Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 3 (2022)

Review of Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace by Travis Webster

Jacob Herrmann
Rice University
jh115@rice.edu

Webster, Travis. Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace. Utah State UP, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-64642-148-0. $22.95.

Recent scholarship, such as Nicole Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson’s The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors (2016), has paid increased attention to writing center administrative labor. However, issues of identity are frequently omitted from such discussions. Travis Webster’s Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace brings new light to the discussion by focusing on the personal accounts of queer writing center administrators. In a field that reveres personal stories and narratives, Webster nicely combines qualitative story-telling practices with data-driven research. Webster, now an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech University, showcases his nearly twenty years of writing center experience and his intimate knowledge of LGBTQ+ scholarship in the field. To date, Queerly Centered is the only book-length project exclusively concerned with LGBTQ+ studies in the writing center field.

In Queerly Centered, Webster records and examines twenty interviews with gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer administrators to examine visible and invisible labor in the writing center. He positions his research among discussions of intersectionality (e.g., Denny; Hallman Martini and Webster), and racial dynamics (e.g., Riddick and Hooker; García; Green). Participants come from differing professional backgrounds and herald from a variety of institution types, including community colleges, public research institutions, and private schools. Their administrative positions also differ greatly, from staff administrators to tenured faculty. Yet, the study is limited in terms of participant gender and race. As Webster notes, most of the participants are white and cisgender. Only one participant identified as transgender and two were gay men of color. However, these demographics are more representative of the lack of diversity in the writing center field, rather than issues with participant recruitment methods.

The book builds its narrative through participant voices on three central themes concerned with queer writing center labor as capital, activism, and tension. Each central chapter begins with historical vignettes that highlights the personal stories, experiences, and perspectives of his participants. At the start of “Queer Writing Center Labor and/as Capital,” we see among the narratives Madeline, a writing center director at a southern university who operationalizes “lesbian humor” for productive administrative means; Mike, a former grassroots AIDS organizer; and Matt, a gay man who learned at a young age to read the room for the sake of queer survival. Webster discusses these histories and embodied experiences that queer directors bring with them as capital or “resources gained, lost, rendered, transacted, traded, and heralded in an institutional economy” (29). He argues that the origins of these practitioners—that is where and how they first came to writing center work—creates a sense of rhetorical readiness for taking on such work. Interestingly, Webster complicates the queer writing center origins by examining black queer capital towards the end of the chapter. As compared to the “nurturing” pedagogical approaches of white gay men in the writing center field, Brian, a gay black writing center director at an HBCU, describes exactly the opposite. Brian learned from his mentor, also a Black writing center director, that to best serve Black students he needed to adopt a queer, tough exterior. As Brian’s narrative shows, discussions of labor and queerness primarily center on white bodies at PWIs. Webster writes that “Blackness is erased, [Brian] tells me, and I agree” (43).

Perhaps the most emotionally charged chapter, “Queer Writing Center Labor and/as Activism,” deals with, in Webster’s own words, “condoms, dental dams, LGBTQA parade marches, promoting sexual -and mental-health initiatives, ‘calling [people] out on their shit’ (but ‘politely,’ says a participant), leading us, as practitioners into relatively uncharted writing enter research territory” (53). At times both uncomfortable and widely eye opening, this chapter tells how queer administrative labor often exceeds the confines of expected writing center work. Writing centers become de facto sites of sexual health education where a dearth of resources exists. Diverse minority administrators disproportionately engage in social justice work and advocacy both in and outside their centers. Often, queer administrators are faced with supporting the mental and emotional health of tutors amid violent and oppressive local, national, and global contexts, such as the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting or the numerous homophobic tweets of former president Donald Trump.

Webster carries over the discussion of oppression and violence towards LGBTQ+ administrators in the workplace in his following chapter, “Queer Writing Center Labor and/as Tension.” As he argues, navigating instances of explicit and implicit bullying, disciplinary erasures of LGBTQ+ voices, and national tensions is labor-intensive work. Despite the reputation of universities being primarily left-leaning and narrativizing social progress, they are still made up of people, and thus, are reflective of larger trends of societal violence towards queer people. Many of the participants recount instances of mobbing or bullying, and one administrator, Mike, is even referred to as the “fag” by one of his colleagues. In one particularly striking moment, Webster directly addresses non-queer readers:

I pause to comfort nonqueer readers. If you’re reading this book, I don’t think you’re the quintessential oppressor [. . .] Most of us are good people, and that’s not the point. Such claims are dangerous. In moving toward antiracism, these sentiments absolve white people of complicity in inherently racist systems. I learned that such a mindset—one of “we’re good people”—sidesteps white complicity in systemic oppression, and further, “good white people” are dangerous because of such complacent mindsets. (93)

Like many moments of this book, this calling out is both uncomfortable and necessary. Despite the well-meaning intentions of “good people,” being complicit in oppressive systems is a form of violence. By engaging the audience, Webster opens the text up for moments of self-reflection and asks his readers to interrogate their own ideals of activism regarding LGBTQ+ and racial minorities.

Queer readers will find themselves nodding in recognition to the experiences and stories told throughout this book. While at times self-confirming for queer readers, Webster’s study also speaks to the multiplicity of queer experiences which transcend cultural and regional expectations. Several of the East Coast participants, for instance, recounted explicit bullying, despite being in regions typically deemed more “queer-friendly” than the South or conservative Midwest. Tenured appointments also seemed to offer little protection from implicit workplace harassment or bullying as well. For non-queer readers, this book is a testament of the need for greater support for LGBTQ+ administrators and students and provides a sense of recognition of the unequal distribution of labor that falls on the shoulder of queer and racially diverse minorities.

An absence of voices haunts Queerly Centered –a fact that seems all too apparent to Webster throughout the text. This is just a small sampling of queer stories; so many voices still go unheard. Writing center studies has yet to fully explore how queer labor intersects with other identity factors such as race, disability, and class. To his credit, Webster does a remarkable job of highlighting the voices of the two black participants, often providing explicit subsections that add nuance to the queer administrative experiences. In the concluding chapter, he also addresses the noticeable absence of transgender, gender nonconforming, and pansexual identities among the participants. As he notes, Queer, Lesbian, and Gay issues are distinctly different from transgender ones. Speaking from my own experience, for those administrators with bisexual or pansexual identities, the complicated liminality of these sexual identities often offers “passing” privilege, but at the risk of feeling neither entirely part of the straight nor gay community. This makes me wonder how labor differs for those administrators with such liminal passing identities from those administrators who are more explicitly “out” in their centers.

Queerly Centered asks us to interrogate complicated questions about the everyday labor practices of queer writing center labor. Queer writing center administrators draw from their queer histories and engage in university activism, often while navigating workplace tensions. This book is a valuable read for all writing center practitioners and higher education administrators – queer and non-queer alike. We should not take this study as representative of all queer writing center voices, nor does it try to be. Instead, it challenges how we talk about writing center labor and breaks new ground by amplifying diverse queer voices.

Works cited

Caswell, Nicole I., Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors. Utah State UP, 2016.

Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring. Utah State UP, 2011.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 29-60, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44252637.

Green, Neisha-Anne S. “Moving Beyond Alright: And the Emotional Toll of This, My Life Matters Too, in the Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 15-34, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26537361.

Hallman Martini, Rebecca, and Travis Webster, editors. “Special Issue: Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces.” The Peer Review: A Journal for Writing Center Practitioners, vol. 1, no. 2, 2017. https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/writing-centers-as-braver-spaces-a-special-issue-introduction/.

Riddick, Sarah, and Tristan Hooker eds. “Special Issue: Race and the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019. http://www.praxisuwc.com/162-from-the-editors

Webster, Travis. Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace. Utah State UP, 2021.