Desire confounds rhetoricians and sexologists alike. In this essay, I draw on Karen Barad’s agential realism to theorize sexual desire as a “phenomenon”: a dynamic entanglement within and between bodies, including physiological processes, stimuli, awareness, and the instruments deployed to measure it. These relational elements intra-act in the context of enduring social forces that shape our experiences. Juxtaposing contemporary clinical research and an influential sexual survey, The Hite Report, as “agential cuts,” I examine how the phenomenon of desire is complexly rhetorical, as the elements comprising desire collaborate to mobilize and inhibit behavior but may also be subject to gendered intervention and constraint.

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

This essay explores potential connections between feminist historiography in rhetoric and the digital humanities. We investigate how specific digital innovations might invigorate feminist historiographic study, and we pause to consider how a turn to the digital might run counter to feminist methodological imperatives.

This essay attends to the archive as an “inventional site for rhetorical pasts” (Morris, “Introduction”) by examining the construction of a queer archive and its effects on lesbian subjects. Drawing on queer archival theories of ephemera, I argue that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's Lesbian/Woman (1972) constitutes an archive of lesbian experience that functioned rhetorically as a communal and identificatory resource. Martin and Lyon rendered the experiences of women associated with the lesbian homophile organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in the form of “anecdotes” and strategically curated them into middle-class categories designed in direct contrast to the gender and class transgressions of the lesbian bar scene. I identify the rhetorical effect on readers, “archival consciousness raising,” by analyzing autobiographical letters Martin and Lyon received in response and tracing the limits of this effect for more diverse lesbian readers.