Context's Critic, Invisible Traditions, and Queering Rhetorical History

Abstract

Inspired by this journal's centennial occasion and John Murphy's call to rhetorical history, I queer his reading of Barack Obama's “turn to the past.” Turning to my own critical past, I revive incipient ideas of contextual twilight, critical liminality, and critical self-portraiture to query the operative rhetorical traditions neither Murphy nor Obama voice, to draw distinctions between making and accounting for LGBTQ history, and to imagine the history Obama might tell were the critic to ask. This historical-critical labor strives to expand the reach and grasp of queering rhetorical studies for the next century of the Quarterly Journal of Speech.