Mari Boor Tonn

«Feminine style» and political judgment in the rhetoric of Ann Richards

This essay argues for a revised perspective of the theory of “feminine style” developed by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell to explain the characteristics of historical feminist rhetorical action. Using a cas...

Militant motherhood: Labor's Mary Harris “mother” Jones

This essay uses industrial labors Mary Harris “Mother” Jones as a case study to explore the link between labor union agitation and the use of symbolic motherhood by female labor leaders. The essay argues that maternal aims of physical protection, facilitating emotional and cognitive development, and developing group identity were conducive to empowering oppressed coal mining audiences who suffered from fear, low self‐esteem and chronic dependency, and ethnic and geographic barriers. Joness militant version of motherhood—realized through non‐discursive maternal practices and a “feminine” rhetorical style comprised of warm validation and aggressive confrontation—equipped developmentally immature audiences with skills essential for resistance.

Hunting and heritage on trial: A dramatistic debate over tragedy, tradition, and territory

This essay employs Kenneth Burkes theory of motivation to examine the intense debate surrounding the killing of Karen Wood. The shooting itself and its divisive aftermath was a representative anecdote for a community struggle over territory in both literal and figurative senses. Whereas previous studies have demonstrated how a controlling malignant scene may be used to reduce action to motion and thereby absolve agent, this study demonstrates that a scenic perspective can also accomplish the reverse: motion may be elevated into action depending upon the qualities that inhere within an individual or the indivudals relationship to the scene. Agent is the coordinating term to resolve the polarity of scene and act and thereby makes a transfer possible.

Co‐constructed oratory: Speaker‐audience interaction in the labor union rhetoric of Mary Harris “mother” Jones

The rhetoric of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, a paid organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, illustrates how a speaker can actively elicit vocal responses by listeners and acknowledge and integrate them so as to influence the content and structure of the speech. The resulting rhetorical performance contains a co‐constructed quality. Discourse analytic techniques reveal how Jones guided the co‐construction of the speech across multiple turns in order to accomplish her agitative goal within the performance event. Public rhetorical experiences that are participative can verify participative ideology such as labor unionism when passive audience members are transformed into performers.

Miss America Contesters and Contestants: Discourse About Social “Also-Rans”

In introducing my remarks on Bonnie J. Dow’s essay, I, as a card-carrying feminist, begin with a confession of sorts. Miss America 1968 was my personal hero. When Debra Barnes from Kansas was crowned in the fall of 1967, I was 13. I had lived all my life on a small struggling farm near McCune, Kansas, population of around 400, and I was poised to follow the four older of my several siblings to become a first-generation high school student. Barnes had been reared by her father and blind mother in the only slighter larger Moran, Kansas, about 40 miles away, and although I had never traveled there, I had heard rumors it boasted a nearby stoplight and more than one gas station. Over 30 years later, I still recall certain details surrounding this particular Miss America contest, due, in part, to the intense regional media attention showered on this national event featuring a homegrown girl enrolled at the local college. Indeed, excepting talk of Jacqueline Kennedy’s regal bearing at her husband’s funeral, I had never before witnessed a person of my gender at any level generate such heightened regional media interest or community conversation. But my enduring memory also results from various meanings I invested in this talented young woman with a past not so dissimilar from mine. In my socially conservative world in which female inferiority was literally an article of religious faith, female aspirations were hardly encouraged. And I had watched my bright and gifted oldest sister who, when forbidden to apply to college or even to take purportedly “impractical” high school courses no woman would ever need, decide to marry at 17, take up years of factory work, and embark on a long struggle to keep a corrosive mix of disappointments and sense of inadequacy at bay. Thus, odd as it may now seem, through Barnes I entertained the subversive possibility of female mobility—higher education, travel, perhaps professional opportunity, and exposure to diverse intriguing people—that had appeared beyond my reach. Moreover, as a female adolescent struggling to locate an identity in a conservative religious household heavily influenced by the principle of coverture—the submersion of female identity into a husband or father—I also recall being captivated by Barnes’s articulation of self and her disarming self-assurance. I remember, for example, being struck by her calm demeanor when winning the title, as if she considered herself worthy of it. Barnes had qualified for the finalist interview round, I recall, by winning both the swimsuit 150 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's Sabotage. Scene as both controlling and catalyzing acts

Elizabeth Gurley Flynns controversial 1915 essay, Sabotage, reveals the rhetorical difficulty of integrating deterministic and hortatory approaches to the scene‐act ratio for purposes of absolution. Incorporating both materialistic and mystical perspectives in the same text resulted in incompatible rhetorical images of workers and their acts of sabotage.

Fighting Feminism: Exploring Triumphs and Obstacles in Feminist Politics and Scholarship

The William A. Kern Endowment in Communications was established by the Rochester Telephone Company in honor of Kern, a former company president who served as a trustee for the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1959–1964. The endowment funds the William A. Kern Professorship in Communications in the Department of Communication and exists to sponsor research into contemporary communication issues. Through the endowment, Kern Professor Diane Hope has organized two annual conferences in Visual Communication and, in conjunction with her role as general editor of Womens Studies Quarterly, held three annual conferences exploring gender and communication. Tonns keynote address was for the third and final conference, which had the theme “Feminist Discourse: Theories, Practices. Challenges.” The address that appears below has been altered slightly for publication purposes.

Teaching Communication Criticism

“Ambitious” is among the first words that come to mind when describing this recent addition to rhetorical criticism textbooks co-authored by Malcolm O. Sillars and Bruce E. Gronbeck. Not counting the extensive bibliography, Communication Criticism is a little shy of 300 pages. Even so, it contains 12 packed chapters, including entries on analyzing texts, the mechanics of writing critical essays, accuracy in interpretation, and a survey of various critical approaches ranging from the standard neoclassical, narrative, and ideological to the less commonly treated psychoanalytic. Unlike criticism anthologies that compile and categorize a set of disciplinary “greatest hits” using various critical methods, prefaced by brief introductions to each methodological category, this textbook provides only suggested reading lists at the end of the chapters, thereby using its pages to explore more fully the assumptions, characteristics, and criticisms of each critical approach. The result—despite some pitfalls possibly inherent in the grand goal of comprehensiveness—is a valuable and welcome companion volume to the more standard criticism “readers” or to an instructor’s self-designed reading list of representative essays. The book is divided into four overarching parts: “Contemporary Communication Criticism,” “The Rhetorical Tradition,” “The Social Tradition,” and “The Cultural Tradition.” Most sections include useful discussions not typically found in criticism textbooks. For example Part 1, “Contemporary Communication Criticism,” contains a chapter that includes an exploration of three historical and contemporary approaches to criticism (the civic-liberal, the epistemological, and the critical-cultural), a chapter on analyzing texts (with “texts” skillfully distinguished from “works”), and an excellent chapter on the THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 3.3 (July 2003): 301–304  2003 National Communication Association