Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Queering Pasts and Futures of Public Address

Charles Morris, Pamela VanHaitsma — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

When Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse was published in 2007 by University of South Carolina Press, it constituted the first collective effort to bring queer studies directly into public address and more broadly into rhetorical studies. The project stood on the shoulders of earlier interventions in the discipline of Communication, especially Gay Speak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication (1981) and Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality (1994).

Transing Public Address

Lucy Miller — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Trans people have been absent from much of public address history. Historical figures like French noble, diplomat, and spy Chevalière d'Eon and British doctor James Barry have been subject to skepticism about their trans identities instead of being analyzed as exemplars of trans public address. In rhetorical scholarship, the analysis of trans rhetoric has been limited to a few contemporary examples, with more attention given to efforts to restrict trans rights and discourse surrounding our deaths. Given the limited presence of trans people in rhetoric and public address, I argue for the need to trans public address. Transing public address is built on Yep, Russo, and Allen’s concept of transing, in which gender is seen as contingent and frequently being assembled and reassembled, and asks rhetorical scholars to ask “what if” in response to questions around trans inclusion in public address instead of rejecting this inclusion to uphold essentialist understandings of gender.

Gather the Children: Trans of Color Liberation Rhetoric as Provision

Ashley Noel Mack, Rico Self — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

“Gathering” is a Black queer vernacular term that refers to discursive and embodied performances of community, resistance, insult and offense, and self-defense. Through engagement with the trans of color liberation rhetorics of Indya Moore and Qween Jean, “gatherings” are revealed as embodied and relational rhetorical acts that collect, bring together, or otherwise provide for queers of color across difference. We argue that gatherings serve as a rhetoric of provision, which indexes a rhetor’s discursive maneuvers to provide marginalized communities—in this instance, queer and trans communities—with care and resources to counter systemic and institutional violence at multiple intersections.

Unknowing Nex Benedict

Erin J. Rand — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Nex Benedict, a nonbinary 16-year-old with Choctaw heritage, died by suicide in Oklahoma in 2024 after enduring anti-trans bullying and being beaten up at school. Nex has been amplified as a figure for collective mourning, an exemplar of the cruel ongoing attacks on queer and trans youth and the devastations of settler colonialism. But efforts to capture Nex’s memory raise questions about how 2SLGBTQ+ communities and scholars extract value from the deaths of queer and trans people of color, even as we seek to illuminate their entanglements with broader cultural patterns of racialized transantagonism. This essay therefore asks if we, as scholars of queer public address, can orient ourselves more ethically toward Nex and others like him. I propose “critical queer disorientation” as a mode of engagement that emphasizes the suspended state of disorientation based in the lived embodiments of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people. A critical queer disorientation can be a practice of rhetorical inquiry, a resource for political invention and community solidarity, and a means for reimagining the future of queer public address scholarship.

Pauli Murray's Intersectional Quest for Equality

Isaac West — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Pauli Murray's advocacy efforts provides insight into the inventional possibilities of intersectional and analogical arguments.

Queer Worldmaking in Frictional Space: The Promise of Queering Public Address

Alyssa Samek — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

This essay examines the debate about lesbian rights that took place at the National Women’s Conference in honor of International Women’s Year (IWY), held in Houston, Texas in November 1977. This unique moment brought together white, conservative, antifeminist, anti-queer women, into the same space with BIPOC and white straight feminists, and BIPOC and white lesbian feminists. I examine how their collective presence and conflicting rhetoric concerning lesbian rights or “sexual preference” at IWY created a generative frictional space. I illustrate how queering public address and engaging with archives as an “archival queer” recuperates queer voices and experiences, enhances their visibility in the pages of our journals, adds complexity to rhetorical histories, and resists structures of power in the discipline.

Untranslatability as Queer Failure: Reimagining Engagement in the Politics of Meaning

Shuzhen Huang — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

This essay argues that public discourse is structured by heteronormativity and geopolitical power, rendering queer—especially transnational queer—experiences marginal or unintelligible within dominant rhetorical frameworks. Drawing on queer and transnational scholarship, it foregrounds translationality as a vital condition of queer articulation. Examining translational failure—untranslatability, multiplicity, and friction—as a queer methodology, the essay demonstrates how transnational queer experiences disrupt linguistic hierarchies and reconfigure the parameters of public address.

The Rhetoric of Queer Catachresis

Jeffrey Bennett — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

This article engages how queers are made to combat contrived catachreses that inhibit responses to cultural maltreatment from authoritarian regimes. I argue that LGBTQ+ scholars have long confronted these catachrestic figurations but have also successfully repurposed such aspersions in generative fashion. A reclamation of catachresis by queer critics can function as a rejoinder to the stifling delirium manufactured by anti-queer factions. I conclude by turning to queer rhetorical scholars whose work offers us a path forward in chaotic times.

Notes from Northeastern

Morgan DiCesare — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

This essay attends to recent policy changes at universities nationwide and their impact.

Clandestine Public Address

Annie Hill, Lisa A. Flores — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

This article examines how the second Trump administration uses executive orders, lawsuits, and public address to attack the norms of government while attempting to contract who counts as the people (dēmos). We argue that queering public address stands as a necessary direct action against this lethal antidemocratic agenda. Further, we posit that clandestine communication–a queer form of public address that moves via stealth and fugitive transmissions–is a vital resource for providing care and mutual aid and for resisting a government keen to displace and erase its ever-expanding list of enemies.

Recommitting to Transformation in Queering Public Address

Thomas R. Dunn — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

This essay argues for a recommittment to a core tenant of the queering historical discourse project: transformation. While transformation of the field was a key component of the edited volume, Queering Public Address, today, the author argues queer scholars in communication and rhetoric must be willing to push the boundaries further. Key strategies advanced include investing in the local, making a pivot to production, and going "back to the steets."

Quotidian Queerness: Navigating the Betwixt and Between of Queer Public Address

Jeffrey Nagel, Kelly Williams Nagel — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

According to a recent Gallup survey, America is “queerer” than ever. Despite this, the flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration showcases the material violence, erasure, and threat of oblivion for LGBTQ+ populations from the public sphere. This potential tension between queerness’ normalization as an increasingly everyday experience and its simultaneous political marginalization poses a vital methodological question for all scholars of rhetoric and public address: how do we study the public that is not public and how do we address those who cannot be acknowledged? Responding to these ongoing complexities, we argue that an increasingly important resource for scholars of queer public address is a (re)turn to archives. Specifically, we urge renewed scholarly interest in the everyday affective quietness contained within vernacular and quotidian objects in traditional and non-traditional archives alike.

What’s a Homonormative to Do? Notes from the Institutionally Compromised

Christa J. Olson — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Queering a disciplinary formation like the field of public address is a queerly normative thing to do. Pulling strands from queer rhetorics, abolitionist theory and practice, and Latin American political theory, this essay muddles about in the implications, difficulties, and promise of that project, ultimatley approaching both 'queer' and 'public address' sidelong and askance.

The The Pink Scar: How Nazi Persecution Shaped the Struggle for LGBTQ+ Rights by Thomas R. Dunn. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025; pp. xiv + 206, $99.95 hardcover; $24.99 paperback; $9.99 ebook.

Linda Horwitz — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood's Queerness, by Erin J. Rand

Dylan Rollo — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Not Playing Around: Feminist and Queer Rhetorics in Videogames (review)

Maria Tsangarakis — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence. By J. Logan Smilges. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. pp. vi + 288.

Jackson Tucker — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Truth Be Told: White Nostalgia and Antiracist Queer Resistance In "Post-Truth" America by Laura E. Tetreault (review)

Kenneth Avery — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400