This article examines the rhetoric and pedagogies of employment and workplace guidebooks for adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) to demonstrate how the texts reflect and reinvent cultural desires or fantasies about contemporary employees and also work to norm real autistic employees to be closer to a neurotypical ideal. This norming is achieved in large part through the guidebooks’ surprising appropriations of and appeals to rhetorical training.

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.

This article places responses received from an open-ended survey of graduate students and faculty in dialogue with published commentary on the scope of composition studies as a discipline to explore three interrelated disciplinary dilemmas: the “pedagogical imperative,” the “theory-practice split,” and the increasingly complicated relationship between “rhetoric” and “composition” as our field’s titular terms.

In today’s classroom and larger cultural climate, overtly politicized “critical” composition pedagogies may only exacerbate student resistance to issues and identities of difference, especially if the teacher is marked or read as different her/himself. I therefore suggest that the marginalized teacher-subject look to contemporary theoretical notions of the “radical resignification” of power as well as to the neglected rhetorical concept of mêtis, or “cunning,” to engage difference more efficaciously, if more sneakily. Specifically, I argue that one possible praxis for better negotiating student resistance is the performance of the very neutrality that students expect of teachers.

Explores some queer and performative objections, challenges, and counterproposals to the identity-based pedagogies still dominating composition studies and closely related fields, bringing to the foreground pedagogies that take the instability of identity as a starting point and move toward even greater deconstruction. Proposes a tentative theoretical (re)solution that dis/integrates the binary underlying these “two” approaches to praxis.

ver ten years have now passed since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began making trouble with its challenges to the systems of gender and sexuality. The book has been translated into nine languages; anniversary editions have been released, and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in subsequent articles, interviews, and book-length works. In short, Gender Trouble, and, most particularly, the theory of performativity delineated within this book, has remained on postmodern theory's center stage since its 1990 appearance. Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her original and more modest intentions for it, and she credits the continually changing context of its reception for Gender Trouble's endurance (Preface vii). While Butler's humility and attribution to audiences here are refreshing, Gender Trouble's central claims did constitute theoretical interventions of the first order, disrupting feminism as many of us knew it, and helping to found queer theory in the process. Subverting common-sense beliefs that gender and sexuality are fundamental truths of the self, Gender Trouble (in what are now statements of their own commonplace familiarity) tells us instead that both are always acts, expressions, behaviors, which, like performative speech acts, bring into existence that which they name, and, through their repetition, come to constitute the identities they are purported to be. In other