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Contents

Introduction

History of Abstinence Education in the United States and Utah’s Sex Education

Methods of Queer Linguistics and CDA: The Construction of Heteronormative Temporality

The Introductory PowerPoint: Heteronormative Parameters of Utah’s Sex Education Material

Junior High (JH) and High School (HS) Resource Guides: Heteronormativity vs. “Bad Sex”

Binaries: Fractal Recursivity and Erasure

Future vs. Sex

Conclusion

Works Cited

About the Author

Introduction

Scholars in many disciplines, including rhetorical studies, have engaged in the study of language and sexuality, though the intersections of queer studies and critical discourse analysis are not yet discernible in our field (Alexander and Rhodes; Alexander and Wallace). Recognizing the work of interdisciplinary queer studies scholars, we have seen the emergence of queer linguistics, a poststructuralist approach which is surfacing in recent academic work on gender and sexual identities (Chavéz; Bucholtz and Hall; Leap; Motschenbacher). Queer linguistics focuses on “the linguistic construction of heteronormativity,” or the discursive construction of heterosexuality as normal and natural (Motschenbacher 151); this methodology seeks to foreground discursive practices of sexuality to disentangle their power operations and denaturalize normative processes. Aligned with queer linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is also post-structural, grounded in the idea that language is inextricable from social and cultural processes (Fairclough and Wodak). CDA is distinct from discourse analysis because of its dedicated aim to critique and transform problematic social structures (Fairclough and Wodak; Titscher et al.), though queer linguistics has not always engaged CDA methods (Leap).

In utilizing explicit CDA tools within a queer linguistics framework to analyze data, I aim to bring together these two strands of investigative thought, strengthening the rigor of both frameworks. One particular criticism of critical discourse analysis, which is the inability to analyze discourse that is absent (Blommaert), invites space for queer linguistics to offer rhetorical scholars a methodology to enrich the study of language and power. In using a queer linguistics lens on normative language practices, queer absences are highlighted, helping language scholars to recognize and advocate for non-normative spaces and subjectivities.

Queer linguistics is particularly valuable for the study of sex education materials, which may often further the rhetoric of heteronormativity at the expense of marginalized identities (Hobaika and Kwon; McNeill). In this article, I utilize queer linguistics with CDA methods drawn from linguist Michael Halliday to examine three of Utah’s State Office of Education’s high school and junior high abstinence-based sex education materials from 2016 (before they were removed from the website). Utah is a unique site of study in regard to sex education, since 90% of the state’s legislature is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and heteronormative family structures are explicit in LDS values: “God made it pretty clear that families are important when he created Adam and Eve. The Holy Bible calls them ‘man and…wife’ (Genesis 2:25), and the first commandment God gave them was to have children” (The Church). Though there are other states with a majority of religious lawmakers, Utah is the most religiously homogenous state, with 55% of the people identifying as LDS. Laws are often aligned with religious history or beliefs, from alcohol restrictions to polygamy amendments (Pew). A study of Utah’s sex education offers us insights that consider the larger context of religious culture on state policy, and the invisible and pervasive nature of heteronormativity.

Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini discuss Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s argument (Warner coined the word “heteronormativity”) in Love and Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance: “As Berlant and Warner argue, part of what makes heteronormativity so powerful is that it depends on and works through a set of unconscious assumptions. That is, heterosexuality forms the basic idiom of everyday life” (28). A queering of critical discourse analysis exposes the rhetoric of heteronormativity in the presence and patterns, as well as the absences, in language.

In the following analysis, I will use 2016 curriculum from the Utah State Office of Education website, specifically materials which explicate “Human Sexuality Law and Policy.” The three documents I analyze are the single introductory PowerPoint for teachers from the required “2015 Online Class” for teachers on “Human Sexuality Education Review,” the junior high resource guide (JH) and the high school resource guide (HS) for parents and teachers on teaching human sexuality. The resource guides state that they were revised in 2006; they were possibly unchanged through the spring of 2016. In examining the linguistic formations in these materials, we can understand how sex education in Utah has historically and recently developed in relation to the state’s heteronormative ideology.

I demonstrate that heteronormative temporality is built into the language ideology of the sex education materials, a construction that becomes visible through “lexical cohesion,” repetitive patterns of words and semantic meaning (Halliday and Hasan 318-20), and three processes: iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. “Heteronormative temporality” (HT) clearly pervades this curriculum, emphasizing family and character development. HT focuses on normative time frames of institutions such as marriage and traditional family structures, with emphasis on the future, longevity, and the maturation of the adolescent into adulthood, denigrating other lifestyles (Halberstam 5-7). People may participate in language ideology when they notice differences in the ways others communicate—they rationalize and justify linguistic differences with ideologies that explain the source and meaning of differences, often relying on stereotypes (Irvine and Gal 35-36).

The act of differentiation often reflects a move to glorify or demean a social group. As seen in the lexical patterns I found in the data, positive language is associated with the language of heteronormative temporality, and negative language is associated with identities outside HT ideology. In interpreting the patterns, I utilize Irvine and Gal’s concepts of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure, which aid in ideological recognition or misrecognition of linguistic complexities (403). In iconization, the linguistic feature is seen as an essential feature of the social group. Fractal recursivity is the repetition of binaries—branching out from the main binary, more binary structures proliferate and often imitate and reiterate the original dichotomy presented in that specific context. Recursions of one main binary multiply in the language of the sex education materials, particularly the dichotomy of “future versus sex,” which will be explained in further detail. Lastly, erasure backgrounds or ignores elements that do not fit within the ideology.

In my analysis, I argue that language ideology attaches moral value to heteronormative identity in these documents. Heteronormative language is naturalized and its opposition is demonized; both are recognizable, but identities that exist outside the binary are ignored or backgrounded. This absence is magnified through the lens of queer linguistics. For queer rhetorical studies, researchers may find queer linguistics paired with concrete CDA tools invaluable in foregrounding obscured or erased identities.

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Contents

Introduction

The Multilingual Writing Classroom: A Contact Zone

Negotiating Literate Identities in the Contact Zone

Contact Zone-Based Composition Pedagogy

The Critical Autoethnography Project

Conclusion

References

About the Author

Appendix

Introduction

I remember sitting in the orientation for graduate student teachers who would be working in the writing program. The majority of participants were first-time teachers slated for the “mainstream” sections which, at our university in the southeastern US, were largely composed of domestic, white, monolingual English-speaking students. The small handful of us in the MA program in applied linguistics and TESOL already had a year of experience co-teaching the EAL (English as an Additional Language) sections that were “intended and required for international students who are non-native speakers of English” (“Course Descriptions and Outcomes”).

At the meeting, everyone was given the same materials–textbooks, syllabi, training–regardless of which course we were going to teach. I remember receiving the syllabus that included the series of projects for the course, thinking about how clear it was, based on the entire orientation and the resources with which we were provided, that everything was geared towards the mainstream course. Those of us teaching the EAL sections had support from our own faculty, but the writing program did not explicitly provide any unique preparation for our work in this different context.

I tried to rationalize that this made some sense given the fact that this was the first year that the EAL teachers had ever been required to attend this orientation and that there were many, many more mainstream sections than EAL ones. Even so, as I read the materials, I thought about my own research and coursework and felt compelled to engage in praxis, “when theory and practice inform and transform each other” (Berlin 76), and acknowledge the unique socio-linguistic, -cultural, and -political nuances of the classroom I was about to enter. In the writing that follows, I attempt to unpack contact zone theory (Pratt 34) in regard to multilingual writing pedagogy and demonstrate how I updated a foundational writing assignment prompt to reflect contact zone principles.

Through this work, I aim to empower other graduate student teachers to practice autonomy in their curriculum design, advocate for critical curriculum design in EAL writing classes, and encourage the use of culturally-relevant, decolonial pedagogies in all kinds of writing courses.

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Contents

Introduction

Rhetorical Style in the SP Genre

Methods

Results and Analysis

Conclusion

References

About the Author

Introduction

The statement of purpose (SP), also known as a personal statement or PS in the United States (Barton, Ariail, & Smith, 2004; Bekins, Huckin, & Kijak, 2004; Ding, 2007) and a motivation letter in some other places (Lopez-Ferrero & Bach, 2016), is an important student writing genre (Samraj & Monk, 2008) and academic self-promotional genre (Bhatia, 1993). However, we should note here that the SP genre is different from other academic writing or self-promotional genres in some ways. For example, in the SP genre, the applicants are not under any obligation to follow any stringent rule, structure, and format like research abstracts and job application letters (Ding, 2007). In most cases, the applicants are not given any substantive instructions to write their SPs, and the SPs are shaped by “local cultural values and national academic traditions” (Swales & Feak, 1994, p. 229). The SP plays an important role in graduate applications (Ding, 2007), and it helps in initiating a relationship with a particular unknown audience or discourse community (for example, an admission committee). According to Miller’s (1984) genre definition, the SP genre can be understood as follows: the SP is written in response to a situation that recurs in society, such as applying for admission to graduate school. This rhetorical situation further gives rise to an exigence (an individual’s need to submit an application package), which in turn motivates an individual to engage in social action (such as writing an SP). That action mediates private intention (the individual’s desire to gain admission and make a better future for himself or herself) and a public need (a university’s need to recruit students and a society’s need to educate its citizens) (Malone & Wright, 2018, p. 124).

Previous scholars have focused on the SP genre primarily to analyze the rhetorical moves and steps—one type of structural analysis—used by applicants to achieve their goals in their SPs (Barton et al., 2004; Bekins et al., 2004; Brown, 2004; Ding, 2007; Henry & Roseberry, 2001; Lopez-Ferrero & Bach, 2016; Samraj & Monk, 2008). A few scholars conducted a stylistic analysis on other promotional genres, such as grant proposals (Khadka, 2014; Tseng, 2011). However, no researchers have tried solely to understand applicants’ rhetorical style (the closest equivalent is elocutio in Latin, which translates to “speaking out,” or lexis in Greek, which translates to “thought” and “word”), which is not only ornamenting (Kennedy, 2007, p. 197) or “the dress[ing] of thought” (Corbett & Connors, 1999, p. 338), but also “putting ideas into words” (Cunningham, Malone, & Rothschild, 2019, p. 160), in SPs.

Stylistic analysis is a component of genre analysis; genre analysis is concerned with two main aspects: firstly, common and conventional textual features contributing to the pedagogical understanding of genre in terms of form and function and secondly, “socio-cultural” and “cognitive constraints” prevalent in a specific field (Bhatia, 1993, p. 16). The stylistic analysis is one way of analyzing textual features primarily focusing on lexico-grammatical features (i.e., primarily a statistical analysis of grammatical features and common language usage in a genre), text-patterning (i.e., an analysis of syntax or language choices), and structural interpretation of the text genre (i.e., structural interpretation of moves and steps in a genre) (Casañ-Pitarch & Calvo-Ferrer, 2015, p. 77). In other words, a rhetorical stylistic analysis reveals how language works in a system (in my study, the SP genre) and what kinds of meanings a certain type of text conveys (Jeffries & McIntyre, 2010). With an aim to inform prospective graduate students on how to employ an effective style in their SPs in order to persuade the admission committee and to explore the SP genre rhetorically or specifically to analyze the SP texts through the interpretation of language (Simpson, 2004), I attempted to determine my participants’ use of rhetorical style in their SPs. Because stylistic analysis might reveal the good qualities of the writing (Li, 2009), I assumed that my analysis will help identify the effective stylistic features in my successful SP sample. Additionally, I hope that my study will inspire the educators in technical communication and composition to integrate this genre into their courses; students will learn through either SP analysis or SP writing how to use style as a persuasive strategy to influence an audience.

I conducted a stylistic analysis of the SPs submitted by former and current graduate students at a public research university in the United States. They wrote their SPs to gain admission to a Master’s (MS) program in technical communication. The university does not offer a doctoral degree in technical communication, but it offers both Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in technical communication. To understand the role of style in their SPs, I looked for a limited set of stylistic markers (personal pronouns, contractions, sentence length and variety, and paragraph length) as I analyzed each SP sentence by sentence. I organize this article in the following way. I first provide my style-related literature review on the SP genre. Then, I explain the approaches taken for analyzing style and discuss the findings from that analysis. Finally, I conclude this article with a summary of the major stylistic trends found in the SPs and suggestions for future research on the SP genre.

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Contents

Introduction

Outlining the STOP AAPI HATE Initiative

Linking the STOP AAPI HATE Reports and Cultural Rhetorics

Assembling a Cultural Rhetorics Methodology: Decolonial, Indigenous, and Feminist Theory

Critiquing the STOP AAPI HATE Reports

Reimagining Future Options for STOP AAPI HATE Data

Imagining a Cultural Rhetorics-Informed Future for Technical Communication

References

About the Author

Introduction

At the start of 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak quickly became a critical international issue, sowing fear as the disease spread indiscriminately into communities around the world. As the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic, the general public began to shift its focus towards the site of the initial outbreak: the Chinese city of Wuhan. This widely-accepted fact of COVID-19’s Chinese origin quickly morphed into a central point of racial blame in popular media conversations. In their initial COVID-19 coverage, many news outlets initially complemented their articles with images of Chinese citizens wearing protective face masks, even if the content itself had nothing to do with China. In his press briefings, United States President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” before explicitly blaming China as the pandemic began to negatively impact the U.S. 

Historically, the Trump administration’s negative treatment of China mirrored the U.S.’s xenophobic attitude towards Chinese immigrant railroad workers in the late 1800s. According to Reny and Barreto (2020), “Chinese immigrants have been stereotyped as culturally exotic and as dirty acute vectors of disease” (p. 7). Due in part to these inaccurate stereotypes, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law to bar an immigrant population based on its ethnicity. Additionally, the nationally-backed Geary Act of 1892 renewed the terms of the Exclusion Act and required all Chinese Americans to carry proof of U.S. residence. If a Chinese immigrant failed to produce this proof, the immigrant would face either deportation or a sentence of hard labor. Both of these restrictive laws, not fully repealed until 1943, serve as examples of longstanding institutionalized racism against Chinese immigrants in the U.S. The current COVID-19 pandemic has reignited this anti-Chinese, contagion-based xenophobia in America. With anti-Chinese rhetoric quickly being disseminated and normalized by media and authority figures, all AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) are once again becoming targets for racial abuse.

As an Asian American graduate student and full-time office worker, I experienced this anti-AAPI attitude firsthand when a worker in my building explicitly attributed my small cough to the “Chinese coronavirus,” encouraging their other coworkers to avoid me for the rest of the day. Although this was a singular occurrence, I remember still feeling hurt, lost, and alone days after the encounter. Thankfully, I was taking my first graduate course in cultural rhetorics at this time, where we routinely discussed the field’s four core pillars: stories, relationality, constellation, and decoloniality. Inspired by these conversations, I began thinking about digitally telling my own story, or sharing my own experience within an online community. My search for this space eventually guided me to the STOP AAPI HATE website, a digital activist initiative that gives victims of anti-AAPI rhetoric a chance to share their stories with the public via submitted “incident reports.” On a mostly consistent schedule, STOP AAPI HATE releases a summative technical document which outlines trends within submitted incident reports, while also sharing selected AAPI accounts within those reports.

In this article, I assert that the STOP AAPI HATE reports are technical communication documents that engage with the pillars of cultural rhetorics by sharing AAPI stories and by giving voice to resistance that opposes dominant anti-AAPI narratives in coronavirus-related media. Using these pillars, along with decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist theory, to inform my methodology, I then critically examine how STOP AAPI HATE gathers and presents data in these reports, explaining how these current practices unknowingly limit user access to valuable AAPI stories. Ultimately, by suggesting solutions that reimagine the presentation of STOP AAPI HATE summative report data, I will demonstrate how a cultural rhetorics approach can bolster both the accessibility and reach of technical communication documents.

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Contents

Introduction

The Multimodal Turn

Composing to Assemble Publics

The Retold Histories of Clemson

The Process: Making Documentary Videos in the FYC Classroom

The Retold Histories of Clemson: Three Documentary Films

Behind the Scenes: Access, Accessibility, & Audiences

Conclusions

References

Appendix A: Assignment Prompt for The Retold Histories of Clemson Project

About the Author

Introduction

“Picture” this: a trio of your students huddled around a camera, aiming it toward a street of commuting cars. Another small group of students whispers behind a laptop about a script they are composing collaboratively, and a third group of students tests the lighting next to a greenscreen assembly they’ve put together in the hallway. You, perusing the aisles of this classroom, have left your students to their own business for the class session. They have a goal to work toward, yes, but the path they take to reach that goal is up to them. They’re hardly on their own, of course: you, their instructor, have put the tools in their hands, even showed them how these tools work and how they can be used to create something entirely new, but at a certain point you decided it was time to turn them loose, to step back and sink into that feared “unstructured time” you’ve spent your teaching career anxiously avoiding. But, you sit down, you listen, you hear the conversations happening: how do we solve this problem? How do we film that? Is this music the right choice? What do we need to do to accomplish our goals? What are we trying to say with this film we are making?