Through Working Closets: Examining Rhetorics of LGBTQ Professional Identities Inside a Corporate Workplace is itself a story about how rhetorical practices (such as storytelling) help us negotiate and form identity(ies). I call for a new understanding of identity-building practices in the workplace. This research is a qualitative study based in interviews and site visits around one major Fortune 500 American discount-retail corporation. I introduce the concept of Working Closets, which my participants and I show through stories and experiences to be spaces, risks, situations, and relationships negotiated through moments of closetedness and outness. This challenges and dismantles the notion of "the closet" as a singular space one is either in or out. This work is an example of a cultural rhetorics approach interrogating professional identity building practices and the reconciling of that with personal/non-professional identity. Ultimately, these stories are about rhetoric and power. I seek to theorize about who gets to define "professional" and when and where. How do LGBTQ professionals survive or even succeed in heteronormative or hostile workplaces? How do LGBTQ persons challenge or work around the moments when their identities are covered over or contested? My participants' data speaks to these situations and tells the stories around them. Through threads of both commonality and difference, my participants build a conversation around the contemporary LGBTQ professional and the issues confronting them. Both the American and the global workplaces are increasingly destabilized and diverse, as are notions of LGBTQ identity and the lived experiences of LGBTQ lives.
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