This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory—intersectionality, copresence, and disidentification—are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk of the article, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is examined to illustrate what engaging in alternative rhetoric from a marginalized cultural position may mean in practice.

The author reads five volumes of College English with attention to the extent to which authors account for issues of systemic difference in their writing—both in their representations of themselves as authors and in their representations of others—as one means to explore how (indeed whether) we have begun to transcend normativity in our disciplinary conversation and to identify problems in the way we deal with difference. He concludes by exploring how pedagogy and practice that deal substantively with difference are by nature transformative.

Provides a mini-autoethnography of three institutional moments in which the author saw a set of conditions that invited him to speak or write as a gay academic to make political interventions in dominant culture. Explores three important issues that are often unacknowledged in everyday discussions of homosexuality: exposing heteronormativity as heterosexism, moving beyond invisibility, and the trap of "double consciousness."

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Investigates problems faced by minority students. Examines case studies of African-American men who had finished bachelor’s degrees in education or English at a predominantly White university. Reports case study participants’ responses to their school experiences.

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This study investigates the impact of task definition on students’ revising strategies. Our primary aim was to determine if freshman students could revise globally if instructed to do so and if those global revisions would result in improved texts. We asked two groups of freshmen to revise a text provided by the experimenters; one group was given eight minutes of instruction on how to revise globally, and the other was simply asked to make the text better. The texts written by students who received the instruction were judged both to be of significantly better quality and to have included significantly more global revision. Further, the improvement appears to affect the treated population generally rather than just a small part of that population.

Robert de Beaugrande, Critical Discourse: A Survey of Literary Theorists. Norwood: New Jersey, 1988. 472 pp. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing: De construction, Composition and Influence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 256 pp. Chris M. Anson, ed. Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1989. 371 pp. John T. Harwood, ed. The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Gerald Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry. Edited with an introduction by Peter Burian. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xx + 221 pp. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 207 pp.