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Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons™

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Critical and Cultural Studies

Selected Works

2015

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

His Final Homily: Pope John Paul Ii's Death As An Affirmation Of His Life's Message, Joesph M. Valenzano Nov 2015

His Final Homily: Pope John Paul Ii's Death As An Affirmation Of His Life's Message, Joesph M. Valenzano

Joseph M. Valenzano III

Every Sunday morning, a member of the Roman Catholic clergy addresses his flock after a reading from one of the Gospels. These homilies ordinarily last between 10 and 20 minutes and allow the priest an opportunity to interpret the Gospel message from that day's reading, as well as discuss how that message relates to contemporary events and issues. During the final two months of his life, Pope John Paul II provided a longer, more powerful symbolic homily to the world. The message summarized his positions on freedom, suffering, and the dignity of human life.

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Molding Messages: Analyzing The Reworking Of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ In Grimm’S Fairy Tale Classics And Dollhouse, Jeana Jorgensen, Brittany Warman Aug 2015

Molding Messages: Analyzing The Reworking Of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ In Grimm’S Fairy Tale Classics And Dollhouse, Jeana Jorgensen, Brittany Warman

Jeana Jorgensen

The story of “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410) is one of the most consistently captivating fairy tales. It tells of a cursed princess dreaming in a tower, waiting patiently for her prince to rescue her. Those who recreate the tale for contemporary audiences spin the story anew, reconstructing again and again what it means both to sleep and to awaken. This chapter analyzes two modern television versions of the tale, one for children and one for adults, comparing their incorporation of feminist messages and parallel ideas about shaping narratives and shaping lives. The children’s cartoon Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics (also called …

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“We Are Not Free”: The Meaning Of In American Indian Resistance To President Johnson's War On Poverty, Casey R. Kelly Jul 2015

“We Are Not Free”: The Meaning Of In American Indian Resistance To President Johnson's War On Poverty, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

This essay examines how the ideograph was crafted through dialectical struggles between Euro-Americans and American Indians over federal Indian policy between 1964 and 1968. For policymakers, was historically sutured to the belief that assimilation was the only pathway to American Indian liberation. I explore the American Indian youth movement's response to President Johnson's War on Poverty to demonstrate how activists rhetorically realigned in Indian policy with the Great Society's rhetoric of “community empowerment.” I illustrate how American Indians orchestrated counterhegemonic resistance by reframing the “Great Society” as an argument for a “Greater Indian American.” This analysis evinces the rhetorical significance …

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Exoticizing Poverty In Bizarre Foods America, Casey R. Kelly Jul 2015

Exoticizing Poverty In Bizarre Foods America, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

No abstract provided.

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Détournement, Decolonization, And The American Indian Occupation Of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971), Casey R. Kelly Jul 2015

Détournement, Decolonization, And The American Indian Occupation Of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971), Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

On November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes” (IOAT) invaded Alcatraz Island. The group’s founding proclamation was addressed to “the Great White Father and All His People,” and declared “We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery” (2). Tongue-in-cheek, the IOAT offered to purchase Alcatraz Island for “twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red clothe.” In this essay, I illustrate how the IOAT engaged in a rhetoric of détournement, or a subversive misappropriation of dominant discourse that disassembles and imitates …

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Bizarre Foods: White Privilege And The Neocolonial Palate, Casey R. Kelly Jul 2015

Bizarre Foods: White Privilege And The Neocolonial Palate, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

No abstract provided.

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Neocolonialism And The Global Prison In National Geographic's Locked Up Abroad, Casey R. Kelly Jul 2015

Neocolonialism And The Global Prison In National Geographic's Locked Up Abroad, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

This essay examines the reformulation of colonial ideologies in National Geographic Channel's Locked Up Abroad, a documentary program that chronicles the narratives of Westerner travelers incarcerated in foreign nations. An analysis of Locked Up Abroad evinces neocolonialism in contemporary media culture, including: the historic association between dark-skin and savagery, the backwardness of the non-Western world, and the Western imperative to civilize it. The program's documentary techniques and framing devises sustain an Otherizing gaze toward non-Western societies, and its portrayals elide a critical analysis of colonialism in its present forms. I advocate for neocolonial criticism to trace how NatGeo remains haunted …

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Shaved Or Saved? Disciplining Women’S Bodies, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl Jul 2015

Shaved Or Saved? Disciplining Women’S Bodies, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl

Casey R. Kelly

Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of women’s vaginas. We argue that the rhetoric of both communities produces the same disciplinary configuration for the control of women’s bodies. Both communities instruct women that the appearance of a prepubescent and pure vagina is essential to sexual appeal and self-care. Whether sex positive or sex negative, both communities articulate a model of sexual health that negates women’s status as active, desiring subjects. Ultimately, we argue that public scrutiny of women’s vaginas implicitly and overtly …

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Remembering Radical Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories In Contemporary Documentaries About The Black Power Movement, Kristen Hoerl Jul 2015

Remembering Radical Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories In Contemporary Documentaries About The Black Power Movement, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

Contemporary rhetoric about race and racism has been shaped, in part, by popular films. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has provided a variety of what Kelly Madison refers to as "anti-racist-white-hero" films.1 Movies including Amistad, Cry Freedom, The Long Walk Home, Mississippi Burning, and Ghosts of Mississippi have routinely positioned white protagonists as civil rights heroes who win justice for the black community by punishing or humiliating white antagonists. Each film frames racial injustice as the consequence of closed-minded individuals, rather than as the outcome of the U.S. economic and political system. More recently, the motion pictures The …

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Shaved Or Saved? Disciplining Women’S Bodies, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl Jun 2015

Shaved Or Saved? Disciplining Women’S Bodies, Casey R. Kelly, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of women’s vaginas. We argue that the rhetoric of both communities produces the same disciplinary configuration for the control of women’s bodies. Both communities instruct women that the appearance of a prepubescent and pure vagina is essential to sexual appeal and self-care. Whether sex positive or sex negative, both communities articulate a model of sexual health that negates women’s status as active, desiring subjects. Ultimately, we argue that public scrutiny of women’s vaginas implicitly and overtly …

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Monstrous Youth In Suburbia: Disruption And Recovery Of The American Dream, Kristen Hoerl Jun 2015

Monstrous Youth In Suburbia: Disruption And Recovery Of The American Dream, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

Although the American Dream myth idealizes youth who grow up in suburbia as culturetypes of imminent success, the Columbine High School shootings demonstrated that all not suburban youth will grow up to succeed. The extensive news media coverage of the tragedy reflects broader anxieties about the declining status of the suburbs in American society. In the wake of the shootings, the news media created a myth of monstrous youth in suburbia that functioned to repair suburbanites’ waning faith in the myth of the American Dream.

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Turning Points In Relationships With Disliked Co-Workers, Jon A. Hess, Becky Lynn Omdahl, Janie M. Harden Fritz May 2015

Turning Points In Relationships With Disliked Co-Workers, Jon A. Hess, Becky Lynn Omdahl, Janie M. Harden Fritz

Jonathan A. Hess

Although most people begin their employment with the education and on-the-job training to handle the tasks their jobs entail, few long-term employees boast that they feel competent in dealing with all the difficult people they encounter in the workplace. Unpleasant coworkers range from annoying nuisances to major sources of job frustration and career roadblocks. Given that periodic preoccupation with unlovable coworkers is nearly a universal feature of organizational life, it is not surprising that such relationships are given due attention in the media and popular press (e.g., Bramson, 1989; Topchik, 2000). What is surprising is how little scholarly attention has …

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Managed Convictions: Debate And The Limits Of Electoral Politics, Ronald Walter Greene, Darrin Hicks Feb 2015

Managed Convictions: Debate And The Limits Of Electoral Politics, Ronald Walter Greene, Darrin Hicks

Ronald Walter Greene

In response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s proposed agenda for future Presidential debate research, we recall the troubled relation between debate and conviction, which has fueled disciplinary and public controversy throughout the last century. Following a brief genealogy of three such controversies, we describe four models of debate as a cultural technology for managing the economy of moral conviction: debate as critical deliberation, debate as civic virtue, debate as social justice, and debate as game. We claim that reading Jamieson’s proposal in light of these technologies reveals a potentially disturbing fault line: if we fail to distance the aims and methods …

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