Queerly Remembered

Thomas R. Dunn

Description

An interdisciplinary examination of the strategies GLBTQ communities have used to advocate for political, social, and cultural change

Queerly Remembered investigates the ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) individuals and communities have increasingly turned to public tellings of their ostensibly shared pasts in order to advocate for political, social, and cultural change in the present. Much like nations, institutions, and other minority groups before them, GLBTQ people have found communicating their past(s)—particularly as expressed through the concept of memory—a rich resource for leveraging historical and contemporary opinions toward their cause. Drawing from the interdisciplinary fields of rhetorical studies, memory studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, Thomas R. Dunn considers both the ephemeral tactics and monumental strategies that GLBTQ communities have used to effect their queer persuasion.

More broadly this volume addresses the challenges and opportunities posed by embracing historical representations of GLBTQ individuals and communities as a political strategy. Particularly for a diverse community whose past is marked by the traumas of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the forgetting and destruction of GLBTQ history, and the sometimes-divisive representational politics of fluid, intersectional identities, portraying a shared past is an exercise fraught with conflict despite its potential rewards. Nonetheless, by investigating rich rhetorical case studies through time and across diverse artifacts—including monuments, memorials, statues, media publications, gravestones, and textbooks—Queerly Remembered reveals that our current queer "turn toward memory" is a complex, enduring, and avowedly rich rhetorical undertaking.

Sujets

• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• GLAAD
• Romaine Patterson
• Gay Shame
• Gender bender
• Distrust
• Tokenism
• Effeminacy
• Queer Nation
• Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
• Dissident
• Embarrassment
• Heteronormativity
• General officer
• Nickname
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Controversy
• General
• V.
• Oppression
• Anecdote
• Queer
• Matthew Shepard
• Dissidence
• LGBT

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611176711
• Langue: English

Extrait

Q ueerly Remembered
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
Q ueerly Remembered
Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past
Thomas R. Dunn

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-670-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-671-1 (ebook)
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1 Making do with Heterosexual History
CHAPTER 2 A Monument to a great fag
CHAPTER 3 Remembering Matthew Shepard
CHAPTER 4 Imagining GLBTQ Americans
CHAPTER 5 Preserving a Queer (After) Life
CHAPTER 6 In (Queer Public) Memory s Wake

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. East-facing Alexander Wood statue
2. North-facing plaque depicting Wood s lands
3. Plaque featuring Wood s accomplishments
4. The Fondling Plaque
5. Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C .
6. Gay Vietnam Veterans Memorial
7. A death display using form to queer the gravescape
8. Patricia Cronin s Memorial to a Marriage
9. Memorial to a Marriage in Woodlawn Cemetery s garden gravescape
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
On June 24, 2016, President Barack Obama designated a new Stonewall National Monument, the first National Park landmark to honor the LGBT community s role in national life. The monument, which includes the Stonewall Inn and immediate surrounding area in New York City, commemorates a community uprising that took place at the site after a police raid on June 28, 1969. The designation of the national monument came less than two weeks after a gunman at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killed forty-nine people and a century after the founding of the National Park Service.
In Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Remembering the GLBTQ Past , Thomas R. Dunn explores in a series of case studies a turn toward memory as a political and rhetorical action by members of a community sometimes erased by history. Dunn s studies of monuments, memorials, statues, gravestones, textbooks, and publications recovers, celebrates, and interrogates memory and forgetting as rhetorical actions in a conflicted, fluid, and changing community seeking to contribute to queer persuasion.
Queerly Remembered is a lucid and penetrating study, sure to be of interest for memory studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and rhetorical studies.
Thomas W. Benson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At its heart, queer monumentality is about publicly acknowledging the meaningful moments and people from our collective pasts that have made our presents and futures more livable and empowering. In these few paragraphs, I would like to recognize the many people and institutions that contributed in ways large and small to the completion of this book, lest they be forgotten.
This project would have been impossible without the unflagging intellectual and financial support from three outstanding institutions of higher learning. Support from the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and a Graduate School Summer Fellowship, both from Syracuse University, facilitated a summer of reflection that spawned the initial considerations of this book. These concerns were further crystalized through a research fellowship provided by the School of Arts and Sciences during the first year of my Ph.D. program at the University of Pittsburgh. The School of Arts and Science also provided a summer research grant for travel and study in Toronto, Ontario, in 2008. My research in Scotland, England, and Ireland in the summer of 2009 was made possible by a grant from the Frank and Vilma Slater/Scottish Nationality Room Committee at Pitt. In addition, a generous grant from Pitt s Women s Studies Program Student Research Fund enabled archival investigations and fieldwork in San Francisco, California, Washington, D.C., and Princeton, New Jersey. The Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University has also been hugely supportive of this project, offering encouragement, time to write, and financial support.
Likewise, several people, organizations, and institutions have generously supported this book and its earlier instantiations by granting this scholar their support, insights, and/or permission to reproduce materials. In doing so, they have helped make the final product infinitely better. For their generosity, I would like to thank Patricia Cronin, Jessea Greenman, Del Newbigging, Dennis O Connor, Congressional Cemetery, the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, the Daniel E. Koshland San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the Manuscript Division of Princeton University Library, and the late David B. Boyce. Thanks also to Michigan State University Press for granting permission to reproduce and extend chapter 3 , which was previously published in Rhetoric Public Affairs , and to Taylor Francis for granting permission to reproduce chapter 2 , previously published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech . In addition, my heartfelt thanks to the staff at the University of South Carolina Press, who expertly saw this book from slapdash ideas on a page to final product.
I have also been particularly lucky to spend several years working on this book in the company of outstanding scholars whose input enhanced this manuscript. For their proofreading, hole-poking, and merrymaking, I must thank Brita Anderson, Josh Beaty, David Landes, Katie Kavanagh O Neil, Joe Packer, John Rief, Brent Saindon, and Joe Sery. Thanks to Kendall Phillips for introducing me to the study of public memory and nudging me to stick with academia and to Chuck Morris for exemplifying for me and many others the queer paths backward that so enrich this project. Very special thanks also go to John Lyne, Kirk Savage, and Ronald Zboray. Each has offered me endless support, advice, and expertise. Collectively they pushed me to do my best work and worked together fabulously-no small achievement in itself. Other colleagues, mentors, and friends who helped me immeasurably in this journey include Kari Anderson, Eric Aoki, Hamilton Bean, John Crowley, Carl Burgchardt, Bernadette Calafell, Greg Dickinson, Sonja Foss, Katie Gibson, Stephen Hartnett, Linda Hobgood, James Janack, Lisa Ker nen, John Lynch, Brent Malin, Nick Marx, Mari Lee Mifsud, Gordon Mitchell, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Belinda and Bj rn Stillion Southard, Barbara Warnick, Elizabeth Williams, and Mary Zboray, as well as anyone I may have forgotten.
To my mentor and friend Lester Olson go my most heartfelt thanks. Over countless classes, e-mails, lunches, and discussions, you have been my biggest supporter, most encouraging voice, and most exacting interlocutor. Thank you for pushing me to ask tough questions, to interrogate my own assumptions, and to stay true to myself. Thank you also for encouraging me to pursue my insights vigorously, to avoid simplistic answers, to seek out complexity, and always to keep in mind how the tasks at hand might be done in life-affirming ways. It has been both a pleasure and an honor to work with you.
For me the hardest part of writing this book was letting go of the cherished moments that might have been spent with an unbelievably supportive family. As this book demonstrates, not all GLBTQ people have been fortunate to have families on whom they can rely. My family has always been there for me, and I am so thankful for them every day. To Matt, Dan, Grace, Jillian, and Carly-thank you for the phone calls, the laughs, the encouragement, the visits, and all the moments you had my back. To my parents, Gary and Barbara, I aspire every day to make you proud. The completion of this book was possible only because of the countless books you read to me and with me decades ago. Thank you for the family dinner table, asking me how my day was, making me do my homework, and allowing me to learn from my mistakes. Thank you for believing in me always, loving me no matter what, and for all of the persistent words of support you have given me my entire life. Finally, to my husband Craig: thank you for sharing nearly every adventure and misadventure of this project. Thank you for indulging my nerdy interests, putting up with my trips abroad, sticking by me in good and bad times, having faith in me always, moving across the country with me, keeping me well fed and constantly laughing, and always being your amazing self, proudly and without fear. You still make me happier than I thought I could be. I love you and I am grateful for you every day. You are my everything.
Finally, this project is dedicated to the countless GLBTQ people in the past and present who-despite overwhelming odds to the contrary-found ways to live, to speak, to be heard, and to persevere so that others might learn to speak in a queer voice.
CHAPTER 1
Making do with Heterosexual History
I N 1914 D R . W ILLIAM J. R OBINSON, A physician, sexologist, and chief of the Department of Genito-Urinary Diseases at Bronx Hospital who examined individuals suspected of being homosexual inverts, published an account of his views on homosexuality. 1 Castigating his sexological colleagues who argued that same-sex desire was a normal part of human existence, Robinson reasserted that homosexuality was a sad, deplorable, pathological phenomenon. Every sexual deviation or disorder which has for its result an inability to perpetuate the race is ipso facto pathological, ipso facto an abnormality, and this is pre-eminently true