Rhetoric, Politics & Culture

The (Un)Freedom of Reproductive Care and its Economic Impact

2025-02-27T20:02:43-05:00

In this essay I reflect on my personal experiences with reproductive care and how those experiences have affected my professional life since the Dobbs decision. While the political climate of recent years and especially the last election cycle has affected me in more ways than one, I specifically reflect on my pregnancy while on the job market after the fall of Roe v. Wade to focus mainly on how we can better engage with issues related to health and economic wellbeing along with other issues.

Fostering Grit, Designing Debates

2025-02-04T12:51:14-05:00

In this reflection, the authors share results from a study using non-competitive debate as a way to pursue civil discourse in the classroom. They believe it is one way to better engage the public, our students, and important social issues.

Annihilation

2025-01-23T19:30:17-05:00

Annihilation is an existential and racialized public feeling to a loss of humanity in the confinements of U.S. citizenship. Emerging from a "Rhetorics of Revolutions" class whereby decolonization is incommensurable with Liberal revolutions, we read authors from Edward Said, Sara Ahmed, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, Aimé Césaire, Hortense Spillers, Jeremy Engels, to Achille Mbembe during the U.S. Presidential Election of 2024. A reflection on journalist Linsey Davis's response to Donald Trump’s closing debate argument, the essay calls to imagine stories beyond citizenship.

Reflecting on the Political Climate and 2024 Election Cycle

2025-02-10T00:14:47-05:00

In response to the Reflections 2024 forum call, three graduate students offer their imperatives for challenging institutional norms, grappling with perceived safety, and calling for action in dealing with (and preparing for) the 2024 Presidential Election. They offer perspectives on a (white) academic bubble, the death of polite careerism and the politics of pretending, and the need for insurgent community research.

Stop Bringing Citations to a Knife Fight

2025-01-31T12:57:04-05:00

This contribution to the "Reflections on 2024" forum explores what the irrevocability of our divergent existences means for scholars of rhetoric moving forward.

Introduction: Standing Still in the Whirlwind

2025-03-20T15:13:01-04:00

On the evening of July 21, 2024, hours after President Joseph Biden announced his decision to discontinue his re-election campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, the organizers of #WinWithBlackWomen, a group of businesswomen, political strategists, and student, faith, tech, and labor leaders, decided to circulate the invite to their regularly scheduled Zoom meeting. More than 44,000 Black women and allies logged on for the call and thousands of others were turned away because the platform could not accommodate the volume of eager attendees. During the Zoom call, attendees pledged nearly a million dollars to support Harris’ presidential run. The evening set off an unprecedented wave of political fundraising in the following days. Moreover, the call reignited optimism among groups of American voters who had expressed apprehension and dismay about the 2024 election.

The Politics of Being “Just Fine” in Stripper Rap

2025-03-20T15:20:03-04:00

As a Black queer sophistiratchet rhetorical scholar, when I hear Black women expressing a desire to be “just fine,” what I hear is a subtle yet substantive acknowledgment of compounding forms of gratuitous sexual violence and a resilient desire for wellness amid precarity. Black Rhetoric, as a tool and conceptual process, celebrates the innovative and inventive use of speech, language, and performance. In this respect, the communicative lives of Black women like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Assata Shakur have taught me that rhetoric is less about the available means of persuasion and more about the available means of creative resources to enact survival and liberation. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Susanna Morris, Brittney Cooper, Gwendolyn Pough, Tamika Carey, and Sesali Bowen continue to inform my evolving understanding of Black queer feminism (BQF) and rhetoric as worldmaking technologies. In other words, BQF as an interdisciplinary framework provides scholars with alternative intellectual histories to make sense of Black women’s rhetoric as a worldmaking process and practice. In Rico Self and I’s 2021 essay, Refusing to Die: Black Queer and Feminist Worldmaking Amid Anti-Black State Violence, we mobilize a definition of BQF to reflect on the generative power of rhetoric as a worldmaking practice in the case of Breonna Taylor. We characterize BQF as an abolitionist praxis that “accounts for the rhetorical processes of creating livable lives [for] Black people, even amid social and physical death.”

Becoming as Fine as We Wanna Be

2025-03-20T15:24:50-04:00

Black women preachers across a variety of experiences and social locations are employing discursive savvy to disrupt oppressive practices and forge new futures. Interpreting Scripture and the world on their own terms, these Black preaching women are often, as Lisa L. Thompson says, “outsiders-within” society and their own faith communities, daring to name their realities and understandings of God against the minefields of race, gender, sexuality, and class oppression. Among this group of worldbuilding Black women preachers are womanist clergy and other proclaimers utilizing womanist ethics in their enactment of rhetorical agency. Womanism, a liberation discourse and social movement centering Black women’s lived experiences, empowers Black women to expose injustice in all its forms and to create worlds where everyone can be free. I consider three womanist rhetorical strategies—cosmic perspectival discourse, sanctified imagination, and radical inquiry—in one exemplary, womanish sermon, to illustrate a worldbuilding ethic for becoming just as fine as we wanna be.

Focus, Fortitude, and Resilience in the Work of African American Women

2025-03-20T15:29:21-04:00

Are African American women “just fine”? I offer two basic assertions. First, as a person of African descent myself who has been researching the lives and work of African American women for several decades, I proclaim that I have found no time in recorded history when women of African descent have been “just fine.” With very few exceptions, it seems, we just do not know that world and have not had the privilege of living and working in it. The second assertion is symbolized by the poem “Mother to Son,” written by Langston Hughes.

“Just Fine,” or Mothering Against Motherhood

2025-03-20T15:32:02-04:00

In their groundbreaking collection, Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies of Discourse, Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss Davis note that simply producing work about Black women does not necessarily make such work emancipatory for Black women. Rooted in major themes of Black feminist/womanist thought (e.g., attending to the complexities of intersectionality, recognizing the importance of lived experience to knowledge and meaning, and acknowledging traditions of thought and struggle), Houston and Davis articulate “an angle of vision on Black women’s rhetoric and everyday talk that takes account of the material circumstances and ideological contexts of Black women’s communication and honors Black women’s interpretations of discourse.” They argue that centering Black women’s public and private–i.e., rhetorical and interpersonal–communicative practices in liberatory scholarship, then, “connects the situations and concerns of the masses of ordinary African American women” and “celebrates [Black women’s] communication competencies, empowers us to enlarge our range of communication skills, and encourages more humane discourse environments for Black women speakers.” From this perspective, an honoring of tradition, I have endeavored to situate myself for this discussion.

We Fine, But Not Just Fine

2025-03-20T15:34:34-04:00

Black girls already possess leadership characteristics such as “bossiness” and “impatience” that align with women of color leaders and social change agents in their communities. Yet girls get the message from adults, schools and society that their headstrong characteristics are negative (Smooth & Richardson, 2019). Author Monique Morris [now Couvson] notes how being assigned a Black girl identity informs how people see Black girls as well as how Black girls see themselves. Whether we believe these narratives, it is nearly impossible for us to escape seeing ourselves through the dominating institutionalized white patriarchal male supremacist worldview, whatever our gender status, sexuality, age, education, abilities, economics, skin color, or hair texture. Our degradation is structured into the economy and calibrated to the “legitimate” ways of making meaning and making money in this society.

Learning to Landscape

2025-03-20T15:39:08-04:00

As a researcher who centers Black women and Black female literacies within my work, ‘just fine,’ is more like a self-soothing mantra I say to myself as I negotiate and navigate people, texts, stereotypes, histories, and societal expectations that are anything but just fine.

In fact, they are often just terrible.

For example, I am finishing my first book. It is about former First Lady Michelle Obama and the 2,800 square foot vegetable garden that she planted at the White House in 2009. It is formally known as the White House Kitchen Garden (WHKG). So many aspects of this research are rewarding. I get to talk about an iconic Black woman and rhetorician within our contemporary moment. I can study an under-theorized space and contribution within Mrs. Obama’s first ladyship. Finally, I get to do these things while using rhetoric to build an argument for how it is necessary for us all to recognize, re-read, and reclaim this Black woman-led and created space at the White House.

Black Diasporas are a Call and Response to the Continent

2025-03-20T15:49:11-04:00

Note of format: This work was performed as a call and response spoken word piece for

a supersession at the 2024 Rhetoric Society of America conference.

This is an ode to call and response

representing Black women/femmes and

orature as collective Black kinship.

When I say, “just fine.” I need y’all to say,

“Everything is just fine.”

Conclusion: “Can’t let nobody take it away from you, from me, from we”

2025-03-20T15:59:44-04:00

I brought in two framings of the cipher/cypher for my closing because I realized that what I had to say about the cipher in Check It While I Wreck It in 2004 offers a perfect setup and description for the magic that happened in the “Just Fine: The Rhetorics of Black Women and Femmes” Supersession at the 2024 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference. And Toni Blackman’s new book, the Wisdom of the Cypher, also captures the magic of that moment, because these Black women and femmes got open, and we were all energized. Black women and femmes took up space at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in ways we have never seen before; that is what I had a front-row seat to witness at the 2024 Biennial Conference in the Denver Sheraton. The audience sat at rapt attention, riveted, soaking in every word of wisdom from these dynamic scholars like so much manna. Souls were fed. We who were in that room, at that moment, felt full. You who have had a chance to read some of the revised wisdom brilliantly framed and contextualized by Tamika L. Carey’s poignant and provocative introduction are getting a chance to experience some of it. And I hope this closing that I am offering sufficiently reiterates just how special this cipher was and how important it is that we can have this collaborative article as a published manifestation of the moment. I will first give you a recap of the conference cipher.