Communicating Human-Object Orientation

Abstract

The Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale (OSI) website is the largest source of information representing a community who experiences emotional and romantic desire towards objects. This chapter presents a queer rhetorical analysis of OSI to understand how queer communities that must negotiate multiple taboos (en)counter the public. The author argues that OSI reveals two things about taboo communication: 1) the discursive and material boundaries that constitute the taboo and 2) the rhetorical work required to disrupt these boundaries. The author's analysis reveals how OSI engages in complex rhetorical practices to lay the groundwork for a queer-posthuman counterpublic—a rhetorical space that disrupts the heteronormative moral divisions and anthropocentric paradigmatic distinctions that constitute certain lived experiences as taboo. Such a move exposes the possibilities and ethical implications at stake in communicating the taboo while outlining an analytic framework for understanding the rhetorical processes that facilitate (en)countering the taboo in public communication.