Being in a CR Group for One : A Man\u27s Experience at the 1981 NWSA Convention at Storrs

You stumble into the preregistration line, knowing you\u27re the only human being in the lobby with a beard, hoping no one will pay attention to your suddenly unique gender. Your mind flashes back to the Hartford airport a few hours ago: masses of tired businessmen being catered to in the cocktail lounge by girls wedged into tight white blouses and even tighter black hot pants and even tighter black high heels. As you sipped your Bloody Mary, you wondered if Susan Griffin had seen the place. But the present snaps you forward with the moment you\u27ve been nervously anticipating: a woman, in this instance one directly behind you, asks in a tone of forceful curiosity, Do you teach women\u27s studies? Gulp. Now you\u27re not just sweating from the heat or the crowd or the weight of the suitcases. You take a deep breath, slowly turn, and croak, Yes. Then, in a burst of compulsion, a desperate move to gain legitimacy, you whip out your credentials: courses taught, papers given, friendships achieved. Only after several minutes do you realize that she has pretty much accepted your right to be there, that she has replaced her furrowed brow with a smile—that, in fact, you\u27re being slightly ridiculous. She interrupts to let you know that she is a friend of your college\u27s president. Would you give him her regards

Figuring Rhetoric: From Antistrophe to Apostrophe through Catastrophe

This essay explores rhetoric tropologically through various strophes: antistrophe, catastrophe, and apostrophe. Our purpose is to delineate problems and possibilities that these tropes pose for rhetoric in an effort to create new rhetorics. We seek to display the antistrophic and catastrophic figurations of rhetoric and then use visual lenses of photography and cinema to disrupt the figurations. Following the disruption, we seek to heighten sensibilities to other figurations, in particular an apostrophic figuration. We cast apostrophe as a figure for change because it marks a deeply felt turn toward difference and otherness. Turned as such, rhetoric becomes erotic