The Best Titles from #RSA12
There’s something heartening when a discipline that’s two and a half millennia old so readily embraces digital studies and Kanye West without losing its focus on Gorgias or hillbillies. Well done, Rhetoric Society of America.
The biennial RSA Conference, in Philly this year, was themed around “Re/framing identifications,” which should tell you something about rhetoricians: they love to embrace the third canon (style) and play with titles. That’s good news for fans of (A)cademic (T)itles, and so here are my favorite presentation titles plucked from this year’s conference program. These are in no particular order, and “favorite” can mean “clever use of wordplay” or “egregious abuse of academese so esoteric that no one will ever care about what you publish” or sometimes a 3rd nonsensical category that just strikes me the right way.
- “‘We Don’t Need No Thought Control’: Self-authorization, Bricolage, and Garageband as Critical Pedagogy”
- ”Circulating Counterhegemonic Ideographs Within the Immigration Debate: Rhetorical Agency and Postmodernity”
- ”Would a SLUT by Any Other Name Still Wear Stilettos?: The Rhetoric of Underwear and Sexual Assault McCarthy”
- ”@$$hole: A Story of Internet “Being” and Rebellion”
- ”A Gorgian Fool’s Deadly Serious Game: Embodiment, Performance, and Parody in Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC”
- ”Shaftesbury on Humor as a Midwife to Common Sense”
- ”I’m Kind of, Mostly, But Not Totally Sorry I Killed Your Mother: Apology in the Aftermath of the Salem Witchcraft Crisis”
- ”From a Vial of Hemlock to a Vial of Steroids: Apology, Agonism, and Aporia*”
- ”The Queerness of Rurality; Or, Idaho Made Me This Way”
- ”Kneading a Palatable Identity: The Rhetorical Function of Cookbooks in the Assimilation of New Mexico”
- ”Paper Towels Getting Married: Listening to the Cultural Logics of Homosexuality”
- ”Inception: How US and Danish Politicians Used Conversational Implicatures to Plant Views in People’s Minds”
- ”Hunting for Identity: Community, Performance, and the Curious Case of the Huntard in World of Warcraft”
- ”Tea Shall Overcome: Questioning the Appropriation of Civil Rights Movement Rhetoric in Conservative Politics”
- ”Kanye West’s Reframing of Audience Values”
- ”The Grammar of Anonymous: A Pentadic Analysis of Operation BART”
- ”The TSA Made Me Queer: Consubstantiality of Breast Cancer Survivors and Queers Under TSA’s Gaze”
- ”The Hillbilly as “Rhetorical Myth”: Re/Framing Appalachian Identity”
- ”The Rhetoric of Breeches: A Textual Re-evaluation”
- ”Teaching Latour to Count to Three: How the Third Sophistic Might Cultivate an Ethos of Care”
- ”They Speak English in What?: Burkean Consubstantiality in the Boondocks”
- ”Internet Memes and the Exchange of Insiderness”
- ”Here Comes the… Groom? Post-Feminist Masculinity during the Wedding Planning Process”
- ”Performing on Twitter: Comedians and the Rebirth of the One-Liner”
- ”Meth, Myth, & the American Dream: A Narrative Analysis of the Montana Meth Project”
- ”Throw Tomahawk, Cast Spirit Walk: The Problems of Agency and Representation of American Indians in Video Games”
- ”“RIP, mothafucka!” Naming, the Death of Osama bin Laden, and (dis) Identification”
- ”Hedwig and the Angry Inch: A Theory of Bodily Rhetoric”
- ”Why You Can’t Persuade a Zombie to Not Eat Your Brains”
- ”Conservative Vice Lords, Incorporated: Rhetorical Constructions of Identity as Social Mobilization”
- ”I’m a #muthaf@cknmonsta: Hip-hop Female Discourse and Agency in Online Spaces”
Well done, folks, and well hosted, Philadelphia.
RHETORIC!
