Abstract

Although Alan Turing has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rhetoric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2018-01-02
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2018.1395268
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

References (52) · 7 in this index

  1. 10.1215/9780822391272-008
  2. Enculturation
  3. Reader’s Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies
  4. Rhetoric Review
  5. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age
Show all 52 →
  1. 10.1145/2658985
  2. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
  3. 10.7551/mitpress/9780262015424.001.0001
  4. 10.1080/10436920802107674
  5. Consuming Technologies
  6. The Essential Turing
  7. 10.1023/A:1008371426608
    Journal of Logic, Language and Information  
  8. Present Tense
  9. Rhetoric Review
  10. Rhetoric Review
  11. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
  12. Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race
  13. Present Tense
  14. Addressing Normativity in Technical Communication: Putting Technical Communication in Con…
  15. Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab
  16. Present Tense
  17. Rhizome
  18. NMC Media-N
  19. When Computers Were Human
  20. The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research
  21. 10.1145/2542504
  22. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
  23. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
  24. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
  25. Alan Turing: The Enigma
  26. 10.1136/bmj.1.4616.1105
  27. Peitho
  28. Technical Communication Quarterly
  29. Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science
  30. 10.1215/9780822375159
  31. Stanford Literature Review
  32. Tekhnema
  33. Rhetoric Review
  34. Fox
  35. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  36. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  37. 10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4_14
  38. Epistemology of the Closet
  39. Man Enough: Embodying Masculinities
  40. Replaceable You
  41. 10.7208/chicago/9780226450834.001.0001
  42. Essential Turing
  43. The Essential Turing
  44. On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
  45. Turkle, Sherry.The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. 20th Anniversary Edition. Cambridge: MIT P, 2005.
  46. Artificial Intelligence
  47. Affect and Artificial Intelligence