Pamela VanHaitsma

“The Erotic as Rhetorical Power brings Audre Lorde’s concept to life through careful historiographic readings. Writing from her lived experience, VanHaitsma guides her readers to a nuanced understanding of how same-sex and other queer relationships sustain the lives and political expressions of women rhetoricians. Her voice is clear, direct, and organized as she bridges her own intimacies with those of the women who have inspired them to formulate a theory of the erotic that remains relevant and urgently needed today.” —Aimee Carrillo Rowe, author of Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

“Important and engaging, The Erotic as Rhetorical Power demonstrates how to read settler colonial white women’s contributions in ways that don’t overlook their troublesome lapses. VanHaitsma’s focus on same-sex intimate friendships provides fresh examples of how behind-the-scenes investments support and enable rhetorical productivity.” —Charlotte Hogg, author of White Sororities and the Cultural Work of Belonging

“VanHaitsma is an expert on archival research methods—few contemporary scholars know how to find archives, let alone use them at the level she does. The Erotic as Rhetorical Power sets an example for rhetorical and feminist scholars on the power of archives.” —Cheryl Glenn, author of Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope

---

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.

---

Reviewed in Women’s Studies in Communication (48.3) and Peitho (27.2)

---

Ohio State University Press, 2024

---