An Invitation to Rhetoric: A Generative Dialogue on Performance, Possibility, and Feminist Potentialities in Invitational Rhetoric

This performative essay uses the anticipated 25th anniversary of Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin’s essay, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” as a pivot point to explore the notion of invitational rhetoric applied variously and processed through the embodied experiences of the two authors: A Black gay identified male and a White queer identified woman in what some might construct as a hierarchical relationship as academic dean and faculty. This is important for the reader to know—relative to a particular performed academic/administrative/intellectual/collaborative project that penetrates the political and power structures of academic relationality—modeling an aspect of invitational rhetoric in which both authors maintain immanent value and an openness to each other as collaborator and audience invoking possibility and potentiality within, across, and beyond the categorical distinctions of their persons that have historically both divided and conjoined them. In addition, the essay embodies a version of assemblage/collaborative writing to explore issues of performance, race, gender, culture, and violence in academic and everyday contexts.