Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body

Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body PDF Author: Brett Lunceford
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498570704
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Although nudity is something that everyone has experience with, public nudity is still largely considered taboo. Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body examines instances of public nudity where sexuality is at the forefront of public body display. It presents a range of case studies: the legal aspects of sexualized public nudity as it relates to communication theory and the First Amendment; the controversies surrounding the work of photographer Jock Sturges; the public performance art of Milo Moiré; the topless protests of FEMEN; the social media activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy; the ritualized flashing during Mardi Gras in New Orleans; and the sexual displays of Folsom Street Fair, the largest leather pride festival. Taken together, these cases teach much about identity, self-determination, and sexuality, and illustrate the complicated rhetorical nature of the human body in the public sphere.

Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body

Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body PDF Author: Brett Lunceford
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498570704
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although nudity is something that everyone has experience with, public nudity is still largely considered taboo. Public Nudity and the Rhetoric of the Body examines instances of public nudity where sexuality is at the forefront of public body display. It presents a range of case studies: the legal aspects of sexualized public nudity as it relates to communication theory and the First Amendment; the controversies surrounding the work of photographer Jock Sturges; the public performance art of Milo Moiré; the topless protests of FEMEN; the social media activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy; the ritualized flashing during Mardi Gras in New Orleans; and the sexual displays of Folsom Street Fair, the largest leather pride festival. Taken together, these cases teach much about identity, self-determination, and sexuality, and illustrate the complicated rhetorical nature of the human body in the public sphere.

Naked Politics

Naked Politics PDF Author: Brett Lunceford
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739177028
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Naked Politics: Nudity, Political Action, and the Rhetoric of the Body by Brett Lunceford, examines the rhetorical power of the unclothed body as it relates to protest and political action. This study explores what the disrobed body communicates, and how others are invited to make sense of this display. The actions examined range from grassroots protests to those of professionalized social movement organizations. Specifically, Lunceford examines PETA and the use of chained women and the Running of the Nudes; lactivists, or women engaging in public breastfeeding as protest action in both online and physical space; the World Naked Bike Ride’s worldwide protest against oil dependency and attempt to raise awareness of the vulnerability of cyclists; and a contest held on College Humor that invited women to write their preferred presidential candidate on their exposed breasts and send the picture to them to post on the site. Although these actions may seem to have little in common beyond their use of body exposure, they all share the notions that something can happen when you take your clothes off and that the act of disrobing can have social and political consequences. Moreover, these groups illustrate the often paradoxical views of the exposed body—by both the participants and the observers—and how such bodies operate in the public sphere. Even when the voice is silent, the body still speaks; Naked Politics considers what is being said.

The Nude

The Nude PDF Author: Richard Leppert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042996465X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Nude explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function in the conflicted terrain of culture and society in Europe and America from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as set against questions about human sexuality that emerge around differences of class, gender, age, and race. Author Richard Leppert relates the visual history of how the naked body intersects with the foundational characteristics of what it is to be human, measured against a range of basic emotions (happiness, delight, and desire; fear, anxiety, and abjection) and read in the context of changing social and cultural realities. The bodies comprising the Western nude are variously pleasured or tormented, ecstatic or bored, pleased or horrified. In short, as this volume amply demonstrates, the nude in Western art is a terrain on whose surface is written a summation of Western history: its glory but also its degradation.

Critique of Pure Nature

Critique of Pure Nature PDF Author: Simona Stano
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031450752
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
This book challenges the Western contemporary “praise for Nature”. From food to body practices, from ecological discourses to the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary imaginaries abound with representations of an ideal “pure Nature”, essentially defined according to a logic of denial of any artificial, modified, manipulated — in short, cultural — aspect. How should we contextualise and understand such an opposition, especially in light of the rich semantic scope of the term “nature” and its variability over time? And how can we — if we actually can — envisage alternative models and approaches capable of better accounting for such richness and variability? The author addresses these fundamental issues, combining an initial theoretical problematisation of the concept of nature and its evolution — from classical philosophy to the crucial changes occurred through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism and the modern era, finally considering recent insights in philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology and semiotics — with the analysis of its discursivisation — from the iconography of Mother Nature between the past and the present to the representation of catastrophic events in fictional and non-fictional texts, from clean eating and other popular food trends to the ambivalence of the naked body between its supposed natural ascription and its multiple cultural characterisations. Thus she introduces a critique of pure Nature, providing a systematic study of the way nature is attributed meaning and value in some of today’s most relevant discourses and practices, and finally tracing a possible path towards an “internatural turn”.

Participatory Critical Rhetoric

Participatory Critical Rhetoric PDF Author: Michael Middleton
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498513816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Increasingly, rhetorical scholars are using fieldwork and other ethnographic, performance, and qualitative methods to access, document, and analyze forms of everyday in situ rhetoric rather than using already documented texts. In this book, the authors argue that participatory critical rhetoric, as an approach to in situ rhetoric, is a theoretically, methodologically, and praxiologically robust approach to critical rhetorical studies. This book addresses how participatory critical rhetoric furthers understanding of the significant role that rhetoric plays in everyday life through expanding the archive of rhetorical practices and texts, emplacing rhetorical critics in direct conversation with rhetors and audiences at the moment of rhetorical invention, and highlighting marginalized voices that might otherwise go unnoticed. This book organizes the theoretical and methodological foundations of participatory critical rhetoric through four vectors that enhance conventional rhetorical approaches: 1) the political commitments of the critic; 2) rhetorical reflexivity and the role of the embodied critic; 3) emplaced rhetoric and the interplay between the field, text, and context; and 4) multiperspectival judgment that is informed by direct participation with rhetors and audiences. In addition to laying the groundwork and advocating for the approach, Participatory Critical Rhetoric also offers significant contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism more broadly by revisiting the field’s understanding of core topics such as role of the critic, text/context, audience, rhetorical effect, and the purpose of criticism. Further, it enhances theoretical conversations about material rhetoric, place/space, affect, intersectional rhetoric, embodiment, and rhetorical reflexivity.

Stripped

Stripped PDF Author: Maggie M. Werner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108832X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Stripped examines the ways in which erotic bodies communicate in performance and as cultural figures. Focusing on symbols independent of language, Maggie M. Werner explores the signs and signals of erotic dance, audience responses to these codes, and how this exchange creates embodied rhetoric. Informed by her own ethnographic research conducted in strip clubs and theaters, Werner analyzes the movement, dress, and cosmetic choices of topless dancers and neo-burlesque performers. Drawing on critical methods of analysis, she develops approaches for interpreting embodied erotic rhetoric and the marginal cultural practices that construct women’s public erotic bodies. She follows these bodies out into the streets—into the protest spaces where sex workers and anti-rape activists challenge discourses about morality and victimhood and struggle to remake their own identities. Throughout, Werner showcases the voices of these performers and in the analyses shares her experiences as an audience member, interviewer, and paying customer. The result is a uniquely personal and erudite study that advances conversations about women’s agency and erotic performance, moving beyond the binary that views the erotic body as either oppressed or empowered. Theoretically sophisticated and delightfully intimate, Stripped is an important contribution to the study of the rhetoric of the body and to rhetorical and performance studies more broadly.

Visual Rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric PDF Author: Lester C. Olson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 141294919X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this "visual rhetoric." This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler "This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components." —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon

Free and Natural

Free and Natural PDF Author: Sarah Schrank
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From Naked Juice® to nude yoga, contemporary society is steeped in language that draws a connection from nudity to nature, wellness, and liberation. This branding promotes a "free and natural" lifestyle to mostly white and middle-class Americans intent on protecting their own bodies—and those of society at large—from overwork, environmental toxins, illness, conformity to body standards, and the hyper-sexualization of the consumer economy. How did the naked body come to be associated with "naturalness," and how has this notion influenced American culture? Free and Natural explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body and the environment from the early twentieth century to the present. Sarah Schrank traces the history of nudity, especially public nudity, across the unusual eras and locations where it thrived—including the California desert, Depression-era collectives, and 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. She also highlights the many tensions it produced. For example, the blurry line between wholesome nudity and sexuality became impossible to sustain when confronted by the cultural challenges of the sexual revolution. Many longtime free and natural lifestyle enthusiasts, fatigued by decades of legal battles, retreated to private homes and resorts while the politics of gay rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and racial equality of the 1970s inspired a new generation of radical advocates of public nudity. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Schrank demonstrates, a free and natural lifestyle that started with antimaterialist, back-to-the-land rural retreats had evolved into a billion-dollar wellness marketplace where "Naked™" sells endless products promising natural health, sexual fulfilment, organic food, and hip authenticity. Free and Natural provides an in-depth account of how our bodies have become tethered so closely to modern ideas about nature and identity and yet have been consistently subjected to the excesses of capitalism.

Theorizing Digital Rhetoric

Theorizing Digital Rhetoric PDF Author: Aaron Hess
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351788639
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Theorizing Digital Rhetoric takes up the intersection of rhetorical theory and digital technology to explore the ways in which rhetoric is challenged by new technologies and how rhetorical theory can illuminate discursive expression in digital contexts. The volume combines complex rhetorical theory with personal anecdotes about the use of technologies to create a larger philosophical and rhetorical account of how theorists approach the examinations of new and future digital technologies. This collection of essays emphasizes the ways that digital technology intrudes upon rhetorical theory and how readers can be everyday rhetorical critics within an era of ever-increasing use of digital technology. Each chapter effectively blends theorizing between rhetoric and digital technology, informing readers of the potentiality between the two ideas. The theoretical perspectives informed by digital media studies, rhetorical theory, and personal/professional use provide a robust accounting of digital rhetoric that is timely, personable, and useful.

The Rhetorical Power of Children's Literature

The Rhetorical Power of Children's Literature PDF Author: John H. Saunders
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498543308
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The Rhetorical Power of Children's Literature is an edited volume with contributions from established and new scholars of rhetoric offering case studies that analyze a full array of genres in children’s literature from picture books to young adult novels. Collectively, this volume’s contributions interrogate how children’s literature is a powerful yet under examined space of rhetorical discourse that influences one of the most vulnerable segments of our population. This book is singularly unique given that it will be the first collection of essays on children’s literature from the distinct perspective of the field of Communication. Beyond topical novelty, the contributors utilize a range of scholarly methods to analyze instances of the rhetoric of children’s literature. Consequently, essays in this volume may be read for both their specific topical content and as exemplars for multiple methodological approaches to the study of the rhetoric of children’s literature. Collectively, the contributors set out to contribute to our knowledge of how instances of children’s literature operate as rhetorical discourses. The volume is organized by case studies approached through critical, rhetorical lenses that analyze specific instances of children’s literature from two distinct stages of children’s developmental reading experiences including pre/early literacy and fluent reading. Structurally, the book includes eight content chapters divided evenly with four chapters analyzing books for young children and four chapters analyzing books targeting audiences from late-childhood to adolescence. An overview of each content chapter accompanies this proposal. is an edited volume with contributions from established and new scholars of rhetoric offering case studies that analyze a full array of genres in children’s literature from picture books to young adult novels. Collectively, this volume’s contributions interrogate how children’s literature is a powerful yet under examined space of rhetorical discourse that influences one of the most vulnerable segments of our population. This book is singularly unique given that it will be the first collection of essays on children’s literature from the distinct perspective of the field of Communication. Beyond topical novelty, the contributors utilize a range of scholarly methods to analyze instances of the rhetoric of children’s literature. Consequently, essays in this volume may be read for both their specific topical content and as exemplars for multiple methodological approaches to the study of the rhetoric of children’s literature. Collectively, the contributors set out to contribute to our knowledge of how instances of children’s literature operate as rhetorical discourses. The volume is organized by case studies approached through critical, rhetorical lenses that analyze specific instances of children’s literature from two distinct stages of children’s developmental reading experiences including pre/early literacy and fluent reading. Structurally, the book includes eight content chapters divided evenly with four chapters analyzing books for young children and four chapters analyzing books targeting audiences from late-childhood to adolescence. An overview of each content chapter accompanies this proposal.