This book advances a theory of the erotic as a rhetorical power that holds variable political possibility, fueling rhetorical practices and pedagogies with the potential to both transform and instantiate existing hierarchies of difference. Within this theory, I understand the erotic as an interanimation of desires--simultaneously intimate, intellectual, pedagogical, and political--that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the creative power to forge connections as well as foment change. This creative power takes on a specifically rhetorical valence as intimate connections blur the boundaries between so-called private and public life, energizing rhetorical activities that include public speaking, published writing, and the teaching of rhetoric oriented to social change. Importantly, although the pursuit of such change is more often idealized as creating connections across difference in order to facilitate positive transformation, in actuality the erotic may fuel rhetorical practices that move in directions radical, progressive, or conservative. My theory of the erotic as rhetorical power emerges from historiographic and imaginative engagements with the archives of romantic friendship. Working with materials from over twenty manuscript and digital collections, I have investigated the rhetorical activities of (presumably cisgender) women who sustained same-sex romantic friendships and teaching careers for decades, separated from each other only by death. From what I have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, the women who were able to sustain such relationships and careers were white; they were born into families privileged by the "violent inheritances" of settler colonialism and slavery in occupied territories now known as the United States. In this sense, the women''s romantic friendships and career opportunities stand in contrast to those of the African American couple already introduced in my prologue, Rebecca Primus (1836-1932) and Addie Brown (1841-70).

I imagine another past for Primus and Brown, one less constrained by anti-Black racism, within the imaginative interludes woven between the book''s body chapters. In the chapters themselves, my historiography centers three, more privileged couples whose lives, relationships, and rhetorical activities are relatively well documented in archives. First are "lifelong companions" Sallie Holley (1818-93) and Caroline Putnam (1826-1917). During their forty-five years as a couple, these white women from the North traveled together on the antislavery lecture circuit and then moved to the South to teach at a freedmen''s school. Another couple, Irene Kirke Leache (1839-1900) and Annie Cogswell Wood (1850-1940), shared an "opulent friendship" for more than three decades. Both conservative women who published their writing, Leache and Wood taught at a boarding school for white girls in the South. Also published authors, Gertrude Buck (1871-1922) and Laura Johnson Wylie (1855-1932) were active as a rhetorical theorist and suffrage activist. Teaching and administering the rhetoric program at Vassar College, they shared a "close personal and professional relationship" for almost twenty-five years.

My historiographic focus on the extensively archived activities of these three couples allows for investigation of the erotic as rhetorical power across the latter portion of the "long nineteenth century," from the years of abolitionist activism leading up to the Civil War and then into the Progressive Era reform movements. These couples also reflect the complexities of the erotic as rhetorical power, because it fueled the women''s teaching at diverse educational sites as well as their speaking and writing to competing political ends. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I flesh out my theory of the erotic as rhetorical power through engagement with a range of thinkers from ancient times to the present. I then more fully situate my investigation of the erotic as rhetorical power in the long nineteenth century. Specifically, I introduce the place of the erotic within women''s romantic friendships and show how the teaching profession was particularly conducive to enabling such relationships between privileged women. I also underscore how, even as the erotic of these romantic friendships fueled the women''s rhetorical activities toward sometimes transformational ends, settler colonialism and slavery were the conditions of possibility for both that erotic and its archives. Within this context, the erotic as rhetorical power energized rhetorical activities that alternately challenged and reinforced problematic power dynamics. My goal in what follows, then, is not to recover the erotic between women in romantic friendships as universally positive or inherently radical or progressive.

Rather, I argue for the significance of the erotic as a rhetorical power that, while directed to conflicting social and political aims, is central to rhetorical theory and history as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ historiography.