Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement. By James E. Caron. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021; pp. 1-273, $109.95 hardcover.

Amy M. Young — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Divine Aboagye — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Review: Informing A Nation: The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Brandon Johnson — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Book Review of Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Carly S. Woods — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Book review of Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Embodied Alliances Across Difference

Lisa Silvestri — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

This essay explores how space, place, and body factor into coalition-building across

difference. In particular, the author focuses on performative and corporeal aspects of U.S.

military Veterans at Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017. The aim is to identify how

embodied presence enables social alliances and transformative coalitional subjectivities

to form

Obama in Osawatomie: the Limits of Rhetoric about Public Policy and the Power of a Coherent Ideological Vision

Robert C. Rowland — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

President Barack Obama faced very difficult electoral prospects in the summer of 2011. A slow economic recovery, along with Republican efforts to block his agenda, had undercut his message of hope and change. Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas has been widely recognized as a crucial moment in his successful 2012 campaign. Obama’s speech was important not because he supported new policies, but because it corrected a major flaw in the community-oriented narrative at the core of his message. Obama reenergized his retelling of the American Dream by shifting the villain in his narrative from partisanship to the greedy rich.

Replacing Notorious: Barret, Ginsburg, and postfeminist positioning

Calvin R Coker — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

This essay offers a reading of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings to make sense of how widespread outrage of replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a conservative idealogue was resolved through the invocation of postfeminist motherhood. I argue that a combining a sensibility of postfeminism that historicizes and individualizes gender-based oppression with an idealization of motherhood positions Barrett as the logical and defensible successor to both Ginsburg’s seat, and her legacy of feminist work. I conclude with the implications of this circulation of postfeminist motherhood, with specific focus on political movements for equality and treatment of women.

Designing “The People”: Constitutive Fractures in Contemporary Collectives

Daniel DeVinney — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400

At the 2017 Women’s March, Shepard Fairey’s We The People posters generated a great deal of excitement for their patriotic depiction of a diverse “people.” But the posters’ success exists in tension with the broader critiques of the Women’s March. This essay argues that our current understanding of constitutive rhetoric is ill equipped to explain this tension. Using the ideas of Danielle Allen and feminist scholars Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Karma Chávez, and Alyssa A. Samek, I perform several readings of the posters to explicate the fractures within our theories of constitutive rhetoric. I demonstrate that our current understanding of “the people” through oneness is hampered by a unity/difference binary that limits our ability to understand heterogenous collectives. Instead, I argue that an approach of wholeness better captures the complex collective life of contemporary coalitions and better attunes scholars to the intricate ways “the people” come into being. I argue that shifting the key terms of constitutive rhetoric to solidarity, vision, and health can help critics develop a more nuanced understanding of diverse coalitions. Overall, this essay offers scholars an opportunity to rethink our theories of “the people” to better account for the emerging strategies, needs, and values of contemporary collectives.