Abstract

When two transgender teenagers posted eerily similar suicide letters to public Tumblr accounts in late 2014 and early 2015, they inspired a viral memorialization effort across the website. In this article, I argue the widespread circulation of transgender suicide rhetoric facilitates the possibility for queer rhetors to provoke collective enactments of rhetorical agency even after their deaths. I identify the suicide letters as an emergent rhetorical form, which on its dissemination and due to its intelligibility, incites a kairotic moment. The kairotic moment may be protracted by a network of bodies who feel and collectively reproduce its sensate exigence. As it becomes viral, the kairotic moment acts as the queer futurity of ecological rhetorical agency because it stretches the visceral pressure of exigence beyond its original spatiotemporal emergence, draws bodies into collaborative networks, and orients invention toward the dismantling of normative rhetorical constructs and the composition of alternative worlds.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2019-01-01
DOI
10.1080/02773945.2018.1549334
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

References (41) · 4 in this index

  1. Rhetorical Moves in an Occluded Genre: A Qualitative Analysis of Suicide Notes Master's T…
  2. The Cultural Politics of Emotion
  3. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
  4. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric
  5. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Show all 41 →
  1. 10.5422/fso/9780823225033.001.0001
  2. 10.1080/14791420.2015.1119290
  3. 10.1215/9780822384434
  4. 10.2752/174321905778054845
  5. Washington Post
  6. 10.14321/qed.5.1.0024
  7. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  8. 10.1215/23289252-2400226
  9. 10.1215/10642684-2006-029
  10. 10.2307/j.ctt21668mb.24
  11. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetoric
  12. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
  13. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  14. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece
  15. Lithub
  16. Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks
  17. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday
  18. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England
  19. Slate
  20. Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse
  21. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
  22. Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere
  23. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  24. 10.1080/00335630802210377
  25. Reclaiming Queer: Activist & Academic Rhetorics of Resistance
  26. 10.14321/qed.1.2.0038
  27. 10.2307/j.ctt5hjqwx
  28. 10.1016/j.jeap.2015.04.006
  29. New York Times
  30. Time and Qualitative Time
  31. The Transgender Studies Reader
  32. Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture
  33. Rhetoric Review
  34. 10.18574/nyu/9781479832149.001.0001
  35. Charles. Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent
  36. 10.7312/will17790