The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Nick Sanders, Oakland University 
Constance Haywood, East Carolina University    
Floyd Pouncil, Mott Community College  
Ruby Mendoza, Santa Clara University

Confession: We are in the crosshairs of a deadly culture war. Since our initial ideation of this special issue focused on the intersections and intimacies among queer, trans*, and feminist approaches to multimodal rhetorics, increasing and incessant targets on higher education, queer, trans, and feminist cultural spaces have culminated in an increasingly hostile battlefield. For instance, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, a group of genocide scholars, has recently warned that the United States is in “early stages of genocide against Trans Americans.” After decades long disinformation campaigns that framed gender and racial diversity as a threat to the Republic has culminated in the removal of affinity spaces that foster LGBTQ community and survival, from Ohio to Texas. White nationalist groups continue to organize to cancel university faculty and staff who teach toward pluriversal futures, or, worse, ask students to cite credible research in their responses.

Such coordinated attacks are, of course, not new. As Martinez and Maraj (2024) trace in their editor’s introduction to a 2024 College English special issue, conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, planted seeds of discord to wreak havoc since at least 2012, that ultimately framed DEI and CRT as “a villain, the boogeyman waiting for your children at school. It was a manufactured sociopolitical crisis intended to stir up the masses; create havoc and confusion; and promote intentionally deceptive definitions, terms, and concepts” (p. 9). From these vantage points, we acknowledge both that the current moment participates in a long-standing attempt to erode, and even eviscerate, pluriversal democratic futures (Chan, 2025) and heightens recurrent harm and violence toward the most vulnerable among us. We offer this frame to underscore that these attacks are not new, but they are hypervisible, felt, and visceral and thus require intention and deliberation in this particular moment for survival, coalition, and community. 

In our initial call, we spoke of Black feminist organizing groups, like the Combahee River Collective, and the work they did during the 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts, to address systematic oppression through collective participation. We thought of Royster and Kirsch in their push for feminist rhetorical studies to rethink how we engage in public action through critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalizing our points of view. Criticality was also important to our understanding of the power of queer, trans, and feminist rhetorics, and we thought through how the power of multimodality necessitated, like what Waite (2015) points toward, an interrogation of what we can actually do with the power derived from critical discourse. However, we always want to be careful not to oversimply our tools for enacting queer, trans, or feminist practices and say, importantly, that non-performatives (Ahmed, 2012) fall far from the needs of present-day exigencies for the work that multimodality does to combat hegemonic power grabs. Accordingly, we put forward the following articles, zines, webtexts, and conversations as a way of insisting that by focusing on the intersections of queerness, we can move “beyond simply theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to theorizing how that mediation may propose material bodies into action.” (Johnson, 2001)  Like we said in our call, we all believe queer and transgender scholarship should critique institutional cistematic oppression to amplify and liberate communities–and we hope this issue contributes to that goal.

Accordingly, in this issue you will find essays, zines, poems, studies, interrogations, podcasts, and other forms of multimodal writing that interrogate and examine the civic work of queer, trans, and feminist multimodal composing. We’ve arranged contributions in thematic categories that offer commentary, synthesis, and tension across articles, zines, and webtext that we have broken into categories: Materiality & Criticality; Memory; Institutional (Non)Performance, and Counterstory. Our first section features submissions that focus on materiality and criticality where contributors discuss critical engagements of materials in ways that disrupt cisheteronormative practices/ideologies in productive ways while simultaneously being critical of it. Next, we have submissions that deal with memory including how embodiment interacts dynamically with the framing of our experiences. Institutional (Non) Performance brings together contributors’ work that centers using queer, trans, and feminist lenses on the operating of institutions including issues of space, place, and the physical enactment of values. Our last major section, Counterstory, collects reframes and puts language to the realities of queer, trans, and feminist life. We end with a coda section that offers a synthesis and tension of multimodality, queerness, and disciplinary futures, as both a conclusion and invitation for the future of this work in the field. 

We close our introduction with an invitation to use multimodality to dream and resist. As such, this issue goes beyond just adding to academic discourse– as a solely intellectual pursuit. Rather, we aim to engage readers with the work of humans who choose to show up, exist, resist, and persist while navigating systems that actively work to erase us. As the issue itself deals with that which is materially consequential, we recognize the risk that comes even with the visibility of this work; still, we forward that in times of uncertainty it is our boldness, our shared knowledge, our individual experiences, and our rhetorical prowess that shapes, informs, and solidifies our collective futures. As scholars and practitioners of rhetoric and composition, we acknowledge that the world we live in is shaped largely by the cultural values and meanings that we assign to the objects around us and those meanings evolve based on what we choose to do with them. As we strive towards transformation and liberation within the publics, institutions, and communities that we belong to, we hope that the pieces shared here sheds light to the very unique and dynamic ways that this work is taken up. We invite you to engage with this special issue authentically, non-linearly, and in a way that hopefully inspires you to reflect on the ways you, yourself, might do good, disruptive work using the tools and materials around you.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. In On being included. Duke University Press.

Chan, A. S. (2025). Predatory data: Eugenics in big tech and our fight for an independent future. University of California. 

Combahee River Collective. (1977). Combahee River Collective statement. In Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (pp. 304-316). The New Press. 

Digital Transgender Archive. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/.  

Enoch, J. (2010). Composing a rhetorical education for the twenty-first century: TakingITGlobal as pedagogical heuristic. Rhetoric Review, 29(2), 165-185.

Johnson, E. P. (2001). "Quare" studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly, 21(1), 1-25.

Royster, J. J., & Kirsch, G. E. (2012). Feminist rhetorical practices: New horizons for rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. SIU Press.

Waite, S. (2015). Cultivating the scavenger: A queerer feminist future for composition and rhetoric. Peitho Journal, 18(1), 51-71. https://cfshrc.org/article/cultivating-the-scavenger-a-queerer-feminist-future-for-composition-and-rhetoric/.