ABSTRACT

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 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.

part Section I|79 pages

Histories, Re-Histories, Archives

chapter 2|9 pages

Undoing Happiness with Pleasure

Rhetorics of Affect in The Ladder 1

chapter 6|8 pages

Printing a Queer Identity

Edward Carpenter, Ioläus, and the Affirmation of Same-Sex Desires in the Nineteenth Century

chapter 8|7 pages

An Archive of Disposability

(Trans)gender and Sexuality in South Africa

chapter 9|8 pages

Re-Historicizing the “Lacking South”

Archiving Queer Memory and Sexual Visibilities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia Through the Invisible Histories Project

part Section II|77 pages

Methodologies

chapter 12|9 pages

Queer Topoi

Writing “Like” Sedgwick

chapter 13|8 pages

Methodologies Not Yet Known

The Queer Case for Relational Research

chapter 14|7 pages

Blake Brockington's Rhetorical Afterlife

Fugitive Black Trans* Data and Queer Kairotic Methodology

chapter 15|7 pages

Histories in (Trans)lation

Xie Jianshun and the Potential and Perils of Trans Historiography

chapter 17|7 pages

Between the Sheets

Gavin Arthur's Sexual Circulation

chapter 19|6 pages

Queering Spaces

part Section III|57 pages

Communities

chapter 20|7 pages

“Let's Get Some Family Chosen”

Refugees, Homonationalism, and Queer Family Rhetoric

chapter 22|8 pages

Womyn's Words

Rhetorical Practices of Lesbians in the Tampa Bay Area

chapter 23|9 pages

Mountain Dirt(y) Queer Rhetorics

Making Appalachian Queerness Visible

chapter 25|7 pages

“People Can't Say I'm a Man, They Can't Say I'm a Woman”

Reality Expansion in the Kewpie Collection

chapter 26|7 pages

Converging in a Room of Our Own

The Ladder, Autostraddle, and Queer Convergence in Online Communities

part Section IV|83 pages

Identities

chapter 27|7 pages

Prescribe for Me, Doctor, for I Have Sex

Rhetorics of Empowerment, Queer Shame, and the Confessional in PrEP Prescribing

chapter 28|7 pages

Making Nothing Out of Something

Asexuality and the Rhetorics of Silence and Absence

chapter 30|7 pages

Fuck (Gay) Racism

Queer Asian American Rhetorics of Abe Kim's TikTok

chapter 32|7 pages

How Much Does It Take?

Persuasion and the Stakes of Will in The Transformation

chapter 33|7 pages

Irreversible Damage

Trans Masculine Affectability and the White Family

part Section V|80 pages

Provocations & Interventions

chapter 37|7 pages

Sexual Assaults, Queer Panics

Gemma Watts and Reynhard Sinaga

chapter 38|6 pages

Anti-Normativity under Duress

An Intersectional Intervention in Queer Rhetoric

chapter 39|10 pages

Lettering Me Queer

An Open Letter to Gurlesque

chapter 41|10 pages

Rhetorical Work

Genre Fluidity as a Queer Rhetorical Practice of Activists: a Play/Chapter in Multiple Acts

chapter 43|9 pages

“Soft Armor” for Ugly Bodies

The Radical Visibility of Queercrip Fashion

chapter 45|7 pages

Queer Rhetorics as Intervention Methods

The Curious Case of Conversion Violence

part Section VI|81 pages

Speculations

chapter 46|9 pages

The Fabulous Rhetorics of Queer Inhumanity

Speculating with Queer Inhuman Figures to Restory Queerphobic Histories

chapter 47|9 pages

The Queer Babadook

Circulation of Queer Affects

chapter 48|7 pages

Rhetorics of Gay Future and Queer Futurity

Strategies of Disruption

chapter 50|7 pages

Between Queer and Digital

Toward an Understanding of the Rhetoric of Digital Queerdom

chapter 51|7 pages

Queering the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

Bodies, Embodiment, and the Future

chapter 52|7 pages

Cuir-ing Queer

Speculations on Latin American Notions of Queerness 1