Rhetorical Scholarship Research Articles

“Greater than fear”: theorizing affective blockage in social movement rhetoric

ABSTRACT Created by street artist Shepard Fairey, the protest poster, “We the People are Greater than Fear,” emerged as a powerful visual response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Though celebrated as a progressive symbol of inclusion, we argue the poster, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces some of the very prejudices it seeks to confront by associating Muslimness with suspicion, foreignness, and fear. Using “Greater than Fear” as a case study, this essay contributes to scholarship combining critical affect theory with rhetorical studies by theorizing affective blockage as a means of understanding the ways affect contributes to the resilience of hegemonic narratives by preventing certain meanings from surfacing. We argue the poster reveals a cautionary lesson about how affect can obscure critique of cultural texts created with progressive intent, inadvertently bolstering softer, more subtle forms of racism embedded in liberal contexts. We also discuss the importance of interrogating rehearsed affective associations that, by virtue of their familiarity, seem normal and acceptable but ultimately reinforce exploitative conceptions related to identity categories such as race, religion, sexuality, class, and gender. We conclude with insights for rhetorical scholars about how affective associations can enable ostensibly liberal discourses while at the same time preventing their critique.

Hospitable Historiography and/of the First All-Woman Special Supreme Court in the State of Texas

ABSTRACT Rhetorical scholars working with archival materials face the persistent question: “What happened?” Records are present, yet what they record is absent. This essay addresses the historical narrative of the Texas Supreme Court case, Johnson v. Darr. This event and its expansive archive have been used as evidence for political claims to significance. Drawing from Michelle Ballif, we attempt a “hospitable historiography.” Discussing the tension between the archival “cut outs” and the event’s inherent “eventfulness,” we suggest that archival ruptures may offer insights into the significance of the past. We explore the ethical considerations of historiography, particularly in relation to feminist methodologies and the need to acknowledge the multifaceted identities of historical figures. We conclude, proposing a reevaluation of the event’s significance, challenging traditional interpretive frameworks, and advocating for a more hospitable approach to historiography. The gambit is to know the past otherwise. The potential gain is both methodological and ethical.

“I love how that pussy talk”: Black women, subversive reclamation, and the rhetorical power of Black pussy talk

ABSTRACT As a contested site of struggle, Black women rappers’ use of hip-hop and rap music provides them with a platform to affirm their sexual autonomy amid gratuitous sexual violence. Sexual agency is central to Black abolition. To imagine futures beyond violence necessitates that we view Black women’s sexual rebellion as an abolitionist praxis amidst precarity. In this essay, I introduce subversive reclamation—a critical reading posture and experimental approach—to explore the imaginative potential of Black pussy talk as a rhetorical strategy employed in Black women’s contemporary stripper rap. I situate this exploration of Black women’s pussy talk within and in conversation with Black queer feminist (BQF) theories of sex and sexuality as well as pleasure and joy to consider how Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s hip-hop song, “WAP” queers hegemonic inscriptions of Black women’s sexualities. Ultimately, I argue that subversive reclamation offers a disruptive reading of Black women’s pleasure, fundamentally shifting how rhetorical scholars should talk about Black women’s bodies, sexualities, and futures in popular media and public discourse.

Powermapping “Stop Cop City”: abolition ecology for possibilities beyond enclosure

ABSTRACT This essay brings the analytic of abolition ecology into conversation with the critical rhetorical study of social movements, to emphasize the ecological dimensions of racialized violence, settler colonialism, and abolitionist liberation struggles. We do so by advancing the method of rhetorical powermapping, as one way to constellate the rhetorical labor of activists/protectors as they unearth the depth and textures of power temporally and spatially. Putting rhetorical powermapping into practice, we follow the contours of recent insurgent movements to “Stop Cop City” as they unsettle power from within the urban forests of Atlanta, Georgia to broader national and global regimes. Such a practice emphasizes the need for multi-scalar and multi-species systems thinking in any vision of an abolitionist future. Stop Cop City insists we contend more deeply with the ecological dimensions of violence and the indispensability of life amid climate chaos, global militarism, and racialized and gendered repression. It also demands, we argue, that rhetorical scholars adopt alternative methods and analytics to make sense of emerging, decentralized movements on their own terms, the histories and relations that ground them, and the human and more-than-human solidarities they require.

Reintroducing Derrick Bell into contemporary discourse: A review of ‘Racism and Resistance: Essays on Derrick Bell’s Racial Realism’

Edited by Timothy J. Golden, “Racism and Resistance: Essays on Derrick Bell’s Racial Realism” presents a diverse set of perspectives from scholars in philosophy, law, theology, and rhetoric that critically engage with and expand upon Derrick Bell’s theories and scholarly works. This review approaches this work from outside the disciplines of its contributors and evaluates the volume for its accessibility, interdisciplinarity, and application of Bell’s theory of racial realism in contemporary discourses on racism and anti-racism. “Racism and Resistance” is divided into four parts, each containing two chapters. This review focuses on Part 1 – Racial Realism, Religion, and the Negro Problem and Part 4 – Racial Realism and Theology, as they are excellent examples of both the disciplinary range of this book and the authors’ command of Bell’s body of work.

One of the Secrets of the Phenomenon of Precedence and Delay in (the Book Al-Burhan fi Tawjih Mutashabih al-Qur'an by Muhammad bin Hamza bin Nasr Al-Kirmānī)

The precedence and delay are expressive arts distinguished by the Holy Quran, and they are stylistic features that have a great impact on the beauty of the style and its effective presentation in a concise manner that matches the context and reveals the depths of souls and adapts meanings to the appropriate considerations for the occasion. Scholars of Arabic rhetoric in various specialties have given them utmost attention, searching for them in various texts to display their aesthetics and artistic magnificence that stir the souls. The Quranic text was among the best of these texts as they examined it for the secrets of precedence and delay, especially in the similarities found in the blessed verses. Rhetorical scholars attempted to reveal some of the masterpieces of precedence and delay in the blessed verses.

Desiring God and Christian Hedonism: awakening an immanent joy

ABSTRACT In the following rhetorical analysis, the contemporary evangelical philosophy called Christian Hedonism is examined. This philosophy was initiated by John Piper during the eighties through the now classic text Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Using rhetorical conceptions of immanence and transcendence, the artefact demonstrates a desire to transcend the contemporary bounds of evangelicalism through the immanent substance of joy. By challenging Kantian philosophy, which rejects emotions, Piper awakens interlocutors to an eligible process of transcendence within the then metaphysical dialectic of conservative evangelicalism. Through immanence, incongruity emerges allowing, most significantly, for suffering to become synonymous with joy thus giving rhetorical scholars further insight into the rhetorical inner workings of this modern day Christian philosophy.

The Rhetorical Possibilities of Communicative Time Travel

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, provides a unique opportunity to reexamine how affect, memory, authenticity, embodiment, and authorship are conceptualized and discussed in rhetorical scholarship. This is particularly significant as affective experiences resulting from communication with AI are increasingly normative due to the public-facing nature of many large language model chatbots. Drawing first on a recent case wherein an AI user produced a chatbot facsimile of her childhood self, this article suggests that affective changes facilitated by AI represent not only new avenues for exploring affect, but also how time itself is experienced.

Critical Rhetoric Meets Community-Based Participatory Research

ABSTRACT This project responds to a set of methodological challenges for the critical commitments of rhetorical fieldwork and investigates how community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods can help address them. As an example, we draw on Bailey Flynn’s CBPR research with Resilience, a not for-profit “rape crisis center” that provides services and therapy to thousands each year in Illinois. CBPR, like participatory critical rhetoric (PCR) methods, privileges field data as objects of rhetorical analysis. Unlike PCR and other approaches, CBPR methods prioritize the formalization of collaborative relationships with community stakeholders at every stage of research. We argue that greater integration of CBPR methods in rhetorical field methods will aid in privileging the epistemological perspectives of community stakeholders, solidifying critical communication scholarship’s commitment to conducting research with consequences, and providing a common ground for interdisciplinary exchange between critically trained rhetoric scholars and qualitative communication researchers.

Rewriting the plan of the world: Peter Thiel’s messianic rhetoric and the end of progressive neoliberalism

ABSTRACT Following the 2007–8 financial crisis, far-Right conservatives advanced a reactionary political turn, seeking to replace the prevailing political order, what Nancy Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism,” with an overtly exclusionary and rapacious form of capitalism. This article investigates how entrepreneur Peter Thiel sought to shape this transition, adopting a messianic rhetoric to return capitalism to its essential principles. Employing Giorgio Agamben’s study of Saint Paul, I argue that Thiel employed a Pauline stance to realize a plērōma, or fullness, of capitalism, preserving the profit motive while jettisoning neoliberalism’s deployment of progressivism. In this analysis, I build upon rhetorical scholars’ exploration of contemporary neoliberal discourse, framing the billionaire rhetor as a uniquely agentive figure in twenty-first-century capitalism and positing neoliberalism as an eminently versatile rhetorical logic capable of operationalizing arguments from across the political spectrum.

On occupying the silent parenthetical: Thinking-feeling after the Ends/ings (Part 1/2)

ABSTRACT To speak of “the End” as a cataclysmic future event, as depicted in popular apocalyptic genres, oversimplifies the prolonged, multiplicitous character of the End Times as they unfold unevenly across different scales, speeds, populations, and intensities. As many rhetoricians and other critical scholars have noted, an interrelated series of Ends and Endings mark the contemporary conjuncture, disrupting disciplinary traditions and the prevailing epistemic terrain: the End of Speech, Debate, the University, Time, the Individual, Politics, The Greeks, Whiteness, the Canon, Capitalism, Colonialism, Patriarchy, Prisons, Discipline, Man—in short, and in the spirit of Frantz Fanon, The End of the World. In Part 1 of this two-part essay, I begin to speculate on what it might mean to think otherwise from these unfolding and overlapping Ends and Endings, call attention to the limits of criticism-as-usual, and raise a number of questions for rhetorical scholars committed to studying social change and enabling different possible futures and worlds. I consider the im/possibilities of realizing a transformative rhetorical studies rooted in pluriversality, the undercommonsense, experimental writing, and the “radical rhetorics” (Aswad) of communities born in struggle.

A Dialogue on Public Health Celebrities during COVID-19

This dialogue offers a transnational perspective on the emergence of public health officials (PHOs) as celebrities during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on scholarship on public health rhetorics (e.g., Keränen, 2014; Malkowski & Melonçon, 2019) and on our experiences of living through the ongoing pandemic as well as observing its effects in Australia, Canada, China, and the United States, we focused our discussion on our local contexts; key public health celebrities who emerged in those contexts; changes in public reaction to those figures over time; and why the celebrification of public health figures is of interest to scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine. We close by reflecting on how our transnational discussion of public health celebrities has reshaped our understanding of celebrification in health and outline key areas of future collaboration and inquiry.

Engaging with melodrama: a tribute to Steve Schwarze

ABSTRACT In this forum, several rhetorical scholars revisit Steve Schwarze’s 2006 essay, “Environmental Melodrama,” and the scholarly conversations his work inspired. The five essays featured in this forum not only remember Schwarze as a supremely gifted, insightful, and kind rhetorician, environmentalist, activist, teacher, colleague and friend; as he would have wished, they engage anew with his recuperation and regeneration of the concept of melodrama in a variety of settings: activist movements, resistance, controversies, ethnographic encounters, public speeches, and political campaigns. In doing so they not only re-establish the crucial importance of melodrama as a rhetorical form, genre, mode, or tactic, they underscore the enduring legacy of Schwarze’s work itself.

Michael A. Gilbert: Not arguing logically is not illogical: Other ways of communicating arguments

Michael A. Gilbert has contributed significantly to the field of contemporary Argumentation Theory. Most notable are his multi-modal theory of argumentation and coalescent argumentation, models of argument that he developed to address how interlocutors actually argue in the marketplace. His ideas were not always understood, appreciated, or acknowledged by the larger argumentation community. Recently, though, the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric (in Ontario, Canada) recognized Gilbert’s contributions in a week-long Institute dedicated to his scholarship. Provoking as his theories might seem, rhetorical scholars can find some common ground with Gilbert’s works.

Stuart A. Selber: What is Digital Rhetoric?

The interview conducted with Stuart Selber by Jim Ridolfo in this special issue on “Challenging Rhetorical Traditions” provides an overview of Selber’s innovative and impactful career studying digital rhetoric. From Selber’s award-winning 2004 monograph Multiliteracies for a Digital Age to his newest monograph Institutional Literacies: Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication, we discuss how the literacies and landscapes of digital rhetoric have significantly changed and will continue to change as we wade into an era of increased digital privacy concerns, deep fakes, and Generative AI. Professor Selber’s work is an excellent example of how scholarship in contemporary digital rhetoric is revolutionizing the field of traditional rhetoric and the teaching of literacy, both re–elaborating its basic notions and expanding its future applications.

The practice and pragmatics of Scandinavian research in rhetoric. Audience studies in Scandinavian rhetorical scholarship

This paper demonstrates the connections between certain cultural traits of Scandinavia, a scholarly interest in rhetorical practice and the workings of rhetoric, and a recent interest in audience-oriented research methods. Scandinavia is characterised by a tradition of practical rhetoric, egalitarianism, high trust, and low scores on power distance and masculinity in Hofstede’s culture comparison tool. This, I suggest, is reflected in an interest in the everyday pragmatic functions and workings of rhetoric, paving the way for the use of audience research.

Multimodal rhetorics in the gun debate: Encouraging youth agency in March for Our Lives’ “The Most Vicious Cycle”

ABSTRACT In October 2018, March For Our Lives (MFOL) released “The Most Vicious Cycle,” a music video designed to mobilize collective agency among youth voters in the midterm election. The video, which features the song “Safe,” performed by Sage (featuring Kesha, Chika), utilizes a Rube Goldberg machine sequence to visually depict the “vicious cycle” of gun violence and the predictability of the gun control debate. Rhetorical scholars have largely examined the gun control debate by analyzing the public address of political elites and argumentation presented in gun rights discourses. There exists, then, a need to consider how youth activists, who have been excluded from the gun control debate, are using emergent discursive strategies like the music video to claim authority and exercise agency. I argue that the video’s multimodal discourse employs visual, lyrical, and sonic elements to create an immersive and instructional experience that performs a collective youth agency grounded in struggle. The video acts as a pedagogical tool to inspire collective agency by visualizing gun violence and amplification, visually refuting the status quo, and displacing authority. In moments when discourse and debate have become static, multimodal elements can provide a new perspective, making arguments felt, immediate, and grounded in experience.

Beyond Biomedicine

Fourteen women of color vividly illustrate their experiences of culinary spaces circa 2015 in the zine Women of Color #11: Food and Family History (hereafter WOC11). WOC11 reveals how rituals surrounding food function as vital moments for healing someone’s psyche, soul, and body. Yet, the biomedical framework for health frequently reduces eating to physiological topics like weighing the right amount. By taking us beyond biomedicine, this article examines how food practices promote wellness linked with feelings and the body. I argue that WOC11 illustrates vernacular forms of care by naming violent processes of alienation in Western foodways and commemorating food practices that encourage wellness for the zinesters’ selves, families, and communities. Scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), the argument concludes, need to expand where and what is studied by thinking about health as physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness; such topics orient the field toward the lived realities of violence and care.

Toward reproductive justice rhetorics of care: state senator Jen Jordan’s dissent of Georgia’s heartbeat bill

ABSTRACT As we emerge into a post-Roe landscape spurred by state-level “heartbeat bills,” the stakes are high for rhetorical scholars to identify rhetorical topoi that have the capacity to intervene in legislative acts of reproductive injustice. Already, feminist rhetorical scholars have determined the rhetorical limits of topoi derived from legal, medical, and <choice> frameworks. Thus, I build upon Kelly Pender’s “rhetoric of care” to theorize what I name reproductive justice rhetorics of care, rhetorical topoi that can advance reproductive justice (RJ). Importantly, I view RJ as a contingent telos – not an analytic – to which both radical (protest) and reform (institutional) rhetoric can contribute. I argue that Georgia state Senator Jen Jordan’s dissent of HB 481, Georgia’s heartbeat bill, offers three RJ rhetorics of care from within the constraints of institutional dissent: women as the fiduciaries of life, reproduction as an embodied process, and mother – reclaimed and reframed. This analysis underscores the importance of identifying the rhetorical strategies invoked by state legislators to challenge reproductive injustice, given that abortion access will now be controlled by states post-Dobbs. Further, my analytical approach to finding topoi that move toward a contingent telos has implications for additional justice-oriented movements.

De-whitening consent amidst COVID-19 rhetoric

ABSTRACT This article exposes four white-supremacist tactics embedded within extant consent discourse that became increasingly mobilized through the COVID-19 pandemic. These tactics include discourses of militarism as well as the dismissal of Black autonomy, reproductive access, and disability within existing consent rhetoric. We argue that these tactics create renewed exigence for de-whitening consent, and we build such a de-whitened consent framework by applying rhetorical scholarship on sexual violence to the 2020 Michigan anti-lockdown extremist protests, which were largely undertaken by white men. By exposing the white-supremacist tactics visible in these extremist protests, we highlight how pandemic-related rhetorics of bodily autonomy apply differently to Black, Muslim, disabled, trans, and migrant populations, and thus offer a de-whitened consent framework as a tool to chip away at white supremacist discourse.