Citation:

Pruitt, John. “Heterosexual Readers in Search of Queer Authenticity through Self-Selected LGBT Novels.” Teaching English in the Two Year College. Vol. 42, No. 4, May  2015, pp. 359-374.

Summary:

John Pruitt describes the semester long descriptive research experiment in which he observes a group of self-identified heterosexual students read and discuss different books by LGBTQ authors and about LGBTQ characters. He explains his motivations and methods and distills the conversations the students carried out. He also offers a brief reflective analysis that touches on the implications for readers and teachers handling texts portraying the experience of groups composed of people with identities different than their own.

The initial motivation for the semester long experiment came from a smaller, more informal experiment, where he compared the conversations that followed a reading of the novel Christ-Like by his gay men’s book club and later a group of five of his heterosexual students. He noticed that the approach and subject of the conversations changed when his students were reading the novel, which led him to wonder more about the reading strategies of his heterosexual students when they encounter LGBTQ inclusive literature. He phrases this as a curiosity about how “students interpret the Other before coming to class” (359). He designs and receives a grant for an experiment in which a larger group of students discusses LGBTQ novels they select, with a video camera acting as the only evidence of his presence.

Pruitt briefly outlines prior scholarship on discussions of LGBTQ literature that offer theories for him to test. This scholarship presents these discussions as opportunities to use literature to resist heteronormativity and combat homophobia. He also looks at ethnographic research on USA book discussion groups, typically composed of middle class white women, that exposes the tendency of these groups to skim over challenging subject matter such as racism, while emphasizing the values and experiences with which they more easily identify. He offers two opposing evaluations of these sorts of discussions, as either reaffirming racial hierarchies, or inspiring social and political change.

Pruitt lists the goals of his eight students, which include learning about the intersection of their own race and sexuality, learning about non-Western attitudes towards LGBTQ communities, and finding more authentic portrayals of LGBTQ characters. This last goal of finding authenticity persists throughout their discussions, while authenticity becomes a contested modifier, and ultimately is the subject of Pruitt’s analysis. The students examine portrayals of LGBTQ characters across a variety of novels and discuss topics such as historical accuracy within novels, hyper masculinity, violence towards LGBTQ characters, race, family structures and more. Often these sub-topics are lenses through which students evaluate the authenticity of the characters’ experiences. Gradually, Pruitt witnesses the literature and discussions complicate student understanding of what constitutes an authentic portrayal of LGBTQ life.

He understands this complication to be a necessary goal of any future curriculum that assigns LGBTQ fiction. For him, a search for authenticity, alternatively termed authenticism, assumes certain identities and subjects to be legitimate sources of knowledge and portrayals of difference, which ultimately reinforces existing, static subject positions and hierarchies, and limits a discourse on difference.

Quotes:

“I wanted to better understand how my students interpret the Other before coming to class, where hey would ask questions for clarity and discussion, and I would present various schools of thought to deepen and extend those inquiries.” (359)

“Because of this homogeneity, these readers appropriate the subject matter with which they identify and overlook that which troubles or alienates them.” (360)

“Each student referenced Samantha’s highly contested term authentic by expressing curiosity about an inherent quality among fictional LGBT characters in their search for better understanding of what was to them an elusive population.” (362)

“I sought to understand the impact of self-selected LGBT novels on heterosexual college students with the more focused intention of learning how to teach these novels on my campus.” (362)

“For Jesse, the depiction of a raditionally perceived oppressed group as oppressors themselves contradicted his perception of an authentic gay subculture.”(365)

“the students drew out interesting perspectives on the intersections of race and sexual orientation as a means of authenticating LGBT culture.” (368)

“Each alternative leads to the same conclusion: future assignments of LGBT fiction must complicate and problematize the notion of authenticity.” (371)

“I wonder now how a group of gay students would question the authenticity of heterosexuality in a set of self-selected novels, with heterosexuality as their own “Other”.” (372)

Reflection:

I chose this article because I hoped it would complement my first reading, which explored how the social aspects of a community college classroom can assist student reading outcomes. That article advocated for selecting readings that reflected students’ personal lives and understandings of the world, to create a peer network within the classroom. This article looked to do the opposite, based on the brief abstract, that states how student reading outcomes can be enhanced by presenting students with novels and literature about the Other.

I’m not sure at this point if these articles were complementary, as Pruitt’s was structured as an outline of a descriptive research experiment situated in a single semester, whereas Kiefson’s was more a summary of techniques and attitudes she had accumulated across many semesters of teaching. However, this article certainly complicated my expectations for what it would mean to offer course readings to students, and how to facilitate those discussions.

Throughout this article, I was consistently uncomfortable with Pruitt’s explicit description of LGBTQ communities as the Other to his students, and his students’ search for authenticity. A search for authenticity in this way must conflate a multitude of experiences and prioritize certain experiences over others (namely their own, as the means by which they understand the experiences of others). Why allow this sort of discussion, which could reinforce narrow notions of LGBTQ experience and let heteronormative perspectives metastasize? Why not insert a facilitator instead of a camera? Towards the end of his article, however, I realized the worth of structuring the experiment as purely descriptive research. An instructor or facilitator has no control over the perceptions and assumptions that form in a student’s head prior to class. Gaining an understanding of how these perceptions form, and what students’ priorities are before they enter a structured discussion, can help facilitators form their own teaching goals. Through this research Pruitt realizes the importance of complicating the idea of authenticity, and the advantages that come from reading a set of novels that offer diverse perspectives.

An additional layer of complication arises when I consider my own teaching. I would like to incorporate reading and comprehension strategies as soon as next quarter. I would also like to find texts that present a multiplicity of experiences and identities (instead of just my own as a straight, white guy). When reading Kiefson, this felt like a simple project, present students with texts that reflect what they’ve experienced, these texts will resonate with them, they will engage more with the work and will feel a part of our classroom community and I will have a classroom full of happy friends who feel heard and respected. I don’t know actually know what will resonate with students when they read texts, or what conversations they will want to have. If students approach a conversation with a divisive or narrow attitude how can I facilitate conversation more effectively? What would I do if students were always evaluating texts on the basis of authenticity? Also, how can I be an authority figure in relation to our study of these texts when they deal with identities much different than mine? I would like to be more than a camera on a tripod, but I’m not really sure how much more I ought to be.

In my last RAB I outlined a basic research structure that was oriented towards evaluating student perceptions of their own reading abilities before and after we use some of Kiefson’s techniques. This article made me want to construct some a similar descriptive research experiment to Pruitt’s, perhaps where before discussing a topic, I ask students what they think the most important topics were in the reading, or what they are most interested in discussing. Ideally, I would like to combine Pruitt’s and Kiefson’s ideas about how students resonate with different or similar identities to their own, and am now very curious about student perceptions of a text prior to any facilitation. However, any potential research ideas I had before have gotten foggier and more complicated, and seem ensconced in more questions of ethics and identity than I feel equipped to answer.