The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers: Intersectional Rhetorics
Autor Pamela VanHaitsmaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 4 oct 2024
The Erotic as Rhetorical Power offers a queer feminist history of rhetoric that recovers the civic contributions of women teachers in same-sex romantic friendships. Extending perspectives from ancient rhetoric to nineteenth-century progressivism, from Audre Lorde’s Black lesbian feminist theory to its present-day uptakes, Pamela VanHaitsma conceives of the erotic as an interanimation of desires that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the power to forge connection and foment change. VanHaitsma’s theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from both historiographic and imaginative engagements with more than twenty archives of romantic friendships between women: Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam, Irene Leache and Anna Wood, Gertrude Buck and Laura Wylie, and Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. VanHaitsma considers how even as the erotic in these romantic friendships fueled the women’s rhetorical activities toward transformational ends—whether working toward the abolition of slavery, greater educational access, or voting rights—it also energized rhetorical activities that sometimes challenged but also reinforced troubling power dynamics. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power uncovers the erotic’s significance as a conflicted site of power that is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ studies.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215609
ISBN-10: 0814215602
Pagini: 246
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.53 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Intersectional Rhetorics
ISBN-10: 0814215602
Pagini: 246
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.53 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Intersectional Rhetorics
Recenzii
“The Erotic as Rhetorical Power brings Audre Lorde’s concept to life through careful historiographic readings. Writing from her lived experience, VanHaitsma guides her readers to a nuanced understanding of how same-sex and other queer relationships sustain the lives and political expressions of women rhetoricians. Her voice is clear, direct, and organized as she bridges her own intimacies with those of the women who have inspired them to formulate a theory of the erotic that remains relevant and urgently needed today.” —Aimee Carrillo Rowe, author of Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound
“VanHaitsma is an expert on archival research methods—few contemporary scholars know how to find archives, let alone use them at the level she does. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power sets an example for rhetorical and feminist scholars on the power of archives.” —Cheryl Glenn, author of Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope
“Important and engaging, The Erotic as Rhetorical Power demonstrates how to read settler colonial white women’s contributions in ways that don’t overlook their troublesome lapses. VanHaitsma’s focus on same-sex intimate friendships provides fresh examples of how behind-the-scenes investments support and enable rhetorical productivity.” —Charlotte Hogg, author of From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community
Notă biografică
Pamela VanHaitsma is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education.
Extras
This book advances a theory of the erotic as a rhetorical power that holds variable political possibility, fueling rhetorical practices and pedagogies with the potential to both transform and instantiate existing hierarchies of difference. Within this theory, I understand the erotic as an interanimation of desires—simultaneously intimate, intellectual, pedagogical, and political—that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the creative power to forge connections as well as foment change. This creative power takes on a specifically rhetorical valence as intimate connections blur the boundaries between so-called private and public life, energizing rhetorical activities that include public speaking, published writing, and the teaching of rhetoric oriented to social change. Importantly, although the pursuit of such change is more often idealized as creating connections across difference in order to facilitate positive transformation, in actuality the erotic may fuel rhetorical practices that move in directions radical, progressive, or conservative.
My theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from historiographic and imaginative engagements with the archives of romantic friendship. Working with materials from over twenty manuscript and digital collections, I have investigated the rhetorical activities of (presumably cisgender) women who sustained same-sex romantic friendships and teaching careers for decades, separated from each other only by death. From what I have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, the women who were able to sustain such relationships and careers were white; they were born into families privileged by the “violent inheritances” of settler colonialism and slavery in occupied territories now known as the United States. In this sense, the women’s romantic friendships and career opportunities stand in contrast to those of the African American couple already introduced in my prologue, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932) and Addie Brown (1841–70). I imagine another past for Primus and Brown, one less constrained by anti-Black racism, within the imaginative interludes woven between the book’s body chapters. In the chapters themselves, my historiography centers three, more privileged couples whose lives, relationships, and rhetorical activities are relatively well documented in archives.
First are “lifelong companions” Sallie Holley (1818–93) and Caroline Putnam (1826–1917). During their forty-five years as a couple, these white women from the North traveled together on the antislavery lecture circuit and then moved to the South to teach at a freedmen’s school. Another couple, Irene Kirke Leache (1839–1900) and Annie Cogswell Wood (1850–1940), shared an “opulent friendship” for more than three decades. Both conservative women who published their writing, Leache and Wood taught at a boarding school for white girls in the South. Also published authors, Gertrude Buck (1871–1922) and Laura Johnson Wylie (1855–1932) were active as a rhetorical theorist and suffrage activist. Teaching and administering the rhetoric program at Vassar College, they shared a “close personal and professional relationship” for almost twenty-five years. My historiographic focus on the extensively archived activities of these three couples allows for investigation of the erotic as rhetorical power across the latter portion of the “long nineteenth century,” from the years of abolitionist activism leading up to the Civil War and then into the Progressive Era reform movements. These couples also reflect the complexities of the erotic as rhetorical power, because it fueled the women’s teaching at diverse educational sites as well as their speaking and writing to competing political ends.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I flesh out my theory of the erotic as rhetorical power through engagement with a range of thinkers from ancient times to the present. I then more fully situate my investigation of the erotic as rhetorical power in the long nineteenth century. Specifically, I introduce the place of the erotic within women’s romantic friendships and show how the teaching profession was particularly conducive to enabling such relationships between privileged women. I also underscore how, even as the erotic of these romantic friendships fueled the women’s rhetorical activities toward sometimes transformational ends, settler colonialism and slavery were the conditions of possibility for both that erotic and its archives. Within this context, the erotic as rhetorical power energized rhetorical activities that alternately challenged and reinforced problematic power dynamics. My goal in what follows, then, is not to recover the erotic between women in romantic friendships as universally positive or inherently radical or progressive. Rather, I argue for the significance of the erotic as a rhetorical power that, while directed to conflicting social and political aims, is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ historiography.
My theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from historiographic and imaginative engagements with the archives of romantic friendship. Working with materials from over twenty manuscript and digital collections, I have investigated the rhetorical activities of (presumably cisgender) women who sustained same-sex romantic friendships and teaching careers for decades, separated from each other only by death. From what I have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, the women who were able to sustain such relationships and careers were white; they were born into families privileged by the “violent inheritances” of settler colonialism and slavery in occupied territories now known as the United States. In this sense, the women’s romantic friendships and career opportunities stand in contrast to those of the African American couple already introduced in my prologue, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932) and Addie Brown (1841–70). I imagine another past for Primus and Brown, one less constrained by anti-Black racism, within the imaginative interludes woven between the book’s body chapters. In the chapters themselves, my historiography centers three, more privileged couples whose lives, relationships, and rhetorical activities are relatively well documented in archives.
First are “lifelong companions” Sallie Holley (1818–93) and Caroline Putnam (1826–1917). During their forty-five years as a couple, these white women from the North traveled together on the antislavery lecture circuit and then moved to the South to teach at a freedmen’s school. Another couple, Irene Kirke Leache (1839–1900) and Annie Cogswell Wood (1850–1940), shared an “opulent friendship” for more than three decades. Both conservative women who published their writing, Leache and Wood taught at a boarding school for white girls in the South. Also published authors, Gertrude Buck (1871–1922) and Laura Johnson Wylie (1855–1932) were active as a rhetorical theorist and suffrage activist. Teaching and administering the rhetoric program at Vassar College, they shared a “close personal and professional relationship” for almost twenty-five years. My historiographic focus on the extensively archived activities of these three couples allows for investigation of the erotic as rhetorical power across the latter portion of the “long nineteenth century,” from the years of abolitionist activism leading up to the Civil War and then into the Progressive Era reform movements. These couples also reflect the complexities of the erotic as rhetorical power, because it fueled the women’s teaching at diverse educational sites as well as their speaking and writing to competing political ends.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I flesh out my theory of the erotic as rhetorical power through engagement with a range of thinkers from ancient times to the present. I then more fully situate my investigation of the erotic as rhetorical power in the long nineteenth century. Specifically, I introduce the place of the erotic within women’s romantic friendships and show how the teaching profession was particularly conducive to enabling such relationships between privileged women. I also underscore how, even as the erotic of these romantic friendships fueled the women’s rhetorical activities toward sometimes transformational ends, settler colonialism and slavery were the conditions of possibility for both that erotic and its archives. Within this context, the erotic as rhetorical power energized rhetorical activities that alternately challenged and reinforced problematic power dynamics. My goal in what follows, then, is not to recover the erotic between women in romantic friendships as universally positive or inherently radical or progressive. Rather, I argue for the significance of the erotic as a rhetorical power that, while directed to conflicting social and political aims, is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ historiography.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments Archives, Collections, and Databases Cast of Characters PrologueIntroduction The Erotic as Rhetorical Power in the Long Nineteenth Century Introduction to Interludes Imagined Pasts beyond the Archives Chapter 1 A Radical Erotic of Antislavery Affection: Abolitionist Lecturing and Freedmen’s Teaching, 1848–1893 Interlude 1 A School Girl Again Chapter 2 A Conservative Erotic of Emulating Beauty: Commonplace Rhetorics and Belletristic Instruction, 1868–1900 Interlude 2 My Husband Chapter 3 A Progressive Erotic of Sapphic Egalitarianism: Communication and Leadership among Equals, 1897–1922 Conclusion to Interludes Future Archives Conclusion Erotics of Rhetorical Power Bibliography Index
Descriere
A queer feminist history of rhetoric that looks at the erotic as a complicated site of rhetorical power, asking us to read the archives critically and differently.