Queer Caucus Sponsored Panel in Spokane, WA

OCTOBER 2024 — The Queer Caucus Sponsored Panel this year will meet in Spokane, WA, at CCCC. Co-author David Ornales and I have been accepted for the role of Speaker 2 - “Toward a Rhetorics of Alienation Informed by Difference, Alterity."

Photo by James Richman, https://www.visittheusa.com/destination/spokane

Before Marx’s theory of alienation, writings from antiquity used iterations of the term alien to describe both immaterial estrangement from God and alienation from one’s own material property. Queer writings continually circle back to economic and social experiences of alienation. Rhetorical studies as a tool is needed to systematically parse the complex relationship between the individualized queer self and the alienated other under global industrialization as mediated in language through argument.

Grounded in queer rhetorics and capitalist critique, my project first charts Marx’s alienation within texts from theorists trained in French post-1945 philosophy. The artifact analyzed is Gary Fisher’s Gary In Your Pocket, a diarist’s response to state-sponsored genocide and an arguable literary equivalent to The Diary of Anne Frank.