Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Beer, Blogs, And Bitches, Lauren Murray
Beer, Blogs, And Bitches, Lauren Murray
Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
Beer has been branded as a product that is available to men; we see this in popular advertisements online and on television. The heteronormatively-masculine image that is created presents a complicated rhetorical situation for women interested in beer. When searching the online community for female beer bloggers, I came across blogs that seemed to be addressing women who are alienated in the beer community with hyper-feminine rhetoric. This stark contrast to the rhetoric that we typically see in beer advertisements did not appeal to me either. I've been referred to as "the girlfriend with great taste in beer" and intercepted …
Queer The Tech: Genderfucking And Anti-Consumer Activism In Social Media, Matthew A. Vetter
Queer The Tech: Genderfucking And Anti-Consumer Activism In Social Media, Matthew A. Vetter
Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
A companion text to a piece of online activist rhetoric, this essay attempts to explain how social media networks and other digital interfaces intercede and influence users' constructions of gender and consumer identity. Gaining awareness of the influence networks have over our lives, should empower users to appropriate and subvert those networks for alterior agendas. This essay, and the activism it introduces, demonstrates an appropriation of Pinterest, a "pinboard-style" social media network, for the purposes of suberting and exposing its typical hetero-normatie and pro-consumer practices.  Â
The 5-Sided Lego, Hanna Barker, Shawn Beaumont
The 5-Sided Lego, Hanna Barker, Shawn Beaumont
Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
The study of rhetoric usually concerns itself with analysis of discourse more clearly identifiable as a text, but often overlooked is how apparently non-textual elements may shape our own personal narratives. However, rhetorical theory can indeed be applied to something like LEGO, that beyond marketing and branding, most people do not immediately consider textual. Ultimately by using the Burkeian pentad as a terministic screen, this project aims to determine how the act of playing with LEGO, and even the LEGO brick itself, serve to construct realities, and how those realities impact our own.
The Image-World: A Found Comic Poem, Franny Howes
The Image-World: A Found Comic Poem, Franny Howes
Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
The text of this comic is excerpted entirely from Susan Sontag's essay, "The Image World," from her 1977 book On Photography. I was assigned to read and respond to this piece when I attended the Adventure School for Ladies Comics Intensive, an alternative graduate program focused on gender, labor, and the comics industry.Sontag's essay critiques the way contemporary western culture uses photography for "imprisoning reality" and "depersonalizing our relation to the world." Photography creates another reality by the physical impression of light on film: what she calls the "image world." The idea of a separate and additive reality created through …
Why The Duke Lacrosse Scandal Mattered — Three Perspectives, Heather Lee Branstetter
Why The Duke Lacrosse Scandal Mattered — Three Perspectives, Heather Lee Branstetter
Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
When a controversial event forces the contemporary American public to engage with important socio-political issues that intersect with constructions of race, gender, and class, the underlying social conditions too often remain unexamined. Our public discourse instead works to sensationalize and polarize discussion of such events; as an effect, participants in the discourse engage in rhetorical strategies that rely on the emotions of indignation, anger, and blame. This essay looks back to the discursive exchanges that arose in response to the Duke lacrosse scandal of 2006. I analyze three "representative" patterns of public response, while also interpreting the cultural conditions that …