The Enigmatic Lynndie England: Gendered Explanations for the Crisis at Abu Ghraib

This essay examines the gendered explanations for the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, I examine how mainstream news media's selective focus on Lynndie England encouraged the public to read Abu Ghraib primarily as a gender crisis rather than as a crisis in US military culture. This framing not only deflected attention away from the other soldiers involved in the scandal (particularly the men who were involved) but also diverted criticism away from more comprehensive discussions regarding the US military's use of abuse and torture, the unlawful detainment of suspected terrorists, and the erosion of civil liberties in the post-9/11 era. Moreover, these representations of Abu Ghraib as a gender crisis prompted new criticism regarding gender integration in the military and constructed feminism as the new villain in the American melodrama.     

Environmental Melodrama

Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline's reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification should be the telos of rhetoric. In response, this essay advances a concept of melodrama as an integrated set of rhetorical appeals. It uses examples of environmental rhetoric to illustrate how the inventional resources of melodrama can transform public controversies and oppose dominant discourses that rationalize or obscure threats to the quality and existence of life on Earth. Based on these arguments, the essay endorses a sophistic critical perspective that foregrounds timeliness as the primary ground for rhetorical judgment and refuses to treat any rhetorical frame as inherently superior to another.     

Edge of seventeen: melodramatic coming‐out in new queer adolescence films

Queer adolescence films in the US and Britain in the 1990s show positive representations of same‐sex attraction, romance, and confrontations with homophobia. Films like Beautiful Thing, Edge of Seventeen, and Get Real are primarily targeted at young gay and lesbian viewers who need supportive and optimistic visualizations of eroticized queer politics, struggle and success, agony and happiness. These films are characterized, however, by complicated representations of the queer body, eroticization of physical inequality in same‐sex relationships, and the melodramatic coming‐out of agonized protagonists, which highly support the notion of a fixed and stable sexual orientation.