Advertisements for hearing aids often tout the “invisible” nature of their product, designed to obscure visible markers of disability. This essay examines mid-century appeals to women hearing-aid wearers, emphasizing the labor of embodied and cognitive passing in kairotic spaces as well as practical rhetorical implications of human/machine integration, both of which continue to apply in contemporary contexts.

Visibility is strategic. Visibility is insistent. Visibility is an argument—for disabled people, an argument for recognition and rights, a demand to be part of the public and participants in public...

This article examines natural metaphors for authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia, an influential precursor to and source for today’s encyclopedias. Carefully situating Chambers’s chosen metaphors of the honeybee and the daw within both historical and genre contexts reveals important nuances of authorial originality in reference texts that are most often understood as explicitly non-original and uncreative. His decisions concerning intellectual property were driven by his understanding of the transformative aspects of encyclopedic authorship and his ethical positioning of the encyclopedist as a gatherer and distributor of knowledge. His use of the honeybee as a metaphor for encyclopedic authorship demonstrates a rhetorical astuteness that draws from England’s rich apiary tradition as well as deeply British symbolism that positioned the honeybee as royal, moral, and virtuous. Taken together, Chambers’s argument demonstrates the need for careful attention to situated, historical factors in discussions of authorship and ownership.

This special issue of College English brings together well-established scholars of intellectual property as they present fresh work to the field. Their essays offer wide-ranging, provocative explorations of intellectual property as a cultural artifact over the past three centuries.