On the Queer Farm: The Rural Challenge to Rhetoric’s
Urban Conceit
Erin J. Rand, Syracuse University
Beginning with the farmer as a figure
of rhetoric opens up possibilities for imagining the generative, reproductive,
but also fickle nature of rhetorical discourse, and for thinking of the rhetor
as one who carefully sows and cultivates, and ultimately reaps the results of
her or his speech acts. Both of these depictions—rhetoric
as farming, the rhetor as farmer—yield a plethora of metaphors that highlight
the rich and fecund nature of language.
However, there is a third possibility available here: to focus not on
the practice of farming or the persona of the farmer, but rather on the place
and environment of the farm, or the rural landscape within which the pursuits
of the farm and the farmer take place.
Unlike farming and the farmer, which lend themselves fairly easily to
comparison to rhetoric, the rural space of the farm appears to be, as I will
explain below, conceived as somewhat antithetical to the purposes and practice
of rhetoric. Thus, as the rural
landscape is specifically excluded from rhetoric, it is also, through this
founding exclusion, queerly installed at the heart of the history and study of
rhetoric. Rhetoric’s urban bias and
emplacement in the city, then, is a queer conceit indeed.
Rhetoric vs. Rurality
The tendency to
think about rhetoric through specifically urban spaces has deep roots in the
history of rhetoric. Rhetoric and
democracy arose contemporaneously with the organization of people into cities
and the creation of the agora as a
central gathering place. As Cicero tells
it, rhetoric was responsible for the first emergence of human
civilization. Previously, humans were
“wandering at random over the fields” and “hidden in habitations in the
woods,” and relied only on their
physical strength for survival. But one
man’s reason and eloquence induced them to assemble together, to adopt a new
cooperative form of living, and to become “gentle and civilized.” For Cicero, only the power of rhetoric could
have persuaded individuals to willingly acquiesce to the will of others, to put
the good of the community before individual gain, and to submit to law without
violence.[1] Thus, in Cicero’s account, as David Fleming
explains, “rhetoric accounts for the origins of the city; the city, in turn,
provides a function and context for rhetoric.”
That is, “historically, the art of rhetoric…and the self-governing city
are closely linked; in some places and during certain periods, to think about
one was essentially to think about the other. Rhetoric, in such contexts,
served as the primary instrument of civic life; and the city served as the
primary scene of rhetoric.”[2]
While in Cicero’s
formulation the honorable, civilized life of the city is juxtaposed with the
“savage and brutal” life of the countryside, the values of the urban/rural
binary are often reversed.[3] For instance, in Aristophanes’ Clouds, the action begins with
Strepsiades, who comes from the country, lamenting his marriage to his urban wife,
whom he characterizes as haughty and luxurious, extravagant and gluttonous, and
sexually unrestrained.[4] In contrast to Strepsiades’ simple and pure
rural background, life in the city proves not only to be full of temptations
for Strepsiades’ son, but also to present a much more complicated terrain of
ethics for Strepsiades. After convincing
his son to study sophistry under Socrates as a means for evading his debts,
Strepsiades eventually discovers the error of his ways and the danger of false
arguments, and violently sets fire to Socrates’ school. Typically read as a satirical critique of the
Athenian sophistic movement, Clouds also
suggests an interesting relationship between rhetoric and urban life. Strepsiades, the representative of rural
wholesomeness, is not presented as a clearly sympathetic character and
therefore does not fulfill the usual role of the comedic protagonist; that is,
he does not exhibit strong moral principles, he does not renew citizens’
commitments to Athenian ideals, and he does not demonstrate the solution to a
social problem.[5] Instead, his rural naïveté leaves him
ill-equipped to evaluate the sophists’ tactics or to effectively guide his son,
suggesting that the complexity of the ethics of city life require not
sophistry, but rhetoric. As Sluiter and
Rosen put it, “life in the big city makes ethical behavior far more complicated
than an agroikos would normally
expect.”[6] Difficult urban decisions, in other words, call
for a more nuanced tool of analysis and persuasion; presumably, the simplicity
of country life does not present the same conundrums, nor require the same rhetorical
skills to navigate them. Once again,
rhetoric appears not just as a goad toward city life or an adaptation to it,
but also as unnecessary for—if not actually in opposition to—rural life.
Queerness
vs. Rurality
It comes as no surprise
that rurality is also often understood in opposition to queer life. That is, while the “civilized” nature of the
city might accommodate queerness, if the queer strays into the rural, the
result is typically imagined as tense and uncomfortable, if not actually
violent. Some queer scholars have attempted
to point out such “metronormative” assumptions, arguing that they incorrectly conflate
queer visibility with urban queer existence.
That is, “the metronormative narrative maps a story of migration onto
the coming-out narrative,” such that the closeted subject from the country supposedly
finds full self-expression of sexuality only by “coming out” into an urban
community of other queers.[7] One result of this narrative is that the
rural comes to stand in as the city’s “other,” a place “out there” on which to
project homophobic attitudes and behaviors, while the city maintains its status
as the epicenter of liberal tolerance and progressive thinking.[8]
Thus, when Michael
Warner and Lauren Berlant theorized queer spaces through the disruption of
norms of intimacy and the public/private binary, they drew their evidence
primarily from Christopher Street in New York City. And when Douglas Crimp described gay men’s
sexual possibilities prior to the AIDS crisis, he centered on spaces unique to
an urban environment: “back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses, and
baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes.”[9] This association between the urban environment
and queerness arises from an earlier belief in the iniquities of the city. Just as Aristophanes described the
temptations and wantonness of city living, mid-nineteenth century American public
discourses cast homosexuality as a product of the impure conditions and
degeneration of city life. As Catriona
Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson put it, “there is the assumption that
homosexuality is a product of the urban, and that rural and wilderness spaces
are thus somehow free from the taint of homoerotic activity.” Wilderness spaces, parks, rural life, and
physical labor were, in fact, understood as a corrective to the unhealthy
influences of the urban, and the valuation of the rural went hand in hand with
the condemnation of sexual “perversity.”[10]
Whether the city
is figured as a queer space because of its immorality or because of its
tolerance, then, queerness and rurality seem destined to be antithetical. Just as rhetoric is defined in opposition to
the rural, so too does the rural function as queerness’s founding
exclusion. But my intent is not merely
to point out the parallelism of these two formulations; neither is it to assert
the existence and positivities of rural rhetoric or rural queerness (claims
that are at once too obvious and too complicated to pursue here).[11] Rather, I mean to suggest that the rejection
of the rural effectively guarantees its continual reinstatement as rhetoric’s
queer remainder. And the “safe and
stable polis” is therefore always troubled
by the rural spaces that lie outside of its civilizing influence.[12] As I will show in the final section, it is in
this imperfect exclusion of rurality that we can get a glimpse of the queer
possibilities for thinking differently about rhetoric’s relationship to
rurality.
Queer
Rurality and Rhetoric
I began with Cicero’s account of the emergence of cities through the gentling and community-building effects of rhetoric, but his apparent dismissal of the “savage” countryside may not be the end of the story. For example, Marcia Kmetz reads Cicero to better understand “the role of the rural citizens in the social fabric of ancient Italy” and to forward Cicero’s “redefinition of rural people and landscapes” and his “development of a rural civic ethos.” Kmetz emphasizes that for Cicero, ethos was a communal feature, rooted not in an individual speaker, but in a place. Defining ethos as “a habitual gathering place,” she contends “that place is a central component of character, that the physical location of the rhetorical act or the rhetor contains a character of its own that shapes communal values and the rhetor’s performance of those values.” As such, the rural landscape in Cicero’s thought does not serve merely as a backdrop to human activities, but is instead an important and indivisible part of human interactions. Kmetz points out that Cicero not only refers to rural people and places in most of his works and maintains his own connections to his rural origins, but that he also emphasizes the importance of the rural for its own sake, especially in the way that it “shapes its participants and defines the character of those associated with it.”[13]
Similarly, Sheila Murnaghan examines selections from Odysseus, Hesiod,
and Socrates, noting that while the farmer and the tasks of farming were marked
by rusticity and a lack of sophistication, in certain circumstances speech about farming—by those who were not necessarily
farmers—could confer authority on the speaker.
For example, she identifies in Hesiod’s Works and Days a series of passages that suggest a speaker’s
attentiveness to the proper timing of tasks can be demonstrated through one’s
observations of the natural world: the arrival of rain and frost, the locations
of the stars, certain bird calls, and the emergence of new leaves.[14] In other words, a speaker’s sensitivity to kairos might be exhibited
through—indeed, might even be said to emerge from—human interactions with the
natural rhythms of the rural landscape.
Further, Murnaghan characterizes the space of the farm as occupying
something of a liminal zone: not quite within the purview of the city, but also
distinct from the wild, unsettled, and uncultivated land that looms
beyond. The habitual occupants of this
space thus have a “clear-eyed skepticism” that arises from being both insiders
and outsiders (while not belonging fully to either category) and therefore may
make the most trustworthy rhetors and qualified leaders. She describes this unique perspective as
“just a bit detached, just a bit off-center,” or, I might add, just a bit
queer.[15]
These admittedly brief tastes of rhetoric’s rural places
is not merely a way of asserting the value of the rural in relation to the
urban, but also a way of understanding the (usually unrecognized) centrality of
rurality to the theorization of rhetoric.
Acknowledging the rural influences on classical rhetorical thought
suggests that the exclusion of the rural serves to reinforce the dominance of
the urban, and that reinvigorating our attention to the rural may begin the
shake the apparent “naturalness” of the urban rhetorical model. That is, just as heteronormativity requires
queerness as its exclusion in order to consolidate the privileges of
heterosexuality, metronormativity—in both queer and rhetorical
scholarship—requires the rural as its rustic and devalued foil. Importantly, the American mythos of the
rural—in which the rural symbolically represents community, stability, and a
truly participatory democracy—upholds the possibility for the urban model of
democratic participation, even as it is devalued as old-fashioned and
unsophisticated.[16] In this sense, then, the rural functions
queerly in relation to the urban in the history and theory of rhetoric. In short, while I do not mean to posit the
rural as a space of liberation or resistance, I do want to suggest that genuine
attention to the place of the farm, the rural landscape, might provide a provocative means of queering
the heteronormative and metronormative rhetorical tradition.
Works Cited
Aristophanes. Clouds. Ed. M.W. Humphreys. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing,
2010.
Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner.
“Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24
(1998): 547-66.
Carter, D.M. “At Home, Round Here, Out There:
The City and Tragic Space.” In City, Countryside, and the Spatial
Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by Rosen and Sluiter, 139-172. Boston: Brill, 2006.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Inventione. Trans. C.D. Yonge.
Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Crimp,
Douglas. “Mourning and Militancy.” In Melancholia
and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 129-49. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002.
Fleming,
David. “The Space of Argumentation: Urban Design, Civic Discourse, and the
Dream of the Good City.” Argumentation
12 (1998): 147–166.
Gray,
Mary L. Out in the Country: Youth, Media,
and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: New York University Press,
2009.
Halberstam,
Judith. In a Queer Time and Place:
Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press,
2005.
Henderson, Jeffery. Translator.
“Introduction.” In Aristophanes, Clouds.
Newburyport, MA: Focus Classical Library, 1993.
Kmetz,
Marcia. “‘For Want of the Usual Manure’: Rural Civic Ethos in Ciceronian
Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 30.4
(2011): 333–349.
Mortimer-Sandilands,
Catriona and Erickson, Bruce, Eds. Queer
Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010.
Murnaghan,
Sheila, “Farming, Authority, and Truth-Telling in the Greek Tradition.” In City, Countryside, and the Spatial
Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by Rosen and Sluiter,
93-118. Boston: Brill, 2006.
Proctor,
David E. Civic Communion: The Rhetoric of
Community Building. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.
Rosen,
Ralph M. and Ineke Sluiter, Eds. City,
Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity, Boston:
Brill, 2006.
---,
“Introduction.” In City, Countryside, and
the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by Rosen
and Sluiter, 1-12. Boston: Brill, 2006.
[2] Fleming, “The Space of Argumentation,” 148.
[3] Cicero, De
Inventione, 6.
[4] Aristophanes, Clouds,
np.
[5] Henderson, “Introduction,” 5.
[6] Sluiter and Rosen, “General Introduction,” 1.
[7] Halberstam, In
a Queer Time and Place, 36.
[8] Gray, Out in
the Country, 9.
[9] Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public”; Crimp, “Mourning
and Militancy,” 140. For other examples
of rhetorical analyses of queer spaces that focus on urban environments, see: Thomas
R. Dunn, “Remembering ‘A Great Fag’: Visualizing Public Memory and the
Construction of Queer Space,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 97.4 (2011): 435-460; Kyra Pearson and Nina Maria
Lozano-Reich, “Cultivating Queer Publics with an Uncivil Tongue: Queer Eye’s
Critical Performances of Desire,” Text
and Performance Quarterly 29.4 (2009): 383-402; Isaac West, “PISSAR’s
Critically Queer and Disabled Politics,” Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies 7.2 (2010): 156-175.
[10] Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies, 15.
[11] An account of the specificities of rural
rhetoric can be found in, Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell,
Eds., Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on
Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2012). For examples of the
specificities of rural queer lives, see: Mary L. Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America
(New York: New York University Press, 2009); Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New
York: New York University Press, 2010).
[12] Carter, “At Home, Round Here, Out There,” 161.
[13] Kmetz, “‘For Want of the Usual Manure,’” 335-340.
[14] Murnaghan, “Farming, Authority, and Truth-Telling,”
104-5.
[15] Murnaghan, “Farming, Authority, and Truth-Telling,” 107,
110, 117.
[16] Proctor, Civic
Communion, 17-18.
