The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric

The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, offering a dynamic overview of the history of and scholarly research in this field.

The handbook features rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, class, and sexuality. More important, chapters also attend to the intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability, and neurodiversity. In so doing, the book acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory has to work by scholars of color, feminists, and activists, inside and outside the academy. The first book of its kind, the handbook traces and documents the emergence of this subfield within rhetorical studies while also pointing the way toward new lines of inquiry, new trajectories in scholarship, and new modalities and methods of analysis, critique, intervention, and speculation.

This handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students studying rhetoric, communication, cultural studies, and queer studies.

Jacqueline Rhodes is the Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work on queer and feminist rhetorics has been published in journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, PRE/TEXT, and Rhetoric Review. Her co-authored and co-edited books have won a number of awards, including the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and the 2015 Computers & Composition Distinguished Book Award (for On Multimodality); the 2016 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship (for Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self); and the same award in 2017 for Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics. Her award-winning documentary feature Once a Fury (Morrigan House, 2020), which profiles the members of a 1970s lesbian separatist collective, is currently streaming on tellofilms.com.

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The author, co-author, or co-editor of twenty-one books, Alexander writes frequently about queer culture and conducts research in the areas of life writing, lifespan writing, and the rhetorics of popular culture. His most recent work has been in creative nonfiction, consisting of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award), Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot, Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir.