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1 D E f I N I N g A LT E R N AT I V E R H E TO R I C Embracing Intersectionality and Owning Opacity A central insight to keep fully present in our thinking, rather than on the periphery, is the necessity of resisting a tendency to view discourse (language in particular use) as a disembodied force within which we are inevitably, inescapably, innocently swept along. Royster, 2002 The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine. Butler, 2005 Could it be that we just don’t know ourselves? That the very words we use to speak ourselves to others obscure as much as they elucidate? That we emerge only in the cracks when words fail to perform as we have come to expect them to? Could it be that we fail words by forgetting they are not/can never be disembodied but continue to exist only as we speak/write/display them? That we suffer from the illusion that when we speak we have not already been spoken? Some of us are compelled to write because we cannot escape daily reminders that words define us as different, as other. Some of us are swept along, free to speak, write, text, sing, shout, live with invisible words that allow us to lie with the herd. This book is about those who are compelled to write: those who don’t need Jacqueline Jones Royster’s reminder that words are not innocent neutral tools, those who do not need Judith Butler to tell them that words they cannot control are used to label them as freaks, queers, others —dismissible. I explore what it means to speak with cracked voices, to use words, language, and rhetoric in cries and rants, teases and taunts that refuse to accept the status quo. But this book is for all of us, too—all of us who are willing to look at the limits of our own knowing and accept that we have responsibility for what falls outside our experience, all of us who are willing to reject the myth of 4 C OM P ELLED TO WRI T E objectivity and embrace our subjectivities, all of us who are willing to see language as discourse and to own the implications of that insight. Of course, I am hardly the first to note the need for a different understanding of rhetorical agency and its implications. At least since we began reading de De Saussure, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Foucault, and others, rhetoric and composition scholars have understood that language is not a set, value-free tool. By consequence then, neither is rhetoric. Rather both language and rhetoric are always socially, culturally, and historically situated and dependent on actual practice for their continued existence . The underlying principle here is that language and rhetoric are both constitutive in that meaning making is based on the existence of these sociocultural systems that serve as the basis for shared understanding , but also in that these systems themselves have no existence independent of actual practice. Indeed, language and rhetoric are in a very real sense themselves reconstituted with each communicative interaction. One of our field’s chief problems has been how to translate our understanding of the theoretical complexities amongst language, culture , rhetoric, and individual identity into rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy that moves substantively beyond the presumptions of current traditional rhetoric that language and rhetoric are largely neutral tools and that, once mastered, they can be wielded equally by all as the means to economic and other kinds of power. I bring a queer twist to this problem, proposing that the concepts of intersectionality and opacity used in queer theory can help us sort out the knotty problem of negotiating identity in rhetorical theory and pedagogical practice. As Royster argues in the opening epigraph, the discursive nature of language and rhetoric must be at the center of any understanding of rhetoric and composition that takes postmodernism seriously, and discourse must be understood as an embodied force that has real consequences for real people. My most basic argument in this book is that defining some kinds of semiotic exchanges as alternative rhetoric can help us sort out both the ways members of some groups have been systematically marginalized by dominant discourse practices that pretend neutrality and the means those who have been so marginalized have used to challenge the discourses of power. In this regard, I begin with two critical assumptions: (1) personal...

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