Anniversary memories, a lost critic, and queer future multitudes of critical/cultural studies

ABSTRACT

This essay remembers Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies’ (CC/CS’s) queer engagement with the discipline. Its anniversary also conjures memories of queer critical/cultural scholar Daniel Brouwer, tragically lost in 2021. These intersecting memories amplify the archive of LGBTQ critical/cultural studies as resource for queer multitudes in the field to come, where traces of past and future imaginings might mobilize across and between generations of queer critics.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical/cultural studies
• queer memory
• reflexivity
• generosity
• intergenerationality
• Daniel Brouwer

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Bob Ivie for this invitation. Portions of this essay were presented in 2022 and 2023 at University of Kansas, Arizona State University, and University of Wisconsin. He thanks Jay Childers, Belle Edson, Sarah Tracy, Sara McKinnon, Rob Asen, John Hendricks, Catherine Squires, and Keven Rudrow for their support in memorializing Dan Brouwer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 James W. Chesebro, ed., GaySpeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1981); R. Jeffrey Ringer, ed., Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

2 Frederick C. Corey and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Sextext,” Text and Performance Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1997): 58–68.

3 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 1–25.

4 James F. Darsey, “The Cavilry that Killed Criticism,” unpublished paper.

5 Isaac N. West, “Queer Perspectives in Communication Studies,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Jon Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

6 Robert L. Ivie, “What Are We About?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (June 2004): 125.

7 Gilad Padva, “Edge of Seventeen: Melodramatic Coming-Out in New Queer Adolescence Fims,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 1, no. 4 (December 2004): 355–72.

8 Charles E. Morris III and John M. Sloop, “‘What Lips These Lips Have Kissed’: Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–26.

9 Ahmet Atay, “Charting the Future of Queer Studies in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: New Directions and Pathways,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (June 2021): vii.

10 Charles E. Morris III, “The Mourning After,” in Remembering the AIDS Quilt, ed. Charles E. Morris III (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011), xxxvii.

11 Jeffrey A. Bennett and Charles E. Morris III, “Rhetorical Criticism’s Multitudes,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–3.

12 V. Jo Hsu, “Toward QTPOC Community: A Theory in the Flesh, an Open Letter, a Closing Wound,” Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture 1, no. 1 (Summer 2021): 31–2.

13 Brouwer’s zine collection was donated to The Jean Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at University of Minnesota: https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/13/resources/9615.

14 Daniel C. Brouwer et al., “Toward a Critical Pedagogical Syllabus of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 8, no. 5 (November 2012): 125.

15 Brouwer et al., “Toward a Critical Pedagogical Syllabus,” 127.

16 Tamika L. Carey, “Necessary Adjustments: Black Women’s Rhetorical Impatience,” Rhetoric Review 39, no. 3 (July-September 2020): 269–86.

17 Karma R. Chávez, “The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance,” Keynote Address, Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, Syracuse, NY, May 29, 2021.

18 Timothy Oleksiak and Jonathan Alexander, “Queer Generosity: An Introduction from the Guest Editors,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 8, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 1–13.

19 Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2; Ames Hawkins, “Dear Sam; Dear Linda; Love Ames,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 8, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 149–60.

20 Francesca Gentile and Nicolo Gentile, “Through the Kink-Scene Curtain: Sculptural Experience as Generous Uncertainty and Queer Logics of Exchange,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 8, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 204. See also Isaac N. West, “Queer Generosities,” Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 5 (October-December 2013): 538–41.

21 María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

22 Dustin Bradley Goltz, “Queer Generativity: Temporal Collisions of Fred Astaire’s Dancing Lessons,” Text and Performance Quarterly 41, nos. 1–2 (2021): 109.

23 Bryant Keith Alexander et al., Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet: Qualitative Inquiries on Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2023), 2–3.

24 Roberta Chevrette and Kimberlee Pérez, “‘Loneliness in a Beautiful Place’: Collaboration as Queer Methodology, Techné, and Modality of Remembering,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 2 (2022): 182.

25 Charles E. Morris III and John M. Sloop, “Other Lips, Wither Kisses?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2017): 182–3.

26 Ivie, “What are We About?” 126.

27 Robert L. Ivie, “Rhetorical Innovations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 4 (1995): 2.