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Erasing Race: Convenience Memories of Anita Hill and Rhetorics of White “Worthy Victimhood” in News Coverage of the Ford/Kavanaugh Hearings
Drawing from theories of race and time, this article examines how
discourse policing the continuities of lynching’s past and present
manifests temporally to construct the hegemony of white national
time. This dominant temporal formation materializes in the law and
public memory as an institutionalized common sense (of legal time
and memorial time) to create “times of suffocation” for Black lives
and which perpetuate end-of-lynching sentiments in contingent
projects to maintain the racial status quo (Ore). We explore how
countertemporal rhetorics of racialized violence manifest both in
Black women’s responses to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights
Crimes Act and the Equal Justice Institute’s National Memorial for
Peace and Justice to confront the suffocating hegemony of white
national time, enabling a space and time to breathe and articulate
different conceptions of justice, memory, and healing. By centering
on the time of racialized violence, we argue that narrow definitions
of racism, justice, and memories of racism’s “past” are impoverished,
as they cannot account for the fundamental temporal relationship
between lynchings past and present. We introduce a spatiotemporal
politics of breathing as a framework through which “racial rhetorical
criticism” (Flores, Towards) can better account for ongoing legacies
of anti-Black violence and the possible futures enabled by recognizing
nonlinear temporalities.
Drawing from critical trans theory’s methods of systemic analysis, this article examines how #MeToo’s carceral politics have reinforced the exclusion and ongoing abuse of those most vulnerable to gender and state violence. The stories of many people of color, queer, transgender, poor, and/or disabled folks remain inarticulable within a retributive system that requires survivors to narrate themselves as “perfect victims.” Adopting critical trans theory’s emphasis on administrative violence, I connect the transformative visions of penal abolition with discourses on sexual violence. Focusing on the rhetorical strategies of incarcerated survivors and their defense committees, I demonstrate how these rhetors model forms of Rebecca Dingo’s “networked arguments.” In doing so, they offer a promising vision of how organizers and advocates can address the particularities of individual experience while also responding to and working collaboratively against oppressive social and state institutions.
I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the “undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.
Best known for her Southern fiction, Eudora Welty began her career with the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Her photographic “snapshots,” as she called them, served as a window into the Jim Crow South, focusing on the poor, Black, female experience and providing an image of the South that runs counter to public memory. Welty's photographs alter memories of the segregated South by allowing contemporary audiences to gaze upon the Black experience, highlighting positive experiences and emphasizing a shared history. This altered public memory allows for more possibilities of a shared past and the potential for healing. At the same time, this alteration is problematic because it undermines the reality of the suffering experienced by African Americans.
In this study, I examine four web memorials to explore the material construction of memory on the internet. Using Blair's arguments about the rhetorical materiality of memorials, I seek to understand the vernacular responses to 9/11 in the form of individually crafted web memorials. I argue that vernacular web memorials contain dual rhetorical functions of being memorials themselves as well as the tributary markers found at other national monuments. Additionally, webmastered memorials highlight the vernacular strategies of narrative memory, which recall the individual responses and calls to action after 9/11. The internet both fosters the use of vernacular commemoration and hampers it through the use of commercially registered domain names. First, web memorials assist in the creation of vernacular commemorative communities in the form of web-rings. Second, however, the durability of the digital monuments is challenged by the very form they take due to their potentially ephemeral nature.
At the height of the Me Too movement, CBS News fired its top correspondent,
Charlie Rose, for sexual misconduct—a scandal that subjected CBS to public scrutiny.
This essay investigates CBS’s reporting on the Charlie Rose case to explore how the
organization used the apologia strategies of corrective action, blame shifting, and
bolstering in efforts to repair its reputation and answer the Me Too movement’s call for
change. In contrast to most apologia scholarship, which understands image repair as
a defensive discourse, this essay shows how CBS weaponized apologia as an offensive
rhetoric. Specifically, I argue that CBS’s apologia contributes to broader discourses of
rape culture by externalizing silencing tactics characteristic of internal organizational
communication, individualizing narratives of sexual violence, and concealing survivors’
experiences from its rhetoric. Ultimately, this essay offers insight about apologia’s ability
to recuperate hegemonic discourses surrounding sexual violence and to institutionalize
organizational rhetorics of rape culture.
What happens when we treat sexual trauma as a disability? This article examines the federal execution case of Lisa Montgomery, who murdered Bobbie Jo Stinnett and kidnapped her baby, with this question as its motivation. Prior to execution, dozens of clemency petitions circulated publicly, revealing how Montgomery was repeatedly subjected to instances of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse across her lifetime, generating robust commentary about mental disability and sexual violence. I argue that these petitions—even in their effort to retrain public opinion of how Montgomery’s history shaped her actions—upheld carceral logics that insisted Montgomery must pay for her bodymind, reinforcing the idea that mentally ill women do not belong in the public sphere. By carving critical space for sexual violence within feminist disability studies, this article demonstrates how the tensions that ensue when categorizing the aftermath of sexual trauma as a disability result from a discursive incapacity of the state.
This paper considers how conservative media reported on the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh which emerged during his 2018 confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court. Whilst the focus on the potential reputational damage to Kavanaugh was perhaps unsurprising, this paper is concerned with how the Kavanaugh name was mobilised to allow Brett Kavanaugh to stand in for his family, American men, and the nation more broadly, and contrasts this with the relative erasure of Christine Blasey Ford’s narrative, that worked to paint her (and feminists who supported her) as an aggressive force attempting to destroy the lives of men. This was operationalised through moralistic conservative discourses that worked to privilege Kavanaugh’s discursive victimisation, over Blasey Ford’s material one. The message rang clear: tarnishing a man’s “good” name is more perverse than sexual assault itself.
In this essay, I analyze the defense statement Brock Turner delivered before being sentenced for the rape of Chanel Miller. Turner’s statement exemplifies how white masculine sexual abusers rhetorically construct a fragmented self to evade responsibility for their actions and crimes. By attending to subtle shifts in verb tense and voice, I explain how Turner appropriated victimhood by constructing three different temporal subject positions for himself. Inscribing himself as simultaneously the abject abuser of the past, the virtuous victim of the present, and the servant survivor of the future, Turner evaded responsibility for assaulting Chanel Miller by foregrounding his own suffering. This case study extends scholarship on labile and abject masculinity by illustrating how white men fracture their subjectivities, cast out the abject within, and co-opt victimhood to evade responsibility for violence against women, people of color, and members of marginalized communities.
By the spring of 2022 there were nearly 200 bills making their way through 40 state legislatures that explicitly prevented public schools from teaching “divisive subjects” that could make some students feel “discomfort.” Nearly all included language that banned supposed concepts of critical race theory (CRT) or the 1619 Project. The attacks on and misrepresentations of CRT illustrate whiteness’s preferred memory of U.S. history as a rhetorical vehicle for sustaining political, economic, and social power. I offer here an argument for what a preferred memory looks like, how it is constructed, and why. I suggest that popular American movies have overwhelmingly created discourses of race that comfort and sustain whiteness. I use the 2011 film, The Help to show how narratives comfort whiteness and define racism through collective nostalgia and intentional ignorance. I then identify several key strategies whiteness employs to “insulate itself against refutation” while reaffirming racism as strictly an interpersonal phenomenon.
When President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2018, many Democrats initially opposed him. He became a much more controversial nominee when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford brought forward accusations that he sexually assaulted her in 1982. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh’s rhetorical style of predatory white masculinity was supported and encouraged by a chorus of Republican senators. Kavanaugh’s articulation of predatory white masculinity made white men victims, used women as pawns in white men’s innocence narrative, and enacted a partisan agenda to justify rage and nostalgia for a time when white male privilege was less scrutinized. But with the Kavanaugh confirmation, predatory white masculinity shifted norms and conventions about judicial temperament. His rhetorical style produced a shift in temperament, which augmented rage and grievance as the ideal temperament for men in power, especially when echoed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and then-President Trump.
In 2018, 156 survivors took over a small courtroom in Lansing, Michigan, to deliver victim impact statements at the sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar. This article argues that the survivors collectivized their voices and mobilized the subversive potential of the victim impact statement (VIS) to disrupt courtroom norms, hegemonic scripts, and generic expectations that contain and diminish testimony of sexual violence. This article also argues that white supremacy animated this moment of rhetorical rupture and demonstrates how racist logics of worthy victimhood infect the rhetorical potential of the VIS genre and restrict opportunity for disruption within its form. This case study explicates the counterhegemonic promise of survivor speech, the subversive limits of generic rupture, and the role that race, power, and privilege play in the mobilization of collective rhetoric.
Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle challenges traditional rubrics for evaluating apologia. In cases of hyper-partisan apologia aimed at convincing a partisan audience, an alternative framework is needed. We argue that Kavanaugh salvaged his confirmation by conducting hyper-partisan apologia and identify three elements of this strategy. This essay demonstrates the importance of differentiating audiences in analyses of apologia and proposes the existence of a sub-genre of hyper-partisan apologia.
In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC—the “Big Three” of the pre-cable television era—discovered the feminist movement. From the famed sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal to multi-part feature stories on the movement's ideas and leaders, nightly news broadcasts covered feminism more than in any year before or since, bringing women's liberation into American homes. This book uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks' eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists' efforts to use national media for their own purposes. The book chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement. Groundbreaking and packed with detail, this book shows how feminism went mainstream, and what it gained and lost on the way.
In this paper, we analyze ways that oppositional rhetoric—specifically cries of “moral panic” and “witch hunt”—resonates in conversations around campus sexual assault and MeToo. We trace the discursive arc around sexual aggression in popular media and reveal a pattern of ideological inversion. Initially, narratives privileged victim-centered perspectives by affirming notions of rape culture. Yet, this quickly gave way to cries of “moral panic” and “witch hunt.” In the following analysis, we argue the oppositional rhetoric performs an ideological inversion posing hegemonic relations as sites of threatened liberty and counter-hegemonic movements as dominating and oppressive. We show how claims of moral panic and witch hunt operate to obfuscate the cultural dynamics that pervade discourse in a neoliberal social context and constrict our ability to address the underlying structural mechanisms that reinforce rape culture.
The #MeToo movement unveiled a shifting testimonial landscape available to victims of sexual assault, one that was able to apprehend the attention of vast public audiences unlike other protests before it. Through an analysis of published #MeToo tweets and public discussion of them, this essay argues that what happened during #MeToo reveals a feminist deployment of megethos. Theorizing what I term feminist megethos through the lens of listing extends theories of magnitude beyond the idea of cultivating coherence or amounting excessive detail, toward a theory that captures how megethos can puncture pervasive yet normalized attitudes that constrain efforts for justice.
In this project, I analyze news coverage of the #MeToo movement to categorize how blame is assigned and what corrective actions are prescribed for the pervasive problem of sexual violence. Although it is tempting to scapegoat individuals, this practice often limits the scope of sexual violence to isolated cases. Transcendence is an alternative route to redemption that attributes blame to structural and societal forces. However, transcendence may erase intersectional differences and silence voices by overshadowing individual stories. I argue that the risks in focusing exclusively on either scapegoating or transcendence can be mediated through the lens of a rhetorical constellation. This approach calls for media and news coverage of #MeToo to attend to the specific circumstances of individual cases and to frame those unique people, voices, and stories as part of a series of interactions with other instances of sexual violence that constitute a call for societal change.
Building an archive of avowed public engagements with anger in the #MeToo movement, this article lends conceptual specificity to understanding anger regulation through the rhetorical vocabulary of volume. Volume illuminates how anger is rhetorically rendered available for some to mobilize around while simultaneously limiting the emotional expression—and thus the political potential—of others. Specifically, volume illuminates how anger waxes and wanes through public life along raced, gendered, and classed lines that too often elevate the righteous expression of privileged anger while ignoring or silencing the anger of those most marginalized. Two forms of volume regulate public anger: the amplification and diminishment of affective intensity or sound and the aggregation and dispersion of bodies, interests, and collective energies. Volume invites critics to assess how different angers circulate under the heading of a social movement to determine how they can suture collective norms of emotional expression.
In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem—how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence—and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the processes and policies that require most faculty and administrators, along with student–employees, to report sexual violence to designated campus offices, per federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Unfortunately, the university’s interventions in sexual violence reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas—communication and agency—the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on posthumanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how U.S. universities can look “beyond the rapist” to generate more robust interventions in sexual violence.
Drawing upon Derrida ‘s concept of differance, this article presences the evocation of specific third persona as an act of public argumentation by President Bush during the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation proceedings allowing him to silence and negate Anita Hill and her supporters while avoiding any explicitly negative claims.
This essay explores the rhetorical framing of civil rights tourism in Mississippi, a state that has invested considerable resources towards developing an infrastructure for attracting heritage tourists. Focusing specifically on a series of historical markers known as the Mississippi Freedom Trail (MFT), the essay identifies three dominant narratives that shape visitors’ understanding of the state’s civil rights history: (1) representations of violence against Mississippi’s civil rights leaders, (2) the role of agitation and community organizing, and (3) the (dis)connections between the past and the present. Although the MFT increases public awareness of the Mississippi Movement, it under-emphasizes the role women played and privileges modes of activism that embraced the very system that disenfranchised Black Americans. For these reasons, we argue that the MFT is limited in its ability to speak to contemporary racial struggles even as it provides a platform for confronting racist symbols in public memory sites.
In Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity, Patricia Davis identifies the Civil War as the central narrative around which official depictions of southern culture have been defined. Because that narrative largely excluded African American points of view, the resulting southern identity was monolithically white. Davis traces how the increasing participation of black public voices in the realms of Civil War memory-battlefields, museums, online communities-has dispelled the mirage of “southernness” as a stolid cairn of white culture and has begun to create a more fluid sense of southernness that welcomes contributions by all of the region’s peoples. Laying Claim offers insightful and penetrating examinations of African American participation in Civil War reenactments; the role of black history museums in enriching representations of the Civil War era with more varied interpretations; and the internet as a forum within which participants exchange and create historical narratives that offer alternatives to unquestioned and dominant public memories. From this evolving cultural landscape, Davis demonstrates how simplistic caricatures of African American experiences are giving way to more authentic, expansive, and inclusive interpretations of southernness. As a case-study and example of change, Davis cites the evolution of depictions of life at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Where visitors to the site once encountered narratives that repeated the stylized myth of Monticello as a genteel idyll, modern accounts of Jefferson’s day offer a holistic, inclusive, and increasingly honest view of Monticello as the residents on every rung of the social ladder experienced it. Contemporary violence and attacks about or inspired by the causes, outcomes, and symbols of the Civil War, even one hundred and fifty years after its end, add urgency to Davis’s argument that the control and creation of public memories of that war is an issue of concern not only to scholars but all Americans. Her hopeful examination of African American participation in public memory illuminates paths by which this enduring ideological impasse may find resolutions.
This article takes on a rhetorical investigation of the spatial and racial politics at play in the Capitol Building’s National Statuary Hall (NSH) collection. I argue that the material arrangement of the NSH collection enacts a form of what I call commemorative privilege, wherein the Capitol’s most prestigious places valorize those citizens that emulate the nation’s history of ascriptive citizenship ideals while the building’s basement houses those citizens whose voices and bodies have resisted such norms. I unpack both structural and embodied forms of commemorative privilege, underscoring the mutually constitutive relationship between people and places. Thus, the analysis demonstrates that not all space is created equal, and where citizens are placed within a symbolic space has material and ideological implications for racialized citizenship ideals.
Questions about the meaning and value of SlutWalk have generated considerable public debate. This article explores how SlutWalk subverts rape logic, rendering it apparent and absurd while circulating counterclaims to oppose sexual violence. By reclaiming “slut” through performative protest and political mobilization, SlutWalk offers trenchant critiques of rape logic's conflation of clothes and consent. Although media and feminist commentators alike met this protest strategy with skepticism, I argue that SlutWalk enacts a perifeminist response to rape logic that demonstrates the subversive power of reclaiming a name.
In March 2006 Crystal Mangum, a Black female exotic dancer, accused three White male Duke student-athletes of sexual violence, igniting a firestorm of media coverage. This article focuses on the public treatment of Mangum, before and after the case was legally resolved, illustrating how she became hypervisible as a vilified object and invisible as a credible subject. Drawing on Black feminist thought, we consider how representations of Mangum serve pedagogical functions, teaching Black female survivors to stay silent.
In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama the first African American US President as the realization of Martin Luther King's dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama's election functions as a site for the production of selective amnesia, a form of remembrance that routinely negates and silences those who would contest hegemonic narratives of national progress and unity.
This article discusses the symbiotic, though uneven, relationship linking scholarship on journalism and memory. Though work on collective memory has yet to recognize the centrality of journalism as an institution of mnemonic record, memory creeps into journalistic relay so often that it renders journalism's memory work both widespread and multi-faceted. This renders journalism a key agent of memory work, even if journalists themselves are averse to admitting it as part of what they do and even if memory scholars have not yet given journalism its due.
This article uses African-American women's experiences with violence as a particular lens to explore the relationships among (1) social constructions of violence; (2) how violence operates to link power relations of race and gender; and (3) potential contributions of transversal politics in anti-violence work. Since definitions of violence have little meaning in the abstract, the article first analyses how hierarchical power relations in the United States influence what counts as violence. Definitions of violence depend not only on the specifics of any given situation, but generally on who has the power to define both group identity and social context. The article then examines how intersectional approaches to African-American women's experiences with violence provide new insights for reconceptualizing the significance of group histories for constructing American violence. Finally, the article explores the potential implications of definitional shifts of violence for a transversal politics that might resist violence.
The Hill‐Thomas hearings pit the logic of freedom against the logic of power. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and many observers assumed that potential victims of sexual harassment feel free to protest and to move beyond the reach of their assailants. Failure to exercise these freedoms casts doubt on their charges of victimization. Such an interpretation of events ignores the logic of power that paralyzes victims. Victims have learned that it is ultimately safer and more advantageous to tolerate abuse than to fight a losing battle against powerful individuals who are likely to prevail.
Efforts to ban critical race theory have been put forth in all but one state - and many threaten schools with a loss of funds. The Conversation
- T N Alexander
GOP senator calls ford ‘credible
- A Bolton
- J Carney
Boohoo …. huh? Kavanaugh isn’t the victim here
- R Abcarian
The reckoning; Bill Cosby in handcuffs. Kavanaugh questioned. A #Metoo shift is in the air
- L Ali
Decision California/the political battles for control of the house; nevertheless Katie Hill persists
- R Abcarian
Kavanaugh’s accuser steps forward
- R Abcarian
Kavanaugh accuser moved 3 000 miles to reinvent her life
- J Contrera
- I Shapira
- E Brown
- S Hendrix
Black sexual politics
- P H Collins
- Collins P. H.
‘I lied for rightwing Supreme Court judge’: Author admits smear of Anita Hill casting shadow over appoint Clarence Thomas to supreme court. The guardian
- M Ellison
The cult of true victimhood
- A M Cole
- Cole A. M.