This presentation discusses rhetorical practices of The Clothesline Project (TCP) as they respond to current politics surrounding the issue of violence against women. An international activist event, TCP invites survivors of sexual violence (and those remembering victims) to communicate their experiences via text and illustrations on tee shirts that get hung on a clothesline in a public space. With increased interest in rhetorics of silence, researchers have explored and called for further attention to subaltern forms of composing (Houston & Kramarae, 1991) as “poetic world making, resisting the exclusionary norms of critical-rational discourse and creating a space for performative, affective, and situated meaning making” (Higgins, Long, & Flower, 2006, p. 29). My empirical research responds to this call by using rhetorical (Foss, 2009) and semiotic (Silverman, 2011) analysis to examine TCP participants’ tee shirts in terms of how participants engage rhetorics of silence to navigate personal experiences with public identity and to provide cultural commentary. In doing so, this work contributes to an understanding of how paradoxes like “silence speaks” allow for subversive communication in material, visual, textual, “spoken” and “unspoken” forms. Moreover, a focus on how oppressed groups use literacy to assert agency, cope with traumatic experiences, and seek justice provides insight into how writings and illustrations produce, reproduce, and become products of various and competing social narratives. After all, audience members, like TCP participants, have worldviews embedded in current cultural narratives of sexual liberation, virgin/vamp dichotomies, governmental initiatives and policies addressing (or failing to address) the issue of sexual assault, and colloquial language for sexual acts. Results of this study extend the prevailing notion that “the personal is political” by aiding our understanding of how women “speak” rhetorically in various forms of activist composing.
About the presenterJessica Rose Corey
Jessica Rose Corey is the SummerStart Writing Coordinator and a Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University. She has taught lower- and upper-division courses in expository, business, argumentative, and public writing; multimodal composing; and research methods and methodologies. Her primary research interests include women’s studies, life writing, pedagogy, the psychology of literacy, writing program administration, and rhetorics of silence.