Disciplinary Dis-orientations and Queering Rhetorics

This week's readings allow us to see the various moments of disciplinary orientation and reorientation that happen when rhetoric is queered and queerness is rhetoricized (the premise of Kelly Rawson's major exam). I'd like to focus on Charles Morris's collection since no one has blogged about his work yet (the night is still young in CCR land, I realize).

I really appreciate the way Morris begins the collection _Queering Public Address_ with the Seneca Falls "boys" photograph. His point is that the photograph is a metonym for all the possiblities of doing queer rhetorical work. What the Seneca Falls "Boys" represent is, as Morris points out, subject to interpretation and subject to "historically specific cultural peformances, politics, and meanings" (3). The "Boys, elusively available on E-Bay, are now are enshrined in the collection of Andrew K. Schultz. The portrait, of course, poses all kinds of questions related to queer historiography. How can we hail the "boys" as historical subjects? How do we read their portrait, and through what lenses? How and in what way are they boys? What pleasures and satisfactions do we get from our viewing and from our understandings and mis-understandings of the portrait? What are we to make of the conventions of portraiture as exercise here? What's there, what is not there? Morris deliberately doesn't tell us much about the "Boys," but he does bring them into the project of the book as a way to foreground questions about doing queer rhetorical histories. And using the term "boys" is really interesting. Are these boys? Why use that term and not another?

"Queer sexuality as a prism for public address" is the focus of this book, and it lives up to that promise. Yet studying public address, as Morris notes, has been a pretty normative space and practice. The scholar of public address traditionally was to look for the great orator (good man speaking well) and look for his (and it was usually a HE) for the rhetor's magnum opus, his greatest speech of all time, the pinnacle of rhetorical achievement. Poststructuralism, cultural studies, and FEMINISMS (which Morris does not mention at first) have played a role in repositioning those notions of public address: challenging view of textuality, discursive traditions, communities, performance. So public address studies has begun to interrogate and reconfigure its boundaries and conceptual categorizations. But..... that only goes so far. As Morris points out, there is a resounding silence about queerness in public address scholarship and in archives and other spaces in rhetorical studies:

"In public address such silences echo through the archives, anthologies, syllabi, reviews, journals, and bibliographies that fail to speak or that distort and diminish, our names and invisible processes by which they are achieved, normalized, and perpetuated" (4).

The book aims to disrupt those silences and omissions, and it aims to establish a "beach head" in rhetorical studies for queer work. In fact, Morris makes a strong statement about not abandoning rhetorical studies and lighting out (as Huck Finn would say) for more queer-friendly academic territory or, as he puts it, "queer hospitable academic locations." In fact, Morris throws down the academic gauntlet. We are going to "stay our home ground and render it pink," he says (queer world-making as Berlant and Warner would say) (5). So in other words, Morris et al is here, queer, and the field damn well better get used to it, adapt, change, and make room. Now this is a manifesto!

That said, Morris goes on to explain that the collection he and the contributors have put together is, er, well, eclectic, but that's the beauty of it. The book appears to break out along the lines of historical recovery (uncovering and recovering or recuperating queer figures/rhetors) and also the work of exploding the categories of public address and of normativity writ large, what he deems the more radical work of queering historical studies. He returns to the Seneca Falls "Boys" as a way to pose these different approaches. The historical recovery model would be more interested in recuperating the photograph as an example of "recovery"--here are two men, likely lovers, captured at a moment in time in a place (Seneca Falls). Their presence is a testimony to queer life at that time. The more radical queer history approach, according to Morris, would not assign meaning or historical value to the photograph, but would be more interested in mapping the discourses we use to construct our readings of it--the discourses that shape our understanding of normativity and sexuality, our reading practices, the normative reach of public address. Morris continually asks us to return to interrogating our own stakes, our own desires, in writing histories, queering histories, engaging queer ideas. I like that he challenges us to go beyond recovery to theorizing and interrogating queerness and rhetoric as well.

The last few pages of the introduction raise many questions that I think we should read aloud in class. I won't record them all here, but I'll highlight the ones that stick out:


How is public address and rhetoric a regime of the normal??
How is rhetoric a regime of the normal? In what ways does rhetoric
s disciplinary and historical moorings constrain queer world making and queer histories?
What possibilities and pitfalls are there to an approach like Morris's of trying to "queer" a whole area of rhetorical study--public address. Where does the volume succeed, where does it not, and why?
What are the methodological risks taken as Morris and others try to queer rhetoric and rhetoricize queer theory?