What relationships enable our work as rhetors, activists, and teachers? What are the material conditions of these relationships? And how do these relationships and conditions allow us to keep loving, working, resisting in the face of ever-increasing political polarizations? These questions and others are asked, answered, expanded, and reframed and asked and answered again in Pamela VanHaitsma’s The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendships between Women Teachers. VanHaitsma magnifies the historical and rhetorical impact of three romantic friendships across the long nineteenth century and also imagines romantic friendships between figures whose stories were lost in the archives. In doing so, she theorizes a new understanding of the erotic as a creative power: one that forged private intimacy between people and their public energy beyond these relations and also produced rhetorics with the potential to be just as subversive as they were oppressive. This book is a complex reckoning with the erotic that unpacks a variety of possibilities across feminist and LGBT+ historiographic work.VanHaitsma opens her work—across the prologue and the introduction—by arguing for a more expansive understanding of the erotic in LGBT+ historiographies, one that considers both private and public lives. While she admits that many scholars have done such work, she notes that there are still vast geographies of time and context that are too often overlooked. She is particularly interested in the era of romantic friendships between women during the long nineteenth century. Romantic friendships, she says, “are interesting precisely because of their complex status with respect to both publicity and sexuality” (17). In an opening historical overview, she further notes that romantic friendships were common in teaching spaces as they enabled women to develop rhetorical intimacies among each other and with the public. Thus, in highlighting these romantic friendships and teaching spaces in light of the erotic, she both fills and expands current gaps in feminist and LGBT+ historiographic work.The Erotic as Rhetorical Power most prominently engages with Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984) and its conception of the erotic as a source of both power and information. VanHaitsma converses with Lorde’s transformative view of the erotic but also complicates it by giving attention to contemporary expansions from Eric Darnell Pritchard’s “As Proud of Our Gayness, As We Are of Our Blackness” to Sharon Patricia Holland’s The Erotic Life of Racism to Lyndon K. Gill’s “In the Realm of Our Lorde: Eros and Poet Philosopher” and many more. The rhetorical power of the erotic is undeniable, but this power can be just as transformative as it is oppressive. As VanHaitsma posits, the erotic as rhetorical power “holds potential to be enacted in ways that both challenge and perpetuate hierarchies of difference as structured with societies that are racist, settler-colonial, patriarchal, heterosexist, transphobic, capitalist, and so on” (11–12). It is this complex view of the erotic that frames her analysis of three particular cases of teaching-based romantic friendships.The first of these cases is presented in chapter 1, “A Radical Erotic of Antislavery Affection,” which follows the romantic friendship between Sarah (Sallie) Holley and Caroline E. Putnam. The women first met during their years at Oberlin College and worked, both together and separately, as abolitionists and teachers at freedmen’s schools. Throughout this chapter, VanHaitsma traces their intimate and rhetorical activities, saying: “Putnam and Holley’s relationship was animated by shared desires for racial justice” (46). Unlike the women discussed in later chapters, Holley and Putman were the only ones to teach African Americans. It is for this very reason that VanHaitsma sees a deep intertwining between their intimate relations, their activism, and their teaching—something that she describes as the “erotic of antislavery affection” (46). Throughout their tenure at freedmen’s schools, Putnam and Holley used the erotic as rhetorical power to fuel dual desires in their relationship and work, crossing the boundaries of private and public in order radically to subvert the racial and patriarchal expectations of their time. At the same time, VanHaitsma acknowledges how they used this same rhetorical power to enact “white saviorism” as both women—and Putnam especially so—consistently reinforced hierarchical structures in their positions at the freedmen’s schools through pedagogies that reproduced normative narratives of “religionism, classism, and Anti-Black racism” (75). The inclusion of Putnam and Holley as the first case is an especially smart move, one that demonstrates the complexity of the erotic as rhetorical power. It spanned these women’s private and public lives and was used by each, in varying measures, to enact both subversive and oppressive rhetorics. While an initial glance at Putnam and Holley’s romantic friendship might see their lives as simple, VanHaitsma’s unpacking of their erotic affection demonstrates the complexity within these romantic friendships.This complexity is even more present in chapter 2, “A Conservative Erotic of Emulation Beauty,” which follows the romantic friendship of two women who could not be any more different from Putnam and Holley. Irene Kirk Leache and Anna (Annie) Cogswell Wood first met at the Valley Female Seminary boarding school and forged a romantic friendship centered around an erotic emulation of feminine beauty. Their relationship and teaching—documented best in Wood’s The Story of a Friendship (1901)—were deeply tied to White supremacy, with both women embodying and pedagogically reproducing the beauty-centered “belletristic rhetoric for privileged white girls in the South” (93). As VanHaitsma notes, their rhetoric “went in an entirely different political direction than that envisioned by Audre Lorde” (95). Rather than dismissing Leache and Wood, VanHaitsma’s understanding of the erotic grapples with the rhetorical power of these women, even as their rhetorics are more troubling than they are transformative. While Wood and Leache simultaneously maintained a romantic friendship as an alternative to the hierarchy of heteropatriarchal marriage, they also reproduced hierarchies of elitism, classism, racism, and ableism within their writings and teachings. In other words, both their private and their public lives were fueled by this conservative eroticism. VanHaitsma’s analysis of this romantic friendship is important because it understands the erotic not only as a lens that can be used to unpack women’s civic contributions but also as one that acknowledges the White supremacist norms they enforced. VanHaitsma uses this chapter to demonstrate the necessity of a complex view of the erotic, one that can reckon with actual archival realities.This reckoning continues in chapter 3, “A Progressive Erotic of Sapphic Egalitarianism.” Here, VanHaitsma follows the romantic friendship and erotic rhetoric of Gertrude Buck and Laura Johnson Wylie, two highly educated White women who worked and lived together at Vassar College for nearly twenty-five years. Unlike that of others discussed in The Erotic as Rhetorical Power, Buck and Wylie’s status in higher education means that they are widely studied and chronicled across the field of composition and rhetoric. VanHaitsma both engages with these former studies and sheds new light on the pair by highlighting how their romantic friendship was defined by a “progressive erotic” (137) based on the principles of egalitarianism. Wylie and Buck maintained a “Boston marriage” and were both active figures at Vassar and in suffrage spaces. In both their private and their public lives, they considered themselves coequals in everything, dividing and supporting each other in rhetorical productions in their teaching, leadership, and activism. The erotic as rhetorical power fueled an egalitarian partnership between the two and, in turn, assisted them in making progressive contributions within both their institution and their communities during their years of romantic friendship. Even so, while Buck and Wylie’s romantic friendship was progressive in what it did for White women in the field of composition and rhetoric and the suffrage movement, VanHaitsma does not hesitate to call out the many ways in which it made little to no effort to challenge institutional racism or classism. Again, her theorizing of the erotic as rhetorical power accounts for this complexity, and, further, the positioning of the three romantic friendships explored across these primary chapters shows how “the erotic can fuel public speaking, publishing, writing, and teaching of rhetoric to multiple political ends—radical, conservative, and progressive” (168).What is most powerful about The Erotic as Rhetorical Power is not only the assertions about the erotic made throughout but also the attention to the whiteness of it all. Early on, VanHaitsma shares that some of her initial interest in romantic friendships was inspired by Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two freeborn African American women who maintained a decades-long intimate relationship. She returns to Primus and Brown again and again through a series of interludes woven between the primary chapters that act as imaginings in which “alternative lives and archives . . . might have been possible” (38). However, the interludes are not only spaces of imagination but also spaces of questioning. How are stories of BIPOC women’s romantic friendships lost in the archives? How are LGBT+ historiographies in the past, present, and future constrained by histories of racist oppression? How can we understand the erotic and its rhetorical power as both productive and problematic? In juxtaposing in the primary chapters romantic friendships between privileged White women and that of Primus and Brown, VanHaitsma proves the necessity for a complex understanding of the erotic, one that both criticizes the current limitations within the archives and invites readers to expand further on the rhetorical power of the erotic.I would further this by saying that we need to view VanHaitsma’s work not only as an invitation but also as a calling asking us to resist the current political oppression and censure of LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and other marginalized histories and archival possibilities. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power is a reclamation of archival possibilities, one that responds to the challenge Anne Cvetkovich first offered in the 2015 “Queering Archives” roundtable discussion: “We can’t know what a radical or queer archive is in theory and instead need to work it out in practice” (Arondekar et al. 2015, 224). VanHaitsma’s practice is grounded in both archival realities and imaginative possibilities; it is a method that understands the “queer archive” as a place both productive and problematic, the erotic as a rhetorical power that is “politically complex rather than ideal” (177). This politically complex conception of the erotic, in all its transformative and troubling iterations, should not exist in the margins but be “central to theory, practice, and the teaching of rhetoric as well as to LGBTQ+ historiography” (178). As archival lens and method, the erotic as rhetorical power puts VanHaitsma in conversation with other emerging queer archival methods like Jean Bessette’s multifaceted view of queer identity in Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives (2017) or K. J. Rawson’s unpacking of archival structures in “Mediating Queer and Trans Pasts” (2022), borrowing from and pushing beyond these works in considering the question of the “queer archive” in the current political moment.I end by following VanHaitsma in quoting Saidiya Hartman (2008, 8): “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them.” Indeed, we are in a political moment of queer loss, and, while our hunger might push us toward palatable tales of queerness, VanHaitsma invites us to fill our plates with historiographies of the erotic that consider all its potential complexities. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power explores the often-overlooked era of romantic friendships, unpacks the rhetorical activities of women in the teaching field, and acts as a guide to fuel future feminist and LGBT+ historiographic work through an intricate understanding of the erotic that offers dynamic means to keep working, loving, and resisting in the face of ever-increasing political polarizations.
Keshia McClantoc (Mon,) studied this question.