This essay is part of a forum on Migration and Gender Studies. I explore how Presidential rhetori... more This essay is part of a forum on Migration and Gender Studies. I explore how Presidential rhetoric around migration performs heteronormative masculinity to frame migrants as threats and the U.S. as the vulnerable feminine.
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Aug 12, 2021
Today’s academy is a dystopia. Many scholars of color and international scholars face the dauntin... more Today’s academy is a dystopia. Many scholars of color and international scholars face the daunting challenge of navigating neoliberal state institutions that are often built on legacies of racism, colonialism, and classism. This essay brings attention to the feelings of despair, anxiety, and paranoia felt by many scholars of color in the fields of humanities and social sciences, but whose narratives too often become ones of abrupt exit from the Ministry of Knowledge (and) Entrepreneurship (MKE). The essay relies on a discussion of Anzaldúa’s intimate terrorism, the composition of today’s academy, and the sense of never-quite-being. These themes emerge out of a dialogue with Anzaldúa, Deleuze, and Harney and Moten, who each have something to say about navigating institutions of power from a position of in-betweenness. Then, I assemble themes from contemporary popular dystopia films to develop a performative fiction—a narrative of never-quite-being that embodies the critical theory and dystopic themes woven through the experiences of a border-body in the academy. The essay ends with a discussion of what being intimate looks like for someone that never-quite-is, informed by Anzaldúa’s concept of mestizaje and Deleuze’s nomad thought.
ABSTRACT In this introduction to our Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies forum titled “Bo... more ABSTRACT In this introduction to our Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies forum titled “Border Rhetorics,” we first and foremost pay tribute to the life and work of the late Dr. D. Robert DeChaine. His work inspired a generation of scholars to take up the call to study the impacts of and the opportunities within border rhetorics. Then, we lay out a renewed vision for the study border rhetorics in the field of communication studies that grapples with today’s material, geopolitical, economic, and personal challenges imposed by bordering logics.
This essay is part of a forum on Migration and Gender Studies. I explore how Presidential rhetori... more This essay is part of a forum on Migration and Gender Studies. I explore how Presidential rhetoric around migration performs heteronormative masculinity to frame migrants as threats and the U.S. as the vulnerable feminine.
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Aug 12, 2021
Today’s academy is a dystopia. Many scholars of color and international scholars face the dauntin... more Today’s academy is a dystopia. Many scholars of color and international scholars face the daunting challenge of navigating neoliberal state institutions that are often built on legacies of racism, colonialism, and classism. This essay brings attention to the feelings of despair, anxiety, and paranoia felt by many scholars of color in the fields of humanities and social sciences, but whose narratives too often become ones of abrupt exit from the Ministry of Knowledge (and) Entrepreneurship (MKE). The essay relies on a discussion of Anzaldúa’s intimate terrorism, the composition of today’s academy, and the sense of never-quite-being. These themes emerge out of a dialogue with Anzaldúa, Deleuze, and Harney and Moten, who each have something to say about navigating institutions of power from a position of in-betweenness. Then, I assemble themes from contemporary popular dystopia films to develop a performative fiction—a narrative of never-quite-being that embodies the critical theory and dystopic themes woven through the experiences of a border-body in the academy. The essay ends with a discussion of what being intimate looks like for someone that never-quite-is, informed by Anzaldúa’s concept of mestizaje and Deleuze’s nomad thought.
ABSTRACT In this introduction to our Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies forum titled “Bo... more ABSTRACT In this introduction to our Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies forum titled “Border Rhetorics,” we first and foremost pay tribute to the life and work of the late Dr. D. Robert DeChaine. His work inspired a generation of scholars to take up the call to study the impacts of and the opportunities within border rhetorics. Then, we lay out a renewed vision for the study border rhetorics in the field of communication studies that grapples with today’s material, geopolitical, economic, and personal challenges imposed by bordering logics.
Alabama House Bill (HB) 56 passed in 2011 and was written by Kris Kobach. The bill targets migran... more Alabama House Bill (HB) 56 passed in 2011 and was written by Kris Kobach. The bill targets migrant groups, pressuring them to “self-deport”. Kobach’s language subjugates migrants in a way that defines their bodies with shame. I am interested in how Goodnight and Natanson conceive of risk in the practice of social argumentation. For that, I employ philosophical perspectives of affect to reconsider language as relational, and demonstrate how affective language moves bodies. I then consider the channeling of affect and the ways negative affects get strategically directed at defined subject-individuals, shifting presumption of not belonging onto those bodies exhibiting migrant characteristics within the state. Affect, modulated through language, creates affective boundaries, and I demonstrate how Kobach obliges citizens of Alabama to participate in both the shaming of the undocumented migrant and the maintenance of the affective boundary keeping the undocumented migrant body from citize...
In the United States today, angry, straight White men are mobilizing political affect to magnify ... more In the United States today, angry, straight White men are mobilizing political affect to magnify the spectacle of threat facing their sexist and heteronormative political values. In many cases, these nativist expressions gender the nation and its citizens as vulnerably feminine to justify violent and masculinist expressions of state power over those who are threatening them. This is evidenced by a recent trend in antimigrant rhetoric expressed by groups like the Minutemen vigilantes on the Mexico–U.S. border and from rightist political leaders—namely, President Donald Trump. Just over a decade ago, the antimigrant vigilante group called the Minutemen Project (MMP) self-deployed to the Mexico–U.S. border and worksites throughout the United States to intimidate migrant communities and create a media buzz (Hoffman, 2016). Jim Gilchrist, the group’s leader, claimed the MMP mobilized to protect citizens from the influx of migrants crossing the border unchecked by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. From 2004 to 2009, Gilchrist recruited “thousands of members who believed the government was doing too little to stop border crossings, and subsequently felt they should take enforcement into their own hands” (Hoffman, 2016). This “enforcement” was more of a performance of patriotic, heteronormative masculinity for the U.S. media than it was an expression of control over migrant communities. The performances were successful, however, in increasing the group’s visibility in the national news media and in influencing the xenophobic and nativist policies adopted by conservative lawmakers in the United States (Hoffman, 2016). The MMP showed us “how sensationalism can bring deeply ingrained cultural mythologies to the surface, drawing from them an emotional response that has considerable signifying and policymaking power” (Oliviero, 2011, p. 702). Today, even though large antimigrant militia groups like the MMP have mostly dropped out of the media spotlight, their masculinist performances of patriotic xenophobes persist. The rapid shift to the right in U.S. politics and subsequent election of Donald Trump, whom I label the Minuteman in chief, have placed migration control at the forefront of the national dialogue once more. Many of the tropes about migrants Trump used while campaigning and since taking office, including characterizing Mexican migrants as rapists and feminizing the victims of crimes committed by migrants, rely on the same heteronormative masculinist performance to mobilize political affect against migrant communities. none defined
ABSTRACT This essay is organized around four claims, which when taken together, demonstrate that ... more ABSTRACT This essay is organized around four claims, which when taken together, demonstrate that it is time for the field of Communication Rhetoric in the United States to rethink the way it does rhetoric: (1) US American rhetoric is the way settler colonialism organizes, (2) assemblage theory can frame US rhetoric as an organizing logic of Settler Colonialism, (3) anti-colonial social movement knowledge production is akin to theory, and (4) rhetoric must find a better method to engage with these anti-colonial movements. I end the essay with a challenge to rhetorical scholars to learn, rather than try to teach.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication, 2023
Rhetorical scholars have recently taken up rhetorical field methods, rhetorical ethnography, and ... more Rhetorical scholars have recently taken up rhetorical field methods, rhetorical ethnography, and other participatory methods to augment textual approaches. Following critical rhetoric, field researchers engage emplaced and embodied perspectives, thereby gaining an immediate understanding of rhetoric and its effects on audiences. Rhetorical field methods/ethnography challenge key assumptions and ethics about rhetorical research, including conceptions of text, context, the critic, the rhetor, and audiences. Although antecedent work at this intersection exists, only recently have rhetorical scholars given full attention to how fieldwork orientations and participatory approaches challenge the project of rhetoric. Rhetorical field methods/ethnography have been applied in a wide array of topic areas, including social movement research, public memory, environmental/ ecological rhetoric, digital rhetoric, international contexts, and audience studies. Tensions that have arisen as a consequence of taking up participatory perspectives include whether such research engages in critical/cultural appropriation or can effectively be conducted within groups that researchers ideologically oppose. Moreover, incorporating participant perspectives, non-textual elements, and affective considerations opens rhetoric to forms of expression that span well beyond traditional, logos-centered criticism. Such a move may dilute rhetorical research by flattening expression, making nearly all elements of human life open for critical consideration. Finally, rhetorical field methods/ethnography have emerged in a larger context of disciplinary reflexivity, with many questioning rhetoric's racist and colonial histories and legacies. To this end, we offer anti-colonial landmarks, orienting toward multidimensionality, liquidity, queering, and community, while disorienting from citizenship. These landmarks trouble rhetoric's legacies, and invite scholars to engage more deeply with de/colonial possibilities of rhetorical fieldwork.
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