A Matter of Regionalism

In 2010-2011, the Nebraska History Museum featured two temporary exhibits: "We the People: the Nebraskan Viewpoint" and "Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances." We argue the public memories of Brandon Teena and Willa Cather contained in the exhibits are distanced from regional politics when articulated alongside the nostalgic regionalist rhetoric of the Nebraska History Museum. Specifically, both exhibits not only discipline the memory of trans* performance within problematic material and symbolic contexts, but also place these memories within a rhetoric of regional optimism that has critical consequences for restricting counter-public formation. In performing this reading, the essay argues that critical regionalism has the potential to offer a nuanced perspective on the geopolitical dimensions of memory places by exploring understandings of the relationship between "local" and "national" commemoration at these sites. Keywords: RhetoricCritical RegionalismPublic MemoryBrandon TeenaWilla CatherMuseum Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank editor Raymie McKerrow, the anonymous reviewers at QJS, Kristen Lucas, and Damien Smith Pfister for their helpful feedback in the development of this project. Notes 1. The Brandon Teena Story, directed by Susan Muska, and Gréta Olafsdóttir (United States: Zeitgeist Films, 1998), DVD; Boys Don't Cry, directed by Kimberly Peirce (United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1999), DVD. See also John M. Sloop, "Disciplining the Transgendered: Brandon Teena, Public Representation, and Normativity," Western Journal of Communication 64 (2000): 165-89; Judith Halberstam, "The Brandon Teena Archive," in Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, eds. Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 159-69. 2. Nebraska History Museum, "Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances," (museum exhibit, Lincoln, NE, October 9, 2010). All subsequent direct quotes in our analysis of the Cather exhibit (see "Willa Cather, Queer Performance, and Regional Ambivalence") share this citation. 3. Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). 4. Deborah Carlin, "Willa Cather, 1873-1947," in Modern American Women Writers: Profiles of their Lives and Works-from the 1870s to the Present, eds. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), 35. 5. As we will detail later the essay, although Cather was not outspoken on LGBTQ issues during her lifetime, many literary critics have found queer themes in her writings. 6. We are not seeking to contribute to the "Brandon industry" surrounding the Brandon Teena case (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 16), nor are we attempting to engage long-standing scholarly debates about Willa Cather's literary legacy. Instead, we ask: can these figures-linked by their Nebraskan identity but spatially differentiated in the museum-be meaningfully read together in the museum space? For information about the two exhibits, see The Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, Projects and Events, http://www.nshsf.org/projects-and-events. 7. See Michael Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," Public Culture 14 (2002): 49-90 and Thomas R. Dunn, "Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13 (2010): 615. 8. Our aim is to study "nonnormative behaviors that have clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects," as articulated by Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 6. This is important because Brandon Teena and Willa Cather did not embrace-in fact, at times, they actively disavowed-labels connoting same sex desire. We take inspiration from John M. Sloop's argument that "mainstream discourses illustrate the rhetorically material ways in which those who do challenge dominant ideology are ideologically disciplined, the ways in which gender normativity is upheld and judged." John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 55. Rather than focus on "lesbian and gay" as fixed identity categories, we examine the mobilization of normative notions of gender, sexuality, and state-based citizenship as systems of discipline in museum representations. 9. Although it stems from a strong interdisciplinary tradition, the study of critical regionalism has just recently experienced uptake in rhetorical studies. Douglas Reichert Powell laid the groundwork for this move in his Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and a recent special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (42.3) continues the charge. See especially Jenny Rice's introductory piece, "From Architectonics to Tectonics: Introducing Regional Rhetorics," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42 (2012): 201-13. We use the term "articulation" to discuss the production of regions as it seems the most fitting rhetorical term for the production of relationality-the joining or fusing of multiple fragments to produce a rhetorical collage. As Nathan Stormer argues, articulation "is about historicizing different configurations of materiality and meaning (collapsed, segregated, overlapping) as conditions for the coming into being of a given form of rhetoric ... to articulate is to spatialize culture and nature by arranging diverse material-semiotic elements into recognizable bodies and languages." Nathan Stormer, "Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 261. Dave Tell argues that the production of regions is best seen as a process of articulating relationships between spaces, histories, and political formations in his, "The Meanings of Kansas: Rhetoric, Regions, and Counter-Regions," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42 (2012): 214-32. 10. Rhetorical analysis of museums has traditionally focused on the rhetoricity of the spatial layout, which works by way of directing the movements of the body throughout the museum display. See Victoria J. Gallagher "Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 303-20. For an overview of museum rhetoric as a process of "collecting, exhibiting, and representing," see Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, "Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum," Western Journal of Communication 69 (2005): 89. 11. Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott, "Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place," in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 2. 12. See Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, "Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art," Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 171-91; Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). 13. To elaborate on the position of visitors within particular ways of seeing, see Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27-47. For an elaboration on the idea of imagined community, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See also Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes. 14. For more on official public memories, see Tamar Katriel, "Our Future is where our Past is: Studying Heritage Museums as Ideological and Performative Arenas," Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 69-75; Carole Blair and Neil Michel, "Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 31-55. 15. Blair and Michel, "Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics," 33. 16. Carole Blair and Neil Michel, "The Rushmore Effect: Ethos and National Collective Identity," in The Ethos of Rhetoric, ed. Michael J. Hyde (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 163. 17. Blair and Michel, "The Rushmore Effect," 163-64. 18. Zagacki and Gallagher, "Rhetoric and Materiality," 172. 19. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, "Memory and Myth," 88. 20. Blair and Michel, "The Rushmore Effect," 175. 21. Daniel C. Brouwer, "From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt's Search for a Homeland," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10 (2007): 701-22. 22. Wendy J. Katz and Timothy R. Mahoney, "Introduction: Regionalism and the Humanities: Decline or Revival?" in Regionalism and the Humanities, eds. Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), xi. 23. Powell, Critical Regionalism, 5. 24. See Rice, "From Architectonics to Tectonics" and Powell, Critical Regionalism. 25. Ash Amin, "Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Place," Geografiska Annaler 86B (2004): 34. See also Doreen Massey, Ash Amin, and Nigel Thrift, Decentering the Nation: A Radical Approach to Regional Inequality (London: Catalyst, 2003). 26. Rice, "From Architectonics to Tectonics," 206. 27. Powell, Critical Regionalism, 13. 28. Rice, "From Architectonic to Tectonics," 203. 29. Rice, "From Architectonic to Tectonics," 203. 30. Powell, Critical Regionalism, 7. 31. Greg Dickinson, "Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 4. For us, the tracing of cultural lines is taken broadly to imply tracing the particular contexts that are most important for understanding the rhetorical operations at the museum. As we will illustrate, while the "cultural resource" of regional utopian rhetoric is manifested at the site, the counter-public potential of the memory of queer figures remains an unfulfilled context at the museum. 32. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki argue that this is a threefold rhetorical process of collecting (selecting which artifacts are to be presented), exhibiting (deciding in which spatial context they will be exhibited), and representing (using whatever sensory and/or multimediated form of presentation that will best achieve rhetorical ends). Greg Dickinson, Brian Ott, and Eric Aoki, "Memory and Myth," 89. Often this methodology considers how visitors articulate their own unique memories in light of the different fragments available to them. See, for example, Roger C. Aden, Min Wha Han, Stephanie Norander, Michael E. Pfahl, Timothy P. Pollack, Jr., and Stephanie L. Young, "Re-collection: A Proposal for Refining the Study of Collective Memory and its Places," Communication Theory 19 (2009): 311-36. For elaboration on visitor behaviors as resistance to sites of memory, see Thomas R. Dunn, "Remembering 'A Great Fag': Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space," Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (November 2011): 435-60. 33. Joshua P. Ewalt, "A Colonialist Celebration of National : Verbal, Visual, and Landscape Ideographs at Homestead National Monument of America," Western Journal of Communication 75 (2011): 367-85. 34. David Bristow, "Oh, the Irony," Nebraska State Historical Society (blog), August 7, 2012, http://blog.nebraskahistory.org/?p=7850. 35. Katz and Mahoney, "Introduction," xxii. 36. "Life is Right," Lincoln Chamber of Commerce (2013): http://www.lifeisright.com. More than one Lincolnite has wondered whether the "right" in the slogan may refer to the political inclinations of the region. 37. Katz and Mahoney, "Introduction," xxii. 38. Rhetoricians, cultural theorists, and literary critics alike have developed this insight, that queer history and memory can be generative for contemporary politics and scholarship. See especially Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris, III. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007) and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 39. Dunn, "Remembering Matthew Shepard," 613. 40. One can look to a number of Facebook pages ("Remember Brandon Teena," Facebook, 2011), YouTube videos, ("Remembering Brandon Teena-Chasing Cars" YouTube, LLC, 2011), and Myspace pages ("Brandon Teena Memorial, MySpace, 2003-2011) to illustrate the coalition-building potential of Brandon Teena's memory. 41. Love, Feeling Backward, 72-99. 42. Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 4. 43. Michael Calvin McGee, "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture," Western Journal of Communication 54 (1990): 274-89. 44. The concept of space of attention is developed more fully in Kenneth Zagacki and Victoria Gallagher's work on the North Carolina Museum of Art. Spaces of attention are rhetorical insofar as they direct perception and sensation to experience certain objects in certain ways, while avoiding or silencing other aspects. See Zagacki and Gallagher, "Rhetoric and Materiality." They can also function by constructing a particular interplay of presences and absences. For instance, see Brian Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson, "Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum," Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 8 (2011): 215-39. 45. Nebraska History Museum, "We the People: The Nebraska Viewpoint," (museum exhibit, Lincoln, NE, October 2010-September 2011). All subsequent direct quotes in this section are from the exhibit and share this citation. 46. For an elaboration on the concept of rhetorical cartographies as a method of discursive analysis, see Ronald Walter Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21-41; Ronald Walter Greene and Kevin Douglas Kuswa, "From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42 (2012): 271-88. We are using a variation on the term here to refer to the particular articulations of spatial relations that constructs a regional rhetoric, suggesting this as a type of cartography, or mapping of connections and disconnections between a number of diverse places. See also Tell, "The Meanings of Kansas." 47. On the rhetoric of excessive corporeal sensation, see Carole Blair, "Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places," Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 271-94. 48. Sloop, "Disciplining the Transgendered,"168. 49. Sloop, "Disciplining the Transgendered," 168. 50. Sloop, "Disciplining the Transgendered," 168. 51. Joe Duggan, "Brandon Fit Profile of Transsexual," Lincoln Journal Star (Lincoln, Nebraska), Jan. 4, 1994. Article included in the exhibit. 52. Rice, "From Architectonics to Tectonics," 206 53. "Three Murdered Near Humboldt Create National Attention," Humboldt Standard (Humboldt, Nebraska), January 6, 1994. Article included in the exhibit. 54. "Three Murdered." 55. Lindemann, Willa Cather, Queering America, 4. For criticism of feminist and queer interpretations of Cather, see chapters 5 and 6 of Joan Acocella's Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 56. Lisa Marcus, "Review of Willa Cather and Others, and: Willa Cather, Queering America," American Literature 74 (September 2002): 656. 57. Willa Sibert Cather, "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," Nation 117 (September 5, 1923): 238. 58. Cather, "Nebraska," 238. 59. Carlin, "Willa Cather, 1873-1947," 36. 60. Nebraska History Museum, "Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances" (museum exhibit, Lincoln, NE, October 9, 2010). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent direct quotes in our analysis of the Cather exhibit share this citation. 61. Nebraska State Historical Society, "Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances" (exhibit pamphlet, Lincoln, NE, 2010): 18. 62. Sloop, "Disciplining the Transgendered." 63. Nebraska State Historical Society, "Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances" (exhibit pamphlet, Lincoln, NE, 2010): 6. 64. Indeed, Cather's biography and writings themselves have a complicated regional map: while she is known as the quintessential voice of a particular bounded region (whether demarcated as Nebraska, the Great Plains, or the Midwest), she was born in Virginia and later lived in Pennsylvania and New York. Her literature certainly brought a sense of the Great Plains to a number of outside readers, although it also explored a variety of other regions. According to Guy Reynolds, to characterize Cather as only a regional writer functions as a form of reductionism, "helping to narrow and constrain the sheer imaginative diversity of her oeuvre" and reducing the spatial pluralism of her life and writings to one bounded territory. See his "Willa Cather's Case: Region and Reputation," Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 86. 65. Quoted in the exhibit from James R. Shively, ed., Writing from Willa Cather's Campus Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1950), 122. 66. Lindemann, Willa Cather, Queering America, 2. 67. Powell, Critical Regionalism, 43. 68. Adrienne Rich, "For Julia in Nebraska," Women's Studies 11 (1984): 324-25. 69. Communication scholarship on media discourses has also noted this relationship. For instance, in Squires and Brouwer's analysis of media framing surrounding the death of Susie Guillory Phipps, the authors argue that national media deflected accountability of the issue by "localizing race," containing the significance and implications of "the Phipps case to the state of Louisiana or the region of the South" (288-89). See Catherine R. Squires and Daniel C. Brouwer, "In/Discernible Bodies: The Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 283-310. 70. Lawrence J. Prelli, ed., Rhetorics of Display (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). 71. Powell, Critical Regionalism, 21. 72. Amy K. Levin, "Introduction," in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010), 3-4. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCarly S. WoodsCarly S. Woods is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-LincolnJoshua P. EwaltJoshua P. Ewalt is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies and Graduate Fellow in the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-LincolnSara J. BakerSara J. Baker is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Geopolitics · Regionalism · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• Decolonizing Regions

  Patricia G Davis, Patricia Davis et al.•Rhetoric and Public Affairs•2021

  Add to list

• The U.S. Empire Remembers Violence Against Asian Women

  Jin R Choi•Women s Studies in Communication•2025

  Add to list

• The Most Important Dress in the Country”

  Jennifer Keohane•Women s Studies in Communication•2017

  Add to list

• The Rhetorical Impact of the Scopes Trial's Interconnected Public Memory Places

  Open Access•Emma Frances Bloomfield•American Behavioral Scientist•2021

  Add to list

• The Politics of a Memory Wound

  Open Access•E Johanna Hartelius, Kaitlyn E Haynal et al.•American Behavioral Scientist•2021

  Add to list

• Visualizing Homeland

  Open Access•Elinor Light•Culture Studies ↔ Critical…•2016

  Add to list

• Text, context, and the fragmentation of contemporary culture

  Michael Mcgee, Michael Calvin McGee•Western Journal of Speech…•1990

  Add to list

• Another materialist rhetoric

  Ronald Walter Greene•Critical Studies in Mass…•1998

  Add to list

• Remembering Matthew Shepard

  Thomas R Dunn•Rhetoric and Public Affairs•2010

  Add to list

• Our future is where our past is

  Tamar Katriel•Communication Monographs•1993

  Add to list

• For Julia in Nebraska

  Adrienne Rich•Women s Studies•1984

  Add to list

• Willa Cather and Others; Willa Cather

  Lisa Marcus•American Literature•2002

  Add to list

• Memories for sale

  Greg Dickinson•Quarterly Journal of Speech•1997

  Add to list

• Publics and counterpublics

  Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar•Quarterly Journal of Speech•2002

  Add to list

• Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art

  Kenneth S Zagacki, Victoria J Gallagher•Quarterly Journal of Speech•2009

  Add to list

• Regions unbound

  Ash Amin•Geografiska Annaler Series B…•2004

  Add to list

• Oh, the Irony

  Chris Lehmann•The Baffler•2012

  Add to list