Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

Performative inquiry – studies of doing and its consequences for being – is a prominent feature of research projects in exploring gender and sexuality, especially when gender and sexuality are closely tied to linguistic practices. Moreover, because performativity of doing unfolds in specific social and temporal contexts, performative inquiry shows how gender and sexuality become inflected variously in relation to intersectionalities and inequalities, and how language use connected to gender and sexuality becomes inflected in similar terms, as well. Performative inquiry is also concerned with assumptions about normative (or ideological) assumptions that regulate “commonsense” distinctions between valued and not-so-valued practices of doing and being. This chapter’s case studies and discussion show how gender and sexuality are shaped by performative practices and how language use is entailed within these gendered and sexual performative formations.

As described by Steele (1997, p. 614), stereotype threat is “the social-psychological threat that arises when one is in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one’s group applies.” This chapter reviews research on how stereotype threat affects students in K–12 settings, including members of underrepresented racial groups and women in quantitative fields such as math and computer science. Because of the potential costs of stereotype threat in terms of individual underperformance and reduced participation in various fields by members of underrepresented groups, it is vital to prevent and reduce stereotype threat in schools settings. Efforts at prevention and reduction may be focused on concerns with belonging, concerns with performance, and management of the cognitive and physiological effects of stereotype threat. Partnership with researchers has been shown to increase both the theoretical fidelity and the effectiveness of school-based interventions.