Eckert, Lena

One’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight. (Deleuze 1995: 141)

If we see and teach writing not as a containment of thought but as liberation, we might be able to bring students to a new understanding and experience of writing. By drawing on Deleuzian conceptualizations of writing, thinking and becoming, I want to propose a new understanding of teaching writing that can empower students to their own thinking. Moreover, I consider it to be a queer-feminist, decolonial way of producing knowledge.

I argue that if we teach to “treat writing as a flow, not a code” (Deleuze 1995: 7) we might be able to empower students to find their own voice in writing and realize that their own experiences matter. Therefore, if we can teach students not to „hide behind the modernist conceit that writing is universal, authoritative, and finalizable“ (Pensoneau-Conway et al. 2014: 322) we might be able to make them realize that writing is quite the opposite: It is always specific and personal, vulnerable, necessarily neglecting, processural and: it can be democratic, powerful and a valuable contribution to the community (in academia but also beyond). By actually letting them experience the necessary incompleteness of one’s own and each others’ writing by writing together and in the vein of becoming, one might enable the embodied and performative dimensions of “the tender together/apartness of writing” (see Wyatt et al. 2010: 730). My paper addresses the theoretical underpinnings of such a possibility of the teaching of collaborative creative and also decolonial, queer-feminist writing – also in Onlinesettings

• Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations 1972-1990 (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
• Pensoneau-Conway, Sandra L., Derek M. Bolen, Satoshi Toyosaki, C. Kyle Rudick, and Erin K. Bolen (2014) Self, Relationship, Positionality, and Politics: A Community Autoethnographic Inquiry Into Collaborative Writing. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. 14(4) 312–323.
• Wyatt, Jonathan, Ken Gale, Susanne Gannon, and Bronwyn Davies (2010). Deleuzian Thought and Collaborative Writing: A Play in Four Acts. Qualitative Inquiry 16(9) 730–741.

Dr. Lena Eckert is a Gender Studies and Literary Scholar based in Berlin and Halle. She also trained as a Writing Coach and enjoys immensely including writing strategies in her teaching of Critical Educational Theory, Post-Anarchist and Aesthetic Strategies in Higher Education. She has published widely on gender and diversity aspects in the context of Media-Pedagogy, Higher Education and Filmeducation. Her main research interest is the vast variety of structural and analytical space|time coordinates of power inequalities as well as subversive strategies to undermine those. Her recent publications include: Mutterschaft und Wissenschaft (Springer 2020) and DIY, Subkulturen und Feminismen (Alma Marta 2021).

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