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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
QUEER RHETORIC
The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late
twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, offering a dynamic overview of the history of and scholarly research in this field.
The handbook features rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in
queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, class, and sexuality.
More important, chapters also attend to the intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability,
and neurodiversity. In so doing, the book acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory has to
the work by scholars of color, feminists, and activists, inside and outside the academy.The first book of its
kind, the handbook traces and documents the emergence of this subfield within rhetorical studies while
also pointing the way toward new lines of inquiry, new trajectories in scholarship, and new modalities and
methods of analysis, critique, intervention, and speculation.
This handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students studying rhetoric, communication, cultural studies, and queer studies.
Jacqueline Rhodes is the Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the
University of Texas at Austin. Her work on queer and feminist rhetorics has been published in
journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, PRE/​TEXT, and Rhetoric Review. Her co-​authored and co-​edited books have won a
number of awards, including the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and the 2015 Computers
& Composition Distinguished Book Award (for On Multimodality); the 2016 CCCC Lavender
Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship (for Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the
Self); and the same award in 2017 for Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics. Her award-​winning
documentary feature Once a Fury (Morrigan House, 2020), which profiles the members of a 1970s
lesbian separatist collective, is currently streaming on tellofilms.com.
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The
author, co-​author, or co-​editor of twenty-​one books, Alexander writes frequently about queer culture and conducts research in the areas of life writing, lifespan writing, and the rhetorics of popular
culture. His most recent work has been in creative nonfiction, consisting of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an
Apology (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award), Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot, Bullied: The Story
of an Abuse, and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF QUEER RHETORIC
Edited by Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business.
© 2022 Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander
The right of Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-69658-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-70151-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-14480-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003144809
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
CONTENTS
List of figures
List of contributors
x
xi
1
1
Introduction
Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander
SECTION I
Histories, Re-​Histories, Archives
5
2
Undoing Happiness with Pleasure: Rhetorics of Affect in The Ladder
Clare Bermingham
7
3
Retroactivism and the Institutional Archive
Jean Bessette
17
4
Bisexual Invisibility, David Bowie, and the Prospects of Queer Memory
Thomas R. Dunn
26
5
The Ready-​Made Queerness of Greco-​Roman Rhetoric
Erik Gunderson
34
6
Printing a Queer Identity: Edward Carpenter, Ioläus, and the Affirmation
of Same-​Sex Desires in the Nineteenth Century
Jason Lajoie
7
Re-​Storying Trans* Zines
Vee Lawson
42
51
v
Contents
8 An Archive of Disposability: (Trans)gender and Sexuality in South Africa
Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki
9 Re-​Historicizing the “Lacking South”: Archiving Queer Memory and
Sexual Visibilities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia Through the
Invisible Histories Project
Keshia Mcclantoc
10 The Trans Rhetorical Practice of Archive Building
K.J. Rawson
SECTION II
60
68
77
Methodologies
85
11 Wobbly Words and Transnational Queer Slippages
Ahmet Atay
87
12 Queer Topoi: Writing “Like” Sedgwick
Allen Durgin
95
13 Methodologies Not Yet Known: The Queer Case for Relational Research
Wilfredo Flores
104
14 Blake Brockington’s Rhetorical Afterlife: Fugitive Black Trans* Data and
Queer Kairotic Methodology
Joe Edward Hatfield
114
15 Histories in (Trans)lation: Xie Jianshun and the Potential and Perils of
Trans Historiography
V. Jo Hsu
122
16 Subatomic Literacies and Queer Quantum Storytelling
Shereen Inayatulla
130
17 Between the Sheets: Gavin Arthur’s Sexual Circulation
Philip Longo
140
18 Queer Ecovisual Rhetorics
Anushka Peres
148
19 Queering Spaces
Fernando Sánchez
156
vi
Contents
SECTION III
Communities
165
20 “Let’s Get Some Family Chosen”: Refugees, Homonationalism, and
Queer Family Rhetoric
Murat Aydemir
167
21 Queer Memes as Rhetorical Scenes
Abbie Levesque DeCamp
175
22 Womyn’s Words: Rhetorical Practices of Lesbians in the Tampa Bay Area
Tyler Gillespie
183
23 Mountain Dirt(y) Queer Rhetorics: Making Appalachian Queerness Visible
Hillery Glasby and Caleb Pendygraft
191
24 Queer Rhetorics of Resistance in HIV Healthcare
Cree Gordon and McKinley Green
200
25 “People Can’t Say I’m a Man, They Can’t Say I’m a Woman”: Reality
Expansion in the Kewpie Collection
Ruth Ramsden-​Karelse
207
26 Converging in a Room of Our Own: The Ladder, Autostraddle, and Queer
Convergence in Online Communities
Josie Rush
215
SECTION IV
Identities
223
27 Prescribe for Me, Doctor, for I Have Sex: Rhetorics of Empowerment,
Queer Shame, and the Confessional in PrEP Prescribing
Zachary C. Beare
225
28 Making Nothing Out of Something: Asexuality and the Rhetorics of Silence
and Absence
KJ Cerankowski
233
29 The Queer Potential of Bisexual Rhetorics
Elise Dixon
241
30 Fuck (Gay) Racism: Queer Asian American Rhetorics of Abe Kim’s TikTok
Austin Miller and Shinsuke Eguchi
250
vii
Contents
31 Anthos, Bottoms, and Anal Sex in Troye Sivan’s “Bloom”
Cory Geraths
32 How Much Does It Take? Persuasion and the Stakes of Will in
The Transformation
D.T. McCormick
258
266
33 Irreversible Damage: Trans Masculine Affectability and the White Family
Liam Randall
273
34 Disidentification (as a Survival Strategy for Religious Trauma)
Mari E. Ramler
281
35 Resilient Closets, Addressivity, and Opening Pandora’s Box
David L.Wallace
290
36 Rhetoric of the Invisible (or, How Bisexual People Demand to be Seen)
Olivia Wood
299
SECTION V
Provocations & Interventions
309
37 Sexual Assaults, Queer Panics: Gemma Watts and Reynhard Sinaga
Ian Barnard
311
38 Anti-​Normativity under Duress: An Intersectional Intervention in
Queer Rhetoric
Marco Dehnert, Daniel C. Brouwer, and Lore/​tta LeMaster
319
39 Lettering Me Queer: An Open Letter to Gurlesque
Ames Hawkins
328
40 Chronicity Rhetoric as Queercrip Activism
Adam Hubrig
339
41 Rhetorical Work: Genre Fluidity as a Queer Rhetorical Practice of
Activists: a Play/​Chapter in Multiple Acts
Ruby K. Nancy
346
42 On Taking the Bottom’s Stance, or Not Your Typical Submissive
Timothy Oleksiak
357
43 “Soft Armor” for Ugly Bodies: The Radical Visibility of Queercrip Fashion
Erin J. Rand
365
viii
Contents
44 Dear Queer Memoir Writers …
Jonathan J. Rylander
375
45 Queer Rhetorics as Intervention Methods: The Curious Case of
Conversion Violence
Travis Webster
SECTION VI
382
Speculations
391
46 The Fabulous Rhetorics of Queer Inhumanity: Speculating with Queer
Inhuman Figures to Restory Queerphobic Histories
James Joshua Coleman
393
47 The Queer Babadook: Circulation of Queer Affects
Michael J. Faris
403
48 Rhetorics of Gay Future and Queer Futurity: Strategies of Disruption
Dustin Bradley Goltz
413
49 (Queer) Optimism Ain’t (Im)Possible
Gavin P. Johnson
421
50 Between Queer and Digital: Toward an Understanding of the Rhetoric
of Digital Queerdom
Trent M. Kays
430
51 Queering the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine: Bodies, Embodiment,
and the Future
Katie Manthey, Maria Novotny, and Matthew B. Cox
438
52 Cuir-​ing Queer: Speculations on Latin American Notions of Queerness
Alejandra Márquez
446
53 Queer Hauntings, Queer Renewings
Aneil Rallin
454
54 Pathological Desire, Perverse Erotics, and Paraphiliac Entelechies
J. Logan Smilges
463
Index
472
ix
FIGURES
9.1
16.1
17.1
18.1
23.1
43.1
43.2
43.3
43.4
46.1
47.1
47.2
47.3
IHP Co-​Production Model
*According to Barad: “Quantum signifies the ‘smallest possible, and
therefore indivisible, unit of a given quantity or quantifiable phenomenon’
[…] a measure of the discreteness of nature” (“Quantum Entanglements” 246)
Gavin Arthur’s “Circle of Sex” schema, as published in the 1962 and 1966
editions of The Circle of Sex (Arthur, Pamphlet). While the diagram may
invoke Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle” for some readers, there is little
relationship between the two. Rubin’s schema describes how sexual
behavior is legitimized while Arthur’s describes sexual types; there is no
intended hierarchy in Arthur’s circle
Laura Aguilar (1959–2018) American Grounded #106, 2006–2007
Inkjet print 22 x 17 inches the Laura Aguilar Trust
Cultural assumptions, characteristics, and values
Unisex panties on left (Models: Ayy Scott and El Taino Annerys. Photo by
Grace DuVal.)
Mermaid tail with seams on the outside and plastic clips for accessibility
(Model: Jay Micah. Photo by Christopher Sonny Martinez.)
Stretch marks as ornamentation (Model: C’est Kevvie. Photo by Colectivo
Multipolar.)
Sky Cubacub reading the Radical Visibility zine while wearing a scalemaille
headpiece. Scalemaille is a type of chainmaille made with flat overlapping
metal plates (Photo by Colectivo Multipolar.)
Coyote’s identity restory
DJ Mikey Pop’s Instagram photo placing the Babadook on RuPaul’s Drag
Race (@djmikeypop)
A popular meme of the Babadook that remixed him with gay iconography,
posted on Tumblr by muffinpines
Users on social media placed the Babadook into queer sites, like creating a
Grindr profile for him, posted on Tumblr by theshitneyspears
x
74
132
141
151
194
368
369
370
373
397
406
407
408
CONTRIBUTORS
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The
author, co-​author, or co-​editor of twenty-​one books, Alexander writes frequently about queer culture and conducts research in the areas of life writing, lifespan writing, and the rhetorics of popular
culture. His most recent work has been in creative nonfiction, consisting of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an
Apology (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award), Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot, Bullied: The Story
of an Abuse, and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir.
Ahmet Atay (PhD Southern Illinois University Carbondale) is associate professor of communication at the College of Wooster. His research focuses on diasporic experiences and cultural identity
formations; political and social complexities of city life, such as immigrant and queer experiences;
the usage of new media technologies in different settings; and the notion of home; representation of
gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in media; queer and immigrant experiences in cyberspace, and critical communication pedagogies. He is the author of Globalization’s Impact on Identity Formation: Queer
Diasporic Males in Cyberspace (2015) and the co-​editor of several books. His scholarship appeared in a
number of journals and edited books.
Murat Aydemir is associate professor in literary and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands. He is the author of Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), and the (co)editor of Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial
Theory (2015) and Migratory Settings (2015), both included in the “Thamyris/​Intersecting: Place, Sex,
and Race” series at Brill Publishing.
Ian Barnard (they/​them/​their) is professor of rhetoric and composition, and director of LGBTQ
studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. Ian previously taught for ten years at California
State University, Northridge, where they served as chair of the university writing council. Ian is the
author of three books, including Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions (University of Alabama Press
2020), winner of the 2021 Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship
from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Zachary C. Beare is assistant professor of English, the associate director of first-​year writing, and a
core faculty member of the communication, rhetoric, and digital media program at North Carolina
State University. His research and teaching focus on composition pedagogy, queer and feminist
rhetorics, affect and emotion, and digital culture. He is especially interested in how identity and
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List of Contributors
emotion mediate rhetorical activity. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication,
College English, Composition Studies, Writing on the Edge, Reflections, the Journal of Cultural Research, and
in various edited collections.
Clare Bermingham is director of the Writing and Communication Centre at the University of
Waterloo. Her research interests include writing studies and writing centers, discourse and rhetoric,
queer and gender studies, affect theory, and early queer American print culture and literature.
Jean Bessette is an associate professor at the University of Vermont. Her research and teaching in
rhetoric and composition draw on gender, sexuality, and women’s studies; archival and historiographic theory; and digital and multimedia studies. She is the author of Retroactivism in the Lesbian
Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures (SIU Press 2018), which examines how American lesbian
collectives have composed and leveraged archives in a variety of media to define and contest identity. She has also published essays on queer rhetoric, queer and feminist historiography, and multimodal pedagogies in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College Composition and Communication,
and Computers and Composition, as well as several edited collections. Her work has received the
CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, the Winifred Bryan Horner
Outstanding Book Award, and the Rhetoric Society of America Outstanding Dissertation Award,
among others.
Daniel C. Brouwer was associate professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication
at Arizona State University. A lifelong activist, Dr. Brouwer was committed to cultural transformation
that began with the ways he related with students, advisees, friends, and family in queer terms. Thank
you, Dan. We love you and miss you.
KJ Cerankowski is assistant professor of comparative American studies and gender, sexuality, and
feminist studies at Oberlin College. He is the co-​editor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives
and author of Suture:Trauma and Trans Becoming.
James Joshua Coleman (Josh) (he/​they) is assistant professor of English education in the Department
of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University. His research interests focus on
intersectional representations of queer and trans history in young adult literature as well as that
literature’s impact on queer and trans educators’ pedagogical practices. He is published in Written
Communication, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in Diversity in Youth Literature, and more. He can
be reached via email at james.coleman@sjsu.edu or online @josheducating (Twitter).
Matthew B. Cox (he/​
him/​
his) is associate professor of English and director of graduate
studies in English at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. His work focuses
on queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, and professional and technical communication through
queer rhetorical lenses. He also worked for many years in editing and documentation in technical and digital industries. His research has been featured in the Journal of Technical Writing and
Communication, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, Computers and Composition, and in
numerous edited collections.
Abbie Levesque DeCamp is a PhD candidate in English at Northeastern University. Her dissertation explores how LGBTQ+​memes function as queer community literacy practices. Her research
interests span community literacy, rhetorical genre studies, visual culture and rhetoric, queer and feminist theory, computers and composition, and media studies. Her article in Computers and Composition,
“XM<LGBT/​>: A Schema for Encoding Queer Identities in Qualitative Research,” explores the
possibilities of queer digital methods in rhetoric and composition research. She teaches first-​year
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List of Contributors
writing, advanced writing in the technical professions, reading and writing in the digital age, and
social media writing.
Marco Dehnert (MA, Arizona State University) is a doctoral student in the Hugh Downs School of
Human Communication at Arizona State University. His research interests focus on critical/​cultural
approaches to communication and rhetorical studies. With a broad focus on how one recognizes and
disavows the Other, his work is situated at the intersections of critical and intersectional rhetorics,
queer and transgender communication studies, qualitative inquiry, and human-​machine communication. His pronouns are he/​him/​his.
Elise Dixon (she/​her/​hers) is assistant professor in the English, Theatre, and Foreign Languages
Department and director of the writing center at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Her
teaching and research focus on queer, cultural, and multimodal rhetorics as well as writing center
studies. Much of her work is focused on how marginalized communities and organizations empower
themselves through collaborative writing and making. Her scholarship has appeared in The Writing
Lab Newsletter, The Peer Review Journal, The Journal of Veterans Studies, and in multiple book chapters.
Thomas R. Dunn is associate professor of communication studies and Monfort Professor at
Colorado State University where he teaches and studies the intersections of LGBTQ+​culture, politics, and rhetorics with a focus on public memory. His numerous articles and award-​winning first
book, Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past, explore how LGBTQ+​people
use their shared pasts to effect political, social, and cultural change in the present. He is currently at
work on a new book on US public memories of homosexuals persecuted by the Third Reich. He is
also the founder of the Queer Memory Project of Northern Colorado, a community and educational
project that teaches undergraduate students how to recover local LGBTQ+​memories and how to
share those memories with public audiences in engaging ways.
Allen Durgin is a course director of readings in gender and sexuality at Columbia University.
His most recent article, “Wallace Stevens, Audre Lorde and the Queer Performativity of the Essay,”
appeared in the edited volume The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form, and his lyric essay
“Baby with the Bathwater: The Queer Performativity of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick” appeared in the
twenty-​fifth anniversary issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Shinsuke Eguchi (PhD, Howard University) is an associate professor in the Department of
Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. Their research interests focus on
global and transcultural studies, queer of color critique, intersectionality and racialized gender politics,
Asian/​American studies, and performance studies. Their recent solo-​authored and co-​authored work
will appear or has appeared for publication in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication,
Review of Communication, Western Journal of Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, and
Journal of Homosexuality. They are co-​editor with Satoshi Toyosaki of Intercultural Communication in
Japan (Routledge 2017), co-​editor with Bernadette Marie Calafell of Queer Intercultural Communication
(Rowman & Littlefield 2020), and co-​editor with Bernadette Marie Calafell and Shadee Abdi of De-​
Whitening Intersectionality (Lexington 2020). They are also book review editor of QED: A Journal in
GLBTQ Worldmaking.
Michael J. Faris is an associate professor in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech
University. He has published on digital rhetorics and literacies, queer theory, and writing program
administration in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Composition Forum, Kairos: A
Journal of Rhetoric,Technology, and Pedagogy, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Peitho, and other journals
in the field.
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List of Contributors
Wilfredo Flores (he/​him/​his) is a queer Mexican American foster care alum who grew up on the
Southside of San Antonio, TX. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and
American Cultures at Michigan State University. For the last four years, he has worked with/​for
Latinx, Indigenous, and/​or queer and trans folks in the mid-​Michigan area as a community organizer
and activist in multiple collectives and coalition projects. His research centers queer and trans communities of color, and his projects constellate science, technology, and medicine studies. In his work,
he contends with the wicked, rhetorical power of settler colonialism to imagine and to create better
worlds and tomorrows.
Cory Geraths is assistant professor of communication at Eureka College. His research uncovers
connections between ancient rhetorical theory and contemporary popular culture, with a particular focus
on gender and sexuality, music, and religion. Cory’s scholarship has appeared in Critical Studies in Media
Communication, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Communication Teacher, Advances in the History of Rhetoric,
Rhetoric Review, EIDOLON, as well as in multiple edited collections, including A New Handbook of
Rhetoric: Inverting the Classical Vocabulary and Rhetoric of the Protestant Sermon in America: Pulpit Discourse at the
Turn of the Millennium. As a teacher, Cory has offered a variety of courses, including classes on digital rhetoric, media and the body, gender and communication, and classical rhetoric.
Tyler Gillespie is the author of The Thing About Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University
Press of Florida 2021) and Florida Man: Poems (Red Flag Poetry, 2018). He teaches in the Writing and
Rhetoric Department at the University of Mississippi.
Hillery Glasby (PhD, Ohio University) is assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric,
and American Cultures and a faculty fellow for the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan
State University. Her co-​edited collection Queer Storytelling in Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the
Unspeakable Other was published in 2020 (West Virginia University Press). Her research, teaching,
and scholarship focus on queer rhetorics and literacies, queer Appalachia, sexual literacies, and DIY/​
craft and digital rhetorics.You can usually find this Virgo jamming to SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead, 40s
Junction, or Yacht Rock channels.
Dustin Bradley Goltz is professor of performance studies in the College of Communication at
DePaul University. He is the author of Comic Performativities: Identity, Internet Outrage and the Aesthetics
of Communication (Routledge 2017), Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation (Routledge 2009),
and the co-​author and editor of Queer Praxis: Questions for LGBTQ Worldmaking (Peter Lang 2015).
Recent essays have been published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Homosexuality,
Text & Performance Quarterly, QED, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Journal of International and Intercultural
Communication. He teaches courses on performance theory, queer theory, identity, and media
representation.
Cree Gordon is a Black, queer, non-​binary, HIV+​, Louisiana native who currently finds themselves
living in the Midwest. They were diagnosed with HIV in Eugene, Oregon, in 2005 when they were
a homeless youth and sex worker. Since then, Cree has been a fierce, unapologetic advocate for those
impacted by HIV, especially young people, trans*/​non-​binary folks, and Black communities. Outside
of HIV work, Cree loves cooking gumbo and eating boudin and cracklin, daydreaming while staring
at clouds, the way the Pacific Ocean makes them feel small, all things Star Trek, and the tv show Pose.
This will be their first published writing.
McKinley Green (he/​him) is assistant professor of English at George Mason University, where he
studies queer rhetorics, community-​based research, and sexual health risk communication around HIV/​
AIDS. His current research project investigates how young people living with HIV communicate about
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List of Contributors
HIV risk on social media and dating applications. McKinley works from a premise that people living with
HIV have developed complex rhetorical strategies to communicate about HIV, and that these situated
communication practices can offer models for public health institutions invested in HIV risk reduction.
Erik Gunderson is professor of classics at the University of Toronto. His research explores the
Greco-​Roman self. Questions of gender and sexuality are routinely in the foreground of this research.
He is the author of six scholarly monographs and edited The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric.
Two of his monographs are specifically dedicated to examinations of rhetorical culture. They are
Staging Masculinity:The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World and Declamation, Paternity and Roman
Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self.
Joe Edward Hatfield (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is an assistant professor in the Department
of Communication at the University of Arkansas. Hatfield is a rhetorician who integrates classical and
modern perspectives to contextualize emergent genres of public communication. Hatfield’s research
reflects an appreciation for critical media and cultural studies frameworks, as well as a general interest in
the interplay between technological change and shifting patterns of gender and sexual identity expression. Hatfield’s published scholarship has appeared in Communication, Culture & Critique, Explorations in
Media Ecology, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Text and Performance Quarterly, and several edited collections.
Ames Hawkins is a transgenre writer, educator, art activist, and professor in the English and Creative
Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. A multimodal composer who uses writing and
art to explore the interstices of alphabetic text, image, and sound, Ames theorizes the power and
pleasure of queer(ing) form. Ames is author of These are Love(d) Letters, an award-​winning, genre-​
bending visual memoir and work of literary nonfiction. Their creative-​critical scholarship appears
across a range of scholarly and literary publications—​both print and online—​such as PRE/​TEXT,
Constellations, Palaver Journal, enculturation, Computers and Composition Online, Slag Glass City, The
Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, and Water~Stone Review. Ames cohosted and coproduced the scholarly
podcast Masters of Text (mastersoftext.com).
V. Jo Hsu is assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where
they are also core faculty in the Center for Asian American Studies and affiliated with LGBTQ
studies. Their research examines how stories shape our shared worlds—​both how narratives are used
to constrain institutional access and social imagination, and also how those structurally marginalized
wield stories to critique and revise the conditions of their lives. Further information and examples of
their work can be found at www.vjohsu.com.
Adam Hubrig (they/​them; Twitter @AdamHubrig) is a multiply disabled caretaker of cats. They
live in Huntsville, Texas, where they work as an assistant professor and English education coordinator
for the English Department at Sam Houston State University. Their research and teaching explore
disability, especially at the intersection of pedagogy, queer rhetorics, community literacy, and teacher
education. Adam’s research is featured in College, Composition, and Communication, The Community
Literacy Journal, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and
Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric. Adam is currently co-​editor of the
AntiAbleist Composition blog space and an advisory board member of the Coalition for Community
Writing.
Shereen Inayatulla (she/​her/​hers) is associate professor of English and the Writing Across the
Curriculum coordinator at York College, CUNY. Her areas of research include composition/​literacy studies, autoethnography, and queer theory. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications
including the Journal of Basic Writing, Changing English, and the Journal of Lesbian Studies. She has
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List of Contributors
presented her research at national conferences and delivered workshops on writing pedagogy for
faculty at institutions across the US. She is currently working on an autoethnographic project that
celebrates the rich complexities of queer, immigrant storytelling practices.
Gavin P. Johnson, PhD (he/​him) works as an assistant professor at Christian Brothers University
in Memphis, TN, where he teaches courses in cultural rhetorics, multimodal communication,
and community-​engaged writing, and he coordinates the Certificate in Professional Writing. His
research is published or forthcoming in Composition Studies, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Computers
and Composition, Literacy in Composition Studies, College Literacy and Learning, Constellations: A
Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space, Peitho, PRE/​TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Teacher-​
Scholar-​Activist, and various edited collections. His dissertation, Queer Possibilities in Digital Media
Composing, was honored by NCTE/​CCCC with the 2021 Lavender Rhetorics Dissertation
Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship and by Computers and Composition with an Honorable
Mention for the 2020 Hugh Burns Best Dissertation Award. He is a proud first-​generation
college graduate from southeast Louisiana.
Trent M. Kays, PhD, is assistant professor and director of college composition at Augusta University
in Augusta, GA. His research focuses on digital rhetoric, queer rhetoric, critical theory, and the
Internet. His current research project focuses on how users within online communities create and
maintain trust, expertise, and authority in opposition to accepted realities. He teaches courses in first-​
year writing, professional writing, research methods, new media, and digital rhetoric.
Jason Lajoie is an early career scholar in responsible innovation, research-​creation design and equity,
and queer media theory, and is a documentary filmmaker. Jason’s research engages queer theory,
applied media theory, critical making, and digital humanities methodologies—​often in collaboration with the University of Waterloo’s Critical Media Lab—​to consider how queer identities are
constructed, shared, and negotiated through media and technology.
Vee Lawson is a PhD student in writing, rhetoric, and American cultures at Michigan State
University with interests in digital cultural rhetorics; queer, feminist, and trans rhetorics; and community building through ephemeral texts.
Lore/​tta LeMaster (PhD, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) lives, loves, and creates on
stolen land and in the traditional territories of the Akimel O’otham (Pima) and Pee-​Posh (Maricopa)
peoples. She is assistant professor of critical/​cultural communication and performance studies at
Arizona State University. Her scholarship engages the intersectional constitution of cultural difference, with particular focus on the life, art, and embodiment of queer and trans people of color. She
spends much of her time laughing and dancing in community. Her pronouns are interchangeably
she/​her/​hers and they/​them/​theirs.
Philip Longo is a continuing lecturer in the writing program at University of California, Santa
Cruz. His book project Circles of Sex: The Queer Origins of the Sexual Revolution examines the circulation of concepts of sexuality and gender identity from 1950s–​1960s American queer publications
to mass market magazines. Parts of this project appear in the book collections American Literature in
Transition, 1960–​1970 and The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture.
Katie Manthey (she/​her/​hers) is assistant professor of English and director of the writing
center at Salem College, a small women’s college in Winston Salem, NC. Her research and
teaching are focused on professional writing, cultural rhetorics, dress studies, and civic engagement. She is a body-positive activist and moderates the website Dress Profesh, which highlights
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the ways that dress codes are racist, cissexist, ageist, classist, etc. Her work has appeared in Peitho,
the journal of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition,
Jezebel, and Computers and Composition.
Alejandra Márquez is assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance and Classical
Studies at Michigan State University. She earned her PhD in romance languages and literatures from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include contemporary Latin
American literature, queer/​cuir studies in Latin America, contemporary Mexican chronicle, gendered
narratives of northern Mexico, gender identity and transgressions, depictions of state-​sponsored violence, and Latinx literature and culture. She has published articles in academic journals such as Revista
de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, Chasqui, and Latin American Literary Review. Her current book
project focuses on representations of lesbian desire in contemporary Mexican literature.
Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki is a postdoctoral research fellow working on the GlobalGRACE project
(www.globalgrace.net) housed at the African Gender Institute (AGI), and at the Centre for Theatre,
Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS), University of Cape Town, as well as at the NGO Sex
Workers Advocacy and Educational Task Force (SWEAT). She is also a lecturer on the gender studies
program at the AGI, University of Cape Town. She holds a doctorate in gender studies from Utrecht
University in the Netherlands. Her research interests are in critical race theory, gender, class, sexuality,
public health, and decolonial thought and praxis.
Keshia Mcclantoc is a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska–​Lincoln. She frequently
researches and writes on rural literacies, queer rhetorics, Internet cultures, and queer archives. She is
especially interested in queer people’s literate practices in the rural South of the USA, which she is
currently writing her dissertation on. She has previously published in Transformative Work and Cultures
and Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal.
D.T. McCormick is a PhD candidate in rhetoric at Purdue University. Their research addresses the
rhetorical dimensions of areas such as trans life, health and medicine, drugs and recovery, psychiatry,
and scientific inquiry. Methodologically, their work primarily engages in archival and historiographic
research, through which they consider questions of rhetorical theory ranging from argumentative
strategy to biopolitics to the materiality of communication. They also teach first-​year writing and
writing for medicine and healthcare.
Austin Miller (MA, Northern Arizona University) is a PhD student in the Department of
Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico focusing on critical intercultural
communication and rhetoric. After attending Florida College, a small Christian liberal arts college
in Tampa, Florida, Austin became interested in studying the intersections of queerness and evangelicalism. His work primarily examines contemporary conversion therapy movements and discourses.
Previously, Austin’s work has won top student paper and top paper at the National Communication
Association’s International and Intercultural Communication and GLBTQ Communication Studies
divisions, respectively.
Ruby K. Nancy is assistant professor of business communication in the Labovitz School of Business
and Economics at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She is a proud graduate of the rhetoric,
writing, and professional communication PhD program at East Carolina University. She also holds an
MPA with an emphasis in executive leadership development from Drake University and an MA in
English with an emphasis in writing studies from Western Illinois University. A longtime activist and
queer feminist, Ruby’s previous professional experience also includes work in journalism, in entertainment production, as a clergywoman, and as a business owner. Her research interests include dress
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and adornment rhetorics, the rhetoric of labor acknowledgments, and community writing projects
that center economic justice activism.
Maria Novotny (she/​her/​hers) is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-​
Milwaukee. Her research examines how reproductive health patients advocate for their version of
healthcare.While this work has been formally published in journals such as Reflections, Rhetoric Review,
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Peitho, Present Tense, and Technical Communication Quarterly, her scholarship is also connected to her community organization The ART of Infertility.
Timothy Oleksiak is a low-​femme assistant professor of English and the director of the professional
and new media writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is currently working
on a book-​length project on the history and approaches to student-​to-​student peer review. His works
on queer rhetorical theory and composition have appeared in Peitho, PRE/​TEXT, Pedagogy, College
Composition and Communication, and edited collections Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing
Studies and The Culture Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging? He is an enthusiastic
lover of opera, his husband, and his queer families.
Caleb Pendygraft earned his PhD at Miami University of Ohio and is currently assistant professor
of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy on Cape Cod. He is an administrator within the
writing program, teaches writing, business communications, and literature, while his research explores
the alliances between literacy, queerness, and new materialisms. Recently he has been published in
Queer Storytelling in Appalachia and has upcoming work in the Journal of Appalachian Studies, Bodies of
Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice, and Envisioning the Valleys: Appalachian Ecocriticism
and the Paradox of Place. His book project Animate Literacies: Queer Literacies in Appalachia is underway.
He is the 2021 recipient of the Appalachian Wilma Dykeman Fellowship, a proud cat dad, and loves all
things nature. Kentucky and Appalachia are home for Caleb.
Anushka Peres is assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is a multidisciplinary rhetorical scholar and photographer, invested in the environmental and social repercussions
of colonial conceptualizations of land and sites of possible intervention. She works across media and
with a range of collaborators on public queer feminist projects that seek more sustainable ways to
see and be with the environment and each other. Her work has been published in The Journal of
Multimodal Rhetorics and New American Notes Online and her photographs have been shown in galleries
globally. She is an award-​winning educator who is active in community engagement initiatives, artist/​
activist networks, and coalitional environmental projects.
Aneil Rallin is associate professor of rhetoric and composition and director of the writing program
at Soka University of America, situated on the lands of the Acjachemen peoples, and author of Dreads
and Open Mouths: Living/​Teaching/​Writing Queerly. This chapter is an excerpt from a longer work-​in-​
progress titled Against Queer Joy.
Mari E. Ramler is assistant professor of English in the professional and technical communication program at Tennessee Tech University where she teaches courses on the rhetoric of science,
technical communication, and writing digital bodies. She has written about queer usability for
Technical Communication Quarterly and about guilty breasts for Capacious, Constellations, Screen
Bodies, and Textshop Experiments. Currently, she’s writing about climate grief and sacred rhetoric,
“God’s Body Is Dying.”
Ruth Ramsden-​Karelse is currently completing her PhD in the English faculty at the University
of Oxford, where she holds the inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Studentship in association with
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Merton College, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Stuart Hall
Foundation. Her doctoral research centers on the worldmaking work of self-​described gays and
girls from communities formerly classified “Coloured” in Cape Town, South Africa from 1950
to the present, with a focus on the Kewpie Collection. Ruth is founder and co-​convenor of
the Oxford Queer Studies Network and a research associate at the University of Manchester’s
Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), where she works on practices of grief and survival in
racially minoritized queer and trans communities living in the UK. Her writing has appeared in
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Erin J. Rand is associate professor in communication and rhetorical studies and affiliated with
LGBTQ studies at Syracuse University. Her scholarship examines rhetorics of gender and sexuality in
public discourse, focusing particularly on queer and feminist modes of agency, dissent, and social protest. She is the author of Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance and is published
in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/​
Cultural Studies, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and Women’s Studies in Communication. Her
current book project investigates how rhetorical figurations of childhood are racialized, gendered, and
sexualized across contemporary controversies involving youth sexuality.
Liam Randall is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–​Madison. Their research
interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, science and technology studies,
education policy, queer theory, and carceral studies. Their work often focuses on the racializing production and impact of rhetorical modalities of surveillance and control in technology and policy on
people with disabilities and trans people.
K.J. Rawson is associate professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern
University. He is also the founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-​winning
online repository of trans-​related historical materials, and he is the co-​chair of the editorial board of the
Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary. His work is at the intersections of rhetoric, the digital humanities, and queer, trans, and feminist studies. Focusing on archives as key sites of cultural power, Rawson is interested in the rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections in
both brick-​and-​mortar and digital spaces. He has co-​edited special issues of Peitho and Transgender Studies
Quarterly and he co-​edited Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Rawson’s
scholarship has also appeared in a number of journals and edited collections.
Jacqueline Rhodes is the Kelleher Centennial Professor of rhetoric and composition at the
University of Texas at Austin. Her work on queer and feminist rhetorics has been published in
journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, PRE/​TEXT, and Rhetoric Review. Her co-​authored and co-​edited books have won a
number of awards, including the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and the 2015 Computers
& Composition Distinguished Book Award (for On Multimodality); the 2016 CCCC Lavender
Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship (for Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the
Self); and the same award in 2017 for Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics. Her award-​winning
documentary feature Once a Fury (Morrigan House, 2020), which profiles the members of a 1970s
lesbian separatist collective, is currently streaming on tellofilms.com.
Josie Rush is a visiting instructor of composition at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, where
she enjoys working with students to embrace their creativity and write with confidence and care.
Her research interests include queer theory, pedagogy, women’s writing, and the interplay of identity
and technology. When she is not teaching or writing, she enjoys spending time with her wife and
their pets.
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Jonathan J. Rylander is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-​Eau Claire,
where he teaches writing and rhetoric courses and directs the Center for Writing Excellence. His
scholarly work has appeared in College Composition and Communication and the collection Sexual
Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics. His creative work has appeared in Miracle Monocle, Ligeia Magazine,
and Thimble Literary Magazine.
Fernando Sánchez is associate professor of English in professional writing at the University of
St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, where he coordinates the academic development program. He has
taught various courses in professional writing, spatial rhetorics, and race, gender, and technology.
He has published articles most recently in journals such as Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Technical
Communication Quarterly, Technical Communication, Computers and Composition, and the Journal of
Technical Writing and Communication, as well as in various edited collections.
J. Logan Smilges is assistant professor of language, culture, and gender studies at Texas Woman’s
University. Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, their scholarship and
teaching lie at the nexus of disability studies, trans studies, queer studies, and rhetoric.Their first book,
Queer Silence: Disability, Pathology, and the Rhetoricity of Absence, is forthcoming from the University
of Minnesota Press, and their other writing can be found in Disability Studies Quarterly, College
Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and elsewhere. Currently, Smilges serves as the co-​
chair for the Disability Studies Standing Group at the Conference on College Composition and
Communication.
David L. Wallace is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the California State University, Long
Beach. He is author of Compelled to Write: Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice and co-​author of
Mutuality: Alternative Pedagogy in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom. In addition, he has published
two dozen articles and book chapters on rhetoric and composition, queer rhetorical theory, and
Harry Potter. When freed from his duties as a dean, he plays beach volleyball, bakes luscious desserts,
reads mystery novels, and swims the occasional mile.
Travis Webster is assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at Virginia Tech University. He is the author of
Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace (Utah State University Press 2021).
His recent research also appears in College Composition and Communication, Writing Center Journal, WPA:Writing
Program Administration, and The Peer Review. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, queer studies, and writing studies administration since 2006.
Olivia Wood (she/​her) is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center focusing on
rhetoric/​composition and bisexuality. She currently teaches composition at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice and Fordham University and works as a digital pedagogy fellow for the OpenLab
at the New York City College of Technology. Her academic work has appeared in the Journal of
Bisexuality, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and The Peer Review, with a forthcoming research profile on
queer memoir in LGBTQ+​Studies: An Open Textbook. Olivia is also a proud union member and a
writer and editor for Left Voice.
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1
INTRODUCTION
Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander
What is queer rhetoric? A decade ago, we might have tried to provide a somewhat definitive answer
to that question. We might have put together a bibliography of the major work being done in
the field, from that of Charles Morris on queer archives to Blake Scott on queerness and medical
rhetorics to our own work on composing queerly in digital spaces. That time is long past. The proliferation of recent work in queer rhetoric has come as a welcome and invigorating surprise, a surprise
exceeding the boundaries of straight trajectories or definitions. We write at a time in which queer
and trans critiques, interventions, analyses, and methodologies are more vibrant—​and diverse—​than
ever before.
Thus, we will queerly refuse a comprehensive survey in this introduction. And we will also queerly
refuse a definition of queer rhetoric, even if we have been so bold as to offer tentative definitions
in our own past work (together and separately). Suffice it to say that queer rhetoric now, provisionally, might mean thinking and writing about bodies, intimacies, pleasures, identities, communities,
practices, activisms, and politics in challenging and often contrary ways. That’s not to say that “queer” and
“contrary” are interchangeable. They’re not. But it is to say that queer remains for many writers a
modality of resistance (but not just negatively so). Queer is not just saying no. It is also saying yes, and
affirming and validating to different ways of being in the world, perhaps to being in the world differently. But not always and not in every way.
Confused yet? We believe that that confusion may be the most important offering of a queer
rhetoric—​that it leaves us troubled, perhaps incited, b​ ut delightfully and generatively so. Indeed, after
reading, selecting, and assembling the chapters in this collection, we ourselves are delighted, provoked,
challenged, and excited to see where queer rhetoric goes next.
That said, we can offer you an anticipatory snapshot of what’s going on in queer rhetoric right now.
To that end, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the emergence and ongoing becoming
of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. We feature rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, and sexuality. More than a “best of ” collection,
The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric features original work by contemporary scholars reflecting
on and forwarding key areas of study in queer rhetoric. More importantly, chapters attend to the
intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability, and neurodiversity. In so doing, the
book as a whole acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory owes to work by scholars
of color, feminists, and activists inside and outside the academy.
This book doesn’t contain everything; it is necessarily partial, as every such collection will be.
However, in issuing a call and putting together this volume, we have noted some telling trends, some
provocative ways that scholars look forward, some ongoing concerns, and some nice surprises.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003144809-1
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Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander
Notably, these trends include ongoing and expanding critical engagement with trans issues
and theories. Hardly monolithic, trans approaches are nonetheless revitalizing analyses of gender
as fundamental to understanding human identity, community, and politics. Related to this delicious surge of interest in trans theories is a keen concern with embodiment, with the material
stuff of intimacy, erotics, desire, and sex. Queer theoretical engagement in rhetorical studies is
willing now more than ever to consider the body, the meaty substance of what we are. A renewed
interest in bodies and sex is perhaps also related to the emergence of attention to rhetorics
of bisexuality, a delightful and much needed turn in queer rhetoric that parallels increasing
representation of bisexuality and bi-​eroticism in the larger public consciousness, at least in the
Western world. Even further, attention to bodies and embodiment may be closely connected to
consideration of the “material turn” and the new materialism; bodies are never just with bodies
when desiring but also always already with a range of material actors and actants. The expanded
field of rhetorical inquiry to include material and ambient rhetorics now includes scholars who
are particularly interested in the queer dimensions of such intra-​action between the human and
the nonhuman. Often closely tied to this interest in materiality is the ongoing interest in affects,
an interest that has moved from the fetish for failure and shame in the early part of the twenty-​
first century to more utopian and hopeful forms of feeling, even as the extent of the apocalyptic
Anthropocene continues to reveal its horrors. Finally, joining this list of nice surprises is the
ongoing and ever more sophisticated engagement with archives, including an interest in historical particularity and the development and analysis of specific case studies of queer rhetorical
practice. We think of this last turn, particularly as it engages an increasingly diverse set of queer
and trans rhetors, as taking seriously the challenging alternatives to living and worldbuilding
enacted by subjects making lives outside of or in active opposition to the consumerist and capitalist ideologies of the modern era.
To help navigate this work, we have divided the handbook into six sections: Histories,
Re-​
H istories, Archives; Methodologies; Communities; Identities; Provocations and
Interventions; and Speculations. To start, Histories, Re-​H istories, Archives explores the
importance of historical and archival investigation into the complex representation of queer
rhetorical practices in a variety of historical contexts; our authors pay particular attention
to the use of history in the development of queer rhetorical strategies. In Methodologies,
contributors ask: how does one do queer rhetoric—​a nd then, at the same time, how does one
do the study of queer rhetoric? Chapters in this section forward a range of methodologies
available for the study of queer rhetorical practices. Next, in Communities, contributors
consider how queer rhetorical practices are often used to create, question, bolster, and
disrupt a variety of communities. Our authors examine how queer rhetors in aggregate
participate broadly in acts of worldbuilding, in counterpublics, and in interventions in
larger publics. Drilling down further, the following section, Identities, contains chapters
that demonstrate how identity, however vexed and vexing, remains a powerful modality
through which queer rhetors establish and explore ethos. In this section, authors investigate
and complicate the relationships among and between queer/​trans identity and rhetorical
practices. Next, in Provocations and Interventions, our contributors ask how queer rhetorical practices might inform worlds within and beyond the academy. Chapters included
here draw on and explore the varied and creative work of queer activists as queer rhetors.
Finally, in our concluding section, Speculations, our authors think through how queer
rhetorical practices often robustly intersect other domains and articulations of identity,
community, praxis, materiality, and imagination. This section explores such intersections
as well as work that uses queerness generatively to speculate on what queerness might be
and become.
Any such division of chapters will seem at times arbitrary, and authors who are engaging issues of
community are just as often speculating and exploring new methodologies. We have placed chapters
2
Introduction
in terms of our (and their authors’) perception of emphasis, and no placement is meant to suggest separateness from other sections of the book. Indeed, while we might (and will) argue that work in any
one of these categories can also do the work of other categories, our division helps us trace multiple
trajectories of rhetorical scholarship, from initial concerns with making visible the presence of queer
rhetorical practice to explorations of queer and trans modes of rhetorical theorizing and critique, and,
most recently, toward queer rhetorical speculation. Additionally, throughout this varied body of work,
our authors attend to how our historical understanding of queer rhetorical practice is being revised
constantly through new theories of historiography. They also explore how multiple political registers
necessarily underscore any work on queer rhetoric. We invite you to dip in and out of sections and
see how much of this work overlaps—​delightfully so.
As we conclude working on this collection, we are acutely aware of some of our limitations.While
we value the diverse range of our authors, particularly in terms of the varied embodied experiences
they bring as queer, trans, queer of color, trans of color folk, we regret the relative paucity of work
specifically from Black scholars. Many folks we approached were simply too busy to contribute—​
itself an indication of how often such scholars are tapped to represent Black and queer concerns.This
remains a structural condition of an academy that has yet to foster, nurture, and support a range of
scholars, particularly Black queer scholars. Also underrepresented is more work on queer migration
issues, and we regret, for instance, the inability to include work by scholars such as Karma Chávez
(read her work!).
At the same time, these limitations indicate an emerging issue, or at least an emerging
question: does queer rhetoric meet the theoretical and political, not to mention personal, needs
of current scholars of color, particularly Black scholars? Jack Halberstam, one of our most
brilliant queer and trans theorists—​in a recent interview with Jonathan—​notes their own turn
to “post-​queer” thinking and the embrace of terms and concepts from Black studies, such as
“abolition, waywardness, wildness, undercommons”—​terms and concepts that do not elide the
queer but do not center it, that allow for more intersectional and cross-​sectional work on identity,
community, culture, politics, and worldbuilding.1 It may be the case that many of the authors
presented here will also follow suit, turning to paradigms, theoretical constructs, methodological
engagements, and other ways of doing work in queer rhetorical studies that put queerness and
trans into even deeper conversations with issues of race, ethnicity, ability, class, nationality, and
age—​a move that we can only anticipate with pleasure. What an irony if this handbook is both
the first and the last of its kind; future work might make a “handbook of queer rhetoric” seem,
well, retro, or at least insufficient to the lived complexity of being human in a world of many
fellow human and nonhuman entities.
Finally, one of the great pleasures of working on The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric has
been the ongoing delight of collaboration, the sparking of challenging thoughts and feelings, not only
between us as editors, but with our many brilliant contributors. We thank our authors for provoking
us to think harder, deeper, and more pleasurably than ever before. They remind us of the kind of joy
that Audre Lorde describes in “The Uses of the Erotic,” a text that has guided our lives and careers
and the construction of this volume. Lorde writes:
[An] important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless
underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into
response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens
to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a
poem, examining an idea. (p. 89)
Lorde’s turn to the erotic and its uses is not just in service of living life on one’s own terms. It is also
turning outward and opening oneself to the experience of joy across multiple spheres, domains, and
ecologies. Bodies, music, dancing, bookcases, writing, and ideas—​we invite you to dance with the
3
Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander
bodies that have brought their rhetorical music, writing, and ideas to you through us. What could
enable, enact, and sustain a queer rhetoric more than that?
Note
1 For more on Halberstam’s work in this area, see their Wild Things:The Disorder of Desire (Duke UP, 2020).
Works Cited
Halberstam, J. Jack. “Writing Sex: Jack Halberstam.” Interview by Jonathan Alexander. Los Angeles Review of Books,
4 June 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/writing-sex-jack-halberstam. Accessed 8 Feb. 2022..
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007,
pp. 53–​59.
4
SECTION I
Histories, Re-​Histories, Archives
2
UNDOING HAPPINESS
WITH PLEASURE
Rhetorics of Affect in The Ladder1
Clare Bermingham
In 1956, The Ladder magazine was founded by the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), an early lesbian
group that was committed to improving the lot of the lesbian in America. The monthly publication circulated through formal and informal distribution channels2 across the United States and
was read by women in a nascent community who, otherwise, had virtually no access to writing by
and for lesbians.3 Initially intended as a newsletter for the DOB, it contained social and political
commentary and reportage, as well as short fiction and poetry. The DOB, composed primarily of
white, professional, middle-​class women, engaged directly with dominant discourses of disease,
mental illness, and criminality that constructed lesbians as sick and deviant. They committed to
making societal change through education, research, and legislation,4 and through The Ladder, they
advocated for lesbians to accept themselves and “adjust” to society by dressing and acting according
to gender and class norms of the 1950s and 1960s. In context, this was a radical rhetorical strategy
that grew from the “material and rhetorical needs” of their emerging community (Alexander
and Rhodes “A Theoretical,” para. 4), and it was pragmatic more than ideological. However, it
narrowed possibilities for an acceptable lesbian performativity that was often inaccessible to certain
classed, racialized, and gendered bodies. In conversation with the DOB, writers and readers regularly debated and negotiated constructions of lesbian identity and strategies for acceptance and fair
treatment. As a result, complicated and contradictory rhetorical currents ran through the textual
public constituted through The Ladder, and resistances to normative pressures emerged in a variety
of forms. This chapter traces rhetorics of affect that inserted feelings of lesbian desire and pleasure
into a politics of respectability.
As early as its second issue, readers actively participated in The Ladder by writing letters, opinion
pieces, reviews, fiction, and poetry that shared questions, issues, and challenges back to writers and
other readers. This level of discursive engagement, like in other contemporary gay magazines such
as The Mattachine Review and ONE Magazine, was unique, demonstrating that early gay readers were
active discursive participants in constructions of and discussions about homosexuality during this
period (D’Emilio 113–​4). Existing research about the rhetorical and discursive work of The Ladder
focuses on the DOB’s integrationist approach and how it was enacted through the magazine’s social
commentary and political reportage. Vigiletti discusses how normative discursive strategies pushed
against constructions of deviance and aligned with the larger normative pressures of the period,
while Cutler argues that the claims-​making rhetorical moves available to the DOB, due to their social
position as women and homosexuals, restricted them to normative framings. Other research traces
DOI: 10.4324/9781003144809-3
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Clare Bermingham
the magazine’s reliance on mythological and historical associations with Sappho and the fictional
figure of Bilitis to support discourses of femininity, culture, and white middle-​class values (Valentine).
Readers engaged with these discourses of normativity and assimilation, as D’Emilio and Soares note,
and many, including its own members, actively resisted and disagreed with the dominant approach of
the DOB. Research to date, however, has not discussed the role of the fiction published in the magazine. Fiction participated in the discursive circulations constructing and negotiating lesbian identity,
relationship, and community, and this examination of how short stories in The Ladder intervened in
the “homonormative” (Duggan) rhetorical strategies of the DOB reveals how affect produces other
modes of queer knowledge for queer relations. Specifically, the rhetorical function of pleasure, which
was generated in reader-​submitted fiction and letters, resists the normalizing rhetoric of happiness.
It engages readers’ experiences of being and feeling lesbian, asserting as Grindstaff frames it, desire
against identity (156).
This essay is concerned with the period from 1956 to 1963 that Vigiletti calls the “first movement”
of The Ladder (48–​49) while it was still closely associated with the DOB.While literary contributions
to The Ladder during its final years are notable for the names of such contributors as Jane Rule, Rita
Mae Brown, Isabel Miller, and Judy Grahn, earlier stories and poems were submitted anonymously
by readers. To the degree that The Ladder circulated through lesbians in urban centers and rural
locations, its literature represents ideas and imaginings by lesbians occupying various geographic and
social positions in the United States. And readers of The Ladder demonstrated significant investment
in its short stories. In frequent discussions and debates exchanged through letters, readers opine about
stories, criticize or praise the characters and plots, discuss what are accurate portrayals of lesbians, and
argue whether stories should end on hopeful or realistic notes. Unlike lesbian pulp novels that could
be censored by the post office for having endings that were perceived as supportive of lesbianism
(Paul and Schwartz), short stories in The Ladder, because they were circulated to a private members’
list, were not censored in the same way. Fiction was seen as relatively unimportant by the DOB
editors and leaders; they were typically included based on available space and often served as filler
content for the DOB editors (Lyon interview; Grier interview).The result is that short fiction in The
Ladder is a motley mixture of genres, lengths, and points of view, from romance to family dramas, and
from science fiction to first-​person narratives.
Affective Circulations
Michael Warner’s concept of a “counterpublic” reveals the processes of becoming that were made
possible through and against such texts as The Ladder (Publics 12, 67). Counterpublics are constituted
by and through discourse as texts, and counter-​discourses address an imagined audience produced
by their texts and discourses through shared identifications and multiple positions. Always in
movement and in progress, counterpublics mediate affective relations by producing space for negotiating meanings and values attached to gender and sexuality. As a result, counterpublics make possible
new ways of doing gender and sexuality, re-​making affective elements, such as “intimate association, vocabularies of affect, styles of embodiment, erotic practices, and relations of care and pedagogy,” and they enable “new forms of gendered or sexual citizenship” (57). The affective elements
of a counterpublic echo what Raymond Williams describes as a “structure of feeling,” which binds
affect and conscious social belief together as “thought as felt and feeling as thought” (132). Feeling,
Williams argues, organizes the social “in process,” the historical moment that may or may not be
recognizable later when it fossilizes or cements into recognizable institutions and forms (132–​33).
To excavate structures of feeling requires tracing the affective workings of social change and process,
unearthing those elements that were elided as other feelings “hardened” and settled into what carried
forward as the “known,” simultaneously de-​naturalizing the reified “known.” To unearth a rhetoric
of affect means reexamining texts to explore the working of feeling that produces other possibilities
for knowing, speaking, asserting, and countering dominant discourses. Affective circulations construct
8
Undoing Happiness with Pleasure
space for (re)producing other types of knowledge and ways of knowing, which flow through public
discourses and other legitimized modes of knowledge production.
Squeezed between the strange sexual freedom of WWII (Faderman 121–​25) and the feminist
and gay liberation movements of the 1970s, and pressed up against the wall of sexual and gender
normativity (Creadick), the historical moment of The Ladder’s production was traumatic for women
who were beginning to see and experience themselves queerly. Intensities of feeling and trauma during
this era make possible a queer rhetoric of affect as feelings of being in constant and “chronic crisis”
intensify the sense of being embedded in a historical moment (Berlant, “Intuitionists” 846). During
the 1950s, lesbians navigated threats of social shame, loss of livelihood, loss of family and children,
institutionalization, and violence (Soares 31). At the same time, they negotiated textual constructions
of deviant, abnormal, sick, and sinful lesbians in medical and psychological discourses (Caprio; Henry;
Terry), and in legal, criminal, and legislative contexts (D’Emilio 28–​31; 42). As an archive, The Ladder
preserves and constructs both the knowledge and feeling of this specific moment (Cvetkovich, Archive
241). It provides a context for the rhetorical practices that responded to these traumas and which
emerged from “the specificity of queer experience and queer possibility” (Alexander and Rhodes, “A
Turn” para. 1).
“Homosexuality is Not the Dirty Word it Used to Be”
In her opening “President’s Message” from the first issue of The Ladder, Del Martin implored
readers with a powerful message to come out of hiding and to participate in this new movement.
“Homosexuality is not the dirty word it used to be,” she claims, and being associated with the DOB
and The Ladder carries little risk (6). A few issues later, after a reader suggests that those who can come
out of hiding must have little to lose, she replies:
We aren’t “bar-​hoppers,” but people with steady jobs, most of them good positions and we
all have faith that one day we will not be looked down upon if discovered, but that people
will think that we are the same as they with only the personal difference of our sexual preference. (9)
In two messages, Martin demonstrates the dual urges towards assertion and assimilation articulated
by the DOB. Notably, she rejects lesbianism’s sordid associations by citing class and economic
respectability, by defining lesbianism only by the gender of one’s sexual partner, and by creating
a relationship of sameness between the DOB and other “respectable” women as a legitimizing
strategy.
By distancing The Ladder lesbian from gay bars and the typically butch-​femme working-​class
lesbians who formed their own sub-​community within them (Kennedy and Davis), the DOB
distinguished between “types” of lesbians, citing a binary between “two classes of homosexuals –​
the well behaved and stable, and the exhibitionist and unstable” (Hales 12). The former is typically
portrayed in terms of vigor and productivity: “I’m a healthy citizen who contributes to the welfare of
the community” (A.T. 11), while the latter are framed as confused and maladjusted “mixed-​up kids
who look like men and aren’t” (G.K. 30). Lorraine Hansberry, a two-​time correspondent to The Ladder
(Lipari 220), mapped the difficult landscape that lesbians navigated by drawing parallels with Black
people’s experiences of racism during the same period. As Lisbeth Lipari summarizes, Hansberry
takes an anti-​conformist stance when she recognizes that even the most respectable appearance is no
protection against racism or homophobia (Lipari 233). At the same time, Hansberry argues for the
necessity of conforming for advancement of the lesbian cause:
I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-​
dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame. Someday,
9
Clare Bermingham
I expect, the “discreet” Lesbian will not turn her head on the streets at the sight of the
“butch” […] But for the moment, it still disturbs. It creates an impossible area for discussion
with one’s most enlightened […] heterosexual friends. (Hansberry Nemiroff 27)
When Michael Warner produces the figures of “the good gay” and “the bad queer” from a 1984 essay
by Gayle Rubin, he argues that the good gay is always haunted by the bad queer (Trouble 114). These
figures are doubled in The Ladder, where the “good lesbian” is troubled by the “bad dyke.” While
the bad dyke is associated with the dominant discursive stigmas of sexual difference, social liminality,
sexual excess, and disease, the “good lesbian” is invested with rhetorics of citizenship, domesticity,
normativity, and social alignment.
The DOB often engaged with medical and legal discourses, and research was a critical part of
their rhetorical strategy. After becoming frustrated with what they perceived as research biases, they
embarked on their own research project: “It is high time information was collected and published
covering all Lesbians, not just a few. And apparently the only way to make sure this is done is
to do it ourselves” (“A Lesbian Questionnaire” 9; emphasis in original). In 1958 and 1959, 500
surveys were sent to readers of The Ladder, and 160 were returned (“DOB Questionnaire” 4). The
results of the questionnaire are grouped into three areas. Under “Type of Group Represented”
(5), responses generalize the respondents as nearly exclusively white and financially secure with
good credit ratings. They were well-​educated, established in professional and clerical roles, and frequently members of professional and social organizations (6–​9). The second category of responses
concerned “Family Background” (9), which speaks to the influence of psychoanalytic discourse
on the survey and responds to experts who connected homosexuality to inadequate parenting and
dysfunctional childhoods (Terry 215–​17). Most respondents reported that they had had “happy”
upbringings and good family relationships. Approximately 40% of respondents’ families knew that
the respondents were lesbians, and of this number, 75% were accepting (“DOB Questionnaire” 12).
The report summarizes that “surprisingly little [of] the disturbance usually thought to be associated
with deviant personality development” was found in respondents’ answers (13). The final group
of responses was titled “Personal History” (13), and here over 90% of respondents stated that they
were exclusively or mostly homosexual, that they accepted their sexuality, and that their romantic
relationships tended to be stable (13–​26). Regarding the consumption of alcohol and drugs, socializing at gay bars, and gender identity, the report states:
The group as a whole does not conform to the stereotype with respect to heavy drinking
and continuous attendance at “gay” bars. Their sex identification lends some, but not much,
support to the stereotyped “butch” picture. [This is] a group whose members consider
themselves, on the whole, to be well-​adjusted, a large majority of whom have not had, and
do not want, psychotherapy. (26)
The survey reveals and couples together two themes: it praises social productivity and upward
movement through education, careers, and income at the same time that it celebrates positive and
stable families, homes, and romantic relationships. Together, these two themes construct a framework of value that extends from familial and economic aspirations towards a normative respectability
embraced by middle-​class America.
Happy Homonormativity
Links between the middle-​class family and capitalist American identity during this era underscore
how the normative stabilities of home and family were constructed in response to the chaotic
tensions of the Cold War (May 24). Discourses of normality permeate the script of Americanness,
establishing an ideal that is both desirable and impossible (Creadick 2). To aspire to normality is to
10
Undoing Happiness with Pleasure
be drawn towards comfort, to fall in line with social and cultural norms, to fit into and feel at ease
in the alignments of heteronormativity with other norms of gender, class, race, ability, etc. (Ahmed,
Cultural 147–49). Happiness is constructed as the good feeling generated by such alignments, by our
orientation towards the objects that bring or promise personal and social happiness (Ahmed, “Happy”
38–44). The conflation of personal and social happiness is contained in the heterosexual imperative,
in the push towards the reproduction of the heterosexual family unit, the genetic and economic
investment in the production of children to extend the family line, and the obligations that these
attachments bring (Ahmed, Promise 90–​95). Under these conditions, “homonormativity” enables the
production of happiness through certain kinds of substitutions. For example, in “My Daughter is a
Lesbian” by Doris Lyles in the July 1958 issue of The Ladder, the author both critiques and recovers
the concept of “normal” in her description of her daughter’s life:
I will be very frank in saying that I am lucky in that [my daughter] found a congenial, intelligent, loving and kind “mate” in this association of which I am aware but do not understand completely as a normal mother and wife. I do not like that word “normal” applied
here, for there are no two more normal persons alive than my daughter and her charming
associate. (4)
Lyles invokes her status as a “normal” wife and mother for credibility, while simultaneously framing the
word “normal” as problematic. Then she reinterprets the word for this era when she describes her daughter
and daughter’s partner as the most normal people alive. But this move is tempered by a heteronormative
framing of the couple. In her portrayal, her daughter is “serious” and “holds a fine position in a respected
professional field,” while her partner is “congenial, intelligent, loving and kind” as well as “charming”
(4). These respective masculine and feminine descriptors construct a kind of heterosexual relation; however, Lyles also never refers to her daughter’s partner with female pronouns nor as a woman. “Lesbian” is
foregrounded in the title, but it remains theoretical by not materializing the gender of the second woman.
In place of pronouns, masculine and feminine adjectives create a veneer of heterosexuality without the
shadow of a butch/​femme framing, a move that is reinforced by Lyles’s nod to respectable middle-​class
values: “I knew she would find someone of kindred tastes and lead a very circumspect life no matter what
path she chose, for I knew my child and understood she could not be cheap and promiscuous, whether
Lesbian or heterosexual.This thought was a great comfort” (4). Her daughter’s normativity is constructed
in Lyle’s confidence that, regardless of her choice of “mate,” her daughter’s taste and orientation are towards
discretion and prudence, which will protect her and her family from exposure and shame.
Class norms and the fulfillment of familial obligations enable the substitution of homonormativity
for heteronormativity in other contexts. For example, in Jay Wallace’s 1961 short story called “The
Yanks are Coming,” a daughter’s lesbian relationship fulfills the promise of heterosexual marriage
through the foregrounding of “happy objects” that promise good feeling (Ahmed,“Happy” 30). Set in
the context of WWI, it is story of secret lovers, Geraldine and Louise, and Geraldine’s suitor, Harwood.
As Harwood is about to leave for war, Geraldine’s mother says: “Papa and I have decided that you
should encourage [Mr. Harwood], and perhaps marry in another year or two” (9). This instruction
from parent to child exemplifies the reproduction of heterosexuality as inheritance (Halberstam 5),
and Geraldine’s response is to follow Louise to New York. When Harwood returns to Geraldine’s
house after the war, her parents describe her new life:
“Yessir, our little girl doesn’t forget the old folks; far away working on a big newspaper in
New York City, but our little girl sends home money to her old folks every single week!
Yessir!” […]
“Never misses a week, Harwood, no sir! Every single week we get a letter and money from
Geraldine; don’t we Mama?” […]
11
Clare Bermingham
“[…] She’s working for an executive you know, Mr. Harwood. She’s secretary to this big
newspaper man in New York City.” […]
“Yes, Mr. Harwood, Geraldine has a fine position now. She started in the office, then went
to some school there in the city; now she makes twenty-​five dollars a week!” […]
“Yes, Mr. Harwood, our little Geraldine is a career girl now. She shares an apartment with
her old childhood friend, Louise Anderson.” […]
“Oh, my, yes, they live together, sharing a very fine apartment in New York City; and they
have a wicker set in the parlor … that’s the very latest fashion, you know. And they own an
automobile, a Ford.” […] (Wallace 11)
In this exchange, Geraldine’s letters and money sent home show her fulfilling her obligation to the
family financially instead of familially. Her parents’ emphasis on the happy objects of class status—​her
salary, apartment, furniture, and vehicle—​compensate them for the loss of heterosexual inheritance
and reproduction promised by the ideology of the family.
Lyle’s and Wallace’s stories suggest possibilities for maintaining the lines of happy familial bonds
and social normativity while transforming heteronormative expectations into homonormative ones.
For readers, they produce feelings of comfort and reflections on their own lives, as described in a
letter from M.L. of Rhode Island:
My friend and I have lived together for less than five years, but as far as we are concerned,
it’s for life. We own our furniture and car jointly, and just signed a mortgage for a home of
our own. Well, it will be our own in 15 years! (22)
M.L.’s long-​term commitment and material signifiers of middle-​class happiness enable her to construct her relationship within a hetero/​homonormative framework and in alignment with American
family life. Such stories and anecdotes get in line with DOB’s philosophy of encouraging lesbians
to adjust to society through dress and behavior: “As long as the outward forms of propriety are
observed, the personal life of any individual should be his own” (“More Alike” 11). By encouraging
lesbians to blend in with social and cultural norms, they argue that “good lesbians” can be happily
accepted if they exercise discretion, dress right, and preserve the good feelings of others.
Pleasure and Possibility in the Cruise
Moments of disruptive pleasure produced in reader letters and in short fiction interrupt the normative urges of the DOB in The Ladder. Pleasure, as an affect, departs from happiness in its intensities and
in its temporalities.While the line of happiness sustains and extends across time and even generations,
pleasure erupts and interrupts. It shakes things up, surprises us, opens our perspective up to new
possibilities of contact and connection. If happiness keeps us in line by sustaining our attachment to
the promise of the good life (Berlant, Cruel 24), then moments of pleasure produce cracks in those
attachments. Queer pleasure disrupts and discomfits by “mak[ing] the comforts of heterosexuality less
comfortable” (Ahmed, Cultural 165). Queer pleasure is political. Inserting queer sex and queer bodies
into heteronormative spaces can claim those spaces as queer or produce new spaces and relations:
Queer pleasures put bodies into contact that have been kept apart by the scripts of compulsory heterosexuality. […] The hope of queer is that the reshaping of bodies through the
enjoyment of what or who has been barred can “impress” differently upon the surfaces of
social space, creating the possibility of social forms that are not constrained by the form of
the heterosexual couple. (Ahmed, Cultural 165)
12
Undoing Happiness with Pleasure
Queer pleasure, as the movement of queerness against and through the prescriptions and
proscriptions of heterosexuality, surfaces in many of the short stories in The Ladder amid their
urgings towards normativity. The claim of lesbian love and its existence can be an act of resistance and defiance, bringing two bodies together despite prohibitions against queer desire. In this
way, queer pleasure and happiness can exist simultaneously. Pleasure, emerging in queer textual
moments, produces ways of knowing and feeling that are outside the social and bound to it. In
many short stories in The Ladder, pleasure feels through the threats and traumas of the social.
And, while the moment opens space for pleasure through connection, there exists a simultaneous threat of collapse of that space. Pleasure registers within its historical moment (Cvetkovich,
Archive 7; Mixed 14); in The Ladder in the mid-​twentieth century, pleasure both elides and
exposes the dangers of queerness in normative America.
Roland Barthes’s discussion of textual pleasure unearths a way of thinking about affective production through text. He describes the act of reading as identification between the writer and the reader,
a space that is both social and intimate. Employing the queer term, “cruising,” he takes the writer’s
perspective:
I must seek out this reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is
then created. It is not the reader’s person that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility
of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still
be a game. (4; emphasis in original)
In framing the unpredictability of seeking and cruising, Barthes creates the possibility of connection
and loss, just as in the act of queer cruising, identification and connection may result in a sexual
encounter or in failed identification and the risk of violence. But the pleasure of the cruise is not its
outcome; instead, it is the space of possibility as it is produced and performed: Sex may be the point
of cruising for some, but cruising and having sex are different interactions. […] There are many levels
of erotic investment and fantasy that exist in the idea of the possible, the potential, and the wholly
unrealized encounter. (Turner 60–1) What matters is the sense of possibility in the silent exchange
and the potential for its success and failure. The experience of being cruised is at the center of a 1957
short story:
The eyes! Konnie shifted in her seat and looked quickly to the table.What a strange moment.
It had happened before in life. On the street; parties; in classes in school years back; the
thing of being surrounded by many people and suddenly finding another girl’s or woman’s
eyes, commanding one, holding one’s own. It was extraordinary. Pleasant, she thought. No,
not pleasant. Terrifying because of the kind of pleasure it brought. Pleasant was wrong to
describe it, but pleasure, ah!” (Jones 9; emphasis in original)
In the moment of this cruise, the character is drawn backwards to other similar moments of recognition. She binds the contradictory affects of terror and pleasure together as a feeling that is nearly
impossible to articulate except through her final “ah!” In Barthes’s formulation, textual pleasure
emerges out of contradictions in a text. He writes: “what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam,
the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss” (7).While he was not
specifically writing about queer texts, there is a tension in queer texts that marks the space between
safety and death, between possibility and impossibility. The cruise creates a possibility for recognition
and relation with another queer subject even while queer subjectivity and desire are rendered impossible and illegitimate. There is pleasure in the cruise because it presents a threat to the inviolability of
heteronormativity while it is at risk of violence and failure.
The production of queer pleasure during the 1950s and 1960s operates as a continuous assertion
of queer possibility against a heteronormative social order. The Ladder produced queer pleasure amid
13
Clare Bermingham
and against its productions of happiness, interrupting reproductive lines of normativity to insert queer
recognition and connection. While these textual interruptions are not restricted to depictions of
cruises, the trope of the cruise recurs in the magazine in a variety of ways. Public encounters between
lesbians were fraught, and the 1957 account, “Essay on a Lesbian,” describes the “exquisite pain” that
accompanied this kind of connection:
For me there is the strange feeling on entering a room full of unknown people that someone
is a friend, and suddenly a casual smile from across the room confirms that feeling and you
are welcome there. I don’t believe I would give up that kind of third eye for the little piece
of chalk and sidewalk. The exquisite pain of holding hands when you know it must be a
secret. “To kiss in a shadow” has real advantages, even merits. (B.G. 20)
Cruising encounters like this one are like cracks in heteronormative spaces.They produce momentary
possibilities for desire and pleasure accomplished through a hidden connection with another woman,
and they also suggest a way of thinking about The Ladder as a text that itself cruises and interrupts
heteronormativity.Wrapped and mailed in brown paper, The Ladder circulated like a dangerous secret
and connected readers in a counterpublic network that engaged them in its production. One letter,
sent by Niki from Minnesota, conveys the release and pleasure the magazine brought:
I, like most others, live two lives, one for the benefit of the public and the other for myself.The
majority of the so-​called “normals” will not accept us on any basis and so we live in a sort of
make believe world, a secret, exciting world, but a bit frightening too.When The Ladder comes
to my door once a month I live in that secret world for approximately 20 or 25 minutes while
I read each and every word and marvel at the work that is being done to alleviate the pain of
falseness that most of us endure just for the sake of not being called queer. (23)
As Niki describes the ordinary world she inhabits, she expresses her dual excitement and fear at being
surrounded by normality and risking being uncovered by it. Amid this contradiction, The Ladder
opens a space of encounter and visibility for Niki, a space of seeing and being seen. This is pleasure
under constraint—​despite insistences of queer impossibility, pleasure constructs moments of queer
recognition, connection, and desire.
In the early lesbian community, much queer rhetoric adapted normative categories of gender
and class to redeem the lesbian as a respectable and contributing citizen. Bessette suggests that
“[q]‌ueerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences—​not two cohesive
opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms” (155), and
this nuanced approach allows for an understanding of the DOB’s strategies as critical interventions
in dominant discourses. However, the production of queer affect through reader-​submitted fiction
and letters interrupts these normative alignments to derail happiness with moments of pleasure. Such
moments materialize the contradictory delights and dangers of being lesbian during this period, and
they make possible other ways of experiencing and performing lesbianism through encounter and
desire.
Notes
1 This chapter is adapted from my SSHRC-​funded PhD dissertation, Feeling Queer Together: Identity, Community,
and the Work of Affect in the Pre-​Stonewall Lesbian Magazine,The Ladder, University of Waterloo, 2018.
2 Gallo (41) and Soares (35) note that one copy of The Ladder could pass between several to many women,
which makes readership numbers difficult to calculate. It was available on newsstands and bookstores in major
US cities beginning in the mid-​1960s. By the early 1970s, subscriptions exceeded 3,000 (Gallo 181).
3 The Ladder was the second lesbian magazine to be produced in the US.The first was called Vice Versa and it was
produced in 1947 by Edythe Eyde under the pseudonym Lisa Ben. Eyde produced a total of nine monthly
14
Undoing Happiness with Pleasure
issues and distributed them through friends in and around Los Angeles (Gallo xxxii–​xxxiv; Faderman and
Timmons 105–​106). Readers could also access lesbian fiction in pulp novels that were authored by lesbians
during the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Beebo Brinker series by Ann Bannon and books by Ann Aldrich
(pseudonym of Marjane Meaker).
4 The DOB “Statement of Purpose” had four goals and was printed at the front of every issue of The Ladder
until the April/​May 1970 issue.
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Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian
Community. Routledge, 1993.
Lipari, Lisbeth. “The Rhetoric of Intersectionality: Lorraine Hansberry’s 1957 Letters to the Ladder.” Queering
Public Address, edited by Charles E. Morris III, U of South Carolina P, 2007, pp. 220–​248.
Lyles, Doris. “My Daughter is a Lesbian.” The Ladder, vol. 2, no.10, July 1958, pp. 4–​5. Arno Press, 1975.
Lyon, Phyllis. Personal interview. 5 September 2011.
Martin, Del. “President’s Message.” The Ladder, vol. 1, no. 1, October 1956, pp. 6–​7. Arno Press, 1975.
—​—​—​. “President’s Message.” The Ladder, vol. 1, no. 4, January 1957, pp. 8–​9. Arno Press, 1975.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 1988. Basic Books, 2008.
M.L. Letter. The Ladder, vol. 2, no. 9, June 1958, p. 22. Arno Press, 1975.
“More Alike Than Different.” The Ladder, vol. 4, no. 2, November 1959, pp. 10–​11. Arno Press, 1975.
Niki. Letter. The Ladder, vol. 4, no. 5, February 1960, pp. 23–​24. Arno Press, 1975.
Paul, James C.N., and Murray L. Schwartz. Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail. Greenwood Press, 1977.
Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Culture, Society and
Sexuality: A Reader, edited by Richard G. Parker and Peter Aggleton, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2007, pp. 150–​87.
Soares, Manuela. “The Purloined Ladder: Its Place in Lesbian History.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 34, no. 3,
1988, pp. 27–​49. Scholars Portal, doi:10.1300/​J082v34n03_​03.
Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. U of Chicago P, 1999.
Turner, Mark W. Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London. Reaktion Books, 2003.
Valentine, Jody. “Lesbians Are from Lesbos: Sappho and Identity Construction in The Ladder.” Helios, vol. 35,
no. 2, 2008, pp. 143–​69. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/​hel.0.0008.
Vigiletti, Elyse. “Normalizing the ‘Variant’ in The Ladder, America’s Second Lesbian Magazine, 1956–​
1963.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2015, pp. 47–​71. JSTOR, doi:10.5250/​fronj
womestud.36.2.0047.
Wallace, Jay. “The Yanks are Coming.” The Ladder, vol. 5, no. 9, June 1961, pp. 4–​9. Arno Press, 1975.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. MIT Press, 2002.
—​—​—​. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard UP, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977.
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3
RETROACTIVISM AND THE
INSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVE
Jean Bessette
In the 1970s and 1980s, LGBTQ+​archives surfaced across the United States from the Lesbian
Herstory Archives (LHA) in NYC to the ONE Archives in LA. Amid the vigor of gay liberation
and feminist activism, grassroots archives sought to challenge and augment the sources in institutional archives and libraries from which damaging histories were written and queer lives were
erased. They were driven by “retroactivism”: the rhetorical practice of collecting, composing, and
revising accounts of the past to foster queer community, shape identity, and combat shame, isolation, and harassment. Rooted in a distrust of institutions and their incapacity to recognize, preserve,
and showcase queerness in all its complexity and diversity, grassroots archives were situated in and
for the community they served—​and some were adamant that they be funded and managed by the
community too.
This early resistance to institutions comports with scholars’ understanding of the rhetoricity of
queer archives, a subject of increasing interest in the field over the past decade (Alexander and
Rhodes, Bessette, Morris and Rawson). As Charles Morris and K.J. Rawson maintain, queer archives
“function variously as rhetorical resources” (79) for queer worldmaking that exert pressure on dominant institutions in at least two ways. First, by asserting that “queers have been here,” archives intervene in “(hetero/​homo)normativity’s respective governance and discipline” (77) and second, they
“critique and challenge the normativizing collecting and circulating practices of other institutions”
(76). And yet, more and more, queer archives are partnering with and even originating within the
very institutions early retroactivists resisted and confronted.
Today, a browser search for queer archives indicates a notable shift from the 1970s, returning
dozens of hits for universities, public libraries, and even the state of Arizona. This essay investigates
this shift and the brackish border between queer community and institutional archives. In this
chapter, “community archives” are collections of historical materials that are gathered, organized,
and administered by the community the materials represent. “Institutional archives” refers to university and governmental archives and state and regional historical societies that operate according to
professional standards by trained archivists and are not defined by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or an
otherwise-​identified community.
While early queer community archivists engaged in the rhetorical practices of retroactivism
in the 1970s in direct contravention of the absences, biases, and austerity of institutional archives
and libraries, there were in fact parallel conversations about activism, diversity, and the archiving
of “ordinary” lives in professional archival studies. Today, debates continue in archival studies about
the role of the archivist in society. As queer archives enter and even originate in universities and
general historical societies, they change those institutions—​and are changed by them. The rhetorical processes of archivization in community archives—​the selection, description, and delivery of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003144809-4
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Jean Bessette
historical materials for their intended audiences of researchers—​can conflict with traditional archival procedures that operate within institutional collections. How do community archives queer the
institutions they enter? How are queer collections normalized or sanitized by institutional standards
for provenance, original order, and austere reading rooms? How have conceptions of “community”
versus “institutional” archives elided LGBTQ+​people who reside in both spaces? The answers to
questions like these suggest that contemporary retroactivism complicates the hardline distinctions
between community and institutional archives drawn by early queer archivists.
Shifting Alliances: From the 1970s to Today
From the perspective of some early grassroots queer archives, institutions had earned their distrust.
Joan Nestle, a founder of the LHA, found inspiration for “archival dreaming” in the streets: in the
1960s and 70s “grassroots moments of protest and creation” against racial injustice, abortion restriction, the brutality of war, and the punishment of sexual deviance (“Who Were We” 236). Government,
university, and other public and private institutions—​their elitist hierarchies and bureaucracies, their
rules and demands for decorum, their refusal to contain and showcase diverse lives—​were implicated
in these crimes and, even if they weren’t, they could constrain LHA’s response. As activists, the
LHA collective were attuned to the ethos of gay liberation; its founders had witnessed police violence against protests, raids on queer public space, and the violent suspicion of the McCarthy era.
Nestle writes with pride about LHA’s independence from institutions: about the founding collective’s
freedom from professional training as archivists or librarians, their exploits as a ragtag group of misfits
at academic conferences, and their unfettered solidarity with a “larger politic” of human rights (240).
Forty-​five years after its founding, LHA continues to refuse hierarchical structure, institutional alliance,
or government funding, supported instead by consensus governance and community donations.
Around the time of their creation in the mid-​1970s, a number of gay and lesbian community
archives emerged across the country. Some, like the West Coast Lesbian Collections (now the June
L. Mazer Archives), were inspired into existence by LHA’s example. Others emerged in a zeitgeist of
retroactivism following the Stonewall Uprising, contemporaneous civil and women’s rights activism,
and the earlier homophile movement. For example, the personal collection of homophile activist
Jim Kepner became the first holdings of the Western Gay Archives, which grew into the ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Retroactivist community archives dappled the United States,
their founders driven to preserve the ephemeral artifacts, newsletters, magazines, and personal effects
of queer people.
The goal was more than preservation though: retroactivism is defined by the motivation to cohere
identity through the composition and collection of the past, to counter dispersing discourses of individual pathology with shared history (Bessette 10). As Polly Thistlewaite, an LHA volunteer wrote,
“LHA founders saw lesbians as a people and sought to congeal a lesbian identity and community,
distinguishing lesbians both historically and culturally from straight women and gay men” (153).
Retroactivism, at least at the time, necessitated that the archives be governed by the community
their collections represented—​and shaped. The novice archivists were gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or
queer; the appraisal process was distinctly political, often with a radical openness to sexual, racial, and
class diversity in order to counter the erasure and bias in university, governmental, and other public
archives and libraries. At the time, most of these community archives were housed in the apartments
of their most fervent collectors, their materials accessed by the community in the homes of the community. There were no queer archives in university special collections or other public institutions.
Today, however, LHA is rare in the longevity of their steadfast independence from institutional
partnerships.To get a sense of how queer archives have shifted in context and alliance, I examined the
Society of American Archivists’ Lavender Legacies Guide. This list of queer archives was assembled
in 1999 by the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable based on the results of a survey of collections
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Retroactivism and the Institutional Archive
of LGBTQ+​primary materials. In 1999, the list contained 56 archives in the United States, ranging
from community archives, state and regional historical societies, religious archives, university archives,
and public libraries. By 2021, the list had grown to 135 archives across the United States. While the
list is not exhaustive, as it relies on archivists to have responded to the initial survey or identify themselves to the steering committee of university archivists, it presents an interesting picture of how
queer archives have shifted alliances and setting since their proliferation in the 1970s and 80s. Out
of 135, only 24 are independent community archives with their full focus on LGBTQ+​records and
artifacts, unallied with any major institution. The small percentage of the list made up of LGBTQ+​
-​focused community archives suggests a considerable migration of queer archives into institutions.
Thirteen archives on the list are the result of partnerships between a grassroots community archive
and a major institution. For instance, the ONE Archives is now the “ONE Archives at the USC
Libraries,” the Northeast Ohio LGBT History Archives are part of the regional Western Reserve
Historical Society, and the June L. Mazer Archives are now partnered with UCLA. Partnerships
between grassroots community archives and large institutions require considerable negotiation and
often the gradual establishment of trust. The June L. Mazer Archives partnership began as “Access
Mazer,” a limited collaboration with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women to digitize five of
Mazer’s larger collections. The success of the project led to a larger alliance with UCLA’s Special
Collections. Like most grassroots archives, the Mazer Archives had limited space and funds, but despite their growing needs for both and their trust in the Center for the Study of Women, they were
understandably wary of the larger institution: would its values and principles change over time? What
if UCLA decided to move or restrict access to the collections? After a lengthy negotiation process
and some soul-​searching by Mazer’s collective, a contractual agreement was reached wherein Mazer
retained ultimate ownership of the materials (Making Invisible Histories Visible).These negotiated, flexible custodial agreements have become common in partnerships between community and institutional archives (Stevens et al. 64), which are sometimes an existential necessity. Indeed, at least seven
independent grassroots queer archives on the Lavender Legacy Guide’s list are now defunct, likely
due to a dearth of resources.
But the largest grouping of the Lavender Legacy Guide’s listings are queer archives created at
large institutions. Out of 135 archives on the list, 91 were begun by university special collections
departments or general history museums. This represents the most significant shift from the early
queer archives, which were resolutely grassroots and often counterposed to the libraries and archives
whose “card catalogs” represented a “journey in self-​hatred for a curious ‘homosexual’” (Nestle, “Will
to Remember” 235).To put it mildly, queer archiving was not then a priority for university, state, and
regional archives.
Activism and the “Ordinary” in Archival Studies
Yet, even at the time of LHA and other early queer community archives’ founding, the division
between institutional and grassroots archivists with regard to activism and diverse appraisal of the
“ordinary” over the elite was less rigid than it may have appeared. At the same time that queer
community archives emerged in the 1970s to rescue and preserve the history of lesbian and
gay subjects, the archival profession was also engaged in some debate about their role in a more
just, diverse, and democratic society. In 1970, historian Howard Zinn “shocked and offended”
the Society of American Archivists with his polemic that archivists’ claim to apolitical neutrality was a myth (Quinn 11). He challenged the profession to recognize how prioritizing the
wealthy and powerful over the “impotent and obscure,” and the elite individual over collective
movements and ordinary people, was itself a political act counterposed with a just, open society.
Describing the status quo as “archival biases,” Zinn accused archivists of an insidious passivity.
While Zinn’s appeal did not immediately overturn the values of the profession, it was influential. Four years later, F. Gerald Ham, then-​president of the Society of American Archivists, gave
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Jean Bessette
an address challenging archivists to shift from a passive “custodial tradition” of protecting their
institution to an active approach to filling gaps in the historical record in order to better “mirror”
society, to help “people understand the world they live in” (Ham 13).
In Zinn and Ham’s appeals we can see a number of shared values with contemporaneous queer
community archives. Zinn urged archivists to “take the trouble to compile a whole new world of
documentary material about the lives, desires, needs of ordinary people” (25). His appeal echoes the
ethos of the LHA, which actively sought documentation of the lives of “ordinary” lesbians. Nestle
recalls the “incredulity” of visitors to LHA who would implore, surely “you don’t mean my work,
my poems, my letters, my photograph?” In response, Nestle would provide assurance: “Yes, yes, you
are the lesbian for whom the archives exists, to tell and share your story” (“Will to Remember”
233). Like LHA, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco was from the beginning focused on
“documenting not just the most powerful and visible people within queer communities, but the
ordinary and underrepresented as well” (Wakimoto et al. 303). A foundational value of these early
queer archives was to upend notions that the records of the elite, even the elite within LGBTQ+​
communities, were the only artifacts worth saving. Though they never mention sexuality, gender, or
queerness in their addresses (and this is a significant omission), Zinn and Ham were advocating for a
similar ethics of active, diverse collection.
In a small sense, these coeval challenges to institutional archival values soften the distinction
between community and institutional archives. And, today, like community archivists, archivists
within large institutions generally “accept as a core responsibility building collections to ensure
that all voices in society are represented,” as Jennifer King, a special collections archivist at George
Washington University libraries, maintains (190). Describing GWU Special Collections, King
explains that her department has a “robust and inclusive collection development policy” that
actively seeks to redress gaps and imbalances in their holdings (190). Like many archives, GWU’s
Special Collections seek in particular to diversify regional history with artifacts from the GLBTQ
community in the area. Of course, it is important to note that community archives, and their
tireless efforts to collect and preserve their own history, provided the proof that gaps and imbalances
existed in the first place.
But contemporary acceptance of comprehensive, diverse, active collecting has not settled the
debate about the activist role of the archivist in society. Indeed, the debate rages on in archival
studies. In 2002, Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook edited an influential special issue of Archival
Science in which they admonished the archival profession for its ongoing refusal to reckon with
archives’ complicity in the perpetuation of power and the “central professional myth of the past
century that the archivist is (or should strive to be) an objective, neutral, passive (if not impotent,
then self-​restrained) keeper of truth” (5). Schwartz and Cook sought to draw together postmodern theories of the archive from the humanities (led by Foucault and Derrida) with the archival “science” of the profession. South African archivist Verne Harris went further, advocating not
only recognition of the complicity of “custodianship” in the “exercise of power” but the “moral
imperative” of archivists to work against “the replication of existing relations of power” (121).
In 2007, Randall Jimerson, an archivist at Western Washington University, explicitly named such
calls “activism,” arguing that “it is essential to seize the power of the archives and to use it to hold
institutions and governmental leaders accountable” (270).
In particular, Jimerson’s advocacy for a social-​justice-​oriented archival practice sounds a lot like
grassroots retroactivism—​though his inspiration comes from professional archivists and their scholarship. “What gives me hope,” he writes, are the recent ways archives have “redress[ed] social injustices
… document[ed] underrepresented social justice groups and foster[ed] communities” (256). His evidence? Books of essays by information science professors and archivists at university and state archives
that document and argue for such practices. The call for activism and diversification of institutional
archives is coming, as it were, from within the house.
20
Retroactivism and the Institutional Archive
However, the persistence of strong proponents of activist archiving within the profession does
not mean they represent the profession at large. For one, even archivists sympathetic to the call to
represent the diversity of society in the archives have pumped the brakes on the suggestion of a
social justice imperative. Mark Greene, for instance, argued in 2013 that “an important line exists
between documenting controversial social issues and actively participating in them. It is a line, however, considerably blurred by the archival social justice admonition” (316). Greene’s concern about
becoming a “social activist” archivist is that aligning oneself with a cause might impede acquiring
materials from opposing sides of an issue. His caution has inspired a number of published replies, as
the debate continues in the profession (Jimerson, “Archives and Social Responsibility;” Ramirez). His
hesitation points to a potentially impassable chasm between institutional archives and community
archives: identity and trust.
Identity and Trust
While the archival profession’s conception of activist archiving clearly shares values with retroactivism,
it is not the same. Retroactivism, as I have conceived it, is characterized not only by the imperative
to democratize archives to more comprehensively reflect the diversity of society but also by the
challenge to structures of power and injustice. Retroactivism manifests when rhetors collect and
compose versions of the past that not only intervene in injurious discourse about queer love and lives
but also construct and mold identity through rhetorical acts of historical production. Whose identity
is shaped when the queer archive exists as part of a larger university archive or historical society? Are
the collective rhetors—​the archivists involved in appraisal, processing, description, preservation, and
exhibition; the donors, whose artifacts and records make up the collections—​part of the community
whose identity is shaped? Is the mission of the archive to represent the institution or society or the
history of its segments? Who does a queer archive understand as its audience when the archive lives
an institution otherwise funded and defined?
The answers to these questions are also blurrier than they might seem, particularly because
individuals possess multiple professional and social identities: like scholars and laypeople, archivists
who work in university settings can identify as an LGBTQ+​subject and volunteer at community archives. For example, King writes that George Washington University Special Collections’s
archivists had volunteered for years at a DC-​based, community-​owned and -​operated queer
archive, The Rainbow History Project. Indeed, some community archives credit institutionally employed volunteers for their success. The volunteer-​run and-​funded Lavender Library,
Archives, and Cultural Exchange of Sacramento, for instance, began collecting archival materials
in 1998 but could not start processing them until 2005, when a trained archivist joined as a volunteer. Buzz Haughton, the archive’s lead cataloger told researchers that their collections “had
lain dormant because none of us had the archival background to make it real” until Ron Grantz,
a retired professional archivist, came to help (Wakimoto et al. 304). Often, the individual is what
blurs the lines between institution and community.
Yet, the question of identity at institutional archives remains open, even if individual archivists
identify with both their occupations and a sexually identified community. As Greene contends, “as a
profession, we continue to debate vigorously whether the archival mission is societal or institutional”
(314). Whom does the archivist serve? A community? All aspects of a diverse society? Or the institution that funds it? In the context of retroactivism, the question of whom an archive serves is intimately entwined with identity. In community archives, the answer can be easier: typically, the archivist
serves the community, of which they are a part. Archivists in mainstream institutions wrestle with a
vaguer, sometimes contradictory mandate, as archival scholars have shown. Several, such as Jimerson,
Harris, and Cooke argue that archivists must serve society, while others, like Greene, eschew a social
justice mandate and defer to institutions to decide their own priorities for archivists. In a letter to The
21
Jean Bessette
American Archivist, Richard Cox went further, lamenting that institutional loyalty actually precludes
a broader societal mission.
So, whom do university archives serve? Most appear to straddle dual missions of serving society
and the university, and it is not clear which mission succeeds if there is a conflict. According to
William Maher’s The Management of University and College Archives, a major aspect of a university
archives’ mission is “to appraise, collect, organize, describe, make available, and preserve records of historical, legal, fiscal, and/​or administrative value to their institution” (20, my emphasis). What constitutes
value to an institution is often what its administrators authorize. A necessary early step in managing
university archives, Maher explains, is “to draft and secure institutional approval of a document to
authorize the archives’ existence and confer the authority necessary to accomplish its mission” (20).
University missions may or may not be aligned with social justice and diversity, although they increasingly are (at least nominally).Yet, potential conflicts in mission are what underpin LHA’s continued
independence from institutions. As Nestle put it in 1979, “we would be surviving in their context,
in an ongoing world dedicated to power elitism, and survival of the patriarchal fittest” (“Notes on
Radical Archiving” 10).
Presently, active, diverse collection practices do serve the institutions who perform them. In
2011, Sonia Yaco and Beatriz Hardy surveyed archivists to find out the effects of their activism
on the institutions that employ them.Their findings were generally positive, as archivists reported
that they advanced the university’s mission and solicited good publicity and new connections.
When the institution’s mission aligns with the community’s, it appears that activism is welcomed.
Community archives, particularly those motivated by the sometimes-​violent suppression of
queerness and its history, can be understandably wary about the longevity of an institution’s
mission. Indeed, what defines a community archive most is the “active and ongoing involvement
of members of the source community documenting and making accessible their history on their
own terms” (Stevens et al. 60).
Because of these conflicts in identity—​in who serves and is served by the archive—​institutional archives must work hard to gain the trust of the LGBTQ+​communities in order to
partner with community archives and to solicit donations from individuals to build their own
queer archives within the institution. As King explains, George Washington University’s collection
policy is to actively redress gaps in its records, particularly with regard to LGBTQ+​history; its
institutional mission is presently aligned with community archives. But this alignment does not
erase impediments to trust by the community. King recognizes that “the challenges associated
with queer archiving at my institution can be grouped into issues of perception, politics, reputation, and the impact of each of these on trust” (190). As a large, old, and expansive institution,
GWU is often read by potential community donors as “the Establishment” with its own priorities. King writes about measures taken to build trust by inviting faculty members to become
representatives of the academic study and teaching of queer culture, not representatives of the
GWU “institution.” The key to queer archiving within the institution, King explains, is to emphasize the human element within the university—​to forge connections with people, not institutions,
by volunteering at queer community archives and engaging with donors and researchers. The
people are constrained by institutional mandates and values but can also exceed them, resist them,
and advocate for change.
This capacity for resistance to institutions from within institutions suggests the potential for
queer archives to queer the institutions they enter. The primary way I have seen this queering
at work is through the way queer archives expand the audience for the archives beyond the
traditionally assumed faculty and student researcher. The way queer archives seek to reach those
audiences can alter the standard ways university archives go about their work of appraising, processing, describing, and exhibiting records and artifacts. For example, at Brown University, the
director of the John Hays Library Special Collections commissioned Public Humanities graduate
students to develop a collection plan that comprehensively represented a “multiplicity of queer
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Retroactivism and the Institutional Archive
experiences, including representing more people of color, a wider range of sexual and gender
identities, greater social and economic diversity, and … [more] Trans* experiences” (Iemma
et al. 25). This brief, despite its issuance from an institutional archivist, mirrors the mission of
many queer community archives, but the fact that it was issued to Public Humanities students
demonstrates the Hays Library’s interest in expanding their audience to the community outside
the university. They explain that
as Public Humanities students, we approached this task with a unique set of ideas about
community involvement, accessibility, and engagement. Public Humanities practitioners
seek to practice meaningful and accessible modes of engagement with the humanities with,
for, and by audiences and communities. (25)
Public access is part of how institutions can build trust with donors who fear that their materials may
be buried within inhospitable storage.
At the University of North Texas (UNT), the queering of the institution manifests through specific acquisition, exhibition, and digitization practices. In 2012, UNT’s Special Collections worked
with Dallas LGBTQ communities to build an expansive collection of historical materials (Parker
and Gieringer). While some of the holdings from individuals and organizations are similar in kind
to typical special collections records (e.g., papers, photographs), the bulk of the donations were
queerer: worn clothing, buttons, sports equipment, and memorials. The care taken by queer archives
to preserve wearable, tangible objects is intentional, to “bring to life a sense of dynamic lesbian history
that itself depends on bodies” (Bessette 80).The acquisition of queer artifacts upsets business-​as-​usual
in university archives, as new strategies for processing and preservation and imagining audiences have
to be developed.
Conclusion
Retroactivism in the institutional archives remains an uncomfortable fit, relying on an ongoing
rhetorical negotiation between archivists, administrators, donors, and diverse audiences of
scholars, students, and community members. The tension between the terms of a “queer institutional” archive points to the instability of a queer archive in any setting, the difficulty in defining
any archive as “queer.” The early distinctions between community and institutional archives
were often easier to spot, simply in the homey setting. Entering the LHA feels like entering a
home because it is one: the limestone row house on the edge of Prospect Park is cluttered and
comfortable, lined with packed bookshelves, worn photographs, and plush furnishings. From
the beginning, the archive opened its doors to the lesbian-​identified community as a safe space,
holding educational and social events and welcoming non-​specialist volunteers to sort through
its holdings. Like LHA, many early queer archives began in their founders’ homes, not only out
of financial necessity but because a home is what was what LGBTQ+​people adrift in history
and often estranged from family needed.
By contrast, in many institutional archives, the research experience can feel sanitized and
constrained by what Rawson calls “environmental accessibility”: reading room policies that
affect the way a space “feels” and how a researcher is treated in it (127). Are there photographs
on the walls that look like you—​that showcase gender and racial diversity—​or do the walls celebrate elite white men, the historical leaders of the institution? Are bathrooms gender-​neutral
or are they gender-​segregated and policed? Are preferred pronouns respected? How do spaces
and archivists signal that the researcher is welcomed as a body? How do reading room policies
assume carelessness and negligence—​conveyed by limiting the researcher to a small number of
folders per day and often one at a time, with bags, pens, and most belongings locked outside an
austere reading room? And yet queer community archives can also create this sense; the GLBT
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Jean Bessette
Historical Society’s reading room policies similarly preclude these kinds of belongings. Indeed,
queer community archives are wary too of harm to fragile historical materials—​perhaps even
more so given a history of vandalism and harassment.
It may be fitting that queer community and institutional archives cannot maintain their binary distinction. The presence of queer people, queer materials, and history itself push against the constraints
of our categories.
Works Cited
Alexander, Jonathan, and Jacqueline Rhodes. “Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive.” enculturation,
Jan. 2012. http://​encult​urat​ion.net/​queer-​rheto​r ic-​and-​the-​pleasu​res-​of-​the-​arch​ive.
Bessette, Jean. Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Southern Illinois UP, 2018.
Cox, Richard. “Forum: American Archivist Cover Controversy.” The American Archivist, vol. 68, no. 1, 2005,
pp. 8–​14.
Greene, Mark. “A Critique of Social Justice as an Archival Imperative: What Is It We’re Doing That’s All That
Important?” The American Archivist, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 302–​34.
Ham, F. Gerald. “The Archival Edge.” The American Archivist, vol. 38, no. 1, 1975, pp. 5–​13.
Harris,Verne. “Jacques Derrida Meets Nelson Mandela: Archival Ethics at the Endgame.” Archival Science, vol. 11,
2011, pp. 113–​24.
Iemma, Kristen, Maddie Mott, Julia Renaud, and Nicole Sintetos. “Stakeholder Interviews and University
Collections: An Exploratory Methodology.” Journal of Archival Organization, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019,
pp. 45–​5 1.
Jimerson, Randall. “Archives and Social Responsibility: A Response to Mark Greene.” The American Archivist, vol.
76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 335–​45.
—​—​—​. “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice.” The American Archivist, vol. 70, no. 2,
2007, pp. 252–​81.
King, Jennifer. “Trust and the Activist Archivist.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol. 1, no. 2, Summer
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4
BISEXUAL INVISIBILITY, DAVID
BOWIE, AND THE PROSPECTS
OF QUEER MEMORY
Thomas R. Dunn
The state of bisexual representation in memory and commemoration worldwide is paltry at best.
Even amid an explosion of lesbian, gay, and (increasingly) transgender memorials, monuments, and
memory projects (Dunn, Queerly Remembered), efforts to remember bisexual lives remain negligible.
Indeed, in my decade of investigating queer monumentality as a white cisgender gay man, I have
encountered no explicit commemorations to bisexual individuals. Likewise, a separate inventory of
queer monuments in 2018 identified no bisexual works (Orangias et al.) and a 2018 National Park
Service study confirmed “invisible” best describes the status of bisexuals in US commemorative
culture (Hutchins 08-​01). Certainly, the word “bisexual” appears in extant queer memory projects
focused on the LGBTQ+​community generally, though the “B” is almost universally perfunctory.
And even when well-​known bisexuals are memorialized in public, their bisexuality is rendered unintelligible. For example, a monument to Freddie Mercury in Montreux, Switzerland makes no reference to his bisexuality in text or form; meanwhile Eleanor Roosevelt’s memory is simply yoked to
that of her husband at the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC. Studies of other mnemonic forms—​
textbooks, films, archives, etc.—​generally are no better at displaying bisexual historical representation.
Simply put: beyond some sparse and unsatisfying examples, rhetorically rich memories to bisexuals
are rare in the public sphere, rendering this community invisible at great cost. Remedying this invisibility in memory and elsewhere, thus, represents an important challenge to queer rhetorical practice
and scholarship.
The invisibility of bisexual people (or “bi-​invisibility”) in public memory generally and queer
memory in particular is part of a larger bisexual erasure that has operated for decades. Bi-​invisibility
is defined as “the studied omission of bisexuality in discussions of sexual orientation” (Yoshino
367), including the “tendency to omit bisexuality from history, media, and other discourses,” and
the “denial of the actual existence of bisexuality” (Stange et al. 159–​60). Recognized by activists
for decades but only studied by academics in recent years, bi-​invisibility is theorized as essential
to a pernicious heterosexual–​homosexual binary that each side affirms as part of an “epistemic
contract” to shore up their own identities, institutions, and imaginings of how sexuality functions.
In particular, bi-​invisibility is often used to stabilize notions of sexual orientation, maintain sex as
a tool of differentiation, and preserve the supposed social virtue of monogamy (Yoshino 362). In
practice, bi-​invisibility has been identified in diverse cultural texts from law, politics, education, and
popular culture, among others. While every motivation for and iterations of bi-​invisibility cannot
be unpacked here, instantiations of bi-​invisibility are vast, powerful, and profoundly problematic.
26
DOI: 10.4324/9781003144809-5
Bisexual Invisibility
Yet bi-​invisibility remains a deeply understudied subject in the academy. Within queer rhetoric
specifically, bi-​invisibility has only recently been considered at length (VanHaitsma). Considerations
of bi-​invisibility in queer memory have been noted previously, but not examined (Dunn, Queerly
Remembered; “Queer Memory”). Other productive considerations of bi-​invisibility are also taken up
in this volume, suggesting queer scholars recognize such work is needed to make queer rhetoric more
than just a subfield in the future. In this vein, I undertake this tentative investigation of bi-​invisibility
within the growing area of queer memory rhetorics, with a particular emphasis on how bi-​invisibility often constrains queer memories and how such constraints might be overcome through creative
rhetorical acts.
To that end, in this chapter, I ask how extant public memories of certain bisexual persons
might offer insights for confronting bi-​invisibility in the production of queer memory sites
and what lessons those sites might teach us about challenging bi-​invisibility in queer memory
rhetorics more generally. Specifically, I turn to a recent illuminating rhetorical artifact: Earthly
Messenger (2018) a commemorative statue to the late rock star, cultural icon, and known bisexual,
David Bowie. Erected in Market Square in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK, Earthly Messenger
is a powerful expression of queer memory focused on a bisexual icon. Designed and sculpted
by Andrew Sinclair, the statue features two prominent Bowie figures—​chief among them, the
character Ziggy Stardust, which Bowie unveiled in Market Square in 1971—​fronting a collage
of constellated Bowie faces, each representing one of the singer’s multiple roles and/​or personas.
Analyzing Bowie’s remembrance in this commemorative site, I glean key takeaways for how we
might better combat bi-​invisibility in queer rhetorics, as well as note some challenges for greater
bisexual visibility in queer memory.
Why David Bowie? This is an important question since Bowie avoided traditional politics,
was far from a representative anecdote of bisexual life, and—​as we will see—​reinforced some
potentially dangerous bisexual stereotypes. Highlighting Bowie here also furthers a pernicious whiteness already at the center of much queer memory practice and scholarship (Dunn,
“Queer Memory”). This concern is particularly notable given that Bowie’s meaningful interracial relationships and pointed instances of racial justice advocacy were also interspersed with
moments of racist flirtation and charges of racial appropriation in his music. And yet, Bowie’s
memory cannot be overlooked for other reasons. For one: Bowie was one of the most influential
public figures to claim a bisexual identity, something he did in the press after coming out first as
gay in 1972. Indeed, despite his complex coming out—​Bowie was to regret, reiterate, and embrace
the label “bisexual” throughout his career—​it is an oft-​referenced instance of bisexual visibility
that resonates still in bisexual and non-​bisexual communities alike (Zane). For another: Earthly
Messenger represents perhaps the most significant public commemoration of a bisexual person—​
even if Bowie’s bisexuality is not stated anywhere in the statue or its description. What’s more: as
we will see, this commemoration—​while far from perfect—​holds potentially valuable insights
into commemorating a bisexual figure in ways that disrupt bisexual erasure. It is also meaningful that Bowie’s androgyny makes him a less commonly represented figure in queer memory
work to date, whose subjects tend toward the masculine and homonormative. Finally: Bowie is a
resource for rhetorical invention with a built-​in audience, widespread name recognition, and an
appeal that transcends boundaries of sexuality (and gender, class, race, etc.). Said otherwise: while
Bowie may not be an “ideal” bisexual representation—​if such a thing could ever exist—​he is the
figure perhaps most well-​poised to begin erasing bi-​invisibility in our rhetorical representations
of the past.
This chapter proceeds, then, by briefly reviewing some major ways in which bi-​invisibility appears
in queer memory and history. Then, I turn to Earthly Messenger to unpack some strategies by which
bi-​invisibility in memory might be combatted. Finally, I draw some wider lessons to be learned about
bi-​visibility and the prospects for queer memory by remembering David Bowie.
27
Thomas R. Dunn
Bi-​Invisibility in History and Memory
According to bisexual advocates and activists, the erasure of bisexuals from history and memory is
significant. Indeed, a groundbreaking report by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission notes
that, almost without exception, bisexuals find themselves occupying either “an invisible place in history” or simply being “erased from history” altogether (Ulrich 5). Bisexual activist Loraine Hutchins
notes this erasure occurs even while bisexuals “have always been a part of history, visible or not” (08-​
01). Indeed, bisexual advocates, activists, and academics have spent decades bringing these memories
to light through community organizing, archiving, and memory preservation, and select publications
like Steven Angelides’s A History of Bisexuality and articles in the Journal of Bisexuality (Hutchins
08-​03; 08-​10). Yet the invisibility of the bisexual past persists, producing significant negative effects
that include limiting bisexual role models (Ulrich 5), disrespecting the memories of bisexual leaders
(Hutchins 08-​01 to 08-​02), causing distressed mental health in bisexual people (Bostwick and Dodge
80–​1), and the postponing of conversations about rethinking sexuality more broadly (Wilde). From
a rhetorical perspective, I might add that bi-​invisibility within the LGBTQ+​past also deprives
bisexuals of inventional resources for claiming the greater respect, equity, organizational representation, and bisexual-​specific resources and programming they are owed.
What contributes to bisexual erasure in history and memory? In addition to factors that explain
bi-​invisibility generally, Hutchins argues bisexual erasure occurs in this sphere for numerous reasons.
Among them: earlier sex research that conflated bisexuals with gays and lesbians (08-​06), prioritizing individuals who claimed explicit bisexual identities only (08-​07); biphobia/​censorship within
organizations (08-​09); high social costs that kept many historical bisexuals closeted (08-​09); a “now
you see me, now you don’t mentality” that includes bisexuality in name but denies bisexuality in
practice (08-​14); and the distribution of bisexual organizing within, between, and among disparate
social movements, wherein each movement separately diminishes bisexual participation (08-​16).
Hutchins also points to the vilification of bisexuals in early HIV/​AIDS discourses and the outright
denial of bisexual existence more generally as empty but effective justifications for bisexual exclusion
in public remembrances (08-​20).
From a rhetorical perspective, we might add other factors that have kept the bisexual past
from wider representation. Some are familiar issues that similarly limit representation of women
and transgender folks in the LGBTQ+​past, including under resourcing (i.e., underfunding)
the bisexual past, representational disagreements, and limited roles for bisexuals in decision-​
making bodies. The uneven commitment to the term “bisexual” as an identity marker in the
bisexual+​community also presents representational challenges that gay, lesbian, and trans folks
have tended to avoid. In addition, there are a set of monosexual norms embedded within theories and practices of commemoration that, as we will see below, limit bisexual visibility in these
kinds of works. Overcoming these and other challenges represents a significant undertaking with
important implications for bisexual lives.
Considering Earthly Messenger
In contrast to other limited commemorations to bisexuals that fail to make their subject’s bisexuality
imaginable to public audiences, in Earthly Messenger we can see several rhetorical choices made by
the artist and organizers that contest bi-​invisibility, render Bowie accessible to bisexual remembrance,
and offer insights for the wider prospects of bisexual representation in queer memory in practice and
scholarship.
The first choice is the decision to resist monosexual scripts embedded within commemorative
traditions. As mentioned earlier, both the statue and the plaques flanking Earthly Messenger remain
notably textually silent on Bowie’s sexuality. Undoubtedly, for some bisexual advocates, this silence is
a missed opportunity: how better to challenge bi-​invisibility than to mark Bowie’s sexuality in monumental form? However, given the statue’s stated purpose—​to commemorate Bowie’s career with a
28
Bisexual Invisibility
particular emphasis on his connection to Aylesbury and Ziggy Stardust—​it is unsurprising that the
plaques do not venture into Bowie’s complex history of sexual identification.
But what should not be missed amid this textual silence is that Earthly Messenger does not preclude the possibility of remembering a bisexual Bowie either. Said otherwise: the statue challenges
bi-​invisibility in that it refuses the significant cultural scripts and imperatives to identify Bowie as
either heterosexual or homosexual. Much as laws, symbols, and rituals for remembering the dead
are often infused with heteronormative scripts that seek to reterritorialize queer lives after death
(Dunn, Queerly Remembered 136–​144), these same rhetorics are inculcated with monosexual norms
that can erase bisexual lives rich in diverse desiring durations, permutations, and gendered attractions.
For example, consider the obituary genre’s scriptural obligations to name the deceased’s privileged
survivors in the text—​particularly any legally recognized spouse, regardless of the quality, length, or
exclusivity of that relationship—​thereby suffusing the deceased’s memory with monosexual markers
that make them intelligible within the hetero–​homo binary. Other commemorations do similar
work, ascribing in various symbolic forms—​proximate and adjacent internments; privileged places in
memorial services or in funeral processions; rights in death dictated by law; the ability to authorize
memorial narratives and biographies and their interpretations; even the etching of the names of
monosexually-​privileged loved ones on the dead’s grave marker or monument—​that the deceased
was monogamous, often cisgender, heterosexual or homosexual, and was consistently such throughout
their lifetime, whether true or not. It is certainly the case that memories of Bowie, who married
two women during his life and had two biological children, could be easily consigned to a hetero/​
monosexual frame by the mere mention of his family in the statue. Likewise, it is easy to imagine
in this era of queer monumentality how Bowie’s earliest identification as “gay” in the press might
find its way into the plaque’s text, despite Bowie’s renunciation of that moniker decades ago. But
Earthly Messenger refuses to place Bowie within the hetero–​homo binary despite these monosexual
imperatives, preserving the possibility of remembering Bowie otherwise.
Beyond spurning the imperative to erase Bowie’s bisexuality, Earthly Messenger also represents
Bowie in two ways—​with multiple personas and over his lifetime—​that make remembering his
bisexuality more likely than not. Specifically, by adopting in the statue certain aesthetic elements
amenable to what English and bisexual theorist Jenée Wilde calls “dimensional sexuality,” visitors to
the site are encouraged to resist bi-​erasure and recall Bowie as a figure who transcended either heterosexuality or homosexuality.
In coining the term “dimensional sexuality,” Wilde seeks to replace “our culture’s outdated
one-​dimensional map of binary sexuality with a multidimensional framework that enlarges the
human domain and breaks the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure once and for all” (322). To
do so, Wilde argues, we must chart people’s sexuality so the determining factor in assessing an
individual’s sexuality is no longer sexual-​object choice alone—​a primary tool of bi-​invisibility.
Rather, Wilde calls upon us to rethink sexuality in more complex ways that include, at minimum,
three different factors: the degree of fluidity of sexual-​object choice, the number of people one
desires, and the timeline over which one’s sexual desires are considered. When we do so, Wilde
claims we better capture people’s actual sexual desires and practices, while also avoiding tendencies toward bi-​erasure and making space for bi-​visibilities that exceed the one-​dimensional
hetero–​homo binary (328–​31).
One of the aesthetic choices that resonates with dimensional sexuality in Earthly Messenger is
depicting Bowie, not as a single, static, and essentialized person, but as a constellation of multifaceted
personas who collectively represent the person we remember as David Bowie. This is achieved in
the statue via at least fourteen different characters, roles, and faces from throughout his career—​a
choice instantly recognized by even a casual Bowie fan. Included among the menagerie of characters
in the statue are stage personas like Aladdin Sane, The Blind Prophet, and Ziggy Stardust as well as
characters from iconic feature films like Jareth from Labyrinth and Thomas Jerome Newton from The
Man Who Fell to Earth. Embracing Bowie prismatically makes great sense for remembering someone
29
Thomas R. Dunn
whose career was so multifaceted, whose life included so many reinventions, and whose audiences
span mediums, genres, and generations.
Yet the embrace of Bowie’s alter egos is also productive for those in search of his bisexual
memory. Indeed, by rejecting the impetus to place a single, definitive Bowie figure on a pedestal,
the artist allows viewers to reject any strategic essentialisms in commemorating Bowie, particularly one that might reify the homo–​hetero binary. Instead, the many faces of Bowie here permit,
even encourage, visitors to seek out a panoply of different kinds of sexual desirings that any one
of the Bowie figures may have had—​and to consider them together in a mélange of sexual and
gender disruption.
The Ziggy Stardust figure at the center of the statue is perhaps the most compelling example
of how any one of the Bowie representations in Earthly Messenger creates a space for bisexual
remembrance. Certainly, Ziggy’s appearance—​still recognizable as Bowie—​replete with striking
makeup, a tight-​fitting body suit, and an evocative pose, cues the audience to consider Bowie’s
life as one in which androgyny, gender-​fluidity, and outrageous sexual energy was the norm.
The character of Ziggy is also particularly known, not only for being attracted to multiple
genders, but for seducing multiple partners, often at the same time—​something Bowie himself acknowledged practicing throughout his life. As such, Ziggy makes nearly impossible the
idea that Bowie should simply be remembered as a cisgender heterosexual or homosexual man;
instead, the inclusion of the Ziggy persona compels audiences—​at least in part—​to remember
Bowie as a person unconstrained by such labels, as someone who pushed outdated boundaries
of sexuality in a bisexual manner.
However, Ziggy is not the complete story of Bowie’s memory. Rather, Earthly Messenger contains
another prominent, full-​sized Bowie persona: that of the be-​suited Bowie of the 1980s. Here, Bowie
appears stylish, fastidious, and classically handsome with a familiar, if elevated, sense of masculinity.
His pose and demeanor in this persona are one many heterosexual women and homosexual men
would find appealing in a traditional male partner, at least compared to Ziggy. That the blue-​suited
Bowie appears slightly behind the Ziggy figure, but of similar size and bearing, suggests that while
Ziggy may take precedence in this particular commemoration in Aylesbury, a large part of Bowie’s
memory is captured in this secondary figure as well. It is in this juxtaposition that Earthly Messenger’s
potential for bisexual visibility becomes more apparent: in making space for Bowie as a “both/​and”
of Ziggy Stardust and blue-​suit Bowie, audiences are asked to reconcile a figure who is masculine,
feminine, and androgynous all at once, implicitly calling into question the fluidity not only of Bowie’s
gender but of the gendered performances he desired. Nor is this duo limited to the main figures in
Earthly Messenger; the inclusion of the dozens of other Bowie alter egos in the background—​and their
depicted hairstyles, expressions, gestures, and looks—​just complicates these questions further. Thus,
the multiple personas of Bowie in the statue, beyond representing Bowie’s many achievements, also
make a bisexual memory of the rock star possible.
The second representational choice in Earthly Messenger is an aesthetic that prioritizes remembering
Bowie—​and his sexuality—​over his lifetime, rather than in a singular moment. Or, to draw from
Wilde’s dimensional sexuality framework, here Bowie is rendered not only in many personas, but
in personas that span eras and decades, making temporality a key part of how we are to remember
Bowie in the statue.
By traditional Western standards of statuary and commemorative design, including such an expansive timeline in a single work is exceedingly rare; rather, as rhetorically rich artifacts, memorials and
monuments are often exigence driven. In other words, such depictions are often asked to capture the
subject(s) in a singular, definitive moment in time: the final strike in battle, the pivotal exhortation, or
the iconic snapshot of a flashbulb memory. Indeed, the choices artists make in selecting these singular
moments—​and their rhetorical effects—​are often the very stuff of public memory controversies. By
contrast, including representations of Bowie from across his lifetime, as a tribute to his whole life’s
work, avoids many of these issues; however, this lifespan framing also makes possible a more robust
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