Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 22, No. 2 (2025)
LGBTQ+ Alliances and Allies: Affinity Groups as Queered Professional Development for Writing Centers
Katharine Brown
Auburn University
brownkh@auburn.edu
Jonah Breed
Auburn University
jwb0085@auburn.edu
Abstract
This article introduces affinity groups as a writing center professional development initiative in support of the inclusion of our LGBTQ+ employees. These groups invite employees with shared identities to form a supportive community and hold critical conversations about relevant topics. A writing center at a large university in the Southeastern United States engaged in queer worldmaking and launched two affinity groups in support of LGBTQ+ inclusion: the LGBTQ+ Alliance, and the LGBTQ+ Allies. In this article, the authors engage in storytelling to consider how participating in and leading affinity groups impacted their professionalization and their sense of welcome. They conclude with reflections on how writing center administrators can queer their approach to staff professional development with the goal of creating a more welcoming workplace for LGBTQ+ employees.
Introduction
Writing center literature reflects a significant gap in attention to supporting LGBTQ+ employees and students; Rihn and Sloan attributed this gap to heteronormativity in the field. While there has been growing attention to LGBTQ+ experiences within writing centers, praxis-focused literature often only addresses the needs of the LGBTQ+ students who visit writing centers (Herb and Perdue; Simpkins; Suhr-Sytsma and Brown), rather than the LGBTQ+ employees who staff these spaces. Accounts that detail the experiences of LGBTQ+ consultants and administrators frequently share personal narratives of trauma, discomfort, or fear (Anonymous; Denny; Dickerson and Rylander; Dixon; Sloan), and intervention suggestions are often limited to calls for one-time Safe Zone training (Herb and Perdue).
This lack of attention to LGBTQ+ employees and students is concerning, as writing centers frequently purport to be welcoming spaces to all who enter. While writing center scholarship has done a good job theorizing the need for inclusion, there is a gap in knowledge about how those theories translate into practice. At our large writing center at University Writing (UW) at Auburn University, we observed that we had a limited understanding of how to enact LGBTQ+ inclusion. In fact, we found we were inadvertently centering cisheterosexual perspectives in our staff professional development curriculum. LGBTQ+ staff shared with us that our efforts to educate peer consultants about LGBTQ+ identities left them feeling dissatisfied or even hurt when their colleagues expressed resistant perspectives. Thus, it became clear that we needed to develop a new approach to welcoming our LGBTQ+ staff, one that centered their experiences and celebrated their identities.
We built upon calls made by Carter and Dean as well as Eller and Wood to investigate what makes students feel welcome in writing centers by turning our focus to welcoming LGBTQ+ peer consultants. To better welcome LGBTQ+ peer consultants, we engaged in queer worldmaking, defined as creating a space where queer people can thrive (Berlant and Warner). Professional development is the main contact time we have with staff, and we re-envisioned our approach to professional development by centering our focus on the wellbeing of our LGBTQ+ employees. As a result of this reconsideration, we launched affinity groups, which included the LGBTQ+ Alliance, a space for members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the LGBTQ+ Allies, a space for anyone interested in learning about allyship. By forming groups based on identity, supportive communities could be built, and conversations could be cultivated that supported wellbeing. These groups represented a departure from UW’s usual approaches to professional development.
We contend that welcoming practices differ for employees with marginalized identities, and we call for a queered approach to staff professional development. By first exploring how to welcome our LGBTQ+ student employees, we will be better positioned to welcome LGBTQ+ student writers. Through queer worldmaking, we communicated our commitment to creating a workplace that is more welcoming to LGBTQ+ staff and invited everyone to have a role in that work. In this article, Katharine H. Brown, UW’s Associate Director who developed and led affinity groups, and Jonah Breed, then a Graduate Program Assistant who participated in and later co-led affinity groups, reflect on how these groups supported their learning and growth. They consider how these groups celebrate queer empowerment, avoid centering queer trauma, and impact workplace culture. Their model for queered professional development can be adopted in other writing center contexts.
Positioning Our Work
UW is a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)/Writing in the Disciplines (WID) program and writing center at Auburn University, a large, R-1 research institution in the Southeastern United States. It is staffed by six full-time administrators, ten graduate assistants, an undergraduate assistant, and approximately 40 student workers. UW has one director and two associate directors, each of whom focuses on a different population: faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. For faculty, UW offers faculty academies, in which teams of faculty within departments collaboratively redesign their courses or programs to incorporate high-impact writing assignments. For graduate students, UW offers four writing programs that give attention to mindful writing for wellbeing, peer support, and specialized tutoring. For undergraduate students, UW offers the writing center, which is staffed by graduate assistants and student workers. Additionally, UW facilitates in-class writing workshops upon faculty request.
With a large team of employees and a wide range of programming, UW’s administrators sought to establish a culture of professional development around community and wellbeing. To this end, administrators held a weekly team meeting and regularly read and discussed books that addressed topics such as positively framed conversations and healthy habit-building. Katharine, who supervises the graduate assistants and directs the graduate student writing programs, began each graduate assistant weekly professional development meeting by leading a breath-focused meditation that aimed to calm stress and center focus on the present moment. One of her goals was to create an environment where thoughtful reflection about identities and experiences was welcomed. All staff involved in the writing center engaged in regular, ongoing professional development in small groups called Circles (Marshall) and all staff meetings. They were annually invited to participate in Safe Zone training, which Auburn University’s Student Counseling & Psychological Services describes as a 4-hour training course that focuses on sexuality and gender to create safety for LGBTQ+ students. Auburn’s Safe Zone program is adapted from the Safe Zone Project, which provides learning resources and outlines values for LGBTQ+ inclusive organizations.
While establishing a culture of professional development, UW’s administrators centered diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as an ongoing source of inquiry and sought to inform programming and policies with principles grounded in DEI. In practice, UW engaged in a semester-long initiative with the full staff in 2020, in which we read about antiracism in writing center praxis and conducted an assessment institute. For the assessment institute, staff created a rubric and evaluated programmatic materials, such as workshop slide decks and handouts, for antiracism (Basgier, et al.; Cicchino, et al.). This project led to the development of a linguistic diversity statement, which we shared at the start of all workshops, as well as the revision of several workshops. Other initiatives included inviting experts from Auburn University’s diversity office to lead discussions about identities and help us align Auburn University’s and UW’s diversity statements. Additionally, the full staff regularly considered compassion practices to encourage team unity and to create a more welcoming environment for staff and clients.
Peer consultant professional development also centered DEI; in fact, one peer consultant learning outcome stated that consultants should “serve writers from various backgrounds and identities using practices grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion (e.g., sharing pronouns, ‘calling in’ and ‘calling out,’ asking questions about client’s background and experiences relevant to their project).” As professional development, peer consultants were assigned readings – usually selected from writing center-focused journals – that aimed to educate them about LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and neurodiverse identities, among others. These readings were then discussed in Circle or all staff meetings.
In spite of these efforts, student employees with minoritized identities at times disclosed to administrators uncomfortable or painful experiences resulting from the professional development curriculum. LGBTQ+ peer consultants described hearing colleagues discuss their identities from uninformed perspectives, and they noted that assigned readings were aimed at educating cisheterosexual people about LGBTQ+ identities, topics about which they were already deeply knowledgeable, and thus they did not learn from the content. As writing center literature has given little attention to LGBTQ+ identities, it was difficult for administrators to identify readings that resonated with our staff. It was clear that these attempts to create a welcoming and inclusive environment were falling short, and UW needed to queer its approach to LGBTQ+ inclusive professional development.
Literature Review
LGBTQ+ Identities in Writing Center Literature
The research gap on LGBTQ+ lives in the midst of writing centers has been repeatedly noted. In 2006, the International Writing Center Association published a Diversity Initiative Position Statement that identified “the absence of a significant body of research and scholarship addressing diversity matters in our discipline” and called for attention to “members of underrepresented groups such as people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and people with a range of abilities, economic needs, and linguistic expression” (1). Perhaps in response, there has been growth in attention to many of the underrepresented groups described in the statement. However, the significant gap in research into LGBTQ+ inclusion persists. In fact, Denny described this lack of scholarly activity as a “curious silence” (n. pag.).
Also identifying silence toward LGBTQ+ lives, Rihn and Sloan conducted a meta-analysis on writing center literature that addressed LGBTQ+ lives at the length of at least one paragraph. Beyond exposing a gap, these authors argued that heteronormativity is apparent within writing center research and tutor guidebooks, both in what is written and what is ignored and thereby rendered invisible. In a similar vein, Robinson et al. called out Ryan and Zimmerelli’s classic The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, a text frequently assigned to peer writing consultants, for framing diverse identities as “issues that might arise” disruptively during a consultation (n. pag.). These authors compellingly exposed writing center literature as normative, both reflecting and perpetuating the climate of writing centers. Through being silent on LGBTQ+ identities or framing these identities as potentially disruptive, writing center studies has fallen short of meeting the needs of LGBTQ+ employees and students.
Concerningly, research that breaks silences through sharing the experiences of queer consultants in writing centers consists of three stories of trauma (Dickerson and Rylander; Dixon; Sloan). Sloan described tutoring a student whose paper described “the sin of homosexuality”: “Never had I felt myself, my own identity, so directly threatened—pushed back towards that old ultimatum, that suffocating closet door" (9). Second, Dickerson considered whether to come out to a student after facing a “heterosexist question” about his experience of opposite-sex attraction, ultimately deciding it was unsafe: “There was an intense war happening behind the scenes. A split second calculation of the pros and cons” (Dickerson and Rylander 7). Third, Dixon described her exclusion from conversations about supporting LGBT writers, stating, “My bisexuality was not ‘queer enough,’ at least for my writing center colleagues” (n. pag). These accounts reflect trauma experienced within writing centers; concerningly, reading only stories of trauma in LGBTQ+ focused professional development positions LGBTQ+ identities as an issue or as suffering and disempowered. Instead, we hoped to cultivate discourses of empowerment throughout our professional development, and thus create a more welcoming space for our LGBTQ+ staff.
Affinity Groups as Queered Professional Development
Although writing center literature continues to explore welcoming clients, there is a gap in research on welcoming staff inclusively. Writing center administrators often aim to create friendly, welcoming, homelike spaces; however, Grutsch McKinney as well as Eller and Wood argued that these attempts often center privileged identities while missing opportunities to welcome individuals with marginalized identities. While these authors’ critical lenses on welcoming are helpful, their emphases remain on welcoming clients.
Writing center literature addressing professional development also focuses on welcoming clients, and it makes little mention of staff wellbeing. Professional development is typically an ongoing process throughout a peer consultant’s tenure that focuses on clients’ comfort, satisfaction, and connections with peer consultants (Peterson; Robinson et al.; Wulff). DEI-oriented professional development is more frequently a one-time occurrence that is client-serving (Connor and Clinger; Greer et al.). Attempts to address LGBTQ+ inclusion often rely on Safe Zone, a one-time training that focuses on the learning of cisheterosexual participants and, in the space of writing centers, may maintain a focus on client experiences. As an example, Anonymous, a writing center administrator, described implementing Safe Zone training “to prepare ourselves and make gestures toward queer and trans students” (n. pag.).
While Safe Zone is a valuable program that begins conversations about LGBTQ+ inclusion, it does not represent a sustained approach to LGBTQ+ inclusion that builds community and invites conversations over time. Instead, it is a one-time DEI experience that emphasizes voluntary participation, and it can be challenging for administrators to find time in busy onboarding and professional development schedules to add this experience. As an example, Herb and Perdue hoped to implement a one-hour Safe Zone training for staff, but they “simply weren’t able to fit the program into our training meetings” (76). Furthermore, the training does not equip administrators to radically re-envision approaches to professional development and LGBTQ+ inclusion. In fact, Standridge, a writing center administrator, felt reluctant to display a Safe Zone sticker, fearing that heterosexual, cisgender students seeing the sticker would feel uncomfortable and decide to not visit the center: “We should support those [LGBT] groups who are un-safe. But we should not do that at the cost of educating those not in the group” (n. pag.). While Safe Zone is a valuable introduction to LGBTQ+ topics, sustained attention to LGBTQ+ lives in the midst of writing centers and transformative practices are much needed.
Instead of a one-time DEI training, affinity groups offer a sustained approach to creating a more inclusive workplace. The history of affinity groups can be traced to the Civil Rights Movement. Employees of corporations such as Xerox launched employee resource groups (ERGs) to give Black employees a space to advocate for their rights in the workplace (Catalino et al.). Over time, ERGs, or affinity groups, were adapted within educational settings for students and faculty with minority or underrepresented identities. In their current form, affinity groups invite participants with shared identities to establish a supportive community, hold critical conversations about relevant and challenging issues, and take collective action over a sustained period of time (Alicea and Johnson; Oto and Chikkatur). In professional spaces, they are a paid opportunity for employees to participate in DEI efforts. Generally, affinity groups focus on supporting individuals with marginalized identities, and separate allyship groups for people with socially privileged identities may be formed.
Beyond building a healing community, many affinity group members collectively engage in activism or design an intervention (Greene; Kulkarni, et al.; Michael, et al.). However, UW’s affinity groups emphasize community and wellbeing while not asking group members to undertake a service project. With plans to expand affinity groups to support additional minoritized identities, we wanted to avoid putting the onus of improving the culture of inclusion on the members of the office who were already experiencing identity-based challenges at our predominantly white institution. UW’s affinity groups cultivate wellbeing through community support, and they avoid championing traditional narratives of workplace productivity, such as those within writing center research that focus on client experiences while ignoring staff experiences.
To our knowledge, our affinity group project within the space of a writing center is the first of its kind, and it represents a queered approach to staff professional development. A goal of UW’s affinity groups was to welcome staff, especially LGBTQ+ staff who may find few resources to support them as they navigate identity-related challenges and traumas in our unique socio-cultural location. This queered approach to professional development shifts the direction of conversations away from clients and toward wellbeing. After all, as Giaimo stated, writing center “success...depends on the emotional wellbeing of our workers” (7). In other words, UW moved away from productivity narratives that only address client experiences. Instead, we believed that centering staff wellbeing, especially that of our LGBTQ+ staff, would result in improved client experiences. Thus, we see our affinity groups as care work (Giaimo) focused on welcoming our LGBTQ+ employees.
Affinity Groups’ Theoretical Framework
In this section, we consider how theories of queer worldmaking, discourse, brave spaces, and storytelling have informed the design of UW’s affinity groups.
UW’s affinity groups engaged in queer worldmaking with the aim of creating a more welcoming workplace for LGBTQ+ employees. Berlant and Warner defined queer worldmaking as the creation of expansive queer cultures where queer people can thrive. Outside of queer cultures, the authors argued, “we would always be outnumbered and overwhelmed” (563). The members of the LGBTQ+ Alliance collaboratively created a brave space in which members could have transformative conversations about their identities because socially privileged, cisheterosexual perspectives were minimized or absent. The members of the LGBTQ+ Allies also participated in queer worldmaking by collaboratively creating a brave space in which they reflected on their identities and ongoing allyship journeys while considering ways to make the workplace more inclusive for their LGBTQ+ colleagues. Through this multifaceted approach to queer worldmaking, UW expanded its ways of welcoming LGBTQ+ employees.
A primary way affinity groups engage in queer worldmaking is through relationship-building while cultivating queered discourses. Discourses, according to Butler, can empower and oppress while impacting the way a person understands themselves. Jones et al. aptly stated, “The language a person hears used about them becomes the language they use about themselves” (7). Through attention to discourse, individuals can work together to queer a culture and language that is historically cisheteronormative. LeMaster et al. emphasized that through building relationships among LGBTQ+ individuals, a world separate from “discursive violence” starts to form (347). Thus, our goal was to hold conversations within both groups that celebrated queer identities and queer empowerment. We deliberately avoided focusing on the traumas we had previously highlighted in our professional development curriculum, as trauma-focused conversations can inadvertently enact discursive violence by only focusing on pain and disempowerment.
Katharine’s vision for affinity groups centered on fostering sustaining and healing relationships through queered discourses; thus, affinity groups are a wellbeing project. Instead of avoiding conversation about LGBTQ+ identity and lived experience–a cisheteronormative move–affinity groups embrace these conversations, drawing on the brave versus safe spaces framework to structure conversations. Safe spaces problematically prioritize members’ comfort and protection from challenging conversations (Arao and Clemens). Safe spaces rhetoric may camouflage members’ avoidance of topics that can ultimately help them understand themselves and the people around them; this avoidance of challenging topics can foster silence about LGBTQ+ people. This ultimately leads to the space’s cisheteronormativity remaining uncontested. On the other hand, brave spaces embrace challenging conversations by recognizing that discourse is required for meaningful change (Arao and Clemens).
In UW’s affinity groups, we leaned into storytelling to reflect on our experiences and build community. Andrew situated storytelling as part of consultant professional development; through storytelling, writing center staff become “better learners and better teachers – identities that are better together than apart” (n. pag.). Through storytelling, consultants build connections, explore their consulting identities, and move away from the potentially isolating task of one-on-one tutoring (Andrew). We see storytelling as part of wellbeing and learning, and we sought to establish a brave space within affinity groups for storytelling. Brave spaces require that members “own [their] intentions [and] impacts” of their words (Arao and Clemens 145) and creating group agreements that guide conversations can foster community and vulnerable conversations. Essentially, group agreements require participants to acknowledge that their statements impact others and to discuss what collective growth will look like for members.
By drawing on theories of queer worldmaking, discourse, brave spaces, and storytelling, we developed affinity groups. Our groups represent a novel, potentially transformative approach to writing center professional development, one founded in queer worldmaking that centers the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ employees. We believe that affinity groups have impacted the culture of our workplace and improved the wellbeing of our staff. In the next sections, we give a brief overview of our launch of affinity groups, and then we engage in storytelling to show how these groups shaped our experiences at work.
Affinity Groups in Practice
Getting Started
To recruit affinity group members, Katharine invited participation at an all-staff meeting. She described the goal of creating a more welcoming and inclusive workplace for LGBTQ+ employees, and she noted that participation is a paid professional development opportunity. She shared that the groups were important to her as a queer woman, and she described the identity-based vulnerability she had felt in past workplaces. Finally, she described the groups as sites of community building where discussions of identity and inclusive action would take place.
One-third of the staff elected to participate by completing an online survey. Once Katharine had a list of participants, she emailed availability polls to determine when to schedule meetings. She was careful that responses to the polls would only be seen by her to avoid outing anyone’s identity to others. Based on poll results, Katharine scheduled three groups, each with seven members. There would be one LGBTQ+ Alliance group and two LGBTQ+ Allies groups. She scheduled 5 meetings per group at a biweekly interval. In future semesters, Katharine allowed groups to decide how often they wanted to meet, and several groups, including the LGBTQ+ Alliance, chose to meet weekly throughout the full semester.
Additionally, Katharine selected a theme and wrote discussion questions for each session. Rather than creating separate curricula for each group, she wrote a curriculum for the LGBTQ+ Alliance and used the same one for the LGBTQ+ Allies. With this strategy, Katharine sought to queer the curriculum while centering and honoring LGBTQ+ lives. In practice, Katharine allowed the conversation to flow as members saw fit, as long as the conversations honored group agreements and loosely pertained to the day’s topic. In subsequent semesters, Katharine shifted to a student-led model of the groups. In the new model, group members suggested topics they wanted to explore, and Katharine and the student leaders crafted discussion questions and curated resources for each session.
Group Agreements
Drawing on brave space theory (Arao and Clemens), Katharine set aside time during the first meeting of each affinity group for the collaborative creation of group agreements. While creating group agreements, participants discussed their goals for participation and the kind of community they hoped to create. These conversations acknowledged that each member held the ability to shape the dynamics of the group and that conversations about identity can be challenging. Some examples of agreements created by groups include:
Confidentiality is vital. I won’t disclose the names of the members of this group or their identities to anyone. I am free to discuss my own experiences in the group, but I won’t discuss those of others.
I will listen mindfully with an awareness that discussions are vulnerable.
I will share ideas and ask questions with the understanding these may impact others.
I will come to this group as an equal, and I will not evaluate or assess anyone based on our discussions.
We believe that the success and bravery of UW’s affinity groups began with establishing expectations for conversation and behavior both within and outside of meetings. These group agreements acknowledged that conversations may be uncomfortable, as our goal was to avoid creating a pseudocommunity that avoided critical discourse (Grayson). Creating group agreements encouraged group members to consider their identities, engage in storytelling about their experiences, and contemplate welcoming practices. In the next section, we share our own stories about how participating in and leading affinity groups impacted our sense of belonging and our professional development.
Experiential Narratives
In this section, we engage in storytelling and share personal narratives that capture small but impactful experiences within the LGBTQ+ Alliance and the LGBTQ+ Allies. Storytelling, as we explained earlier, can be an act of queer worldmaking. Through reflecting on our identity-based experiences and positionalities, we take a step toward building a workplace that is more welcoming to LGBTQ+ people.
We begin our stories with our positionalities because awareness of positionality is integral to our ability to impact programmatic culture. We recognize that we are always engaged in a process of consciously and unconsciously shaping UW's culture through the lens of our identities. By regularly investigating and reflecting on our identities, we seek to understand how our identities shape our decisions and UW's culture.
First, Katharine reflects on her own learning and growth through participating in and leading the LGBTQ+ Alliance. Next, Jonah reflects on his developing understanding of allyship, considering how participating in the LGBTQ+ Allies impacts his work as an educator.
Katharine’s Positionality Statement
When I joined the UW team in May 2020 as a graduate assistant and doctoral candidate in English education, I was anxious about entering a new workplace. As a white, queer woman, I wondered what climate toward LGBTQ+ people existed within the unit and whether I could be open about my identity without repercussion or social alienation. However, I found UW’s emphasis on DEI to be inviting, although I sensed a need to deepen attention to welcoming LGBTQ+ staff and clients. By making my queer identity visible, I hoped to advocate for LGBTQ+ inclusion.
To that end, I began searching writing center literature for resources on welcoming LGBTQ+ staff and clients, finding scant information. Thus, I decided to focus on LGBTQ+ inclusion in writing centers as my dissertation study. In conversations about this goal with Christopher Basgier, Director of UW, he suggested researching affinity groups as one way to enact inclusive practice. This sparked the concept for my dissertation study, in which I implemented affinity groups at UW and studied their impact through a qualitative research study. My aim was to create a more welcoming workplace for LGBTQ+ staff and to expand UW’s affinity groups in subsequent semesters to address additional identities.
As I envisioned affinity groups and designed my dissertation study, I experienced a change in roles at UW. I planned affinity groups in early summer 2022, was hired as Assistant Director of UW in July 2022, launched affinity groups in August 2022, graduated with my Ph.D. in August 2023, and was promoted to Associate Director in September 2023. In each of these roles, I have continued to develop, expand, and lead affinity groups while reflecting on how my positionality influenced my work toward creating a more inclusive workplace.
Katharine’s Narrative
My queer journey has been fraught with challenge, and in different spaces I have struggled with feeling either too queer or not queer enough. I felt far too queer for the spaces where I had grown up: a conservative, Southern Baptist home and school. Coming out to family and friends resulted in loss of meaningful relationships. In those spaces and relationships, I struggled to celebrate my identity.
My feeling of being too queer also manifested in professional spaces, and at times I strategically chose to not disclose my identity. In past workplaces, when coworkers inquired about my dating or personal life through heterosexist terms (“Do you have a boyfriend?”), I responded with gender neutral language (“I’m in a relationship”) and quickly moved the conversation elsewhere. Concealing my queerness felt necessary for survival.
On the other hand, I had navigated the feeling of being not queer enough in other spaces. When I visited LGBTQ+ focused events, I felt out of place. Growing up, I had experienced little exposure to media and conversations that celebrated LGBTQ+ identities. Thus, I was not able to pick up on cultural and media references often made at those events. I am also cisgender, and my clothing choices did not visibly signal my queer identity.
In fact, the spaces where I had felt most comfortable in my identity were in my graduate courses and at UW. I found allies in some of my professors, and I wrote about my positionality in my qualitative research methods courses. I felt that UW’s emphasis on DEI was welcoming, and I tentatively began asking for more attention to LGBTQ+ inclusion, an act of self-advocacy and self-celebration that I hadn’t attempted in other workplaces. This was well received, and I felt empowered to launch the LGBTQ+ Alliance and the LGBTQ+ Allies as activism and advocacy for LGBTQ+ people. My goal was to celebrate queer identities and queer empowerment and build community while avoiding centering trauma. However, I felt impostor syndrome and worried that I was not queer enough to lead the LGBTQ+ Alliance. I also worried that my presence as an administrator would put a damper on conversation.
Nevertheless, from the very first meeting of the LGBTQ+ Alliance, I experienced kindness, welcoming, and acceptance from the group members. When I arrived for the first meeting just a few minutes early, I found that the other group members had arrived even earlier and were already discussing their identities and experiences in our workplace, at our university, and in our region of the United States. Rather than leading or directing the conversation as I had planned, I joined as a peer and co-learner.
Over time, I shifted the LGBTQ+ Alliance meetings to a student-led model. I was eager to give peer consultants the opportunity to lead conversations on topics they felt were meaningful, and I suspected that a peer consultant as discussion leader would be far more inviting than an administrator. In this new approach, members of the LGBTQ+ Alliance suggested topics, and then they collaborated with me and each other to identify resources and design discussion questions and activities on those topics. We then facilitated the sessions.
Recently, members of the LGBTQ+ Alliance requested that we discuss queer fashion and queer signaling through fashion. For queer people, fashion is connected to identity expression, and fashion choices may impact professional security. As an example, an employee adopting queer fashions may face increased surveillance from coworkers who are not LGBTQ+ affirming. In other words, fashion is a relevant and vulnerable topic for many LGBTQ+ employees, and queer fashion can be an important topic for queered approaches to staff professional development.
When this topic was requested, I again felt imposter syndrome about my ability to co-lead these discussions with the student members. In the LGBTQ+ Alliance, I was surrounded by colleagues who had bold, defined senses of style that challenged gender norms and thoughtfully signaled queerness. On the other hand, I felt that my clothing choices tended to conform to professional and gender norms, and I was unlikely to be read by others as queer.
Our session on fashion opened with an invitation to participants to draw their favorite outfits and share their drawings with each other, explaining why they enjoyed wearing those items. One of the student leaders then asked, “What makes your style queer? The answer is not that a queer person is wearing it.” Members thoughtfully described the ways their clothing represented their identities. I was the last to speak, again feeling impostor syndrome about whether my fashion was queer enough for the Alliance.
“I don’t think I have much fashion sense, much less a queer sense of style,” I shared, looking down at the table rather than at others. When I spoke, the group member seated next to me immediately began staring at my white leather sneakers, making a wordless point. “Personally, I think you have a great sense of style,” shared one member. Another group member told me, “There’s a style called lesbian academia, and you might want to look that up to see if it resonates with you.” I acknowledged that I knew the style and that I was dressed similarly, with my tucked in, striped and collared button-down shirt covered with an oversized, “boyfriend” style cardigan, all in shades of blue and gray. It was one of my favorite outfits, one I had worn the week previously while presenting at an academic conference. It was comfortable and felt like me, just as much as my floral dresses also feel like me.
In that moment, I felt validated and accepted. Rather than feeling like too much or not enough, I felt like my identity was just right for me, and I had a sense of belonging with my colleagues. For me, a sense of belonging is a first step toward experiencing safety in my identity and wellbeing at work. Experiences such as this one reaffirmed to me that queer worldmaking is an important component of LGBTQ+ inclusive writing center professional development. Providing a foundation of belonging for peer consultants is necessary to the work of writing center administrators, and professional development initiatives are a means to communicate welcoming and belonging. A foundation of belonging can then be a starting point for peer consultants to engage in self-directed, goal-oriented professional development.
Through leading the affinity groups, I was able to deeply consider what makes me feel welcomed and safe, which includes community membership and stated support from others. Queer worldmaking requires ongoing, intentional efforts from all members of an ecosystem, and it is not a one-time effort. Seeing my colleagues, including Jonah, engage in the LGBTQ+ Allies was another factor that supported my sense of welcoming and belonging as a queer woman.
Jonah’s Positionality Statement
I joined the UW team in August 2020 as an undergraduate peer writing consultant. An aspiring secondary English language arts educator, I wanted to bolster the UW community while preparing for my career. Due to my positionality as a cishet white male, identity-based concerns were not immediately apparent to me. However, UW’s emphasis on DEI motivated me to explore how I could help build an equitable space, especially when I was promoted to lead consultant in August 2021. As lead consultant, I led a weekly Circle group, in which many conversations centered on identity. Thus, I considered how I could make the space both accommodating and open.
In summer 2022, I began my master’s degree in secondary English language arts education and was hired by UW as a graduate assistant. Katharine, then newly hired as Assistant Director, was my supervisor. During the affinity groups’ pilot semester, I joined the LGBTQ+ Allies. In the subsequent semester, Katharine and I collaboratively led a new UW affinity group, Allies Reflecting on Whiteness. Through participating in and leading these groups, I became more interested in the ways spaces can aid and affect those with marginalized identities, as well as the role of affinity groups in the greater ecosystem of writing centers.
After co-leading Allies Reflecting on Whiteness, I developed another affinity group curriculum, How to Be an Ally. The curriculum covered allyship more broadly, and it positioned allyship as an ongoing process of reflection, rather than a label. While working with affinity groups, I considered how my identity as a cisheterosexual white man affected my decisions as a leader and curriculum developer. I reflected on my allyship journey, and I sought to position myself as both an authentic listener and a person with lived experience.
Jonah’s Narrative
Like many who grew up in the Deep South, I was raised in a religious home and culture that avoided conversation about LGBTQ+ identities. When conversation about these identities did occur, they were framed negatively. These limited and skewed representations of LGBTQ+ identities shaped my understanding throughout childhood, even throughout my first few years of high school. I’ll leave the details of this negative discourse out of the narrative to prevent perpetuating it.
In the back half of my time in high school, I got really into rap music thanks to a few friends of mine. One of the artists who immediately grabbed my attention was Kevin Abstract, the face of the then up-and-coming rap group and self-proclaimed boyband Brockhampton. He rapped very openly about his identity as a gay man, the pride he felt in his identity, and the discrimination he faced both then and growing up. In “Star,” the second track of the first Saturation (a series of three albums all released in 2017), Abstract began his verse with, “Heath Ledger with some dreads / I just gave my ***** head.” The two lines are both confident and boastful, and I was enthused by how Abstract was so unapologetically himself. It was the first time in rap and in my personal life that I had heard someone exude pride in their identity as a gay man. In the Saturation II song, “Junky,” Abstract detailed hostility toward gay men in Texas while also explaining why he rapped about his identity so much. He puts it simply, “’cause not enough ****** rap and be gay.” Abstract’s raps and Brockhampton as a whole came to me at the right time, as I was still trying to find confidence in myself in late high school. To see someone embrace a part of themselves that I had seen pushed to the side time and time again not only made me feel like it was okay to be myself, but it also made me question the avoidant and hostile framework that I grew up around.
As I got to college and met more people, I quickly learned how harmful the culture I grew up in was to people with LGBTQ+ identities. I began to reject a lot of the avoidant behavior I was accustomed to, but I had no idea how to be an ally. As I began working for UW, things changed. I learned more about identities and how they affect people’s experiences. When I heard that Katharine was piloting affinity groups, I joined the LGBTQ+ Allies to further my understanding of allyship. The group’s composition was very diverse culturally and in age, including members of both the student staff and administration.
During the first semester of the Allies affinity group, Katharine focused one of our conversations on representations of LGBTQ+ identities in media. This conversation was pivotal for me and my thinking about allyship. A lot occurred in this conversation, so I would like to describe some of the key moments and my takeaways from them. In that conversation, I mentioned how limited my exposure to LGBTQ+ identities was growing up and how media representations made up most of that exposure. I mentioned some shows from the mid-2000s that featured highly caricatured representations of these identities. Others mentioned representations in shows or movies that they felt were poor and shared ideas about what makes a representation “good.”
I offered up The Wire as a positive example, noting that Omar Little’s character felt powerful, and his identity as a gay man played a vital role in his empowerment. Omar’s actions drive the plot forward at several points in the story, and in a show that uses its seasons to focus on specific ecosystems within the city of Baltimore (often pulling in and out of certain character groups), Omar’s recurring presence stands in contrast.
As I left this meeting, I felt like I contributed to a moment of collective growth by telling stories about my experiences with media. In subsequent meetings, members contributed a piece of media and conversed about the strengths and weaknesses of its representations of LGBTQ+ identities. Pooling experiences with peers felt meaningful and non-isolating. One member offered to create a list of the media we discussed throughout the meeting and shared it with us afterward.
In retrospect, I do not believe a group of cisheterosexual people can fully define “good” representation. The canonized definition of good LGBTQ+ representation should not come from a group of cisheterosexual people. However, the discussion of representation was one of the most valuable experiences in the Allies group. With media being largely present in many of our lives and presenting a window into unfamiliar cultures, it is crucial to compile and reflect on our shared experiences with it.
My current definition of a “good” representation in media is one that humanizes an identity without tokenizing it or positioning characters with the identity as constant victims. While I think it is important to include challenges characters face, if a character is placed in a cycle of fighting to overcome struggles because of their identity, it ultimately paints them as victims who react instead of acting with the agency one might expect from a cisheterosexual character. This ultimately leads to representation of disempowerment.
Through reflecting on representation, I began to consider my peer consultant work as a collaboration with storytellers with myriad identities. Through conversations with clients, I better understand who they want to be in their writing and can give them tools to aid their growth. As I think about my next steps as an educator, I recognize that sharpening and reflecting on what I identify as “good” representation will influence the texts I share with students. In my classroom, I aim to provide better representations of LGBTQ+ identities than I was given.
Conclusion
As our narratives demonstrate, our affinity groups increased our sense of belonging and our knowledge of how we can create a more inclusive space for LGBTQ+ employees. Since our affinity groups’ priority is to foster wellbeing through queer worldmaking, these groups function differently than traditional professional development. Traditional professional development prioritizes the experience of clients rather than the wellbeing of staff, and it falls into the productivity-minded impetus that queer worldmaking pushes against. Despite this difference, writing centers should not forgo the “traditional” topics of professional development. Peer consultants should feel welcomed and nourished by the space they work in while also benefiting from the strategies presented in traditional professional development. Thus, we envisioned a space where both professional development approaches exist.
Our immediate goal was to create a more inclusive workplace for our LGBTQ+ employees, but the ideas produced in affinity groups informed other areas of our writing center. Even though participation was not mandatory, group members were more equipped to center wellbeing in other professional development small group discussions by modeling practices from their time in affinity groups. Affinity groups did not ignore client experiences but rather created a space for all staff members to exist and grow together. In doing so, the client experience can be improved as a byproduct of a happier, more welcomed staff.
In the same way that affinity groups ask members with shared identities to create meaning and build wellbeing through storytelling, appointments in the writing center ask both client and consultant to approach the meeting as writers with unique identities and lived experiences. Through exercising queer worldmaking in affinity groups, peer consultants can be better positioned to reach and support clients. A common occurrence in writing appointments is that clients come in thinking they are not a “writer.” While traditional professional development aids peer consultants in reaching the client at several stages of writing, affinity groups empower peer consultants to discuss writing as a shared identity that people come to with different lived experiences. In our writing center, we work on the writer rather than the writing. In traditional professional development, consultants are given tools to view the client as a writer, regardless of field or ability. Through the addition of affinity groups, consultants are better equipped to aid the client in viewing themselves as a writer. Both approaches are necessary for a center and its people to thrive.
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