This article provided me with some much-needed definitions (and anti-definitions) of queer, rhetoric, and queer rhetoric. It’s easy to lose specificity around terms when they’re used so often with an unspoken understanding of what they mean, that you stop clarifying what you mean.
Queer: Anti-normative. You can be gay but not queer, and (depending on who you ask) queer but not gay.
Rhetoric: Bessette cites a definition from Condit: “reading texts ‘as they are situated in history is what constitutes rhetorical criticism as a distinct discipline in the humanities” (152). This seems untrue to me, as plenty of literary scholars (in particular History of the Book scholars) consider historical context. But a later definition also cited from Condit rings much more true to me: “we judge a ‘rhetorical artifact not solely on the action within a text but also on how that rhetoric acts upon the context within which it creates meaning’” (157). “Where are the boundaries between literary study and rhetorical study?” has been especially perplexing to me now that I’m reading 30ish queer memoirs for a rhetoric concentration. But an eye toward reception, and multiple receptions, and social impacts, and uptake by the audience, makes sense to me as a possible (although very arguable) distinction.
Queer Rhetoric: Can still be concerned with what is normative and anti-normative, what upholds cisnormativity and heteronormativity and what resists these pressures, but the queer rhetorician ought to stop to consider the multiple contexts that could make the same act or object or discourse event mean very different things, to different people in the same time, or to people in different times.
So then, if one of my primary interests in these memoirs is when they talk about how the author made meaning from other queer (or not queer!) texts, then really the memoir is functioning as evidence of another text’s rhetorical impact, rather than the memoir being the real object of study, maybe.
This also relates to one of my motivating questions for the history of sexuality list, especially the “theories of the history of sexuality” subsection. Historicism, new historicism, unhistoricism, etc. debates are on the surface level about the question of, “How should the history of sexuality be done?” but are kinda also about, “What work regarding the history of sexuality is worth doing and why?” I wouldn’t argue that any particular kind of work in this area is NOT worth doing, but each kind of research certainly has different purposes and impacts. Identifying historical figures and characters as LGBTQ+ is usually ahistorical, but so many LGBTQ+ people today feel super validated and excited by discovering people from centuries ago who seem like them. I think historicizing sexual behavior and discourses and representations is interesting and important, and I definitely want people to be doing that work, but for myself, I’m more interested in how later people made use of different histories of sexuality or sexual histories of historical people, in making meaning for their own lives.