Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse (Studies in Rhetoric/communication)

Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse (Studies in Rhetoric/communication) by Morris, Charles E., III. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781570036644.

In Queering Public Address ten noted rhetorical critics disrupt the silence regarding nonnormative sexualities in the study of American historical discourse and upend the heteronormativity that governs much of rhetorical history. Reconfiguring Quintilians mandate that an orator is a good man speaking well, contributors grapple at the intersection of rhetoric, history, and sexuality as they interrogate historically situated discursive performances, politics, and meanings of the "good queer speaking well." Enacting both political and radical visions, these scholars articulate the promises of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender public address and the critiques that work to deepen their fulfillment. Charles E. Morris III introduces the volume by offering a portrait of the queer historical/rhetorical critic, one vexed by disciplinary disorientation, seeking to reverse what Morris terms the "queer impoverishment" of the field of public address studies. Continuing the discourse, Dana L. Cloud, Ralph R. Smith, Russel R. Windes, Karen A. Foss, Julie Thompson, and Morris critically approach from nonnormative perspectives various principles, objects, methods, and theories that have explicitly or implicitly directed the practice and judgment of rhetorical-historical analysis. In the latter part of the volume, John M. Sloop, Eric King Watts, Robert Alan Brookey, Lisbeth Lipari, and Lester C. Olson examine specific historical subjects, voices, styles, and performances by means of various discourses that intersected in relation to ideologies, issues, and events constituting queerness over time. The contributors consider figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harvey Milk, Marlon Riggs, and Lorraine Hansberry and issues as diverse as collective identity, nineteenth-century semiotics of gender and sexuality, the sexual politics of the Harlem Renaissance, psychiatric productions of the queer, and violence-induced traumatic styles.