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Intersectional Rhetorics: A Case Study In The 2013 Supreme Court Decisions On Doma, Proposition 8, And The Voting Rights Act., Michelle Kearl Dec 2013

Intersectional Rhetorics: A Case Study In The 2013 Supreme Court Decisions On Doma, Proposition 8, And The Voting Rights Act., Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

The summer of 2013 saw a troubling social justice whiplash. On June 26th, in two separate decisions the Supreme Court repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and found no standing in the Perry case, also known as the Proposition 8 case, effectively opening the way for gay marriages to resume in California. Just one day before these decisions, a clear victory for mainstream gay rights movements, the same court ruled that the federal government must create a new standard for evaluating how states meet or violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the court did not gut the Act …


Towards A Critical Intersectional Rhetoric: Critical Rhetoric Meets Intersectionality, Michelle Kearl Dec 2013

Towards A Critical Intersectional Rhetoric: Critical Rhetoric Meets Intersectionality, Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

The most recent treatments of critical rhetoric have attempted to expand its appropriate methodological focus (Hess, 2011; Hess & Herbig, 2011; Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011). It is within this expansion that I pitch this theoretical interrogation and building of critical rhetoric. While the newest research argues for a variety of in situ, ethnographic, and other considerations of ‘live’ rhetorics, my investments are more directly in the responsibility of critical interpretation of texts. McKerrow (1989) establishes a series of obligations for critical rhetoricians as they analyze rhetorical artifacts; two critiques, eight praxes, and a perpetual criticism is no small endeavor. …


From Freedom Rides To Justice Rides: Analogizing Social Movement Rhetoric In A Post-Identity America., Michelle Kearl Dec 2013

From Freedom Rides To Justice Rides: Analogizing Social Movement Rhetoric In A Post-Identity America., Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

This presentation explores the rhetorical strategies, specifically the use of analogy, used in the rhetoric of the Created Equal organization. Created Equal, an anti-abortion activist organization, argues that it is a social movement in the vein of the Civil Rights Movement. The rhetoric employed by the organization is remarkable in its pedestrian attempt to veil its religious ideology, as well as its attempt to closely associate itself with the traditional Civil Rights agenda. Specifically, the tactics, images, and promotional material used and produced by the organization both explicitly and implicitly equivocate their commitments to stopping abortion to the demands of …