1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Queer 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.
- Introduction
- Undoing Happiness with Pleasure: Rhetorics of Affect in The Ladder
- Retroactivism and the Institutional Archive
- Bisexual Invisibility, David Bowie, and the Prospects of Queer Memory
- The Ready-Made Queerness of Greco-Roman Rhetoric
- Printing a Queer Identity: Edward Carpenter, Ioläus, and the Affirmation of Same-Sex Desires in the Nineteenth Century
- Re-Storying Trans* Zines
- An Archive of Disposability: Gender and Sexuality in South Africa
- Re-Historicizing the "Lacking South": Archiving Queer Memory and Sexual Visibilities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia through the Invisible Histories Project
- The Trans Rhetorical Practice of Archive Building
- Wobbly Words and Transnational Queer Slippages
- Queer Topoi: Writing "Like" Sedgwick
- Methodologies Not Yet Known: The Queer Case for Relational Research
- Blake Brockington’s Rhetorical Afterlife: Fugitive Black Trans* Data and Queer Kairotic Methodology
- Histories in (Trans)lation: Xie Jianshun and the Potential and Perils of Trans Historiography
- Subatomic Literacies and Queer Quantum Storytelling
- Between the Sheets: Gavin Arthur’s Sexual Circulation
- Queer Ecovisual Rhetorics
- Queering Spaces
- "Let’s Get Some Family Chosen": Refugees, Homonationalism, and Queer Family Rhetoric
- Queer Memes as Rhetorical Scenes
- Womyn’s Words: Rhetorical Practices of the Lesbian Community in the Tampa Bay Area
- Mountain Dirt(y) Queer Rhetorics: Making Appalachian Queerness Visible
- Queer Rhetorics of Resistance in HIV Healthcare
- "People Can’t Say I’m a Man, They Can’t Say I’m a Woman": Reality Expansion in the Kewpie Collection
- Converging in a Room of Our Own: The Ladder, Autostraddle, and Queer Convergence in Online Communities
- Prescribe for Me, Doctor, for I Have Sex: Rhetorics of Empowerment, Queer Shame, and the Confessional in PrEP Prescribing
- Making Nothing Out of Something: Asexuality and the Rhetorics of Silence and Absence
- The Queer Potential of Bisexual Rhetorics
- Fuck (Gay) Racism: Queer Asian American Rhetorics of Abe Kim’s TikTok
- Anthos, Bottoms, and Anal Sex in Troye Sivan’s "Bloom"
- How Much Does It Take: Persuasion and the Stakes of Will in The Transformation
- Irreversible Damage: Transmasculine Affectability and the White Family
- Disidentification (as a Survival Strategy for Religious Trauma)
- Resilient Closets, Addressivity, and Opening Pandora’s Box
- Rhetoric of the Invisible (Or, How Bisexual People Demand to be Seen)
- Sexual Assaults, Queer Panics: Gemma Watts and Reynhard Sinaga
- Anti-Normativity Under Duress: An Intersectional Intervention in Queer Rhetorics
- Lettering me Queer: An Open Letter to Gurlesque
- Chronicity Rhetorics as Queercrip Activism
- Rhetorical Work: Genre Fluidity as a Queer Rhetorical Practice of Activists -- A Play/Chapter in Multiple Acts
- On Taking the Bottom’s Stance, or Not Your Typical Submissive
- "Soft Armor" for Ugly Bodies: The Radical Visibility of QueerCrip Fashion
- Dear Queer Memoir Writers…
- Queer Rhetorics as Intervention Methods: The Curious Case of Conversion Violence
- The Fabulous Rhetorics of Queer Inhumanity: Speculating with Queer Inhuman Figures to Restory Queerphobic Histories
- The Queer Babadook: Circulation of Queer Affects
- Rhetorics of Gay Future and Queer Futurity: Strategies of Disruption
- (Queer) Optimism Ain’t (Im)Possible
- Between Queer and Digital: Toward an Understanding of the Rhetoric of Digital Queerdom
- Queering the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine: Bodies, Embodiment, and the Future
- Cuir-ing Queer: Speculations on Latin American Notions of Queerness
- Queer Hauntings, Queer Renewings
- Pathological Desire, Perverse Erotics, and Paraphiliac Entelechies
Jacqueline Rhodes (University of Texas at Austin) and Jonathan Alexander (University of California, Irvine)
HISTORIES, RE-HISTORIES, ARCHIVES
Clare Bermingham (University of Waterloo)
Jean Bessette (University of Vermont)
Thomas R. Dunn (Colorado State University)
Erik Gunderson (University of Toronto)
Jason Lajoie (University of Waterloo)
Vee Lawson (Michigan State University)
Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki (African Gender Institute—University of Cape Town)
Keshia Mcclantoc (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
K.J. Rawson (Northeastern University)
METHODOLOGIES
Ahmet Atay (College of Wooster)
Allen Durgin (Columbia University)
Wilfredo Flores (Michigan State University)
Joe Edward Hatfield (University of Arkansas)
V. Jo Hsu (University of Texas at Austin)
Shereen Inayatulla (York College, CUNY)
Philip Longo (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Anushka Peres (University of Nevada, Reno)
Fernando Sánchez (University of St. Thomas)
COMMUNITIES
Murat Aydemir (University of Amsterdam)
Abbie Levesque DeCamp (Northeastern University)
Tyler Gillespie (University of Mississippi)
Hillery Glasby (Michigan State University) and Caleb Pendygraft (Massachusetts Maritime Academy)
Cree Gordon (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and McKinley Green (George Mason University)
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse (University of Oxford)
Josie Rush (University of Pittsburgh at Bradford)
IDENTITIES
Zachary Beare (North Carolina State University)
KJ Cerankowski (Oberlin)
Elise Dixon (University of North Carolina Pembroke)
Austin Miller and Shinsuke Eguchi (University of New Mexico)
Cory Geraths (Eureka College)
D.T. McCormick (Purdue)
Liam Randall (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Mari E. Ramler (Tennessee Tech University)
David Wallace (California State University, Long Beach)
Olivia Wood (CUNY Graduate Center)
PROVOCATIONS & INTERVENTIONS
Ian Barnard (Chapman University)
Marco Dehnert, Daniel C. Brouwer, and Lore/tta LeMaster (Arizona State University)
Ames Hawkins (Columbia College Chicago)
Adam Hubrig (Sam Houston State University)
Ruby K. Nancy (University of Minnesota Duluth)
Timothy Oleksiak (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Erin J. Rand (Syracuse)
Jonathan J. Rylander (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire)
Travis Webster (Virginia Tech University)
SPECULATIONS
James Joshua Coleman (San Jose State University)
Michael J. Faris (Texas Tech University)
Dustin Goltz (DePaul University)
Gavin P. Johnson (Christian Brothers University)
Trent M. Kays (Augusta University)
Katie Manthey (Salem College), Maria Novotny (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee), and Matt Cox (East Carolina University)
Alejandra Márquez (Michigan State University)
Aneil Rallin (Soka University of America)
J. Logan Smilges (Texas Women’s University)
Biography
Jacqueline Rhodes is the Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work on queer and feminist rhetorics has been published in journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, PRE/TEXT, and Rhetoric Review. Her co-authored and co-edited books have won a number of awards, including the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and the 2015 Computers & Composition Distinguished Book Award (for On Multimodality); the 2016 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship (for Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self); and the same award in 2017 for Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics. Her award-winning documentary feature Once a Fury (Morrigan House, 2020), which profiles the members of a 1970s lesbian separatist collective, is currently streaming on tellofilms.com.
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The author, co-author, or co-editor of twenty-one books, Alexander writes frequently about queer culture and conducts research in the areas of life writing, lifespan writing, and the rhetorics of popular culture. His most recent work has been in creative nonfiction, consisting of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award), Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot, Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir.
"The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric does exactly what a handbook should do: it challenges the boundaries of the field while providing parameters, it provokes, it intervenes, and it offers something of interest for almost everyone. Smart, naughty, and cutting edge, both new and established voices come together to create a queer and trans rhetorical theory agenda that will be impossible to ignore for many years to come." - Karma R. Chávez, author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance
"This handbook will be the definitive overview of the fabulous, diverse, and rigorous work in queer rhetorics for years to come. Contributors are well-attuned to the important ways in which identities and communities materialize in and through rhetoric, while simultaneously—through provocations, interventions, and speculations. Queer futures like the ones José Esteban Muñoz imagined when he encouraged us to cruise utopia are on full display in this indispensable volume." - Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance
"From the erotic to the fabulous, the resilient to the radical, this comprehensive collection maps the current landscapes of queer rhetorics as it also makes space for an un-imagined future. Queer rhetorics emerge here in all their varied possibilities." - Lisa A. Flores, University of Colorado Boulder