The Erotic as Rhetorical Power offers a queer feminist history of rhetoric that recovers the civic contributions of women teachers in same-sex romantic friendships. Extending perspectives from ancient rhetoric to nineteenth-century progressivism, from Audre Lorde’s Black lesbian feminist theory to its present-day uptakes, Pamela VanHaitsma conceives of the erotic as an interanimation of desires that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the power to forge connection and foment change.

VanHaitsma’s theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from both historiographic and imaginative engagements with more than twenty archives of romantic friendships between women: Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam, Irene Leache and Anna Wood, Gertrude Buck and Laura Wylie, and Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. VanHaitsma considers how even as the erotic in these romantic friendships fueled the women’s rhetorical activities toward transformational ends—whether working toward the abolition of slavery, greater educational access, or voting rights—it also energized rhetorical activities that sometimes challenged but also reinforced troubling power dynamics. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power uncovers the erotic’s significance as a conflicted site of power that is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ studies. 

Introduction    The Erotic as Rhetorical Power in the Long Nineteenth Century
Introduction to Interludes        Imagined Pasts beyond the Archives
Chapter 1        A Radical Erotic of Antislavery Affection: Abolitionist Lecturing and Freedmen’s Teaching, 1848–1893
Interlude 1      A School Girl Again
Chapter 2        A Conservative Erotic of Emulating Beauty: Commonplace Rhetorics and Belletristic Instruction, 1868–1900
Interlude 2      My Husband
Chapter 3        A Progressive Erotic of Sapphic Egalitarianism: Communication and Leadership among Equals, 1897–1922
Conclusion to Interludes        Future Archives
Conclusion      Erotics of Rhetorical Power