Stripped

Stripped

Author: Maggie M. Werner

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-11-11

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 027108832X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Stripped examines the ways in which erotic bodies communicate in performance and as cultural figures. Focusing on symbols independent of language, Maggie M. Werner explores the signs and signals of erotic dance, audience responses to these codes, and how this exchange creates embodied rhetoric. Informed by her own ethnographic research conducted in strip clubs and theaters, Werner analyzes the movement, dress, and cosmetic choices of topless dancers and neo-burlesque performers. Drawing on critical methods of analysis, she develops approaches for interpreting embodied erotic rhetoric and the marginal cultural practices that construct women’s public erotic bodies. She follows these bodies out into the streets—into the protest spaces where sex workers and anti-rape activists challenge discourses about morality and victimhood and struggle to remake their own identities. Throughout, Werner showcases the voices of these performers and in the analyses shares her experiences as an audience member, interviewer, and paying customer. The result is a uniquely personal and erudite study that advances conversations about women’s agency and erotic performance, moving beyond the binary that views the erotic body as either oppressed or empowered. Theoretically sophisticated and delightfully intimate, Stripped is an important contribution to the study of the rhetoric of the body and to rhetorical and performance studies more broadly.


Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies

Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies

Author: Sean Morey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1317407083

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.


The Elocutionists

The Elocutionists

Author: Marian Wilson Kimber

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-01-19

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 025209915X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre--dominated by women--achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.


Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education

Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education

Author: David Gold

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1135104956

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking. Enriching our understanding of women's oratorical education and practice, this cutting-edge work makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and communication.


Conversational Rhetoric

Conversational Rhetoric

Author: Jane Donawerth

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 080933027X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Conversational Rhetoric, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres-humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women's preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks.


Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America

Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America

Author: Carolyn Skinner

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2014-01-27

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0809333015

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Women physicians in nineteenth-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to nineteenth-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough. Whether women could or should be physicians hinged mostly on maintaining their femininity while displaying the newly established standard traits of successful practitioners of medicine. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos provides a unique example of how women influenced both popular and medical discourse. This volume is especially notable because it considers the work of African American and American Indian women professionals. Drawing on a range of books, articles, and speeches, Carolyn Skinner analyzes the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women physicians. She redefines ethos in a way that reflects the persuasive efforts of women who claimed the authority and expertise of the physician with great difficulty. Descriptions of ethos have traditionally been based on masculine communication and behavior, leaving women’s rhetorical situations largely unaccounted for. Skinner’s feminist model considers the constraints imposed by material resources and social position, the reciprocity between speaker and audience, the effect of one rhetor’s choices on the options available to others, the connections between ethos and genre, the potential for ethos to be developed and used collectively by similarly situated people, and the role ethos plays in promoting social change. Extending recent theorizations of ethos as a spatial, ecological, and potentially communal concept, Skinneridentifies nineteenth-century women physicians’ rhetorical strategies and outlines a feminist model of ethos that gives readers a more nuanced understanding of how this mode of persuasion operates for all speakers and writers.


Treacherous Texts

Treacherous Texts

Author: Mary Chapman

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0813549590

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere. Beginning with sentimental fiction and polemic, progressing through modernist and middlebrow experiment, and concluding with post-ratification memoirs and tributes, this anthology showcases lost and neglected fiction, poetry, drama, literary journalism, and autobiography; it also samples innovative print cultural forms devised for the campaign, such as valentines, banners, and cartoons. Featured writers include canonical figures such as Stowe, Fern, Alcott, Gilman, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Millay, Sui Sin Far, and Gertrude Stein, as well as writers popular in their day but, until now, lost to ours."--Publisher.


Rhetorics of Motherhood

Rhetorics of Motherhood

Author: Lindal Buchanan

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2013-04-08

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0809332213

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Becoming a mother profoundly alters one’s perception of the world, as Lindal Buchanan learned firsthand when she gave birth. Suddenly attentive to representations of mothers and mothering in advertisements, fiction, film, art, education, and politics, she became intrigued by the persuasive force of the concept of motherhood, an interest that unleashed a host of questions: How is the construct defined? How are maternal appeals crafted, presented, and performed? What do they communicate about gender and power? How do they affect women? Her quest for answers has produced Rhetorics of Motherhood, the first book-length consideration of the topic through a feminist rhetorical lens. Although both male and female rhetors employ motherhood to promote themselves and their agendas, Buchanan argues it is particularly slippery terrain for women—on the one hand, affording them authority and credibility but, on the other, positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo. Rhetorics of Motherhood investigates that paradox by detailing the cultural construction and performance of the Mother in American public discourse, tracing its use and impact in three case studies, and by theorizing how, when, and why maternal discourses work to women’s benefit or detriment. In the process, the reader encounters a fascinating array of issues—including birth control, civil rights, and abortion—and rhetors, ranging from Diane Nash and Margaret Sanger to Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama. As Buchanan makes clear, motherhood is a rich site for investigating the interrelationships among gender, power, and public discourse. Her latest book contributes to the discipline of rhetoric by attending to and making a convincing case for the significance of this understudied subject. With its examination of timely controversies, contemporary and historical figures, and powerful women, Rhetorics of Motherhood will appeal to a wide array of readers in rhetoric, communications, American studies, women’s studies, and beyond.


Working in the Archives

Working in the Archives

Author: Alexis E. Ramsey

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2009-12-14

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0809386895

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Archival research of any magnitude can be daunting. With this in mind, Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa Mastrangelo have developed an indispensable volume for the first-time researcher as well as the seasoned scholar. Working in the Archives is a guide to the world of rhetoric and composition archives, from locating an archival source and its materials to establishing one’s own collection of archival materials. This practical volume provides insightful information on a variety of helpful topics, such as basic archival theory, processes, and principles; the use of hidden or digital archives; the intricacies of searching for and using letters and photographs; strategies for addressing the dilemmas of archival organization without damaging the provenance of materials; the benefits of seeking sources outside academia; and the difficult (yet often rewarding) aspects of research on the Internet. Working in the Archives moves beyond the basics to discuss the more personal and emotional aspects of archival work through the inclusion of interviews with experienced researchers such as Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Peter Mortensen, Kathryn Fitzgerald, Kenneth Lindblom, and David Gold. Each shares his or her personal stories of the joys and challenges that face today’s researchers. Packed with useful recommendations, this volume draws on the knowledge and experiences of experts to present a well-rounded guidebook to the often winding paths of academic archival investigation. These in-depth yet user-friendly essays provide crucial answers to the myriad questions facing both fledgling and practiced researchers, making Working in the Archives an essential resource.