Stephanie L. Young

The Intermingling of Aesthetic Sensibilities and Instrumental Rationalities in a Collaborative Arts Studio

This article argues for the theoretical and practical incorporation of aesthetic sensibilities into the communicative management of hybrid organizing. Using Deweys Art as Experience as a conceptual framework, it explores imaginative and aesthetic practices as knowledge-producing resources for organizing and social change. The analysis centers on the complex and contradictory ways that artful capacities and instrumental rationalities interweave to achieve the organizational order of a collaborative art studio. Using discourses from multiple stakeholders, this article examines in detail three themes: art as creation and vocation, art as ephemeral integration, and art as survival and social change. Findings are discussed in the context of other scholarship committed to recovering and fostering alternative logics for organizing.

Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

Abstract This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mothers experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of ones identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.

Running Like a Man, Sitting Like a Girl: Visual Enthymeme and the Case of Caster Semenya

Much attention has been given to the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, an 18-year-old South African athlete subjected to “sex testing” during the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, but far less attention has been given to Semenyas rhetorical response to the medias scrutiny of her body. This essay explores how Semenyas portrait on the cover of You, a prominent South African magazine, employs a visual rhetoric that functions as an enthymeme. I argue that while Semenya hailed audiences to view her as an authentic, feminine self, her visual enthymeme was constrained by medical conceptions of gender. By investigating the Semenya case, I analyze how female athletic bodies are displayed, disciplined, and reinscribed into sexist and racist discourses about gendered athleticism.

“You Can Be an Agent of Change”: The Rhetoric of New Age Self-Help in Enlightened

Extending Cloud’s (1998) work on the rhetoric of therapy and Payne’s (1989a, 1989b) concept of therapeutic rhetoric, this essay explores discourses of New Age self-help on the HBO television series Enlightened. We argue that New Age self-help rhetoric is a form of therapeutic rhetoric that merges New Age spirituality with the American tradition of self-improvement. We critically examine the show’s protagonist, Amy Jellicoe, who engages in New Age self-help rhetoric to enact an “agent of change” identity, and analyze how Enlightened praises and problematizes New Ageism’s emphasis on social responsibility. Ultimately, this close textual analysis provides an in-depth look into how New Age tenets are represented in popular culture and the ways in which New Age self-help rhetoric simultaneously resists and reproduces neoliberal individualism within modern society.

“I’d Know That My Child Was Out There”: Egg Donation, the Institutionalized “Ideal” Family, and Health Care Decision Making

ABSTRACT This study investigates how young women of egg-donating age perceive egg donation. Using institutional theory, this study demonstrates how participants frame a health care decision, such as egg donation, utilizing familial ideals. Results revealed that women expressed the importance of ownership over their genetic material and that familial ideals encourage an ideal way to create a family, which egg donation only fits as a last resort. Results show that familial ideals reach past the institution of family into broader decision making, such as that of health care. Further, results show that as more families are constructed through assisted reproductive technologies, attempts should be made to gradually alter the familial ideal to encompass novel medical technologies such as egg donation.

It's Not Just Black and White: Exploring a Pedagogy of Racial Visibility and the Biracial Korean/White Self

In this autoethnography, I offer a pedagogy of racial visibility. Drawing on my embodied experiences both in and outside of the classroom, I explore how I engage in dialogue with my students about theoretical and critical approaches toward understanding rhetorics of race in the United States. Specifically, as an embodied storyteller, I reflect upon my personal stories as a biracial Korean American woman and investigate the instabilities of racial identities, the taken-for-granted racial understandings, and racism and white privilege in America.

Social Documentary Photography: An Appreciation

For the social documentary photographer, the camera is not so much an artistic tool as it is an instrument for social reform and political action*a way to reveal the struggles, strife, and strength of individuals on the fringes of society. In Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer, Melanie Anne Herzog pays homage to the acclaimed documentary photographer whose images reflect not only the harsh material conditions confronted by individuals but also the faces of human resilience and dignity. Herzog begins with a brief historical review of documentary photography, introducing readers to key U.S. social documentary photographers such as Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White. Within this section, she skillfully examines how each photographer significantly contributed to the field and chronologically explores the role of photography in raising political consciousness about poverty and social injustices within the United States. After the Introduction, she positions Milton Rogovin as a key contemporary documentarian within this tradition of photography. While Herzog draws the reader in to the inspirational life of Milton Rogovin, she directly addresses her role as biographer. She writes, ‘‘The challenge this project presented was to maintain the centrality of Milton’s voice while enjoining my own scholarly voice with his*and yet to preserve both’’ (p. 11). Indeed, Herzog accomplishes this delicate balance between voices. The book is co-narrated by Herzog and Rogovin, their voices emerging distinctly, yet effortlessly interwoven. The reader is invited into a conversation of sorts, with Rogovin sharing his personal narratives while Herzog historically contextualizes his stories. Although Rogovin’s

Book Review: A Review of: “Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery, by DoVeanna S. Fulton. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 2006.”

The tradition of oral narrativity, the verbal sharing of stories, has been and continues to be an essential part of African American women’s experiences. This oral tradition, as a mode to communicate strife and pain as well as a way to verbalize identity and self-hood, can be witnessed in the literary voices of contemporary African American women writers such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou. In Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery, DoVeanna S. Fulton critically examines the subjective voices and storied experiences of enslaved African American women, urging us to recognize the value of the orality and oral narrativity. Fulton carefully guides us through autobiographical and fictional narrative texts, identifying themes such as family, identity, sexuality, abuse and resistance. Rather than merely providing the reader with a collection of slave narratives, Fulton examines the rhetorical techniques of the oral tradition within these stories, such as repetition and the cyclical nature of orality. Fulton supplements her own critical analysis with other literary critics’ interpretations, creating an intertextual examination of these narratives. In Speaking Power, Fulton argues that storytelling is potentially a powerful mode of resistance for African American women. Through narrative, Black women’s histories are recovered and (re)voiced. Fulton argues that the emphasis on orality, not literacy, distinguishes these African American women’s slave narratives from those told by African American men, such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Orality becomes an essential tool for survival. Although literacy may be seen as one way of enabling slaves to overcome oppression, orality can be viewed as a way of preserving culture. Through oral storytelling, women create a space where cultural roots, family ties, and identities flourish. Enslaved African American women continuously struggled to maintain kin relations through narrativity in the face of a system that denied slaves familial ties. Family histories could be retained by orally sharing the stories from grandmother to mother to daughter to build strong matrilineal linkages. Indeed, ‘‘passing on family history orally is a form of historiography that resists the dominant culture’s efforts to negate African American identity’’ (p. 3). Through telling and re-telling, The Howard Journal of Communications, 18:193 195, 2007 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1064-6175 print/1096-4649 online DOI: 10.1080/10646170701310013