Composition Studies

On Rachel Robinson-Zetzer’s office door, a postcard reads, “Q***r Teachers are Living Proof of Q***r Futures.” She looks at it daily, wondering what that promise means for her students—and whether they feel it, too.

In “The Q***r Compositionist Has Questions: Beginnings, Imaginings, and Futures,” Robinson-Zetzer follows that uncertainty into her teaching. Her students’ openness about their q***rness gives her hope, even as she fears for them amid anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.

Those concerns enter the writing classroom. Returning to Harriet Malinowitz’s work, Robinson-Zetzer considers whose identities are privileged and how fear of rejection can shape what students feel able to express. The students and teachers have changed; many of the questions remain familiar.

She leaves those questions open, recognizing something she also asks of beginning writers: a willingness to work without knowing where their thinking will lead. “Sitting in the unknown allows space for surprise, for new voices to be heard, for joy.”

What room does your classroom leave for identities—and futures—still taking shape?

Read Rachel Robinson-Zetzer’s contribution now: https://bit.ly/54-1_16
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“That was the most vulgar wedding I’ve ever been to!” A friend offers this verdict at Timothy Oleksiak’s wedding. Oleksiak is proud.

His WWA contribution, “On the Matter of Mattering,” begins with that celebration and distinguishes writing about q***r experience from composing q***rly. Pleasure, camp, and deliberate silliness can shape how writers invent and arrange, helping them discover ways of being that haven’t yet taken shape.

That freedom to experiment sits alongside a desire to belong and be understood. Oleksiak asks editors to seek out, develop, and publish q***r composition. When we asked what teachers might bring into their classrooms, he turned to the trust that makes such writing possible:

“Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not just about writing q***rtext. It’d be for writing teachers to develop conditions where student-writers trust that q***rtexts would be something they can see themselves doing.”

What would help students trust that q***r ways of composing have a place in your classroom?

Read “On the Matter of Mattering” now: https://bit.ly/54-1_15
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A walk through Ireland with a donkey might seem an unlikely place to begin a conversation about writing classrooms.

For Albert C. DeCiccio, Kevin O’Hara’s journey with Missie offers a way to think about the company writers need. In his FEN Blog essay, he connects parallel working and body doubling to the care students practice in his writing-center practicum: checking on absent classmates, responding to drafts, and supporting one another as tutors.

Those everyday practices lead to a larger question about education organized around individual achievement and accumulating grades. Drawing on Tara Yosso’s community cultural wealth, DeCiccio considers how students’ knowledge, relationships, and aspirations can sustain a community—and how that care can extend to other writers.

What forms of care help writers keep going?

Read “Donkeys, Parallel Working, and Body Doubles,” freely available on the FEN Blog.

Link: https://bit.ly/FEN-Blog-01

Q***r composition, Violet Livingston writes, has grown “like a mycelial network, branching in all directions.”

For Livingston, figuring out where that network might go starts with knowing where we are. At Landmark College, she teaches neurodivergent students in a small first-year writing class where the same five-paragraph essay can feel limiting to one student and reassuring to another. “We are gentle here.”

That classroom is also where she reads Octavia Butler. Butler looked at the problems people were already neglecting and gave them thirty years to grow. Yet she called the work of looking ahead—of discerning possibilities and offering warnings—an act of hope.

Livingston carries that hope into q***r composition: “How much of our q***r brilliance has been spent arguing for our right to exist?” Critique stays. Her question is what else becomes possible once argument and critique are no longer the field’s primary modes.

Her answer begins with the shape of the field itself. A mycelial network has no single trunk or tidy genealogy. It grows through connections: elders and younger scholars, q***r-of-color critique, citational justice, divergent viewpoints. And when the field branches, its writing can branch too.

Livingston describes her own writing as “a scrapbook of thoughts half-glued onto the page.” When that writing is “purposely misunderstood or deemed illegible,” she says, she has the most empathy for the neurodivergent students she teaches.

Her closing ask is aimed squarely at journals: keep making room for textuality, speculation, lyricism, and poetics. These are, she writes, “resources we will need to keep hanging on.”

What forms should our field make more room for?

Read the full response: https://bit.ly/54-1_14
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When Erin Green asks what q***r composition is willing to do, she isn’t asking hypothetically.

She begins at the University of Oklahoma, where a controversy over an anti-trans student essay ended with one graduate instructor fired and another removed from the classroom. Green reads the episode through Eric Darnell Pritchard’s idea of literacy normativity: writing and rhetoric used to mark people as other and do harm.

Green is also tired of being told to wait. Drawing on Fannie Lou Hamer, Brittney Cooper, and Martin Luther King Jr., she places that impatience in a longer history of marginalized people being told justice will come eventually, if only they wait. “My life is on the line, so my patience is wearing thin.”

What she wants from q***r composition is theory that can leave the page: organizing, advocacy, mutual aid, and work alongside q***r and trans activist movements. “Our q***r scholarship is only possible because of these activists and organizers,” she writes.

That demand reaches the classroom. Green told us, “We must resist pedagogical approaches that encourage us to be apolitical.” Drawing on Laura Greenfield, she warns that ethically neutral writing instruction can sharpen hateful persuasion: “this is no longer a ‘could.’” For Green, a “better writer” must learn to recognize and critique systems of oppression, then act on that understanding.

Green asks what q***r composition has done to show trans scholars that the field will “not just include us but fight with us.” That solidarity may carry risk. Protecting trans people now, she argues, is “worth the risk.”

What would moving from inclusion to solidarity look like in your classroom or program?

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/54-1_13

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When Seth E. Davis interviewed for a job at LeMoyne-Owen College, an oil portrait of Dr. Juanita V. Williamson presided over the conference table. He had never heard of her. His first questions were simple: Who is this? What did she do to deserve an archive?

Davis, a Black q***r literacy scholar, recognizes himself in this forgetting. "I also think part of me wrote off the contributions of HBCU professors myself," he writes. The assumption reads differently now that he teaches a 6/6 load while trying to publish with limited resources.

Williamson had been challenging assumptions about race, region, and language well before the field adopted Students' Right to Their Own Language in 1974. Her position was controversial, in Davis's word. He describes her leaning away from prescriptive styles of teaching writing toward descriptive ones while still teaching standard English, and being ardently against the 1974 adoption of the resolution, which she believed would inherently disenfranchise non-standard speech styles.

Davis describes her work as accessible without necessarily being appreciated. Baddour also told him that in 2013 Williamson's archives were set to be discarded before LeMoyne-Owen professors Dr. Juanita Bass and Dr. Charles "Brownie" Moore saved them.

Davis understands his own recovery work through Black feminist q***r literacies of memory: q***r ancestry, chosen family, and reclamation. What he describes is an intellectual kinship. "Frankly," he writes, "the shared experience of being Black and leaving Memphis to attend graduate school at a PWI in the Midwest almost makes us blood related." He often sees himself, he writes, as her "distant nephew doing work on campus."

He calls recovery and reclamation a q***r composition practice, and returns to Memphis asking for more stories of day-to-day life, beyond the big names and familiar headlines.

Whose work in your corner of the field should more of us know?

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/54-1_12

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Six colleagues sent Joshua Barsczewski some version of the same professional obituary: the college essay is dead.

His response is not exactly mourning.

In “Q***ring Composition after Gen AI,” Barsczewski begins with something large language models do remarkably well: produce statistically probable language. That makes them particularly adept at reproducing familiar academic genres, moves, and prose styles.

And that raises a more interesting question than how to keep students from using AI: what have our assignments been rewarding all along?

Q***r composition has been asking versions of that question for decades. If academic success depends on reproducing recognizable forms and normative expectations, Gen AI may be exposing a problem that predates the technology.

Barsczewski’s alternative is not an AI-proof assignment. It’s a more expansive sense of what writing might do: genre refusal, embodied and performative writing, hybrid multimodal texts, collaborative composition. Not novelty for its own sake, but writing that makes the rules themselves available for reconsideration.

Or, as he puts it: perhaps it’s time to cultivate the improbable.

Where does your assignment reward coloring inside the lines?

***rComposition

Penguins. Generative AI. A Memphis archive.

In 54.1’s Where We Are, six scholars take up the present and future of q***r composition—and arrive by very different routes. Joshua Barsczewski turns toward the improbable. Seth E. Davis looks to recovery and the archive. Erin Green asks what theory is for when q***r and trans scholarship is under attack. Violet Livingston brings Octavia Butler into the writing classroom. Timothy Oleksiak considers how q***rness gets composed into the world. And Rachel Robinson-Zetzer returns to questions that have followed the field for decades.

We’ll spend the next few weeks reading each response more closely. For now, consider these six places to start.

Which line are you still thinking about?

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In 54.1, Where We Are turns to the present and future of q***r composition.

Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes published “Q***r: An Impossible Subject for Composition” in JAC in 2011. Fifteen years later, editors Zachary Beare and Jacob Babb return to that essay with five questions for six scholars: Joshua Barsczewski, Seth E. Davis, Erin Green, Violet Livingston, Timothy Oleksiak, and Rachel Robinson-Zetzer.

The questions range widely: how q***r composition has changed and where it might go; what makes the work riskier now; what new technologies are changing; whose voices the field has left out; and what q***rness asks us to reconsider about rhetoric itself.

The answers range wider still—through generative AI, place and memory, precarity and q***r life, classrooms and pedagogy, genre, pleasure, refusal, and the possibilities of composing otherwise.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll spend time with each of the six responses.

Which of the editors’ five questions would you want to answer?

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