Rhetorical secrets: A genealogy of gay male identity in twentieth century America

The rhetorical life of "homosexuality" has experienced profound changes in the thirty years following the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Queer activism and academic queer theory present substantive challenges to any notion of a fixed "homosexual" identity. Yet, contemporary historical events necessitate a resistive engagement with the production of sexual identity categories. In particular, this rhetorical investigation of heteronormativity focuses its attention on the constitution of gay male identity in the United States during the late twentieth century. In order to disrupt contemporary rhetorical strategies of heteronormative power, this thesis enacts Michel Foucault's genealogical method by locating specific historical and discursive contingencies that might disrupt the apparent coherence of the modern apparatus of sexuality. Judith Butler's work on the performative character of sexual identity enables the contingencies of heteronormativity to be deployed differently.; Chapter One explores a rhetorical economy of secrecy and disclosure that secures the coherence of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, a key discursive effect of heteronormative power. A critique of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet and a transgressive reading of Herman Melville's Billy Budd map the ways in which disrupting the rhetorical appeal of sexual identity-as-secret might undermine the heteronormative production of gay male identity. Chapter Two elaborates Judith Butler's performative rhetoric, which animates the remainder of the thesis. Chapter Three and Chapter Four examine contemporary materializations or formations of the gay male body. Chapter Three interrogates how the gay male body becomes figured as a scapegoat for the AIDS crisis, and Chapter Four articulates how rhetorical responses to photographic images of hyper-masculine gay male bodies might work to resist such scapegoating effects. Both chapters transgress heteronormativity along an axis of corporeal containment/excess. Finally, Chapter Five and Chapter Six work to disrupt heteronormative productions of sexual collectivity. Chapter Five investigates the recent same-sex marriage debates, in which gay male subjectivity is again placed within a hierarchy of containment/excess as it relates to sexual behaviors. Chapter Six provides a corrective for this normalization through a re-conceptualization of coming out, and its potential to strip the heterosexual family of its normative force.