Sexual Rhetorics

Methods, Identities, Publics

Jonathan Alexander, Jacqueline Rhodes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317442660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Sexual rhetoric is the self-conscious and critical engagement with discourses of sexuality that exposes both their naturalization and their queering, their torquing to create different or counter-discourses, giving voice and agency to multiple and complex sexual experiences. This volume explores the intersection of rhetoric and sexuality through the varieties of methods available in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies, including case studies, theoretical questioning, ethnographies, or close (and distant) readings of "texts" that help us think through the rhetorical force of sexuality and the sexual force of rhetoric.

Part I
Sexed Methods

1 Promiscuous Approaches to Reorienting Rhetorical Research

Heather Lee Branstetter

“Isn’t this what good scholarship already does?”
“This sounds sexy and all, but it also sounds unethical.”
“Aren’t you just reifying harmful stereotypes?”
“What about the negative aspects of promiscuity, like disease?”

It was a packed room, the biggest audience I’d ever had for a presentation, despite the fact that all three of us—Risa Applegarth and Jean Bessette along with me—were relatively new scholars. The intersection of methods and memory studies was having a moment, it seemed, at this 2009 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference. I have now come to believe that methodology was having a moment in the field of rhetoric more broadly. I had spoken about the need for a more “queer and promiscuous” approach to feminist scholarship, and I advocated its usefulness for scholars whose work intersects with memory studies and women’s rhetorical historiography. I had been inspired by the RSA Institute workshop with Charles Morris, Karma Chávez, and Isaac West a few months prior. The barrage of excited yet critical questions that hit me afterward showed me that I had touched a sensitive spot. Some members of the audience saw the approach I was outlining as not being an example of “legitimate” scholarship, whereas others didn’t see what was new about it at all, and still others perceived it as inappropriate or even immoral. Was I doing something wrong, I wondered?

My presentation was meant to guide, to inspire others to mix up our scholarship, moving and shaking the traditional ways of doing things, but ever since I’ve tried to talk about it in academic spheres, it’s been met with demands that it make itself more communicable without “infecting” traditional scholarship with its vector potential. I know some questions come from an empathetic place, a true desire to understand, to connect. But some questions also come from a defensive impulse to sequester or suppress perspectives or approaches (“let them have their ‘special issues’ and ‘alternative rhetorics’”). And of course some others want to control (aka “professionalize”) what might potentially be dangerous—on the loose, running around stirring up shit. What is the value of diversity—why on earth do we even bother to admit students from a variety of backgrounds, affirm equal opportunity hiring practices, or talk about the need for different perspectives and epistemic processes—if our goal is merely to program everyone to work in monologous tongues that reify a tower of ivory babble?

In their introduction to this collection, Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes assert that sexuality is robustly rhetorical. To this statement, I add that rhetoric is also robustly promiscuous. And promiscuity is also inherently queer insofar as it challenges mainstream sexual values and ideas about what sexuality should be: the terms overlap where they challenge “normal” paradigms of morality and what constitutes deviance. In this case, queer does not simply point us toward a gay or lesbian identity, nor to a homo versus hetero perspective, since the term queer can have the effect of covering over difference and mischaracterizing a diversity of voices when it is used synecdochically (or metonymically … maybe both at the same time).¹ And, as I will explain throughout the remainder of this piece, the term promiscuity does not indicate the inability to control one’s sexual impulses or desires. Nor does it point us toward inherently indiscriminate sexual behavior. Rather, I wish to describe and inspire more diverse orientations to research, a way of doing scholarship by embracing the historical linkage of promiscuity (and its inherent queerness) with deviance and pathology. I hope to unsettle and confound our notions of scholarly decorum, propriety, and tradition. The approach I describe is often performative, playful, and mischievous. It embraces peculiarity, suspends expectations, and follows hunches in order to go deeper without being “properly introduced.” This orientation is usually subversive insofar as promiscuity has traditionally been used as an accusation against someone whose behavior is perceived as indiscreet, suspicious, and generally disreputable. A promiscuous approach does not seek to redefine norms—rather, it seeks to disrupt normalcy altogether, to intimately engage with and vicariously inhabit multiple perspectives, to live through the desires of strangers, to simultaneously invite and affirm the variety of human experience.

An explicit focus on sexual rhetorics and research methodology offers the unique opportunity to examine intersections of sexual-rhetorical approaches with the productive conceptual potential of promiscuity, “a constellation of discursive practices that emerge at different times for different groups in order to articulate resistance to regimes of sexualized normalization,” as Alexander and Rhodes put it in 2012 (“Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive”). Our field would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the perspectives, people, and acts often seen as sexually deviant but not necessarily LGBTIA. To be more specific, I’m thinking of slutty women, sex workers, interracial sex, or fetish, kink, and polyamorous orientations. For the purpose of this piece, the regimes of sexualized normalization include our own research and academic institutional contexts. By inhabiting and exploring the value of sexual-rhetorical perspectives that have traditionally been denigrated or dismissed, we enhance possibilities for scholarly invention and persuasive action.

Our research topics and methods should reflect the variety of our rhetorical activity as humans. I focus here on describing the productive potential I see for more promiscuous approaches to rhetorical scholarship, connecting my examples to rhetorical historiography and community or cultural rhetorics. I address the liabilities I’ve encountered while experimenting with a promiscuous approach and suggest ways to justify the value of this sexual-rhetorical perspectival lens during those times when it becomes strategically necessary to make ourselves tactically communicable to those who might otherwise find us illegible, interpret our work as immoral, or dismiss our contribution as “personal,” dilettantish, or niche. I close with brief applications and extensions. In this chapter, I orient toward some potential lines of flight I see for reapproaching (don’t I really mean “reproaching” my smart-ass spell check wants to know? maybe, I think) rhetorical research by embracing its promiscuous nature as a methodological hermeneutic.

Academic Freedom
Means Polyamorous Ideas
Creative Movement
Promiscuous Approaches

“What is an Approach? Define Your Terms. Fit Your Ideas in with Others Who Have Come Before.”

No. (Not yet—that’s the next section.) But okay, fine, I will try to explain what I mean by “approach”: I mean an orientation, inspiration, feeling, philosophical investments, theoretical contexts, and methodological implications.

In “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” Dilip P. Gaonkar observes that a “striking and commonly noted feature” inherent in rhetoric’s interdisciplinary resurgence “is the sheer promiscuity with which the term rhetoric is deployed” (37). He critiques what he calls several times “the promiscuous use of the term rhetoric” as “almost talismanic,” a surface-level substitute for making an analysis rhetorical (71) that “severely undermines rhetoric’s self-representation as a situated practical art” (76). I love this piece and appreciate the observations about how rhetoric’s supplementarity—the rhetoric of X, rhetorical X, X and rhetorics, or, as in the case of this book, simply X rhetorics—functions as a hermeneutic. Gaonkar notes the interpretive roles of rhetoric in pedagogy, critique, and theory, but what has arisen more recently as rhetoric has become more thoroughly disciplined, is increasing interest in methodology. The way rhetoric is paired with the word promiscuous in the essay reveals the following undercurrent: if rhetoric is being so slutty, sleeping around with all the other disciplines, it may no longer be unique or valuable to have sex with rhetoric. In the case of methodology, however, I would argue that rhetoric’s promiscuity has made it more valuable as an interpretive lens. And that’s what I mean by an “approach.”

I stumbled upon a promiscuous approach when I jumped down the rabbit hole of social movement rhetoric and collective invention for my dissertation and discovered that the critique of institutional structures I’d been studying applied to the very scholarship I was expected to engage in order to demonstrate field competence and earn my degree. I began to wonder: Which of our practices were suspect, and how and why? I began to feel like we needed a “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” adapted to scholarly rhetoric and research. Which of our professionalization, incentive systems, and citation practices continued to exist primarily because they reaffirmed the dominance of the preexisting system, and which of our practices were truly oriented toward forwarding significant, ambitious, and legitimately creative new ideas?

A promiscuous approach to rhetorical research acknowledges and experiments with multiple ways of being, wants research to be self-determined and free, wants to “have sex” with lots of different kinds of projects in lots of different ways and understand those projects on their own terms in order to bring something unique out of the result, without feeling economically coerced to publish in traditional venues or conform–contort one’s spectrum of ideas and skills into a “coherent research agenda.” And again, if we are to affirm the variety of our human rhetorical activity, there should be room for promiscuous approaches, topics, perspectives, and styles in our rhetorical scholarship and professional spheres.

Rhetorical promiscuity is a reorientation of our traditional academic ways of doing style, expression, and genre. Promiscuous rhetorics question where we put our acknowledgments, who we cite, and how we write. A promiscuous approach transcends traditional ways of judging propriety—it is a radical orientation toward openness, trying on different ways of looking at the world and spreading that knowledge around. Promiscuous approaches attempt to be transparent and truthful, even as they are inherently complex, role playing, embracing the iterative yet unpredictable and at times parallel process energy of simultaneity, interactivity, multiplicity, excess, rhythm, collective invention, social movement, connection, exchange, give and take, service, performance, a dialogic interplay of power and strategy or moving in intuitive empathic approaching telepathic ways. Yes, I’m talking about sex. And I’m also talking about rhetoric. Promiscuous approaches to rhetoric challenge our complacent acceptance of what “proper” scholarship feels like, looks like, acts like. It engages memorable, flexible, improvisational ideas at event horizons in communal ways. It’s rhetoric outside the confines of marriage to the academy, not limited to higher education echo chambers for the purposes of reproduction.

For those of us whose writing and teaching intersect with sexuality and sexual topics, our research often arises organically out of the content and context, and our approaches have been inherently risky. It is therefore even more important for us to be relentlessly thorough when translating our process and relevance to others. Our profession continues to need more representative understandings of rhetoric in the lives of real people, people whose relationship to sex and sexual desire range across a spectrum. Because our field has looked to the classical Greek and Roman canon to legitimate our research, we have missed out on valuable perspectives as we play a rigged game: the weight of our academic heritage requires those of us working in more promiscuous ways to jump higher procedural hurdles in terms of developing new theories, discovering relevant methodologies, and justifying broader applications for the ones we already have.

A Slutwalk of Hir Own
(Or, Promiscuity Shacks up with Traditional Ways of Doing Scholarship and Methodology. And yes, even Deleuze. At the same time.)

In which our protagonist attempts to sexually orient hirself within incongruous perspectival lenses, simultaneously throating self-destruction and fisting self-preservation in search of freedom …

This section is about the liabilities and challenges of promiscuous approaches. It is also about trying to make promiscuous methods tactically communicable and theoretically alive.

Whore. Contaminated. “Inappropriate.” “Unprofessional.”

How many times have these words been used to regulate and control? Promiscuity’s free-spirited approach threatens the stability of a well-controlled, regulated, “professional” situation.

The word appropriate—as in square, but also as in cultural appropriation, as in, to appropriate someone else’s culture—has colonial problems. Similarly, the word professional [and professor] is caught up in the “middle class” values language games of:

confusing self with [academic] corporation.
caught up enforcing rules you didn’t write, don’t endorse
(trying not to get kicked down) =
moving up the economic ladder
profession =

It’s the working professional classes or those trying to move from the so-called working class over to the working professional classes who are colonized by the overly complex and self-contradictory hierarchy of mainstream values. Even socially progressive academics reify traditional values by default and—often in small-talk situations or grad school/job market/tenure and promotion/research committee/grant foundation behind-closed-doors and off-the-official-record evaluation situations—make erroneous assumptions or question those who have taken the time to consider which mainstream values and practices are worth continuing to reinforce. The academic world remains monogamous and/or square in practice, especially in terms of research subjects and methods.² So often it’s the already less visible research subjects, people, and projects that suffer. Our profession’s socialized demand that we appeal to the traditionally dominant norms of scholarship that have actively worked to exclude a diversity of voices is a social justice problem for me: the expectation that we appeal rhetorically to those very norms to adequately defend our divergence from them turns into an ethical imperative to do otherwise, to get with others who are similarly oriented and resolve not only to do scholarship differently but also to inhabit our scholarly personas in different ways, acting in accordance with our conscience regarding the social responsibility we have to those beyond the traditional boundaries of the academy, even when that work is not already recognized by existing academic incentive mechanisms. Because otherwise nothing will change. A promiscuous approach to rhetoric chooses topics based on ambition and significance, idealistically (yet not naïvely) oriented toward making the world a place where difference is embraced.

Resources are allocated and assumptions are made in part according to what others read when they scan your CV. And square scholarly professional imperatives can feel alienating to promiscuous approaches, which draw inspiration from varied realms. But a promiscuous approach also strives to be communicable at times (and perhaps at times contagious) in its search for connection with others who might be working in more traditional ways but who also feel restricted by scholarly norms and who thus might be recruited (if not converted) in the quest for a greater diversity of approaches. A promiscuous approach challenges norms, but is also varied and diverse, and at times engages with traditional and perhaps necessary professional tasks. It does not dismiss the work of others that is truly relevant, even when that work has at times excluded truly relevant and valuable perspectives from its own intellectual harems. So for the next three paragraphs, I’ll engage with the traditional approach to legitimating promiscuous, intimate, or sexual methods according to disciplinary expectations.

Previous published work that explicitly addresses methods in rhetorical historiography has emphasized the importance of democratizing our understanding of the past in order to work toward more socially progressive futures. In my own research, I have found Working in the Archives and Beyond the Archives valuable collections that bring together much of the rhetorical historiography methods already visible within the field. We can extend the methodological and practical lessons more broadly as we emphasize connections. For example, the introduction to Working in the Archives points us toward primary sources found not only in traditional university libraries but also unpublished writing in unexpected places, such as those found in records kept by local historians in small towns, with Charlotte Hogg’s work on rural women emerging as a useful example. Scholars in feminist historiography have forged significant paths to extend our discussion of rhetorical methodology beyond traditional topics and approaches (for m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What’s Sexual about Rhetoric, What’s Rhetorical about Sex?
• PART I Sexed Methods
• PART II Troubling Identity
• PART III (Counter)Publics
• List of Contributors
• Index