Richard A. Rogers

Overcoming the objectification of nature in constitutive theories: Toward a transhuman, materialist theory of communication

A wide range of contemporary theories of communication understand “reality” to be socially constituted by means of discourse. These constitutive theories have been adopted by many scholars because of the obvious political benefit: these theories directly refute claims about the “essential nature” of sexual, racial and other differences that are used to legitimize oppressive social systems. However, in emphasizing the influence of culture and discourse, constitutive theories often position the natural world as something that is passive and malleable in relation to human beings. I argue that communication scholars should closely examine the affiliations between constitutive theories and material attempts to order the earth, to bring it into line with idealist discourses such as logic and geometry. While the political benefits of constitutive theories should not be ignored, neither should their possible relationship to environmental violence. “Discourse” has become the foundation for a new regime of truth; I...

Beasts, Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Television Advertisements

This paper examines three recent television advertisements that symbolically link meat not only with masculinity, but specifically with the “crisis in masculinity.” Using an ecofeminist lens, I engage in an intersectional analysis of these advertisements to demonstrate how they articulate the eating of meat with primitive masculinities as a response to perceived threats to hegemonic masculinity. These advertisements demonstrate that scholars interested in the status of masculinity must pay attention to the “threats” to masculinity posed by environmental and animal rights movements, and that scholars interested in environmental movements must pay attention to the role of masculinity in resisting moves toward sustainability. This analysis demonstrates the utility of ecofeminism in understanding the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and environmentalism while also pointing to the need for ecofeminism to continue to explore the implications of intersectionality for ecofeminist theory and criticism.

Magick as an Alternative Symbolic: Enacting Transhuman Dialogs

This essay examines Neo-Pagan practices of magick and, via Rogerss criteria for a transhuman theory of communication, argues that these practices enact a transhuman dialog that has potential to enhance environmentally sustainable ways of living. Magick helps to re-member immanence in all entities through learning to exercise modes of sensation that have become dormant. Of central importance to the practice of magick is taking eros seriously while expanding awareness beyond the human to the other-than-human. Such sensory experiences and relationships serve to recover the concrete from the dominance of the abstract, eros from the dominance of rationality, the material from the dominance of the ideational, and the natural from the dominance of culture. This essay works to bridge theoretical and practical implications of dialogs with nature by identifying practices that can overcome trained incapacities that block sensual, dialogic relations with the other-than-human world, while also acknowledging limitations in the transformative potential of Neo-Pagan ideologies and practices.

Deciphering Kokopelli: Masculinity in Commodified Appropriations of Native American Imagery

Kokopelli “the hump-backed fluteplayer” has become an icon of the Southwest as well as a metonym for the regions Native American cultures. Guided by the trope of the primitive, this essay analyzes contemporary Kokopelli imagery as a projection of Euro-American masculinist fantasies and as a contemporary commodity form, the cipher. Kokopelli imagery models a virile and promiscuous heterosexual masculinity while erasing its anatomical signs. It articulates intersections of gender, race, and culture that simultaneously highlight and obscure primitive masculinity and racial difference, enabling the use of Native American culture and spirituality to (re)vitalize Euro-American masculinity and promote (neo)colonial appropriations.

Rhythm and the performance of organization

Rhythm is a form of discourse central to social organization. This essay weaves together a variety of anecdotes, ethnographic analyses, labor histories, and critical theories around the central theme of rhythm in order to hear the relationships between organization, epistemology, consciousness, and body without positing one of these elements as foundational. This approach expands and complicates the understanding of what constitutes “organization” and calls for a greater accounting in communication theory of the role of physiological structures in human social life.

The Gender of Water and the Pleasure of Alienation: A Critical Analysis of Visiting Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam, located on the Arizona-Nevada border and damming the Colorado River, is a well-known and often-visited place. The meanings people assign to such a structure articulate key environmental, economic and technological ideologies. An exploration of those meanings is important for understanding the forces that shape public perception and environmental policy. Specifically, this essay examines the official rhetoric of Hoover Dam from an ecofeminist perspective. Through a critical reading of the educational displays, films, plaques and other texts as well as the physical structure of the dam itself, three rhetorical strategies used in the dams official presentation are identified. First, the Bureau of Reclamation presents the Colorado River as a chaotic, feminine entity in need of masculine control. Second, the rivers rhetorical status as an Other encourages audiences to identify with the subject position of natures master and thereby participate in the pleasures such an identity offers. Third, the Bureau uses the prevalent “common sense” of Native Americans as environmentally sensitive in combination with an “historical” Native American voice to establish the dam as both environmentally sound and a logical step in humanitys progress toward economic development and dominion over nature.

From hunting magic to shamanism: Interpretations of native american rock art and the contemporary crisis in masculinity

This essay examines two prominent models for the interpretation of Native American rock art, highlighting projections of Euro-American gender ideologies and tensions over masculinity onto (pre)historic cultures. Specifically, the figure of the Native American shaman models masculine power as symbolic and spiritual, not physical, yet linked to a virile heterosexuality. By identifying discursive homologies, this centering of a primitive, spiritual masculinity is understood as a response to the Euro-American “crisis of masculinity.”

1984 to Brazil: From the pessimism of reality to the hope of dreams

The 1985 film Brazil has several direct parallels to George Orwells 1984. To understand these parallels, a narrative analysis of the values implied in each vision is undertaken. The means by which Brazil resists cooptation by the dominant 1984 is discussed in light of the value analysis. The explicit connections to 1984 and the ironic nature of Brazil are seen as the means by which the films independence is maintained and its somewhat more optimistic message preserved through a process of contextual reconstruction.

“Your Guess is as Good as Any”: Indeterminacy, Dialogue, and Dissemination in Interpretations of Native American Rock Art

Abstract This essay examines the theme of the unknown meanings of Native American rock art in interpretive materials at rock art sites in order to explore the rhetorical constitution of indeterminacy in neocolonial contexts. The implications of indeterminacy are explored through Peterss (1999) discussion of dissemination and dialogue as normative models of communication. This analysis demonstrates that indeterminacy is used to license appropriations and polysemic interpretations of the traces of indigenous cultures, thereby enabling the projection of Western cultural imaginings onto the rock art and discouraging engagement with the interiority of indigenous others.