Queer Rhetoric in Situ

Abstract

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

Notes

1. ¹I thank RR readers Alexandra Cavallaro and Jacqueline Rhodes for their generous and insightful feedback. I also extend my deep and ongoing gratitude to Jessica Enoch for her feedback on an earlier draft of this essay and so many others.

2. ²As I elaborate later in this essay, Erin Rand defines queerness as the risk of failure fundamental to any rhetorical act while Alexander and Rhodes (in an earlier piece in 2011) define queer as impossibility and excess.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Bessette

Jean Bessette is an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Computers and Composition. Her book manuscript, “Rhetorics of Retroactivism: Composing Lesbian Pasts and Futures,” is under review.