B(l)acklash: Tamera,Tia, and the “white man’s whore”

Tamera Mowry-Housely and Tia Mowery-Hardrict first gained popularity with their 1990s sitcom Sister Sister and re-entered the limelight in 2011 with the Tia &; Tamera reality show. During the opening scene of season one, Tamera disclosed that she was referred to as a “white man’s whore” on social media. By using critical discourse analysis, we examine how producers on Tia and Tamera and Oprah: Where Are They Now? employ this trope to construct Tamera in a particular way and reinforce postracial storylines.     

Tim McGirk,Parrhesiastic Rhetoric,and Mass-Mediated Representations of Haditha

This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of some of journalistic parrhesiastic framings of the Haditha “incident.” On November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines killed some 24 Iraqis in a town in the Anbar region in Iraq, and for several months many members of the press tried to compare this incident to the My Lai Massacre. The essay highlights some of the parrhesiastic strategies that were used by Tim McGirk and other critics of the Bush administration who tried to argue that Haditha may have truthfully been a revengeful “massacre” that was perpetrated by enraged Marines. These critics may have hoped that the work by Tim McGirk of Time Magazine would signal the beginning of the end of this Iraqi war, but the author argues that Haditha was recontextualized and domesticated as either lawfare or as a counterinsurgency narrative.     

It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club,Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony

Offering a critical interrogation of white masculinity within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), this essay uncovers a key strategy through which hegemonic systems persist, positing the abject body as a trope for understanding the life of hegemonic ideological formations. Adopting the “interspace” of abjection allows hegemonic masculinity to become everything and nothing at the same time and is a “dangerous” strategy that must be denied at all costs. Insofar as hegemony requires its abjection to remain invisible, this essay names hegemonic masculinity “abject” in order to offer critical prophylaxis against white masculinity's attempts to reproduce its cultural privilege.     

Anonymity in Applied Communication Research: Tensions Between IRBs,Researchers, and Human Subjects

This essay examines the rather complex role of anonymity in communication research as revealed in the narratives submitted to this special issue. First, narratives were examined quantitatively to assess the prevalence of issues related to anonymity, with terms such as “anonymous” and “confidential” emerging most often. Next, a thematic analysis of the narratives suggests five tensions discussed in some detail: anonymity or (not and) confidentiality, over-promising and under-delivering anonymity, to sign and record … or not, named vs. anonymous vs. pseudonymous, and whether institutional review boards (IRBs) should be anonymous. The essay concludes with several applied recommendations for IRBs, researchers, and participants as they confront these tensions linked to the role of anonymity in human subjects research.     

The Psychology of Marathon Television Viewing: Antecedents and Viewer Involvement

This study focuses on the expanding trend of marathon (“binge”) television viewing. It examines the personality antecedents of such media consumption (attachment style, depression, and self-regulation deficiency) as well as the psychological experiences of marathon viewers relative to the narrative (transportation, enjoyment) and its characters (parasocial relationship, identification). In a two-study design, theoretical models of media use and involvement, on one hand, and models of media addiction, on the other hand, are applied to predict the extent of marathon viewing and to compare it with “traditional” viewing. Results advance understanding of enjoyment and involvement theory and support cognitive theories of media addiction. At the same time, the study’s findings reveal that marathon television viewers are active both cognitively and emotionally during and after the media exposure, thus alleviating some concerns about the “problematic” nature of the “binge” viewing phenomenon.     

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.     

Audio: The Movie [DVD]. York,PA: Tracer Technologies, 2006

NPR analyst Juan Williams appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and said that he gets “worried” and “nervous” when he sees people in Muslim dress on airplanes. Two days later NPR fired Williams and the day after that Williams issued a serious accusation against NPR: “I was fired for telling the truth.” Criticism of NPR mounted—arising particularly from conservative commentators—and CEO Vivian Schiller disseminated a statement defending her organization. This essay applies the theory of image repair discourse to NPR's CEO Vivian Schiller's apology for firing Williams. Two accusations were in play and they prompted two distinct defenses: Her reaction to accusations that NPR had not followed appropriate procedures for termination Williams employed the strategies of mortification and corrective action and her defense of the firing itself used transcendence, bolstering, and attack accuser. This essay evaluates this defense as a poor example of image repair.     

“New Conformism Redux”

To assess future priorities for cultural studies, this essay returns to the later writings of Raymond Williams, in particular his concerns about “new conformism.” It is argued that today we face comparable analytical challenges in which the pressures of institutionalization, and a strain of ahistoricism, have produced a “weak materialism” in contemporary cultural critique. The essay recommends a flexible and context-driven navigation of the current dominant tendencies toward micro-recuperative and macro-epistemological analysis, and proposes that this flexibility is the preferred mode of assuring that the dynamism of culture is captured by our critical methods.     

Urban crisis: Polarization and communication

This essay is a speculative attempt to explain the operation of four interaction elements that exist in an urban crisis situation. The relations of “polarization”; “communication,”; “isolation”; and “confrontation”; are viewed structurally as constituent elements in the creation or alleviation of crisis tensions. Communication is suggested as an alter‐native technique of confrontation in tension modification.     

Narrowmobilization and Tea Party Activism: A Study of Right-Leaning Alternative Media

Past research concerning the theoretical framework of Resistance Performance (RP) has been based on observations of liberal organizations and activists. In the following essay, we engage in a qualitative content analysis of alternative media utilized by conservative “Tea Party” activists to build on the concept of RP. Overall, we discovered that the dominant theme found in much of the content focuses on “purity,” which is considerably different from past RP research that found broad themes of “human rights,” “democracy,” “be the media,” and “principles of unity” embedded within liberal alternative media content. We conclude that the theme of “purity” gives rise to narrowmobilization, which constructs very focused protest communities within right-leaning politics.     

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 Strategic Rhetoric of an “At-Risk” Educational Identity: Interviewing Jane

This essay explores how communication research on “at-risk” students relies on under-theorized understandings of identity as seemingly stable traits and characteristics. In this sense, “at-riskness,” as a cultural identity, is dangerous precisely because it encourages researchers to link identity difference with failure, rather than to explore the presence and perpetuation of particular ideologies. We illuminate such ideological tensions through our analysis of a complex educational identity—an in-depth interview with an “at-risk” student—where we locate strategic rhetorics (i.e., discursive constructions that reify normalized assumptions about educational success and failure) that demonstrate how ideology constitutes the phenomenon of educational risk.     

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.     

Practical Patriotism: Camp Fire Girls,Girl Scouts,and Americanization

Drawing primarily on discourses and events from the period surrounding World War I, this essay examines the methods deployed by Camp Fire Girls and Girls Scouts to recruit the daughters of immigrants and, upon joining, acculturate these new members to the American way of life. The argument begins by analyzing those discourses describing the so-called “new immigrant” from southern and eastern Europe as a threat to national unity. Turning to the ways in which the new immigrant problem was gendered through the rhetorical construction of a “girl problem,” this author argues that the advocates describing the girl problem leveraged the presumed cultural rift between foreign-born parents and their new-world children in order to induce the daughters of the foreign-born to perform as American. The essay closely analyzes the discourses of two groups committed to the project of Americanizing the daughters of immigrants: the Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts. The article contends that these groups, the two most popular of the period, Americanized the daughter of the foreign-born by using recruitment tactics that invited her to dissociate from an old-world ethnicity, deploying legendary heroines re-figuring the girl's American belonging, and engineering patriotic regimens habituating her to American customs. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how these groups rhetorically refigured the cultural and social belonging of their members in order to assuage public concerns about national unity.     

The Tao of speech

This essay argues that the study of “speech” as an act and as a subject matter may present the characteristics of a “Tao.” A “Tao” consists of a way of life leading to an increase in humane being for the individual and for society.     

Thinking Machinically,or, the Techno-aesthetic of Jackie Chan: Toward a Deleuze-Guattarian Media Studies

This essay argues the conceptual opacity surrounding technology results from instrumentalism, which posits an a priori distinction between essentialized, binary terms: the human, and the technological, which is both the product and material projection of that essentially human agency. This essay explores a “machinic” alternative to instrumentalism by engaging the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. After mapping the conceptual terrain suggested by their work as applied to technology, this essay looks to the cinematic performance aesthetic of Hong Kong action-film star Jackie Chan in order to sketch the affective/perceptual/kinetic terrain of the machinic.     

On Misfits and Margins: Narrative,Resistance, and the Poster Child Politics of Rosie O'Donnell

This essay addresses why Rosie O'Donnell's “coming out” as a lesbian, as a gay parent, and as an advocate for gay adoption generated such little and lukewarm response, arguing that O'Donnell's lesbianism was rationalized in the public discourse by powerful preexisting narratives that constructed her as both maternal and childlike. These narratives converged with the narrative alterity of O'Donnell's homosexuality in such a way as to sharpen and strengthen established heteronormative discursive margins. The O'Donnell case contributes to an understanding of how dominant narratives negotiate competing narratives of resistance and offers an opportunity to examine mediated representations of “coming out.”     

Border Patrolling and “Passing” in Eminem's 8 Mile

This essay argues that the semi-biographical film 8 Mile represents Eminem as being both racially distinctive and as possessing universal commercial appeal. 8 Mile accomplishes this paradoxical construction by portraying “Rabbit” as “white trash,” a discursively “dark” (white) object, and as an American mythological white subject. The film makes whiteness hyper-visible by subjecting it to raced and gendered struggles. Through real and symbolic violence, Rabbit battles “dark” villains and grapples with “dark” women, initiating a rite of passage. The film grounds Eminem's hip hop authenticity in Rabbit's discursive darkness, but attaches to this image the marketable allure of mythic whiteness. I conclude by contemplating how the film's conservatism reifies “blackness.”     

On the rhetoric of social movements,historical movements,and “top‐down” movements: A commentary

This essay offers a commentary on the case studies of movement rhetoric by Stewart, Condit and Lucaites, Darsey, and Nelson. It proposes a modified definition of “social movement” in light of the apparent evidence of “top‐down” movements but nevertheless insists on the centrality of the variable of institutionalization in analyses of the rhetoric of social movements.     

“Born This Way”: Queer Vernacular and the Politics of Origins

This essay critically examines debates about the supposed inborn nature of sexual orientation. Although popular discourses suggest that sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic, several scholars and activists have argued there is danger in postulating same-sex desire is innate. This analysis looks to another feature of the controversy, arguing that when queers themselves utilize “born this way” rhetoric, they frequently do so in surprising ways that rest outside dichotomist forms of reasoning. Exploring posts on the “Born This Way” blog, this essay argues that vernacular appropriations of the phrase are more fluid among LGBT publics than often imagined, allowing for a rethinking of the epistemology of the closet.