“Deeply Disturbing – As They Should Be”: A Rhetorical Comparison of Deathly Language and Death-Focused Archives

Cheyenne Zaremba

Archival scholars are fond of using “deathly language” (“ghostly,” “spectral,” “haunting”) to describe encountering death in the archives. This paper advocates that archival scholars consider the way deathly language functions as an idiom of haunting that informs the way researchers understand and talk about the archive in general, and specifically death-focused archives. Through a rhetorical critical analysis of death-focused archives, this project demonstrates that deathly language construes death-focused archives as “haunting,” creating barriers to establishing normative relationships with death as it exists in the archive.

Emergency-Exigence in LGBTQ Campus Archives: An Agambean Reading of Penn
State’s LGBTQ Collection

Sergio Peña

This essay explored the Penn State LGBTQ Records collection to develop the
emergency-exigence lens for reading queer institutional memory with campus archives through an Agambean analysis that recognizes broader patterns of exception. While this essay extensively analyzes the institutional events for advancing emergency-exigence, it also extends reads archival practices that exclude vibrant queer life and stories from flourishing in the archive. By focusing on the experiences of crisis and liberation recorded in the archive, the emergency-exigence lens provides guidance for reading archives of bare subjects to understand the sovereign machinations that hinder bare life from flourishing in dominant, hegemonic structures. In theorizing emergency-exigence, I aim to encourage archival scholars and archivists to critically consider the organization and imagining of bare subjects within their work to foster opportunities for these bare subjects’ memory to flourish inside and outside of the archive.

White Woman-Hood: The Rhetorical Fraternity of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan

Matthew L. Parnell

As the largest women’s hate group, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) galvanized
hundreds of thousands of women into the fraught and contested political climate of the 1920s. Considering the lack of rhetorical scholarship regarding women’s hate groups, this essay seeks to define the uniquely gendered and racist political activism of the WKKK. I argue that the WKKK rhetorically constructed a version of white nationalist rhetorical activism that fused contemporary frameworks of white power rhetoric with gendered and mundane forms of racism. Through an investigation of archival materials related to the WKKK, I find that women’s white supremacist groups evoke a unique rhetorical style worthy of further investigation.

From, A River City: Flood Postcards and Community Resilience in the Archives

Sierra S. Parker

This paper evaluates the ways in which archival description of flood-related postcards orients contemporary memory of flood events in Portsmouth, Ohio. The paper engages with the visual argument of the photograph on picture postcards, the collection’s archival description, and scholarship on natural disaster to argue that this archive establishes a “watery sense of place” as central to the river community’s identity. In doing so, the archive sustains memory of flood events and enables intergenerational resilience for a community that faces reoccurring natural disaster.

The Anti-Archival Presidency: Donald Trump, the Limits of Presidential Archives, and The Potential of Feminist Methodologies

Brandon M. Johnson

My project argues that Donald Trump’s attempts at destroying records and his embrace of Twitter communication (which NARA struggles to legally archive) represent the culmination of an “anti-archival presidency” that poses a challenge to the future of presidential archives. I position Trump at the end of a longer history of presidential archives and review the existing literature on presidential libraries and records-keeping. I then offer the potential of digitization and feminist archival methodologies as possible ways of addressing these challenges. I offer a pair of case studies as examples: The Trump Twitter Archive, a website dedicated to hosting Trump’s tweets (including the deleted ones) and a parody Trump presidential library that serves as a kind of imagined archive.

America’s Institutionalization of Baseball

Mike Delayo

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Middletown State Homeopathic Asylum fielded a baseball team. With the aid of an account book that tracked team finances and a collection of newspaper accounts of the team, I analyze how the team was presented to the public. Though their official institutional records may be scarcely populated or silent altogether, Middletown’s Asylum Base Ball Club demonstrates that organized sports have, since their origin in the United States, allowed folks who have been silenced by the powers that be to transcend those circumstances and still be rhetors with things to say to the world.

Queer Worldmaking in Isolation: Queer Rural Zines and the Production of Approximate Togetherness

Cora Butcher-Spellman

This project examines queer rural zines and their relationships with rurality,
ephemerality, and queer worldmaking. I argue queer rural zines share knowledge and activities as a queer worldmaking practice that fosters what I call “approximate togetherness” in spite of rural isolation. Approximate togetherness is a broader conceptualization of togetherness that, rather than being limited by space and time, depends on a sense of connection and shared experience. This analysis of queer rural zines shows how zines can complement and contribute to a broader range of queer worldmaking practices.