Public controversies involving the Smithsonian index more than simple disagreement over its contents or subject matter. As a public institution founded in and for the U.S., the Smithsonian embodies a tangled array of attitudes, ambitions, and anxieties associated with "American" identity that complicate reductive views of disputes about it. Taking up recent controversies involving the National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL), this essay illuminates how senatorial clashes over the perceived merits or faults of installing "Latino" representation at the Smithsonian reveal a shared yet enduring commitment to cultivating and intensifying the policeability of Latinx communities. Fulfilling along an aesthetic axis what Gilberto Rosas terms a "managed violence," this museal rhetoric reveals not only disagreement concerning a museum dedicated to "Latino" communities at the Smithsonian, but, too, competing stances over how visible to make the interest in the policeability of Latinx communities in the service of the U.S. settler colonial state. I conclude that the in/visibility of policeability provides and/or forecloses opportunities for escaping unmanaged violence(s).
This article argues that online endometriosis communities constitute a form of digital doulaship, where community members create networked care webs that contest medical gaslighting and expand pathways to care. Through analysis of posts and comments from the Reddit community r/endo, this study demonstrates how individuals with endometriosis employ digital platforms to visualize otherwise inexpressible pain, broker access to healthcare resources, and affirm experiences of institutional dismissal. Unlike traditional doulaship's dyadic relationships, digital doulaship operates through peer-to-peer, distributed networks that leverage platform affordances to create persistent communities of support. Drawing from disability justice scholarship on care webs and reproductive justice theories of advocacy, this research reveals how digital doulaship enables collective rhetorical labor that transforms private suffering into political representation. Rather than reinforcing fertility-focused medical frameworks, these communities actively resist reproductive framings of endometriosis, creating alternative rhetorical spaces where chronic pain is validated on its own terms. This analysis contributes to rhetorical scholarship by demonstrating how marginalized individuals craft meaningful advocacy practices within systems designed to silence their embodied experiences.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fundamental challenge to rhetoric, agency, and humanity. We argue that AI reveals how empowered audiences have created new post-human agencies beyond the speaker and the audience that we call the generative persona. This persona, forged in the ashes of what was once called the "author," is unhinged from earthly coexistence and social accountabilities, because it exists as an ideal manifestation of its audiences' affective rhetorical inputs. The generative persona auto-poetically creates new interactions, facts, and realities. We use the generative persona as a heuristic to analyze the agencies of Donald Trump and AI. We trace the homologies between Trump and AI by focusing on their engagement in three overlapping functions: resource consumption/grifting, stochastic parroting/repetition, and hallucinations/confabulations.
Reactionary discourses are maintained by a characteristic refusal of ambiguity, contingency, and uncertainty. While rhetorical criticism is a valid means of approaching these discourses, they are structured by key signifiers that are understood in anti-rhetorical terms by their users and interpreted as non-arbitrary indicators of hidden truth. This article proposes the notion of atropic or anti-rhetorical devices and analyzes the role of bone as an example in White supremacist, incel, and anti-trans communities. Attention to anti-rhetorical strategies of reading may offer conceptual clarity to the study of far-right discourses and clarify the potential of rhetoric to disrupt them when understood as a mode of engagement with the world that exceeds its battery of specific techniques.
This article analyzes Luis Munoz Marin's symbolic redeployment of Puerto Rican exemplarity, the geopolitical and strategic logic of situating the island as a hemispheric gateway to the Americas, following the failed assassinations and political insurgencies of 1950. By casting his nationalist adversaries as communist puppets of Eastern empires, Munoz Marin solidified his position as Puerto Rico's governor and demonstrated his allegiance to U.S. administrations during the Cold War. In this regard, Munoz Marin used the symbolic, geopolitical, and military exemplarity of Puerto Rico to navigate a colonial double-bind, the notion that a colonial power must control the Caribbean as an (inward/outward) invasion point. To this end, we read Munoz Marin's rhetoric as a form of resistance against geopolitical alignment, revealing the anticolonial advantages of embracing the island's rhetorical hybridity that manifests at the border between national independence and federated statehood.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published the ninth iteration of the Mandate series, Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, also known as Project 2025. This book and associated initiatives are a call for what Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, calls "the second American Revolution." While policy analysts suggest that the governmental and cultural ramifications of Project 2025 would be catastrophic if achieved, we concern ourselves with the rhetorical tactics of the document, which rely on metonymic linkages among conspiratorial fragments. Project 2025 authors argue through a networked m & eacute;lange of conspiratorial subtexts, falsehoods, and symbols that prop up the urgency of Project 2025's ongoing implementation. This essay analyzes the metonymic connections among the rhetorical elements of the document to illustrate how Project 2025 urges audiences to corral and condense broad, and often contradictory, demands into a codified policy mandate. We argue that the metonymic tropes leveraged in Project 2025 illustrate the functions of networked conspiracism.
In the last decade, conservative artist Jon McNaughton has gained notoriety. This essay reads McNaughton to make better sense of conservatism's relationship with liberal democratic visual culture. McNaughton's paintings register as kitschy dissent from the democratic elements of US visual culture. Analyzing his work not only makes sense of the work that form does in making conservative audiences keen for his art, but also outlines how a conservative way of seeing confounds some common assumptions in visual rhetorical studies, and complicates the overall functionality of liberal democratic society more generally. While confirming the democratic potential of the visual, the study suggests the need for revision to key methods in visual rhetorical criticism in light of the resilience of the right-wing visual regimes, with special attention to circulation and an assessment of the right-wing's ability to generate broad hostility to the entirety of the modern liberal democratic enterprise.
