CFP Online at https://www.emsparb.com/bidigirhets.html
Over the last few decades, the fields of rhetoric and writing studies have undergone a sort of queering. With the publications of books like The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric (Eds. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander, 2022) and Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects (Eds. William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas, 2019), special issues on queer rhetorics (Peitho’s Cluster on Queer Rhetorical Listening, Ed. Timothy Oleksiak, 2020), and several articles across multiple journals (including Computers and Composition, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly), scholars have come to recognize the value of queer rhetorical approaches. However, as bisexual scholars, Cindy and Derek have come to recognize that the invisibility that is often socially inherent to bisexuality is often also reiterated in some of these queer approaches, which tend to focus more heavily on the L and G of LGBTQIA+ and less on some of the other letters, or on “queer” as a larger umbrella. To be clear, this is not a critique of these important works in our field, but merely a recognition that it’s time for bisexual rhetorics to emerge from erasure to visibility.
Neither hetero nor homo but somewhere on the spectrum in between, bisexual identities–and thus, rhetorics–are often erased, often categorized as straight or gay depending on what kind of relationship they are in at the moment. If a bisexual woman dates another woman, she’s a lesbian; if that same woman later dates a man, she was faking it for attention. The same goes for men – either they’re gay or faking gay. However, bisexuality is not this simple. It’s not an “either, or” but a “both, and.” Despite the implications of it being called bisexuality, it does not fit neatly into a gender binary attraction model. Bisexual people can be attracted to men or women (trans or cis), nonbinary, genderqueer, or any other gender. We can be attracted to one person at a time, or many people. We may be more romantically attracted to some people or more sexually attracted to others. Bisexuality is messy and resists easy classification, and as a result so do our rhetorics.
Recent scholarship on bisexual rhetorics has started to untangle some of the complexities of bisexual identities, but we have a long way to go. Pamela VanHaitsma (2020) examines the collected papers of Rebecca Primus (a freeborn African American woman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) to affirm her likely bisexuality and to argue for the need for an archival framework that can account for bisexual rhetorics. A handful of chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetorics engage with bisexuality as well. Thomas R. Dunn (2022) cites VanHaitsma’s work, highlighting “how bi-invisibility often constrains queer memories” and examining a commemorative statue of David Bowie to show how creative rhetorical acts can dismantle these constraints (p. 27). Similarly, Olivia Wood (2022) explains how bisexuals often internalize the biphobia and cultural invisibility we encounter on a regular basis before examining TikTok to highlight how users are creating “new, distinctly bisexual cultural reference points” (p. 304). Notably, Elise Dixon theorizes bisexual rhetorics and connects them to queer rhetorics, showing how they can enrich our notions of queerness. These four pieces are doing important work, but there is much more to be done.
As such, this symposium on bisexual digital rhetorics will extend some of these conversations and start new ones on how bisexuals establish, build, and mold their rhetorical identities in digital spaces. In particular, we want to extend Elise Dixon’s (2022) argument for recognizing bisexual rhetorics as more than a lack or an erasure:
| I see bisexuality’s queer potential for the exact reason that it is often erased or elided within queer and LGBT work: because it occupies a precarious space that invalidates (some) gay and lesbian activists who push the born this way narrative to advance issues of equality like same-sex marriage…. I implore rhet/ comp scholars to consider how bisexual rhetoric embodies frameworks of thoughts that can evolve queer rhetorical scholarship to be even more unstable, disruptive, and illusive. (Dixon, 2022, p. 241) |
While Dixon’s corpus for analysis extends beyond the digital, we are focusing on digital spaces because that is where many queer folks first get to recognize and examine our queer identities. It’s where we find others like us and form communities outside of the boundaries of our analog existence. It’s here where we recognize a fruitful avenue for extending Dixon’s argument that we need to conceive of bisexual rhetorics as more than a reaction to how others perceive us (or don’t, or refuse to), but as community and identity building.
Our goal is to elevate the voices of bisexual and queer scholars while increasing the visibility of bisexual rhetorics. In particular, we are hoping to attract a diverse and intersectional group of authors who can begin to assemble a messy puzzle of what it means to be bisexual in digital spaces, to be an individual whose very existence results in the dissolution of binaries and resists neat categorization. What does it mean to build a bisexual community? What does it mean to be bisexual and [___] (and poly, and ace, and trans, and and and)? What does it mean to create a community where bisexuality is not always under scrutiny or erasure? These are just some of the questions we hope articles will answer.
TENTATIVE TIMELINE
- July 15: Proposals due to bisexualdigitalrhetorics
- September 1: Invitations sent to accepted contributors
- December 1: Article drafts due
- January 1: Feedback returned
- April 1: Revised articles due
- May 1: Full symposium manuscript submitted to Rhetoric Review
- ~September 2025: Publication of symposium issue in coordination with Bi Visibility Day
The length of manuscripts will be determined by the number of accepted articles. Rhetoric Review Symposia manuscripts are shorter than typical articles, and so are often not as in-depth. They are editorially reviewed, not double-anonymous peer reviewed.
REFERENCES
Banks, William P., Cox, Matthew B., and Dadas, Caroline (Eds.). (2019). Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer methods, queer projects. Utah State University Press.
Dixon, Elise. (2022). The queer potential of bisexual rhetorics. In Rhodes, Jacqueline and Alexander, Jonathan (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of queer rhetorics (pp. 241-249). Routledge.
Dunn, Thomas R. (2022). Bisxual invisibility, David Bowie, and the prospects of queer memory. In Rhodes, Jacqueline and Alexander, Jonathan (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of queer rhetorics (pp. 26-33). Routledge.
Oleksiak, Timothy (Ed.). (2020). Cluster on Queer Rhetorical Listening. Peitho, 23(1).
Rhodes, Jacqueline & Alexander, Jonathan (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge handbook of queer rhetorics. Routledge.
VanHaitsma, Pamela. (2020). An archival framework for affirming Black women’s bisexual rhetorics in the Primus Collections. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 51(1), 27-41.
Wood, Olivia. (2022). Rhetoric of the invisible (or, how bisexual people demand to be seen). In Rhodes, Jacqueline and Alexander, Jonathan (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of queer rhetorics (pp. 299-307). Routledge.