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.