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Coming out is a powerful way for individuals to disclose, constitute, and perform membership in stigmatized identity categories. The practice has now spread far beyond its LGBTQ origins. In this essay, I examine how atheists and other secularists have taken up and adapted coming out discourse to meet their situational and rhetorical needs. Through an analysis of 50 narratives about coming out atheist, I show that atheist writers use coming out discourse to claim both high and low agency over their identities. They both follow and resist a low-agency approach that has sometimes characterized LGBTQ uses of coming out discourse. Furthermore, I argue that the attribution of high personal agency in coming out discourse and other discourses of identity can introduce themes of deliberation, choice, and uncertainty, leading to a richer public discussion of identity category membership.

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This essay investigates the representation of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people during the debate over whether they should serve openly in the United States military. Many studies on this topic have focused on the question of whether this debate ‘militarized’ LGB people. This study takes a broader view, tracking five rhetorical archetypes (the Gay Warrior, the Gay Spoiler, the Gay Victim, the Gay Family Member and the Gay Activist) through two US Congressional Hearings. I identify and track these archetypes using a coding procedure that draws on concepts from Membership Categorization Analysis, rhetorical theory, discourse analysis and elsewhere. The result is a holistic picture of how LGB people were represented across the hearings. While they were increasingly associated with military values in the later hearing, they were also less often represented as victims, spoilers or activists in a negative sense. These findings offer additional insights into how the meanings-in-use of identity categories are changed in discourse.

Sociolinguists use the terms everyday and ordinary to align themselves with the traditions of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. Rhetoricians and communication scholars use these words to at least partially reject idealized accounts of political speech in favor of actually existing, local democratic practices. Karen Tracy aligns herself with both camps in her account of how everyday citizens "do" deliberation. She presents interconnected case studies of the deliberations of the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD). She draws on transcripts of school board meetings, newspaper coverage, and first-person interviews collected over a three-year period. She sets forth two goals: to present a detailed account of what local, ordinary political talk looks like and to argue for a measured norm of political communication that she terms REASONABLE HOSTILITY.The book is divided into nine chapters, with the first two providing a compact introduction to relevant theories of democracy, a summary of the discourse analysis methodologies used and, finally, a brief history of education governance both in the United States generally and in the BVSD specifically. The third chapter begins the analysis with an investigation of how citizens and board members used democracy (both the word and concept) in competing ways. Tracy argues that, although democracy almost always entails competing meanings, its ambiguity makes it an important argumentative resource. Ch. 4 provides an in-depth statistical portrait of citizen participation in school board meetings and details typical strategies for expressing dissent, including emotion and feeling talk, god and devil terms, and references to meeting rules. Ch. 5 examines the role of local media in instigating and sustaining political discussion. Ch. 6 is an account of a board reelection campaign that assesses the function of platitudes and personal attacks. Tracy's analysis in this chapter is unusual in that it envisions potentially positive aspects of what are traditionally seen as negative campaigning tactics. Ch. 7 examines wording disputes in a controversy surrounding the district's diversity policy. Tracy shows how multiple frames can be used to make sense of disagreements at the level of policy wording. Ch. 8 offers a close-up view of a single board meeting and six lessons that can be drawn from it.