Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

A Queer Rhetorics Framework for Discourse-Based Interviews

Joshua Barsczewski

Abstract: This article connects discourse-based interviews with larger conversations about queer research methods. Using examples from an ongoing research project about LGBTQ+ students’ experiences as academic writers, this article describes how discourse-based interviews can be productively and ethically utilized as part of queer rhetorics research and provides a framework to attune future researchers to the need for accountability, rhetorical listening, and attention to discomfort.

Introduction

In Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects, William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas offer three conceptual frameworks for queer rhetorics research: rhetorics of intentionality, rhetorics of failure, and rhetorics of forgetting. Their edited collection, which represents the most comprehensive attempt at delineating queer research methods for writing studies to date, offers chapters on queer historiography (Bessette), quantitative research (Patterson), counterstory (Novotny), autoethnography (Faris), and others. Yet, missing from the collection is a sustained treatment of interviewing as a method. Discourse-based interviews (DBIs), specifically, only pop up once in the entire collection, in Dadas and Cox’s chapter On Queering Professional Writing, where they get mentioned as part of a research project that could have or should have been queerer. Yet, I would argue that DBIs as imagined by Odell, Goswami, and Herrington are not only commensurate with queer rhetorics methodologies, including the tenets of intentionality, failure, and forgetting, but anticipated concerns about empirical research queer scholars have been suggesting for decades. Not only can DBIs illuminate tacit knowledge of writing, they can help participants express and think through tacit knowledge of their identity and how it relates to their rhetorical production. In this article, I aim to build on the conversations in Banks, Cox, and Dadas’s collection by offering up a framework for both understanding DBIs as a queer method and enacting DBIs ethically as part of a queer rhetorics research project. To illustrate and illuminate as I go along, I will offer up narratives from my ongoing research process.

Jude

Like, I suspect, most other researchers, the data collection process for my current project has been chock full of starts and stops, interruptions and mistakes. The project—on how LGBTQ students write about or invoke their identities in academic writing contexts—began when I was a graduate student and has persisted as I’ve worked at three different institutions while also living through the COVID-19 pandemic. One of my most informative research participants was Jude, a loquacious nontraditional aged student and writing tutor who described themselves as “queer as fuck.” Our DBI, which was scheduled to take 2 hours, took 3.5, and in it Jude provided a lot of raw data for me to analyze. Among other things, their answers indicated that they were a writer who engaged in frequent acts of rhetorical resistance against the confines of academic writing standards, a topic I could easily envision myself expanding as part of a queer rhetorics project given queer theory’s emphasis on subversion of norms.

Somehow, the file on which our DBI recording was held became corrupted before I could make backups or have it transcribed. After consulting with multiple IT specialists, the best I was able to recover was the first 25 minutes. Jude agreed to re-record the interview, and a few weeks later we sat down to do it all again. Same questions, same focal passages, same alternatives offered to elicit tacit knowledge. During the interview, I noticed that Jude’s answers were different than I remembered from the first go-around. They weren’t as fully fleshed out, for one thing, but they also seemed to indicate a changed mind—a new perspective on writing. For example, at one point during both interviews I asked Jude to look at a passage of writing they submitted for their Legal Studies class where they had defended Antonin Scalia’s legal philosophy. In both interviews I asked Jude, a community organizer and leftwing activist on and off campus, why they wrote in defense of conservative philosophies. I also adapted a passage from one essay, toning down some of the value statements and rhetorical flourishes and I asked Jude to compare the two. From my memory, during the first recording, Jude discussed how they never agreed with what they had written in the first place, they just wanted to be a contrarian to rile up their classmates and professor, whom they perceived as disagreeing with Scalia.

As we were re-recording, however, Jude defended Scalia’s intellect. They said they had been having a tough semester with multiple health issues when they wrote those pieces:

I just got off my medication. I was going through a lot, you know, I was a little bit checked out and I was just doing the work to do the work. But these legal cases are usually not very compelling, but the arguments from Scalia were actually interesting. It was kind of like, “Okay, I can see where you’re coming from, bro,” because they’re well-articulated. What I respect about Scalia is that you can follow his logic.

This is a different Jude than in the first recording. The previous one—the one I was so excited to have as an informant for my project—described acts of rhetorical resistance, playing with a teacher’s expectations of what a queer person and leftwing activist would think about Scalia. The new version—the one I have recordings of, the one I can quote with some level of accuracy—is describing ennui, an attachment to Scalia’s logics because he was less boring than other Supreme Court justices, a possibility that the conservative judge might have had some good points after all; or, at the very least, a respect that Scalia was able to make his claims in a more easily digestible way that would require less effort to write about. Where does this new version of Jude fit with my project? And how can I understand the two Judes separately from each other?

Queer Research Methods in and out of Writing Studies

My experiences with my participants such as Jude, who came across differently from one interview to the next, or other participants such as Garrett, who changed the way he identified at least three times over the course of my project, or Adrien, whose verbal descriptions of his writing in the DBI do not match the writing samples he gave me, all point to common experiences those of us doing queer research have noted—an apparent discrepancy between the “systematic, coherent, orderly, modal, normative, positivist, and generalizable” methods and knowledge-making procedures valued by the social sciences with the “fluid, flux, disruptive, transgressive, interpretivist, and local knowledges” necessary to do queer research (Ghaziani and Brim 4). Historically, queer theory has emphasized the instability of knowledge, the contingency of language, and the uncertainty of knowledge claims. For these reasons, Jane Ward describes the pairing of “queer” and “methodology” as “a productive oxymoron” that is not easy to resolve but which presents exciting possibilities (72). Figuring out how to wrangle this oxymoron is not always clear, though conversations are ongoing. Nash and Browne’s 2010 volume, Queer Methods and Methodologies asks, “If, as queer thinking argues, subjects and subjectivities are fluid, unstable, and perpetually becoming, how can we gather ‘data’ from those tenuous and fleeting subjects using the standard methods of data collection such as interviews and questionnaires? What meanings can we draw from, and what use can we make of, such data when it is only momentarily fixed and certain?” (1).

To even talk of “queer” and “methods” in the same sentence is to risk a certain intellectual and epistemological perversion. Queer theory and empirical research methods have not, historically, been compatible bedfellows. As Brim and Ghaziani have explained, there is an “overriding queer suspicion of method” that has animated both the humanities and social sciences (16). This suspicion comes from several angles, including queer theory’s aim to resist generalizable knowledge and what Brim and Ghaziani describe as a rejection of “the fetishizing of the observable” (16). To describe something as observable is to pin it down, to stabilize it; yet, queer theory teaches us that gender, sexuality, embodiment, and identity are not so stable. Queer researchers can thus fall into an impasse. How can we write and publish on queer topics while recognizing the inherent problems with doing so?

As I indicated above, queer rhetorics has started taking up these conversations, but has not yet comprehensively theorized interviews as a method. Outside of the discipline, however, queer scholars have provided frameworks and concepts through which to think about the act of interviewing. For example, in describing his oral history project on Black queer southern women, E. Patrick Johnson has emphasized the role of performance in interviews as an alternative to methods that try to capture objectivity. Johnson’s usage of performance as a lens calls on researchers to imagine the wholeness of the person they are interviewing—a person who has made themselves vulnerable to, and whose way of answering questions or storytelling is influenced by, power dynamics in the interview. His work encourages researchers to focus less on what facts can be extracted from an interviewee, but instead to privilege them “as feeling and thinking subjects” (53). Catherine Connell, from a somewhat different perspective, reminds researchers that they need to be mindful how their own “epistemological assumptions” can be invisible even to themselves. When conducting an interview, the types of questions asked and the topics focused on can ignore other aspects of an interviewee’s life experiences. As Connell describes, her own experience interviewing LGBTQ teachers led her to “conceptualize sexuality in a narrow and normative way that reflected neither my political nor my personal understanding of sexual identity” (129). Keeping in mind that we enter into research settings with our own lived experiences, subjectivities, and identities, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Lynda Johnston, and Gordon Waitt call on researchers to take note of how researcher and participants might understand gender and sexuality in different ways. They call for “queering communication” in the research process, which means taking stock of how gender and sexuality are linked with race, gender, ethnicity, geographical location, and other factors and how those factors unfold within the interview itself. We cannot, they caution, approach interviews with an assumption of how social dynamics will be at play but must keep in mind that these things are actively negotiated through the interactions of the interview itself.

Blair

Blair, who described himself as a bisexual, transgender Filipino American man, was a writing tutor and junior English/biology double major when I interviewed him. During our DBI, Blair said that he felt conventional academic settings did not always know what to do with a writer like him, whose race, gender, sexuality, and even his choice of major “trapped” him between binaries. In one of the papers he sent me, he describes himself as occupying intersections between discourse communities who do not speak to or understand one another. As he wrote, “I was not fully part of one or the other, and was therefore deceiving both. To be part of the intersection almost felt like a discourse community of its own, but not truly separate, for it could not exist without both.”

As I was reading through Blair’s corpus of writings, I noticed that a lot of his papers relied on extensive literature reviews—even when he was not explicitly asked to use outside sources. In one paper for an introductory literature course, he used several sources to analyze Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz’s novel uses the concept of fukú americanus, or a curse against people of the Dominican Republic. In his essay, Blair builds on this concept to describe the gender binary itself as a colonial curse. Blair cited five sources beyond Díaz despite not being required to do so for the assignment. I asked Blair to consider how he could have written his essay without the extensive citations, and he said:

Blair: There’s a lot of gender theory going on that the audience probably knew nothing about. I heard about it on Tumblr, initially. There were all these people talking about it and sometimes they would mention a source and I would Google that source. But I needed to back [the essay] up with sources. I highly doubt that words like “European colonial construct” would have been good enough, so I pulled in like five sources.

Josh: So you anticipated this could’ve been a sticking point for your audience?

Blair: I don’t know. I felt like I needed to prove it cause my argument was based on it, and also I was going on the assumption that no one else has read the things I had read. Also, no offense, but it is really hard for people to wrap their heads around gender in general, so I needed more than 1 source.

In his aside that he means “no offense,” I hear Blair calling me out—a white, cis, gay man who he correctly predicted had not read as much about fukú as he had and who did not know as much about trans experiences as he did. Later, as we were wrapping up the DBI, I asked Blair to think about how his identity related to how he constructed his papers, and he said:

I feel like it makes me look at pieces of writing differently; it makes me think about the gender and sexuality aspect of writing in the way that I don’t think cis people or straight people even consider. Like I’m always asking myself how gender and sexuality play a part, and I noticed in my English classes it’s treated as an optional aspect to look at in literary characters, and I don’t think it should be. I think it’s very necessary when you’re looking at character experiences and that definitely ties back to my life and how my gender affects every aspect. So, I bring that effect into the text itself.

Pressed to discuss what he means here even more, he said, “I would say that as far as leaving your identity at the door, I can’t do that. There’s a lot I’d like to forget that the world will not let me forget. I don’t mind, though, when I look into things and there’s not a lot on it; then I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I have to write it instead of waiting for someone else to.’”

Intentionality, Failure, and Forgetting in DBIs

Banks, Cox, and Dadas, as well as Banks’s earlier work with Stephanie West-Puckett, described three central tenets of queer rhetorics research: rhetorics of intentionality, rhetorics of failure, and rhetorics of forgetting. DBIs engage with these three tenets in multiple ways, and while I would not say that DBIs answer all concerns of queer researchers, I do see in DBIs a set of ethical and epistemological principles that anticipated concerns raised by more recent queer researchers, and to which I now think we could return for guidance.

Rhetorics of Intentionality

A rhetorics of intentionality calls attention to the process and practice of writing, rather than the outcome. Banks, Cox, and Dadas discuss intentionality in relation to debates within queer and trans studies about passing (as straight, as gay or lesbian, as male or female). To privilege outcome over intention is to fall into an evidentiary logic that sees knowledge of identities, of texts, and of bodies as observable and stable. Outcomes have a finality that render them useful for most empirical research, but perhaps too solid for queer research. Thinking of writing studies, Banks, Cox, and Dadas encourage scholars to ask, “what is the point of studying (evaluating, obsessing over) the products students create?” (13). Might we instead focus on choices student writers wanted to make but didn’t, or could have made but chose not to?

To recognize intentionality is to recognize writing as a rhetorical performance enacted by a human operating under constraints. DBIs recognize this through their very structure. They take final texts and make them un-final, by changing them or offering them up as inherently tentative, by respecting that the writer might have more to say on the topic. In their article, Odell, Goswami, and Herrington describe their central approach as asking, “Here you do X. In other pieces of writing, you do Y or Z. In this passage, would you be willing to do Y or Z rather than X? What basis do you have for preferring one alternative to the other?” (223). Questions like these assume a process instead of a product and recognize that process as unstable. By pointing out divergences or inconsistencies within a writer’s corpus, the DBI assumes that writing could change or could be altered. Writing here is understood fundamentally, then, as performance, and a performance that while connected to particular strictures and power dynamics, could be otherwise.

Rhetorics of Failure

Failure as a concept has a long history within queer studies (Halberstam). Failure as a concept for queer inquiry asks us to reimagine what counts as success. As Banks, Cox, and Dadas describe it, “queerness-as-failure” asks “what if we embraced those moments of research failure?” (14). What do we make of outliers, of data points that resist easy classification? To acknowledge or embrace failure as an aspect of the research process itself—and not as a perversion of infidelity—is to acknowledge the contingency of knowledge.

DBIs do not offer queerness-as-failure as Banks, Cox, and Dadas necessarily understand it, but the method as envisioned by Odell, Goswami, and Herrington leans into its own capacity for failure. Tacit knowledge itself can even be understood as a failure to an extent, insofar as it is knowledge not normally expressed and known through performance and through action rather than institutionally-sanctioned learning. Toward the end of their article, the authors describe possible objections to their method. One critique they engage with is about the value of interviews for deducing writers’ self-knowledge. While it is true that self-knowledge is complicated and contingent, and that interviews are not necessarily the strongest way to demonstrate empirically verifiable self-knowledge, Odell, Goswami, and Herrington defend their method, saying “we are not using interviews to obtain information about mental processes. We are using interviews to identify the kinds of world knowledge and expectations that informants bring to writing tasks and to discover the perceptions informants have about the conceptual demands that functional, interactive writing tasks make on them” (228). In this rebuttal to an imagined critique, I hear the authors negotiating the language of successful research and saying, “Yes, we fail to do what you want. Instead we do something different.” Instead of providing psychologically verifiable and replicable research, the DBI humanizes subjects and provides them with a space to think about the world as they understand it.

Rhetorics of Forgetting

Of the three tenets, rhetorics of forgetting is perhaps the least clearly relevant for DBIs. Banks, Cox, and Dadas describe rhetorics of forgetting as two-fold: on the one hand, they describe historiographic efforts to “mine the archives for lost stories, lost composers, lost teachers, and to tell their stories” and, on the other hand, to “ask why certain elements of our disciplinary past have been forgotten” (15). DBIs are not really connected with archival or historiographic research, nor extensively with gaps in disciplinary history, but we can read DBIs as acknowledging the limitations of knowledge practices. Banks, Cox, and Dadas describe the rhetorics of forgetting as asking, “When we look for X, what are we strategically forgetting in order to keep X in focus? How could we acknowledge that tension in our work? Why might we need to forget X in order to discover Y?” (16). There’s a way we can read Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s article as doing just that. In their article, they describe how the researcher—rather than the writer—is given the power to decide which features of a text to emphasize. Rather than pretending this power dynamic does not exist or is neutral, they acknowledge it as part of their process. We might even see the selection of topics—the choices to focus on small aspects of a text—as an act of remembering, not from historical erasure necessarily, but from methods that might otherwise ignore it.

One of the most memorable moments in Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s article is when they talk about how a research participant signs her name. Such a small aspect of a text—the type of textual feature that could easily be forgotten—leads to new tacit knowledge about writing. As they discuss, they noticed that an administrator they were working with signed her name in different ways depending on the document—M. Smith, Margaret Smith, Meg, or Meg Smith. They asked her if she would be willing to sign her name on a particular letter as Margaret or Meg Smith and she replied, “This [letter] is going to a permanent file. I am looking to the years to come. Someone looking back…. It makes no difference whether I am male or female making this decision. [What matters is that] I am a grade A supervisor. They have to know where he is placed and who evaluated him. But I don’t use Margaret Smith for this reason: I want to be neuter” (230). Apart from the somewhat fascinating gender dynamics to this answer (when one wants to be a “neuter” is perhaps a much larger topic), this is a level of insight that seems produced through the collaborative nature of the interview itself. By drawing attention to a seemingly insignificant aspect of the text, Odell, Goswami, and Herrington rescue it from memory, from being erased, and work with their participant to make meaning from it.

Garrett

More than any other student I worked with on this project, Garrett’s academic experiences represent a possibility for queer academics unimaginable even a few years ago. Garrett, a white, gay person whose gender identity has evolved throughout the project but who uses he/him pronouns, has had the opportunity to take multiple classes on queer theory, identity, LGBTQ history, representations of gender and sexuality in art and literature, and performance studies. His writings for college ranged from analyses of Paris is Burning and Ru Paul’s Drag Race to discussions on the theories of Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz. He even won a competitive university grant to fund his own avant-garde drag performance series, which he wrote about for his senior honors thesis and which he has continued staging long after graduating. In our interviews, he said that he has felt continually supported writing about his own experiences as a queer person, saying, “I’m tempted to take courses that ask about the personal… I’ve just taken a lot of classes that are about queer people, about the LGBTQ community, and the theatre, which is a space of fluidity of performance. So I don’t really even feel like I’ve had an opportunity where I’ve been in a class where I’ve really felt uncomfortable.”

Throughout his undergraduate career, Garrett returned frequently to the topic of white privilege (his own and others). As a reader, I noticed a shift in how he discussed his privilege. In his early writings—for example, in a piece describing his study abroad trip to South Africa—he describes white privilege as something a “system” has given to white people. As he progressed throughout his studies, he wrote more frequently about how he actively benefitted from and perpetuated white privilege. As part of our DBI, I asked him to reconsider how his earlier writings depicted whiteness and to consider if he would rewrite them differently now. As he looked over his earlier writings, he said:

I see someone who had just taken a course on whiteness. It was like, “I’m white privileged.” And I had just come into school and was discovering these things. I don’t know if I’d be writing like that anymore, honestly. Now with a more sophisticated understanding, a more nuanced understanding, it feels kind of like White Privilege 101, to be quite honest. But I mean, that was real. I needed that step to access a greater understanding of what I have now. And I know even what I’m saying now is going to change in four years. And that’s totally fine. That’s part of being a person, being a student.

Garrett’s moving beyond just tacit writing knowledge here; he’s analyzing how his education has influenced his perception of his own identity, and how this perception made its way into writing. He came back to this topic several times over the course of the interview, even after I had moved on to a new topic, engaging in a recursive act of self-knowledge production.

A Framework for Queer DBIs

The tenets of intentionality, failure, and forgetting provide a lens to rethink DBIs as a space of knowledge production for queer rhetorics research. The DBI offers a chance to consider writers’ intentionality as they produce new understandings of their writing process and consider alternatives to what might have been. In my research, Garrett was able to discuss his writing and way of thinking as emanating from a temporal intellectual position he no longer occupied—an understanding of himself as a writer that emerged through the interview process itself. Likewise, DBIs offer a space to think about the logics of success and failure as they work against the impulse to create verifiable, replicable research but instead allow for research participants to emerge as complex figures whose tacit knowledge emanates from a variety of experiences, exigencies, and contexts. In my own research, this became clear with Blair, who through the DBI came to understand how his rhetorical decisions were driven in part by assumptions he made about his audience’s knowledge of LGBTQ topics and postcolonial theory. And, finally, DBIs offer a space to dis-, un-, or re-cover meaning, where the seemingly small details that might otherwise be forgotten can contribute to an overall understanding, providing valuable opportunities to think with research participants as intellectual contributors to a project. Attuning to the differences in my multiple interviews with Jude revealed this, as they were able to describe how their choices of what stances to write from were driven by a sense of boredom in their coursework and a desire to explore new ideas, even if those ideas didn’t match what they thought in their daily life. In all three cases, participants revealed a deep entrenchment between their personal identities and the rhetorical decisions they made given their understanding of academic writing contexts, demonstrating that tacit knowledge of writing is linked in complex and multifaceted ways with tacit knowledge of the self.

Researchers using the DBI method should deeply think about how to do so when working with participants from marginalized genders and sexualities. Although queer rhetorics methods are not solely focused on studying queer people or queer texts, many scholars in queer rhetorics do just that, and the specific needs and vulnerabilities of these communities should be foregrounded when designing a research study. Thus, I encourage anyone using the DBI method to think of how they will be accountable to their participants, how they will be active listeners to their participants, and how they will acknowledge and make use of the discomfort inherent in queer interviewing. This framework is designed to complement the tenets of intentionality, failure, and forgetting to align the more empirical DBI with queer rhetorics research. Accountability aims to ensure representations of writers’ processes are ethical. Listening acknowledges the failure of a researcher to be the font of knowledge and demands a more active and collaborative research process. Discomfort asks researchers to make meaning from aspects of the interview process other than words, recovering parts of the process that might easily be forgotten.

Accountability

Accountability, which involves honoring the fullness of participants’ contributions and making steps to rectify mistakes, is essential. When working with marginalized or multi-marginalized participants, researchers need to be thoughtful of our own positionality in relation to participants even, and perhaps especially, if we too are marginalized. Although positionality statements are a baseline, they are not the finish line. All researchers in writing studies should think about how they will be accountable throughout the entirety of the research process, from participant recruitment to data collection to analysis.

In ‘When You Know Better, Do Better’: Honoring Intellectual and Emotional Labor through Diligent Accountability Practices, Eric Darnell Pritchard describes a recent situation in writing studies where their work—as well as the work of Black feminists, activists, and trans scholars—was ignored. Although attempts were made to address the harm done, Pritchard described how his and others’ ideas were tokenized in the process. Pritchard points out something their partner, David Glisch-Sánchez, has taught them, that “one of the most inhumane scholarly practices is to ignore and minimize what someone’s intellectual work and full presence in the space-time we share with them has done, is doing, or can do.” To the extent that DBIs depend on participants developing and expressing tacit knowledge, they are intellectual contributors to our projects. Thus, we should take Pritchard’s writing seriously and think through the implications of what it means to acknowledge and maximize someone’s intellectual work.

Scholarship has historically not been accountable to LGBTQ+ participants—especially, as G Patterson writes, to trans participants who are often elided, ignored, and silenced by cisgender researchers. As Patterson says, the growth of queer and trans studies in the academy has enabled cisgender researchers to “gain access to and personally (and unevenly) profit from trans spaces, people, and perspectives” (147). Membership in a broader LGBTQ+ community does not mean that any one person has the epistemic lenses to speak on behalf of or for others (Ivy). When working with trans research participants, Patterson has pointed out the necessity of disclosing one’s own position, only working on research that materially benefits trans people, thoroughly educating oneself, and not taking space from trans colleagues. And as I have written elsewhere, scholars need to be prepared to stop, back off, and possibly even end their research projects if and when it becomes clear that they are out of their element (Barsczewski).

On a logistical level, researchers should be accountable to participants’ non-tacit writing knowledge. Since DBIs are putatively meant to elicit tacit knowledge, researchers should tread carefully when creating alternative rhetorical options to build their questions. Treating intentional rhetorical choices as alterable could cause harm to participants. For example, textual features like gender pronouns and identity labels are often—perhaps even typically—the product of significant agency: deliberate and thoughtful and not open for debate. Recognizing that this language is often not tacit, but explicit, is key to being accountable to the participants.

Researchers conducting DBIs for queer rhetorics projects (or any project, really) might consider asking themselves the following questions to help develop accountability practices:

1. Am I the right person to be doing this?

2. How can I recognize, honor, and acknowledge my research participants as full intellectual contributors to this project?

3. What assumptions am I making about participants’ writing choices, and how do these assumptions relate to how I’ve developed interview questions?

Listening

Interviews—even when conducted with a great deal of thoughts towards ethics—are unbalanced. An interviewer sets the stage for the interviewee to respond so that the interviewer can then extract this information into knowledge. Queer, Black, and feminist research practices call attention to this power dynamic, and have found ways of mitigating it (co-writing, offering participants chances to correct their record, etc.) but have not completely eradicated it. As part of an attempt to reduce unequal power dynamics, interviewers should do whatever they can to ensure their participants are active members of the process.

At this point, the influence of rhetorical listening on the discipline has been profound. Krista Ratcliffe defines rhetorical listening as “a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural exchanges” (1) and her concept has been generative for many scholars, including a recent cluster conversation in Peitho that builds on Ratcliffe’s work to think about listening in queerer ways (Oleksiak, “Introduction”). Yet, a concern for listening in writing studies can be traced even further back. In “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” Jacqueline Jones Royster asks us to imagine how we speak to and listen to others, saying:

How can we teach, engage in research, write about, and talk across boundaries with others, instead of for, about, and around them? My experiences tell me that we need to do more than just talk and talk back. I believe that in this model we miss a critical moment. We need to talk, yes, and to talk back, yes, but when do we listen? How do we listen? How do we demonstrate that we honor and respect the person talking and what the person is saying, or what the person might say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak? How do we translate listening into language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response? How do we really “talk back” rather than talk also? The goal is not, “You talk, I talk.” The goal is better practices so that we can exchange perspectives, negotiate meaning, and create understandings with the intent of being in a good position to cooperate, when, like now, cooperation is absolutely necessary.” (38)

I quote Royster at great length because her questions—asked decades ago—are still pertinent, have still not fully been answered. The Peitho cluster provides helpful ways of thinking about rhetorical listening specifically when working with queer projects, including drawing attention to how “the carceral logics of exclusion and disposability” act as barriers to listening (Lewis), imagining “neurodivergent forms of rhetorical (non)enagement” beyond listening (Smilges), and thinking through the emotional demands required to listen to those whose worldviews may differ from or even threaten our own (Oleksiak, Fullness of Feeling).

What the Peitho cluster makes clear is that listening is not always pleasurable—in fact, listening can cause pain, and can force us to reconsider how we think about ourselves and others. LGBTQ people, who are often though not always the focus of queer rhetorics research, are often not listened to and often not believed. Given that a DBI is a space where the interviewer has the potential to occupy more rhetorical space than in other interview scenarios, since the interviewer has to take on an active role in generating alternative rhetorical options, it is especially important for researchers to signal one’s intent to make the interview a space where meaning can be negotiated and understanding can be reached across differences, across emotional states, and across power differentials. For example, researchers might closely attend to changes in body language or tone that signal certain questions are off limits to the participant. Researchers might apologize and make changes if a participant calls out a line of questioning. Researchers should also be prepared to offer interpretations of interviewee’s answers and provide interviewees with a chance to respond in turn.

As part of the research design process, researchers might ask themselves:

1. Have I constructed this space in a way that allows my participant and I to exchange perspectives and negotiate meanings?

2. How can my participant speak back to me if I am doing something that makes them uncomfortable? What can I do to ensure they feel authorized to speak back to me?

3. How will I account for new negotiations of meaning such as participants changing their minds about a topic, or providing answers that do not seem obviously commensurate with previous statements or writings?

Discomfort

The final framework I offer for DBIs is actually not specific to DBIs, but applicable to any interview-based research method. In some ways, the previous two concepts—accountability and listening—seem poised toward making interviews a seamless process where everyone feels respected and heard. And to an extent, that is true: researchers should generally try to do those things. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that queer rhetorics research is not always seamless. It can be messy and uncomfortable. Queer rhetorics research often focuses on personal issues: sex, sexuality, gender, gender identity, violence, homophobia, cissexism, racism, classism, drug use, embarrassment, disappointment, pain, desire, pleasure, and love.

Yet, rather than trying to eliminate discomfort, we might instead think about how discomfort “can lead to more profound and methodological and analytical insight” (Connell 131). During my DBIs, I had multiple moments of discomfort. I was uncomfortable during the long silences when Adrien had difficulty answering my questions. I was uncomfortable when Blair implicated me and other cis people by saying that we can’t wrap our heads around gender. I was uncomfortable when Garrett started talking about a professor in my department he was attracted to. I was uncomfortable when Chaim started taking his shoes and socks off while we sat in my office. Some of these are moments of discomfort that could have been solved (I could have asked Adrien questions in different ways). Some are just moments where I needed to check my own assumptions about normative behavior (there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking off one’s shoes, and my discomfort with Chaim doing so says more about me than it does him).

I also need to think about the ways I made my participants uncomfortable. I know of some of these instances—when Jude thought I was critiquing his writing on Scalia, when Garrett thought I was judging him for using the phrase “true self” when I asked him why he used it, or when I handed my participants an IRB-approved informed consent form that asked for their names and Adrien asked if he was supposed to use his deadname because my form did not specify “preferred name.” I own these mistakes and while some of them are embarrassing for me, I need to contend with them instead of wish them away. Instead, I need to remember that “queer research is not the resolution of ambivalence, contradiction, or failure in the field, but rather the recognition—to tolerate the uncertainty and the vulnerability, the pleasure and the pains of the word, and to keep asking, keep thinking, keep writing, keep fighting in the face of it” (Connell 138).

DBIs themselves are probably no more nor less likely to cause discomfort than other types of research methods, but the nature of queer research primes it for moments of discomfort, some of which should be avoided and some of which just needs to be accepted as part of the process. For example, a participant’s answers can bring up aspects of tacit knowledge that a researcher hadn’t considered, isn’t emotionally prepared to hear, and may not have a framework through which to interpret. Rather than covering over or ignoring those moments of discomfort, researchers might ask themselves:

1. Is this moment of discomfort caused by my own biases as a person?

2. Does this moment of discomfort need to be resolved? If so, am I the person who needs to resolve it?

3. How will I address this discomfort in any texts or publications rather than ignoring it?

Conclusion

In How (and Why) to Write Queer: A Failing, Impossible, Contradictory Instruction Manual for Scholars of Writing Studies, Stacey Waite provides a 63-point list of how to write queer. Number 60 is, “Don’t come to conclusions. Come to other things: inquiry, questions, failures, side roads, off-road” (48). To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to listen to Waite’s advice. The queer rhetorics framework for DBIs contains, I hope, more questions and inquiries than strict or normative guidelines for queer rhetorics scholars, or any scholars interested in using DBIs. Throughout the writing of this piece I have found myself bumping up against or even bristling at my own hubris: isn’t a “framework” antithetical to queer research methods? Frameworks imply stability, a holding of something in place, which is the opposite of what I wanted to do. Perhaps, instead, I should use the language of orientation like Banks, Cox, and Dadas. Orientation, as Sara Ahmed describes it, refers to an embodied experienced or “how bodies become orientated by how they take up time and space” (123). Throughout this article, I have tried to draw attention to how the DBI method is attuned to how bodies take up time and space; DBIs center the human performance of writing, recognizing in the interview people’s fluidity and capacity for change, for seeing new orientations or options or alternatives out of a text and asking participants to imagine choices they could have made but did not. While conducting a DBI is not easy, the method provides opportunities for researchers and participants to collaborate through active meaning making in a way that does not depend on the heteronormative logics of observability, neutrality, or stability. Queer rhetorics research has made it abundantly clear that queer methods are messy and complex, and DBIs are a method that acknowledge that messiness and complexity.

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