The Queer Kairotic: Digital Transgender Suicide Memories and Ecological Rhetorical Agency

Abstract

When two transgender teenagers posted eerily similar suicide letters to public Tumblr accounts in late 2014 and early 2015, they inspired a viral memorialization effort across the website. In this article, I argue the widespread circulation of transgender suicide rhetoric facilitates the possibility for queer rhetors to provoke collective enactments of rhetorical agency even after their deaths. I identify the suicide letters as an emergent rhetorical form, which on its dissemination and due to its intelligibility, incites a kairotic moment. The kairotic moment may be protracted by a network of bodies who feel and collectively reproduce its sensate exigence. As it becomes viral, the kairotic moment acts as the queer futurity of ecological rhetorical agency because it stretches the visceral pressure of exigence beyond its original spatiotemporal emergence, draws bodies into collaborative networks, and orients invention toward the dismantling of normative rhetorical constructs and the composition of alternative worlds.

Keywords:

• kairos
• queer rhetoric
• rhetorical agency
• rhetorical ecology
• transgender

Acknowledgments

For their critical commentary and intellectual generosity during various stages of the revision process for this article, I send many thanks to Susan Jarratt, Jake Dionne, Josh Barnett, Laurie Gries, Tiara Na’puti, and both anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹ See chapter two of Ambient Rhetoric, particularly the section “Kairos beyond Subjectivity,” in which Rickert reads Scott Consigny’s Gorgias: Sophist and Artist in light of more recent posthumanist claims on the ancient kairos made by Debra Hawhee and John Muckelbauer, for a richer discussion of how classical conceptions of kairos can reinscribe a problematic subject-object relationship that shrouds the contextual embeddedness of kairos and its force (83–90).

² I quote both Alcorn’s and Mahaffey’s suicide letters verbatim. I do not revise any grammatical errors except when necessary for clarity.