GENRE FLUIDITY AND WRITING IDENTITY: ACTIVIST WRITERS, QUEER FEMINIST RHETORICS, WORKING FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

Abstract

My dissertation proffers genre fluidity as a term to describe the rhetorical acts of shifting across and moving among genre conventions by blending and/or transgressing genre boundaries. Genre fluidity is defined as two rhetorical strategies writers and communicators use: 1. employing multiple texts in multiple conventional genre forms for one purpose; and 2. combining and reshaping conventions of multiple genre forms within a single text. Here, I construct both of these practices—multi-text single-focus writing and mixed-genre single-text writing—as queer rhetorical moves with broad applicability. My project focuses on Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alice Walker along with four local activist-writers in Eastern North Carolina, examining connections between identity and writing as a way to better understand genre-fluid rhetorical practices. The organization models genre fluidity by including digressions and interruptions of memoir, brief polemics, and a bit of storytelling. I also deliberately cross boundaries by focusing on well-known writers and their texts (humanities scholarship) and working with community member participants (social science scholarship) who are activists engaged in working for social and economic justice (the ultimate goal of my work). This intentional genre-fluidity in the text is queer (open to new forms and to possible failure) and feminist (multi- vocal and praxis-oriented), and it is both personal and political. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship as well as writing studies and rhetorical genre studies, I explore the writing practices of community activists for social and economic justice. I argue that aggregating existing scholarship of these rhetorical practices through a genre-fluid framing is a necessary prequel to further study. Significant attention to genre fluidity holds the promise of extending research and critical inquiry in rhetoric and rhetoric-adjacent fields. Genre-fluid practices can leverage commonalities and connections across genre (and disciplinary) boundaries for existing and not-yet-encountered rhetorical contexts in public discourse and in business and professional communication.