s due to familial expectations. Maybe it’s because of a long-held passion for the subject. What we can do as educators is encourage students to examine the unique personal stakes in their writing.

I’ve also run this exercise in a workshop for graduate students, “Queering Writing Pedagogies.” Even these more advanced students struggled at first to articulate why they write. They ultimately explained that asking such questions felt vulnerable, yes, but deeply helpful in reinvesting their work with personal stakes. If students don’t understand why they’re writing, they might be tempted to give up on writing altogether.

FAILURE

Failure, (un)fortunately, is part of the writing process—a fact that many educators keep from students. Though we try to normalize messy first drafts and the need for revision, university educators still risk reproducing the illusion that the “perfect” student essay exists somewhere.

Queer writing pedagogies de-emphasize this illusion of perfection, re-centering failure’s anarchic playfulness; thus, they draw from the understanding that “Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.”[6] Queer folk fail at reproducing “normative” social lives. As theorists like Halberstam note, these failures need not be mourned but rather celebrated for their rejection of disciplinary norms that police experimentation.[7] In our writing practice, failure can be funny, absurd, silly—something to laugh with. Though many graduate student educators won’t have the institutional support to carry out techniques like “ungrading,”[8] we can celebrate failure in a way that encourages students to resist equating themselves with their grades. Instructors might share personal anecdotes about their writing failures; we might also stage Messy First Draft conferences, low-stakes peer review sessions, and stream-of-consciousness brainstorming exercises. By normalizing failure as inherent to writing, we can help students overcome their writing paralyses—all those daunting expectations can be made silly, returning students’ writing to the “wondrous anarchy” of childhood play.[9]

FRAGMENT

Experimenting with fragmented writing genres also returns the writer to that disjointed temporality of play. Queer writing pedagogies “[open] up an alteration of time in its ways of organizing bodies,” producing “infringements in educational temporalities” primarily centred around progress.[10] Thus, queer writing pedagogues celebrate what they’ve termed the “forgotten genres” of poetry, manifestos, graffiti, and leaflets, where narratives are choppy and ideas spiral.[11] Assigning works-in-fragments like Gloria Anzaldúa’s La Frontera/Borderlands and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts as examples demonstrates how academic research might swirl together with autopoetics in a portrait of the self’s relationship to the world—all without adhering to a traditional, “composed” essay structure. [12]

Encouraging students to think of ideas as inherently fragmented also allows us to embrace queer theory’s support of ephemera in scholarly research. As José Esteban Muñoz has famously observed, queer lives and experiences (as with other marginalized experiences) have mostly been preserved as ephemeral, resistant to institutionalized expectations of “rigour.”[13] When teaching subjects like film and media histories, we might emphasize the contingencies of preservation and open our assignments to non-traditional sources. The works of Heather Love and Ann Cvetkovich are particularly well-known for demonstrating a queer approach to the archive;[14] another more recent, wonderfully teachable example is Diana Anselmo’s A Queer Way of Feeling. Anselmo deploys a methodology she terms, “affective historiography,” “a form of researching past film experiences that cannot be disarticulated from autobiography, emotion, and loss and thus must embrace indeterminacy and incompleteness as strengths rather than pitfalls of sociohistorical research.”[15] This description encapsulates many of the reflections and suggestions I’ve put forth here: queering writing pedagogies means reinvesting written assignments with the autobiographical, the emotional, the imperfect, the incomplete, the failing and flailing. Allowing students to submit works like autotheoretical assignments, found footage films, and poetic reflections on archival objects opens space for self-expression for those who do not normally see themselves represented in the institution. Additionally, by recentering students’ experiences and feelings, we as educators emphasize the uniqueness of each student’s writing, which cannot be duplicated by generative AI.

So what can this look like in practice? For a Girlhood Cinemas course I just finished teaching, I assigned a final project wherein students collaborated in pairs to create a zine, echoing the grassroots politics of ‘90s girl cultures. I provided examples from the Queer Zine Library[16] that combined collectivity, fragmentation, and collage aesthetics with critical theory. This assignment incorporated queer politics and pedagogies into the writing classroom while encouraging students to make connections with their classmates through the playfulness of artistic collaboration. The collisions of zine layouts perfectly encapsulate the anarchic play of queer theory, life, and experience.

Conclusion: Pleasurable Resistance

Queer writing pedagogies do not claim to fix every issue educators are experiencing with undergraduate disconnect. I myself have been disheartened to see so many AI-generated assignments come across my desk. However, by using queer writing pedagogies, we can inject university teaching with a sense of play and experimentation—we can re-find the pleasure in teaching which, as bell hooks writes, is an act of resistance itself.[17] Queer writing pedagogies bring pleasurable resistance into the classroom: the pleasure of resisting the claustrophobic expectations of disciplinary normativity. The pleasure of playing with an idea without an endpoint. The pleasure of collaboration without judgment. By queering writing pedagogies, we can remind students that, in such absurd times as these, their own messy, imperfect, but original ideas are more important than ever.

Amanda Greer (she/elle) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in McGill University’s Department of English; she received her PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Her work, broadly, focuses on the intersections of girlhood studies, critical pedagogy theory, mid-century cinemas. She previously worked as a Graduate Educational Developer with the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation.

1. Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, “Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition,” JAC 31, nos. 1-2 (2011): 183. ↑

2. Farrell, O., Brunton, J., Ní Shé, C., Costello, E., “#OpenTeach, “The Pedagogy of Care,” in #OpenTeach: Professional Development for Open Online Educators (Dublin: #OpenTeach Project, 2021). ↑

3. Alexander and Rhodes, 181. ↑

4. Beth Buyserie and Ricardo Ramírez, “Enacting a queer pedagogy in the composition classroom,” ELT Journal 75, no.2 (2021): 195. ↑

5. Stephanie Ann Shelton, “Queer Contemplative Pedagogy: Challenging Gender and Sexuality Norms Through Contemplation,” Journal of Homosexuality 69, no. 12 (2022): 2049-2065. ↑

6. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. ↑

7. Halberstam, 10. ↑

8. See Amy Kenyon, “What is Ungrading?” Duke University Learning Innovation Blog, accessed January 13, 2025, https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2022/09/what-is-ungrading/). ↑

9. Halberstam, 3. ↑

10. val flores, “Queer/Cuir Pedagogies: Fictions of the Absurd, Writings of the Stagger,” in Queer Epistemologies in Education, ed. M. Pérez and G. Trujillo-Barbadillo, (New York: Springer Publishing, 2020), 243. ↑

11. Alexander and Rhodes, 202. ↑

12. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987) and Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015). ↑

13. José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” Women & Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 6-7. ↑

14. See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). ↑

15. Diana W. Anselmo, A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2023), 20. ↑

16. See “Collection Development Manifesto,” Queer Zine Library, accessed January 13, 2025, https://www.queerzinelibrary.com/collection-development. ↑

17. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10. ↑