This project joins a growing conversation about the cultural significance of memes (and Internet memes in particular), offering a critical analysis of Republican Jesus-one popular image macro that mocks contemporary American conservatismin order to illustrate the rhetorical potential of these putatively harmless do-it yourself (DIY) creations. Ultimately, I argue that Republican Jesus offers a critique of contemporary conservatism that creates "perspective by incongruity" and, thereby, creates a space for ideological struggle.
This article offers an examination of the rhetoric of Save the Ta-Tas, a breast cancer awareness and fund-raising organization whose breast cancer advocacy products are highly sexualized, flirtatious, cheeky, and irreverent, especially in contrast to traditional discourses about breast cancer that have tended to render the afflicted as brave warriors or infantile and docile. Reading the organization’s range of merchandise as a discourse, I argue for a post-Marxist perspective that understands these texts as part of an important moment where breast cancer advocacy is disarticulated from the specter of death in order to appeal to a thanatophobic public.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.