Rhetorical Critic(ism)'s Body: Affect and Fieldwork on a Plane of Immanence

Everyday domestic spaces, such as kitchens, are often crucial to the understanding of practices and discourses of queer and other marginalized communities. However, due to the private nature of these spaces, they can be difficult for rhetorical critics and others to access. This article offers arts/practice-based research as an intervention into rhetorical field methods (RFM) as a means of accessing and engaging with private, often inaccessible places, such as kitchens. In addition, arts/practice-based methods can expand the notion of “doing” rhetoric and co-creation with participants, which result in the creation of subject formations and alternative, collaborative, and affective archives. Such building of collective queer archives is essential, I argue, in that it helps to not only document the “stuff” of queer lives but also capture fleeting and affective moments of queer collisions and becomings. In addition, arts/practice-based research methods can aid researchers to generate knowledge and archives related to underrepresented aspects of queer lives. To engage with queer domestic spaces and the intersection of RFM and arts/practice-based research, I reflect on Autostraddle.com’s “Queer in the Kitchen” gallery, my participation in the creation of this text, and the development of my own gallery Queering the Kitchen.

Section: The Rhetoricity Of Queer Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Doing It” in the Kitchen: Rhetorical Field Methods, Arts/Practice-Based Research, and Queer Archives

Beck

2020

“…Participatory critical rhetoric, for example, highlights relations of power, politics, and participation that occur as rhetorical critics seek to make sense of the complex rhetorical dynamics of marginalization, resistance, and control. Moreover, this approach emphasizes doing rhetoric (Hess, 2011;McHendry et al, 2014) as a critical process that seeks to intervene, disrupt, and reimagine more just material/discursive relations. Similarly, critical ethnography (Conquergood, 1991;Madison, 2005;Thomas, 1993) attends to power, justice, and resistance.…”

Section: Critical/cultural Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Situ Rhetoric

Endres

Hess

Senda-Cook

et al. 2016

Self Cite

This special issue examines intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry through (re)introducing rhetorical fieldwork. We define rhetorical fieldwork as a set of approaches that integrate rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field. This set of approaches falls within the participatory turn in rhetorical studies, in which rhetorical scholars increasingly turn to fieldwork, interviews, and other forms of participatory research to augment conventional methodological practices. The special issue highlights four original articles that employ, exemplify, and reflect on the value of rhetorical fieldwork as a form of critical/cultural inquiry. In this introduction, we not only introduce the key themes and articles in the special issue but also compile our take on the state of the art of rhetorical fieldwork in an effort to introduce this form of research practice to those who have not encountered it before.

“…He contends that "rhetoric should be augmented with a participatory sensibility and method" so that rhetoricians can "advocate alongside vernacular organizations, arguing for their causes" (p. 128). In this way, he suggests that rhetorical fieldwork involves both sensitivity to the inherent rhetoricity of our interactions in the field, as well as a commitment to the perspectives of the participants with whom we work (see also, McHendry, Middleton, Endres, Senda-Cook, & O'Byrne, 2014;Middleton et al, 2011;Rai, 2016). Despite providing a foundation for scholarship involving rhetoric and fieldwork, none of these studies involved research of media.…”

Section: Investigation and Analysis Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going to Work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch

Dunn

2016

Most studies of media focus on production, representation, or audience. Using rhetorical analysis and ethnographic field methods, my article offers one way to study media production contexts, representations, and audience interactions in relation to one another. For this project, I conducted a narrative rhetorical analysis of the reality docu-series Cathouse that takes place in a legal brothel in Nevada, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. In addition, I visited the brothel and used ethnographic field methods of participant observation and interviewing to investigate the lived experiences of the women working at the Ranch. My analysis revealed a web of intertextual discourses of prostitution that I could not have accessed had I not used these methods in conjunction with one another. By bringing perspectives from rhetorical inquiry, cultural and media studies, and ethnography into conversation with one another, I provide a framework for analyzing production, representation, and audience for the Cathouse series, while attending to both the content of the women’s stories and how these participants rhetorically constructed and performed their identities. Finally, my analysis offers insights into ethnographic and textual “crises of representation” in relation to the concept of “rhetorical authenticity” in media representations, the relationships between audience members, production, and representation in reality television, and material impacts for the women who work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch that I could not have accessed without using these methods together.