Bending Bars: A Dialogue between Four Prison Teacher-Researchers

This dialogue illustrates the various ways the four authors have undertaken literacy work inside prison--from writing workshops in jails and prisons, to exchanges between college students and incarcerated writers, to college classes in correctional facilities, to investigations of fragmented documents from a progressive era girls’ training school. We situate these ongoing efforts as methods for supporting writing that might heal the individual, social and cultural wounds evoked by our country’s mass incarceration policies and for making that writing public

Rhetorical gestures in British elocutionism

This project uncovers the rhetoric of gesture in British elocutionist handbooks on delivery (about 1650 to 1800). In the work of Bulwer, Sheridan, Walker, Priestley, Austin and others, the gesture exceeds its caricature in histories of rhetoric: an ancillary, if “detached” mechanism for the coercion of audience. Instead, the gesture produces meaning as it promotes appeal. It recommends presence as an inventional resource, and moving-with as a means to coming to terms, drawing toward what Crowley, writing in the context of contemporary political action, calls “civil discourse.” By tracking and analyzing the rhetorical gesture through interrelated thematic locations—medicine, theatre, pulpit, and philosophical chemistry—this project not only argues for reembodying invention, but also (like the Elocutionists themselves did) suggests that theorists of material and body rhetoric would benefit by extending their cross-disciplinary reach. Rhetorical gesture points out an alternative to “invention” (as well as rhetoric) that is by nature personal, oral and alphabetic. I offer this study/ gesture in support of current efforts to theorize the body’s role in the production of argument (Hawhee, Davis), as well as feminst rhetorics that assert the importance of looking beyond the speaker (Glenn, Ratcliffe) and even text, for rhetorical subjects and “stance.

The Trans-Exclusive Archives of U.S. Capital Punishment Rhetoric

We offer a rhetorical distinction between certain de jure and de facto forms of U.S. capital punishment rhetoric. From this distinction, we argue for building a space conducive to critical analysis of state-institutional legal language within the field of transgender communication studies. We hold together: the absence and unrealizability of named trans life in the official language of capital punishment law and the unofficial deadly consequences of articulations of transgender life-in-prison by judicial and administrative rhetors. We view this critical combination as an opportunity to turn these archives of erasure, absence, and failure toward a productive and hopeful end. By mapping the discursive structure of cisnormative punishment institutions, trans rhetorical study can provide useful resources to the effort to abolish those very institutions