Queering Genre and Joy: Reclaiming and Navigating Queerness Through Hybridity

Throughout my experience in English education, queer texts and queer interpretations of texts have often been denied to me in favor of upholding more canonical and more cis-heteronormative works and analyses. This delayed my ability to write through my gender, sexuality, and overall queer identity, because I had no literary references to take inspiration from. The ways in which I played with genre and form in my work were discouraged because I was taught that my writing would not be taken seriously in academia if it did not represent the “official” literary canon. By melding together memoir, theory, poetry, and visual art, this creative thesis seeks to reclaim queerness where it has been denied to me throughout my academic and personal life, to navigate my own queerness through hybrid writing and visual forms, to offer those forms to others as a method of navigating one’s identity, and to challenge the notion that multimodal works like those that appear on various social media platforms are not to be taken as seriously as literary classics