Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, by Cheryl Glenn

I guess the first thing this book makes me think about is neurodivergent speech patterns. Some people (I think mostly autistic people, but maybe also other groups) pause “too long” or “not enough” or “aren’t good at turn taking” in conversations, and that affects how they are perceived. This is very much a rhetoric of silence, or rather, people ought to be aware of differences in speech patterns that might mean silences (or lack of silence) should be interpreted differently than they might be used to. Lots of autistic people identified with Beth Harmon on The Queen’s Gambit, and in reading people’s tweets about it/her, I saw 1) non-autistic people arguing that Beth was cold to one of the guys she slept with, in part because she went back to reading her book after they had sex, and in part because of how she froze when he first kissed her 2) autistic people saying they felt her going back to reading showed that she felt comfortable with him, enjoyed the sex, and was now returning to her previous task and was happy to have him stay or go. I think there’s a bit of dialogue where he asks if she’d like him to stay or go, and she says it’s up to him. He feels hurt because he feels like that means she doesn’t care about him, but some people argued that she was being considerate of his needs and simply stating her non-preference in a direct way.

Glenn doesn’t really talk about this category of issues around silence, but she does discuss how positionality affects how one’s silences are interpreted, and who can be silent. If a white man is silent, he’s just a man of few words. If he’s a rich man, he’s powerful. If a Black man is silent, he’s uncooperative, or sullen, or unintelligent, or rude. Women’s silence might be interpreted as unintelligence as well, or lack of confidence, or rude, or modest and appropriate, depending on the situation and other aspects of the women’s identity.

Glenn cites Johannesen, who lists 20 different potential functions of silence. I would say about 5 are rhetorically “positive,” meaning relating to an interest in engaging with the other person or agreeing with them (silence due to thinking seriously about what to say, silence due to agreement, silence due to being emotionally moved, silence due to not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings, companionable silence), around 13 (I think this is the most arguable) are some kind of negative (meaning the person is not or is not interested in being engaged in the conversation), and the rest are “neutral.” I think the neutral and negative are the most arguable because things like “the person is silence because they feel no urgency to talk on this matter” is not inherently negative, but could easily be perceived as negative (why don’t you think this is important?).

Some examples/case studies Glenn talks about:

• Bill Clinton’s sex scandals and the chosen or enforced silence of his lovers, victims (of unwanted sexual advances), and family members

• The Clinton administration’s silencing of a federal appointment nominee— they told her not to speak publicly until her confirmation went through. She was not allowed to respond to many allegations and misinterpretations of her work.

• The stereotype that Native Americans are silent or value silence more than other kinds of people.

• Anita Hill’s original silence and then forced speaking (via court order) against Clarence Thomas, then how the committee re-silenced her

"Queer Rhetoric in Situ" by Jean Bessette

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.