Queer theory posits that identity, much like the act of writing, is fluid. Ever-changing. It requires grappling with boundaries and definitions that might have never been under consideration before. If I had any takeaways from this article (with which I struggled—it just felt so heady at times), it was this. I initially started writing this blog post as some way to connect this lesson with the other realizations I’ve had over the course of our class, but I found myself continuously led back to one idea: writing memoir.
I know I’ve made it a habit of including anecdotes with my blog posts. To be honest: I struggled with this one. It reminded me a bit of our first reading from Lauer—a lot of ideas that I agreed with, but did not know what to do with. I did not want to just write about being queer and being a writer, because that did not feel in line with the spirit of the article. I ended up reflecting on part of the memoir I had written in a class taught by Edi Giunta. While the content was about me being bisexual, I ended up realizing that the act of writing it was in itself pedagogically queer.
If identity is fluid, memoir is the act of capturing your identity at one point in time. Past that, you must decide which identity you are writing from. You may be writing about your seven year old self, but whose voice are you using? The child version of you, or the version of you now, who has experienced more and knows more? How do those identities live in the same piece? What do you do with the inherent tension between them?
Memoir is also an act of grappling with your perceived identity. When you write memoir, it is your perception of who you are and what you have experienced. However, we cannot discount the fact that you have also been perceived and experienced. It is a constant negotiation of truth, and is just one of the many distinct layers of identity and experience we have. If you remember an experience one way and someone else remembers it differently, you have every right to write it as you remember. However, you must always be prepared to have it seen another way. My parents do not know I am queer. To them, I am as straight and cis as one can be. It does not help that my partner is, in fact, a straight cis man. That is the identity I have chosen to take up around them. While writing this memoir—and subsequently having it published online—I had to reconcile with the fact that there were two different spaces for me and my identities, and that there was a very real possibility that they might cross over. Still, I decided it was worth it.
As a genre, memoir is also well-equipped to discover what is possible in and out of its boundaries. “Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom” pulls from Ki Namaste and their argument that heterosexuality must exist for us to be able to understand queer theory. The boundaries of one form the definition of the other. That means we can, as writers, use queer theory and memoir as a space to play and explore. My favorite memoir, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, is a beautiful example of this. Not only does Machado use its subject matter (confronting the lack of domestic abuse narratives in lesbian stories, even though it is a grim reality) to question what is normal, but she also uses form as a way to push against norm. In the Dream House’s chapters are each based on different styles, genres, and tropes (ie., “Dream House as Horror”, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure”, or “Dream House as Famous Last Words”). By acknowledging what is the norm, writers are given the tools to push against boundaries.
My attempt to write about my queer memoir, in the end, was not just an attempt at inclusivity, thank god. There are also so many ideas that we’ve discussed in class that I see reflected in this article: writing as social commentary, the power of discovery, how shame robs writers. It feels good to be able to have a throughline in places I didn’t expect.
