Restorying With the Ancestors: Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices and Alternative Rhetorics of Queer Futurity

Abstract

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

Speculative F(r)ictions: A Youth Restorying Horror and Monstrosity

“…I, too, have strained relationships in life that haunt my headspace. Perhaps, as Coleman (2021) suggested, we can build community and affirm each other's humanity through sharing our moments of haunting.…”

“…Evoking Corntassel et al (2009), Montes explained how restorying the self is also a process of restoration in which Indigenous ways of knowing and being are sustained despite the persistence of colonial violence in our modern society. Similarly, Coleman (2021) spotlighted how a group of nine queer adult writers mobilized historically rooted speculative composing practices as they wrote alongside the voices and histories of queer ancestors to forward alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Coleman's participants drew upon the speculative to challenge tropes of queer unhappy endings.…”

De-storying Community Narratives: Unimagined Community in Queer Educators’ Small Stories

“…Based on emerging pattern codes about the imagination, queer community, and affect, I then engaged in a second read of the data using Miles and colleagues’ (2014) emotion coding to illuminate participants’ divergent responses to intersectionally diverse queer community narratives. Adopting a pragmatic-contextual approach (Coleman, 2021b), I expanded this coding to include a wider range of affective responses beyond codified emotions and referred to this as affect coding . When a participant explicitly named an emotion or affect, I used their terminology as a form of in vivo coding.…”

“…So, even as scholars rightly advocate for centering historically marginalized stories through storying (Annamma et al, 2017;B. Love, 2019;Pritchard, 2017), counter-storytelling (Ellison & Solomon, 2019;Wargo, 2018), and restorying (Coleman, 2021b;Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), these works often operate from a belief that such stories are available within consciousness and thus are able to be imagined and told. As this article proffers, certain stories-those most suppressed by dominant narratives and thus most marginalized-rarely arrive consciously within the imagination, and moreover, I argue that this is a learned literacy practice of de-storying.…”

“…Whether orally or in writing, we composed new stories, many stories, into existence, and through that process, we lamented; we laughed; and we cried together. In composing stories, we came to recognize intersectional similarities and differences between our storied experiences as queer educators (Coleman, 2021b). However, parallel to those stories we told were a number of narratives that we actively unimagined.…”