From FemRhet '13: The Gender Project is a series of documentaries about the lived experiences of gender and sexuality. It’s also a queer feminist dissertation research project set within the academic power structure. This presenter will identify the institutional and systemic barriers to this dissertation project, as well as discuss the negotiations and maneuvering required to submit (queer feminist) videos as academic writing for the completion and granting of a doctoral degree.

1. Dissing the Academy:
Doing Queer Feminist Video Work
Casey Miles
@soulsmiles
Queer Theory Playground
Michigan State University

2. vimeo.com/channels/thegenderproject

3. Steve

4. “As we have suggested throughout this volume, the
tectonic/paradigmatic shifts we have been describing point
to a new era in rhetorical studies, one that is much more
fluid, shifting, and expansive than before. This re-formed
view encourages the use of patterns of observing, reading,
analyzing, and interpreting that are dialogical, dialectical,
reflective, and reflexive and that generate thereby multiple
sources of information that have to be balanced in
knowledge creation and knowledge use” (139).
Feminist Rhetorical Practices:
New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies
Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch

5. “Queerness has the potential to stretch our sense of
not only what can be composed, but how it can be
composed. If queerness means more than just one
more static representation of “diversity,” containable
in its knowability, then it must move in multiple
directions at once, embracing multi-modality, multi-
genre texts, and even, when available or perhaps
necessary, multi-media” (183).
“Queerness: An Impossible Subject for Composition”
JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 2011
Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes

6. Katie
Femme: Doing it Wrong

7. “Mapping Dissertation Genre Change
Through Analysis of Interdisciplinary Award-Winning Dissertations”
Kate Pantelides
Across the Disciplines, Spring 2014
Special issue on graduate writing

8. Rhetoric & Writing at MSU
(my program)

9. Rhetoric & Writing at MSU
(my program)
• “major piece of research or
scholarship”
•“typically a book-length
work”
• Handbook refers to The
Graduate School

10. • 3 year MFA degree
• MSU’s Plan B – no written
thesis
• Thesis Project with written
statement
• Public exhibition of project
Art, Art History & Design at MSU

11. • Dissertation, OR
• A series of public recitals and lecture-recitals,
AND
• 1 lecture-recital accompanied with a
“scholarly paper”
Doctor of Music at MSU

12. • Written dissertation
• Handbook defers to The Graduate
School
Phd in English at MSU
with Film & Visual Culture Emphasis

13. • Electronic Thesis and
Dissertations
• Focus on document
requirements – font, table of
contents, spacing, footnotes…
• No mention of multimedia
The Graduate School at MSU

14. Conclusions
• Written component
• From artist’s statement to scholarly paper
• Public exhibition
• In addition to defense

15. Questions
• What is the balance between video and
text?
• How will length be measured?
• How much justification will I have to do
IN the dissertation?

16. Conclusions for Rhetcomp
Let’s do this!