In recognizing the symbolic potential of the body, fashion photography is a logical but critically underexplored area for the study of militarism in popular culture. Using the conception of imperial democracy as a theoretical framework, a semiotic analysis of Steven Meisel’s editorial “Make Love Not War” published in “Vogue Italia” identifies how gender and uniform are used to replicate imperialist narratives in a luxury fashion context. These visuals uphold the tenets of new militarism by fetishizing military aesthetics.

The article attempts to present the rhetorical analysis of selected publications which can be currently found in the Internet and which deal with the issues covered by the acronym LGBTQ+ (and its variants). Differentia specifica of various definitions of the notion (starting with “people” and “community” to “ideology” and “degeneration”) manifests itself in, among others, the reference to two other, highly significant, because persuasively catchy notions: health and disease, both of the body and the mind, on which the analysis taking into account all textual dimensions (inventio, dispositio and elocutio) on the one hand, and extratextual (communication, contextual and consituational) conditions of the internet “dispute” about LGBTQ+, focuses. The description of how the notions of “health” (somatic and mental) and “disease” (also dual) are used in this analysis lead to the final conclusion that the twofold approach to LGBTQ constitutes the incarnation of, to a certain extent, the perennial civilizational or cultural conflict between barbarity and humanism, whose depositary, among others, also (classical) rhetoric in one of its numerous meanings remains.

This paper demonstrates the connections between certain cultural traits of Scandinavia, a scholarly interest in rhetorical practice and the workings of rhetoric, and a recent interest in audience-oriented research methods. Scandinavia is characterised by a tradition of practical rhetoric, egalitarianism, high trust, and low scores on power distance and masculinity in Hofstede’s culture comparison tool. This, I suggest, is reflected in an interest in the everyday pragmatic functions and workings of rhetoric, paving the way for the use of audience research.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, w jaki sposób amplifikacja retoryczna wpływa na dyskurs, nadając terminom naukowym wydźwięk emocjonalny. Przedmiotem studium jest polski dyskurs genderowy w jego wariancie politycznym. Artykuł składa się z pięciu części. Po zdefiniowaniu w części wstępnej pojęć gender i dyskurs, zwrócono uwagę na narzędzia amplifikacji retorycznej. Materiał badawczy – polskojęzyczne teksty internetowe prezentujące różne stanowiska w debacie na temat płci – przeanalizowany został pod kątem typologii używanych mechanizmów amplifikacji.

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media. Through rhetorical analysis of selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person’s reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.

This paper discusses the visual encodings of non-normativities in the selected K-pop music videos and seeks to establish them within the aesthetic of gendered desirability that deviates from what is considered a social norm in South Korean culture. The first part presents a short history and current boundaries of Korean pop music and the construct of gender and its (inter)relation with sex and rhetoric of desire are discussed. The next section maps out the changes in the understanding of normativity and the concept of queerness. The final part of the paper relates the theories and practices of non-normative identities to the visualities from post-2007 K-pop music videos, using examples to illustrate and contextualize them. The authors focus on the representations of masculinities and show how selected texts can be read as spaces of liminality defying normative cultural and social rules.