Page 99 →Conclusion

Failure is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.

Jack Halberstam (2011)

The now familiar story of Eliza’s love letters concluded predictably with a conventional happy ending. That is to say, the story’s ending was in keeping with the teleological orientation taught by the heteronormative rhetorical education of her time. Although her fiancée, Horace, had broken their engagement after reading her early romantic letters, over time she learned to compose epistolary rhetoric that rendered the break in their relationship temporary. Eliza and Horace reunited through romantic letters and pursued the normative purpose for the genre. To put it another way, Eliza overcame her initial rhetorical, pedagogical, and relational “failures.” She was “successful” in learning to write generically conventional love letters and in achieving the heteronormative progression promised by nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals: “love, courtship, and marriage.”

Understood according to this heteronormative logic of success, my history of epistolary instruction and practice is a history of pedagogical and relational failure. Complete letter writers instructed everyday people in how to achieve the happy endings of stories like Eliza’s. The manuals taught genre conventions for address, pacing, and purpose, while also embedding a conception of romantic relations as heteronormatively gendered, temporally “straight,” and teleologically oriented to marriage. But this heteronormative instruction failed insofar as it was marked by openings that could be seized with queer effects by learners in nonnormative romantic relations. Addie Brown, Rebecca Primus, and Albert Dodd were such learners, all failing in their queer rhetorical practices. While Brown and Primus learned genre conventions widely taught by manuals, the women queered Page 100 →those conventions through same-sex epistolary address and exchange that refused mastery of both straight time and its normative telos. Dodd’s rhetorical practices also failed, insofar as he subverted the normative focus on civic engagement within his classically modeled college-level training, instead transferring what he had learned to develop genre-queer epistolary practices for romantic engagement.

But to name these failures is no slight to Brown, Primus, and Dodd’s rhetorical ingenuity. Quite the contrary. To turn toward failure is to place their rhetorical practices, however generically unconventional for the period, within a longer story—a history not limited to the happy endings of letter writers such as the fictional Eliza—a history that underscores the failures of both heteronormative rhetorical education and heteronormative historiographic practices. This history is a story in which failure is, as Jack Halberstam has asserted, “something queers do and have always done exceptionally well” (Queer Art 3). Characterizing failure as a practice one might do “exceptionally well” of course challenges normative ideas about success and failure, and this is precisely the point where failure functions as cultural “critique” (11). As Stacey Waite has emphasized in her work on queer failure and pedagogy, attention to failure does not disregard the inventive ways that learners navigate cultural norms, generic conventions, and rhetorical constraints. Rather, this sort of critical attention underscores how larger cultural forms and educational systems “set the scene for the failure in the first place,” how they “produced it as a failure” (Teaching Queer 58).¹

I advocate, as this book comes to a close, that our “queer movement” within histories of rhetoric and sexuality gather further momentum through movement toward such failure (Morris, “Archival Queer” 147). In a first sense, this type of queer movement involves studying the rhetorical practices of still other learners like Brown, Primus, and Dodd—learners who failed by the heteronormative standards within their given historical contexts and, in so doing, revealed the failures of heteronormative rhetorical education. Research on additional sites of rhetorical education for romantic engagement and a broader range of queer rhetorical practices would not only expand histories of rhetoric but also hold historiographic implications for interdisciplinary histories of sexuality in terms of how the texts of intimate life are interpreted. As my analysis of Brown and Primus’s epistolary rhetoric concluded, historians may take up a rhetorical and pedagogical stance that nuances approaches to same-sex romantic letters within histories of so-called romantic friendship. Specifically, histories of sexuality might move beyond familiar debates about romantic friendship by reading romantic letters as epistolary rhetoric that is learned and crafted. Moreover, as my analysis of Dodd’s genre-queer epistolary practices showed, there is room for historians of sexuality to rhetorically situate letters in relation to a broader range of genres. Here historians of rhetoric, in moving toward queer failure through further study Page 101 →of queer rhetorical practices, have the potential to contribute in meaningful ways beyond rhetorical studies.

But, in a second sense, moving toward failure means confronting the failure of historiography itself where queer rhetorical practices like Brown, Primus, and Dodd’s have gone understudied in the fields of rhetoric, communication, and composition. Specifically, this queer movement exposes the failure of citizenship and civic life as normative historiographic frames in rhetoric. With respect to histories of rhetorical education, it underscores the failure of histories oriented exclusively to civic engagement to account for queer practices in the nineteenth century.

The reasons to engage in queer movement toward failure are not limited, however, to becoming more inclusive of queer rhetorics within histories of rhetorical education. As Karma Chávez has argued, moving beyond the “long standing investment in the normative function of citizenship” within rhetorical studies is not merely a matter of confronting, yet again, our “history of exclusions” (“Beyond Inclusion” 163–164). Instead, she wrote, “it is imperative that we break from that history, not in order that Rhetoric may become a more inclusive discipline but so that it may become something entirely different: a discipline constituted through non-normative, non-citizen, non-Western perspectives and ways of knowing and being” (164). Such a break amounts, in Halberstam’s terms, to failure as resistance to “mastery” through “critique” and “refusal,” insofar as successfully mastering rhetoric’s historiographic norms means focusing on a narrowly conceived civic domain as though it were separate from that of romantic, private, or intimate life (11).²

In histories of rhetorical education, queer failure as a critical break from the normative focus on civic engagement involves movement toward a discipline simultaneously constituted through nonnormative historiographic ways of knowing and attentive to queer ways of being rhetorical. While my own queer history of rhetorical education has maintained a focus on Western practices from the nineteenth-century United States, I invite scholars across rhetoric, communication, and composition to join in developing histories of rhetorical education for romantic engagement within other cultural locations and historical periods—not simply to be more inclusive but also to encourage new kinds of historiographic failure that will allow rhetoric to be constituted in nonnormative ways.

We may resist mastery of what Chávez called the “citizenship narrative” in rhetoric and move toward historiographic failure through attention to rhetorical education for romantic engagement well before and after the postal age (163). While I opened with Eliza’s distinctly nineteenth-century story, we can just as easily imagine a present-day Eliza. Expected to reply to Horace’s romantic epistolary address and wanting to avert potential failure, Eliza enters into her Page 102 →Google search box “how to write a love letter.” The search returns advice articles from wikiHow, BuzzFeed, the Atlantic, and Hallmark. One of the first tips she encounters is, “1. Don’t worry that love letters are a thing of the past.”³ In spite of such reassurance from articles about romantic epistolary rhetoric, however, it is more realistic to imagine that our twenty-first-century Eliza, or Liz, receives her romantic messages via text, Facebook, Snapchat, Tinder, or any of the many other dating sites and apps. So Liz instead Googles “online dating how to.” This Liz also finds advice on rhetorical practices for composing romantic relations from wikiHow and the Atlantic, as well as Lifehack and the New Yorker.⁴ These are just a few of many examples from only the first page of search results, and, as Liz reads on, she finds more articles as well as advertisements for books and apps that promise to assist with everything from the so-called lost art of love letters to romantic communication in a digital age.

Our hypothetical Liz also finds that, although rhetorical and pedagogical practices for romantic communication have evolved considerably, certain problems and possibilities seem to persist across historical and technological specificities. In the digital as much as the postal age, everyday people such as Liz are faced with questions about developing language practices for romantic engagement. How, for instance, does one learn language practices for rhetorically participating in romantic relations, and where can models be found? How do learners successfully balance inventing their practices in keeping with such instruction and also writing “from the heart”? And, when desires and relations are queer within the context of contemporaneous conventions, how do people fail “exceptionally well” by learning to compose nonnormative relations from the models, genres, and practices available to them?

In exploring these questions through archival research on romantic epistolary rhetoric in the nineteenth-century United States, I found it was taught and learned through the overt genre instruction of popular letter-writing manuals, from examples found in cultural texts such as poetry and the novel, and even via transfer from formal college-level rhetorical training for civic engagement. Diverse learners drew on the genre conventions and rhetorical awareness widely modeled and taught, and yet, in writing “from the heart” to compose epistolary rhetoric for queer romantic relations, they necessarily subverted cultural norms and transgressed generic and educational boundaries. The instruction and practices under study here show that rhetorical education invents both civic and romantic life. In teaching generically conventional practices for romantic relations, rhetorical education for romantic engagement shaped U.S. citizen subjects as heteronormative romantic subjects. At the same time, this rhetorical education was subject to queer failure and reinvention: learners creatively crafted queer and genre-queer practices for composing nonnormative epistolary rhetoric that failed by the standards of normative instruction.

Page 103 →Even as my concept of rhetorical education for romantic engagement has emerged from archival investigation of romantic epistolary rhetoric, it also suggests further opportunities for historiographic practices that move beyond civic engagement and toward queer failure. Whereas my study of the postal age has taken the romantic letter genre as its touchstone, rhetorical training in other genres and modes will be more salient in studies focused on different historical periods and cultural locations. I have formulated my definition of rhetorical education with the goal that it be relevant for such studies. Again, I define rhetorical education for romantic engagement as the teaching and learning of language practices for composing romantic relations. Crucial to the potential relevance of this concept is my use of the broad (perhaps even vague) phrase “language practices.” While “language” maintains some interest in the role of alphabetic language, “practices” are not limited to romantic epistolary rhetoric or even to alphabetic writing. Instead, depending on the context under study, scholarship may consider rhetorical instruction and practices that are written and spoken, digital and multimodal.

Histories of Western rhetorical education for romantic engagement could examine, for instance, the ways classical rhetorical training through oral dialogue and declamation exercises prepared young men for rhetorical participation in specific forms of same-sex erotic relations. As noted in my analysis of Dodd’s encounters with representations of homoerotic relations within classical rhetoric and literature, eroticized same-sex relations between men (and with boys) were a fairly standard feature of classical rhetorical education. In Isocrates as well as Plato, such relations were seen as pedagogically productive for learning through oral dialogues about rhetoric. Moreover, as Erik Gunderson’s work suggests, rhetorical exercises through the genre of declamation amounted to another important form of rhetorical training with potential connections to same-sex relations between Roman men. While Gunderson’s scholarship is more concerned with rhetorical (and psychoanalytic) theory, future historical research could examine rhetorical education for romantic engagement in this context. Such research could move toward queer failure in both senses, the pedagogical and rhetorical as well as the historiographic. First, this research may ask, how did training in rhetoric teach cultural norms for privileged young men’s participation in same-sex erotic relations, pedagogical and otherwise, as well as opposite-sex romantic relations and marriage? And where did such training fail, as evinced through queer rhetorical practices? Second, and just as important, how may historiography attentive to such practices fail by the standards of the citizenship narrative within rhetoric, thus queering even those histories that focus on the most disciplinarily normative contexts of Ancient Greece and Rome?

Of course, movements toward queer failure within histories of Western rhetorical education need not be limited to these contexts. Another potential Page 104 →starting point for historical research on periods prior to the nineteenth century is suggested by Catherine Bates’s history of courtly rhetoric in Elizabethan language and literature. Bates has considered modern as well as prior meanings of courtship, analyzing literary representations of “both ‘courtship’ in the sense of wooing or making love to another person, and ‘courtship’ in the sense of being a courtier, of suing for favour, of behaving as courtiers should behave” (1). Whereas Bates offered what is primarily a study of literary and linguistic history, another history more focused on rhetorical education for romantic engagement could investigate questions like these: how were English people taught rhetorical practices for participating in courtly love during the Elizabethan era? How did this instruction fail by producing queer practices? And how may a historiographic focus on the different types of courtship rhetoric—that of both the wooer and the courtier—fail in terms of normative distinctions between romantic and civic domains?

Future studies of rhetorical education for romantic engagement may move toward queer failure through consideration of not only historical but also present-day instances of teaching and learning. There is almost no end to the popular pedagogical texts that now teach language practices for rhetorically participating in romantic relations. These pedagogical texts include a large number of twenty-first-century manuals. While taking book form, such manuals move beyond strictly alphabetic language; they teach the rhetoric of romantic engagement via multiple genres and modes, addressing language practices that are verbal, embodied, visual, and digital.

One intriguing and disturbing example is Robert Greene’s popular “primer,” The Art of Seduction.⁵ Greene’s book approaches seduction precisely in the way that Plato warned against in his condemnation of rhetoric and that nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals also cautioned learners to avoid. Instructing readers about the social power of seduction, Greene has identified types of seducers and “victims,” and he taught “cunning” strategies and “tactics” for how seducers make an “art” of persuading and manipulating their victims (xx–xxv). Interestingly, Greene drew most of his types from literary figures of the past, so that the “rake” and the “coquette” of the eighteenth and nineteenth century persist in this twenty-first-century instruction (17–28, 67–78). While perpetuating cultural norms for gender, sexuality, and power in ways that raise obvious ethical dilemmas, Greene’s book is ripe for a study of rhetorical education for romantic engagement that accounts for its popular pedagogy rather than simply discounting it as manipulative and sexist. Such a study could move toward queer failure in both senses. First, how does Greene’s instruction in composing romantic relations through the art of seduction fail by the standards of contemporary norms for ethical and “healthy” relationships? And how are his own seductive pedagogical aims subject to failure, to appropriation toward queer and feminist Page 105 →ends? In the second sense of queer failure, how may the examination of manuals like Greene’s fail in terms of historiography’s normative orientation to civic engagement by taking up questions of power and seduction that so fully saturate political and intimate life?⁶

Other studies of present-day rhetorical education for romantic engagement that move toward queer failure may consider books that teach language practices not limited to the alphabetic. In addition to how-to articles like those our hypothetical Liz found, available books range from The Rules for Online Dating: Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in Cyberspace to Love @ First Click: The Ultimate Guide to Online Dating, from The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Online Dating to Online Dating for Dummies.⁷ These books offer advice on representing oneself through visual and digital rhetoric as well as participating in the various forms of exchange afforded by dating websites, messaging platforms, apps, and other forms of digital communication. Such guides could be examined to look at questions such as these: how does their instruction teach shifting cultural norms as well as new modes for rhetorical participation in romantic relations? And what openings for queer failure emerge with digital forms of rhetoric for romantic engagement?

To fully understand the complexity of present-day rhetorical education for romantic engagement, future studies will need to compare books like these to other manuals offering less normative instruction. While the majority of popular books generally presume heterosexual relations, other manuals focus on same-sex relations. Manuals such as Man Talk: The Gay Couple’s Communication Guide teach readers how to use language within romantic relations between men; books on gay and lesbian relationships more broadly, such as Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships That Last, include advice chapters focused on language practices, especially in oral communication.⁸ These books raise questions about how instruction in language practices for same-sex relations may also embed culturally normative or “homonormative” conceptions of those relations as oriented to long-term (even “permanent”) coupling.⁹ In present-day contexts, what are perhaps more queer are manuals that teach language practices for participating in relationships that, regardless of the genders of those involved, are oriented not to the couple but to various nonmonogamous configurations. Guides such as Redefining Our Relationships: Guidelines for Responsible Open Relationships and The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities include extensive instruction in how to communicate about emotions, jealousy, and boundaries within nonmonogamous relations.¹⁰ Studies that examine such guides alongside the more heteronormative ones may ask questions like these: how do these books teach different language practices and cultural norms, both conventional and queer? How do the guides focused on same-sex and nonmonogamous relations Page 106 →encourage queer failure, functioning as a refusal and critique of heteronormative and homonormative cultures in the United States?

Future studies of rhetorical education for romantic engagement should also move toward queer failure while turning to a broader range of cultural contexts, not limited to Western and colonial rhetorics, as the work of Chávez along with that of Qwo-Li Driskill, Wendy Hesford, Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley, and Malea Powell would advise in various ways. There is a need to interrogate the relevance of Western concepts of romantic and erotic love within global and indigenous contexts. Scholars may explore how such concepts do and do not travel (in relation to more material flows) with imperialist, colonizing, and/or queer effects.

Potential research sites for such exploration are suggested by interdisciplinary studies, such as Laura Ahearn’s Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal and Nicole Constable’s Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages. Constable, for example, has considered multiple modes of correspondence among Filipinas, Chinese women, and U.S. men within the context of globalization. These correspondents wrote to one another in pursuit of marriage, with hundreds of Internet dating and “mail order” companies involved in the process of exchange. While Constable’s ethnographic study focused on the experiences of the women and men involved, a study of rhetorical education for romantic engagement could examine websites associated with Internet dating businesses that offer instruction in rhetorical practices for transnational online dating across significant geographic and cultural distance. What heteronormative conventions are emphasized within this instruction in language practices for composing cross-cultural relations? How is this same instruction marked by queer failure with respect to various culturally specific notions of relational success?

Investigation of contexts beyond the West could further queer movement toward failure as a critique of rhetoric’s normative citizenship narrative. Like Western concepts of romantic and erotic love, our very notions of “citizenship” and “civic” would need to be interrogated, as suggested by Chávez as well as by Amy Wan. Here scholars may consider how sites of rhetorical education for romantic engagement shape citizens, noncitizens, global citizens, and even citizens as global consumers. As Constable’s study indicated, many present-day pedagogical texts—especially those published and sold online—circulate globally. How do these texts teach language practices that encourage particular forms of state-sponsored romantic relations? At the same time, how does their instruction fail in terms of culturally varied concepts of success for romantic, marital, familial, kinship, and/or community relations? How might such instruction, circulating globally and teaching genres and modes for romantic communication Page 107 →across cultural lines, put further pressure on the very idea of “civic” rhetoric as necessarily tied to citizenship or nation?

My concluding account of possible starting points for future studies is by no means exhaustive—just as our hypothetical Liz’s first page of search results was not. Countless other websites, manuals, and past pedagogical practices could be studied. But what I hope this account intimates is the wide-ranging potential for subsequent scholarship to use, extend, appropriate, complicate, and revise my concept of rhetorical education. Reconceptualizing rhetorical education as oriented to not only civic but also romantic engagement, I invite scholars to examine the teaching and learning of language practices for composing romantic relations across different cultural contexts, historical periods, and, by extension, genres and modes of romantic rhetoric. While this book has taken up questions raised by the story of Eliza’s romantic epistolary rhetoric, the new questions I raise by way of conclusion are intended to prompt research that is simultaneously romantic and civic—rhetorical, pedagogical, and queer—with relevance for histories of rhetoric and sexuality as well as our own present-day relations.

May we, in pursuing such research and moving toward queer failure, answer Charles Morris’s call to “produce rhetorical histories … that will warrant and arm our queer scholarship, pedagogy, and activism” (“Archival Queer” 147). And may our histories arm pedagogy and activism that seizes “opportunities,” as Jonathan Alexander and David Wallace encourage, to engage learners in “challenging discussions about how the most seemingly personal parts of our lives are densely and intimately wrapped up in larger sociocultural and political narratives that organize desire and condition how we think of ourselves” (W302–03).¹¹ In these ways and many others, may we think of our queer histories of rhetorical education as holding the potential to both learn from and teach the stories of everyday people like Liz, Eliza, Horace, and Belinda; Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus; and Albert Dodd, John Heath, Julia Beers, Anthony Halsey, Jabez Smith, and Elizabeth Morgan. Page 108 →