In this article, I explore the rhetorical deployment of White tears, tears that are circulated within narratives of interracial conflict as evidence for the rightness of White supremacist norms. More specifically, White tears are those that are framed as deictic indicators of a White victim versus a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) threat. These presumed relations of cause and effect are made possible within an emotional context that assumes a baseline White rationality as the norm; distress signals the threat of non-White aggression. Analysis of several prominent cases of crying demonstrates how tears can be marshaled as evidence for the legitimacy of White bodies at the expense of those of color. Although considering the rhetorical force of affect and emotion is important for critical rhetorical analyses, such work needs to contend with how scripts for emotional engagement are already inclined toward or against certain bodies. It then becomes possible to develop alternative, subversive framings.

On 13 July 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a speech memorializing five police officers slain during a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, Texas. Obama’s speech came on the heels of many other mass shootings, some associated with acts of racialized violence, during his administration. We argue that by deploying aporia, Obama addressed the conflicting constraints and exigencies exposed by the Dallas shooting and opened inventional possibilities that included virtuous behavior, commemorative speech, and dialogic-reciprocal encounters that also reappraised the concept of double consciousness. We conclude by exploring how aporia enables and undercuts discussions of complex social problems during epideictic encounters.

This article looks at how exigence is made publicly observable in user-based media operating on recommendation algorithms. Messaging in these rhetorical environments often takes the form of imitative behaviors rather than statements inviting a direct response. Examined in the article are two audio memes from TikTok representing two modes of imitation: one a physical imitation meme associated with the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, and the other a narrative imitation meme where participants objectify endemic social problems. The findings suggest that the responsorial imperative of audio memes can either intensify the speed and urgency with which an exigence is experienced, or it can bring urgency to endemic problems. The studies also find that the formal qualities of a given audio meme constrain both how an exigence is communicated as well as what kinds of exigences the meme can be taken up for in the first place.

ABSTRACTThis short essay explores oblique approaches to rhetorical theory and practice and, in doing so, accidently arrives at a renewed appreciation of Aesthetics.KEYWORDS: Aestheticsobliquesense AcknowledgmentsI thank Crystal Colombini for reading versions of this essay and offering editorial guidance that made the essay much better. I also thank the anonymous reviewer whose questions and suggestions undoubtedly strengthened the work.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 One such encounter with the oblique can be found in Debra Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (177n13).2 Thanks to Eunsong Kim for pointing me toward Glissant’s discussion of the opaque.

Scholars have often noted that the Greek rhetorical term, kairos, relates etymologically to weaving. However, many accounts of this connection overlook the weaving technology used in ancient Greece, the warp-weighted loom. Examining this technology alongside archeological experiments, ancient depictions on vases, and references in ancient lexicons, we propose adopting a definition of kairos (in its weaving sense) as a “chained spacing cord” used to ensure balance and evenness. By focusing on kairos’ relationship to weaving, we shift its etymological resonances away from the idea of an opening to be penetrated, reemphasizing a concept of kairos grounded in embodiment, materiality, balance, and due measure. More broadly, attending to the materiality of praxis highlights rhetoric’s connection to other technai and offers an additional way to understand gendered histories of rhetoric.

The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric's relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast "world" as "worlds" to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric's investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis)continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric's troubled place.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

ABSTRACTIn the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020, cities across the United States erupted in protest. These public displays reignited debates over the presence of Confederate monuments, such as the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. This essay examines several protest events at the Lee statue memorial space in summer 2020, arguing that these moments are a sustained form of a space for encounter. Protestors reclaimed the Lee statue through art and renaming the space, celebrating Black heritage and excellence, and creating educational, accessible, and safe spaces to encourage conversations about racial justice across social differences. The Lee memorial space, renamed Marcus-David Peters Circle by protestors, shows how spaces for encounter can navigate moments of contingency and eligibility for antiracist activism, and how other toxic memory sites can be remade into generative spaces that offer alternative visions of the future.KEYWORDS: Lost Causeprotest rhetoricspublic memoryspace/place AcknowledgmentsThe author expresses her sincerest thanks to Jacqueline Rhodes, Cheryl Glenn, Michele Kennerly, Jeff Nagel, and the anonymous reviewers for their help at every step of the process.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Spanish translation: "together we are powerful!"

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes a display of Wenonah and the “Lover’s Leap” in Winona, Minnesota, as an example of dissociative memory(-)work. Applying dissociation to the organization of commemorative space, I attend to how the display uses markers of commemorative labor as modifying terms that invite audiences to dissociate investiture from the figure represented in order to privilege the people, actions, and temporal frameworks of those who made and maintained the memorial. This analysis proposes different dissociative units relevant to memory(-)work, including persona memorialized/persona memorializing, act memorialized/act of memorializing, and time memorialized/time of memorializing. Attention to this example of memory(-)work helps critics account for a unique and resilient form of rhetorical colonialism.KEYWORDS: Dissociationlover’s leapmemory(-)workrhetorical colonialismWenonah AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers, Jacqueline Rhodes, and Anna M. M. Gaffey for their insights toward improving this essay. This work also benefited from assistance and resources provided by the Winona County Historical Society and Winona State University Krueger Library.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThe former Badger Army Ammunition Plant in rural southern Wisconsin has long been a landscape mired in settler colonial and industrial attempts to sever social and cultural relations between land and bodies. After the plant was decommissioned, the community decided it should be ecologically restored given the landscape’s legacy of harm. Through inter views with 17 local stakeholders and storytellers, this essay reveals how toxic containment as both metaphor and topoi, grounded in the materiality of toxins, brings visibility to the landscape’s history while at the same time providing a model of local resistance. For those in the Badger landscape, metaphor and topoi lead to personal and social actions that support culturally conscious relationship building with a direct impact on the scientific restoration process. Ultimately, this essay argues that how stories shape spatial experiences matters, especially given the way communities are guided by the metaphor-turned-topoi process.KEYWORDS: Environmental rhetoricmetaphorspatial rhetorictopoitoxic AcknowledgmentsI thank Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Morris Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback in developing this project.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Locals widely refer to the plant’s footprint as “Badger”; however, there is a developing effort to call it by its Ho-Chunk name, Mąą Wakącąk (Maa-wa-kun-chunk), which means “Sacred Earth.”2 “Re-story-ation” is a term theorized by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan (p. 4) and Potawatomi and environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (p. 9) to represent the need for ecological restoration to better account for the relationships between landscapes and people. Stories play a central role in bridging scientific and cultural perspectives.3 The committee was biased in favor of US governmental officials while the remaining seats were distributed between cultural and advocacy groups. Although I hoped to include more Ho-Chunk participants than the original committee (one seat), I was only able to interview two storytellers given limitations related to funding, time, and COVID-19.4 Industrial solvents from a deterrent burning ground plume of toxins discharge to Weigand’s Bay, which connects to Lake Wisconsin and the Wisconsin River.5 Documented health complaints by workers at the plant included headaches and chest pains due to nitroglycerin exposure, as well as cancer deaths (Citizens for Safe Water; Gould).6 Community Conservation Coalition for the Sauk Prairie.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as the Department of English, The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center, and the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, all of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

This article performs a psycho-rhetorical reading of the generalized theorization and specific application of simile in classical and early modern rhetorical treatises and in Shakespeare’s similaically entitled play, As You Like It (1600), respectively. Shakespeare’s play articulates multiple forms of gender and sexuality that are situated beyond the phallic norm inscribed into the privileged category of metaphor and trope; that is, cisgender heterosexuality. These forms include nonprocreative pleasure, lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, adultery, polyamory, pansexuality, drag and masquerade, and nonbinary gender, all of which are associated with the figure of simile. The similaically erotic, polymorphic language of Shakespeare’s illustrative comedy transgresses the Law of the phallus, and fabricates alternative gradations of gender, sexuality, love, li(n)king, and desire. Consequently, repressive and reductive operations of ancient and early modern rhetorical guides constitutively fail in Shakespeare’s play, and reaffirm the nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality that they aspire to censure and censor.

ABSTRACTWhat exactly is the Church? Is it primarily an institution? Or is it the people in its pews? And depending on the answer, what obligations do the people who constitute it in the present have toward the past? This essay utilizes the Pennsylvania State Legislative debate over clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a way to explore how communal commonplaces are activated in public argument and used to shift the dominant meanings of a community. Communal commonplaces act as a shorthand to bring audiences to a place of shared understanding while managing opposing lines of argument, images, and tropes. Understanding the Church as a communal commonplace illuminates how divergent meanings can be activated for wildly different and materially consequential purposes. Analyzing the Church helps us to understand how other communal commonplaces— the nation, for instance—manage opposing images of a community.KEYWORDS: Catholic Churchcommunitymetaphortropes Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 There is considerable debate over the terms used to refer to individuals who have experienced sexual violence. The term victim is often used in legal contexts, whereas survivor is common in antisexual violence advocacy circles (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network [RAINN]). Some individuals who have experienced sexual violence prefer one term over another (or neither), and that preference may change over time and in different contexts (Williamson and Serna). Throughout the essay, in an attempt to honor the terms individuals have chosen for themselves, I use whatever term appears in the text I am most recently quoting or analyzing. Otherwise, I follow RAINN’s practice of referring to individuals as victims when referring to their relationship to the criminal or civil legal system.2 While a partial Statute of Limitations reform bill was signed into Pennsylvania law in 2019, Rozzi’s look-back window was taken out of the bill and put forth as a constitutional amendment. Due to several significant setbacks, the question of the look-back window remains unresolved.3 Both within legal and academic circles, the idea of institutions expressing corporate agency is a contested one. This idea is a part of an ongoing debate over whether groups can exhibit the capacities and actions associated with theories of individual agency, such as the capacity for thought, intention, and moral blameworthiness (Smiley). In both its legal and public use, it is oftentimes used to capture both the tendency for institutions to be the subject of moral reproach, and the idea that individuals both share and enable each other’s actions within specific group structures (Williams). My use of corporate agency within this essay is meant to capture the sentiment of the Rozzi coalition, and their insistence that the structures of the Church enabled the concerted actions of multiple individuals, and thus that the institution could be held legally and morally responsible.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).About the AuthorsFormer Professor of Philosophy Dr. Myriam Miedzian is the author of Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link between Masculinity and Violence, and coauthor with her daughter Alisa Malinovich of Generations: A Century of Women Speak about Their Lives.Retired not-for-profit executive Gary Ferdman worked for organizations focused on changing federal budget priorities and advancing democracy, including protecting and expanding voting rights.Miedzian and Ferdman are the co-founders of Monumental Women.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgmentsMy appreciation goes to Cheryl Glenn, David Gold, Shirley Wilson Logan, Kristy Maddux, Cecilia Shelton, Scott Wible, and Carly Woods for their suggestions as I composed this response.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTABSTRACTSteele Indian School Park (2001), a city park in Phoenix, Arizona, serves as the memory site for the Phoenix Indian School (1891–1990), an off-reservation boarding school that was part of the federal program of forced assimilation. In this essay, we perform an analysis of the park’s 24 interpretive columns, which serve as an educational display. We argue that the park’s recreational use dominates its role as a historic site. To begin we consider how the history of place shapes memory. We argue that, like museums, parks have a colonial past by addressing their historic relationship to assimilation. Next, we establish that the school served as a recreational destination for Phoenicians. We theorize that both these general and specific histories of place influence the site’s public memory narrative by bifurcating the intended audience and privileging a recreational user. To theorize the relationship between recreation and memory, we build on geographer Kenneth Foote’s term “rectification,” which describes how signs of violent or tragic events are removed so that a site can be returned, in this case, to recreational use. To facilitate the process of rectification, we argue the interpretive columns use four interdependent rhetorical strategies—decontextualization, erasure, appropriation, and paternalism—to elide the racist history of forced assimilation. Our findings indicate the colonial history of place, if unexamined, may continue to influence public memory narratives.KEYWORDS: Off-reservation boarding schoolsparksplacepublic memoryrhetoric AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank Joseph Buenker at ASU Library for research assistance.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

The splinternet continues to chip away at transnationally networked publics and reconfigure the digital landscape along national borders. What would a fractured cyberspace mean for conceptualizing transnational rhetorical circulation? How might we rethink our approaches to tracing transnational rhetorical circulation in the splinternet age? This essay begins by contextualizing the infrastructural and geopolitical conditions for transnational circulation, focusing on the implications of the splinternet, and then discusses how we may reconceptualize the notion of place in tracing transnational circulation in a splintered cyberspace. The reconceptualization of place is illustrated with an analysis of how the global online campaign in the name of “stop Russian invasion” and “stand with Ukraine” in 2022 was suspended, repurposed, co-opted, and rejuvenated across the border of the splintered network of China.

Persuasive effect will always be an essential part of rhetoric studies, but it should not be either its ready shorthand, identifying trait, or lodestar. The decades-long momentum to move beyond the identification of rhetoric with the production and management of effects should be pointedly encouraged, with many new rhetorical imaginaries (invitational, dialogic, agonistic, ecologic, etc.) providing ample resources for doing so. This paper will describe the self-limiting nature of an effects frame, show that there have always been alternatives within rhetoric’s traditions to move beyond it, outline the persistence of a first-order identification with persuasive effect in contemporary disciplinary history, and point to specific ways to put this habit in the rear-view mirror. The rhetorical appropriation of Foucault’s interpretation of parrhesia is explored as an example of a rhetorical practice that moves beyond the reductive straight-jacket of effects.

In this article, I argue that an epideictic approach to climate rephotography may produce what Jenny Rice has referred to as “exceptional” public subjectivities by encouraging audiences to further distance themselves from the complex political and rhetorical processes of climate inaction. To elucidate this claim, I conduct an analysis of two popular climate change documentaries that position rephotography as the lynchpin of rhetorically impactful climate advocacy (Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral). Both documentaries function as a form of epideictic in their own right by displaying exemplary moments of emotional conversion as the desired rhetorical outcome of a rephotographic encounter. I then turn to consider how epideictic rephotography potentially forecloses deliberative possibilities enabled through this mode of visual advocacy. I thus conclude by offering insight into how deliberative approaches to rephotography might be incorporated into rhetorical pedagogies.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTIn this essay, age is considered a relevant and significant subject position in which ecological advocates put forth ideologies and cultural constructions of youth to communicate about and for the environment. Young activists employ 'ephebic appeals' to raise awareness of certain issues, display public critical thinking, advocate for society-wide solutions, and empower audiences. The author analyzes the ephebic appeals Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny to better understand how age operates rhetorically to justify youth's entrance and involvement in civic and political deliberations, render public judgments, and enable similar reflections and critiques in others. Overall, the essay considers how ephebic appeals expand disciplinary boundaries as they relate to rhetorical agency, protest and social change, and citizenship.KEYWORDS: Agencyenvironmental communicationsocial movementsyouth activism AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Melanie Loehwig, Matthew Houdek, Alex McVey, Emma Frances Bloomfield, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This essay initiates a critical conversation about (in)fertility in academia. We argue that four patterns of discourse exacerbate the challenges for women and trans* academics struggling to conceive while navigating so-called “biological clocks” and “tenure clocks” simultaneously: conflicting rhetorics regarding egg quantity and quality in relation to the typical age one starts a tenure-track job; sexist and transphobic rhetorics of fear-mongering in medical and academic settings; rhetorics of silence surrounding the impact of miscarriage, which often accompanies infertility; and cisheterosexist institutional discrimination in the face of exorbitant treatment costs. We use feminist “strategic contemplation” to reflect critically on these patterns of discourse in relation to our lived experiences of (in)fertility. In doing so, we validate those struggling, educate those who are not, and seek a more just reproductive landscape for academic women and trans* people whose clocks are ticking.

Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

In this essay, I examine the 17 November 1991 “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” advertisement in the New York Times. The advertisement is a reflection of 1,600 Black women coming to the defense of Anita Hill after the Hill-Thomas Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings. By analyzing how the advertisement’s authors came to the defense of Anita Hill while inverting Lewis Gordon’s idea of bad faith, building with Sylvia Wynter’s conception of Being as Praxis, attuning to Hortense Spillers’s description of Black women as Being for the Captor, and critiquing Kenneth Burke’s “Definition of Man,” I illuminate a logic of care, Being in Good Faith, that broadens rhetorical scholars’ understandings of the boundaries of what humans can care about and how humans can care.

Through the description of activity in an undergraduate voice studio, this essay posits the concept of somatic listening, an active and embodied engagement with verbal metaphor. Somatic listening, which includes aspects of multimodal and relational interlistening, opens singers’ mechanism to being moved by verbal metaphors suggested by their instructor or the text of their score. These movements are traceable through changes in a singer’s voice and in their embodied sensations.

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As COVID-19 infections spread in early 2020, the term herd immunity drew the Trump administration’s attention as a remedy for redressing the pandemic. However, scientific experts warned the Trump administration against adopting herd immunity as a pandemic response. The Trump administration was unmoved. I argue that understanding the Trump administration’s incongruous pandemic response is impossible without theorizing the deeper catastrophic formations uniting herd immunity and the political Right. Drawing evidence from the Trump administration and its allies, I analyze herd immunity as a reflection of a catastrophic form of social Darwinism emerging from the Trump administration’s coronavirus messaging. By exploring the Trump administration’s general enthusiasm for catastrophe, I offer a fresh scholarly contribution at the intersection of rhetorical studies, public address, and health, political, and scientific communication, ultimately illuminating larger theoretical and political lessons for the discipline and beyond.

In comparative rhetoric, interconnectivity emerges as a frame to conceptualize power struggle, one that specifically counters othering and the underlying essentialist and colonial logics. Interconnectivity stands for a third space where difference and connection coexist and where interdependence characterizes the relationship among interlocutors. This essay addresses how to forge interconnectivity and argues for the rhetoric of according-with. According-with refers to a threefold act, namely, to navigate, use, and refigure established and emergent discursive circumstances. In re/contextualizing practices of according-with in China’s pre-Qin period and various other places and time, I specify resourcefulness and situatedness as two epistemes exercised by according-with. The rhetoric of according-with, then, nuances the particular doing-thinking-be(com)ing that disenfranchised people enact to reshape power differentials. The rhetoric of according-with functions as a critical apparatus to cultivate interconnectivity as one pathway toward subverting power.

Judges and jurists frequently read police-recorded video as arhetorical. It is not. Footage recorded from the perspective of an officer favors police. Drawing on both Burke’s theory of identification and film studies, I consider how footage filmed from an officer’s perspective functions as a nonverbal constitutive rhetoric. In an analysis of Harris v. Scott (2007), I demonstrate how police-recorded video encourages viewers to dissolve the space between themselves and the police, inviting audiences to characterize both police and themselves as passive, impartial, and objective viewers of an recorded event. When successful as constitutive rhetoric, footage from police-recorded video makes jurors and judges more suspectable to arguments that characterize police as passive observers in an event.

This essay uses the figure of pollice verso, the “turned thumb” gesture synonymous with Roman gladiatorial contests, as a speculative tool to account for Donald Trump’s use of ambiguity in his rhetoric. Specifically, the essay argues that translating Trump’s demonstrative rhetoric into a deliberative frame can lead to misunderstanding one of his chief resources as a rhetor: the ambiguity of his “thumbful” rhetoric. Through a discussion of Third Sophistic rhetorical theory, affect, and the comedian Sarah Cooper’s parodies of Trump, the essay argues why countergesture should be considered just as indispensable as counterargument for rhetoricians who teach about affordances of digital media.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines discourse surrounding contemporary calls for consilience, a form of interdisciplinary collaboration articulated by E. O. Wilson aimed at uniting the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from a Darwinian perspective. This essay builds on earlier examinations of Wilsonian consilience by analyzing a sample of texts that reflect a “second wave” of consilience and shifting rhetorical tactics over the past two decades. The analysis reveals that current calls for consilience reflect heightened rhetorical awareness among authors and that additional rhetorical work is required to gain adherence among diverse cross-disciplinary audiences. Implications are discussed for future research into enactments of consilience-style interdisciplinary research.KEYWORDS: CollaborationconsilienceE. O. Wilsoninterdisciplinarity Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Wilson’s rationale for unifying the disciplines is, on the surface, noncontroversial. In Consilience, he argues that knowledge is too segregated, academic specialties too specialized, and engagements too infrequent among scholars and researchers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities (9). Additionally, Wilson believes that addressing real-world social and political problems demands “fluency across boundaries” (13–14), that any single branch of knowledge would not yield the synoptic vision required for effective intervention. For Wilson in 1998, consilience remains a “metaphysical” hope, ultimately pointing the way toward a more systematic and integrated account of human knowledge about the world and ourselves (9).2 For example, conferences and workshops include Integrating Science and the Humanities (Vancouver, BC, 2008), Consilience Conference (St. Louis, MO, 2012), and TEDxWellesleyCollege on Consilience (Wellesley, MA, 2014). Scholarly texts include, among others, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Dutton); Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Slingerland & Collard); Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences (Carroll); The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Gottschall).3 While a broader conversation about consilience style research might take into consideration works in subfields such as evolutionary esthetics, evolutionary literary study, paleoesthetics, evolutionary film and media study, evolutionary musicology, evolutionary studies in popular culture and include journals such as Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, these works—along with the remaining chapters excluded from Darwin’s Bridge and Creating Consilience—would fall into the category of enactments of consilience and do not meet Ceccarelli’s criteria for “interdisciplinary inspirational” texts. Although such works might prove to be fruitful examples of enactments of consilience, they do not explicitly label their work as a continuation of Wilson’s Consilience, as is the case in both Creating Consilience and Darwin’s Bridge.

This essay proposes “jian-rhetorical seeing”—an art of invention—to foster genuine dialogs about human rights in transnational spaces and to challenge asymmetric distributions of power that so often course through these spaces. Building on and extending recent scholarship on human rights rhetoric and comparative rhetoric, the essay reinterprets an ancient Chinese concept, jian 鉴, as reflective/reflexive “rhetorical seeing” and brings it into dialog with Confucian ethics and rhetorical theories of recognition. Through an analysis of the Chinese translations and interpretations of rights in a few distilled historical moments during the Late Qing period (1840–1912), the authors demonstrate jian-rhetorical seeing and illuminate the implications of this rhetorical art for human rights debates in today’s global context.

The persuasive power of souvenir postal cards has been overlooked in scholarship. This essay examines how settlers in San Antonio, at the turn of the twentieth century, used souvenir postal cards strategically to produce knowledge about their city and its place in the modern nation, to market it to White tourists and other settlers as a “bordertown,” and to continue to dispossess and subordinate native Coahuiltecan, Tejano, and Mexican locals. Examples in this essay are drawn from a corpus of 300 real-photo postcards (1904–17) to consider their modes of production, images, captions, messages, and affects en masse. Through this essay, I show that souvenir postal cards are a way settler colonialism and coloniality/modernity worked, evidencing on local and global scales networked interest and cooperation between dominant imperial nations and groups to mass-(re)produce themselves and impose their structural patterns of power.

This essay analyzes excessively long speeches in order to argue that circulation naturalizes rhetorical processes that govern meaning within texts. In our view, abundant acts of address unsettle dominant models of speech and circulation, presenting an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between rhetorical forms and circulatory transfigurations. We focus on Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 1927 speech to the Turkish Parliament, which lasted thirty-six hours over six days. We bring together these otherwise unrelated long speeches to outline three fictions of text and circulation: textual unity, speaker persona, and implied audience. We argue that these fictions stand in for the excessive address in circulation and, in turn, forms of circulatory abbreviation naturalize rhetorical constructions internal to the speech. In this way, we offer a rhetorical account of circulation that connects textual processes to circulatory forms.

Using the example of Memorial, Russia’s oldest nongovernmental organization, this essay develops the concept of “precarious commons” to describe the continuous and uncertain process of creating an open-access digital resource and maintaining a community around it. In 2022, Memorial became one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long efforts to open official archives, to collect and solicit testimony from survivors and families of victims of Soviet terror, and to promote democratic values and human rights in public life. These activities illustrate precarious cultural commoning: ever threatened by bureaucratic enclosure, political and cultural amnesia, and outright persecution. The organization’s extragovernmental, mostly volunteer-driven work has established an open digital archive of state repressions as well as a vital space for educating a new generation of memory activists and imagining a different collective future.

This essay places rhetorical theories of publicity and the common in conversation around the concept of intimacy. Defined as a felt sense of proximity or closeness, intimacy is a form of affective relation that underlies both private and public worldmaking practices, and that produces investments in certain forms of life and community. Considering the relationship between publicity and the common in terms of intimacy makes clear that dominant forms of contemporary publicity are predicated on racialized and gendered enclosures of intimacy that have dispossessed noncapitalist relationships to land and community and instead fostered intimacies conducive to capital accumulation. Our argument suggests that critical scholars who are concerned with contemporary capitalism’s subjection of life to the market have a common interest in attending to the ways these histories of enclosure shape the horizons of modern publicity. Our argument also suggests further attention be directed to forms of counterintimacy aimed at producing anticapitalist coalition.

Historically, the commons is conceptually rooted in concerns over shared expertise derived from material resources. Contemporary understandings increasingly examine varied commons rooted in the general intellect—an affective and ideational production across people. Too often, this focus reduces technology to either a tool for, or impediment to, building and accessing robust commons, and overlooks the colonial inheritance of contemporary theory. As a corrective, we follow efforts to rehabilitate the Luddites as not antitechnology, but as technology ethicists, and theorize technology as a coproducer of the general intellect. Situating Sophie Zhang’s and others’ activism as exemplary of a productive neo-Luddism, we argue that technology constitutively remediates the general intellect and as such is central to the ethics of the commons. From this, we advance the argument that rhetorical sabotage is key to promoting a general intellect against the corporate interests and technical-colonialism too often coded into commons.