Queer Path-Making: Expressing or Suppressing Creativity in Arts Doctoral Writing

An insistent and rapacious call for innovation exists at the heart of academic knowledge production. However, the desire to produce a novel product does not appear to extend to notions of creativity in doctoral writing contexts. In this chapter, I explore how doctoral writers in the Faculty of Arts at an Australian university engage with the notion of creativity, both in relation to what it is or might be and where it is found. Building on my earlier work written with Janne Morton and Julie Choi (2019), I trace the diverse and changing perceptions of creativity held by three multilingual doctoral writers throughout their candidature. I utilise the work of Sara Ahmed (2006, 2018, 2019) to reveal how arts doctoral writers may diverge from the well-worn path of “standard” doctoral writing to forge their own unique trail of textual creativity despite the potential dangers posed by this deviation. While the “innovative idea” may be celebrated in the academy, any overtly creative expression could provoke an adverse reaction from disciplinary readers. This adverse reaction commonly led to a critical moment for doctoral writers, as their creative efforts were either sanctioned or forbidden by these powerful gatekeepers. If writers do risk leaving the “safe” path, I demonstrate how this could involve overcoming significant personal, cultural, and institutional obstacles. Ultimately, I show how some arts doctoral writers queer their writing by imagining and then acting upon a desire to produce creative written work. They also queer their doctorate by raising their writers’ voices in a space typically enveloped in denial and silence. Re-imagining the doctorate (Scene): Your thesis or dissertation should be 80,000 words long but no other boundaries exist—either about what you write or how you write it. Any style, any perspective, using any