Alexander on flattening difference and form

Jonathan Alexander’s the CCCC blog is a great reflection on the ways in which readers and writers “flatten difference.” While teaching Judd Winick’s graphic novel Pedro and Me

I became concerned about what my students were taking away from their encounter with the text and our discussions about it. While students appreciated the friendship that is depicted in the book between a straight and a gay man, they also spoke of that friendship—the subject of Winick’s book—in terms that erased the critical differences between the two: Judd and Pedro loved one another as friends because they realized they were more like one another than not; Pedro’s homosexuality didn’t matter to Judd and wasn’t relevant to their friendship; our commonalities are more important than our differences.

These were the ways in which students talked and wrote about the book. I began to realize that much of my experience in teaching about difference, particularly texts that grapple with queer differences had resulted in much the same lesson: difference doesn’t matter. Curiously, the subtitle of Winick’s book, “Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned,” seem to evoke the “moral of the story,” gesturing towards the seeming necessity of coming up with an “answer,” a “lesson” about the encounter with difference. For my students, what’s important about queers—and what we can learn to tolerate—is that they are, after all, deep down, just like the rest of us. We’re all just basically human. As I thought more about this “flattening effect”—the erasure of queer difference as an important dimension of experience—I began to realize that I was seeing such not just in my students’ response to difference; the invitation to flatten differences seemed built into the structural apparatus that many of us use in approaching and teaching texts that grapple with difference. . . .

[…A] significant part of my concern with relying on narration of difference has to do with what I call the “flattening effect,” or the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) erasures of difference that occur when narrating stories of the “other.” Such a “flattening effect” arises out of the unexamined assumption that “understanding” and then “tolerance” or even “respect” are predicated on “identity.” By “identity,” I mean not just the acknowledgement that other identities exist, but that those identities are, in essence, somehow identical to your own. Whether you’re black, gay, Latino, disabled, or whatnot, you are still fundamentally human, concerned with similar core issues and very likely sharing core values, if not specific beliefs. Attaining “respect,” then, means that many of us have our differences essentially elided by an overriding narrative of shared humanity.

Concerned with narrative closure and this flattening affect, Alexander asks what type of writing assignments we might ask for in the writing classroom. Drawing on Levinas, Butler, and Robert McRuer, he writes:

Acknowledging the messiness, the unruly disorder of bodies and desires that don’t quite fit into the norm, that refuse simply to be tolerated and accepted as the “same,” means that we may have to question some of our fundamental compositional practices—such as training students to write the “composed” essay that neatly presents points, weighs various positions, and argues through to a rational conclusion. Instead, we may have to acknowledge the points where our knowledge of one another fails to be coherent—where we don’t know.

I am constantly impressed with Alexander’s work, and I especially like how, in this post, he links textual coherence to the closure (“flattening”) of difference — an issue we both agreed upon at 4C’s when I stated there seemed to be some connection between Composition’s drive for what Geoffrey Sirc calls tagmemics (strict adherence to form) and a gendered regime (a drive for closure and coherence; perhaps a “death drive,” but I am not familiar enough with Freud or queer theory to advance this claim, and it’s probably a misuse of the term).

I recently and finally got around to reading Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage a few weeks ago, something I had been wanting to read since I started this blog. I thought the book was fantastic for what it was saying so many years ago, and I was struck by the logic of the medium being the message/massage. Alexander brings up narrative closure, and I was thinking about the novel as I read Bohjalian’s Tran-Sister Radio for class a few weeks ago. Is queer culture incommensurable with the form of a novel — the narrative arc, the closure at the end, the romantic closing off of possibilities, the tendency toward romance?

I am looking for a topic for my project for 584: rhetoric, identity, and writing. I’ve got about a dozen ideas floating in my head, but perhaps I should add this one to the list.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that part of my thinking on the novel was influenced by Professor Christopher Looby’s (UCLA) visit here last week.