University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2018 "We're asking you to show up" : accountability as rhetorical practice for queer, feminist, and racial justice allyship. Laura Tetreault University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Tetreault, Laura, ""We're asking you to show up" : accountability as rhetorical practice for queer, feminist, and racial justice allyship." (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2982. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2982 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “WE’RE ASKING YOU TO SHOW UP”: ACCOUNTABILITY AS RHETORICAL PRACTICE FOR QUEER, FEMINIST, AND RACIAL JUSTICE ALLYSHIP By Laura Tetreault B.A., University of Rhode Island, 2010 M.F.A., Emerson College, 2013 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English/Rhetoric and Composition Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2018 Copyright 2018 by Laura Tetreault All rights reserved “WE’RE ASKING YOU TO SHOW UP”: ACCOUNTABILITY AS RHETORICAL PRACTICE FOR QUEER, FEMINIST, AND RACIAL JUSTICE ALLYSHIP By Laura Tetreault B.A., University of Rhode Island, 2010 M.F.A., Emerson College, 2013 A Dissertation Approved On April 10, 2018 by the following Dissertation Committee: __________________________________ Karen Kopelson Dissertation Director ___________________________________ Mary P. Sheridan ___________________________________ Kiki Petrosino __________________________________ Dànielle Nicole DeVoss ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Judy and Carl Tetreault, for teaching me imagination. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you, first, to Karen Kopelson for everything, the whole time—since you sent my UofL acceptance email (even though I remain your most annoying recruit) through my doctoral hooding. Thank you for the hours-long conversations about matters simultaneously academic and personal; for such stunningly close attention to my words and ideas and for never letting me get away with a half-formed claim; for letting me into Queer Theory; for your friendship. To Mary P. Sheridan: approximately the first thousand times you told me to embrace the mess, I wanted to cry, scream, or hide, but on the thousand and first, I finally tried it out and it turned out to be pretty great. Thank you for knowing I could all along. To Kiki Petrosino: thank you for guiding me away from easy arguments about privilege and positionality in art and activism and pushing me to ask all the deeper questions. And to Dànielle DeVoss: thank you for listening to my multidirectional and uncertain ideas and for handing them back to me on a neatly written piece of paper with bullet points, and for all your draft comments that helped me trust my own directions. Thank you as well to Bruce Horner for being not only a mentor but also a great collaborator, to Bronwyn Williams for your support in the Writing Center and for being an advocate for the LGBTQ+ Writing Group, and to Brenda Brueggemann for supporting early ideas for this project. I am also deeply grateful to the mentors who have been with me since before my doctoral program and who continue to provide such strong support. iv John Trimbur, thank you so much for being there for me during and way beyond my time at Emerson, and for knowing just what to say to guide me through an endless array of academic anxieties. Thank you to Jabari Asim, my MFA thesis chair, for understanding and supporting my love of research and inquiry and for conversations about race in America that formed some of the seeds of my current work, including in this dissertation. Tracing back to my undergraduate work at URI, thank you to Mary Cappello for showing me that it’s not only possible but also often magical to merge intellectual inquiry and creative work. This project and the five years of doctoral work it represents would not have been possible without the friendship of my UofL crew. Thank you to my cohort, who scooped up a lonely Boston girl in Kentucky and saw me through so much personal and academic growth over the past five years: Rachel Gramer, Megan Hartline, Jamila Kareem, Keri Mathis, and Travis Rountree. Thank you to my writing group—Megan, Rachel, Keri, Elizabeth Chamberlain, and Michelle Day—for reading many early drafts of these chapters and for your support of my sprawling messes of ideas, which meant the world. To Tasha and Justin Golden, thank you for your love and for understanding about art and poetry and music in an academic world. Thank you as well to all the friends who worked with me and challenged me through our forums on equity and sustainability at UofL: Sara P. Alvarez, Michael Baumann, Khirsten Echols, Ashanka Kumari, and Caitlin Ray, I can’t wait to see all you’re going to do in this field and this world. And thank you to the cohorts ahead of mine, who were so good at holding space for this newcomer, especially Ben Wetherbee, Brittany Kelley, Amy Lueck, and Stephanie Weaver. All the above relationships are the most important thing I take away from this process. v To my best friend and forever writing and random adventure partner, Shannon LeBlanc: thank you for the bus ride and the honesty and for walking around Cambridge all night convincing me that moving to Louisville would maybe be okay, and then for your keys and couch when I found myself in Indiana. I’m so glad you came here too. And to Ashley Avery-Miller, muse, thank you for being the first to know and for staying on the phone with a baby queer across all the miles and all the time. Thank you to my enduring Emerson group: Jen Crystal, Emily Avery-Miller, Martin and Anshika Hansen- Verma, Susannah Clark, Abby Travis, Tina Paschkópic: I’m so glad our MFA brought us together but that we keep showing up for each other in so many ways. I want to thank my parents, Judy and Carl Tetreault, for too much to fit on any page: for my education, all the books I wanted, and all the enormous and tiny ways you have supported me my whole life. Mom, thank you for the road trips, for being my fire extinguisher, and for showing me that if I mess something up I can always just make something interesting out of the mess. Dad, thank you for the weird creature drawings and the trees, for our love of music and stories, and for teaching me to make new things out of old materials. I love you both so much. Finally, endless, enormous, daily gratitude to Emily Thomas, the best surprise I found in Kentucky. vi ABSTRACT “WE’RE ASKING YOU TO SHOW UP”: ACCOUNTABILITY AS RHETORICAL PRACTICE FOR QUEER, FEMINIST, and RACIAL JUSTICE ALLYSHIP Laura Tetreault April 10, 2018 In this threatening political climate, many are asking how to advocate for social justice across axes of difference, such as in coalitional movements working for queer, feminist, and racially just futures. Rhetoric and composition scholarship, especially cultural rhetorics, has long studied the activist practices of specific communities, but cross-community allyship remains undertheorized. This dissertation responds to these public and scholarly exigencies by more deeply exploring the complexities of positionality, privilege, and oppression that accompany advocacy across differences. The project explores the rhetorical dimensions of allyship in complexly networked, contemporary digital social justice messaging, focusing on centering racial justice in queer and feminist activism in order to advance an antiracist approach to studying intersectional activist rhetorics. This dissertation forwards scholarship on allyship in social justice through advancing a rhetorical methodology grounded in accountability. I argue that allyship is a vii rhetorical process that requires awareness of context and positionality, and the work of developing allies’ activist rhetorical awareness must foreground accountability to vulnerable communities. The analytical strategies I advance derive from Black Feminist and queer of color activist community practices: asking to whom and for what a particular rhetorical action is accountable; centering those most vulnerable in a particular context while making critical connections to intersecting, systemic oppressions; and foregrounding impact over intention as a way to trace rhetorical circulation with a focus on understanding the potential consequences of specific actions for communities most vulnerable in a given context. These strategies are inherently rhetorical, requiring awareness of context, position, and audience, in addition to emerging aspects of rhetoric such as circulation. By unpacking the rhetorical dimensions of activist strategies, this project advances a methodological frame for antiracist social justice allyship. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………. iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………… vii LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………….