Shackelford, Luke2025-01-072025-01-072024https://hdl.handle.net/11299/269235University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2024. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication. Advisors: Thomas Reynolds, Molly Kessler. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 153 pages.Through a combination of queer/trans philosophical methods, rhetorical history, and modified grounded theory, this project seeks to contribute to both the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine and Writing Pedagogy in the analysis of Bisexuality and bisexual masculinity in historical and digital communities. First, the project establishes a conceptual argument that bisexuality in medical rhetoric functions as both a foundational nexus for western medical taxonomy, and a threat to the conceptual boundaries in that same taxonomy, centering on the destabilizing effect of bisexual men on concepts of gender and sexuality. By challenging the bio/logics associated with stable categories, yet still expressing partial legibility as a category itself, bisexuality provides a useful conceptual lens to study processes like medicalization of identity categories, and the interaction between expert and public medical rhetorics. Then, the project looks at the function of bisexuality and masculinity in activist rhetoric and community pedagogy. By analyzing three historical activists as paradigm cases through archival materials and oral historic interviews, the study finds bisexual men articulate their masculinity as a form of pedagogy. In promoting radical inclusivity, utilizing irreverent humor, and agonistic divestment from neoliberal identity politics, bisexual men involve themselves in community through sexual health activism, conference and archive organizing, social work, and state policy implementation. In doing so, bisexual men knowingly or unknowingly respond to the public spread of medical bio/logics, shifting the conversation away from trace logics of identity and to community engagement and support. Finally, this project moves to grounded theorycrafting in studying the conversations of contemporary digital communities founded by and for bi+ masc folk. By incorporating existing scholarship and the paradigm cases alongside in-vivo coding and abstraction, my research ensures these communities remain anonymous–however, they still provide valuable insights into the way bisexual men continue to move alongside, with, or against bio/logical discourse. By tackling interpersonal and ethical considerations of polyamory, intra-community misogyny, gender expression, and considerations of self-mastery, this project finds that these bisexual men value nuance, fair treatment, and utilizing their desire to erode the binary of masculinity and femininity, even while they may often resort to hegemonic tropes of masculinity in their self-understanding. In the interest of developing pedagogical interventions to connect these values to political solidarity, this project finally proposes ways to orient academic and public pedagogy around such values. This project ends with a theoretical speculation on the nature of bisexual community, and the possibility that bisexual politics necessitates the metaphorical death of such communities.enArchival WorkBisexualityMasculinitiesQueer TheoryRhetoricRhetorical HistoryThesis or Dissertation