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Ironic performativity: Amy Schumer and the conventions of embodiment -- The end of the discussion: the crisis of judgment -- The joke is on you: audience contexts, criticisms, and investments -- "We saw your boobs": "Bro Camp" and subversive coaching -- Conclusion: racial humor and performing white innocence

Queer bonds conceptualize inventive and resistant modes of belonging, sociability, and relation that push at, through, and outside normative relational systems and their normative commitments. The essay juxtaposes contemporary gay suicide discourse, specifically the "It Gets Better" campaign and 2009's Prayers for Bobby with the 1985 Molly Ringwald made-for-TV film Surviving: A Family in Crisis, examining how normative familial bonds in discourses of heterosexual suicide produce a resistant and relational discourse of brutal selfishness. Contrary to a rhetoric of selfishness, mediated representation of gay youth suicide reproduces a discursive link between gay identity and suicide that constructs gay suicide as problematically logical, sensible, and intelligible. Conceptualizing a queered rhetoric of selfishness, resisting gay suicidal logics, the essay looks to queer bonds forged in John Hughes's 'Brat Pack" films of otherness as maps of relational resistance and inventive articulations of non-normative modes of queer selfishness and belonging.

Border Rhetorics is a collection of essays that undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the US-Mexico border as it functions in the rhetorical production of civic unity in the United States. A "border" is a powerful and versatile concept, variously invoked as the delineation of geographical territories, as a judicial marker of citizenship, and as an ideological trope for defining inclusion and exclusion. It has implications for both the empowerment and subjugation of any given populace. Both real and imagined, the border separates a zone of physical and symbolic exchange whose geographical, political, economic, and cultural interactions bear profoundly on popular understandings and experiences of citizenship and identity. The border's rhetorical significance is nowhere more apparent, nor its effects more concentrated, than on the frontier between the United States and Mexico. Often understood as an unruly boundary in dire need of containment from the ravages of criminals, illegal aliens, and other undesirable threats to the national body, this geopolitical locus exemplifies how normative constructions of "proper"; border relations reinforce definitions of US citizenship, which in turn can lead to anxiety, unrest, and violence centered around the struggle to define what it means to be a member of a national political community. Contributors Bernadette Marie Calafell / Karma R. Chávez / Josue David Cisneros / D. Robert DeChaine / Anne Teresa Demo / Lisa A. Flores / Dustin Bradley Goltz / Marouf Hasian Jr. / Michelle A. Holling / Julia R. Johnson / Zach Juatus / Diane M. Keeling / John Louis Lucaites / George F. McHendry Jr. / Toby Miller / Kent A. Ono / Brian L. Ott / Kimberlee Pérez / Mary Ann Villarreal.