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.

As COVID-19 vaccines began distribution in early 2021, the Atlanta Journal Constitution profiled the Morehouse School of Medicine as they administered inoculations to famed Civil Rights activists. ...

In this essay, we interrogate the power of sensory rhetorics to craft what Jenell Johnson (2016) defines as a “visceral public”: a public bound by intense, shared feeling over a perceived threat of boundary violations. Specifically, we situate miasma—that environmental degeneracy produces bad smells carrying disease—as a historical disease etiology overtaken, but not fully displaced, by the insights of germ theory. This sanitary-bacteriological-synthesis is capable of constitutingvisceral publics so adeptly because germ theory’s explanatory power as a disease etiology continues to rely on the rhetoric of sight and smell as a set of publicly accessible sensory engagements. To illustrate the raced, classed, and gendered consequences of this sanitary-bacteriological-synthesis, we offer a comparative analysis of two images of disease capturing the public imagination: the early 20th century typhoid fever and the 2015–2016 Zika virus outbreak.

This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four topoi that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned topos: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their topos. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.

Abstract This essay maintains that the intensive anger that scholars have dismissed in Margaret Sanger’s The Woman Rebel functioned rhetorically to redefine morality in the Progressive Era. After advancing a theory of angry rhetoric as a public moral emotion, I offer a reading strategy of emotional adherence to track anger’s diffuse discursive power in The Woman Rebel. The angry rhetoric of The Woman Rebel not only laid a new cultural ideal for the morality of contraception, it also constituted a militant identity for those oriented by their anger at The Woman Rebel’s suppression and Sanger’s criminal indictments. This essay closes by meditating upon the lasting role that anger has played in energizing the International Planned Parenthood Federation over the past 60 years.