What’s Queer Multimodality Now?
Gavin P. Johnson, Texas Christian University
Part 1: With too many examples to list •••
As a teacher-scholar, I have long been invested in the rhetorical possibilities afforded when entangling queer thinking and multimodal composing, especially with digital media. In my dissertation, aptly titled Queer Possibilities in Digital Media Composing, I argued,
Such entanglements call us to recognize the inherent affordances and constraints of digital media and multimodal texts…as tactics that can work on and against systems of power, including the neoliberal university…There are queer possibilities in digital media. The material-discursive work of composing digital media is not yet completely disciplined by accountability logics regardless of sustained attempts from institutionalized forces. (Johnson, 2020, p. 10)
While I still feel a bit of queer optimism about the potential of digital media and multimodal composing (Johnson, 2022), I have grown more concerned about the practices, people, and technologies that link and are linked together making these promises actionable. From the stories we tell multimodally to the stories we tell about multimodality, it is difficult to navigate what has become––or, perhaps, what is left––of these queer possibilities.
Indeed, while multimodality does work in the world that is materially consequential (Mendoza et al. 2024), that work has not always proven beneficial for multiply marginalized communities. This is true of queer multimodal scholarship that has often recreated the Eurocentric, post-structuralist “gay” and “lesbian” neoliberal subjects displaced from the intersections of race, class, and non-Western embodied experiences (Prasad, 2019). The discursive gaps––genealogical erasures?––that emerge leave us with excellent scholarship highlighting multimodal justice and digital activism but do not offer us a praxis of rhetorical action that defy classical understandings of author–text–audience.
How, for example, do our theories prepare us for memes that actually rally white supremacists; or, the right-wing podcasting ecosystem (echosystem?) that actively spreads mis/disinformation; or, the grotesque use of doctored images fueling anti-abortion arguments; or, the “feminist” pink pussy hats and memeification of Ruth Bader Ginsberg recentering white women in conversations about bodily autonomy when data show that Black and brown communities are disproportionately impacted; or, the protests against the Trump administration depicting queer sexualities to critique his relationship with Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin; or, the vocally online trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS) and “LGB without the T” movements happily rainbow washing capitalism while advocating for the removal of trans elders from national monuments, archives, and historical retellings?
With too many examples to list, we’re faced with the question: Have our theories of multimodal queerness/queer multimodality prepared us for the material critique and on-the-ground action that needs to be aimed both beyond and within our so called movement/field/community/coalition?
I am inspired by the essential essay and special issue “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” in which Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz (2005) queried “the utility of queer as an engaged mode of critical inquiry” (pp. 1–2). They wondered aloud (in writing) if queer studies could––after a decade and a half (or so) of academic deployment––address globalization, an “infinite ‘war on terrorism,’” and queer liberalism while also leveraging its privileged position to attend to the intersections of “race, gender, class, nationality and religion, as well as sexuality” (p. 4) and not “sound like a metanarrative about the domestic affairs of white homosexuals” (p. 12). Pairing this questioning of queer’s utility with the select examples provided above suggests we must interrogate multimodality’s queer claims. From my concerned position, I ask: what’s queer multimodality now?
Part 2: A Collage of Quotes on Queer’s Multimodality/Multimodality’s Queerness •••
“That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1994, pp. 7–8).
“We understand queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves. As such, it is a composing that is not a composing, a call in many ways to acts of de- and un- and re-composition. Such ‘composing’ consists of a complex mix of affect and negotiation. On the one hand, queer composing is a demand born out of anger, resentment, and pain…At the same time, our ‘full, nasty, complicated lives’ often require acts of de-composition, of un-composing and re-composing dominant narratives of sexuality, gender, and identity…We work and rework those dominant forms, both to counter and to assert, to say no to the damage done to us but also to use that damage to make liveable lives.” (Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander, 2015, “Composing while queer” section)
“Imagine the kinds of beings we might dream ourselves into becoming when we do not have to adhere to such narrow templates to even be given acknowledgment. Imagine that. Hmm, imagine that. My, my, my…” (Marquis Bey, 2022, p. 228).
“Queer/trans theories offer one way for arresting our familiar, print-based logics of reading and analysis, and encourage us to embody a difference analytical tradition––one that grows out of intentionality rather than outcome, out of what might be rather than what was carefully planned or orchestrated. In doing so, we might be better able to capture the rich and complex ways in which various types of media are moving across, between, among––and often quite beyond––traditional sites of meaning” (William P. Banks, 2018, p. 349).
“Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing…Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality and concrete possibility for another world” (José Esteban Muñoz, 2009, p. 1).
Therefore...'queerness' is a coalitional term, a term that always implies an intermeshed understanding of identity, subjectivity, power, and politics located on the dirt and concrete where people live, work, and play. By understanding queer as orienting us not toward the 'not yet' but rather toward coalition, we find a vital alternative to both inclusionary and utopian politics. (Karma R. Chávez, 2013, p. 7)
“Writing/typing queer verses visually representing queer does not offer an equivalent meaning; rather, representing queerness multimodality matters, especially in terms of queer rhetoric” (Rachel Reyerson, 2019).
“That queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclusionary operations has always been one of the field’s key theoretical and political promises. What might be called the ‘subjectless’ critique of queer studies disallows any positing of a proper subject of or for the field by insisting that queer has no fixed political referent” (David Eng, J. Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, 2005, p. 3).
“Wargo: Will you show me your archive?
Gabe: Yeah, but its nothing but reblogged images of pretty pictures and GIFs of guys taking their shirts off. . .” (2017, p. 146).
“Queer culture has found it necessary to develop this knowledge in mobile sites of drag, youth culture, music, dance, parades, flaunting, and cruising––sites whole mobility make them possible but also renders them hard to recognize as world making because they are so fragile and ephemeral” (Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, 2002, p. 202).
“An alternative relationship between self and space, represented in zines as a queering of the public realm, allows for a re-imagined sense of how things might have been or even could be” (Adela C. Licona, 2005, p. 113).
“If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and future imaginings, it will have to remain that what is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (Judith Butler, 1993, p. 228.)
“Queerness and queer are not about the heroic and triumphant distancing from the normative but rather how queerness and queers are awash in the flow of the everyday––where norm and queer are not easily indexed or separable but are constantly colliding, clashing, intersecting and reconstituting. Therefore, queerness and the normative are really about mess––its violence, ambivalence, and its productive possibilities” (Martin F. Manalanson, 2018, p. 1288)
“This is a very queer image and its complexity turns my stomach with the most potent forms of nostalgia for a past that never was” (Cody Jackson, 2019, zine 1, p. 10)
“The multimodal turn in rhetoric, composition, and digital media studies has insufficiently integrated the insights of queer of color and women of color multimodal texts and theories…” (Pritha Prasad, 2019, p. 155).
Part 3: What’s Left of Queer after Multimodal Mainstreaming •••
Fifteen years after the publication of “What’s Queer,” Eng and Puar (2020) questioned, “what’s left of queer?” In the time since Eng, Halbertsam, and Muñoz’s thinking on queer epistemology, queer diasporas, and queer liberalism, the world had moved further toward a global, liberal subject. Objectless critique, Eng and Puar’s (2020) proposed framework, seeks to continue the momentum of subjectless critique insofar as detaching queer theorists from the “fetishization” of proper subject(s) and object(s) positionalities that limit queer to a governing/governable apparatus; or, “moving away from subject positions altogether and illuminating the biopolitical and necropolitical aspects of disaster capitalism” (Castro-Rappl, 2021). Like Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz (2005) demand a rethinking queer critique and Eng and Puar (2020) encourage that we not be governed, I’m ruminating on how the queer possibilities of multimodality have become governed by its deep integration––“mainstreaming”––into our theories of composition, pedagogy, and curriculum as well as global practice for sociopolitical interactions.
The push for multimodality, and its queer possibilities, has been long and well fought. But, in a cruel irony, has the push encouraging experimentation in composing and pedagogically mandating an embrace of (certain) multiple ways of meaning-making taken the teeth out of multimodality? What does it mean, for example, when multimodality is incorporated into assessment standards and, in turn, shaped by assessment standards? Or, what does the “professionalization” of multimodality do to any proposed radical potential? What does it mean when we move multimodality from the work into the job or the grind (Kynard, 2019)?
This rings familiar with queer politics as well. The push for liberation evolved into a push for recognition and then assimilation. Think: homonormativity (Duggan, 2003) and homonationalism (Puar, 2007). It was one thing when we started seeing rainbows in Target, and it was quite another when they started printing “queer” on t-shirts and coffee mugs. And yet, where do those concepts even stand as right-wing governments move globally to erase trans identities in public, censure queer media, strike critical race and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from curricula, and (if the tea leaves are to be believed) withdraw LGBTQ rights that have not even reached maturity? What of our cultural processes and their fragile political products?
Turning (turning turning turning) back to multimodality, we might consider how the proper objects of multimodal argumentation have settled into recognizable forms––the video essay, the infographic, the podcast, the webtext. Even when we move outside the digital constraints of common deployments of multimodality––turning back to Jody Shipka’s (2011) ballerina shoes or Sonia C. Arellano’s (2022) quilting methods––we (as a field, and often in opposition to the researcher’s intention) find ourselves, again and again, fetishizing the object, the product, of composition. Oh fuck…maybe this is just another, yet another, [not another], call for serious engagement with process.
If queer is to be an ungovernable not-object-not-subject, then is it a process? But wouldn't process suggest a formula for action? What about a post-process queerness? Ugh…but doesn’t post- circle back in post-structuralism? This is why queer is an impossible subject (Alexander and Rhodes, 2011), isn’t it?
My head hurts. I’m dizzy. This world is dying.
Part 4: I’m Sorry for Asking (but not really) •••
- Can scholars in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies rethink multimodality in relation to historical and contemporary emergencies?
- What does multimodality have to say about the global rise of neo-fascism?
- When will the field engage queerness beyond the Western mode(s)?
- What might multimodality offer activist work focusing on the rolling back of “human rights,” especially for queer and trans communities?
- How does teaching with/through multimodality respond to systematic attacks on higher education?
- How do we reconcile the fact that we now are forced to fight for the neoliberal programs we must also still critique – “DEI,” “human rights,” “the university”?
- Si tu craches en l'air, est-ce que ça retombe sur le nez?
- What insight does multimodality give us into the expanding surveillance state or the ecological impact of AI technologies?
- How have the queer aesthetics of multimodality made it inaccessible?
- Is genocide multimodal, and if so, how do we square that?
- Can queer help us navigate the contradictions, misdirections, and misgivings of multimodality, or does queer get sucked into the “happy cosmopolitanism” of it all (Prasad, 2019)?
- And, perhaps most challenging, in what ways might multimodality perform queer generosity (Oleksiak & Alexander, 2021), or “epistemological humility” (Eng, Halberstam, & Muñoz, 2005, p. 15)?
In sum, what critical conversations does multimodality engender in rhetoric, composition, and writing, and are those the conversations queerly challenging the infrastructures of power that undergird the emergencies we collectively face? Shouldn’t it? Don’t we deserve that, at least?
For “anything less,” Alexander and Rhodes (2013) argued, “requires that composition do something else––that it eschew multimedia if it cannot teach it in ways that are fully cognizant of the rhetorical capabilities of those media” (p. 20).
So, I’m asking you: What’s queer multimodality now?
References
Alexander, J. & Rhodes, J. (2013). On multimodality: New media in composition studies. CCCC/NCTE.
Alexander, J. & Rhodes, J. (2011). Queer: An impossible subject for composition. JAC, 31(1/2), 177–206.
Arellano, S. C. (2022). Quilting as qualitative, feminist research method: Expanding understandings of migrant deaths. Rhetoric Review, 41(1), 17–30.
Banks, W. P. (2018). Beyond modality: Rethinking transmedia composition through a queer/trans digital rhetoric. In Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric (pp. 341–51). Routledge.
Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (2002). Sex in public. In M. Warner (Ed.), Publics and Counterpublics (pp. 187–208). Zone Books.
Bey, M. (2022). Black trans feminism. Duke.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge.
Castro-Rappl, J. (2021, February 3). Three questions with David Eng and Jasbir Puar, editors of “Left of Queer.” News from Duke University Press. https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/three-questions-with-david-eng-and-jasbir-puar-editors-of-left-of-queer/.
Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.
Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality?: Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Beacon Press.
Eng, D. L., Halberstam, J., & Muñoz, J. E. (2005). Introduction: What’s queer about queer studies now? Social Text, 23(3–4), 1–17.
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Johnson, G. P. (2022). (Queer) optimism ain’t (im)possible. In J. Alexander and J. Rhodes (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetorics (pp. 421–428). Routledge.
Johnson, G. P. (2020). Queer possibilities in digital media composing [Doctoral Dissertation, The Ohio State University].
Kynard, C. (2020). “All I need is one mic”: A Black feminist community meditation on the work, the job, and the hustle (& why so many of yall confuse this stuff). Community Literacy Journal, 14(2), 5–24.
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Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York UP.
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Rhodes, J., & Alexander, J. (2015). Techne: Queer meditations on writing the self. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State UP. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/techne.
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Shipka, J. (2011). Toward a composition made whole. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Wargo, J. A. (2017). Designing more just social futures or remixing the radical present? Queer rhetorics, multimodal (counter) storytelling, and the politics of LGBTQ youth activism. English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 16(2), pp. 145–60.
Gratitude
In a time of anxiety and violence, I offer gratitude. Thank you to Erin Green and Cody Jackson for reviewing drafts of this article and encouraging me to experiment with Twine. Thank you to the randos on the internet who freely share their knowledge of working with/against Twine’s coding structures. Thank you to Charlotte Hogg for your enthusiastic clicking. And thank you to the editors of this special issue for opening space for me to share these thoughts and frustrations.
This article is dedicated to those queer thinkers and doers who inspire me to ask hard questions, push back against simple answers, and be disagreeable. I am accountable to you in our shared search for possible worlds otherwise.