This article explores cadaverous rhetorics with a focus on public displays of human remains at anatomical museums. The article has two primary components: First, it advances a theory of cadaverous rhetoric grounded in a blending of rhetorical, feminist, and psychological affect theory. The article argues that combining Casey Boyle's transductive rhetoric with Sara Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and the psychology of extensive affective regulation offers a great deal of insight into the public display of human remains. Second, the article explores the cadaverous rhetorics at three museums: the Mütter Museum, Surgeon's Hall, and the Museo de la Medicina. The article traces how the practices of acquisition, preparation, preservation, display and contextualization aim to blunt negative affective responses and to catalyze positive visitor experiences. The article closes with a rumination on the limited success of cadaverous rhetorics in the face of visitor tendencies anchored in attachments to justice-oriented frameworks.

This essay develops a rhetorical theory of the commons that accounts for both its ontological and political dimensions and contributes to conversations between new materialist rhetorical scholarship and critical rhetorical theories of human power relations. We develop such a theory by considering how the dimension of ontological entanglement that Ralph Cintron describes as the “deep commons” materializes through systemic organizations of affect that foster some relational capacities at the expense of others. This framing allows us to study capitalism and commoning as affective-rhetorical systems that capacitate the deep commons through distinct practices of boundary-making. Whereas capitalism produces boundaries that treat the deep commons as a source of tendentially limitless growth and enact a split between nonhuman nature and human society, commoning practices draw boundaries aimed at plural and interdependent relation between commons systems and their constitutive outsides, enabling more robust expressions of the deep commons to emerge.

This essay examines social panic surrounding trans youth, arguing that rhetorics supporting “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) emerge from and reinforce hegemonic scripts about race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Building from Jay Dolmage’s concept of “disability drift,” I demonstrate how anti-trans activists channel other social anxieties into transphobia. Arguments about ROGD frame trans people as infinitesimally rare and as threats to all other communities, but these claims rely on the same narratives used to stigmatize mental illness, to dehumanize people of color and queer people, and to police the bodies and behavior of cisgender women. Introducing the concept of “affective drift,” I consider how ROGD rhetorics draw from ableism, racism, and heteronormativity to fuel transphobia and vise versa. In direct opposition to the logics of ROGD, then, I propose that rhetorical studies is equipped to foster connections across contrived social divides, and to enact solidarity in one another’s struggles.

This essay contributes to scholarship on precarity and rhetoric by exploring how participatory epideictic rhetorics, data, and infrastructure contribute to precarity. We concentrate on how shared data practices (i.e., systems for archiving, storing, distributing, and communicating information) produce and sustain human/material vulnerabilities for users, developers, and systems with observational research of VirtualLearners, a business that created, aggregated, and sold data (i.e., videos, texts, and games) to educators. We argue that VirtualLearners’s glitching online ratings system and its associated data nurtured user precarity by encouraging barriers to education, the basis of economic and social mobility. In this essay, we expose VirtualLearners’s backstage computational techniques and tactics that transformed the rhetorical capacities made available to students and teachers. As part of this study, we introduce the concept of affective data technologies to explain how publics are encouraged to become invested in data practices that can make them complicit in their own precarity.

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.

In 1970, black autoworker James Johnson, Jr., fatally shot three people at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axel Plant in Detroit. The shooting occurred three years after a devastating urban uprising and in the context of black militant labor organizing in local automotive plants. After a legal defense arguing racism and labor exploitation provoked his actions, Johnson was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. In this essay, I attend to the defense strategy that attempted to retain the political critique implicit in Johnson’s “black rage” while working within the constraints of jurisprudential and clinical notions of “insanity.” The Johnson case suggests that the mobilization of black affect is an always-ambivalent endeavor that can enable radical critique and political practice, while also subordinating black rhetorical agency.

From the early to mid 2000s, economists, pundits, and other commentators engaged in heated debate about the possibility of a bubble in the U.S. housing market. Prognosticating in a variety of public forums, debaters divided along largely ideological lines, with adherents of mainstream neoclassical economics producing a forceful narrative accord that a bubble was unlikely or impossible. Approaching this debate as a case of the powerful discourses that strive to keep markets intervention-free, this essay explores market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, seeking to understand how the allegation of a bubble imbricates expectations of decorum and provokes a constraining rhetorical response. With particular attention to the phenomenon of “bubble denial,” I highlight how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by “The Leisure and Cultural Service Department,” the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in “an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China” (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum’s multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland’s theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the “affective dimension of politics.”

This article argues for a rethinking of the rhetorical canon of memory as a productive tool for understanding and effectively responding to recent changes in culture, economics, and politics. After reviewing historical conceptions of rhetorical memory both before and after its “canonization,” we identify two processes at the heart of the contemporary relationships between persuasion and memory: an “externalization” of memory and commonplace rhetorical structures through information networks and technologies, and an “internalization” of memory and dispositions that takes place in human affective systems. We conclude by arguing for the value of such an expanded notion of rhetorical memory for addressing two of the more pervasive and significant registers of contemporary persuasion: advertising and populist politics.