Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

2020 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award Honorable Mention from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition

Romantic letters are central to understanding queer history. Debates about letters of ＂romantic friendship,＂ however, too often reduce them to unstudied expressions of heartfelt feeling. In Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age, Pamela VanHaitsma shows how the genre should be understood as a learned form of rhetoric.

VanHaitsma argues that epistolary instruction in the nineteenth-century United States shaped civic engagement in predictably heteronormative ways even as it opened up possibilities for queer rhetorical practices. Her archival study draws on writings whose authors, diverse by gender, race, class, and education, all developed ways of queering cultural norms and generic conventions in their same-sex relationships. VanHaitsma theorizes a new concept of rhetorical education for romantic engagement to account for the significant yet understudied role of such training in inventing both civic and romantic life.

Pamela VanHaitsma is associate professor at Penn State University. She is the 2021 Randy Majors Memorial Award recipient from the National Communication Association’s Caucus on GLBTQ Concerns, and her second book is The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers.