Things Worth Keeping: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World

Abstract

the inclusion of his own same-sex desire within diary entries. Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age moves us outside the space of sexual encounters as a metric of evaluating queerness as VanHaitsma urges scholars to write about queer histories at a time when notions of queerness did not exist. Through the methodology of speculation, VanHaitsma asks us to consider how queer composing was not only possible but also necessary to consider when addressing the queer archive. Her writing also offers rhetorics insight into ways rhetors have queered form and language before queer theory was conceptualized. In her conclusion, VanHaitsma suggests digital space as a future site of inquiry. Thus, she enacts the methodology from the late Jose Munoz in Cruising Utopia, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (4). VanHaitsma’s work in archival research and suggestion considers how digital space links the past to the present and considers what the future of rhetorical education might be. Her move away from queerness located in bodies and focus on queerness as a methodology for composing opens the potential for queer studies. Perhaps we should look at queer practices as opposed to historical queer people for confirmation that queerness has been thriving for centuries. VanHaitsma transports queerness away from the queer body and into locating what does the queer body produce and what do we archive.