Many contemporary queers often understand and critically play with such illogics, creating rhetorically powerful counterlogics. We consider the rhetorical collisions produced by the Lesbian Avengers, for instance, who picture women holding guns or bombs, saying “We recruit”—collisions between our culture’s normative understanding  of what women are supposed to want versus the rage that many lesbians feel about sexism and homophobia. In Friedrich and Baus’s documentary The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too, we see the Lesbian Avengers protesting a school board decision not to include a multicultural curriculum. The women take to the streets, shouting angrily. On one hand, these are certainly women concerned for the welfare of children; on another hand, these are women concerned for all children, even those who may not be part of their particular families. The sense of responsibility here exceeds the immediate nuclear family, the locus of concern toward which our culture bends our gaze. The Lesbian Avengers bend it back again, rhetorically critiquing the notion of family in the process.

Later in the film, several Lesbian Avengers perform a communal ritual centered on fire-eating. They demand that their call for rights be addressed, their voices heard, and the fire-eating serves rhetorically to link their speech with power. They take in the fire of their rage (their word), the “fire of action into our hearts, into our bodies.” They resist the fear of being “consumed” by others’ hatred and ignorance of them. Such rhetorically powerful images reverse the normative understanding of what women are, what they are supposed to be, whom they are supposed to love. They insist on queer speech, while overturning the sexist notion that women are necessarily nurturing and thus not interested in revenge or vengeance.