Confutatio

INTRODUCTION || DISIDENTIFICATION || THEORY || TECHNOLOGY || QUEER RHETORIC || LOGOS || PATHOS || ETHOS || TONGUES || WORKS CITED

No counter-argument exists—at least none we will acknowledge—against the validity of recovering and honoring queer rhetorical practice. We honor it. We value it; that honoring and valuing is sufficient unto itself. At the same time, we contend that queer rhetorical practice is invaluable for several pragmatic reasons.

First, queer rhetoric offers much to our collective historical understanding of the available means of persuasion in oral, textual, visual, and multi-mediated rhetorical practice. Secondly, a study of queer rhetoric shows us the conditions under which the means of persuasion actually become available to some people and not to others. That is, the history of queer rhetoric provides the grounds for a genealogical understanding of how rhetoric is constructed as a gendered, eroticized, and sexed art, even as such gendering and eroticization remain covert, hidden, or unconscious. Third, and perhaps most importantly, a study of queer rhetoric shows us the potential impoverishment of our conceptualization of the public sphere. We borrow the notion of “impoverishment” from Morris, but we want to take the notion of impoverishment several steps forward to critique a conceptualization of the public sphere itself that relies on limited logical discourse, with pathos dutifully under control and ethos heteronormatively established. This is the public sphere in which many of us participate, and for which many of us prepare our students; we, and they, compose essays that introduce important topics, present rational positions on those topics, logically consider potential counter-claims, and conclude with concrete arguments substantiated by appropriate evidence and dutiful consideration. Tone is important in establishing an ethos that persuades but does not harangue, that is firm but also conciliatory.

What is dis-identified in a queering of logos is the identification of logos with ethos, with the authority of reason to speak more credibly than feeling. Queer rhetorical practice does not tout court deny the power of logic or reason; but it radically underscores the ways in which many logics are hetero-motivated to maintain particular kinds of relational dominance. How can queer rhetorical practices effectively challenge such logics? By revealing the very passions through which they are maintained, and by questioning the credibility of those who seek dominance through subordinating others’ desires, or even by subordinating their own queernesses to maintain hetero privilege.

At times, however, logical argument, contained pathos, and an ethos of compromise are clearly unacceptable, and the public sphere must be enlivened by debate that exceeds the limits of Habermasian exchange—an exchange that assumes predominantly rational argumentation leading to steady consensus building. Put another way, the queer challenges the Enlightenment emphasis on logos, and questions, particularly at this late stage of corporate capitalism, the extent to which reasoned debate successfully addresses and ameliorates injustices. Sometimes injustice must be met with outrage. Sometimes we must say, “No, we won’t compromise.” Such embodied debate, such angry argument itself forms as much a part of the public sphere as does the highly composed rationalist arguments we also generate, that we teach in our classes, that we hold as the ideal standard of our “enlightened” public sphere.

Ultimately, when considering queer bodies, identities, practices, and lives—that is, when broaching the sexual and erotic as public performance within civic discourse—our rhetorical practice must consider the fullness of being, in all of its outrageous drives, desires, kinks, and embodied possibilities. We move not by reason alone, and sometimes we must fly in its face. We reach the limits of rational discourse, and ask nonetheless to be taken seriously, to be acknowledged as part of an expansive public sphere of bodies and desires in motion.

We have come, in a theoretical sense, full circle back to Whitman and Wilde, as well as their heirs in the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, and ACT UP, as queer rhetoricians intervening poetically from the margins to demand not just recognition and equality, but a re-imagining of association, affiliation, intimacy, and connection. Warner knows that such re-imagining often happens first not in the public, but in counterpublics, ghettoized spheres of community. He suggests that such “counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely” (88). We hold as well to the hope that queer rhetorical practice, in all of its many outrages, will be poetically transformative, not merely replicative of larger socio-cultural and political norms.