The convergence of artificial intelligence technologies with the growth of Christo-fascist movements in the United States presents an alarming threat to women's health, especially considering known privacy violations by the major players—all in the shadow of the US Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade. These violations are ethotic; that is, they betray information that has been mined algorithmically to construct "user models," bits and pieces of which are sold or otherwise circulated without true "user" consent or cooperation. Such models are best understood as algorithmic ethopoeia, mathematized representations of individuals charted as matrices of commodified categories for commercial trafficking, but also for politicians and law enforcement. Taking inspiration from abolitionist tools for resisting intersectional racism, and incorporating data feminism, we offer six categories of design heuristics to respect and maintain ethopoeic integrity, especially in the domain of women's health in a post-Roe technological landscape, using a fundamental rhetorical concept to serve designers, as well as critics and activists.

Taking the slogan "no lives matter" as a starting point to diagnose the nihilism of our contemporary political culture, in this essay I tie the rise of nihilism to the resurgence of far-right political movements, chiefly the neo-reactionary thought of Nick Land. Following my discussion of Land and the culture of apocalyptic nihilism, I elucidate a Black feminist and decolonial perspective that, I argue, resists this creeping nihilism, and instead offers avenues of engaged political praxis for recuperating the politics of personhood. Using Sylvia Wynter's work as an exemplar of such a perspective, I perform a rhetorical criticism of Land's essay "The Dark Enlightenment" through the lens of Wynter's understanding of the human. Critiquing his arguments, I argue that Wynter's work offers a radical alternative to Land's apocalypticism and antihumanism, one that maintains a commitment to reimagining the human rather than disavowing it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

This essay explores the controversy surrounding the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument (WRPM) that was unveiled in Central Park on 26 August 2020 to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. To read the WRPM’s commemorative process and product, I use an intersectional feminist analytic to consider how interlocking concerns of gender, race, and power inflected the debates and decisions that shaped the WRPM. This intersectional analysis explores how the WRPM became an opportunity for the public to wrestle with the ways this statue could (not) address a complicated suffrage history that would celebrate women’s collective activism and reckon with its racist past.

This essay centers the legal and coalitional strategies of Black feminist Civil Rights attorney Florynce Kennedy in pre-Roe v. Wade abortion rights advocacy. Examining the depositional records of the 1969 case Abramowitz v. Lefkowitz and its subsequent distillation into the 1971 book Abortion Rap, we demonstrate how Kennedy’s rhetorical tactics enabled white women’s reproductive experiences to be intelligible—but centered—as expertise in the legal domain. Kennedy’s lines of questioning enabled feelings about unwanted pregnancies to become intelligible as expertise, challenging the authority of established experts. Kennedy impatiently leveraged her expert knowledge of the legal system to manage the state’s objections that threatened the well-being of witnesses and integrity of the case. While Abortion Rap appealed to the intersections of Black women’s reproductive concerns, it also hindered the possibility for coalitional trust to be built between legal experts and Black Power activists around abortion advocacy.

ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

This essay examines the queer rhetorical capacities of what the pornographer, poet, professor, and tattoo artist Samuel Steward called latriniana—sexual graffiti located in public lavatories. While this genre’s rhetorical objective is often associated with sexual solicitation, this essay argues that latriniana proffers a destabilized logos—always in motion, roving along a continuum of cohesion and disintegration, while never truly landing on any definitive form. As a result, the genre exemplifies what Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes have cited as queer composition’s impossibility. Using samples of latriniana collected from gay bars in San Francisco and New York City, the essay traces the rhetorical gestures inherent to the genre, exploring the way latriniana enables a multiplicity of readings, and thus embodies the chimerical, uncontainable queer logos.

The United Nations Population Fund publications in 2011 and 2014, The State of the World’s Midwifery, both argue that midwives in poor countries need to be professionalized for the good of their countries and of women and children worldwide. These narratives of professionalization as the road to stability, health, respect, and women’s welfare are tangled within broader narratives of neoliberalism. These broader narratives borrow familiar commonplaces from the feminist health movement and colonial reasoning to limit global midwifery’s scope to a neoliberal system of value within a neocolonial development agenda. Using definition as a grounding commonplace to argue for the professionalization of midwives in poorer nations, these reports potentially disenfranchise many birthing people and their attendants in these nations who do not fall under the professionalized definition of midwife.

ABSTRACTDuring a 2018 sentencing hearing of former Olympics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar, 156 survivors offered Victim Impact Statements, and Judge Rosemarie Aquilina made national headlines for her impassioned responses to each survivor. This essay shows how Aquilina’s responses use epideictic rhetoric to make audible a judicial practice of feminist witnessing of assault testimony. In so doing, Aquilina challenges the way blame “sticks” to survivors and casts a scrutinizing gaze on a culture that silences survivors; praises the individual act of testimony and constitutes a collective of “sister survivors,” thereby fostering connection and potential for coalition building; and reframes sexual assault testimony as a public act with socially transformative effects.KEYWORDS: Epideictic rhetoricfeminist judicial theoryfeminist witnessingsexual assault Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I rely on the VIS reproduced on the website In Our Own Words, a resource created by Heartland Independent Film Forum and sponsored by the Michigan Daily Newspaper, MSU’s student paper. Because the statements were published with survivors’ permission on inourwords.org as an educational resource, I have used the survivor’s name if it was released. In cases where it was not, I use the number or symbols that appear on inourwords.org.2 The VIS followed Nassar’s guilty plea to seven counts of sexual misconduct. Although the plea deal meant there would be no public criminal trial during which survivors could testify, Aquilina invited any survivor impacted by Nassar’s abuse, including parents, to offer a statement.3 Aquilina’s vengeance-focused comments also received criticism from feminists, even as they often acknowledged them as an understandable response to Nassar’s abhorrent acts (Gruber; Press). Her comments, in this moment, demonstrate the limitations of what Elizabeth Bernstein calls carceral feminism, wherein criminal prosecution is viewed as a solution to gender violence, without attention to the ways criminal law is entrenched in “masculinism, racism and cruelty” (Gruber).

In this essay, I argue for more representations of Caribbean women in rhetorical studies. In the effort toward representation, specifically for Haitian women, I developed a framework named Caribbean women’s rhetorics (CWR). CWR creates an interdisciplinary, multicultural, Black feminist framework and space where Caribbean women’s lived experiences are the primary focus of making, producing, sharing, and recognizing underrepresented rhetorical knowledges that offer rich representations. To do this work, the features of CWR uphold that value via voicing, proverbs, storytelling, reflection, linguistic practices, and multimodal composing. In providing an approach for the application of CWR, I analyze my interactive digital book The Cultivation of Haitian Women’s Sense of Selves: Toward a Field of Action. With CWR, I hope to expand the existing body of work on Caribbean women’s knowledges to disrupt sociocultural inequalities and improve the quality of life for Caribbean women.

According to African women’s theorizing, nationalism can be nonpolitical. This is a novel approach to defining nationalism, which is usually seen as a purely political event. Women of the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Organizations (FNWO) developed a rhetoric of nonpolitical nationalism in the 1950s that has been ignored by the current politically elite male-led narrative of African nationalism. This marginalization of African women is mirrored in the Black rhetorical cannon as well because they are Africans in an African American-centered narrative. In order to address this double marginality and to understand their novel characterization of nationalism, this essay joins scholarly conversations in the field of women’s historical rhetorics by upholding two objectives. First, it highlights the unique rhetoric of Nigerian women in the FNWO. Second, it analyzes their words to uncover characteristics of nonpolitical thought and situate it within a broader African rhetorical tradition.

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.

Franklin Kameny’s 1963 congressional testimony was not the first instance of gay and lesbian issues being subjected to public inquiry, but his invited presence nonetheless represented the first time that an openly gay individual would testify to Congress. This essay argues that his testimony represents a unique form of rhetorical delivery—embodied silence—that combines public visibility and the language of embodiment with that of silence. Embodied silences interpellate audiences into witnessing absence and disrupt understanding a rhetor and/or their words. From Oscar Wilde to ACT UP, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals are regularly conceived within a negotiation of absence, a queer embodiment of the unspoken and unarticulated. Silence’s legacy and continued centrality to publicness, therefore, marks an important conceptual framework for analyzing these rhetorics. Highlighting homophile activism’s unique historicity, this essay argues embodiment and absence are vital to future queer rhetorical theorizing.

Scholars in disability studies have recently sought to account for fatness, claiming an inseparable link between disability and fat scholarship. Interrogating the stigmas of fatness as a sign of bad character or lack of discipline, rhetoricians have advanced this thinking, illustrating how to be fat is to be rhetorically disabled. Contributing to these efforts, this essay argues that eating disorders, too, are often framed through deficit thinking, positioned as antithetical to mental fitness—a disparaging view echoed prominently by Hilde Bruch. Challenging normative perspectives of rhetoric centered in her theories, I analyze Bruch’s The Golden Cage, tracing descriptions of anorexia and pain through a feminist materialist lens, ultimately revealing how the rhetoricity of fat stigma can be read not only as a product of cultural, patriarchal norms but also as a complex, lived, felt experience of mental disability, expanding theories of rhetoric to the material intersection of gender and embodiment.

This essay presents a theory of rhetorical decay, a rhetorical state that results from argumentative gestures that “derail” and suppress productive discourse (i.e., exchanges that produce new understandings, consensus, or “legitimate dissensus” between members of a public). Reviewing works from critical race studies, rhetorical criticism, and feminist rhetorical studies, the author identifies several individual preexisting concepts that can be classified as individual rhetorical decay–fostering practices. However, a gap remains in theorizing the larger category and understanding the outcomes of such rhetorics; this essay intervenes in this space by creating the metatheory of rhetorical decay, characterizing the family of gestures, examining affiliate concepts, providing an example of rhetorical decay in a contemporary public argument (over lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender marriage), and identifying precedents for mitigating such practices.

This essay prompts us to explore how dominant temporalities work to contain racialized experiences. Engaging Say Her Name (SHN) as an archive of anti-Black policing, this essay illustrates the dis/continuous temporalities of living in (white) times of anti-Blackness. I theorize the rhetorical phenomenon of temporal containment as a specific modality of white linear time that serves to deny, ignore, or relegate racial harms to the past. I argue that discourses created and inspired by SHN are temporally contained through the “freezing” of stories about police brutality against Black women and a cultural fixation with “singular” discrete moments of anti-Blackness rather than an overlapping and unfolding singularity of violence. These two modalities lead us toward a linear politics of Black death that is both a result and form of temporal containment working to temporally erase the lived experiences of Black women and girls in and across time.

This essay applies Craig Rood’s concept of rhetorical closure to the specific case study of the creation of feminist discourse communities to discuss sexuality. It looks at the editorial policies of two feminist discourse communities in order to more broadly analyze the ways that rhetorical closure operates constitutively along with invitational rhetoric. It connects these issues to past and current debates about censorship, echo chambers, safe spaces, and trigger warnings in order to show when and how rhetorical closure is intended to prevent harm. Like Rood, I do not resolve questions on distinguishing the effectiveness or ethics of rhetorical closure. Examining a radical feminist periodical of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere shows how invitational rhetoric works with and as rhetorical closure.

Bisexual discourse is underexamined as such within rhetoric. So too are the historical practices of African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) communities. Responding to these forms of erasure, my essay advances the study of Black women’s bisexual rhetorics through a focus on the collected papers of a freeborn African American woman, Rebecca Primus (1836–1932). Specifically, the essay offers a comparative analysis of two archival collections containing letters to her: the widely studied Primus Family Papers and the more recently acquired Rebecca Primus Papers. Taken together, these collections offer an enlarged view of Rebecca’s epistolary relationships with people of more than one gender. In doing so, I argue, the new collection reveals a need for a bisexual archival framework, which redresses the limitations of any single collection of romantic letters as a necessarily partial and speculative source of information. This framework affirms Black women’s bisexual rhetorics while recovering a more diverse LGBTQ+ past.

While scholars have examined racial dynamics within the US suffrage movement, we have fewer rhetorical treatments of how Black citizens argued for suffrage, particularly for a Black public. This essay examines a 1915 symposium published in the Crisis, featuring 26 African American rhetors. It finds that even as these rhetors deploy available commonplaces of contemporary suffrage arguments, they also draw from racial experience to claim space for Black women’s citizenship within a body politic that figures the ideal citizen as male and white. These arguments, moreover, cleave along gender lines: the men predominantly argue from the topos of justice and ground their claims in abstract democratic principles; the women predominantly argue from expediency and ground their claims in embodied racial and gendered experience. In doing so, they challenge and reshape dominant expediency claims based on white supremacy and reassert the links between women’s suffrage and universal suffrage.

Although many sentences capture Jessica Restaino’s purpose in Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, perhaps this early declaration does so most succinctly: “In essence, I cal...

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers the first queer rhetorical history of nineteenth-century romantic epistolary practices in the United States. Pamela Van...

In 1907, prominent Chicago reformers led by Ellen Henrotin and Jane Addams created an Industrial Exhibit showcasing a history of women in the workplace. Seeking to promote women’s entrance into modern, electricity-powered factories, the Exhibit’s organizers portrayed women’s labor progress in three stages: a stage of premodern, domestic-based craftwork; a stage of tenement-based, sweatshop labor; and a stage of modern, factory-based labor. The Exhibit became a site of controversy when workers demonstrating their labor objected to the Exhibit’s message that tenement sweatshops were old-fashioned and unclean by striking. Their strikes disrupted the Exhibit’s timeline of gendered progress and rearticulated the Exhibit as a site of current labor negotiations between workers, management, and the public. While affluent reformers and working women mutually sought labor reform, they used distinct and unequal rhetorical modes to communicate differing narratives about women’s work to the public.

Charles "Teenie" Harris spent more than three decades as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, capturing through his camera lens both once-in-a-lifetime and everyday occurrences in the city. The Courier played an active role in the lives of many African Americans in Pittsburgh, promoting local and national news, sports, and entertainment that represented their communities. Using a selection of Harris's photos, this essay begins by identifying the self-evidently political images in his oeuvre. It then theorizes what I refer to as idiomatic visual rhetorical strategies of representation that manifest in less obvious places: images of women and children whose celebrations and struggles were not likely to be publicized outside their own neighborhoods. Through the introduction of idiomatic representational strategies, this essay contributes to efforts in visual rhetorics to refine methodologies for interpreting images, and it also furthers historiographies of African American rhetorics.

Through a rhetorical analysis of Romper’s YouTube series Doula Diaries, I demonstrate how the reproductive justice framework helps illuminate the need for an intersectional approach to advance birth justice. While the video series brings obstetric racism to light, portrays empowering birth experiences among women of color, and prioritizes the shared experiences and communities among non-normative birthing people, it falls short on supporting the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people to have children. I further argue for rhetoric scholars to adopt the reproductive justice framework in order to more critically interrogate how intersecting social forces and power structures influence the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities.

This essay analyzes Union peace activism, commonly called the “Copperhead” movement, to illustrate how anti-war rhetoric during the US Civil War participated in debates over the nature of political violence. While the Copperhead push to end the war failed, the movement was an influential cultural and electoral force, pressuring opponents to modify their views while popularizing a version of national identity that did not end with the advent of Reconstruction. Far from petitioning for peace, the Copperheads’ rhetoric reframed the boundaries of justified violence along intersecting lines of gender, race, and memory. Specifically, I consider how the Copperheads appealed to a powerful “generational” memory built on a gendered interpretation of activism itself, offering a narrative of “manly” resolve meant to withstand the withering effects of their effeminate opponents who threatened the bedrock of an American civilization indebted to a white supremacist system.

Equal rights remain a fantasy in the United States. In 2017, President Trump rolled back the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order made by President Obama, an order that ensured busines...

Evangelical women who write from lived experience—in blogs, social media, and memoirs—develop a personal narrative rhetoric to negotiate contentious currents of religious thought. This essay studies the work of Sarah Bessey and Jen Hatmaker, who use this rhetorical strategy to destabilize mainstream evangelical discourses of gender and biblical authority. This study expands understandings of rhetorical practices in North American evangelicalism, particularly the contemporary, female-led Xvangelical movement. Analyzing their writing illuminates the interplay among feminist and conservative agendas in debates over gender roles and biblical authority. Because they take conservative doctrine seriously, Hatmaker and Bessey invoke an audience of evangelical readers disappointed with the political and patriarchal commitments of their churches. Finally, this essay advances conversations about the rhetoric of personal narrative. Bessey and Hatmaker explore the ways life writing creates knowledge and offers alternatives to argumentation based in certainty that often characterizes evangelical rhetoric.

When two transgender teenagers posted eerily similar suicide letters to public Tumblr accounts in late 2014 and early 2015, they inspired a viral memorialization effort across the website. In this article, I argue the widespread circulation of transgender suicide rhetoric facilitates the possibility for queer rhetors to provoke collective enactments of rhetorical agency even after their deaths. I identify the suicide letters as an emergent rhetorical form, which on its dissemination and due to its intelligibility, incites a kairotic moment. The kairotic moment may be protracted by a network of bodies who feel and collectively reproduce its sensate exigence. As it becomes viral, the kairotic moment acts as the queer futurity of ecological rhetorical agency because it stretches the visceral pressure of exigence beyond its original spatiotemporal emergence, draws bodies into collaborative networks, and orients invention toward the dismantling of normative rhetorical constructs and the composition of alternative worlds.

Furthering the field’s attention to the rhetoric of archives, this article offers an extended consideration of archival description as an information infrastructure that provides powerful, although often invisible, orientations to the past. This article examines three stages of the archival process—selection, organization, and labeling—by focusing on a handful of historical objects, held in two separate collections, that depict transgressive gender presentations. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that archival description functions not only for bureaucratic and access purposes, but for epistemological ones as well.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

Readers of A Rhetoric of Motives often acknowledge Burke’s anti-feminist blind spots, but argue that these blind spots need not negate his larger contributions to rhetorical theory. While true, this claim is also dangerous because it assumes that identifying an argumentative blind spot is tantamount to having worked through all its complexities. This article attempts to work through these complexities via a method of mythic historiography grounded in Burke’s concept of the almost universal. This article demonstrates that Burke organizes his philosophy of modern rhetoric and his concept of identification around a deceitful Woman trope in ways that claim a universality that is actually gendered male. By reimagining the relation of identification and myth in A Rhetoric of Motives this article refigures the deceitful Woman trope in terms of its unassimilability within Burke’s modern philosophy of rhetoric and discusses implications for rhetorical studies.

The consensus memory of the 1960 Greensboro student sit-ins suggests that four men were solely responsible for the demonstration. Contrary to that memory is the story of women at Bennett College who began planning the sit-ins in the fall of 1959. This essay uses rhetorics of silence to explore questions about feminist historiography and public memory studies raised by this controversy. In 1960, rather than speaking publicly about their role, Bennett women protected the credibility of the demonstration by taking a position of silence. As time passed, public memories of the event were defined by the four men, and the women’s stories were further suppressed through the processes of commemoration. Studying silence in this context reveals how rhetorical values associated with silence can change over time. Although the Bennett women’s silence began as a temporary tactical choice, their voices were nearly permanently silenced through the processes of commemoration.

The era between the Supreme Court’s (1875) Minor decision and the (1920) Anthony Amendment was marked by productive uncertainty about women’s citizenship status: they were citizens without the right to vote. This essay suggests that a handful of women seized upon the World’s Columbian Exposition to promote economic citizenship as an alternative for women. They promoted women’s economic participation in the fair’s dominant discourses of science and religion, and they rendered it a practice of citizenship in the language of republicanism and liberalism.

In this essay, I develop a feminist framework for analyzing wearable technologies as embodied rhetorics, one that considers (1) how wearable technologies enable micro-performances of gender, status, and identity; (2) how wearable technologies are embedded in policy/political frameworks as well as scientific/medical ones; (3) how wearable technologies are embedded in spatiotemporal networks of actors, objects, and so on; and (4) how the design of technological objects themselves do or do not live up to the promises of wearability and mobility. Using an analysis of the breast pump as my case and drawing from interviews with women about their experiences, I show how the breast pump crystallizes a network of rhetorics that is both disruptive and productive of gendered differences. In particular, the breast pump presents rhetorical arguments for returning to work soon after childbirth while performing a professional role. At the same time, this technology makes an argument for including nursing bodies on college campuses, spaces that have not historically considered those bodies or their needs.

Recently, rhetorical scholars have paid closer attention to how the politics of inclusion function in social movements and counterpublics. While these studies demonstrate how movement constituencies worked together as coalitions and alliances, they have yet to address how one group overcomes its resistance to another. To address this gap, this study turns to the rhetoric of Harriot Stanton Blatch. In the early twentieth century, Stanton Blatch successfully forged alliances between elite and working class suffragists. Yet, during the 1890s, Stanton Blatch’s appeals centered on persuading elite women to include working class women in the suffrage movement. Thus, this essay argues that Stanton Blatch advanced a rhetoric of inclusion that made visible, resisted, and rearticulated class difference toward more inclusive suffrage constituencies. This study finds that, through the process of redrawing boundaries of inclusion, a rhetor must confront the persistent and uneasy tension between inclusion and exclusion.