Quotes Dump

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Alexander, J., Jarratt, S. C. F., & Welch, N. (2018). Unruly rhetorics: Protest, persuasion, and publics.

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Strange Spaces, 5

We intend to move beyond the face value of the obscure and to expound hte sociality of strange spaces and attend to them as produced within society—as laden with power geometries (Massey 1994, 2005). Important questions to be raised are: for whom is the naturalized, invisible spatial texture we take for granted strange? For whom is the strangest of places perfectly lucid, familiar, even ‘at home’?

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Strange Spaces, 3-4

Keeping in play these uncertainties and opacities of space, the volume seeks to expand on Foucault’s enigmatic notion of the heterotopia, a concept which may allow for strange and unforeseen explorations. The heterotopia is a counter-site that simultaneously expresses core ideals and values of a respective society. A heterotopia is an ‘effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’ (1967/1998: 239). These counter-sites, existing in every society, are there. They are both openly acknowledged as existing, yet not freely accessible; they are institutionalized places, places which are outside of all other places, but nevertheless linked to them (such as the cemetery, the Chinese garden, the ward or the museum). Heterotopias come in two forms: heterotopias of crisis (hidden or forbidden places of people in crisis or of disorder: adolescents or menstruating women) and of deviance (rest homes and prisons for example).

What is strange about the heterotopias? Some specific heterotopian traits may crucially inform our discussion of strange spaces. Heterotopias are subject to historical changes and they may function in different ways at different times; they juxtapose irreconcilable sites within themselves and they come about when people are displaced through a break with the ordinary routines of temporality. What is strange about them is further the twofold way that they either create a space of illusion which discloses that the real world is even more illusory or the way that they create an other space; which makes us aware of the incompleteness of our messy and jumbled spaces (Foucault 1967/1998, 243).

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Queer Geographies, 111

First, a rhetoric of orientation encompasses the fusion of the symbolic and material, but we cannot anticipate how those two might align in queer articulations of space and place. ... Rather than celebrate alignments as the a priori configuration of rhetorical processes, what difference would it make to integrate mis-alignment, incoherence, or non-intelligibility as worthy rhetorical performances? ... Further, each of these books underscore the necessity of thinking through space not just temporally, but through deep time and the residual, underscoring the activating presence of palimpsests of cultural and ecological landscapes within contemporary queer rhetorics and culture.

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Queer Geographies, 105

As I’ve previously argued, the instability of norms within environments necessitates a shift from a rhetoric of identification to a rhetoric of orientation. Paired with a rhetorical cartography, orientation maps the circulation of power as it shapes large social worlds such as the suburbs, and the concomitant ways that micro-movements generate queer desires and pleasures.

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Queer Geographies, 102

Working with the assumption that space fundamentally operates as a medium of power, orientation enables rhetorical critics to hold the multiplicities of spatiality while simultaneously adhering to the notion that the final consequence of rhetorical process or action does not necessarily mean coherence, legibility, or lining up in “straight” line. To enliven the spatial turn in rhetorical studies, queer geographies do not merely trace queer identities in space, but also center how racialized sexualities structure the very conditions of possibility for public modes of being.

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Queer Geographies, 99-100

Drawing from three recent monographs that foreground an array of queer geographies across scale and region, this review essay challenges some of the taken for granted assump- tions about space, place, and mobility in rhetorical studies. Broadly, the concept of queer geographies refers to historically and geographically specific relationships between race, class, sexuality, gender, space and place. More acutely, queer geography traces how queer subjectivities are not external to, but instead emplaced within particular environments, cross-border migrations, and diasporic flows. In turn, the study of queer space, place, and movement necessitates a more robust examination of rhetorical concepts, including subjectivity, agency, invention, memory, and emotion alongside the generation of intimacies. More specifically, I imagine the topoi of queer geographies as a confluence of queer and environmental rhetorics that works to redress both the queer impoverishment of spatial scholarship alongside Pezzullo’s invitation to address how environmental matters often are taken for granted in shaping publics and public cultures.

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Queer Geographies, 99

This review essay asks how the field of rhetorical studies can center intersectional queer and trans perspectives within conversations about space, place, mobility, and mapping. What difference does it make to center queer and trans sensibilities, bodies, and practices as central to the production of spatialities? How has our criticism contextualized the study of space and place in ways that would inhibit centering queer positionalities, temporalities, public cultures, and intimacies?

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Queer Geographies, 99

More so, as Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Catalina de Onís note, the turn to space or environmental topoi in situ signals a growing ecological awareness from which to examine social and planetary precarity. Space matters. Space is alive, dynamic. Space is a medium of power. These are foundational tenets of a rhetoric of space and place that have been well established. And yet in accounting for orientations of spatiality as a social process or struggle over belonging, queer and trans perspectives on the matter seem to have fallen off the map.

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Cram, „Queer Geographies and the Rhetoric of Orientation“

Cram, E. (2019). Queer geographies and the rhetoric of orientation. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 105(1), 98-115. doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1553587

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Strange Spaces, 2

This book approaches those bewildering and sometimes unspeakably bizarre spaces where disruption or disarray leave social subjects estranged and out of place. It engages the emotional and mediated geographies of uncertainty and in-betweenness; of cognitive displacement, loss, fear or exhilaration. It expands on why space is sometimes estranging and for whom it is strange. What kinds of perceptual, material and mediated transformations render space strange and obscure? What does it mean to be in estrangement?

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Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity

Jansson, A., & Lagerkvist, A. (2009). Strange spaces: Explorations into mediated obscurity. Farnham, England: Ashgate Pub.

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Insubordinate Spaces, 180

The future of scholarship concerned with social justice requires scholars to know the work we want our work to do; to frame scholarly relations not as competition but as accompaniment; to insist that our ideas and activism be infused with ethical judgement and wisdom; to clarify the significance of different aspects of our scholarly lives; to acknowledge that our work speaks for us but also for others; and to recognize the dialogue and dialectical nature of our views of society. Honing the critical edge of scholarship concerned with social justice depends not only on what scholars know but also on how we go about knowing.

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Insubordinate Spaces, 176

Philip Deloria observes that market pressures can lead many graduate students and junior faculty to believe that they will not succeed in hte profession if they honor the past in any way, if they do not claim to be overturning past scholarship completely and replacing it with „a new political intervention, a new methodological innovation, a new paradigm that redefines the very questions being asked“ (2009, 14). Yet this fetishization of novelty is a core premise of neoliberalism. Under these conditions, researchers can be tempted to reduce social and intellectual differences to simple oedipal conflicts. While the young may attempt matricide and patricide, veteran scholars may charge younger generations with betrayal of foundational research principles and purposes. There are very real structural imperatives that pressure scholars to take this path. But one of hte most important lessons to be learned from the history of fields concerned with social justice is that destructive pressures can be evaded, inverted, subverted, and resisted.

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Insubordinate Spaces, 35

As a pedagogical, epistemological, and political practice inside insubordinate spaces, improvisation opens doors to a way of life grounded in the promotion of possibility. It is a device for turning passive victims of circumstance into active agents of emancipation and a form of alchemy that transforms poison into medicine and humiliation in to honor. ... Improvisation creates new options by revealing possibilities that already exist but have gone unrecognized (Hirmer and Jackson 2016).

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Insubordinate Spaces, 34-35

Spaces designed for subordination are structured in dominance. They are almost always well equipped and well funded. Their routines are carefully choreographed to promote stability and predictability. ... They appear to be permanent and monumental. Insubordinate spaces, however, are ephemeral and fugitive. They are forged in furtive ways on the fly and revolve around the unexpected and the unpredictable. Inside them, people cultivate collective capacities for correlation.

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Insubordinate Spaces, 32-33

Acts of accompaniment can generate creative alternatives to the limitations of hte current historical conjuncture. They can help author and authorize a new social warrant grounded in preferential options for the least powerful, in a politics of respect, friendliness, and humility. A social warrant is a widely shared consensus about what is desired and what is feared, what is permitted and what is forbidden, who is included and who is excluded, what has been done and what should be done. A social warrant is rarely written down or openly announced. It comprises a collective common sense that guides attitudes, aspirations, and actions. A social warrant functions as a de facto social charter that contains foundational principles about obligations, rights, and responsibilities. Accompaniment can be an important crucible of a new social warrant because it recognizes that solidarity is not simply found, but rather needs to be forged. It is poetic and pragmatic, diagnostic and therapeutic. It does not see itself as creating „the“ revolution but rather moves in the direction of thinkers such as the EZLN‘s Subcommandante Marcos, seeking experiences of sharing that might ultimately make a revolution possible.