An Archival Framework for Affirming Black Women’s Bisexual Rhetorics in the Primus Collections

ABSTRACT

Bisexual discourse is underexamined as such within rhetoric. So too are the historical practices of African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) communities. Responding to these forms of erasure, my essay advances the study of Black women’s bisexual rhetorics through a focus on the collected papers of a freeborn African American woman, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932). Specifically, the essay offers a comparative analysis of two archival collections containing letters to her: the widely studied Primus Family Papers and the more recently acquired Rebecca Primus Papers. Taken together, these collections offer an enlarged view of Rebecca’s epistolary relationships with people of more than one gender. In doing so, I argue, the new collection reveals a need for a bisexual archival framework, which redresses the limitations of any single collection of romantic letters as a necessarily partial and speculative source of information. This framework affirms Black women’s bisexual rhetorics while recovering a more diverse LGBTQ+ past.

KEYWORDS:

• Addie Brown
• African American
• epistolary rhetoric
• LGBTQ
• queer
• romantic letters

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jacqueline Rhodes and the anonymous reviewers for their editorial guidance and helpful feedback. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the National Communication Association conference on a panel with Michele Kennerly, Jean Bessette, and Carly Woods, whom I thank for the inspiration of their work on queer epistolary rhetorics. I am especially grateful to Marguerite Nguyen Lehman, who transcribed primary materials and assisted with secondary research for this project, and to Penn State’s Department of Communication Arts and Sciences for supporting her research assistant position.

Notes

¹ A note on my own positionality with respect to this project: I’m a white, queer-identified femme. At other points in my life, I have identified as a dyke or as bisexual. I bring this shifting sense of sexuality—as well as critical reflection about internalized biphobia—to the essay. As a white woman committed to antiracism, I also bring to the project an ongoing process of critical reflection about how to develop LGBTQ+ histories of rhetoric that resist white supremacy and anti-Black racism—that are not only inclusive of Black rhetors, but informed by Black queer and feminist theory, methodology, and history.

² Emphasis added.

³ See also Key; Nutter-Pridgem; Poirot.

⁴ A similar form of erasure occurs in scholarship that uses the acronym yet ignores the “T,” which is known as “LGB-fake-T studies” (Spade qtd. in Vaccaro 275). Work that does attend to transgender rhetorics includes Chávez; Cram, “Angie”; Hatfield; Rawson, “Accessing” and “Rhetorical Power”; and West.

⁵ In addition to Pritchard’s book, additional scholarship on African American LGBTQ+ rhetorics includes Craig; Lipari; E. Johnson; Olson, “Intersecting Audiences,” “Traumatic Styles”; Pough; Pritchard, “As Proud”; VanHaitsma, “Romantic”; and Watts.

⁶ For other rhetorical studies of the epistolary genre, many with an emphasis on nineteenth-century (white) women’s letters, see Bordelon, “Private Letters”; Donawerth, “Nineteenth-Century” and “Poaching”; Gring-Pemble; N. Johnson; Mahoney; Poster; Spring; Trasciatti. On romantic letters in particular, see Bordelon, “Courtship-by-Correspondence”; Hanly; Lystra; Newkirk.

⁷ While this distinction between identity and practice is made throughout queer studies, my own approach is most informed by Alexander and Rhodes’s work on queer practices and Rawson’s on transgender practices. See also, Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Alexander (202). On the distinction with respect to epistolary practices in particular, see VanHaitsma, Queering (11).

⁸ I learned about this second collection when I e-mailed with Andrea Rapacz at the Connecticut Historical Society to secure permissions for the earlier project. I am grateful to her for telling me about the Schlesinger acquisition.

⁹ Emphasis is in the original here and throughout, unless otherwise indicated.

¹⁰ Pritchard (Fashioning 22–23) discusses further queer frameworks and racialized heteronormativity as theorized by Cohen; Ferguson.

¹¹ Additional research on Black women’s bisexuality includes Bates, “Once-Married”; Rust; Scott.

¹² On the complexities of intersectionality within and for Black feminist theory, including with respect to questions of sexuality, see Cooper; Keeanga-Yamahtta; Olson, “Intersecting Audiences,”.

¹³ Jordan’s published essay was adapted from an address delivered in 1991 (131).

¹⁴ I thank Marguerite Nguyen Lehman for first bringing Ochs’s definition to my attention as one that does not require a binary understanding of gender. Of course, bisexuality has been defined in multiple ways, both recently and historically (Berenson; Denton; Halperin; MacDowall).

¹⁵ For just a few examples from among many, see Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Alexander; Denton; Erickson-Schroth and Mitchell; Feldman; Gurevich, Bailey, and Bower; Hutchins and Ka’ahumanu; Marcus; Yoshino.

¹⁶ Although available archives are lacking, research on African American women’s bisexual rhetorical practices is possible through inventive methods, including “critical fabulation,” “critical imagination,” and “queer gossip” (Hartman, “Venus” 11; Holmes, cf. 56; Royster, cf. 80–83; Royster and Kirsch 71; VanHaitsma, “Gossip,” cf. 136). See also Hartman, Wayward Lives (xiii–xv, 34, 75, 289).

¹⁷ It is likely that, at least for a short time, Addie boarded with the Primus family in Hartford (Griffin 18).

¹⁸ Hartman discusses further the sexual violence of domestic service (233–34). On Addie’s experiences with “the perennial hazard associated with domestic service,” see Beeching (43).

¹⁹ On these racist stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality, as well as their implications for rhetorical practices, see Collins (71–73, 77–88); Pritchard, Fashioning (42); Richardson (676); VanHaitsma, “Romantic” (199).

²⁰ While my focus here is on Black women’s LGBTQ+ archives, there is a large and rich body of scholarship on LGBTQ+ archives within rhetoric, communication, and composition. See, for instance, Bessette, “An Archive” and Retroactivism; Cram, “Archival Ambience”; Morris, “Archival Queer”; Morris and Rawson; Narayan; Rawson, “Accessing Transgender” and “Rhetorical Power”; VanHaitsma, “Digital LGBTQ.”

²¹ Beeching notes Rebecca’s age at the time of marriage (177).

²² On gossip, see Holmes; VanHaitsma, “Gossip.”