Scholarship on the rhetoric of reproduction, childbirth, and motherhood has mostly focused on a U.S. context. Drawing on oral histories that we collected from a small group of Estonian women who gave birth during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, we argue that women’s experiences of childbirth in Soviet maternity hospitals and during the postpartum period can be interpreted as micro-rhetorical interactions through which arguments about the worth or value of a particular identity are communicated implicitly and intangibly. The gendered nature of these micro-rhetorical interactions helps to explain the often observed-upon gap between the official Soviet rhetoric of gender equality and the persistently patriarchal nature of Soviet society. Ultimately, we argue that examining the rhetoric of pregnancy and childbirth in an authoritarian political context also necessitates rethinking the functions of and possibilities for rhetorical agency.

Circulation is about flow, movement, dissemination. It averts the gaze from the physical (as in books, magazines) to the intangible (as in algorithms). Laurie E. Gries credits circulation with deve...

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a broad range of digital contexts, including online discussion forums and computer code.

Throughout Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope, Cheryl Glenn is attuned to her positionality and reminds readers why it has become standard and important to “announce one’s standpoint” (...

This article examines the rhetorical productivity of ambiguity in the context of a loosely-defined mood disorder formally known as dysthymia, referred to colloquially as mild depression. First, the article offers a rhetorical history of the unusual institutional conditions under which this definitionally ambiguous diagnostic entity was constructed prior to its debut in the DSM-III. Second, the article explores how dysthymia’s definitional ambiguity functions as a rhetorical resource in the context of contemporary online health interactions.

A “personally situated” approach to community-engaged rhetoric highlights the personal and performative dimensions of advocacy, which are often obscured in public and community-oriented frameworks. When applied to the advocacy practices of parents of disabled children within the context of special education, personally situated advocacy reveals how a strong personal commitment to advocacy within a highly institutionalized space can create unique and often difficult rhetorical challenges. By making these challenges more visible, personally situated advocacy suggests new possibilities for affiliation between community partners and community-engaged scholars.

As I compose this book review, the 2020 presidential primary field is shrinking as fundraising targets are hit and missed and candidates who remain are promising to make medical care affordable for...

In the 1990s, “Murphy Brown” mothers—often unwed, older, white, and professional—could embrace their alliance with stigmatized single mothers or mark their difference from them, while simultaneously demonstrating their alignment with the dominant discourse of “family values.” Many opted for the latter, gathering under the label “Single Mothers by Choice” (SMC). Using an intersectional cultural rhetorical methodology, this article identifies the axioms of “family values” and demonstrates how they shaped SMC’s efforts to legitimize themselves through an analysis of Jane Mattes’s 1994 guidebook, Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.

In 2014, members of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus began contributing citations to a shared Google Document (GDoc) that suggested a relatively significant contribution of scholarship to the field of Rhetoric and Composition studies. Scholars of color have argued that rhetoric and composition scholarship fails to represent diversity in academic publications (Baca; Banks; Jones Royster; Pimentel; Ruíz). This study examines statistical data arrived at through analysis of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography, with survey and interview data from Latinx scholars providing important context about publishing for people of color.

This article examines a lecture that Booker T. Washington delivered to the Tuskegee literary society in order to argue for Washington’s place within a Black Socratic tradition. Readings of this obscure speech invite new understandings of Washington’s habits of public address, including his pedagogical practice as a teacher of rhetoric, and illuminates how rhetors have mobilized the myth of Socrates to galvanize marginalized communities to civic action.

In this fascinating and beautifully crafted monograph, Pamela VanHaitsma adds to her own rich collection of archival, rhetorical, and gendered scholarship. A brilliant scholar, she again challenges...

Lisa Shaver’s recent monograph, Reforming Women, is the culmination of more than a decade of work on the American Female Moral Reform Society (AFMRS), much of it published in Rhetoric Review. Her s...

This essay develops the concept of material inertia, a lens for studying artifacts of material and spatial rhetorics with a focus on long durations. The essay uses the case study of the DeWitt Clinton High School building, constructed in 1906 in New York City and still in use at CUNY John Jay College, to demonstrate how friction between the building’s design and use is exacerbated over decades. The essay argues for reading long-lived spaces via material inertia to understand the rhetorical force of non-human actors across time, and calls for scholarship in material rhetorics to take specifically durational approaches.

This essay examines moments of Black women’s rhetorical impatience, or performances used to manage time within adverse conditions, to expand conceptions of kairos and self-care. It shows how disruption is a vehicle of discipline designed to promote Black women’s respect and wellness, revealing discursive postures that must inform discussions of identity, risk, and power in relation to rhetorical criticism and education.

In their seminal text, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. K...

“The term virtue,” John Duffy notes wryly in his recent book, “is not exactly trending”—yet perhaps it should be (14). Virtue, as Duffy, John Gallagher, and Steve Holmes suggest in the introduction...

Composition-rhetoric is experiencing a surge in research examining how the material is rhetorically consequential, sometimes termed new materialism. However, much of this research is future-oriented, leaving intact traditional disciplinary values. This article offers a hauntological re-reading of our disciplinary history from a materialist perspective wherein we are always-already material. By examining three canonical articles where the original research is haunted by the rhetoricity of matter, the field’s traditional history and, concomitantly, current-future identities are left radically open and unsettled. New adjacent possibilities are available for realization only if/when we render our past-present-future selves unfamiliar.

Few Anglophone rhetoric studies have explored how colonial environments affected the work of American-supported schools and performances. Korea’s first women’s college, however, used hybrid Korean, American, and Christian cultural references in the pageantry, visuals, and music of its 1930 May Day to negotiate Japanese colonization. These May Day “performative educational rhetorics” acknowledged colonial authority while resisting Japanese assimilation objectives until they were silenced during Japan’s Pacific War. Unlike American-operated schools in U.S. colonies and occupied territories, therefore, Japanese colonization rendered performances not only of Korean but also Christian and American identities as potentially subversive symbols of freedom.

This article reports on a rhetorical analysis of media reports on campus sexual assault informed by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The analysis reveals patterns of narrative construction wherein those accused of campus sexual assault remain absent from reporting while universities and accusers are burdened with responsibility. Consequently, the “disappearing accused” contributes to public uncertainties about how to respond to the problem of campus sexual assault and complicates how governing policies, particularly Title IX, are perceived, wherein Title IX’s equity framework does not match expectations of justice in response to violence.

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

One way toward a more embodied digital rhetoric is through interrogating constructions of digital disembodiment. To make that case, this article examines one of the most famous esoteric or “weird” programming languages, which are not designed for any “real world” purpose, but as art, parody, or experiment. This language, named “brainfuck,” is notorious for its difficulty and uses challenges of mastery to assert a “true” (white, straight, masculine) programmer identity. As brainfuck reveals, a contemporary struggle to connect the effects of technologies with the people who create them can be sustained because their creators perform being machine-like themselves.

This article engages archival and oral history research to explore the documentation practices of Gays and Lesbians United for Equality (GLUE), a lesbian and gay organization active in Louisville during the 1980s and 1990s, and their effects on the production of an LGBTQ archive by local activist David Williams. I demonstrate one way of considering the rhetoricity of archives by attending to the situated rhetorical production of materials that comprise them, exploring the relationships between GLUE’s motivated production of organizational documents and the material made available to Williams’s archive. Organizationally, GLUE could not directly engage in explicitly political activity, leading to rhetorical decisions about what to include in organizational documents. These rhetorical performances, as circulated in GLUE’s documents, reflect complicated rhetorical strategies of what Jose Estéban Muñoz calls disidentification with politics.

Sarah Stickney Ellis, a popular and prolific writer, is now perhaps best remembered as Victorian England’s foremost “propagandist of domesticity.” Ellis, in her Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) “domesticated” women’s elocution by situating it within the home. Although women occupied the private rather than the public sphere, they nevertheless were responsible for much of England’s national greatness—its distinctive “domestic character.” In The Young Ladies’ Reader, elocution becomes a domestic duty supporting the English home and nation. Ellis restricts women’s reading to the private domain thereby reinforcing rhetoric’s traditional separation of male and female discourse.

This article examines how digital rhetoric in a big data age affects human and more-than-human life (lands, waters, energies, and so forth) in places beyond immediate rhetorical encounters. By putting particular pressure on what the author calls digital damage, the article draws out the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of Facebook’s New Mexico data center. Coupling Donna Haraway’s methodological tactic of “staying with the trouble” with cultural rhetorics perspectives on story, accountability, and relationality, the essay shows how digital damage can be expressed through a series of interruptive stories. Ultimately, the article intervenes in debates on the Anthropocene, arguing that attending to digital damage through story is one way to register the sensitivities, urgencies, and accountabilities needed to respond to worlds of entangled damage.

What does the endeavor to end chronic homelessness entail? Is ending homelessness a matter of public funding? Of providing shelter beds and access to health care? In Homeless Advocacy and the Rheto...

This essay addresses the deep division and antagonism in political culture, focusing on rhetorical approaches to citizenship conducive to an agonistic pluralism where a multiplicity of viewpoints exist under a larger framework of cooperation. Specifically, it draws on a diverse set of ideas within the rhetorical tradition and popular culture to examine and advocate for “radical friendliness” as a positive and potentially transformative mode of interaction. Friendliness—the observable, rhetorical dimension of friendship—is geared toward identification and consubstantiality and as such, provides one path toward a more productive democratic community.

This article examines the modern foster care system through its intersections with rhetorical theories of care and rhetorical practices of hospitality and provision. At the beginning of the twentieth century, policy makers and activists promoted different rhetorics of fostering as they debated ways to care for America’s vulnerable and dependent children. From this national crisis of child welfare, the modern foster care system emerged. Revisiting the rhetorical struggle over foster care reopens the question of what it means to foster and brings into focus practices of family-making, parenting, child-rearing, and basic hospitality that are implicated in the response.

This article examines Reddit-users’ (“redditors”) responses to a story concerning proposed legislation that would require parents considering not vaccinating their children to participate in a public-health delivered education session on the science of immunization. In theorizing Reddit as a “peripheral public” venue and attending to its use of algorithms to sort content and commentary, this case study uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to explore the rhetorical strategies employed by redditors as they discuss the proposed legislation and the scientific controversy behind it—suggesting new strategies for investigating participatory media, as well as insights for key stakeholders in the vaccine controversy.

"Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education." Rhetoric Review, 39(1), pp. 118–119

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

Attempting to explain the vast levels of income and wealth inequality in America today is a daunting task. Compounding this endeavor by also attempting to explain the rise of Donald J. Trump is ano...

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

In our current cultural era of numerous social movements, it is often easy to lose sight of what drives individuals and collectives toward action. As the editors and contributors of Unruly Rhetoric...

Consider the recording studio. Its walls absorb and release sound waves, filtering and reflecting them. It is filled with electronics that further direct and diffract sound: mics, processors, audio...

This essay discusses the racialized politics, histories, and ideologies that inform the crafting and instituting of core curricula in rhetorical studies. As is the case in many rhetoric and writing studies undergraduate majors and graduate programs, core curricula can be counted on to contain survey courses that review the histories and theories of rhetoric and composition—sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping, and always subject to the ideological orientation of the program/department and the scholarly training of its professors. Through critical race counterstory, this essay explores what core curricula are intended to do within rhetoric and writing studies programs/departments.

This essay analyzes the grammar of military graffiti in Nigeria to uncover the mindless posture with which the military deploys it to assert their power, identity, and temporal orientations in ways that not only subvert and shame a minority group and its belief systems, but also expose the brutal and liminal conditions of the state agents. This analysis extends studies of state graffiti by framing the multifold grammatical components as rhetorical acts of domination.

Hugh Blair’s rhetorical theory reflects the tenets of New Science, answering the call for communication as the transfer of knowledge from the composer to the audience. Reading Blair on style through the Enlightenment cognitive model of physiological psychology suggests a mutual cognitive associative model. In this model, style is essential, not ornamental, as it limits dissonance in the audience’s cognitive process through perspicuity.

Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values. This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor united most workers regardless of craft or trade. They also organized African American workers and women. This essay uncovers how the Knights maintained unity by analyzing speeches given at their annual conventions from 1885-1890. Leaders defined male Knights as chivalric, self-sacrificing, and battle-tested. After identifying the elements of the rhetoric of knighthood, I then explain how the rhetoric offered only ironic inclusion to white women and excluded Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. This argument builds rhetorical scholarship on inclusion and exclusion in social movements by theorizing its partial and ironic modes.

Rhetorical scholars have long regarded identification as a concept central to Kenneth Burke’s work. However, a close reading of Burke’s work of the 1930s locates the early incarnations of identification in the dialectical relationship between human embodiment and symbolicity. By restoring the complications neglected by a largely symbolic approach to identification through increased attention to the body and the material consequences of symbolicity, a revised understanding of Burkean identification captures more effectively the complex material and symbolic divisions that characterize human social life and prescribes means of negotiating these divisions.

This article explores the rhetorical nature of “tangled” memories, what Marita Sturken describes as an intermeshing of sanctioned histories with personal and/or public narratives. To exemplify this phenomenon, the author examines the public memories of Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Greenhow and Boyd actively promoted slavery in their published accounts yet common “retellings” of their lives often elide these positions, and instead focus on their sensational work as Confederate spies. Such a reframing depicts them as progressive women, creating a tangled memory that uncritically lionizes them. Ultimately, the author argues, more complex “retellings” of historical figures are needed.

“We wonder where the rhetorical theory is for unsettling this resting place when it turns out to be a place of oppression for others?” —Sutton and Mifsud, A Revolution in Tropes, p. xiii.In a time ...

Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insider-outsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.

Throughout The Mark of Criminality, Bryan McCann thoughtfully challenges dominant narratives about gangsta rap by shedding light on its kairotic relationship with the beginning of the U. S. governm...

There is little to nothing rhetoric can teach us about Donald J. Trump. That’s fake news. Don’t get me wrong. Rhetoric has a lot to teach us about many things. Indeed, I am a teacher of rhetoric my...

In the nineteenth century, religious tract distribution was a popular form of evangelism. Drawing on evidence from the American Tract Society’s periodical, American Tract Magazine, and tract society reports, this essay claims tract distribution as an early site for women’s rhetorical education. While distributing tracts, women received a door-to-door rhetorical education where they acquired and honed skills including canvassing, establishing ethos, and adapting appeals and evidence to different audiences and rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this essay contributes to a broader understanding of what counts as rhetorical education and how and where that education takes place.