Erin J. Rand
Syracuse University, Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Faculty Member
- Syracuse University, LGBT Studies, Department MemberSyracuse University, Women's and Gender Studies, Department Memberadd
- Erin J. Rand is an Associate Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and is affiliated with LGBTQ Studies a... moreErin J. Rand is an Associate Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and is affiliated with LGBTQ Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. She earned her PhD from the University of Iowa in 2006. Her research focuses on the rhetoric of activism and social movements, especially queer and feminist activism. Rooted in contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, her work also draws upon critical theory, cultural studies, and queer and feminist theories, with an eye both to understanding the rhetorics of social change and rethinking (or queering) the rhetorical tradition.
Rand's essays have appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly, Women's Studies in Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ World Making, Western Journal of Communication, and Journal of Communication Inquiry. Rand's books include Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood's Queerness (Ohio State University Press, 2025) and Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (University of Alabama Press, 2014).edit
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The Lesbian Avengers, an activist group of the early 1990s, utilized rhetorics of visibility to draw attention to lesbian issues, highlighting their gendered and sexualized bodies. Coinciding with the emergence of lesbian chic in popular... more
The Lesbian Avengers, an activist group of the early 1990s, utilized rhetorics of visibility to draw attention to lesbian issues, highlighting their gendered and sexualized bodies. Coinciding with the emergence of lesbian chic in popular culture, the Avengers complicated the bodily abstraction presumed in public discourse by flaunting a sexual excessiveness that could not be contained by a heteronormative economy of desire. Premised on displacement, the Avengers’ visibility therefore productively queers the politics of visibility.
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The 25th anniversary of the founding of ACT UP provides a moment to reflect on the group’s unquestionably profound effects on the management of HIV/AIDS, the queer community, the history of social movements in this country, and even the... more
The 25th anniversary of the founding of ACT UP provides a moment to reflect on the group’s unquestionably profound effects on the management of HIV/AIDS, the queer community, the history of social movements in this country, and even the development of queer theory in the academy. But it should also encourage us to consider the ways in which ACT UP’s legacy is one of complicated affective intensities*affects that produce individual feelings, but also those that drive cultural histories and are directed toward political ends. As Deborah Gould contends, ‘‘various constellations of affects, feelings, and emotions, as they shifted over time, decisively shaped the trajectory of lesbian and gay, and eventually queer, political responses to AIDS.’’ An affective history, or what Ann Cvetkovich calls an ‘‘archive of the emotions,’’ of ACT UP attempts to capture ‘‘activism’s felt and even traumatic dimensions,’’ and challenges definitions of the political that would relegate affect to the private realm. Remembering ACT UP’s naissance, then, is an opportunity to recognize the political stakes of recounting a particular affective history, and also to cultivate a deep appreciation of the contradictions involved in deploying affect as an activist tactic. Especially salient to queer politics and scholarship today is the ambivalent relationship between pride and shame that was forged through ACT UP’s activism. Contemporary queer theorists have suggested that alongside the notable accomplishments of gay liberation activism and gay and lesbian studies in the academy, the gay pride movement has ‘‘generated considerable dissatisfactions . . . [and] given rise to a surprising array of discontents.’’ Thus, in order to interrogate the usually unquestioned choice of ‘‘pride’’ as an affect around which to rally, some queer activists and scholars have launched a ‘‘renewed engagement with a category that represents, by definition, the very opposite of ‘pride,’ at once its emotional antithesis and its political antagonist: namely, the category of shame.’’
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Queer critical rhetoric queers rhetorical theory, disrupting easy delineations of theory, criticism, and the archive. Privileging the unpredictable innovation of queer movement, queer critical rhetoric builds upon rhetorical traditions... more
Queer critical rhetoric queers rhetorical theory, disrupting easy delineations of theory, criticism, and the archive. Privileging the unpredictable innovation of queer movement, queer critical rhetoric builds upon rhetorical traditions even as it challenges the normative logics by which the rhetorical canon is assembled, preserved, and deployed.
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Research Interests: Sociology and Mathematics
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... Citing Laclau and Mouffe, Anna Marie Smith (1998) explains that the identity of one chain of equivalence is constituted by its differential relation with other ... violent and full of rage: Straight people have a privilege that... more
... Citing Laclau and Mouffe, Anna Marie Smith (1998) explains that the identity of one chain of equivalence is constituted by its differential relation with other ... violent and full of rage: Straight people have a privilege that allows them to do whatever they please and fuck without fear ...
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... Citing Laclau and Mouffe, Anna Marie Smith (1998) explains that the identity of one chain of equivalence is constituted by its differential relation with other ... violent and full of rage: Straight people have a privilege that... more
... Citing Laclau and Mouffe, Anna Marie Smith (1998) explains that the identity of one chain of equivalence is constituted by its differential relation with other ... violent and full of rage: Straight people have a privilege that allows them to do whatever they please and fuck without fear ...
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In the past several years, a flurry of queer fashion blogs and websites, new brands, and small retailers have emerged that feature clothing and accessories described as "masculine of center." Targeted toward butch women, trans men,... more
In the past several years, a flurry of queer fashion blogs and websites, new brands, and small retailers have emerged that feature clothing and accessories described as "masculine of center." Targeted toward butch women, trans men, tomboys, genderqueers, and others who desire masculine fashions for bodies not traditionally recognized as male, this new movement in style and design affirms nonconforming gender presentations that are typically excluded from the bi-gendered fashion world. In this article I focus specifically on the sartorial objects of masculine of center style, arguing that they exert an affective pull on viewers, consumers, and wearers, acting as nodal points through which communities and desires cohere. I approach masculine of center fashion as embodied "queer affectation," highlighting the everyday affective practices of dressing and the entanglements of flesh and fabric in the performative materialization of the gendered, raced, and classed body. While fashion's revolutionary impact is certainly circumscribed by the neoliberal commodification of identities, I suggest that the queer lines of attachment enabled by masculine of center fashion are never fully predicted by capitalism's agenda, and thus allow a glimpse of a queerer world organized around the embodied pleasures of and for the aesthetic.
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At the 2015 RSA Summer Institute, several authors of this White Paper convened at the Whither “Social Movement” in Rhetorical Studies? Workshop (organized and co-lead by Christina R. Foust, University of Denver and Charles E. Morris, III,... more
At the 2015 RSA Summer Institute, several authors of this White Paper convened at the Whither “Social Movement” in Rhetorical Studies? Workshop (organized and co-lead by Christina R. Foust, University of Denver and Charles E. Morris, III, Syracuse University). This white paper, collectively authored by The RSA 15, asks relevant questions to the study of social movements: What is at stake in the loss of “social movement” in rhetorical studies? For rhetorical critics who see the value of “social movement” (in interdisciplinary connections and public relevance, for instance), what must be done to rehabilitate the term? More particularly, what is the relationship between social movement as a phenomenon, noun, or “thing” and others’ treatments of social movement as a verb, process, or indicative of meaning change? How might reclaiming “social movement” for rhetorical studies invigorate work across different disciplinary domains, and the public?
The RSA 15:
Suzanne Berg, Newman University
Betsy Brunner, University of Utah
Josue David Cisneros, University of Illinois
Doug Cloud, Colorado State University
Michael Eisenstadt, University of Kansas
Kelly Jakes, Wayne State University
Michelle Kearl, IUPU-FW
Dominic Manthey, Pennsylvania State University
Jade Olson, University of Maryland
Milene Ortega, Georgia State University
Erin J. Rand, Syracuse University
Alyssa Samek, California State University Fullerton
Jessica Shumake, University of Arizona
Ian Summers, University of Utah
Justine Wells, University of South Carolina
To cite this paper in APA: RSA 15 (2016). Whither Social Movement in Rhetorical Studies? A White Paper. Presented at the Rhetoric Society of America conference, Atlanta, GA, May 26-29, 2016. For inquiries, please contact Christina Foust (cfoust@du.edu)
The RSA 15:
Suzanne Berg, Newman University
Betsy Brunner, University of Utah
Josue David Cisneros, University of Illinois
Doug Cloud, Colorado State University
Michael Eisenstadt, University of Kansas
Kelly Jakes, Wayne State University
Michelle Kearl, IUPU-FW
Dominic Manthey, Pennsylvania State University
Jade Olson, University of Maryland
Milene Ortega, Georgia State University
Erin J. Rand, Syracuse University
Alyssa Samek, California State University Fullerton
Jessica Shumake, University of Arizona
Ian Summers, University of Utah
Justine Wells, University of South Carolina
To cite this paper in APA: RSA 15 (2016). Whither Social Movement in Rhetorical Studies? A White Paper. Presented at the Rhetoric Society of America conference, Atlanta, GA, May 26-29, 2016. For inquiries, please contact Christina Foust (cfoust@du.edu)
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At the 2015 RSA Summer Institute, several authors of the proposed White Paper convened at the Whither “Social Movement” in Rhetorical Studies? Workshop (organized and co-lead by Christina R. Foust, University of Denver and Charles E.... more
At the 2015 RSA Summer Institute, several authors of the proposed White Paper convened at the Whither “Social Movement” in Rhetorical Studies? Workshop (organized and co-lead by Christina R. Foust, University of Denver and Charles E. Morris, III, Syracuse University). The two and a half days proved inspiring and productive, as participants considered the loss of the term “social movement(s)” from the scholarly conversation in rhetoric, particularly following McGee’s polemic against the traditions of resource mobilization, functionalism, and the basic reduction of social movement to a “thing” awaiting classification by rhetorical critics (McGee, 1980; DeLuca, 1999; Enck-Wanzer, 2006). Participants considered the relocation of “social movement” into activist work (Cloud, 2009; Aseynas, McCann, Feyh, & Cloud, 2012) and rhetorical field methods (McHendry, Middleton, Endres, Senda-Cook, & O’Byrne, 2014), as well as tactics of resistance related to affect (Bruce, 2015), neoliberal capitalism (Pezzullo, 2011), and digital ubiquity (Ganesh & Stohl, 2013).
Though we can read “social movement” into the record of rhetorical studies, participants raised a number of questions: What is at stake in the loss of “social movement” in rhetorical studies? For rhetorical critics who see the value of “social movement” (in interdisciplinary connections and public relevance, for instance), what must be done to rehabilitate the term? More particularly, what is the relationship between social movement as a phenomenon, noun, or “thing” and others’ treatments of social movement as a verb, process, or indicative of meaning change? How might reclaiming “social movement” for rhetorical studies invigorate work across different disciplinary domains, and the public? This white paper is the product of conversations provoked by these questions.
Though we can read “social movement” into the record of rhetorical studies, participants raised a number of questions: What is at stake in the loss of “social movement” in rhetorical studies? For rhetorical critics who see the value of “social movement” (in interdisciplinary connections and public relevance, for instance), what must be done to rehabilitate the term? More particularly, what is the relationship between social movement as a phenomenon, noun, or “thing” and others’ treatments of social movement as a verb, process, or indicative of meaning change? How might reclaiming “social movement” for rhetorical studies invigorate work across different disciplinary domains, and the public? This white paper is the product of conversations provoked by these questions.
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Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion Depression: A Public Feeling . By Ann Cvetkovich . Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2012 ; pp. xi + 278. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper. Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist . By Barbara Tomlinso...more
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... Citing Laclau and Mouffe, Anna Marie Smith (1998) explains that the identity of one chain of equivalence is constituted by its differential relation with other ... violent and full of rage: Straight people have a privilege that... more
... Citing Laclau and Mouffe, Anna Marie Smith (1998) explains that the identity of one chain of equivalence is constituted by its differential relation with other ... violent and full of rage: Straight people have a privilege that allows them to do whatever they please and fuck without fear ...