Call for Proposals

Computers and Writing 2K Conference

Special Strand:
"Queer Studies"

Strand Coordinators:
Keith Dorwick (kdorwick@uic.edu)
Alison Regan (alison@hawaii.edu)

May 25-28, 2000 Fort Worth, TX
Hosted by Texas Woman's University
Dene Grigar, Chair; Hugh Burns and John Barber, Co-Chairs
http://www.eaze.net/~jfbarber/cw2k/bridge.html

Deadline date: October 15, 1999

Computers & Writing (C&W), an annual, national conference, is actively soliciting proposals for a special strand entitled, "Queer Studies," for its upcoming conference, "Evolution, Revolution, and Implementation: Computers and Writing for Global Change."

Increasingly, Queer Studies is becoming a known and important part of the academy: Students are self-identifying in the classroom; courses and majors and exam areas are appearing in the catalogs; faculty are being hired who are openly self-identified as queer; of those, many produce work that openly addresses the issues raised by the presence of gay, lesbian, queer and bisexual students in the classroom, or of queer communities that are worthy of reflection and study. More importantly, some of that scholarship has not only been important in its own right, but provided a place for a rich outpouring of theory.

But what of our field? Certainly such scholarship is not unknown to us: Computers and Composition recently published a special issue on gender edited by Lisa Gerrard which included Randal Woodlawn's "'I plan to be 10": Online Literacy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students," and references to a number of authors who have worked in the field of Queer Studies. Harriet Malinowitz' dissertation, "Lesbian And Gay Reality And The Writing Class" (Rhetoric), was one of a handful of dissertations in the field; she also has a number of articles out and published Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities in 1995. Computers and Composition has published some articles containing queer content in the past.

However, the number of queer-content articles produced by scholars identified with the subdiscipline of computers and writing or which appeared in journals read by individuals working in that subdiscipline may be surprisingly small when compared to the relatively huge numbers of articles produced that may be counted as simply "queer." A search of the MLA bibliography indicated that were 1,836 articles that had the keywords "gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer." Of those only a handful had clearly identifiable queer content related to the composition classroom or to the use of computers. Of course, the use of any bibliography is suspect: what the indexer doesn't record is lost. But clearly we need to do more work.

Thus, proposals addressing issues relating to Queer Studies (including those of questioning or curious folk, two categories that may not appear in gay and lesbian studies but which may be of particular interest in view of how the Internet is used as a resource by queer youth) from a variety of theoretical perspectives are being sought. Issues that may include, but are not limited to:

• coming out issues
• teaching queer students
• queer communities and computers
• the teaching of queer texts in composition courses
• queers and creative writing
• queer expressive writing
• queer argumentation
• queer biography and literature
• being a queer teacher
• connecting to other political and radical movements
• queers and the politicization of disabilities
• queers and disease, etc.

For more general information about the conference, visit the CW2K website. (www.eaze.net/~jfbarber/cw2k/bridge.html).