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Most of them chose the second option, and two pairs independently chose to research the word "faggot." One of those pairs was a self-selected partnership of international students who told me they made that choice because overhearing the word consistently confused them: no one could tell them what homosexuality had to do with sticks. The other paired a 19-year-old white man who openly identified as gay and a 40-something-year-old black man who identified himself most prominently as a father and community churchgoer. The topic was the younger man's idea; the older went along with it primarily because he was no match for the younger's stubborn insistence. The older man told me, as they got into researching the project, that he was only doing this for the grade; he really didn't think the topic had anything to do with him and expected that he would have to show a lot of patience to put up with the younger man's views on a subject he wasn't entirely comfortable with. The research that they did and the paper they produced told a very different story, however; their final product, although not elegantly composed, told a story about the way the term created, defined, and limited the developing masculinity of all young men in this country, and the older man told me after the project was complete that he'd realized the topic very much had to do with him, with his self-conception and the way he'd come to occupy and think about his own cultural position.

Because peer workshopping was a necessary facet of their paper-writing processes, a few other groups in the class also had a chance to read these papers and talk about the research going into them, so the ideas they generated enjoyed a wider circulation than the small groups responsible for their presentation, but formally or collectively taking them up was never a goal or outcome of the activity. The class, then, didn't ostensibly teach against heteronormativity (although I'm sure I made a comment or two to redirect some overly-assumption-based contributions to classroom discussions), but it did make room for students' exploration of some of the language they hear every day, providing opportunities for them to investigate beyond normative usage to examine history and implication. What's most important to me as a writing teacher is finding ways to develop my students' sensitivity to language—to what words they use, and how, and why, to who those words serve to draw attention to and to eclipse—which in very material ways creates and perpetuates heteronormative assumptions. Jeff's word essay was a great way for me to do that in both my 105 and 205 classrooms last year, especially when paired with Kennedy's text in the context of a research course.