Rhetoric Review Apr 2020

Disidentification and Documentation: LGBTQ Records as Emergent, Entangled Rhetoric

Rick Wysocki

Abstract

This article engages archival and oral history research to explore the documentation practices of Gays and Lesbians United for Equality (GLUE), a lesbian and gay organization active in Louisville during the 1980s and 1990s, and their effects on the production of an LGBTQ archive by local activist David Williams. I demonstrate one way of considering the rhetoricity of archives by attending to the situated rhetorical production of materials that comprise them, exploring the relationships between GLUE’s motivated production of organizational documents and the material made available to Williams’s archive. Organizationally, GLUE could not directly engage in explicitly political activity, leading to rhetorical decisions about what to include in organizational documents. These rhetorical performances, as circulated in GLUE’s documents, reflect complicated rhetorical strategies of what Jose Estéban Muñoz calls disidentification with politics.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2020-04-02
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2020.1727101
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Topics
rhetorical criticism gender and writing
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