Poroi Dec 2024 Open Access

“Smart drugs,” Gender, and the Rhetorical Turning

Kate Maddalena University of Toronto

Abstract

This article uses the example of nootropics—a flexible term that capitalizes on the flexibility of the brain—as a category to describe how seemingly oppositional tropes, or turns, can occupy the same rhetorical topos, or space, and produce distinct ethos, political identity, and commitment within that space. It considers two dialectical, gendered tropes in nootropic discourse. The tropes are a falsely binary and highly problematic set of subjectivities, a Gothic masculine and an ostensible Gothic feminine. These two tropes exemplify how rhetorics of wellness produce identities whose turnings towards a politics does not map cleanly onto electoral politics or even identity politics in the US and Canada.

Journal
Poroi
Published
2024-12-11
DOI
10.17077/2151-2957.33739
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Topics
rhetorical criticism discourse analysis argument gender and writing
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