Ok, so maybe I am just a working-class schmuck, but does that mean I can't have a thought, or an opinion, or be taught, or get a higher degree?  No, it doesn't, but the way we treat first-generation college students often has them running for the door even before their first year is over.  But why is this?

Renny Christopher, author of "New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education," quotes Lee Warren, arguing that "working-class students don't know how to 'work the system . . . They feel unwelcome . . . They are afraid of being found out.'  Further, working-class students' identities and family relations are subject to great stresses when they enter college" (212-13).  I guess here is where I confess that I know this first hand.  I was lucky though.  I started out in a community college where working-class students have a better change of success than they do if they begin in a 4-year institute.

But it still took me 17 years to earn my bachelors degree.  When you are a working-class student, tuition doesn't come easy.  I made it through the first three years without a break.  I was doing great, good grades.  But when the beginning of that fourth year came around, I couldn't afford it.  So I took a semester off and then started back again.  I made it through that semester before the money ran out again.  From there it was a downhill spiral.

Christopher's article discusses the need, once more, for a working-class pedagogy: one that meets the students where they are and uses a more collaborative teaching style.  Often "the academic world is at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to first-generation students, and that it demands that students from the working class deny their past, dissociate themselves from their families, and remake themselves in its own image in order to 'earn' a place within it" (216).

It is time to end the "gatekeeper" form of education and empower "students' learning by bringing the academic environment of the classroom into a sphere where the students already feel empowered, orality: deemphasizing the authority of the instructor, allowing students to engage in teaching and learning from one another: meeting students where they are; and allowing them to perform out of strengths, rather than out of disadvantages" (Christopher 218).

This will likely be the shortest blog entry I've written thus far for a chapter of 30 pages.  When I ask myself why that might be, it seems pretty obvious.  I find Axel Bruns' book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond interesting, but thus far repetitive and somewhat boring.

The third chapter, entitled "Open Source Software Development: Probabilistic Eyeballs," discusses the merits of open source software development, and it often does so in terms of how it fits the four key principles of produsage that Bruns lays out in the previous chapter (which, in case you have forgotten, are 1) open participation, communal evaluation; 2) fluid heterarchy, ad hoc meritocracy; 3) unfinished artefacts, continuing process; and 4) common property, individual rewards). 

Given those 4 principles, I can easily see how open source software meets those expectations, so I did not really need to read 30 pages of difficult to read long paragraphs of only one or two sentences to convince me of this.  To be fair, it is not that I am not on some level enjoying the text (I'd quit reading it if I weren't), but Bruns' style of writing makes it difficult to not just throw up my hands and say "I get it already, and for God's sake, use a period from time to time!!!"

Perhaps the next chapter on news blogs will be better.  I still expect that he'll take a simple concept and use page after page to beat it into submission, but at least I'll have a thorough understanding of it once he does?!

Ok, I'm not sure I'm buying into all that Axel Bruns says in chapter 2, "The Key Characteristics of Produsage," in his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond.  For instance, he concludes the chapter by arguing that "what may result from this renaissance of information, knowledge, and creative work, collaboratively developed, compiled, and shared under a produsage model, may be a fundamental reconfiguration of our cultural and intellectual life, and thus society and democracy itself" (34).  That seems to be quite the claim to make for it to be only the second chapter of the text.

Before I go any further in this blog, I want to note that Bruns writing style is. . . well, I would say along the lines of maybe a Charles Dickens in that the sentences go on forever.  One eleven line paragraph (yes, I said paragraph) was one sentence.  He tends to punctuate with colons and semicolons rather than periods.  Unlike Dickens, whom I find very readable, Bruns text is one you will have to work at.  It is also some what repetitive.

Ok, so I'm going to lay out the basic principles of chapter 2 as I understand them.  It may be wrong, so if you've read Bruns book, by all means, let me know what you think.  Production models since the industrial revolution have been based on the model of production-----distributor-----consumer, where the consumer had no real input into production.  The only option consumers have is to buy or not buy, or choose this brand over that brand.  The produsage model, however, changes all of this. 

Bruns discusses the "collective hive" and how this hive works together to produce AND use the things that are produced.  (I just want to clarify here that I'm not a fan of Cyborgs and collectiveness in this sense, I like my individuality.  Cyborgs bad, well, except maybe for 7 of 9, but that's another story.)  At any rate, people work together to create the artefacts that they then use.  Unlike the typical production model, which has a final packaged product, produsage has artefacts because nothing is ever completely finished.

Bruns also goes into the things that have to come together in order for produsage to be successful.  One interesting concept is the non-hierarchical order it takes.  He actually labels it Ad Hoc Meritocracy.  If you make a popular or awesome change to the product, then you gain social status and move up the hierarchy chain based on your merit.  If, however, you really screw up the next time, you likely lose some of that social status and move back down.  So the hierarchy is always a fluid thing and there is never any one person in charge of the entire project.  Everyone has their specialty and that is the area on which they work.

While there is a lot more to this chapter, suffice it to say that I "think" I've captured the essence of it.  Will this type of production model, or produsage model, take hold enough to create the changes related at the top of this post?  What do you think?

"User-led content 'production' is . . . built on iterative, evolutionary development models in which often very large communities of participants make a number of usually very small, incremental changes to the established knowledge base, thereby enabling a gradual improvement to quality which--under the right conditions--can nonetheless outpace the speed of product development in the conventional, industrial model" (Bruns 1).  The "Introduction" to Axel Bruns' Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage outlines theories on production that became popular at the beginning of the industrial revolution and which have held tight since that time: until now!! 

Bruns makes the argument that we can no longer depend on the terms that have dominated since the industrial revolution to describe what is currently going on.  Thus, he coins the term produsage, and produser.  He says that the term/s "highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge that we examine in this book, the role of 'consumer' and even that of 'end user' have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and user of content have faded into comparative insignificance" (2).  And as for produsers, Bruns believes that "users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role . . ." (2). 

The topic of social networking also comes into play and how it intersects with this concept of produsage.  Bruns discusses the advantages that social software gives us, removing real-world limitations, compensating for inadequacies, and creating environments or tool-sets that are useful for collaborative behavior (3). 

This should be an interesting text.  I am anxious to understand this new type of production of which I believe I play a major part.  I will intersperse these reading blogs with other types of reading, however, due to the length of this book.  Don't want to burn out on this one.

"Adjectives are a way of constraining and controlling.  'The more adjectives you have the tighter the box.'  The adjective before writer [ex: feminist writer, lesbian writer] marks, for us, the 'inferior' writer, that is, the writer who doesn't write like them [the dominant culture]" (Anzaldua 264).  Adjectives are labels, and in Gloria Anzaldua's article "To(o) Queer the Writer--Loca, escritora y chicana," she discusses, among other things, some of the implications of using labels. 

As I have advocated before, I do not like labels, and I avoid using them for myself at all cost.  But often, we are faced with situations where we are forced to use them to define ourselves.  I could say that I am an Appalachian woman (said correctly), or what some would consider a hillbilly.  And I would wear that identity proudly, but as Anzaldua notes, that would place me in a box, and a quite tight fitting box as well. 

So if I didn't like that label, I could say that I am a feminist, or a lesbian, or a rhetorician (I'm NOT a speller), or a middle-class white woman, or, or, or.  As you can see, the list could go on and on forever.  To chose any ONE of those labels and say this is me, would be to deny those other parts that are just as important and just as vital to who I am as any other label.  I would, in essence, be dividing and splitting my identity: who I really am.

Anzaldua drives this point home when she argues so eloquently that "identity is not a bunch of little cubbyholes stuffed respectively with intellect, race, sex, class, vocation, gender.  Identity flows between over, aspects of a person.  Identity is a river--a process.  Contained within the river is its identity, and it needs to flow, to change, to stay a river--if it stopped it would be a contained body of water such as a lake or a pond" (267).  I wonder what my first-year composition students would think of this quote.  The 18 years-old students who felt that by the time you enter college your identity should be pretty much set! 

Anzaldua discusses more than just labels and identity with in this article, which is apparently an excerpt from a larger piece, but it is her comments about identity that resonate the most with me.  Is there such a thing as a lesbian writer, or a queer one for that matter?  I don't know, but I do not wish to cling to just one small part of my identity and be labeled that way.

I would not normally blog about an appendix in a text, but when it comes to Mary L Gray's text Out in the Country, I think it important to consider what Gray has to say.

In this appendix, Gray discusses several aspects of her research methods, including why there were few females in the study.  First, Gray discusses how this type of research is next to impossible to conduct due to the difficulty of gaining IRB approval when wanting to talk to youth under 18 without their parents consent.  She notes that until these conversations can be brought into the school systems, it will continue to be difficult.

Gray also comments on the fact that her research pool was limited due to starting out with youth already involved in some type of LGBT organization.  She states that "this agency-driven approach, however, has significant drawbacks . . . .  The most critical shortcoming of relying on agencies: most rural communities do not have formal infrastructures of not-for-profit social services beyond faith-based organizations" (3670-3686).   She tapped into the pools of friends of those she did meet in organizations, and this was how she found her research participants. 

She believes that the lack of females is, in part, due to the fact that "young rural women were often too busy between work, family, and school commitments to meet with [Gray]" (3717-3733).  Rural young women often have the responsibility of caring for siblings while parents are at work or for caring for older adults for the same reasons (3717-3733).  Therefore, females had less social time to become involved in this type of project. 

Generally speaking, Gray's book brings to light the complexities involved for rural LGBT youth who are trying to negotiate issues of identity and how these youth find ways to be visible while still maintaining a sense of the familial.  It is also enlightening to see how the use of media helps these youths find realness in their queerness.  Truth be told though, I am happy to be done with the book.

Mary L Gray's Epilogue to her book Out in the Country discusses two things: the vote on Amendment 2 in 2004 to Kentucky's ban on same-sex marriage and what happened to the youth she worked with during her research.

She makes a valid point when she discusses the amendment that passed and banned same-sex marriages in Kentucky, as it has in many states.  Often, exit surveys show that voting yes to this amendment has little, if anything, to do with people "hating" or disliking gays or lesbians and more to do with money (surprise, surprise)!  Rural citizens in particular often have no access to the most basic of social or medical services, like health care.  So when people begin to discuss same-sex marriages that would offer benefits that are normally only available to married people, rural folk, and others, begin to get defensive.  As Gray notes, "rural voters who reject recognition of LGBT rights telegraph their own feelings of economic vulnerability, lack of access to social-welfare benefits, and reliance on the material more than symbolic preciousness of marriage to span the gaps in a woefully threadbare social safety net" (3559-3576).  When looked at in this light, it begins to make sense as to why these amendments are continually voted into states' constitutions. 

The rural youth that Gray spoke with concerning marriage noted that they wanted to have the chance to get married, but they did not seem to care whether or not these marriages would be seen as legal.  I would attribute this attitude to their youth, but Gray does not comment on it.

As for what happened to those Gray followed in her research, most have moved on.  The Boyd County High Gay-Straight Alliance became defunct once those who began it graduated.  The one responsible, in large part, for the Highland Pride Alliance also moved on, and when I attempted a google search, no website was found by that name.  Again, I would think that all of these changes are just a product of youth growing and investing their time and energy into different things. 

Gray ends her text with many questions for where this research might go from here, such as "what place will young women and trans rural youth find in this field of identity?" (3624-3639).  But the story does not end here, and there will be one more post before we call this book quits.

In Mary L Gray's conclusion to Out in the Country, she summarizes the points that she makes throughout the book.  But what I find particularly interesting are her arguments about how rural youth do visibility.  Gray argues that "rural queer youth rework their disorientation from self, in places that prioritize familiarity through codes of sameness, discourage claims to difference, and have relatively few local 'others' to turn to for queer recognition" (3331-3347).  So rather then claim an identity of "otherness", they cling to an identity of familiarity to garner as much local support as they can.

As I've made reference too many times, I grew up in a rural area, and I can't imagine what it would have been like for me to try to claim a lesbian identity during those years.  I knew I was different, but I had no way of knowing what that difference was or how to label it.  I wouldn't have even thought it was sexual at the time.  Unlike many of the youth in Gray's text, I had no way of searching for "what was wrong with me" because of course I knew there had to be something!!!  Gray's investigation of how media in general and new media in particular help rural youth work out their identity and find realness in being a rural LGBT youth is critical for helping researchers understand how these youth negotiate this terrain.

For me, it wasn't until I went away to college that things began to make sense to me.  However, I was still in a very small town, with no family and only a few close friends, and certainly no internet.  Life, for any rural youth in my day who questioned their sexuality or gender, were pretty much doomed for a life of misery until they got it figured out; if they did. 

Gray's research is interesting, and there are some things to note in her Epilogue which I will get to in the next post.

I am coming to the end of Mary L Gray's Out in the Country, and as usual, I am looking forward to the concluding chapter tomorrow.  That is the problem with doing "whole" books; I reach a point where I'm no longer sure if the meanings I find are the meanings that are intended.  This chapter, "To Be Real: Transidentification on the Discovery Channel," deals primarily with the meanings two rural trans youth make out of the Documentary "What Sex Am I?" that aired on the Discovery Channel.

What it seems to boil down to, after all of the theorizing and quoting, is that we cannot, or should not, rely on textual analysis of any one piece to determine its usefulness.  As Gray argues, "these narratives of queer realness are compelling not as particular grouping of cinematic, televisual, or digital texts but as situated, discursive practices that mark the local boundaries of LGBT identities" (2811-2827). 

She proves her point by describing the realness that the documentary "What Sex Am I?" has on the two youths mentioned: one an MTF and one a FTM.  The show had a profound effect on the FTM.  He even recorded it so that he could sit down with his mom and watch it.  The point being, the FTM has a supportive family, lives within two hours of medical treatment for the transition, and was allowed to leave school and pursue his GED online to avoid the harassment from classmates.  When his family makes the two hour trip for medical treatment, they also go see the friends that he has made via his internet connections.  Within this context, the documentary opened up an entire new world for this FTM and set him on a path to his true identity.

The other youth, the MTF, has a much different story.  When she caught the show on the Discovery Channel, she watched in constant fear that her parents would return any moment and make her turn the channel.  She lives in an area where the closest medical treatment would be 4 hours away, she is constantly fearful that her parents will discover what she is searching for on the internet on the computer in the family room (and in fact they did find emails on this topic and took away her internet privileges), and she is still in public school where she worries that others will discover her secret.  While the documentary helped make real her feelings, it did little to change her world.

Gray set out to determine "how does it [media] come to matter or to occupy a place of importance in a rural young person's negotiation of queerness" (2845-2860).  It becomes apparent that media has to be considered within the context the viewing, not just the media itself.

"What we call 'the closet' springs from the idea that identities are waiting to be discovered and unfold from the inside out.  Authenticity hinges on erasing the traces of others from our work to become who we 'really' are.  To leave the traces of social interaction visible is to compromise our claims to authenticity and self-determination" (Gray 2780-2796).

Chapter 5, "Online Profiles: Remediating the Coming-Out Story," of Gray's Out in the Country speaks to how media, particularly the internet, plays a role in LGBT identity.  The above quote, for me, pretty much sums up the chapter.  Identities don't just suddenly unfold from the inside out.  Identities are socially constructed.   Rural LGBT youth are aware of their sexual desires but finding "realness" for these identities and desires can be difficult. 

Therefore, many turn to the internet and to sites like Gay.com to read real coming out stories and to give voice and meaning to their desires and feelings.  They often do not know the terminologies used to express what they are feeling until they search the internet for sources to help them understand.  So rather than the internet being a place that "turns them" or puts ideas into their heads, it is a place that helps them understand and come to terms with who they are.  It is a social place that helps  make it all real.

I've often wondered if having a resource like the internet would have helped me come to terms with and embrace my identity much sooner than I did.  I fought against my own feelings for years and refused to knowingly place myself in social circumstances that would bring those feelings to the forefront.  Perhaps if I would have had the internet, a place where I could have researched and learned in private, things would have been different.

Bottom line is that media is a positive resource for many rural LGBT youth, helping them to learn and understand who they are, making their identities real!