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Articles

Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography

 

Abstract

Engaging with feminist rhetorical methodologies of critical imagination and interdisciplinary queer studies of gossip, this essay theorizes gossip as a methodology for feminist and queer historiography in rhetoric. Gossip as historiographic practice is then illustrated through the example of its uses to develop a queer history of rhetorical education and women’s epistolary practices.

Notes

1. 1I would like to thank RR reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jacqueline Rhodes for their helpful feedback. This essay also benefited from the expert research assistance of Sarah Spangler as well as earlier exchanges about gossip with Mark Lynn Anderson, Jean Bessette, Jess Enoch, Nancy Glazener, and participants at the DC Queer Studies Symposium.

2. 2Here and throughout, the emphasis is in the original unless otherwise stated.

3. 3See also Ferreira-Buckley; Gale; Glenn; Glenn and Enoch; Hoogeveen; Jarratt; “Octalog”; “Octalog II”; “Octalog III”; Wu.

4. 4Other scholarship that engages this methodology of critical imagination includes Gold; Gold and Hobbs; Kirsch and Royster; Mortensen; Stuckey; Valdes.

5. 5Feminist scholarship on gossip also includes Adkins; Chidgey, Gunnarsson, and Zobl; Leach; Rogoff.

6. 6Additional queer scholarship on gossip includes Bennett; Friedman; Potter; Tunc; van den Oever. For other sources on gossip in history, see Feeley and Frost.

7. 7For discussion of sexuality before sexological discourse and sexual identity categories, see Chauncey; Foucault; Halperin; Katz; Sedgwick; Somerville.

8. 8For other scholarship on the Brown-Primus correspondence, see Beeching; Grasso; Griffin; Hansen.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pamela VanHaitsma

Pamela VanHaitsma is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. Her essay in Rhetoric Society Quarterly received the 2015 Charles Kneupper Award from the Rhetoric Society of America. Her work also appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, and Journal of Basic Writing. Currently she is completing her first book manuscript—a queer history of nineteenth-century rhetorical education and epistolary practices—and beginning new archival research on the rhetorical practices of women teachers in same-sex romantic friendships.

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