Queerpessimism paradoxically renders queer an impossible subject for rhetoric due to its overcommitment to critiques of antinormativity, which ultimately traps queer rhetoric in a discursive cage and forecloses radical potentialities.

Alexander and Rhodes, Kopelson, and Waite’s observations about composition can be similarly attached to her big sister, rhetoric. That is, much like queer composition exists in an impossible relation to crystalized pedagogical norms, the rhetorical work of queers queering queerly similarly limits its attachments through resisting, by default, the often unnamed and dematerialized “normative.” And while I certainly do not discount the importance of resisting dangerously oppressive institutions and practices, what I find impossible about queer rhetoric is the discursive cage in which it has locked itself. For example, Anthony Slagle demands, “Any queer framework must pose critical questions that help us to understand the role of difference in the construction of messages” (131). In “Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive,” Alexander and Rhodes suggest, “Queer rhetoric names a constellation of discursive practices that emerge at different times for different groups in order to articulate resistance to regimes of sexualized normalization.” More recently, William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas offer this definition: Queer rhetorics begin with the assumption that critique—the calling out of language as language—represents an initial and important destabilization of meaning, not to prevent meaning or to pretend that meaning cannot be made but to ask why this meaning at this time and under these circumstances: these are fundamentally rhetorical questions. (11) What do we do after we pose our “critical questions?” Who is responsible for identifying the “regimes of sexual normalization?” How do bodies survive beyond the hearing and feeling and experiencing of not violent languaging but the destabilization of reality which follows? Is there a there there beyond the resistance of the there that is said to be there? Much like queer theory—the formalized, interdisciplinary academic pursuit—queer rhetorics have bonded themselves so stringently to antinormative resistance vis-à-vis the discursive impulse that their actionability is dulled to inaction. And we know this. Across their oeuvre, Alexander and Rhodes acknowledge that scholarship in queer rhetoric, composition, literacy, etc. “remains relatively sparse and under-read” (“Impossible” 178; “Queer Rhetoric”). Looking at the discursive limitations in both academic and activist rhetorics, Erin Rand confirms the danger of fetishizing resistance and antinormativity: “Clutching resistance too tightly, we are in jeopardy of foreclosing the queerness that inhabits agency as its founding condition” (169). Nevertheless, such foreclosures are apparent through the still marginalized rhetorical scholarship that approaches queer. There is, of course, a further complication. Queer theory struggled, for the past two decades, between the antisocial/antirelational thesis and relational queer utopianism. The back and forth between scholars such as Lee Edelman, the posterchild of antisocial queer theory, and José Esteban Muñoz, queer of color ancestor, is so legendary and well-documented that a rehearsal of their debates seems superfluous. But, for those keeping score, Muñoz and the relational queer utopians won that war. The complication for queer rhetorics, however, is that so much of the work we do as queer rhetoricians is still dominated by the discursive tenets of the antisocial thesis that our invocation of Muñoz, other queer and feminist of color theorists, or any scholar challenging pessimistic critique becomes dematerialized. An issue, therefore, arises not because rhetoricians ignore relational queer utopianism—since Cruising Utopia’s 2009 publication, for example, queer rhetorics scholarship very rarely does not invoke Muñoz’s encouragement to think of queerness as horizon … not yet here— but that we leave the work of the then and there for another time and for someone else (often communities of color) … not yet here. Scholars like Karma R. Chávez and Eujung Kim, among others, warn us that aiming critique solely toward our pasts and action solely toward our futures collapses the much-needed material work of the present. Even so, many of us in queer rhetorics and queer studies, writ large, (yes, I’m including myself in this collective) continuously fall into paranoid readings that allow loud proclamations against, against, against normative structures without trying to (or perhaps knowing how to) turn our words into action. We, by nature of our pessimistic orientations, drown in critique. Thus, queer is an impossible subject for rhetoric precisely because of the ways we currently dematerialize and discursively limit both “queer” and “rhetoric” through pessimistic/paranoid scholarship. From this charge, let me suggest three supporting claims and, more importantly, corresponding questions for further inquiry. First, “queer” and “rhetoric,” in their historic and current formations, demonstrate different desires and are desired differently. Queer, as mentioned above and explained further below, is so tied up in discourses of antinormativity that nearly every political project can be deemed insignificantly queer if strategic essentialism or non-apparent disidentifications are engaged for communal advancement. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, is always about the work of normalization. Even radically progressive rhetorics rely on the power of normalization as a goal of persuasion insofar as any persuasive intention is the intention to make practices acceptable and common among communities. What might happen if we refuse, in the tradition of radical Black feminism, the binary of normative/antinormative (read: rhetoric/queer)? Second, “queer” and “rhetoric” are both de-materialized by discursive traditions of critique/criticism and a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously outlines the paranoid tendencies of queer reading, and her observations can (should!) be mapped onto contemporary rhetorical criticism. Sedgwick—and those who continue her project suggest that the revelation of violent knowledges does not necessarily demand action on the part of the person to whom violence is revealed: “What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent?” (141). Even when attempting to engage in the generative work of affect and relational queer utopianism, we too often find ourselves raging against the normative. In expending our energies on being against, against, against, queer rhetoricians are left with tepid gestures toward complex radical potentialities. What becomes possible if we reconsider material-discursive structures when attending to the rhetorical affects of queer? Third, queer (and most definitely its uptake in rhetoric/composition/literacy/etc.) remains enamored of the addressing/redressing/exploding the subject–object divide of Western liberalism. Tragically, this is another example of the us falling into either/or/and the most obvious trap, the second most obvious trap, or the third most obvious trap. Either we, like good poststructuralists, aim to identify and destroy the autonomous, liberal subject, or we ignore the subject to fetishize the proper objects of critique, or we completely overcorrect to the point of preserving the queer subject and their objects as articulated through neoliberal identity politics, neocolonial sovereignties, and state-granted rights. Sometimes we attempt all three. Is it possible to create a subjectless/objectless critique without engaging the predictable “bad habits” of critical theory?