Abstract This essay outlines the rhetorical elements and discursive strategies used to perpetuate cultural racism, or ethnicism, in contemporary political discourse. Using Marine Le Pen's Islamophobic discourse as a case study, this essay demonstrates how Le Pen deploys ethno-nationalist rhetoric to highlight the dangers that she believes Muslim terrorists pose to French national identity. She portrays Muslim terrorists as rootless wanderers capable of causing irreparable damage to France, which enables her to craft herself as a protector of the French home using populist reasoning. In doing so, Le Pen's discourse stokes fears of clandestine terrorists hiding among the French Muslim and migrant populace, which constitutes the Muslim terrorist—and by extension, all Muslims—as major security and cultural threats to the nation. Consequently, Le Pen portrays French national identity as incompatible with all forms of Islam.

Abstract This essay examines the first major American debate over aerial warfare as a case study in the relationship between visual spectacle and warfighting technologies. In the early 1920s, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell mounted a short but intense advocacy campaign to win public approval for a standalone and fully supported air force. He justified his arguments with sanitized depictions of the warplane's idealized deployment. I call such depictions technological spectacles, and I parse their three hallmarks in Mitchell's advocacy: the dissociation of violence and destruction, the self-justification of technology, and the confusion of possibility for probability. I demonstrate that these habits of spectacle pervaded not only Mitchell's rhetoric but the coverage he received in the press. The essay establishes Mitchell as a key figure in the history of American rhetoric about military technology and, in the process, offers new historical context and critical vocabulary for diagnosing rhetorics of technological spectacle.

Abstract The 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs provides an example of what I call “sport spectacle.” I define “sport spectacle” as a staged encounter in which the institutions of sports and media conjoin with the activities of individual athletes and the gaze of interested audiences to co-produce narratives in which athletic endeavors reflect, shape, or intervene upon social will in material and symbolic ways. Sport spectacle involves a contested co-production of meaning about a sporting event's social importance that occurs before, during, and—through the rhetorical processes of public memory—after the sporting event. I analyze how King and Riggs understood the match within women's movement discourse and the cultural evolution of tennis, in addition to how King and others have treated the match as a cultural touchstone that can be redeployed in public memory. Recent films When Billie Beat Bobby (2001) and The Battle of the Sexes (2017) offer very different characterizations of King's role as a social movement actor and the Battle of the Sexes as a social movement act. While When Billie Beat Bobby credits King with wide-ranging transformation of women's lives in a universe largely devoid of political context, The Battle of the Sexes anachronistically champions King as a closeted LGBTQ+ icon with a more nuanced understanding of sport spectacle as a transformational gathering that prepares spectators for political contestation. This case study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that attends to the nuanced rhetorical dimensions and political contexts of spectacle.

Abstract This essay explores coalition-building as a confluence of space and embodiment. In particular, the author studies the relationship between U.S. military Veterans and Lakota protestors during the 2016 and 2017 anti-Pipeline Demonstrations at Standing Rock. A critical analysis of the case study brings to light a set of workable practices that involve situating physical bodies together in space, locating the situated-self relative to other people and the world, and performing an enlarged understanding of the self as always potentially coalitional. Together, these practices contribute to forming not only a functional social alliance but also a transformative coalitional consciousness.

Abstract Russian disinformation activities imitate divisive U.S. political discourse within a polarized social media ecosystem. As part of a multipronged response, U.S. citizens have been urged to increase their personal vigilance and to identify inauthentic messages, hence flagging foreign-made disinformation by studying its content. However, by applying Taylor's concept of “imitation (in)security” to a set of Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) Facebook and Instagram advertisements, this article explains why content-centered approaches to combatting disinformation need to be reimagined. Building upon imitation (in)security, we propose that the strength of the IRA disinformation campaign was not its ability to foist falsehoods upon unsuspecting Americans, but, rather, its uncanny imitation of prevalent themes, images, and arguments within American civic life. Our analysis of IRA-generated advertisements targeting U.S. military veterans demonstrates how IRA “trolls” were imitating American communication patterns to amplify existing positions within a deluge of messages marked by polysemy. Our analysis suggests readers should be less concerned by such Russian-made imitations than was suggested in much of the breathless 2016 post-election coverage, for the traction of such disinformation hinges on domestic crises and injustices that long predate Russian interference. Pointing to foreign-made social media content stokes a sense of threat and crisis—the essence of national insecurity and a main objective of the IRA's efforts—yet our actual security weaknesses are homemade.

AbstractUsing the murder of Magdiel Sanchez as a case study, we argue that rhetoric’s future must embrace practices of situated listening. While much of the field’s work has focused on speakers and practices of invention, we argue that a more just study of public deliberation must position this approach in conversation with an acknowledgment of situated reception. We follow scholars of color, feminist theorists, and disability advocates who have long argued for the practices of ethical listening, adding that the imperative to listen extends beyond the listening ear, accounting for the totality of the body and its environmental and contextual positions. By reaching beyond the demands of race to consider the intersecting axis of (dis)ability, we push the fields of rhetoric, sound studies, and critical/cultural communication studies to consider embodiment as a whole condition of rhetorical reception.

This essay identifies and explicates a key rhetorical form—“redemptive exclusion”—underlying former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s efforts to defend barring Syrian refugees from American soil. Through a reliance on ethotic prolepsis, the rhetorical form of redemptive exclusion enables the creation of a transcendent perspective that reconciles seemingly opposite contemporary cultural and political rhetorics: xenophobic discourses of exclusion become coarticulated with the mythic promise of an America open to all. We show how Haley’s rhetoric combines antithetical gestures of inclusion and exclusion by interweaving synecdochic narratives of her own immigrant history; hyperbolic narratives of American benevolence toward immigrants; and stereotypical narratives of terrorist identity that preempt the acceptance of Syrian refugees as even potentially American. We argue that Haley converts the rejection of Syrian refugees from American soil into an opportunity for constraining and qualifying the mythic ideal of the United States as an historical beacon for immigrants around the globe. In the conclusion, we suggest that a close study of how redemptive exclusion takes life in Haley’s discourse offers more general lessons about the rhetorical and ideological character of controversies over U.S. immigration policy.

Research Article| December 01 2012 Circulation and Noncirculation of Photographic Texts in the Civil Rights Movement: A Case Study of the Rhetoric of Control Sean Patrick O’Rourke Sean Patrick O’Rourke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 685–694. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940631 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sean Patrick O’Rourke; Circulation and Noncirculation of Photographic Texts in the Civil Rights Movement: A Case Study of the Rhetoric of Control. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 685–694. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940631 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Forum You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract At moments when science regulators perceive a crisis that requires market intervention, they must craft arguments to overcome the burdens of proof placed upon them by both their authorizing statutes and scientific standards of knowledge formation. These "presumptive breaches" lend themselves to rhetorical analysis. This essay offers the eight year bid by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate ephedra dietary supplements as a case study to explicate the role rhetoric plays in proposing and reviewing science regulation.

Abstract This essay uncovers rhetorical processes devoted to rehumanizing the enemy as an antidote to the virulent rhetoric of war. With an eye toward disrupting a problematic process of national identity construction based on otheringand dehumanization, this essay examines Jarhead as a case study that challenges current ideologies of soldiers and their enemies. Using Kenneth Burkes concept of consubstantiality and Linda Hutcheons discussion of reflective oscillation, essay examines Jarhead as a case of rhetoric working to rehumanize enemies, thus providing an example of how film can work against war culture.

Abstract This essay argues for a reprivileging of the object of speech in the study of public address. To this end, public discourse concerning the tonal qualities of male and female speech, particularly in moments of affective transgression, is examined to better discern our deeply gendered, cultural norms of eloquence. The primary case study analyzes reactions to the oratory ofBarack Obama and Hillary Clinton to show how their respective vocal tones played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.