Chapter 3: Queering Text: Literacies Surrounding Cyber Trolling

If at its basic level literacy is concerned with the ability to read and write text, our present digitized reality requires us to stretch our collective imaginations to understand the word text in this new virtual context. What constitutes text, and who makes these decisions? When teachers using digitized versions of 30-year-old textbooks are still warning students to stay away from Wikipedia, it seems clear that the same antiquated processes by which we have vetted text to be suitable for educational purposes are often being employed in digital contexts, and that these processes could do with a good queering. In general terms, I mean to suggest here that a queer methodology can potentially reorient perspectives to destabilize tacit assumptions about a given topic. A queer methodology allows a consumer of contemporary digital texts in a higher education context the opportunity to construct a more robust set of meanings by considering This chapter is based in part on a paper presented by the author at the Philosophy Education Society (PES) 2017 conference entitled “Trolling Toward the Human, Cyber Artifacts, Social Justice, and Queering of intercorporeality.” not only the body of an online text, but perhaps also the comments that troll underneath. Rhetorically, both “queer” and “troll” take on multiple meanings, and I to some extent ‘play’ with these meanings throughout this chapter. Methodologically, I begin with a theoretical framework for reconsidering how trolling comments might be understood as the articulation of oppressive opinions that are denied within normative public discourse. I then conclude by grounding the theory in a more concrete scenario of a discussion board about privilege used on a college campus. This chapter ought not be thought of as a set of instructional methods, rather an exploration of how, as university educators, we might reorient our relationship with particular types of online texts.