Bryan C. Taylor

Our Bruised Arms Hung Up as Monuments: Nuclear Iconography in Post-Cold War Culture

Traditionally, communication scholars have examined nuclear discourse at the expense of nuclear images. This essay compensates by developing a nuclear-critical iconology, one sensitive to the role of images in creating and disrupting popular consent to the production of nuclear weapons. As such, this essay contributes to larger critical projects concerned with visual rhetoric and post-Cold War culture. Following a review of Cold War nuclear iconography and the changing post-Cold War nuclear condition, I examine three aesthetics in post-Cold War nuclear iconography for their signi.cance and potential consequences.

Home zero: Images of home and field in nuclear‐cultural studies

Images of “home” and “field” pervade discourse about nuclear weapons. These images create inter‐related symbolic realms in which nuclear operations are variously promoted, accomodated, and resisted. In analyzing a series of personal and fieldwork narratives, this essay explores various configurations of these images in both official and critical nuclear discourses. It argues that the discursive fields of national‐strategic and critical‐ethnographic operations are mapped and conducted over domestic sites. The existence and oppositional power of these sites are typically repressed, however, in order to maintain the authority of professional nuclear discourses. Revising the relationship between Home and Field potentially transforms the existing practices of both nuclear hegemony and progressive nuclear criticism.

Fat man and little boy: The cinematic representation of interests in the nuclear weapons organization

Throughout the nuclear age, popular‐cultural texts have oriented audiences to the Bomb, and to the organizations that design, produce and deploy it. Collectively, these texts reflect a mixture of patriotism, awe, dread, and opposition to nuclear weapons. This essay explores one film text of a principal event in nuclear history: the construction of the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. The ironic “problems” of the 1989 Hollywood film Fat Man and Little Boy demonstrate the ideological operations of nuclear texts, and the role of the nuclear weapons organization as a symbolic form in cultural discourse.1

Containing the nuclear past

This paper examines the production of a particular nuclear‐organizational history to illuminate the rhetorical and political practices by which stakeholders engage that history as an opportunity to perform preferred ideological narratives. Analysis utilizes data collected from the authors’ reflective participation in this process, and focuses on the tension between nuclear‐historical and ‐heritage discourses. We use the lens of critical public nuclear history studies to show how nuclear‐organizational history contributes to broader controversy over the commemoration of nuclear weapons production in post‐Cold War US culture.

Register of the repressed: Women's voice and body in the nuclear weapons organization

Symbolic forms play an important role in mediating cultural knowledge of nuclear weapons. One recurring form in postwar cultural texts is the nuclear weapons organization—the various groups using labor, technology and materials to design, manufacture and deploy the Bomb. Several of these texts depict the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. Conventionally, these texts privilege masculine, rational and technological elements of that event. Alternately, this essay examines one womans autobiography of Los Alamos, emphasizing its recovery of elements obscured by that focus, specifically gender, subjectivity and sexuality. This alternate version of Los Alamos reveals its contested status as a site of cultural memory and advances critical understanding of the nuclear weapons organization.

Elderly Identity in Conversation Producing Frailty

Conversational texts gathered in a study of relationships between elderly individuals and college students are interpreted as the discursive production of elderly frailty. Conversation is explored as the relational arena in which elderly identity is assembled and displayed. Accomplished in and through discourse, an elderly identity of frailty orients communicators to illness and death and reflects the allocation of power within relationships between the elderly and others. Frailty is also examined as a frame for the narration of accumulated life experience.

Nuclear weapons and communication studies: A review essay

During the late Cold War period, nuclear weapons briefly became a compelling object for communication scholars. This essay reviews that body of work and considers the prospects for nuclear communication scholarship in post‐Cold War culture.

The politics of the nuclear text: Reading Robert Oppenheimer's letters and recollections

Nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war are daunting “facts” of contemporary culture. Nonetheless, they are symbolic productions: the meaning of the Bomb historically has been created in a cultural dialogue between conflicting interests. This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to explore the utility of a key signifier in that dialogue, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. During the 1980s, critics interpreted a published volume of Oppenheimers letters in ways that both clarified and challenged the conventional arrangements of nuclear deterrence. Their responses suggest the enduring value of Oppenheimer as an intertextual form that mediates cultural experience of nuclear weapons.

Browsing the culture: membership and intertextuality at a mormon bookstore

This paper argues that organizational and local host cultures are related through the intertextual performance of membership. It proceeds by claiming that organizations may be usefully read as intertexts, and that the relationship between organizations and their environments is enacted by speakers as they negotiate their multiple identities in talk. These claims are then used to analyze the intertextual performance of membership at a Salt Lake City, Utah bookstore owned by the Mormon church. The analysis demonstrates how: (1) organizational routines surrounding the interpretation of product serve as performances of host-cultural membership; (2) communication among and between store employees and customers clarifies types of host-cultural identity; and (3) the management of controversial texts enacts the organizational environment. The analysis is intended to mark an intersection between organizational and cultural studies by demonstrating how organizations potentially function as sites for the reproductio...

“National security, and all that it implies …”: Communication and (post‐) Cold War culture

Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xxv + 299 pp.,