Looking for truths in the stories we tell in queer communication studies

ABSTRACT

This article offers two suggestions for the future of queer communication studies: First, we should continue to use language carefully and thoughtfully, especially about gender, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Second, queer communication scholarship should be intentionally and meaningfully intersectional, eschewing superficiality and tokenism related to race, ethnicity, and nationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer communication
• transgender communication
• race and racism
• intersectionality
• tokenism

Notes

1 Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings (New York: Penguin, 2020), 58.

2 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

3 Charles E. Morris III and Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Sexing Communication: Hearing, Feeling, Remembering Sex/Gender and Sexuality in the NCA,” in A Century of Communication Studies: The Unfinished Conversation, eds. Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith (New York: Routledge, 2015), 128–65.

4 James W. Chesebro, Gayspeak: Gay Male & Lesbian Communication (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981).

5 Frederick C. Corey and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Sextext,” Text and Performance Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1997): 58–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462939709366169; Atay’s proposal for this forum includes in that history, importantly, the publication of Gust Yep, Karen E. Lovaas, and John P. Elia, eds., Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to Queering the Discipline(s) (New York: Routledge, 2003).

6 For a useful summary of the controversy and an analysis of the episode’s anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, see Luis M. Andrade and Deven Cooper, “The Imperative of Dissecting Anti-Black and Anti-Indigenous Meritocracy in Communication Studies and Beyond,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 8, no. 4 (2019): 23–9, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2019.8.4.23; see also, Ahmet Atay, “Merit, Diversity, and Resilience: An International Faculty Perspective,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 8, no. 4 (2019): 30–4, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2019.8.4.30; Elizabeth F. Desnoyers-Colas, “Talking Loud and Saying Nothing: Kicking Faux Ally-Ness to the Curb by Battling Racial Battle Fatigue Using White Accomplice-Ment,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 8, no. 4 (2019): 100–5, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2019.8.4.100; Benny LeMaster and Amber L. Johnson, “An Ode to Incoherent Canons,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 8, no. 4 (2019): 57–63, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2019.8.4.57.

7 Leland G. Spencer, “Introduction: Centering Transgender Studies and Gender Identity in Communication Scholarship,” in Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories, eds. Leland G. Spencer and Jamie C. Capuzza (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), ix–xxii; Leland G. Spencer, “Intersex: Considerations for Language and Invitations to Further Research,” Women & Language 39, no. 1 (2016): 19–32; Leland G. Spencer, “Special Issue Editor’s Introduction: Transcending the Acronym,” Women & Language 41, no. 1 (2018): 7–15; Leland G. Spencer and Jamie Capuzza, “Centering Gender Identity and Transgender Lives in Instructional Communication Research,” Communication Education 65, no. 1 (2016): 113–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2015.1096949; Leland G. Spencer and GPat Patterson, “Abridging the Acronym: Neoliberalism and the Proliferation of Identitarian Politics,” Journal of LGBT Youth 14, no. 3 (2017): 296–316, https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2017.1324343; GPat Patterson and Leland G. Spencer, “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency: A Critical Analysis of Trans Topics in Rhetoric and Composition and Communication Scholarship,” Peitho 22, no. 4 (2020), https://cfshrc.org/article/toward-trans-rhetorical-agency-a-critical-analysis-of-trans-topics-in-rhetoric-composition-and-communication-scholarship/.

8 Spencer, “Introduction.”

9 Ibid.

10 Leland G. Spencer and Jamie C. Capuzza, eds., Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

11 Benny LeMaster et al., “Unlearning Cisheteronormativity at the Intersections of Difference: Performing Queer Worldmaking through Collaged Relational Autoethnography,” Text and Performance Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2019): 341–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2019.1672885; Benny LeMaster, “(Un)Becoming Ally: Trans at the Intersections of Difference,” Women & Language 41, no. 1 (2018): 155–58; Benny LeMaster, “Unlearning the Violence of the Normative,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 2 (2017): 123–30, https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.4.2.0123.

12 Amber Johnson and Mel Michelle Lewis, “Transcending the Acronym, Traversing Gender: A Conversation in the Margins of the Margins,” Women & Language 41, no. 1 (2018): 128–45.

13 Sarah E. Jones, “Negotiating Transgender Identity at Work: A Movement to Theorize a Transgender Standpoint Epistemology,” Management Communication Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2020): 251–78, https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318919898170.

14 matthew heinz, Entering Transmasculinity: The Inevitability of Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); matthew heinz, “Communicating While Transgender: Apprehension, Loneliness, and Willingness to Communicate in a Canadian Sample,” SAGE Open 8, no. 2 (2018): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018777780.

15 Mia Fischer, Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

16 Lucy J. Miller, “Fear and the Cisgender Audience: Transgender Representation and Audience Identification in Sleepaway Camp,” The Spectator 37, no. 2 (2017): 40–7.

17 Thomas J Billard, “Writing in the Margins: Mainstream News Media Representations of Transgenderism,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 4193–218, http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3461; Thomas J Billard, “(No) Shame in the Game: The Influence of Pornography Viewing on Attitudes Toward Transgender People,” Communication Research Reports 36, no. 1 (2019): 45–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2018.1549539.

18 K. C. Councilor, “Drawing the Body In: A Comic Essay on Trans Mobility and Materiality,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 441–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1556979; K. C. Councilor, “Standing on the Shoulders of Stonewall,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 2 (2019): 40–3.

19 Ace J. Eckstein, “Out of Sync: Complex Temporality in Transgender Men’s YouTube Transition Channels,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5, no. 1 (2018): 24–47.

20 Jamie C. Capuzza, “‘T’ Is for ‘Transgender’: An Analysis of Children’s Picture Books Featuring Transgender Protagonists and Narrators,” Journal of Children and Media 14, no. 3 (2020): 324–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2019.1705866.

21 Benny LeMaster and Amber L. Johnson, “Unlearning Gender—Toward a Critical Communication Trans Pedagogy,” Communication Teacher 33, no. 3 (2019): 189–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2018.1467566.

22 My own attempts since the publication of the edited collection to center trans lives in communication scholarship, often with fantastic coauthors, include: E. Tristan Booth and Leland G. Spencer, “Sitting in Silence: Managing Aural Body Rhetoric in Public Restrooms,” Communication Studies 67, no. 2 (2016): 209–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2015.1122657; E. Tristan Booth and Leland G. Spencer, “Giving an Account of One’s Current Self: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Gender Identity and Reincarnation,” Journal of Autoethnography 2, no. 2 (2021): 177–93, https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.2.177; Jamie C. Capuzza et al., “Transing Communication Education: A Chorus of Voices,” in Queer Communication Pedagogy, eds. Ahmet Atay and Sandra Pensoneau-Conway (New York: Routledge, 2019), 107–29; GPat Patterson and Leland G. Spencer, “What’s so Funny about a Snowman in a Tiara? Exploring Gender Identity and Gender Nonconformity in Children’s Animated Films,” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 2, no. 1 (2017): 73–93; Leland G. Spencer, “Bathroom Bills, Memes, and a Biopolitics of Trans Disposability,” Western Journal of Communication 83, no. 5 (2019): 542–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2019.1615635; Leland G. Spencer, “The Nashville Statement’s Undoing? Grappling with Evangelical Christianity’s Ontology of Sex,” Journal of Homosexuality 68, no. 6 (2021): 1059–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2019.1696101; Patterson and Spencer, “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency”; See Lucy Miller’s conceptualization of a “trans archive” for more examples of scholars in the communication discipline and cognate fields who actively work to center trans lives and experiences. Lucy J. Miller, “Building a Trans Scholarly Archive,” Women & Language 41, no. 1 (2018): 152–54.

23 This point has been made with more nuance in several places, including: Shinsuke Eguchi, “Queerness as Strategic Whiteness: A Queer Asian American Critique of Peter Le,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, eds. Dreama G. Moon, Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, and Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2019), 29–45; Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Monstrous Femininity: Constructions of Women of Color in the Academy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2012): 111–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859912443382; Robert Gutierrez-Perez and Luis Andrade, “Queer of Color Worldmaking: In the Rhetorical Archive and the Embodied Repertoire,” Text and Performance Quarterly 38, no. 1–2 (2018): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2018.1435130.

24 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 17, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871; Brenda Allen made a similar observation about the simultaneous invisibility of race (despite its constant presence, in another sense) in communication theory in general a few years before. See Brenda J. Allen, “Theorizing Communication and Race,” Communication Monographs 74, no. 2 (2007): 259–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637750701393055.

25 Matthew Houdek, “The Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: Toward Divesting from Disciplinary and Institutionalized Whiteness,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 292–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1534253; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068.

26 Moya Bailey and Trudy, “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 762–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395; Paula Chakravartty et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003.

27 Space prohibits me from offering an extended discussion of the problems of racial tokenism, but for a sample of scholarship that engages those questions more deeply, see Yolanda Flores Niemann, “The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20, no. 1 (1999): 111–34, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346994; Srividya Ramasubramanian and Amanda R. Martinez, “News Framing of Obama, Racialized Scrutiny, and Symbolic Racism,” Howard Journal of Communications 28, no. 1 (2017): 36–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2016.1235519.

28 Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

29 Brenda J. Allen has observed that faculty of color are often expected to be experts on race, even if race is not their primary area of study. For instance, Allen herself started writing about gender and race because so many colleagues invited her to give guest lectures on the topic, even though her area of specialty had been computer-mediated communication. Brenda J. Allen, “Feminist Standpoint Theory: A Black Woman’s (Re)View of Organizational Socialization,” Communication Studies 47, no. 4 (1996): 257–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979609368482.

30 Chakravartty et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite.”