Becoming a Detour de Force: Dehierarchizing Directionality and Mobility in Rhetorical Research

Abstract

This article contributes to conversations taking place around new materialist feminist interventions and embodied methodologies related to the rhetorics of everyday life. Historically, the Western metaphysical sensorium has tended to privilege the bodily uprightness of humans with their head and the senses associated with it (e.g., vision and cognition) as sovereign and largely masculinist authorities for rational decision making. Moreover, this metaphysical system ascribes a generally abject passivity to vegetal life on account of its stationary emplacement in the earth, compared to the active human capacity of ambulation (Marder). In an attempt to dehierarchize and remap such exclusionary logics of experience, this article advances the concept of detour de force, a mobile, embodied orientation to rhetorical research that models an ethic of creeping persistence inspired predominantly by vegetal movement. A detour de force suggests a sexually differentiated—that is, an intentionally gendered—orientation, enfolding haptic, aural, gustatory, and olfactory modes of embodied judgment (alongside the ocular) within rhetorical fieldwork.