Anaerobic rhetoric

This essay locates breath in a rhetorical taxonomy of anti-Black/LGBTQIA+ phobogenesis that dehumanizes the academic pulse of queer and racialized learning environments. It names and specifies a discursive-material arrangement of public address called anaerobic rhetoric (i.e., rhetoric without oxygen) that circulates in the hypoxic ontologies (i.e., hematic vessels with reduced blood flow and oxygen-compromised tissues) of U.S. higher education. Rhetorical breath work is a paraontological praxis of breathing otherwise and alongside structural-experiential hypoxias of U.S. higher education. Through such fugitive breathing maneuvers, I invite a similarly dispossessed audience of queer and faculty of color in U.S. academia, experiencing professional barriers to educational care, to re-group as a noisy gaggle of the gagged and aspire to re-possessions of otherwise air. The key locational texts for examining these civic hypoxias resulting from anaerobic rhetoric include (a) U.S. legislative discourses of higher education, specifically, Florida state’s house bills—“The Stop WOKE Act” (HB 7) and “Don’t Say Gay” law (HB 1557)—that take the speech-restricting shape of educational “gag” orders to intensify a white supremacist climate of anti-Blackness/LGBTQIA+ness in 2022–23, and (b) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) based discourses operationalized through white timekeeping techniques of regimenting breath/ing in Predominantly White Institutions (PWI).