ABSTRACT Bisexual discourse is underexamined as such within rhetoric. So too are the historical practices of African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) communities. Responding to these forms of erasure, my essay advances the study of Black women’s bisexual rhetorics through a focus on the collected papers of a freeborn African American woman, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932). Specifically, the essay offers a comparative analysis of two archival collections containing letters to her: the widely studied Primus Family Papers and the more recently acquired Rebecca Primus Papers. Taken together, these collections offer an enlarged view of Rebecca’s epistolary relationships with people of more than one gender. In doing so, I argue, the new collection reveals a need for a bisexual archival framework, which redresses the limitations of any single collection of romantic letters as a necessarily partial and speculative source of information. This framework affirms Black women’s bisexual rhetorics while recovering a more diverse LGBTQ+ past.

中文翻译：

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在 Primus 收藏中肯定黑人女性双性恋修辞的档案框架

摘要 双性恋话语在修辞中没有得到充分的审视。非裔美国女同性恋、男同性恋、双性恋、跨性别者和酷儿+ (LGBTQ+) 社区的历史习俗也是如此。针对这些形式的擦除，我的文章通过关注自由出生的非裔美国女性 Rebecca Primus (1836–1932) 的论文集，推进了对黑人女性双性恋修辞的研究。具体而言，这篇文章对包含给她的信件的两个档案馆藏进行了比较分析：广泛研究的 Primus Family Papers 和最近获得的 Rebecca Primus Papers。总而言之，这些收藏品提供了丽贝卡与不止一种性别的人的书信关系的放大视图。我认为，在这样做的过程中，新收藏揭示了对双性恋档案框架的需求，它纠正了任何单一的浪漫信件集合的局限性，因为它必须是部分和推测性的信息来源。这个框架肯定了黑人女性的双性恋言论，同时恢复了更加多元化的 LGBTQ+ 过去。