Rhetoric Society Quarterly Mar 2013

Risky Appeals: Recruiting to the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement in the Age of “Pink Fatigue”

Karen Kopelson University of Louisville

Abstract

This essay analyzes and contrasts the rhetorical appeals of Breast Cancer Action and Breast Cancer Fund, the two national breast cancer organizations devoted to prevention and environmental activism. Following in the tradition of rhetoric scholars who understand rhetoric as constitutive of its audiences, I elucidate not only how these organizations recruit new audiences to their cause, but who they construct as recruitable. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one of these organizations' rhetorics is successful as constitutive rhetoric (the other's less so), but worry over the political and social actions potentially precluded by its successes. This organization's rhetoric, as I show, retains and thus recirculates many individualistic assumptions and regressive notions of femininity associated with the more mainstream breast cancer movement and, well beyond, with most hegemonic US discourses.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2013-03-01
DOI
10.1080/02773945.2013.768350
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Topics
rhetorical criticism argument
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (4)

  1. Goad (2023)
    The Problem with Police-Recorded Video
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Bradshaw (2020)
    Rhetorical Exhaustion & the Ethics of Amplification
    Computers and Composition
  3. Meloncon et al. (2015)
    Special issue introduction: Charting an emerging field: the rhetorics of health…
    Communication Design Quarterly
  4. Moeller (2015)
    Pushing boundaries of normalcy: employing critical disability studies in analyz…
    Communication Design Quarterly

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CrossRef global citation count: 10 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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