Let’s Have a Kiki About Queer Worldmaking Families: The Irreverent Rhetorician Dishes about Queer Domestic Spheres, the Threat of Stochastic WOrLdSaViNg Rhetorics, and How to Nurture Queer Worldmaking Subjectivity at Home

Jay Hardee

Advisor: Michelle LaFrance, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: McKinley Green, Rachel Lewis

Online Location, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/97916683852?from=addon
June 16, 2025, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

I contend that the discursive, embodied, and affective rhetorics of mobile queer domestic spheres render queer families into worldmakers, reshaping the publics they inhabit into something queerer, more hospitable to marginalized people. But this worldmaking potential is under assault from wOrLdSaVeRs—reactionaries in the media, activists, online trolls, and politicians—who want to “save” the world from queerness and wokeness, expelling queerness and diversity from a fascist unitary public sphere. I describe networks of stochastic rhetoric designed to terrorize queer people, and state legislative attacks on queer people in both public and private spheres. Still, queer families continue the work of worldmaking through our discursive, embodied, and affective engagement with the publics we move through, and through the cultivation of domestic worlds that produce queer subjectivities, queer rhetors in contests about the normative contours of the publics we inhabit.

On top of it all, I add a metacritical move into the mix, writing as the Irreverent Rhetorician, following my kiki methodology that includes writing in a queer voice, flaunting decorum, and tweaking the conventions of academic writing. Throughout the dissertation, I include Queer Family Snapshots, vignettes from my life that illustrate the substantive points of the project, while enacting my central claim that queer domestic spheres have political worldbuilding potential. And I speak to you, ProQuest, like we’re good judies, comrades in queerness, to build rapport with you, my friend and ally, and to demonstrate my claim that normative institutions can be rendered into queer(er) spaces, where queer people—be they parents, children, or scholars—can center themselves, their voices, ways of address, and critical lens of camp, all in service of creating a world of queer values. The institutions and genres of academia, like the institutions of the domestic sphere, can be rendered into instruments of queer worldmaking. Werk.