Jonathan Alexander is Professor of English, Education, and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA where he was the founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication.

Jacqueline Rhodes is Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino, USA.

Introduction: What's Sexual about Rhetoric, What's Rhetorical about Sex? Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes Section I: Sexed Methods 1. Promiscuous Approaches to Reorienting Rhetorical Research Heather Lee Branstetter 2. "Intersecting Realities": Queer Assemblage as Rhetorical Methodology Jason Palmeri and Jonathan Rylander 3. Consciousness, Experience, Sexual Expression, and Judgment Jacqueline M. Martinez 4. Hard Core Rhetoric: Gender, Genre, and the Image in Neuroscience Jordynn Jack 5. Historicizing Sexual Rhetorics: Theorizing the Power to Read, the Power to Interpret, and the Power to Produce Meta G. Carstarphen 6. Milk Memory's Queer Rhetorical Futurity Charles E. Morris III Section II: Troubling Identity 7. The Trope of the Closet David L. Wallace 8. Sex and the Crip Latina Ellen M. Gil-Gómez 9. Affect, Female Masculinity, and the Embodied Space Between: Two-Spirit Traces in Thirza Cuthand's Experimental Film Lisa Tatonetti 10. The Unbearable Weight of Pedagogical Neutrality: Religion and LGBTQ Issues in the English Studies Classroom G Patterson 11. The Story of Fox Girl: Writing Queer about/in Imaginary Spaces Martha Marinara 12. "As Proud of Our Gayness, as We Are of Our Blackness": Race-ing Sexual Rhetorics in the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays Eric Darnell Pritchard Section III: (Counter)Publics 13. "Gay Boys Kill Themselves": The Queer Figuration of the Suicidal Gay Teen Erin J. Rand 14. Consorting with the Enemy?: Women's Liberation Rhetoric about Sexuality Clark A. Pomerleau 15. Sex Trafficking Rhetorics/Queer Refusal Ian Barnard 16. Sexual Counterpublics, Disciplinary Rhetorics, and Truvada J. Blake Scott 17. Presidential Masculinity: George W. Bush's Rhetorical Conquest Luke Winslow 18. Liberal Humanist "Rights" Discourse and Sexual Citizenship Harriet Malinowitz

Sexual rhetoric is the self-conscious and critical engagement with discourses of sexuality that exposes both their naturalization and their queering, their torquing to create different or counter-discourses, giving voice and agency to multiple and complex sexual experiences. This volume explores the intersection of rhetoric and sexuality through the varieties of methods available in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies, including case studies, theoretical questioning, ethnographies, or close (and distant) readings of "texts" that help us think through the rhetorical force of sexuality and the sexual force of rhetoric.