Restorying With the Ancestors: Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices and Alternative Rhetorics of Queer Futurity

Life and Death in Queer Composition Studies: A Review of Literature

While Alexander and Wallace’s (2009) review details queer absence in composition studies broadly ¹ , a concomitant though limited body of scholarship in queer LRC studies have addressed more specific gaps in normative representations of queer life. Mitchell (2008), for example, foregrounds the role introductory composition courses play as a “critical zone of cultural contact” (p. 23). Specifically, she illuminates how queer life unfolds in rural 2-year colleges and calls attention to faculty members’ roles in rendering composition courses as sites of diversity instruction and diversification (p. 26). Mitchell reminds us of the importance of rural sexualities, by spotlighting the often-absented experiences of rural queers from rhetorical constructions of queerness. Furthermore, composition professors Gibson et al. (2000) demonstrate how their identities as “bi, butch, and bar dyke” queer feminists braid with students’ identities to unsettle normative classroom power structures. Likewise, Hudson (2014) in a content analyses of composition readers calls attention to the flattening of queer life narratives, which as Marinara et al. (2009) point out, tethers queer research to gay marriage. In effect, this tethering normalizes rhetorical patterns that render “lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, intersex, and transgender narratives or arguments . . . practically, if not wholly, invisible” (p. 271).

Challenging such invisibility, Wallace (2011) proposes alternative rhetoric as a means to speculate beyond normative queer rhetorics, compositional and literacy practices, and narratives. As he explains, alternative here refers to rhetorics that engage “an individual’s subjectivity rather than attempting to erase it” (p. 5); it embraces the queer as opposed to disavowing it and, importantly, is tied to both intersectionality and opacity. To pursue alternative rhetorics then involves recognizing the multiplicity of queer life, while also respecting the limits of our own knowing. Connected to queer rhetoric, which Alexander and Rhodes (2012) define as “a constellation of discursive practices that emerge at different times for different groups in order to articulate resistance to regimes of sexualized normalization” (queer rhetoric section, para 2), alternative rhetorics provide a speculative prism through which to disrupt sexualized normalization by reimagining and recomposing alternative narratives of queer life.

Importantly, as alternatives, these rhetorics invite speculation, an imagining of how one might be inscribed otherwise with discourses of power and, furthermore, how one might disrupt that power through acts of rhetorical agency (Butler, 2005). Engaging such speculation and agency, Rhodes (2018) draws on queer theory and new materialism to “help us imagine moving agentially within networks of possibility” (introduction section, para. 3). Entangling “troubled/troubling histories” with the quotidian present, Rhodes demonstrates how speculation might inform rhetorical, compositional, and literacy practices that foreground “potential pathways to ‘making future matters’” (introduction section, para. 3). Speculation in this vein reorients queer LRC studies toward imagining and enacting alternative rhetorics of queer futurity through the composition of alternative narratives of queer life (Morris, 2016; Muñoz, 2009; Rhodes, 2018; Rhodes & Alexander, 2015).

However, the rhetorical work that speculation makes possible demands a recognition of perceived realities, and for queer composition and rhetoric studies, such realities have been tied discursively to an imagined queer death. Repeating Heather Love’s (2007) assertion, Western representations of queer history are “littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants” (p. 1), and such tropes have coupled queer death and reality together. They manifest in the 21st century across media outlets (Bridges, 2018), digital platforms (GLAAD Media Insitute, 2017), and textual forms (Ahmed, 2010; Jenkins & Cart, 2018; Waggoner, 2018), and for queer composers, such histories of representational death have installed themselves as the normative narratives of queer life, and in turn, these narratives delimit the discursive formation of the queer subject. As Butler (1993) explains, “Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’” (p. 18). By this logic, queer composers become legible through the very discourses of queer death that constitute them, and these discourses forge normative literacy practices that impede the pursuit of alternative rhetorics.

As described by Eric Pritchard (2017), literacy normativity “create[s] and impose[s] normative standards and beliefs onto people” (p. 28). Broadly, such normative practices and their attendant narratives have rendered queer people, not merely opaque, but “impossible subjects” (Alexander & Rhodes, 2011). Shaped by ephemeral and notably partial archives (Blount, 2005; Cvetkovich, 2003), queer individuals have been rendered illegible outside personal and community narratives of pain (e.g., homophobia, the AIDS crisis, etc.), and as accounts of queer history proliferate (Mayo, 2017), queer subjects, while becoming newly visible, are also becoming newly inscribed within discourses of power. However, queer histories, when embraced as a speculative resource, jostle or and even disrupt the normative subject formations such discourses incite; they redirect discursive flows of power and create pathways for promoting cross-generational connection and for composing alternative rhetorics (Wallace, 2011).

Furthermore, the interplay of the individual and community within queer histories gestures toward the inequitable potential (not capacity) for rhetorical agency to be taken up across the multiplicity of queer life (Wallace & Alexander, 2009). Pritchard (2017) in Fashioning Lives brilliantly describes the uptake of rhetorical agency within the Black queer community, calling attention to normalization’s interlocking effect with queerness, gender, and race both within and beyond the queer community. Such literacy normativity also structures rhetorical conceptions of queer life within the imagination; it shapes not only what narratives we compose but also, more fundamentally, delimits what narratives arrive within consciousness for us to compose. For instance, Sara Ahmed (2010) spotlights the persistent trope of “unhappy endings” in so-called realist depictions of queer life (p. 88), and as she and others have argued (Crisp, 2009), queer life narratives hold their verisimilitude—their felt sense of realness—through depictions of death and dying: decisively unhappy endings.

However, narratives can be recomposed and so too those structures of the imagination that configure our composing practices. In “#SoundingOutMySilence,” Wargo (2018) demonstrates such recomposition at work and traces how Andi, a proud Latina lesbian, feminist, and 17-year-old, composed cartographies of sound to realize social justice in relation to hate speech and surviving self-harm. Blackburn and Schey (2018) similarly spotlight collaborative coauthoring and shared vulnerability as vital examples of expanding queer composition and the imagination. Furthermore, LRC scholars have begun to embrace a speculative turn to confront imagined realities of queer unhappy endings. Rhodes (2018), for instance, draws on lesbian separatist movements of the 1960s and 1970s to invigorate speculation toward a future justice for queer life. Similarly, Charles Morris (2016) spotlights a figure from queer history, Harvey Milk, and calls for “Milk memory” to inform queer politics and the rhetorics that surrounds those politics in the present.

Embracing history broadly, Pritchard (2017) invokes ancestrality to foreground queer ancestors as hermeneutical, speculative resources to enliven the “critical imagination” in acts of “rhetorical invention” (p. 114). For him, ancestors and their descendants (i.e., queer composers today) form imagined relations that echo “across generational lines and between the living and the dead” (p. 111), and these relations encourage speculation to reshape normative compositional and literacy practices. As he explains, ancestor-descendant relationships cultivate “historical rootedness”—a felt sense of connection to queer history and perceived ancestors—and importantly, such historical rootedness remains underresearched in queer LRC studies. As I will argue, such historical roots provide hermeneutical resources necessary for queer composers to speculate beyond normative rhetorics of queer life and toward alternative rhetorics of queer futurity.

Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices: A Conceptual Framework

For the purposes of this article, restorying with the ancestors refers to one sort of ghostly, haunting relation. As Gordon (2008) explains, “Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life” (p. xvi). Figures that traverse time, ancestors provide a useful metaphor for recognizing the discourses of power, particularly abusive ones, that have historically constituted the queer subject. Moreover, these same figures highlight the speculative potential of historical rootedness. Through haunting, queer ancestors invite queer composers to feel and recognize “abusive systems of power” that touch queer life (e.g., homophobia, transphobia, racism, and ableism), and through imagined ancestor-descendant relationships, they can cultivate speculative composing practices. Importantly, however, queer ancestors are not exclusively metaphorical; as one queer ancestor, Gloria Anzaldúa (2015), explains, spirits—and I read ancestors as one form of spirit—are both “literally present” and “imaginatively present” (p. 37). They are a “fantasy,” imagined or speculative figures, that “frees you from the confines of daily time and place, from your habitual identity” (p. 37).

Inviting composers to imagine beyond present realities, ancestors are both a metaphor and a fantasy; they are material, felt experiences of an imagined relationship to the past, and for queer composers, such experiences can invigorate historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs). Grounded in history, these composing practices draw on an felt sense of history to speculate and compose alternative narratives and rhetorics. Importantly, such practices challenge normative literacies born of those same “abusive systems of power” that ghostly ancestors reveal (Gordon, 2008, p. xvi). To challenge that normativity, however, composers must speculate toward and then compose alternative narratives that, in turn, reconfigure normative rhetorics surrounding queer subjects (Wallace, 2011): Specifically, we must restory unhappy queer endings toward some imagined—more just—futurity, but first we must recognize them as structural features of the imagination.

According to Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016), restorying refers to a process of breaking stories down into “their constituent parts—plot, characters, themes—and then synthesizing them in new ways” (p. 318). As one form of HRSCP, restorying provides queer composers with a process for drawing on queer history (e.g., the ancestors) and confronting those realist unhappy endings that structure how queer life is imagined and composed. Thomas and Stornaiuolo explain that this process is not an act of mere substitution, of transposing one character for another, but is instead a fundamental reformulation of narrative. They write, “as young readers imagine themselves into stories, they reimagine the very stories themselves, as people of all ages collectively reimagine time, place, perspective, mode, metanarrative, and identity” (p. 318). Both an individual and collective practice, restorying provides a mechanism for “people of all ages” to speculatively compose together. While Thomas and Stornaioulo’s description refers certainly to physical age, I read “ages” in a more expansive sense, as composing across time or eras. For me, “people of all ages” invites composing with those who came before us, our ancestors. From this perspective, historically rooted queer composers can speculatively compose toward alterative narratives of queer life for futures to come.

The present article thus approaches restorying with the ancestors, also, as a conceptual framework for crafting alternative rhetorics, specifically through the cultivation of speculative compositional practices that realize stories of the past, present, and future otherwise. Advocating for such speculative composing practices, Sami Schalk (2018) explains that

the rejection of verisimilitude, the use of nonmimetic devices, the disruption of linear time, and other tropes which subvert our expectations of reality are all beneficial to writers who wish to represent a world not restricted by our contemporary racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and classist realities. (p. 22)

Eschewing the dictates of reality (e.g., queer unhappy endings), restorying allows queer composers to realize alternative rhetorics articulated toward queer futurity—what José Esteban Muñoz (2009) describes, as an “ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (p. 1). Importantly, queer futurity is not place of arrival or telos as much as a “utopian feeling” (p. 3), one that indicates “this world is not enough” (p. 1). Within the context of HRSCPs, queer futurity can be considered an episteme that presents composers with the felt knowledge that, indeed, we can recompose the world. As my participants demonstrated, restorying with the ancestors presented one means of composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity and provided queer composers the “potentiality or concrete possibility [of composing] another world” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1).

Methods: Speculation With Specters

Sharing etymological links to visibility, speculation played a central role in this project’s methodological design. A focused analysis from a larger narrative inquiry study exploring the queer imagination, this project’s data were generated through phenomenological accounts of queer life, yet my analysis revealed phenomena that exceeded participants’ experience with the living world. Specifically, phenomena I later understood as haunting revealed the role ancestors played in inviting speculation toward alternative rhetorics of queer futurity.

Restorying the Imagination With the Ancestors

The first case begins with Coyote (they/them), a White agender individual and former high school teacher, who, in restorying time, reimagined themself and their painful history into the 1692 context of Salem, Massachusetts. Originally written in prose, their painful history recounted an experience of teaching a queer Young Adult novel and then being shamed by both a student and district official. For our second restorying session, Coyote reimagined their composition within the storyworld of Arthur Miller’s often-taught play “The Crucible,” and they did so by restorying on Piktochart ³ , an online infographic making platform (see Figure 1). Though imagined in a different temporal context, Coyote’s restory retains crucial elements of the original painful history, particularly its narrative sequence: first, of castigation and investigation by an educational authority, then of perceived vilification on the part of a student, and finally of professional disapprobation and censure. Importantly, it was in discussing this restory that Coyote came to recognize the potential of historically rooting their speculative composing practices, and ultimately, this recognition became the first step in restorying their imagination.

As presented in Figure 1, Coyote organized their restory in four parts, each aligning with a catalytic plot point in their original narrative. Coupled with icons of a Bible, cross, devil emotion, and witches hat, these parts draw on multimodal resources (Kress, 2010) to highlight the religiosity that animated Coyote’s painful history and their restory. The composition was realized in Figure 1:

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Figure 1.

Coyote’s restory.

A decontextualized reading of Coyote’s restory coupled with the piece’s sardonic tone fail to convey the pain Coyote vocalized when originally sharing their painful history (Session1A, November 1, 2018). However, remnants of that pain manifest in this piece’s multimodal story elements, and they surface in Coyote’s reference to censorship in “Part 1,” in the symbolic cross of “Part 2,” and in the concluding line, which reads “the Salem Board of Education laments that millennial turnover makes it so hard to keep good teachers.” Though Coyote restoried this event years after it occurred, the story’s tone and ending emphasized a lingering hurt attached to that narrative, while also foregrounding a normative literacy practice central to queer composing: Coyote wrote a queer unhappy ending for their restory.

Noticing a similar trend across participants, I decided to ask Coyote about their ending in our postinterview (May 6, 2019). Specifically, I wanted to understand what story elements Coyote felt were and were not restory-able. I asked, “Did it occur to you to write . . . a happy ending?” Coyote responded,

Nope. Not even once. To be honest, you saying that is the first time I even considered the possibility. . . . But no, I think the only way that it ends happily in a different time period is like, all the mean people get crushed by a tree or something, which would be lovely. Or like, I don’t know, herald in the modern queer rights movement 50 years too soon, I don’t know. . . . But no, it just did not occur to me to make this a happy ending, and I think that is part of the thing. For all the lamenting I do that we never get happy endings as queer people, in terms of our media and our content, damn is it hard to write happy queer endings that don’t feel fake. (Postinterview, May 6, 2019)

As they expressed, writing a “happy ending” in the past was simply beyond imagining; they had not even considered it: “Nope. not even once.” For Coyote, the challenge of writing a happy ending rested, not in penning queer history, but in crafting a representation that did not “feel fake.” Surfacing an imagined and, furthermore, felt reality, Coyote’s response revealed how representation structures the queer imagination, how it invited Coyote—subconsciously—to rearticulate queer unhappy endings as the default, realistic depiction of queer life. Importantly though, the imagination and the realities it holds can be rewritten. As Alexander and Rhodes (2012) describe, queer rhetorics—particularly when articulated as a form of alternative rhetorics—can provide “remedy [to] the impoverishment of our imaginations” (queer rhetoric section, para. 2). In Coyote’s case, to restructure the imagination, they first needed to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which representational histories shaped their composing practices. They needed hermeneutical resources (e.g., queer history and the ancestors) in order to speculate toward alternative rhetorics.

Fortunately, over the course of our postinterview, Coyote demonstrated a growing awareness of the structural effect of queer unhappy endings on their composing practices; and furthermore, they indicated queer history as central to invigorating future speculation composing practices toward alternative rhetorics. In their words,

I think when it comes to creating content and the queer imagination, the queer imagination is still very much restricted by the realities of history and the realities of the narratives that come out of history. . . . I did a comic about it where I was trying to do a queer creative writing contest and the parameters for it was like it can’t have a sad ending. We will not even consider it if the ending is sad. We don’t want these tropes. (May 6, 2019)

A comic books artist and cartoonist, Coyote described here a growing awareness of how historical narratives’ impress upon the imagination, and that awareness arose while reflecting upon a queer creative writing contest in which the trope of queer unhappy endings was explicitly forbidden. It is important to mention, however, that this reflection also prompted cognitive dissonance for Coyote, as the imagined reality of queer death clashed with what Coyote perceived as the contest’s unrealistic expectations: “And I’m like so what are you left with? Because this doesn’t seem real. It just seems like a forced Pollyanna ending that’s not accurate” (postinterview, May 6, 2019). Coyote’s desire to represent queer happy endings yet their incapacity to compose them, in this moment, spotlighted how representational histories form normative rhetorics and literacy practices; furthermore, it gestured toward the importance of “historical rootedness” for speculating alternative rhetorics.

As we concluded our discussion of their restory, Coyote began to contemplate an alternative narrative that was indeed historically rooted. They reflected,

When I think of history, I don’t position queer people as having happy endings even though that’s false. Plenty of queer people did have some, like they found happiness. They found survivalhood, and they were able to thrive as people. (Postinterview, May 6, 2019)

In this moment, Coyote demonstrated consciousness raising. They named the inaccuracy of the imagined reality that shaped their restory and, once aware, began locating the hermeneutical resources necessary to speculate anew. In real time, Coyote rooted their discussion in narratives of imagined queer ancestors—those imagined “queer people” who found “happiness” and “survivalhood”—and subsequently they began speculatively composing with those ancestors. Immediately following that moment of consciousness raising, Coyote began discussing the influence of author Patricia Highsmith, rock star Freddie Mercury, actor Rock Hudson, author Dorothy Parker, and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony on history and their own imagination. For Coyote, each of these was a queer ancestor, and each invited speculation toward alternative futures.

Coyote’s relationship to HRSCPs at this point rested primarily within the imagination, yet the oral narrative of their postinterview demonstrated potential to reshape future composing practices. While the long-term outcomes of Coyote’s case rest outside the scope of the data presented here, the case does reveal a crucial first step toward animating alternative rhetorics of queer futurity: recognition. Once Coyote recognized their own imaginative habits, the potential of queer history and HRSCPs surfaced. Calling on queer ancestors, Coyote began to question normative realities of queer death held within the imagination. Concluding our postinterview discussion of their restory, Coyote speculated, “I’m curious if I’d written this in the future, would that have changed something? Like the 1980s, what would’ve happened? Or like an in between era where I don’t know [much about it].” A beginning, Coyote’s speculative musing nonetheless gestured toward the potential of HRSCPs to invite alternative narratives. Turning to the ancestors, Coyote recognized the false realties of queer unhappy endings and, rooting their composition historically, began speculating toward the “promise and potentiality” of queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009, p. 7).

Restorying Happiness With the Ancestors

In contrast to Coyote, Helen (she/her), a neuro-atypical, queer White lesbian, espoused awareness of queer ancestors haunting her composing practices from the project’s onset, and this awareness was, for her, born of personal battles with depression and the erasure of queer womanhood (preinterview, October 18, 2018). Like Coyote, Helen’s discussion of ancestrality became pronounced while narrating the process of restorying time, and this was specifically true in her discussion of the restory’s temporal setting (see Figure 2). A 10-panel Piktochart, Helen’s restory reimagined her own painful history of domestic partner abuse into the U.S. past, circa 1945. She explained,

I was originally going to pick the early 1900s, which was when lavender marriages were a thing. It was basically in a time before women were thought to experience sexual attraction, so lesbians really thrived in secret. . . . That was originally what I wanted to do, was restory it in that time, and have it end in a place where, when it was abusive and didn’t go bad, there was no recourse because I was alone and no one could know, type of thing.

Then I ended up choosing 1945, I think, partially because I was just in a worse headspace than when I had originally chosen 1920. I wasn’t in a “Let’s make everything happy” headspace. I was in a “Everything sucks and I want to cry” headspace when I wrote that. (Postinterview, May 1, 2019)

Helen’s account of her restorying process revealed a complicated relationship between perceived realist accounts of the queer past and her affective needs in the present. Intending to set her restory in the “early 1900s,” Helen’s first restory—importantly, one she only imagined—drew on queer women’s history to “end in a place where, when it was abusive and didn’t go bad, there was no recourse.” Drawing on histories of lesbian erasure (Castle, 1993; Vaught, 2019), Helen’s imagined restory, if composed on Piktochart, would have represented historical realities attached to queer womanhood—lavender marriages, perceived asexuality, and lesbian social erasure—doing so to craft what was for Helen a happy ending: “in 1920, I think that it would have ended in a way that was happy” (postinterview, May 1, 2019). Writing with the ancestors, Helen’s imagined composition revealed “historical rootedness” at work, how it guided her composing practices, even while taking place exclusively in the imagination.

Reframing lesbian erasure, Helen’s imagined restory demonstrated how one might reclaim “historical erasure as a generative site for theorization of an array of literacy practices” (Pritchard, 2017, p. 105). Within queer history, “historical erasure” has indeed challenged the development of queer literacy practices, instead reinforcing cis-heteronormative practices of reading the word and the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987). However, Helen’s composition indicated speculation as a means to imagine beyond impoverished historical archives and the realities of the closet (Sedgwick, 1990). Transforming theory into practice, Helen imaginatively recomposed a queer past in which “lesbians thrived in secret” and in which her own painful history of domestic abuse “didn’t go bad.” While the exact meaning of not going bad remains unclear, what is clear is that Helen intended for her imagined restory to end by “mak[ing] everything happy,” and by sharing that restory in our postinterview, Helen revealed an intention to disrupt what Sara Ahmed (2010) refers to as happy heterosexuality—the default conclusion of happy endings with heterosexual coupling. Ending her story, Helen imaginatively challenged unhappy queer endings, doing so by directly representing happiness as the conclusion of a queer narrative.

In comparison, the multimodal restory that Helen ultimately shared with our inquiry community took another tact to challenge queer unhappy endings. While this restory concludes with queer death, Helen demonstrated how she used the speculative composing process to restory happiness itself. More specifically, she recomposed her own affective responses to queer unhappy endings. Rooting historically, Helen drew on painful histories of queer womanhood to convey her restory using Piktochart (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Helen’s restory.

Set in the United States of 1945, Helen’s shared restory illuminated those same unhappy elements of queer history that had guided her imagined restory, and it did so multimodally. Shirking a traditional happy heterosexual ending, this piece instead referred multiple times to being “trapped in an insane asylum,” and each plot point was coupled with images that reinforced the piece’s decisively unhappy tone: a despondent young woman, a hospital, and a brain surrounded by electricity. Finally, the narrative’s plot concluded with shock therapy and a lobotomy, which in Helen’s own words, left her “alive but no longer living.”

Drawing on queer women’s history, Helen located speculative resources through which to animate HRSCPs, and she did so in order to fulfill her own affective needs: “I ended up choosing 1945, I think, partially because I was just in a worse headspace than when I had originally chosen 1920” (postinterview, May 1, 2019). Delimiting her composing process, Helen expressed wanting her composition to reflect a headspace of “everything sucks and I want to cry,” and so, Helen composed an alternative form of happiness. Restorying her own affective response to queer unhappy endings, she satisfied her affective needs in the present, while also composing a queer happiness all her own. The restory’s denouement further emphasized this point by directly mirroring Helen’s perceptions of queer history and illuminated how she came to experience happiness, even while representing queer death.

Concluding the composition, Helen quoted Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday”: “Let them not weep. Let them know I’m glad to go.” These words followed the lobotomy that concluded the narrative’s plot and, in a sense, merged Helen’s story with the historical violences she described in her postinterview. While multiple interpretations of this conclusion are possible, I read Helen’s choice of lyrics as an invocation and announcement to her imagined ancestors: She was “glad to go.” She was glad to join “them” and found comfort in the legacy and care the ancestors offered her. Decoupling happiness from heteronormativity, Helen found satisfaction—that gladness she and Billie refer to—by embracing the pain of history. Locating happiness in pain, Helen’s shared restory reconfigured the affective norms of happy heterosexuality, not by subverting the representation itself, but by composing her own affective responses to queer unhappy ending.

Historically rooting both her imagined and shared restory, Helen composed alternative narratives that challenged unhappy queer endings: firstly, by imagining a happy ending to her own painful history of domestic abuse and, and secondly, by composing queer happiness itself. Born of speculation, both restories drew on the painful histories of queer womanhood to reorient the attachment of happiness to happy heterosexuality and unhappy queer endings.

Restorying Reality With the Ancestors

Like Helen, Margarita (they/them) drew on the ancestors to compose their restory. A Latinx, mestiza nonbinary person of indigenous heritage, Margarita drew on historical rootedness to speculate and compose alternative narratives of queer life. However, unlike Coyote and Helen who expressed their encounters with queer histories while restorying time, Margarita’s encounters with the queer past manifested most prominently in their final restory, when they restoried place. Written in poetry, the composition crafted an alternate history of failed first love and familial rejection, and it did so while remaining historically rooteded. From the opening lines, Margarita summoned both genealogy and heritage: “Zacatecos-Aztec-Spaniards-Portuguese/I am some mix of all these, plus some.” A narrative of both indigeneity and colonization, these words conjured ancestors who then guided Margarita’s composing practices toward speculation. Conjuring their presence, Margarita accessed, in a sense, what Gloria Anzaldúa referred to as, “el cenote”—”the imagination’s source of previously untapped, collective knowledge” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. xxv). Drawing on this reservoir of hermeneutical, speculative resources, Margarita composed an alternative historical narrative that realized queer healing; they connected with collective, queer, and indigenous knowledges that allowed them to restory reality itself, with the ancestors.

Structured around two narratives—one past, one present—Margarita’s restory blurred narrative sequences, temporalities, and even characters as it interwove a history of erotic love with an ongoing struggle for familial acceptance. For instance, the pronoun “She,” featured throughout the poem, spotlighted the overlay of these narratives as it transformed into an open signifier, simultaneously lover and mother: “She is with me here in this life/We have known each other in other lives/. . . . There is no calling my mother to let her know/I am in love with another woman/And its [sic] not her.” Margarita’s words portended an unhappy ending and gestured toward an imagination structured around that enduring trope, yet Margarita’s story did not end there. Summoning the ancestors, Margarita instead began to rewrite realities of love and loss. Drawing from el cenote, that wellspring of collective knowledge, Margarita followed Anzaldúa’s (2015) directive and used “the creative process to heal or restructure the images/stories that shape a person’s consciousness” (p. 35). Engaging in a HRSCP, Margarita began restructuring the “images/stories” held within the imagination and thereby found “a more effective way of healing” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 35).

A prominent motif of Margarita’s poem, healing historical wounds revealed itself midway through the piece, becoming most overt in the composition’s shift from storying the present to restorying the past. Usefully, this shift was marked by a narrative cleft that read, “In this story we are in love.” Margarita then continued,

My body is not the product of violence

My body is not the sum of occupied lands

My body does not know the white gaze

My sexuality is entirely my own

And for my own pleasure

As I choose it to be

My gender is not sliced into two boxes

Neither of which I am drawn to

I am not in a box

I am certainly not in a closet

My mother

And her mothers

And our mothers

Have healed

Are healing

My, I hope we can heal . .

The poem overlayed painful realities with an imagined, hoped-for future, and importantly, both are rooted in histories, in “my mother/And her mothers/And our mothers,”—ancestors whose presence invited speculation through an imagined ancestor-descendent relationship. Margarita took up this imagined intergenerational connection as a speculative resource and articulated it toward a healing unfettered by linear time. As they wrote, healing moved through a “Have” of the past, to an “are” of the present, and finally to a “hope” for the future. Complex, Margarita’s restory speculatively enfolded past, present, and future. It conjured ancestors and braided lineages of colonizers and colonized, to spur Margarita’s imagination and the composition of their alternate history.

I read in Margarita’s evocation of the ancestors and their foremothers a call to restory across space and time, life and death. Entering into imagined relations with the past, Margarita engaged in a creative process that tapped into “el cenote”—those collective “images and ensueños [that] emerge from that connection, from the self-in-community” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 5). Holding descendants and ancestors together, Margarita accessed, in Anzaldúa’s words, “el arbol de la via” (p. 5)—a unifying web of images, dreams, and stories that inspirits the imagination to speculate and compose toward alternative realities. Importantly, el cenote invited more than the mere reinterpretation of reality. By bringing ancestors and descendants into communion, it provided hermeneutical, speculative resources through which one might recompose past, present, and future realities held within the imagination, and once reimagined, it incited a process of healing both for self and for community.

Much like Coyote and Helen’s HRSCPs, Margarita’s restory revealed a pathway toward queer healing, and for them that pathway retroactively constructed new realities. Such reconstruction was signaled when they write, “And our mothers/Have healed.” The first healing mentioned in the mid of those shifting verbs tenses, “Have healed” indicated both a speculation and a compositional assertion. Margarita healed the past; they restoried it by enacting a retroactive healing through time, from descendants to ancestors, from “my mother” to “her mothers” to “our mothers.” Rewriting the past, Margarita speculated healed histories and, in so doing, contributed another dream, story, and image to el cenote. Margarita’s restory was thus more than a mere reimagining of reality; it was a contribution to the collective reservoir of dreams; it became a speculative resource through which others might restory the genocidal histories of queer death, and, by extension, the reality of queer unhappy endings held within the imagination.

Restorying with the ancestors, Margarita speculated a retroactive queer healing that reshaped past, present, and future realities. As Anzaldúa explains,

The stories [a composer] believes shape her perceptions of reality. She lives her life according to these stories, and according to these stories she shapes the world. Creating is really a rereading and rewriting of reality—a rearrangement or reordering of preexisting elements. (p. 40)

Aligned with the deconstructive and reconstructive aspects of the restorying process, Margarita’s deployment of HRSCPs in their restory reconfigured the wounds of the past, while also pursuing a future reality defined by intergenerational healing (i.e., queer futurity). Unique from Coyote and Helen’s restories, Margarita’s ancestors were differently named: They were simultaneously colonizers and the colonized, Spaniard and Aztec, lovers and mothers. Yet, Margarita’s restory, once brought into the collective imagination, into “el cenote,” provided a new pathway for all three queer composers to pursue alternative rhetorics of queer futurity—that “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). For Margarita, reordering narratives of queer violence demonstrated the speculative potential of restorying reality. Composing together, ancestors and descendants might heal the wounds of the past and thus restructure those imagined realities, in which queer life is propelled inexorably toward queer death.

In Conclusion: A Happy Beginning

Alexander and Rhodes (2012) describe queer rhetoric as a “constellation of discursive practices” that can “remedy” the “impoverishment of our imaginations” (queer rhetoric section, para. 2). Highlighting the queer imagination, such framing might be read, on one hand, as reifying the deficitizing discourses surrounding queer life, living, and imagining. On the other hand, however, it reveals the contours of a social world that has, from its origins, perpetuated cis-heteronormative expectations for literacy, rhetorical, and compositional practices. Writing in such a world, queer composers have yet to demonstrate the potential of queer composition to restore and, furthermore, restory the “impoverishment” of the imagination. Extending Alexander and Rhodes’s (2012) point, I believe queer rhetoric, discourses, and composition offer “remedy,” not only to “our imaginations,” but to all imaginations that perpetuate the normalized reality of unhappy queer endings.

HRSCPs provide a promising pathway for disrupting such literacy normativities and, integrated into (LRC) studies, for composing alternative rhetorics tied to queer and other futurities. Rooting historically, queer composers can resist and even restory literacy normativities attached to tropes such as queer unhappy endings. As Coyote, Helen, and Margarita demonstrated, imagined histories animate HRSCPs and, when articulated toward the “utopian feeling” of queer futurity (p. 3), result in myriad compositional outcomes that animate critical work. For Coyote, recognizing the ancestors allowed them to challenge the felt reality of queer death and begin restorying their imagination. Helen embraced the ancestors to altogether different effect. She located in representations of queer women’s history a mechanism for restorying happiness outside of heteronormative values and, in so doing, satisfied her own affective needs. Finally, Margarita summoned multiple lineages of their mestiza heritage to restory reality itself, speculating queer unhappy endings toward a felt experience of healing, for themself, for their ancestors, and for future queer composers.

While this study has gestured toward HRSCPs potential, additional research in LRC studies is needed to account for the vast array of critical projects speculative composing practices make possible. We must clarify how the imagined histories composers choose invigorate their SCPs toward alternative rhetorics of differing futurities—queer futurities, Latinx futurities, Black afrofuturisms, disabled futurities, and the numerous intersections thereof. As Coyote, Helen, and Margarita’s cases reveal, restorying with the ancestors provided an actionable framework for realizing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Thomas and Stornaiuolo’s (2016) model focused that process. More precisely, restorying time, place, perspective, mode, metanarrative, and identity allowed participants to account “for the positioning of [queer] subjectivity within the discourse[s] of power” (Wallace, 2011, p. 5). By historically rooting our SCPs, we generated alternative rhetorics to the normative literacy practice of composing queer unhappy endings.

Moreover, LRC researchers might account for varieties of speculative composing practices that exist beyond HRSCPs as well as the role that differing intersectional histories play in either reinforcing normative literacy practices or speculating toward alternative rhetorics. The histories we imagine shape our composing practices, and for those who compose from the margins, research must clarify how the various histories and ancestors we imagine enliven HRSCPs differently. Importantly, HRSCPs do not unfold uniformly, and each might provide a more or less effective means of advancing alternative rhetorics toward anti- and nonnormative discursive configurations of future queer and non-queer life.

Connected to pedagogy, speculative composing practices and, more specifically, restorying, present pedagogical frameworks for enacting critical literacy practices in the teaching of composition. While my own study was not conducted in a classroom, Mirra and Garcia (2020) have demonstrated the potential of using restorying in ELA (English language arts) classrooms to develop young peoples’ speculative civic literacies through composing and dialogue. As they explain, speculative civic literacies challenge “normative stories,” while honoring young peoples’ “experiences, relationships, and dreams for the future” (p. 297). Applying “historical rootedness” to such speculative composing practices, teachers across content areas might guide students through reflective practices, teaching them to recognize and potentially alter the imagined histories shaping their composing practices. Furthermore, educators might invite students to compose speculatively with various imagined histories of the teacher’s choosing so that students might explore the conditional “what if” that indicates speculation. Demanding recognition of the realities we imagine and feel, the cultivation of speculative composing practices opens students to an evaluation of the normative realities held within the imagination. Moreover, through critical reflection, they might then challenge literacies normativities born of those realities, while also composing toward alternative futures animated by anti- and nonnormative practices of reading and writing, imagining and composing.

To conclude, I echo Margarita’s call for queer healing. To pursue alternative rhetorics of queer futurity is to pursue a reconfiguration of the queer imagination. It is an attempt to heal the wounds of the past, not by forgetting that past, but by embracing the queer ancestors that lived it. Feeling the affective experience that is ancestrality, queer composers can indeed heal as we speculate and compose toward the “utopian feeling” of queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009, p. 3). Challenging literacy normativities that “steal[] emotional resources from people” (Pritchard, 2017, p. 24), composers and compositionists alike might understand HRSCPs as a form of restorative literacies. As Pritchard explains “restorative literacies remakes those emotional resources people need for living, especially love, and returns them to work in the best interest of the individual and other” (p 24). Restorying with the ancestors is one form of restorative literacy practice that harnesses speculation in order to “feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). A turn to HRSCPs is thus a turn to restorying, repairing, and healing wounds of the past, and while this article has addressed HRSCPs in relation to queer LRC studies, such practices might similarly invite speculation toward restorative literacies for, across, and between various marginalized communities.