ABSTRACT
Even before sex/gender and sexuality were overtly thematized as subjects and objects of study (and before diverse bodies of sexes, genders, and sexualities visibly and audibly populated the Association), they were present in the history of the discipline of speech because rhetoric, itself, is sexed, gendered, and sexualized. The Greeks worshipped Peitho, the goddess who personifies persuasion and seduction—and one should not underestimate either’s import. Peitho was “utterly essential in democratic states, where persuasion, rather than violence, was the ideal,” yet in “vase painting she has overwhelmingly erotic implications.” 2 And the distance between sex, sexuality, and sexualized violence was not far. In a casual aside, the Theoi Greek Mythology website explains, “Peitho was usually depicted as a woman with her hand lifted in persuasion or fleeing from the scene of a rape” as though these two are parallel. 3
