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612-822-4611
The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship Between Women Teachers

The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship Between Women Teachers

Paperback

Series: Intersectional Rhetorics

Literary CriticismGeneral ReferenceGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 0814259243
ISBN13: 9780814259245
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Oct 4 2024
Pages: 246
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Winner, 2025 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the National Communication Association's Public Address Division

The Erotic as Rhetorical Power offers a queer feminist history of rhetoric that recovers the civic contributions of women teachers in same-sex romantic friendships. Extending perspectives from ancient rhetoric to nineteenth-century progressivism, from Audre Lorde's Black lesbian feminist theory to its present-day uptakes, Pamela VanHaitsma conceives of the erotic as an interanimation of desires that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the power to forge connection and foment change.

VanHaitsma's theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from both historiographic and imaginative engagements with more than twenty archives of romantic friendships between women: Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam, Irene Leache and Anna Wood, Gertrude Buck and Laura Wylie, and Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. VanHaitsma considers how even as the erotic in these romantic friendships fueled the women's rhetorical activities toward transformational ends--whether working toward the abolition of slavery, greater educational access, or voting rights--it also energized rhetorical activities that sometimes challenged but also reinforced troubling power dynamics. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power uncovers the erotic's significance as a conflicted site of power that is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ studies.

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