On Queer Rhetorical Pedagogy and Abe

From: "Sunder the Children: Abraham Lincoln's Queer Rhetorical Pedagogy" by Charles E. Morris III, Quarterly Journal of Speech Volume 99, Issue 4, 2013

Abraham Lincoln's collective memory has always been queer. From Walt Whitman's idolatrous poetry and public lectures about his “Captain” to the Advocate's August 2012 endorsement of Barack Obama for a second term, visually dramatized by its cover illustration superimposing the president's face where the Great Emancipator's had been on the Lincoln Memorial, and through diverse rhetorics in each successive decade between them, LGBTQ people have recalled and configured Lincoln for their own noble purposes of affirmative and interventionist identification, community, politics. Queering Lincoln in this regard has most often manifested hypothetically and analogically—a photograph from the 1976 NYC Gay Pride parade depicts an activist holding a placard upon which is featured Lincoln's face and the slogan, “A Lincoln FREED THE SLAVES. WHO WILL FREE US?”—or essentially and by association, through the implicit and explicit claims of “ethnic” sexual identity that Lincoln is “our” gay forebear. Such mobilizations, while having mattered in manifold ways, have yet to fully exhaust Lincoln as a queer resource of troubling and propulsive indeterminacy and inducement regarding sexuality, which is also then intersectionally to say race, gender, class, age, ability, and more. 

Abraham Lincoln's collective memory has always been queer in another significant sense, too. From William Herndon's formative lectures beginning in 1866 to Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 Team of Rivals and her celebrity consultancy on Stephen Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln, and through diverse rhetorics in each successive decade between them, those with accumulated authority recalling and configuring Lincoln have consistently and with rare exception transgressed boundaries that Barry Schwartz theorized as the distinct domains of history and commemoration. That is to say, the commonsense distinction Kirt Wilson draws between “forensic history,” constituted by expert commitment to mapping “an accurate accounting of the past,” and “epideictic commemoration,” constituted by an “enterprise that builds communal identity and values,” is particularly important not, as he argues, because of theoretical or presumed differential “exigencies” but because of the powerfully obfuscated privileges and dispossessions materialized through “a rhetorically negotiated commingling of history and commemoration”; or, as Barry Schwartz has observed in describing the “symbiosis” created by the “new historians”: “The problem is whether memory and history get in one another's way, and under what conditions one can be confused with the other. … Commemorative occasions are sites of memory, not history; yet historians are now legitimating such sites as ritual participants. Historians are drawing their own affective, magical, symbolic connections.”9 Queering Lincoln in this regard has most often manifested hypothetically and analogically—— Time's November “Election '12” issue, its cover depicting actor Daniel Day Lewis in portrait profile as Lincoln with the slogan “WHAT WOULD LINCOLN DO?”—or essentially and by association, through the implicit and explicit claims of “national” identity that “we” are/from Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps paradoxically, this boundary queering, though long a source of heteronormative and homophobic dominance, affords opportunities for queer worldmaking through disruptive undoings of historically leveraged “truths” and normativities, challenges to institutional and individual violences, and enticing invitations to rhetorical reconstitutions.