Queer (Im)Possibilities

Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes were awarded the CCCC Exemplar Award for their collaborative work, which has been integral to rhetoric and writing studies, particularly in the tracks of queer rhetoric and theories. Indeed, Alexander and Rhodes's collaborative oeuvre has prompted the field to imagine and to reimagine possibilities and impossibilities when interfacing queerness with rhetoric and writing studies, especially in the arenas of digital rhetoric, multimodal composition, and internet studies. They have explored how new media open up possibilities for problematizing sex/gender/sexuality and create possibilities for new representations of sex/gender/sexuality. They have also offered the field definitions and explorations of queer rhetoric. 

Following the award and their impact writ large on writing and rhetoric, I am working with Michael Faris (Texas Tech University) on an edited collection wherein contributors consider how Alexander and Rhodes's work has shaped the field and then extend their contributions to new sites, questions, and problems. It will reprint influential works by Alexander and Rhodes and original essays by scholars in the field reflecting on and extending their work, with a focus on how queerness in the field is not simply "difficult" but is "one of composition's impossible subjects."