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.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"As a book that capably straddles feminist, queer, and rhetorical scholarship, readers will find a great deal to appreciate in this concise monograph. The text's primary contribution is to rhetorical historiography, where it offers an innovative methodological approach to confronting archival absences and accounting for queer rhetorical practices that are notoriously elusive." - Journal for the History of Rhetoric

"Pamela VanHaitsma's scholarship is intentional, smart, creative, and groundbreaking. Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education is a must-read for scholars interested in rhetorical education; the nineteenth century; archival investigation; race-class relationships; and women's, gender, and sexuality studies." - Rhetoric Review

"Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers the first queer rhetorical history of nineteenth-century romantic epistolary practices in the United States This slim volume's claims are compelling and accessible, its glimpse into the queer letters of nineteenth century rhetors is utterly fascinating, and it is an excellent example of how to bring queer scholarship to bear on the field's more traditional concerns with history, citizenship, and genre." - Rhetoric Society Quarterly

"[A]ny course that teaches or integrates archival research methods would benefit by including Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age in its curriculum...all scholars of rhetoric can benefit from VanHaitsma's queer archival methods. She invites scholars to think capaciously and creatively about archival research and the interpretation of affect within archival materials. Importantly, her approach to queering archival methods can open up new lines of questioning, highlight new relationships, and enliven the research of any scholar whose research subject has been systematically erased from archival history." - Peitho

"As a reader, the text was not only enjoyable, but the pages also evoked everyday queer curiosities missing and undiscovered in white Western rhetorical studies [] VanHaitsma's attention to diverse learners, queer ways of being rhetorical, and queer stories of everyday people through epistolary romantic engagement is exemplary." - Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Book Information
ISBN 9781643366081
Author Pamela VanHaitsma
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint University of South Carolina Press
Publisher University of South Carolina Press