A long lineage of Women of Color (WOC) feminists illustrates how, despite academia’s insistence on “bifurcate[ing] life into neat categories—scholar, Chicana, mother, or activist,” in the lived exp...

Jewish rhetorics recently garnered critical attention in rhetoric studies, resulting in extensive scholarship attempting to carve out the field’s jurisdiction. Jewish feminist rhetoricians, for example, often use Jewish rhetorics to reclaim women’s religious experiences. But recovering the secular voices of Jewish women is also essential to understanding Jewish rhetorics, evinced by an anonymous group of nineteenth century women. These women use secular Jewish topoi—exile, tzedek (justice), and zikaron (memory)—to articulate their identity as American Jewish women, demonstrating both Jewish rhetorics’ potential as a cultural rhetoric and topoi’s ability to empower marginalized communities through exclusionary practices.

This article calls for an expansion of the inquiry methods used to explore rhetorical education during the Americanization movement of the early twentieth century. It offers the methodology of administrative history as an approach to help scholars gain perspective on why and how local programs were developed and implemented from the perspective of administrators and participants. This approach enables a more robust understanding of not only the complexity of Americanization programs but also the diversity of approaches that were employed.

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...

Media coverage of the March 24, 2018 March for Our Lives has been voluminous, including notable coverage framing the march in relation to historical precursors. Analyzing two chronotopes, or implicit orientations to space and time, embedded in this coverage, this essay contributes to efforts to understand journalism as a space of vernacular public memory. I argue that journalists and commentators mobilize historical precedent in ways that constrain the possible outcomes of teen activism in the present.

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.

Perhaps unconventional, but necessary, I must divulge my reviewer stance to clarify my relationship with this important work by Bruce Hyde and Drew Kopp. An original Star Trek cast member, Hyde was...

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.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

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.

Agency in prison writing is often theorized as resistance to the material conditions of incarceration and the ideological forces of the State. Situating agency in the larger history of mass incarceration (1970 – 2010) and in the memoirs of those who lived through it, however, shifts the focus from the prison writer as subject resisting an oppressive system and toward the prison writer as rhetor navigating the changing discourses and material conditions of mass incarceration in registers of agency that include resistance, self-determination, and recovery.

Researchers in literacy studies have been refining the definitions and examples of literacy development over the past four decades that have significantly improved our knowledge about marginalized cultures and their literacy development. This article explores the literacy practices of the medieval Scandinavians through archaeological and textual sources. First, I explore the gaps in literacy research followed by a detailed examination of medieval Nordic literacy practices shown in the runestones, artifacts, and the sagas. The intent of this article is to shed light on a literacy tradition outside of the privileged Latinate Christian tradition during the medieval period.

Dave Tell’s Remembering Emmett Till is not simply another historiographical project about the 1955 killing of the black teenager from Chicago. It is about how issues of race, class, geography, and ...

"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.

It is by now not news that our new geological epoch is here. The Anthropocene, the much-contested name used to describe an age of human-influenced change, proclaims a new way for stratigraphers to ...

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...

The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter is a localized study of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the #AllLivesMatter (#ALM) countermovement as played out in Memphis, Tenn...

This article presents the racial politics of circulation as a critical concept for elucidating how whiteness, nationhood, and doxa intertwine to reinforce and amplify white supremacy within a context of white nationalist postracialism. As a case study, the authors investigate how two popular slogans associated with Donald Trump drive the production and circulation of digital doxicons called Trumpicons and how such Trumpicons, in turn, feed back into a socio-political loop of white supremacist logics. In studying how Trumpicons become embroiled in such racial politics of circulation, the authors disclose how new media images contribute to an affective economy of whiteness in contemporary American culture.

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...