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Abstract
This dissertation explores the question of what queer may do, be, or mean through a rhetorical investigation into three instances of ACT UP’s political funerals. In particular, I argue that queer is irreducibly aporetic, made possible by a simultaneous threshold and impasse, by which the term comes to have particular uses in different contexts. In this sense, queer is mobilized within this project as a term with a wide range of possibilities: as an impossible demand to recognize the insurmountable violence of HIV/AIDS, as a term with which the language of the family may be reclaimed and utilized for more liberatory ends, and as a distinct space-time which eschews linearity and denies a normative tale of progress. Drawing from a variety of scholars within queer theory, rhetorical studies, and deconstruction, this project seeks to further our understandings of queer’s potentialities by remaining open to the term’s movements yet nevertheless attending to its contingently and contextually determined limitations; queer, then, as I come to understand it here, is neither a boundless term nor a definitional opposition to normativity but is instead both made possible and impossible by its situationally determined constraints and opportunities. As a result, I suggest that it is a sense of undecidability which gives queer its potentiality, allowing so many different people to use the term to mean so many different things at various times and places. I conclude this dissertation by arguing that it is this undecidability embedded within queer which allows the term to be utilized as a tool in our fight for an impossible yet necessary justice.