ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up queer theory, an umbrella term for a host of theoretical approaches. The presence of queer theory in writing center research largely focuses on sexual and gender identity; pivoting from scholarship in the wider humanities and social sciences, queer theory offers routes to questioning and understanding everyday practices and more abstract dynamics in writing centers. Queering writing center research includes the documentation of LGBTQ+ experiences in teaching, learning, and administration and provides a series of critical lenses to question how normalization and naturalization operates in the production of language and the generation of pedagogy by privileging certain expression, rhetoric, and bodies over others. Queer theory pushes researchers to interrogate positionality in order to open a more complex analysis into the systems, practices, and tactics of structural inequality and ordinary interactions. The chapter invites researchers to explore not just the presence of and dynamics affecting sexual and gender minorities in writing centers and their scholarship, but also the possibility to complicate and imagine ways conventional methods and inquiry can intersect with the social justice core of queer theory.
