“Sponsors of Literacy”
Title of Source: “Sponsors of Literacy
Author: Deborah Brandt
Source Type: Academic Article
Publication: CCC, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998
MLA Citation: Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” CCC, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165- 185.
Notes:
In this seminal article, Deborah Brandt explores the ways in which literacy is constructed, not just within individuals, but within larger social institutions. She points out that while literacy academics spend a great deal of time studying individual literacy, very little work has been done on these larger literacy institutions. Brandt’s largest contribution in this article is her idea of sponsors of literacy. She asserts that literacy is learned through a variety of social systems including family, religion, work, authors and editors, and politics. Brandt states that “sponsor” is an especially apt term due to the fact that sponsors typically provide their help and resources both for the good of those that they assist as well as for their own benefit. The majority of Brandt’s article is then spent analyzing a number of individual case studies in order to demonstrate the role of these sponsors.
While this article is important to any study of literacy, it is especially important in queer literacy because many of the sponsors that Brandt names, as well as many more that she leaves unnamed, are the very institution that have historically stood in the way of queer literacy development. This is because these sponsors have also historically been sponsors of heterosexuality. Queer literacy has developed in spite of these sponsors, not because of them. I argue in my research that in the absence of these sponsors, literacy itself becomes a sponsor. Queer individuals are able to develop their language and identity largely through reading and writing.
Text to Text
- In Dear Rachel Maddow, Brynn names almost all of the sponsors of literacy in her first email to Rachel Maddow. She discusses how her mother and step-father are very conservative and not supportive, how she has been relegated to the basement classes in school, how the email she is writing is a class assignment, and how she was introduced to Rachel Maddow through her ex-girlfriend.