Elastic Literacies: Mapping Queer Identities and
the Social Fault Lines of (In)Equality in
Educational Spaces
Jon M. Wargo, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Teacher Education
Michigan State University
Department of Teacher Education * Michigan State University
313 Erickson Hall * 620 Farm Lane * East Lansing, MI 48824
wa
Abstract
Based on data from a yearlong case study, this article uses connective ethnographic methods to
explore the elastic literacies and social tactics of three LGBTQ youth writers across, on, and
through the microblog Tumblr. Combining theoretical constructs from "new" and "multi-"
literacy studies, this article describes the influences of digital technologies and virtual writing
environments on contemporary configurations of discursive LGBTQ youth identity and digital
composing. Findings suggest that through their participation and writing on Tumblr, these three
youth use language and other rhetorical resources to enact gendered and sexual identities, create
queer connections, and compose community through new genres and modes of communication.
Insights gleaned from this article may offer English educators a more expansive view of
school(ed) literacy/ies and a (re)imagining of the linguistic and textual tools and social tactics
LGBTQ youth employ and explore through the networked lives they lead.
Keywords: digital literacies, writing, LGBTQ youth, Tumblr, identity/ies
Introduction and Purpose
Contemporary youth are living even more “connective/ed” lives than before (Pew
Research Center, 2010). Competence in digital literacy is quickly becoming a prerequisite skill
in the 21st century workforce (e.g., Leu & Kinzer, 2000). Socially, and in conjunction with their
embodied worlds of school and home, youth are becoming savvy in navigating the online worlds
of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking and microblogging spaces. However, they are
not complicit in their interactions and mediations between real and virtual worlds. For many
adolescents, and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth in particular,
these digital environments provide a platform for an agency they feel they do not have in school
and society given their identities as minors. Consequently, virtual worlds provide LGBTQ youth
with perceived spaces wherein they can create, curate, and compose multiple selves, showcasing
their identities and giving voice to affective experiences schools often relegate as unsanctioned.
This study, namely interested in how LGBTQ youth navigate (in)equality (both on- and
offline) through what I offer as elastic literacies, traces the connective lives three youth lead by
illuminating how online spaces empower and enact multiple identities. Named as a “queer” space
by youth participants, the digital writing environment of primary for the study was Tumblr.
Acting as a space to not only build community and create coalition, Tumblr is a space to write
the social, and sometimes sexual, self. Moreover, Tumblr offers itself as a space in which we, as
English educators, can examine and expand our own conceptions of digital writing and honor the
youth differences therein.
Research Questions
Two primary research questions guided my inquiry: a) How do LGBTQ youth navigate
identities of difference (and of affinity) through connective encounters on Tumblr? and b) While
working to combat gender (in)equality and homophobia, how do LGBTQ youth employ elastic
literacies to render the gendered and sexual self intelligible? Undergirding these questions is a
peripheral query interested in better understanding the spatial component of writing in digital
environments, c) How, if at all, do contexts of space (e.g., Tumblr) map out / position LGBTQ
identities of difference across embodied place(s) (e.g., the writing classroom, home, etc.)?
Insights gleaned from these lines of inquiry may potentially shed light on how English educators
can better understand the functions and actions youth employ in navigating (in)equality and
identities of difference in digitally mediated (con)texts.
On Defining (Elastic) Literac(y)/ies
Grounded in understanding literacy as social practice, this study utilizes theories
informed by issues of context and culture. The constellation of such theories is vast, as they are
categorized as: “situated literacies” (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 1999), “New Literacy Studies”
(Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Street, 1994), “social literacies” (Gee, 1996), and/or multiliteracies
(New London Group, 1996). Theories that view literacy as a social practice have shifted the
paradigm of seeing it solely as a set of autonomous skills. Instead, these social theories
illuminate the ideological underpinnings of literacy and shed light on its socio-political and
socio-cultural dimensions.
In an effort to not discount the energetic and affective moments for youth on Tumblr, I
am offering the term elastic literacies. Drawing from Tricia Wang’s (2013) theory of the “elastic
self,” elastic literacies take into account the types of literacy practices that emerge from social
ties and interactions with peers in digital environments. The elastic self, is “characterized by the
feeling that one’s identity is malleable and involves the trying on of different identities that are
beyond the realm of what would be considered normal displays of one’s prescribed self” (Wang,
2013, p. 31). Wang argues, “…the more elastic one’s identity, the more capacity one has to
engage with one’s social surroundings, to react to unfamiliar people and situations, and to
reflexively incorporate the new interactions into their own personal narrative” (p.31).
Rhyzomatic in nature, elastic literacies, in comparison to multiliteracies, are more malleable and
creatively charged. They are less design-focused and more experimental. Elastic literacies, often
employed in the presence of unknown users in virtual spaces, allow individuals to try on multiple
identities. Thus, youth engage elastic literacies without the pressure to commit to an identity.
Elastic literacies take into account the way contemporary youth use specific types of digital
literacy practice to maneuver between the embodied self and the digital selves in spaces of
marginalization and dehumanization. Elastic literacies, conceptually, is a heuristic perspective
that accounts for how the emerging landscapes and digital geographies of new media
technologies, and available communicative practices, shape identity and its relationship to new
imaginings of literacy practice(s). Elastic literacies take heed of what Lewis and del Valle (2009)
identify as the third wave of literacy and identity research. Understanding identity as “hybrid,
metadiscursive, and spatial” (p. 316), elastic literacies serve as an analytic to the multi-spatial
and cross-temporal performances of self/ves.
Methods and Modes of Analysis
This article draws from a yearlong case study (Haas Dyson & Genishi, 2001) saturated
with (virtual) ethnographic methods (Boelstorff et al., 2012; Kozinets, 2010) that explored the
“connective” (Leander & McKim, 2003) literacy lives of a diverse group of LGBTQ youth
across contexts. The primary goal of the larger study was to understand how LGBTQ youth
engage in varying levels of mediation as they negotiate community/ies, construct (queer)
visibility, and orchestrate convergent identities with the use of new media and digital
technologies. For the particulars of this article, I focus on three of these youth: Camille, a 16 year
old multiracial lesbian female; Jack, a 17 year old white trans-male; and Zeke a 16 year old
African American gay male.
As a queer researcher and English educator, I gained access to Center Ridge and City
Town high school in ways an outsider would not have received. While my peripheral status on
Tumblr, and limited proficiency on social networking spaces, offered me the opportunity to ask
questions related to the meta-processes of youth composing, my insider position as queer person
also offered me valuable insight. Although participants still viewed me as “researcher,” asking
me what I was writing or why I was “taking notes on them,” their immediate interest was in my
sexual orientation. In an interview months after my arrival to Center Ridge, I asked Camille
about her initial query.
Author: The first time I came to GSA, you asked, “Are you gay?”…was it easier for you
to allow me in because I’m gay?
Camille: Absolutely… I remember when Ms. Lawrence (GSA advisor) first asked us if
you could come…and I was like, “I’ll ask him if he’s gay!” and they were like “No! You
can’t just ask him! You can’t just ask someone if they’re gay!” So I asked, “Why not?
We’re about to share with him.”…Then you walked in…I remember turning around and
saying, “Yeah, he’s gay. He is one of us.”
As Camille notes, participants were going to “share” vignettes of real and perceived
homophobia, pieces of writing that were deeply personal, and affective moments they had not
communicated to their own family and friends. At the commencement of the study, Zeke, Jack,
and Camille asked me to create a Tumblr of my own and “follow” them. As a follower, I found
that avid participation in this digital community was necessary for my own understanding of
writing the self/ves. Asking me to “follow” was crucial to the study as it signaled that a rapport
between researcher and youth was formed, one wherein I became privy to the type of literacy
work being done. While consenting to share and discuss their writing and composition in digital
environments, Camille, Zeke, and Jack asked me not to share their tumblelog IDs with their
teachers. Being and “becoming a worthy witness” (Winn & Ubiles, 2011) to the types of writing
and remixing these youth were doing was a privilege, one where I, as a researcher, was both an
insider (self-identifying as a gay adult ally) and an outsider (with limited Tumblr expertise).
Residing in this liminal space, and considering my relationship to the site, I was aware of the
competing subjectivities and their potential impact on how I approached and analyzed the data.
In an effort to keep biases at bay and increase reliability, I employed member-checking strategies
by allowing youth to review transcripts, preliminary findings, and all multimodal artifacts
documented here (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).
Participant observation across sites (in-school, on Tumblr, etc.) was the primary mode of
data collection. During the 2013 year, I conducted and audiotaped three semi-structured active
interviews (Holstein & Gubrium, 2002), collected multimodal work, wrote field notes, and
textually analyzed student’s writing on Tumblr. Interviews lasted from 45 to 90 minutes. Divided
into topical categories, interviews elicited responses related to the larger research questions as
well as the features of their writing about difference across contexts.
I analyzed data with a particular focus on understanding how LGBTQ youth engaged
with community language(s), literacies, and digital mediation across contexts. I began with open
coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994) after a close reading of the first set of interviews. After
multiple iterative re-readings of interview transcripts, I analyzed how these LGBTQ youth
shifted their discourse identities (Gee, 2001) and ways of operating in navigating (in)equality
across space and place (from home to school, from in-school to out-of-school, from real to
virtual). Using “sensitizing” concepts (Charmaz, 2003) of inequality, identity/subjectivity, and
types of literacy that emerged in open coding, I moved to axial coding, collapsing how types of
literacy work were enacted across focal themes. This crystalized and brought to fruition the types
of practice(s) employed by all youth participants across sites and contexts. For example,
practices of #tagging, reblogging, and text-based personal posts, emerged as digital writing
themes that many of the youth engaged with in authoring the self/ves on Tumblr.
Triangulating across transcribed interviews, one-on-one protocol think aloud sessions,
analytic memos and field notes, and posts participants excavated from their personal Tumblr
archive (n=120 posts), these procedures led to the patterns discussed in the findings section. In
my presentation of findings I provide exemplars from the data that illustrate the multiple ways
youth navigate inequality and homophobia through their use of, and participation in, the
microblogging community of Tumblr as well as the enactments and constructions of self/ves
they authored in this digital space.
Research Findings
In this section, I present analyses of the types of social tactics and elastic literacy
practices youth employed on Tumblr. I report findings in relation to the action and function each
tactic or practice accomplished. Distinctions between “real” spaces such as the school classroom
and home are important, as participants often constructed these spaces as “unsafe,” leaving the
digital environments of Tumblr as a safe space, one wherein they could write their multiple
self/ves and achieve a visibility that so-called “real” place and space did not permit. Rather than
describe how these spatio-temporal categories varied across theme in isolation, I present their
importance as I lay out the subsections of findings: reblog / remix as resistance and
#hashtagpublics as community literacies. As I show in my findings, purposeful digital writing
gave these youth membership and acceptance to communities they could not find elsewhere,
membership and acceptance to worlds where the resources and practices employed worked to
(re)design more equitable social worlds.
Reblog/Remix as Resistance
Reblogging, a novice Tumblr competency, is one of the many elastic literacy practices
participants used in writing the self/ves. Reblogging, and the remixing participants created by
transforming, evaluating, and re-designing reblogged posts, are two of the focal practices
participants used as acts of resistance. Beyond the practice of using audio/visual and textual
languages across platforms, the participants I studied used reblogging and remixing in complex
ways in order to not only achieve a visibility they felt they did not have in their everyday lives
but, to also critique, interrogate, and resist dominant cultural logics (see Figure 1 and Figure 2
for examples of reblog/remix).
FIGURE 1: ZEKE’S REBLOG
FIGURE 2: CAMILLE’S REBLOG
#hashtagpublics and Community Literacies
The hashtag functions in the space between the contextual and the chronological. As an
elastic literacy practice that is often entwined with, and set apart from, reblogging and remixing,
I found youth participants evoking hashtags in a number of utilitarian ways. A hashtag is a node
of continued context across media, conversations, and locales. Illustrated through participant
interviews and writing, it emerges temporally; pointing to itself as it points to other texts it marks
within its ambit. Hashtags are hybrids in taxonomy and types of information. Hashtags are text
and metatext, information and tag, pragmatic and metapragmatic speech. They are deictic and
indexical--yet what they point to is themselves, their own dual role in ongoing discourse. In this
section, I explore multiple ways youth used the hashtag function as a means to gain followers (a
necessary action for successful Tumbling) and LGBTQ visibility; continued “educating” as a
type of youth activism they felt unwarranted in their embodied space of school; and, finally, how
the hashtag functions as a mechanism to delineate and create siloed categories of identity
wherein Camille, Zeke, and Jack gain the perceived agency and power to marginalize those who
so often critique and dehumanize them (see Figure 3 and Figure 4 for examples of #hashtag
activism and visibility).
FIGURE 3: ZEKE’S POST “NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY”
FIGURE 4: JACK’S POST “TESTOSTERONE TMI”
Conclusion
Elastic literacies and the emergent technologies for LGBTQ youth composing hold great
promise for rethinking research and practice in the teaching of writing. Amid the hype of
utilizing Web 2.0 technologies to rethink the writing classroom, we need to resist the act of coopting youth spaces, technologies, and the materializations of their digital culture(s). Rather, we
must learn from them and “commit to this digital rhetorical perspective on writing…to help [our]
students engage effectively in the ICT [Information and Communication Technology] revolution
taking place right now” (Grabill & Hicks, 2005, p. 307). The work suggests that there is potential
for teachers to capitalize on the sophisticated work youth are already a part of, drawing attention
to the connective actions, social tactics, and functions they are employing in their presentation of
self/ves. Focusing on a common, but potentially rich situation of LGBTQ youth writing in digital
spaces, this study described how three marginalized youth navigated (in)equality and
homophobia through tactics of creating, curating, and composing. Conceptualizing elastic
literacies illuminated how writing constructs multiple vignettes of self/ves; oftentimes
highlighting the varying hues of discursive identity/ies these LGBTQ youth hold and hide. In
particular, and as illuminated through Zeke, Camille, and Jack, youth used Tumblr to render their
sexual identities intelligible. Tumblr, for Jack, Camille, and Zeke, acted as a digital environment
wherein sexuality, conceptually, sat. In centered spaces of heterosexism and homophobia, youth
are writing from the virtual world to combat and disavow embodied conflict.
To return to the article’s title, #donttagyourhate was used by Jack, Camille, and Zeke to
order the virtual world according to a certain set of values. These values, both socially and
culturally situated, governed the virtual world of Tumblr as welcoming to LGBTQ youth. It
allowed them the elasticity and the space to experiment, to create, and as Camille notes “…to
just be.” Rather than focusing solely on how these youth indexed their Tumblr experience
through the paradigm of #donttagyourhate, I want to close with highlighting the critical literacy
work Camille, Zeke, and Jack engaged in and brainstorm how we can learn from them and their
practices. They may have not tagged their hate, but they surveyed difference, interrogated
dominant discourses of privilege, and reflected on their own multiple identities and self/ves as
youth minors. Therefore, this study’s provocations lie not in the refusal of tagging hate, but,
rather, understanding, navigating combatting, and writing against it.
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