The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric

Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late 20th and early 21st 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 as a whole 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.