Jenell Johnson

The Skeleton on the Couch: The Eagleton Affair, Rhetorical Disability, and the Stigma of Mental Illness

In 1972, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton revealed to the American public that he had been hospitalized for depression on three occasions. The revelation seriously damaged the campaign of his running mate, George McGovern, and eventually led to Eagletons dismissal from the ticket. This article seeks to understand the Eagleton Affair by showing how the stigma of mental illness functions as a form of rhetorical disability. Using a reading of stigma in ancient Greece and the work of Erving Goffman, this article argues that stigma can be viewed as a constitutive rhetorical act that also produces a disabling rhetorical effect: kakoethos, or bad character.

Lost and Found in Translation: Popular Neuroscience in the Emerging Neurodisciplines

Recent years have seen an explosion in research by scholars from the social sciences and humanities who apply neuroscience to research in their home disciplines. One way these ‘neuroscholars’ have engaged in conversations with neuroscience is by incorporating books of popular neuroscience into their work. This chapter explores some of the textual changes that result from the translation of neuroscience to popular neuroscience, and through rhetorical analysis, examines how popular neuroscience is used to support claims in emerging disciplines like neuroeconomics, neuroliterary criticism, neurolaw, and neuroeducation. An examination of scholarship from several disciplines – including sociology – reveals that popular neuroscience is often marshaled not as a translation or accommodation of science, but as science itself via two primary rhetorical strategies we have termed ‘fact finding’ and ‘theory building.’

Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited What Happens When Rhetorical Scholars Go Into the Field

As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the authors’ individual research projects that illustrates one of these tensions, and is followed by a response that explicates the questions of power and ethics. While the ethics of any research practice are often tied to a specific project, many of the issues we discuss apply widely to the practice of fieldwork and rhetorical criticism in general, and many of the questions we raise also resonate with one another. As such, the dialogic quality of the essay is meant to serve as its content as well as its form. We suggest that rhetorical discussions of power help all qualitative researchers better understand what is at stake when we move between text and field in our research practice.

“A man's mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public

ABSTRACT This essay forwards a theory of “visceral publics” through a case study of a bitter public health controversy in a small midcentury New England town. Proponents of fluoridation claimed that it yielded significant positive health outcomes, while opponents charged that the measure was politically suspect and physically dangerous. In this essay, I analyze the controversy as it took shape in letters to the editor and argue that the root of opposition to fluoridation was not in political ideology, as scholars have often claimed, but in a perceived threat to the bodys boundaries, which created intense feelings. Although visceral publics are most clearly observable in controversies over the boundaries of the human body, the essay concludes by showing how the concept may be applied to controversies over the boundaries of the national body as well.

Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry, by Carol Berkenkotter

there is nothing among these selected texts that suggests Lorde’s international recognition. In one instance, Lorde’s handwritten text held at Spelman College Archives is, to my knowledge, among the remarkably few extant records of her keynote speech at Melbourne, Australia, concerning the language of difference. Another example of a speech, a portion of which exists among Lorde’s papers at Spelman College Archives, is ‘‘Dream of Europe,’’ which she delivered at a conference in Europe. Evidently, extensive intellectual labor remains to be done with Lorde’s legacy as a public advocate. Despite these serious limitations and specific concerns about I Am Your Sister, speech scholars will nonetheless find it useful as a starting point for research on Lorde, especially if they bear in mind that it will be necessary still to authenticate speech texts, to properly credit the publication history of the ‘‘unpublished’’ materials in earlier gay and lesbian periodicals, and, above all, to devote careful attention to the occasions for Lorde’s public speeches. She was a brilliant orator whose legacy deserves careful and rigorous scholarly attention.