Humility, Trauma, and Solidarity: The Rhetoric of Sensitivity enters a conversation in rhetorical studies about the agency, effectivity, and conditions of possibility for the rhetorical subject. This project is an exploration in several registers of the preoriginary affectability that Diane Davis has called "rhetoricity." Rhetoricity exposes existents to affection from outside in a structure of addressivity that is fundamentally rhetorical. Prior to individuation as a subject, rhetoricity implies that beings are differentiated first through response to an address or call. This extra-symbolic affection brings one into being as the subject of a rhetorical relation. This project aims to inscribe the valences of rhetoricity: its traumatic force, and even violence, but also its generation of the possibility for becoming otherwise. These valences are charted through chapters on reading and addiction, sensitivity, and identification in hypertext video games.
In "Addiction, Humility, and Rhetoricity," I explore the uncontrollable relationality of addiction through a reading of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. I argue that an addictive habit, even reading habits, indicate the radical affectability of the subject. Rhetorical exposedness is a route of access to one's interiority that cannot be totally blocked off. The next chapter examines the public controversy over the use of trigger warnings in college classes. "Sensitive Students" argues that students' experiences of trauma mark an exposition to affection that makes teaching possible. In the final chapter, "Twisted Together: Twine Games and Solidarity," I argue that a set of hypertext video games made by transgender women are contesting the dominant values of gamer culture. By confronting players with an alterity internal to identification, these games erode the centrality of identification to rhetoric and forward solidarity as a shared relation to difference instead.
This project traces the ways that gender marks and even constitutes the rhetorical structure of address. Sensitivity, receptivity, and exposedness are sites of gendering marks that persist and reverberate into the very formation of the rhetorical subject. This project opens a way for rhetoricians to frame exposedness as a rhetorical moment of ethicity: as being outside oneself, being beside oneself, and being for others.Englis
