This article uses the example of nootropics—a flexible term that capitalizes on the flexibility of the brain—as a category to describe how seemingly oppositional tropes, or turns, can occupy the same rhetorical topos, or space, and produce distinct ethos, political identity, and commitment within that space. It considers two dialectical, gendered tropes in nootropic discourse. The tropes are a falsely binary and highly problematic set of subjectivities, a Gothic masculine and an ostensible Gothic feminine. These two tropes exemplify how rhetorics of wellness produce identities whose turnings towards a politics does not map cleanly onto electoral politics or even identity politics in the US and Canada.

How do material and discursive arrangements, technologies and rhetoric, shape the subjects and objects of medical discourse (Scott & Melonçon, 2017; Selzer & Crowley, 1999)? How are the affordances of material and discursive arrangements seized by political actors? Tackling these and similar questions has been a growing preoccupation in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, where researchers have sought better ways of understanding the entanglements of the symbolic and material (Booher & Jung, 2018; Graham, 2009; Jack, 2019; Propen, 2018). A perspicuous case for this research is the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (UICA), an amendment to the Public Health Service Act mandating that women receive an ultrasound and have its images described to them before having abortions. Three US states have a version of this law, with over twenty others having laws similar to the UICA (Guttmacher Institute, 2019, n.d.). Through this law, antiabortionists are able to construct a kairotic situation through the mediating capacity of ultrasound where they can use the actual state of affairs (a woman seeking an abortion) to argue through images for a possible future (a woman foregoing abortion). This article analyzes the UICA to understand how the political speech of antiabortionists enrolls the moralizing capacity of ultrasound to construct a kairotic situation to intervene in women’s pregnancies. Starting from studies of actor-networks (Latour, 1983;1999a) and technological mediation (Verbeek, 2011; 2015), and departing to feminist rhetorical science studies (Booher & Jung, 2018; Frost & Haas, 2017) and rhetorical approaches to imagery and visualization (Propen, 2018; Roby, 2016; Webb, 2009), I argue that not only do translation processes and technical mediation distribute agencies; they construct the very situations where agencies are constituted. This study can widen our understanding of how political entities appropriate the rhetorical capacities of technology and discourse to translate their politics into legislature.

In the work of transnational feminist scholars, there is a share interest in investigating the colonial practices that affect women’s lives around the globe. In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1986) Mohanty claims that scholars in the field should “detect (…) colonialist move(s) in the case of a hegemonic first-third world connection in scholarship” (349) in order to recognize the peculiarities of the cultures whose discourses are being created and thus, avoid the universalization and “homogenization of class, race, religious, cultural and historical specificities of the lives of women” (348). In this regard, Dingo touches upon the vital role of translations in the transcoding of arguments: “the way policy makers and development experts <strong>translate</strong> the term gender mainstreaming into policy documents should be <strong>a crucial concern for feminist rhetoritians</strong> because this act of translation demonstrates how arguments shift and change due to economic and geopolitical contexts and thus <strong>shows how power informs rhetorics</strong>” (2012: 31). Dingo´s conceptualization of the term “translation” is ambiguous, sometimes used to refer to “transcoding” (resituate a taken-for-granted term within the same language in order to fit certain ideologies, 31) and other times as the transfer of words from the source language to the target language (104). In this article, I aim to investigate the “transcoding” of the concept "women empowerment" as it is translated from English to Spanish and vice versa with the attempt to “make visible the ways in which all of our knowledge is mediated” (Queen 2008: 486) from the perspective of a post-colonial theory of translation.

From early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation and Rhetoric surpasses this ontological threshold of persuasion and metatextual transcendence in a far more sophisticated way, exceeding also the sheer plane of textual mechanics. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a systematic inclusion of rhetoric-centered approaches in Translation Studies, and vice versa, would cross-fertilize not just those two fields, but how it also would help to shed light on some areas where a monolingual focus has all too often imposed significant limitations to progress. It will also provide a quick overview of what I define as a “Rhetoric of Meaning in Translation Studies,” and will also explore how the study of rhetorical correspondence at the micro level in source and target languages and texts may be substantially hindered by significant structural disparities at the macro level that may have not been systematically or successfully incorporated in the wider theoretical framework of Translation Studies.

Young appears coy here about the status of his sexuality. He seems invested in rendering a story that highlights how he is constantly perceived as a "faggot" due to his failed performance of proper (black) masculinity and his ability to speak WEV. But he never explicitly claims a gay identity, leaving the reader to speculate.

Through the usage of academic autobiography, this paper examines the difficulties inherent to embodying seemingly incongruous identities outside of the mainstream. Examining metrics for inclusion often utilized in the black, feminist, queer, and BDSM communities, I attempt to locate where women with intersecting identities find and build networks that enable them to both “belong” and to fully express the complexities of their subjectivities without compromise.

‘Here’s a Chance to Dance our Way Out of our Constrictions’: P-Funk’s Black Masculinity and the Performance of Imaginative Freedom” considers the ways that George Clinton’s two funk projects, Parliament and Funkadelic, create new spaces for nonnormative heterosexuality and creative production. I explore issues of embodiment , sexual fluidity, and community in P-Funk’s iconography, lyrics and sound and then consider ways that black male fans have gained a sense of imaginative freedom from their music. P-Funk’s solidly funking music, hallucinatory and often politicized music, experimental cover art and wildly threatrical stage shows create a new a queer space for black heterosexual men. Most significantly, P-Funk’s music explores black experience, particularly bodily, sexual and sensual experience at points of ambiguity, vulnerability, pain, desire, and laughter, using tools of music that speak to their listeners individually and internally, as well as collectively. This power to harness emotionally strong and sometimes inchoate feeling had a powerful effect on its audience—prompting some to find unity and empathy with other black men.

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires.

Manhood, Lorain Style is a narrative essay in which the author discusses issues of masculinity and gender identity in the working-class environment of his hometown Lorain, Ohio. Written mostly as a story, the essay recounts a fistfight that the author provoked and participated in when he was sixteen years old in order to prove he wasn’t “gay” based on the standards of what he considers Rust Belt masculinity.

The cover illustration of What Is Sex? features what is in this culture an instantly recognizable image. 1 Moonlike, an ovum hangs in the center against a black background. Off to the lower left a single sperm, its curved tail suggesting movement, points its head toward the egg. This image depicts a moment of anticipation, just before the merger of egg and sperm. As part of the cover illustration this image seems to function as the answer to the question posed by the title. The juxtaposition of the title and this image implies a definition of "sex" that is necessarily linked to reproduction and a fixed dual-gender system. This image of egg and sperm, which stands in for human females and males, suggests that when it comes to answering the question "what is sex?" human beings are central to the discussion.