In this project, I study the rhetorical practices of two lesbian collectives, the Let's Be an Apple Pie Collective and the Ambitious Amazons, involved with the Lesbian Center in Lansing, MI in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading across twenty years of Center newsletters and other archival and ephemeral materials located in MSU Special Collections, collective and individual archives, and collective oral history interviews I conducted with collective members, I trace the rhetorical practices through which the collectives engaged the lesbian, and larger geographic, community and sustained the Center. I introduce the exigency for the study through both the story of my own coming into this project and the multitude of creation stories the collective members and archival materials tell about the exigence and creation of the Lesbian Center. I also introduce the tensions in these exigencies and introduce the participants and the collectives they were a part of. I build a methodological framework for queer rhetorical historiography and public memory scholarship which draws on and is responsive to the collectives' rhetorical practices of the community. I find that the collectives' rhetorical practices of gathering and naming emerge as tactical interventions to create cultural spaces of survival and "thrive-al" and to negotiate tension and risk within the Center and the larger community. I describe gathering to make available, a rhetorical practice that Lansing lesbian collectives engaged in to create social spaces and places. Gathering to make available involved the tactics of identifying, interfacing, envisioning, documenting, sustaining, and assembling. I also study the collectives' use of naming as a rhetorical strategy. The collectives used tactics of visibility and tactics of coding in naming. I argue that the rhetorical strategy of naming has both discursive and material impacts and speaks to the collectives' larger social and epistemological politics. Finally, I offer methodological implications for scholars of rhetorical historiography.
Read
