In the 1920s, the noble ideal of women’s liberation became tied to the smoking of cigarettes. In the 2000s, the noble ideal of LGBT liberation became tied to Israel’s image as an outpost of liberal democracy amid a desert of Arab backwardness. In both acts of mass persuasion, someone in effect said: Ethos, pathos, and logos be damned! There’s a better way. It is virtually impossible to understand how contemporary rhetoric and mass persuasion function without examining their rhetorical infrastructure as constructed by the field of public relations.
More than twenty years after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed at what queer can gesture toward—“the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning, when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8)—this special issue of The Writing Instructor seeks to enliven queer/reclaim queer/activate queer/reinvigorate queer/explicate queer/exculpate queer/keep queer alive by exploring and ascertaining the state of “queer and now.” Where and how does queer live in the here-now? Does it? What/where are queer’s (anti-)ambitions? Queer’s possibilities? What contradictions/tensions/contestations/excitements/pleasures exist around queer? What constitutes queer production/the production of queers today? (How) does queer overlap with (and/or subvert?) LGB? And T? And how does queer produce (how is queer produced by) literacy, writing studies, pedagogical practices, rhetoric, social/cultural/historical contexts, politics, and ideology?
