Violence and identity politics: 1970s lesbian-feminist discourse and Robin Morgan's 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference keynote address

This essay examines 1970s lesbian-feminist identity rhetorics to interrogate the exclusionary logics of visibility and gender normativity. Lesbian-feminists used such logics to exclude women living “in the closet,” performing gender in nonnormative ways, or avowing a transgender identity. Those struggles form a dynamic context to situate and critically analyze Robin Morgan's keynote address at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” Though Morgan's address exemplifies rhetorical violence of identity politics and transphobia within lesbian-feminist communities, I explore its radically queer possibilities to shed fresh light on persistent struggles that shape contemporary queer politics.     

The Trouble with Aileen Wuornos,Feminism's “First Serial Killer”

Lesbian prostitute Aileen Wuornos was popularly termed “America's first female serial killer.” Between 1989 and 1990, she killed six men, later testifying they had raped or attempted to rape her. By analyzing media coverage of Wuornos’ story, I argue that Wuornos’ incommensurability with available stories of women who kill illustrates the need to expand the rhetorical resources that make female violence and victimage intelligible. After demonstrating that Wuornos’ gender transgressions were disciplined into intelligible terms by understandings of criminality as an already spatial and gendered category, I conclude by discussing the “trouble” Wuornos poses to feminist and queer cultural politics.     

No Jack Kennedy: Mitt Romney's “Faith in America” Speech and the Changing Religious-Political Environment

In December of 2007, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney traveled to Texas to give an address on religion and politics. The speech was heralded by many as Romney's “JFK moment.” This study explores the campaign religion speeches of Kennedy and Romney by considering various issues concerning context, audience, and content of the two speeches. Guiding this analysis is Roderick Hart's work on the civil-religious contract and Kenneth Burke's work on dramatistic analysis, which are utilized to demonstrate that—despite the media's proclamations—Romney's speech represented a stark shift from Kennedy's rhetorical approach. Implications are drawn concerning the differences between the two speeches and an understanding of the confessional political style guiding the intersection of religion and politics today.     

“Once an Eagle,always an Eagle?”: symbolic divestment,recuperative critique,and in-house protests against the anti-gay BSA

A group of Eagle Scouts protested the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) anti-gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and queer policies and heteronormative citizenship ideals by forfeiting their badges, divesting their membership, and writing personal, emotionally charged letters addressed to the BSA to critique the institution from within. Engaging the correspondence illuminates the repertoires of critique and dissent they employ in their in-house protests. To these ends, this essay makes four primary contributions: it (re)calls attention to the correspondence archive as a fruitful site to investigate political speech acts and forms of dissent; it provides an understanding of the politics of emotions in protest and social change efforts, thus contributing to resonant dialogues in social movement studies; it codifies the Eagle Scouts’ particular tactics employed in their in-house protests, captured in the terms “symbolic divestment” and “recuperative critique”; and it offers a case study that details the rhetorical mechanisms of intrainstitutional change.     

The effect of variation of rate on the recall by radio listeners of “straight” newscasts∗

A comparative analysis of the theories of Kenneth Burke and Alfred North Whitehead provides a different perspective of persuasion. The areas of comparison are: (1) the composition of the rhetorical situation and the function of the rhetor; (2) the modules: “identification” and “transmutation” and (3) the paradigms: “consubstantiality” and “concrescence.” Other perceptions of the rhetorical situation, the axiological latitude and functions of the rhetor, and the interrelations between the rhetor and the audience might, thereby, be gained.     

The Effect of Anticipated Future Interaction and Initial Impression Valence on Relational Communication in Computer-Mediated Interaction

This study applies the critical paradigm of “rhetorical enterprise” to the case of nineteenth‐century British reform efforts, particularly the organization and the “gospel” of the Birmingham Political Union, and concludes that cases of rhetorical enterprise challenge critics to account for the enterprising consistency of tactics and creed regardless of the relatively inconsistent factors of men andevents.     

The call of conscience,rhetorical interruptions,and the euthanasia controversy

Emmanuel Levinas writes of how the “call of conscience”; is a “primordial discourse”; that “interrupts”; the routines and language‐games that help organize and give meaning to a person's everyday existence. Levinas thus provides a way of thinking about the relationship between the call of conscience and rhetoric that advances what rhetorical theorists have so far claimed about this relationship. This essay develops the position that the call of conscience is a rhetorical interruption in its purest form. A case study is offered to illustrate how such an interruption manifests itself in the debate over the justifiability and social acceptability of physician‐assisted suicide. The specific rhetorical transaction in question occurred in cyberspace and lasted five months; it began when members of a disability civil rights group known as “Not Dead Yet!”; conducted what their opponents described as an “invasion”; of an electronic mailing list operated by the Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization.     

John Morley and the Irish question: Chart‐prayer‐dream

Attempts to circumscribe “the Burkean method” of rhetorical criticism can be frustrating. Critics more profitably might use Burke as an example and a prod, appropriating—as was done in this study—whichever of Burke's concepts, methods, and metaphors seem applicable to a given rhetorical event. Burke's “chart‐prayer‐dream” trilogy, together with his understanding of “strategies,” was employed to examine Morley's “Home Rule” speech before the Oxford Union in 1888. Morley's reply to Randolph Churchill abandoned propositional argument in favor of reviv‐alistic‐exhortation early in the speech; his strategies of form, argument, labelling, style, and mimesis are best understood as those of the High Priest seeking a confessional and an act of expiation from his auditors.     

Righting the Commons in Red Rock Canyon

In this essay we examine the coil-bound notebooks kept at the summit of Turtlehead Peak in Red Rock Canyon, a recreational hiking trail on the immediate outskirts of Las Vegas. Of the many different sorts of entries, a “nature-culture binary” is the most dominant and unique pattern to be found in the journals. We argue that this nature-culture binary serves as a piece of rhetorical equipment useful for navigating the daunting ecological complexities of everyday life. Invoking culturally familiar tropes of sublimity-and-banality, hikers renew their civic vows by “righting” themselves through the journals. We thus argue that the notebooks ultimately serve as the locus of a “becoming-common” within discourse. At bottom, the nature-culture binary enables hikers to affirm—and in affirming make available, and in making available make possible—the noblest ideals and loftiest hopes of a shared material existence. We conclude by noting a darker implication of this rhetorical performance, namely that the seeds of a more harmonious ecological future are sown alongside a dangerously innocent self-righteousness.     

Thomas Sprat's quest for a philosophy of language

Seventeenth‐century England's quest for utilitarian conceptions of language led the Royal Society and Thomas Sprat to evaluate the scientific, rhetorical, and poetic uses of discourse. The resulting treatise reflects the struggle between “ancient” and “modern,” yet proposes perhaps the most sophisticated linguistic analysis of the century.     

Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism

This essay explores the practice of “culture jamming” as a strategy of rhetorical protest. Specifically, “pranksters” deploy the tools of the mass media and marketing in order to take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Through the concept of “pranking,” this essay suggests that the most promising forms of media activism may resist less through negation and opposition than by playfully appropriating commercial rhetoric both by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes.     

The Good Will Hunting Technique

“The Good Will Hunting Technique” analyzes and enacts rhetorical paradigms present in popular culture. The main objects of examination are Gus van Sant's film, Good Will Hunting, and Eminem's music video “Mosh.” The author extracts positive aspects of popular culture to feature a rational-affective approach to rhetoric. The notion of mind–body rhetorical collaboration, which stems from Behavioral Doctrine developed during Germany's Weimar era, combines an emphasis on exteriority with traditional notions of rhetoric to establish a method for progressive action in lived reality.     

A palmar sweat investigation of the effect of audience variation upon stage fright

The Industrial ("Coxey") Army movement of 1894 was the product of one of America's worst depressions. Groups across the nation attempted to take “A petition with boots on” to Washington, D. C. asking for relief of unemployment. The movement was rhetorical in method and object. As it progressed, it attempted to meet opposition arguments that its members were “tramps” and that it was asking for the impossible: guaranteed employment. Branded as radical, it answered its opponents with diverse rhetorical techniques and arguments rooted in the prevalent value system.     

The rhetoric of academic protest

The faculty protest at the University of Michigan against the war in Viet Nam, because it seems typical of a “new activism,” provides material for a case study of the rhetorical sophistication of this and similar movements in which academic people may be involved.     

Who said what: Subject positions,rhetorical strategies and good faith

The first part of this paper briefly sketches out the idea of subject position by advancing two general types of subject position, showing how they differ and overlap. The second part discusses subject position as it is employed in argumentation, and specifically how it is used as a rhetorical trope to claim or disclaim legitimacy. The third part offers the concept of “good faith”; to address how future research/theory along these lines may provide useful contributions to rhetorical theory and practice.     

The edifice metaphor in rhetorical theory

The literature of rhetorical theory reveals a persistent sense of relation between the arts of rhetoric and architecture. The following essay looks first to assumptions of a germinal relation of force between the arts; and next, to assumptions of an analogical relation of form. The latter relation, developed primarily in terms of the “edifice metaphor,” is traced chronologically to the point of its decline among rhetorical theorists of the present century. Concluding suggestions are offered in explanation of the decline of the metaphor, and in affirmation of the need for viable new figures to express the processes of rhetorical disposition.     

Mobil's epideictic advocacy: “Observations” of Prometheus‐bound

Among “corporate rhetors,” none has been regarded as more creative and aggressive than Mobil Oil. This essay examines Mobil's use of “Observations"—half‐page Sunday newspaper magazine section ads—during the years of 1976–1980. The first focus is upon “Observations” as epideictic discourse developed in response to Mobil's 1975 rhetorical situation. Attention is then turned to examples of the discourse itself and a summary of 149 “Observations.” Following the analysis are treatments of the identificational strategies used by Mobil and the Promethean myth which gives those strategies universal appeal. Finally, Mobil's “epideictic advocacy” is evaluated by the standards of effect, ethics, and art. Through “Observations” Mobil intends to be—like the Sunday newspaper—a part of America's afternoon.     

All Hands on Deck

Abstract

Libraries are immersed in politics, from the “office politics” that take place within libraries to the “real” politics associated with local, state, and federal jurisdictions and mandates affecting libraries. Off-campus library programs include not just those politics associated with libraries but by their very nature extend into deeper political waters that are critical to their establishment and success. This paper examines the political shoals, currents, and rip tides associated with offcampus library programs and suggests that awareness and involvement are key ways to avoid running aground.     

Asian-Japanese: State Apology,National Ethos,and the “Comfort Women” Reparations Debate in Japan

Recent scholarship on apology has shifted its critical emphasis from the juridical use of apology as a means of self-defense to the moral value of apology as integral to specific reconciliation processes. This article examines the “comfort women” reparations debate in Japan in the 1990s as symptomatic of this change in how we think about apology and reparations. It illustrates how “comfort women” reparation lawsuits disrupted the symbolic economy of political apology in an inter-Asian political context and, thus, transformed the rhetorical force of apology from a past-oriented to a future-oriented technology of care.     

Heuristic structures of Dispositio in oral and written rhetorical composition: An addendum to Ochs’ analysis of the Verrine Orations

Building on Ochs’ analysis of “rhetorical detailing” in Cicero's Verrine orations, this essay reveals that the disposition of arguments in the In Verrem shifted markedly from compositions which were structured for oral argument to those which were intended for public reading.