The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric

Jacqueline Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander, Jacqueline Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000567786
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Rhetoric

The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, offering a dynamic overview of the history of and scholarly research in this field.

The handbook features rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, class, and sexuality. More important, chapters also attend to the intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability, and neurodiversity. In so doing, the book acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory has to work by scholars of color, feminists, and activists, inside and outside the academy. The first book of its kind, the handbook traces and documents the emergence of this subfield within rhetorical studies while also pointing the way toward new lines of inquiry, new trajectories in scholarship, and new modalities and methods of analysis, critique, intervention, and speculation.

This handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students studying rhetoric, communication, cultural studies, and queer studies.

1Introduction

Jacqueline Rhodes, University of Texas at AustinJonathan Alexander, University of California, Irvine

DOI: 10.4324/9781003144809-1

What is queer rhetoric? A decade ago, we might have tried to provide a somewhat definitive answer to that question. We might have put together a bibliography of the major work being done in the field, from that of Charles Morris on queer archives to Blake Scott on queerness and medical rhetorics to our own work on composing queerly in digital spaces. That time is long past. The proliferation of recent work in queer rhetoric has come as a welcome and invigorating surprise, a surprise exceeding the boundaries of straight trajectories or definitions. We write at a time in which queer and trans critiques, interventions, analyses, and methodologies are more vibrant—and diverse—than ever before.

Thus, we will queerly refuse a comprehensive survey in this introduction. And we will also queerly refuse a definition of queer rhetoric, even if we have been so bold as to offer tentative definitions in our own past work (together and separately). Suffice it to say that queer rhetoric now, provisionally, might mean thinking and writing about bodies, intimacies, pleasures, identities, communities, practices, activisms, and politics in challenging and often contrary ways. That’s not to say that “queer” and “contrary” are interchangeable. They’re not. But it is to say that queer remains for many writers a modality of resistance (but not just negatively so). Queer is not just saying no. It is also saying yes, and affirming and validating to different ways of being in the world, perhaps to being in the world differently. But not always and not in every way.

Confused yet? We believe that that confusion may be the most important offering of a queer rhetoric—that it leaves us troubled, perhaps incited, but delightfully and generatively so. Indeed, after reading, selecting, and assembling the chapters in this collection, we ourselves are delighted, provoked, challenged, and excited to see where queer rhetoric goes next.

That said, we can offer you an anticipatory snapshot of what’s going on in queer rhetoric right now. To that end, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the emergence and ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We feature rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, and sexuality. More than a “best of” collection, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric features original work by contemporary scholars reflecting on and forwarding key areas of study in queer rhetoric. More importantly, chapters attend to the intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability, and neurodiversity. In so doing, the book as a whole acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory owes to work by scholars of color, feminists, and activists inside and outside the academy.

This book doesn’t contain everything; it is necessarily partial, as every such collection will be. However, in issuing a call and putting together this volume, we have noted some telling trends, some provocative ways that scholars look forward, some ongoing concerns, and some nice surprises.

Notably, these trends include ongoing and expanding critical engagement with trans issues and theories. Hardly monolithic, trans approaches are nonetheless revitalizing analyses of gender as fundamental to understanding human identity, community, and politics. Related to this delicious surge of interest in trans theories is a keen concern with embodiment, with the material stuff of intimacy, erotics, desire, and sex. Queer theoretical engagement in rhetorical studies is willing now more than ever to consider the body, the meaty substance of what we are. A renewed interest in bodies and sex is perhaps also related to the emergence of attention to rhetorics of bisexuality, a delightful and much needed turn in queer rhetoric that parallels increasing representation of bisexuality and bi-eroticism in the larger public consciousness, at least in the Western world. Even further, attention to bodies and embodiment may be closely connected to consideration of the “material turn” and the new materialism; bodies are never just with bodies when desiring but also always already with a range of material actors and actants. The expanded field of rhetorical inquiry to include material and ambient rhetorics now includes scholars who are particularly interested in the queer dimensions of such intra-action between the human and the nonhuman. Often closely tied to this interest in materiality is the ongoing interest in affects, an interest that has moved from the fetish for failure and shame in the early part of the twenty-first century to more utopian and hopeful forms of feeling, even as the extent of the apocalyptic Anthropocene continues to reveal its horrors. Finally, joining this list of nice surprises is the ongoing and ever more sophisticated engagement with archives, including an interest in historical particularity and the development and analysis of specific case studies of queer rhetorical practice. We think of this last turn, particularly as it engages an increasingly diverse set of queer and trans rhetors, as taking seriously the challenging alternatives to living and worldbuilding enacted by subjects making lives outside of or in active opposition to the consumerist and capitalist ideologies of the modern era.

To help navigate this work, we have divided the handbook into six sections: Histories, Re-Histories, Archives; Methodologies; Communities; Identities; Provocations and Interventions; and Speculations. To start, Histories, Re-Histories, Archives explores the importance of historical and archival investigation into the complex representation of queer rhetorical practices in a variety of historical contexts; our authors pay particular attention to the use of history in the development of queer rhetorical strategies. In Methodologies, contributors ask: how does one do queer rhetoric—and then, at the same time, how does one do the study of queer rhetoric? Chapters in this section forward a range of methodologies available for the study of queer rhetorical practices. Next, in Communities, contributors consider how queer rhetorical practices are often used to create, question, bolster, and disrupt a variety of communities. Our authors examine how queer rhetors in aggregate participate broadly in acts of worldbuilding, in counterpublics, and in interventions in larger publics. Drilling down further, the following section, Identities, contains chapters that demonstrate how identity, however vexed and vexing, remains a powerful modality through which queer rhetors establish and explore ethos. In this section, authors investigate and complicate the relationships among and between queer/trans identity and rhetorical practices. Next, in Provocations and Interventions, our contributors ask how queer rhetorical practices might inform worlds within and beyond the academy. Chapters included here draw on and explore the varied and creative work of queer activists as queer rhetors. Finally, in our concluding section, Speculations, our authors think through how queer rhetorical practices often robustly intersect other domains and articulations of identity, community, praxis, materiality, and imagination. This section explores such intersections as well as work that uses queerness generatively to speculate on what queerness might be and become.

Any such division of chapters will seem at times arbitrary, and authors who are engaging issues of community are just as often speculating and exploring new methodologies. We have placed chapters in terms of our (and their authors’) perception of emphasis, and no placement is meant to suggest separateness from other sections of the book. Indeed, while we might (and will) argue that work in any one of these categories can also do the work of other categories, our division helps us trace multiple trajectories of rhetorical scholarship, from initial concerns with making visible the presence of queer rhetorical practice to explorations of queer and trans modes of rhetorical theorizing and critique, and, most recently, toward queer rhetorical speculation. Additionally, throughout this varied body of work, our authors attend to how our historical understanding of queer rhetorical practice is being revised constantly through new theories of historiography. They also explore how multiple political registers necessarily underscore any work on queer rhetoric. We invite you to dip in and out of sections and see how much of this work overlaps—delightfully so.

As we conclude working on this collection, we are acutely aware of some of our limitations. While we value the diverse range of our authors, particularly in terms of the varied embodied experiences they bring as queer, trans, queer of color, trans of color folk, we regret the relative paucity of work specifically from Black scholars. Many folks we approached were simply too busy to contribute—itself an indication of how often such scholars are tapped to represent Black and queer concerns. This remains a structural condition of an academy that has yet to foster, nurture, and support a range of scholars, particularly Black queer scholars. Also underrepresented is more work on queer migration issues, and we regret, for instance, the inability to include work by scholars such as Karma Chávez (read her work!).

At the same time, these limitations indicate an emerging issue, or at least an emerging question: does queer rhetoric meet the theoretical and political, not to mention personal, needs of current scholars of color, particularly Black scholars? Jack Halberstam, one of our most brilliant queer and trans theorists—in a recent interview with Jonathan—notes their own turn to “post-queer” thinking and the embrace of terms and concepts from Black studies, such as “abolition, waywardness, wildness, undercommons”—terms and concepts that do not elide the queer but do not center it, that allow for more intersectional and cross-sectional work on identity, community, culture, politics, and worldbuilding.¹ It may be the case that many of the authors presented here will also follow suit, turning to paradigms, theoretical constructs, methodological engagements, and other ways of doing work in queer rhetorical studies that put queerness and trans into even deeper conversations with issues of race, ethnicity, ability, class, nationality, and age—a move that we can only anticipate with pleasure. What an irony if this handbook is both the first and the last of its kind; future work might make a “handbook of queer rhetoric” seem, well, retro, or at least insufficient to the lived complexity of being human in a world of many fellow human and nonhuman entities.

Finally, one of the great pleasures of working on The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric has been the ongoing delight of collaboration, the sparking of challenging thoughts and feelings, not only between us as editors, but with our many brilliant contributors. We thank our authors for provoking us to think harder, deeper, and more pleasurably than ever before. They remind us of the kind of joy that Audre Lorde describes in “The Uses of the Erotic,” a text that has guided our lives and careers and the construction of this volume. Lorde writes:

[An] important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. (p. 89)

Lorde’s turn to the erotic and its uses is not just in service of living life on one’s own terms. It is also turning outward and opening oneself to the experience of joy across multiple spheres, domains, and ecologies. Bodies, music, dancing, bookcases, writing, and ideas—we invite you to dance with the bodies that have brought their rhetorical music, writing, and ideas to you through us. What could enable, enact, and sustain a queer rhetoric more than that?

Note

1. For more on Halberstam’s work in this area, see their Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke UP, 2020).

Works Cited

• Halberstam, J. Jack. “Writing Sex: Jack Halberstam.” Interview by Jonathan Alexander. Los Angeles Review of Books, 4 June 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/writing-sex-jack-halberstam. Accessed 8 Feb. 2022..
• Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 53–59.

SECTION IHistories, Re-Histories, Archives

2Undoing Happiness with PleasureRhetorics of Affect in The Ladder¹

Clare Bermingham, University of Waterloo

DOI: 10.4324/9781003144809-3

In 1956, The Ladder magazine was founded by the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), an early lesbian group that was committed to improving the lot of the lesbian in America. The monthly publication circulated through formal and informal distribution channels² across the United States and was read by women in a nascent community who, otherwise, had virtually no access to writing by and for lesbians.³ Initially intended as a newsletter for the DOB, it contained social and political commentary and reportage, as well as short fiction and poetry. The DOB, composed primarily of white, professional, middle-class women, engaged directly with dominant discourses of disease, mental illness, and criminality that constructed lesbians as sick and deviant. They committed to making societal change through education, research, and legislation,⁴ and through The Ladder, they advocated for lesbians to accept themselves and “adjust” to society by dressing and acting according to gender and class norms of the 1950s and 1960s. In context, this was a radical rhetorical strategy that grew from the “material and rhetorical needs” of their emerging community (Alexander and Rhodes “A Theoretical,” para. 4), and it was pragmatic more than ideological. However, it narrowed possibilities for an acceptable lesbian performativity that was often inaccessible to certain classed, racialized, and gendered bodies. In conversation with the DOB, writers and readers regularly debated and negotiated constructions of lesbian identity and strategies for acceptance and fair treatment. As a result, complicated and contradictory rhetorical currents ran through the textual public constituted through The Ladder, and resistances to normative pressures emerged in a variety of forms. This chapter traces rhetorics of affect that inserted feelings of lesbian desire and pleasure into a politics of respectability.

As early as its second issue, readers actively participated in The Ladder by writing letters, opinion pieces, reviews, fiction, and poetry that shared questions, issues, and challenges back to writers and other readers. This level of discursive engagement, like in other contemporary gay magazines such as The Mattachine Review and ONE Magazine, was unique, demonstrating that early gay readers were active discursive participants in constructions of and discussions about homosexuality during this period (D’Emilio 113–4). Existing research about the rhetorical and discursive work of The Ladder focuses on the DOB’s integrationist approach and how it was enacted through the magazine’s social commentary and political reportage. Vigiletti discusses how normative discursive strategies pushed against constructions of deviance and aligned wi...