This essay initiates a critical conversation about (in)fertility in academia. We argue that four patterns of discourse exacerbate the challenges for women and trans* academics struggling to conceive while navigating so-called “biological clocks” and “tenure clocks” simultaneously: conflicting rhetorics regarding egg quantity and quality in relation to the typical age one starts a tenure-track job; sexist and transphobic rhetorics of fear-mongering in medical and academic settings; rhetorics of silence surrounding the impact of miscarriage, which often accompanies infertility; and cisheterosexist institutional discrimination in the face of exorbitant treatment costs. We use feminist “strategic contemplation” to reflect critically on these patterns of discourse in relation to our lived experiences of (in)fertility. In doing so, we validate those struggling, educate those who are not, and seek a more just reproductive landscape for academic women and trans* people whose clocks are ticking.

Bisexual discourse is underexamined as such within rhetoric. So too are the historical practices of African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) communities. Responding to these forms of erasure, my essay advances the study of Black women’s bisexual rhetorics through a focus on the collected papers of a freeborn African American woman, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932). Specifically, the essay offers a comparative analysis of two archival collections containing letters to her: the widely studied Primus Family Papers and the more recently acquired Rebecca Primus Papers. Taken together, these collections offer an enlarged view of Rebecca’s epistolary relationships with people of more than one gender. In doing so, I argue, the new collection reveals a need for a bisexual archival framework, which redresses the limitations of any single collection of romantic letters as a necessarily partial and speculative source of information. This framework affirms Black women’s bisexual rhetorics while recovering a more diverse LGBTQ+ past.

AbstractWhile scholars rightly question exaggerated claims for the democratizing potential of digital archives, this essay argues they facilitate civic participation that rhetoricians should encourage further via our pedagogies of public memory. I advance this argument through analysis of four LGBTQ sites: the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, ACT UP New York Records, Arizona Queer Archives, and Digital Transgender Archive. Engagement with these sites is fruitful for exploring archival participation with respect to preserving the past and advancing claims about LGBTQ lives in the present and future.

Stacey Waite’s Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing offers a crucial provocation for rhetorical studies. As “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education” reminds, pedag...

This essay advances same-sex romantic correspondence as a pre-Stonewall site of rhetoric’s queer extra curriculum. Grounded in archival research on African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, I argue their epistolary exchange was animated by queer erotics that enabled their participation in self-education for racial uplift.

Engaging with feminist rhetorical methodologies of critical imagination and interdisciplinary queer studies of gossip, this essay theorizes gossip as a methodology for feminist and queer historiography in rhetoric. Gossip as historiographic practice is then illustrated through the example of its uses to develop a queer history of rhetorical education and women’s epistolary practices.

This essay explores the pedagogical project of integrating digital archival research into the undergraduate classroom. We contend that rather than simply asking students to

This essay advances a new pedagogical approach to engaging with archives in undergraduate courses. Through this approach, students not only examine traditional archival materials from the past, but also create new online archives of present-day sources they identify as related. Rather than training undergraduate students to become archival specialists, this pedagogy invites them to inquire into the relevance of archival materials to their own everyday lives and composing practices in digital spaces.

While romantic letters are usually understood as unstudied and natural expressions of heartfelt love, I argue they are learned through genre instruction and crafted through rhetorical practice. In the nineteenth-century United States, manuals taught generic conventions for epistolary address, pacing of exchange, and rhetorical purpose, embedding within this instruction a heteronormative conception of romantic relations. Yet these same conventions were susceptible to queer adaptation, particularly in the epistolary practices of writers composing same-sex relations. Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus were African American women who learned but reinvented the conventions by negotiating category-crossing forms of address, timing exchange with urgency rather than restraint, and repurposing the romantic letter to erotic and even political ends. Analyzing Brown and Primus's letters alongside manuals thus underscores the dynamic ways both instruction and practice shape romantic letters and life.