Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing Sensorship

Instagram is an IB-MSN with strict and contradictory rules about its uploaded content. Despite its censorship mechanisms, users are finding creative tactics to maintain their imaging practices to circumvent this sensorship—censoring of the senses. This article focuses on the tactics employed by three women engaging in self-imaging practices. These tactics include, but are not limited to, privatizing accounts, abstracting and/or obscuring the body, and timed removals of photos. These tactics are analyzed in order to make sense of how they typify new forms of mobile image production, distribution, and circulation. These women's reactions to the censorship policies with which they must negotiate provide a new conceptual framework—sentio-aesthetics—challenging the normative values and ideologies surrounding sensorship.     

Presenting “The Other Half”: Jacob Riis's Reform Photography and Magic Lantern Spectacles as the Beginning of Documentary Film

This article examines the emergence of the visual documentary genre through the study of Jacob A. Riis's magic lantern spectacles, writings, photographs, audience reception, and critical reviews as published in the press during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To demonstrate an existing strong connection between Riis's lectures and documentary film, in particular, the article also focuses on a more contemporary idea about documenting society—the concept of documentary modes of representation. The analysis of related primary and secondary sources reveals that despite the limitations of technology, “moving” documentary pictures were produced long before they were part of the film genre, and Riis's work should be viewed as one of the principal antecedents to this visual documentary form.     

Testing the rhetoric of China's soft power campaign: a case analysis of its strategic ambiguity in the Six Party Talks over North Korea's nuclear program

China's soft power campaign has spawned many scholarly studies on it, but few have examined its rhetorical aspect. Through keyword analysis, this research examines strategic ambiguity in China's public affairs rhetoric surrounding the Six Party Talks over North Korea's nuclear program. The two keywords, ‘the Six Party Talks’ and ‘da ju’ (big picture, overall view), are semantically open and central to China's rhetoric in defining ‘What is it?’ and ‘Why is it?’ with regard to the talks. Analysis shows that strategic ambiguity contributed to some of China's goals. However, it was not adjusted when it stopped working. Its effectiveness was undercut by certain inconsistent messages, and da ju failed to differentiate between domestic and international political context and was also culturally maladaptive. This research contributes to public diplomacy and public affairs rhetoric research.     

Feminine,Competent, Submissive: A Multimodal Analysis of Depictions of Women in U.S. Wartime Persuasive Messages During World War I and World War II

This analysis used Peirce's triadic approach to interpret 58 public depictions of women during the two world wars. The images, appearing in government posters or as ads and illustrations in U.S. magazines and newspapers, endeavored to convey the seriousness of the war effort and mobilize audiences to support it. Aligned in five thematic clusters (competence, domesticity, heterosexual attraction, beauty maintenance, and romantic longing), many invited polysemy through discrepant visual and verbal cues aimed at different audiences. Women as viewers and as objects of representation were addressed in the context of both citizenship and consumption. The analysis explicates ideological points about wartime gender relations and points to the objectification of women's bodies as implied sexual rewards for product purchase in WWII.     

Marketing the recreational sublime: Jumbo Wild and the rhetorics of humans in nature

Since Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams captured the sublime landscapes of Yosemite, immense technological changes have occurred that demand we revisit discourses about the sublime. Panmediation combined with ever-reaching capitalist practices have shifted the ways in which the sublime is imaged, conceptualized, and utilized. In this paper, we turn to DeLuca and Demo’s (2000. Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3), 241–260.) and Stormer’s (2004. Addressing the sublime: Space, mass representation, and the unpresentable. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(3), 212–240.) essays on the sublime to trace the trajectory of the sublime’s domestication and the ways in which its use in contemporary environmentalist discourses, led by corporations like Patagonia, have reinforced human–nature binaries and anthropocentric discourses. To do so, we examine the 2015 documentary Jumbo Wild, which represents one example of a new turn in depictions of the sublime—what we term the recreational sublime—and how it is rhetorically grounded in visual discourses.     

Gregory Bateson,Niklas Luhmann,and Ecological Communication

Cognizant of the evolving academic discipline of ecological communication (EC), I offer this essay as a follow-up to my previous publication—a critical exegesis of Niklas Luhmann's Ecological Communication (1989)—in this journal. Hoping to throw more light on Luhmann's formulations, I introduce and interpret those writings of Gregory Bateson that apparently influenced the former—and/or attempted to link ecology with communication. While I do not necessarily advocate either of these two thinkers' overall philosophical frameworks, I believe that they deserve attention—at the least insofar as they provide a measure of contrast to the contemporary academic discourse of EC (which remains shallow, intellectually parochial, and nonrigorous). That aside, many specific ideas developed by these two thinkers will interest a wide range of constituencies—especially those devoted to the study of information, communication, and ecology.     

The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.     

Reading the Body on House,M.D.: Medical Surveillance as a Model of the Social

This article focuses on the representation of the body in House, M.D. and suggests its usefulness as a metaphor for the view of the social body on which the series relies. The body in House, M.D. is the central occupation of the narrative, and it is around the body that the paired oppositions certainty/doubt and body/speech occur. In House, confessional speech is a regime of false knowledge while the body is privileged as the foundation of true knowledge—the province of the expert interpreter of the body. Through an exploration of these paired oppositions in the show's representation of medical practice, the author explores the series' model of the social in which the visual mediation of bodies is privileged as social hermeneutic and the intensification of mutual surveillance is the means of authentic interaction.     

Traumatic encounters with Frank Mechau's Dangers of the Mail

This essay examines Frank Mechau's infamous mural Dangers of the Mail as an opportunity to theorize the force of memories contingent upon immediate sensual encounters that operate largely irrespective of actual historical occurrences. Through an analysis of public documents, archival material from the 1930s and early 2000s, and two separate tours of the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in 2015 and 2016, we argue Mechau's Dangers of the Mail triggers a form of traumatic sense memory that positions audiences within a trauma economy in which sensation functions as epistemological grounding for political struggle.     

“Now We Can Talk”

This paper explores debate within Puerto Rico's journalistic community regarding the journalistic role of La Comay, a full-sized puppet host of the popular information and entertainment show SuperXclusivo, which faced a boycott in late 2012 and cancelation in early 2013. Calls to boycott and shutter the daily TV show came from the island's LGBT advocates because of comments made by La Comay that they considered homophobic. This analysis of 58 texts from four of Puerto Rico's island-wide news outlets provides an opportunity to examine how a region's dominant cultural archetype—that of the motherly and controversial comadre, after which La Comay is named—appeared in boundary work conducted by local journalists as they determined whether La Comay should have been awarded journalistic status. This paper is not meant to be yet another examination of satirical journalism as much as it is a chance to explore the appearance of a region's culture in the construction or maintenance of its journalistic community.     

In it for the Long Run?

While previous research has focused on the uses of a variety of online services—such as Web pages and, more recently, Twitter—by media organizations and their audiences, a rather limited amount of empirical inquiry has been directed towards the often more and broadly used Facebook platform. The current paper contributes to the research field by providing a longitudinal study of journalist and audience engagement on the Facebook pages of Sweden's four major newspapers—Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Svenska Dagbladet. Employing state-of-the-art methods for data collection, the results indicate that while audiences appear to be increasing their engagement with news organizations on Facebook—albeit mostly through so-called “likes”—the media organizations themselves are decreasing their engagement with audiences.     

Presidential silence,C. Everett Koop,and the surgeon general's report on AIDS

On October 22, 1986, C. Everett Koop released the Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. This essay examines that report as a rhetorical watershed in the national dialogue about AIDS. We suggest that this report—and the media attention that attended it—dramatically shifted the socio‐political environment concerning AIDS and contextual‐izfd Reagan's silence concerning the disease as a lack of presidential leadership on the issue.     

Nonverbal communication and the support process: Interactional sensitivity in interactions between mothers and young adult children

This study investigated the contribution of nonverbal cues to supportive communication in interactions between mothers and young adult children. Current support communication research primarily focuses on verbal messages communicating support or conceptualizes nonverbal communication in narrow ways. Using the concept of interactional sensitivity from attachment theory for direction, a number of hypotheses concerning support provision were proposed in order to develop our understanding in this area. Findings provide insight into the role of nonverbal as well as verbal communication in supportive interaction. Interactional sensitivity—in the form of certain conversational involvement cues (vocal warmth/interest and kinesic/proxemic attentiveness), responses appropriate to the child's needs, and movement synchrony—predicted young adult children's perceptions of mothers’ supportiveness during a conversation about a relationship problem.     

Comparative Optimism in Online Credibility Evaluation Among Parents and Children

This study investigates comparative optimism—whereby people perceive themselves as relatively invulnerable to risks as compared to others—in the evaluation of online information credibility by children and their parents. Results of a representative national survey of Internet users revealed significant antecedents of children's and parents' comparative optimism, including demographic characteristics, cognitive thinking style, and perceived self-efficacy. Parental optimism was also found to relate to the mediation strategies used to regulate children's Internet use, and comparative optimism in children was associated with tendencies to believe online information and specific evaluation behavior. Findings are considered in terms of their theoretical implications and with regard to the role of parents in children's digital information literacy development.     

Tabloid Journalist as P.O.W.

In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege of Hong Kong and was incarcerated in the Stanley Internment Camp. During her internment Jenner kept a clandestine record of daily life written in pencil on Bronco brand toilet paper and kept hidden in the heels of her shoes. To date her fragmented diary and notes have defied analysis. This paper provides a reading of Jenner's personal wartime testimonio through the frame of tabloid journalism to expose how the tabloid genre—Jenner's stock-in-trade as a journalist before the war—became the framework for her personal testimony during World War II. By interpreting Jenner's private diary and notes as testimonio journalism this paper exposes the flow of the tabloid vernacular style of journalism between private and public discourses.     

Examining the emergence of broadcasting in the 1920s through magazine advertising

This paper focuses on the emergence of radio receiver technology and its use by the American public as revealed in 1,725 magazine display advertisements in 12 general circulation and women's magazines from 1920 through 1929. It explores how the complicated wireless telephone receiver was adapted to usability for the decidedly nontechnical public. The study also explores how the “new”; radio — broadcasting — became useful to the general public in various aspects of daily life by the end of the decade. From a technical and social novelty in 1920, radio had evolved to a place squarely‐ on the path to social and cultural integration with American society by 1929.     

Sites of attractiveness: Japanese women and westernized representations of feminine beauty

Ever since Japan's entry into global geopolitics, scholars have identified Japanese popular cultural texts as a terrain on which this country's complex relationship to the West is negotiated. Few studies, however, have adequately addressed how such texts—and Western influence in general—might be experienced differently by different groups and/or strata of Japanese society. Inspired by the work of postcolonial feminist scholars who argue that gender, race, class, and cultural identity must be examined in relationship to each other, this study focuses on a group of 29 women with whom the author conducted interviews and extensive participant observation during eight months of fieldwork in a small Japanese community. It examines, in particular, how these women negotiated Westernized representations of feminine beauty omnipresent in the Japanese media. This article argues that even though informants assertively critiqued and actively negotiated media representations, their own conceptions of attractiveness—and their daily relationships to their physical selves—matched those of the Westernized media‐defined ideals. In view of these findings, it concludes with a call for a more systematic and critical assessment of gender in transcultural relations.     

Narrative Transportation in Radio Advertising: A Study of the Effects of Dispositional Traits on Mental Transportation

This study examined the impact of 3 individual traits—namely need for cognition, vivid mental imagery ability, and transportability—on one's psychological transportation and ensuing belief change subsequent to listening to a narrative radio advertisement. The study demonstrated that both vivid mental imagery ability and transportability tend to significantly influence one's degree of transportedness. Moreover, the study showed that a higher degree of transportedness leads to a more potent persuasive impact on one's affective and conative responses to narrative radio advertising.     

Necropolitical voices and bodies in the rhetorical reception of Iranian women's asylum claims

In the mid-1990s, US immigration courts were introduced to a group of Iranian women who claimed that they feared persecution because of their “pro-Western and feminist” political opinions and because of the way they performed gender on their bodies. The claims were, in total, unsuccessful bids to asylum. Analyzing these cases set against the geopolitical background of US–Iranian history and contemporary relations, I argue that their denials illustrate three important dynamics. First, building on rhetorical theorizing of voice and body, this essay demonstrates the uneasy reception in US law and politics of willful noncitizen women of color with explicit political voices and bodies, and second, the consequential racialization of these subjects as willful, unorderable migrant subjects too akin in their sovereignty to their state of birth. Third, this analysis adds to the field's attentiveness to geopolitics by consequently demonstrating US necropolitical desires toward Iran in the state's engagement with these cases. I argue that for the United States to recognize these claimants as having political voices contrary to their state would be to recognize the presence and legitimacy of that state—a sovereign that challenges US power and modernity on the global stage.