Articles & Reviews
From GUI to NUI: Microsoft’s Kinect and the Politics of the (Body as) Interface
“As I reflect on my experiences with the Kinect’s depth data, it occurs to me that it is a “degree zero” for experimental work because the data is (in Deleuzian terms) an intensive form, pure potential.”
Rhetorical Empathy in Dustin Lance Black’s 8: A Play on (Marriage) Words
“As a somewhat conservative, non-confrontational rhetorical strategy, rhetorical empathy can open doors of discussion and address fears and threats that may prevent listening and engagement.”
Why So Hostile?: The Relationships among Popularity, “Masses,” and Rhetorical Commonplaces
“We fancy ourselves rational, nuanced, and critically thinking animals and commonplaces help perpetuate this fantasy.”
Louis C.K.’s ‘Weird Ethic’: Kairos and Rhetoric in the Network
“C.K.’s approach to kairos, to the complex forces that shape rhetorical situations, offers an alternative to the dominant mode of contemporary networked rhetoric: snark.”
Our First Special Issue: Medical, Gender, and Body Rhetorics
“Medical rhetoric, much like gender and body rhetorics, enjoys a rich interdisciplinary history and so feels at home in a journal dedicated to the rhetorical study of socially significant and timely topics. We seek to expand the field’s endeavors with this special, double issue.”
A Womb With a View: Identifying the Culturally Iconic Fetal Image in Prenatal Ultrasound Provisions
“Ultrasound provisions specifically exploit the cultural significance of the iconic fetal image in order to dissuade a patient from terminating her pregnancy.”
Inoculating the Public: Managing Vaccine Rhetoric
“Rhetoricians of health and medicine can challenge the effectiveness of the instrumental view of persuasion entailed by the commonplaces that regulate public health, such as fact is knowledge while belief is fiction.”
Laboring Bodies and Writing Work: The Pregnant First-Year Writing Instructor
“In the pregnant composition teacher we see a dangerously stacked set of circumstances… Enclosed in a body that far exceeds her control, she is a microcosm for the larger system in which she must teach.”
Stasis Theory and Meaningful Public Participation in Pharmaceutical Policy
“Our findings suggest that the FDA’s deliberative procedures may more adequately capture stakeholder testimony were it to incorporate a pre-hearing event wherein all parties agree to definitions for key points.”
“Wellness” as Incipient Illness: Dietary Supplements in a Biomedical Culture
“Wellness has become pathologized in Western culture, mapped conceptually onto a medically oriented illness model through processes that are fundamentally discursive in nature, centered on persuasion.”
The Concept of Choice as Phallusy: A Few Reasons Why We Could Not Agree More
“We argue that abortion discourse on all sides has
been too rational and, more importantly,
that this rationality has been defined in a
male-oriented way.”
Healthy Living: Metaphors We Eat By?
“Attending to the most ubiquitous—and hence least noticeable—metaphors within rhetorics of health and medicine can, as Judy Segal notes, shed light on the values that these terms “smuggle into” healthcare policy and practice”
Epideictic Rhetoric and the Reinvention of Disability: A Study of Ceremony at the New York State Asylum for “Idiots”
“I use epideictic rhetoric to examine how the intellectually disabled person was over time constructed and deconstructed via praise and blame.”
Research Update: Pain Medication and the Figure of the Pain Patient
“On the one hand, pain is an event or condition socially negotiated; for the same reason, the pain patient is socially constituted. On the other hand, pain is experienced individually and, in many ways, privately.”
