Project MUSE®: Rhetoric, Politics & Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Rhetoric, Politics & Culture.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2021) through current issueLatest Articles: Rhetoric, Politics & CultureTWOProject MUSE®Rhetoric, Politics & Culture2693-75492693-7522Latest articles in Rhetoric, Politics & Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction to the Special Issue: Standing Still in the Whirlwind
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976968
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On the evening of July 21, 2024, hours after President Joseph Biden announced his decision to discontinue his re-election campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, the organizers of #WinWithBlack-Women— a group of businesswomen, political strategists, and student, faith, tech, and labor leaders— decided to circulate the invite to their regularly scheduled Zoom meeting.1 More than 44,000 Black women and allies logged on for the call and thousands of others were turned away because the platform could not accommodate the volume of eager attendees. During the Zoom call, attendees pledged nearly a million dollars to support Harris’s presidential run. The evening set off an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallIntroduction to the Special Issue: Standing Still in the Whirlwind2025-12-13text/htmlen-USIntroduction to the Special Issue: Standing Still in the Whirlwind2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®269632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Editor’s Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976969
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In 2023, Harvard University President Claudine Gay was forced to resign following accusations of plagiarism, incompetence, and antisemitism because conservatives understood that the best way to attack progressivist politics was via character assassination, bad faith claims, and extortion. Trump refined this strategy while on the 2024 campaign trail and America watched as his target, life-long civil servant, vice president, and democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, was demeaned as a “lazy” “DEI hire” and incompetent and morally compromised civic leader.1 Conservative assaults on the character of Black women continued. In the spring of 2025, MSNBC fired journalist Joy Reid because of her unapologetic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallEditor’s Introduction2025-12-13text/htmlen-USEditor’s Introduction2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®142382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13The Politics of Being “Just Fine” in Stripper Rap: Black Women, Rhetorical Worldmaking, and the Utility of the Freak(Bitch)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976970
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As a Black queer sophistiratchet rhetorical scholar, when I hear Black women expressing a desire to be “just fine,” what I hear is a subtle yet substantive acknowledgment of compounding forms of gratuitous sexual violence and a resilient desire for wellness amid precarity. Black rhetoric, as a tool and conceptual process, celebrates the innovative and inventive use of speech, language, and performance. In this respect, the communicative lives of Black women like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Assata Shakur have taught me that rhetoric is less about the available means of persuasion and more about the available means of creative resources to enact survival and liberation. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Susanna Morris
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallThe Politics of Being “Just Fine” in Stripper Rap: Black Women, Rhetorical Worldmaking, and the Utility of the Freak(Bitch)2025-12-13text/htmlen-USThe Politics of Being “Just Fine” in Stripper Rap: Black Women, Rhetorical Worldmaking, and the Utility of the Freak(Bitch)2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®182022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Becoming as Fine as We Wanna Be: Rhetorical Worldbuilding in Womanist Proclamation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976971
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Black women preachers across a variety of experiences and social locations are employing discursive savvy to disrupt oppressive practices and forge new futures. Interpreting Scripture and the world on their own terms, these Black preaching women are often, as Lisa L. Thompson says, “outsiders-within” society and their own faith communities, daring to name their realities and understandings of God against the minefields of race, gender, sexuality, and class oppression.1 Among this group of worldbuilding Black women preachers are womanist clergy and other proclaimers utilizing womanist ethics2 in their enactment of rhetorical agency. Womanism, a liberation discourse and social movement centering Black women’s lived
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallBecoming as Fine as We Wanna Be: Rhetorical Worldbuilding in Womanist Proclamation2025-12-13text/htmlen-USBecoming as Fine as We Wanna Be: Rhetorical Worldbuilding in Womanist Proclamation2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®199532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Focus, Fortitude, and Resilience in the Work of African American Women
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976972
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Are African American women “just fine”? I offer two basic assertions. First, as a person of African descent myself who has been researching the lives and work of African American women for several decades, I proclaim that I have found no time in recorded history when women of African descent have been “just fine.” With very few exceptions, it seems, we just do not know that world and have not had the privilege of living and working in it. The second assertion is symbolized by the poem “Mother to Son,” written by Langston Hughes. Hughes voices the testimony of an African American woman who is sharing a life’s lesson with her son:While this poem is not the be all and end all for African American women over time, it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallFocus, Fortitude, and Resilience in the Work of African American Women2025-12-13text/htmlen-USFocus, Fortitude, and Resilience in the Work of African American Women2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®243652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13“Just Fine,” or Black Mothering Against Motherhood
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976973
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In their groundbreaking collection, Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies of Discourse, Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss Davis note that simply producing work about Black women does not necessarily make such work emancipatory for Black women.1 Rooted in major themes of Black feminist/womanist thought (e.g., attending to the complexities of intersectionality, recognizing the importance of lived experience to knowledge and meaning, and acknowledging traditions of thought and struggle), Houston and Davis articulate “an angle of vision on Black women’s rhetoric and everyday talk that takes account of the material circumstances and ideological contexts of Black women’s communication and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmall“Just Fine,” or Black Mothering Against Motherhood2025-12-13text/htmlen-US“Just Fine,” or Black Mothering Against Motherhood2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®142852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13We Fine, But Not Just Fine: Insights from A Black Woman Community Engaged Literacy Scholar
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976974
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Black girls already possess leadership characteristics such as “bossiness” and “impatience” that align with women of color leaders and social change agents in their communities. Yet girls get the message from adults, schools and society that their headstrong characteristics are negative.1 Author Monique Morris [now Couvson] notes how being assigned a Black girl identity informs how people see Black girls as well as how Black girls see themselves.2 Whether we believe these narratives, it is nearly impossible for us to escape seeing ourselves through the dominating institutionalized white patriarchal male supremacist worldview, whatever our gender status, sexuality, age, education, abilities, economics, skin color
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallWe Fine, But Not Just Fine: Insights from A Black Woman Community Engaged Literacy Scholar2025-12-13text/htmlen-USWe Fine, But Not Just Fine: Insights from A Black Woman Community Engaged Literacy Scholar2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®283112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Learning to Landscape: Using Black Feminist Rhetoric to Re-Interpret Michelle Obama’s Kitchen Garden
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976975
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As a researcher who centers Black women and Black female literacies within my work, ‘just fine,’ is more like a self-soothing mantra I say to myself as I negotiate and navigate people, texts, stereotypes, histories, and societal expectations that are anything but just fine.In fact, they are often just terrible.For example, I am finishing my first book. It is about former First Lady Michelle Obama and the 2,800 square foot vegetable garden that she planted at the White House in 2009. It is formally known as the White House Kitchen Garden (WHKG). So many aspects of this research are rewarding. I get to talk about an iconic Black woman and rhetorician within our contemporary moment. I can study an under-theorized
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallLearning to Landscape: Using Black Feminist Rhetoric to Re-Interpret Michelle Obama’s Kitchen Garden2025-12-13text/htmlen-USLearning to Landscape: Using Black Feminist Rhetoric to Re-Interpret Michelle Obama’s Kitchen Garden2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®146462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Black Diasporas Are a Call and Response to the Continent
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976976
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Note of format: This work was performed as a call and response spoken word piece for a supersession at the 2024 Rhetoric Society of America
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallBlack Diasporas Are a Call and Response to the Continent2025-12-13text/htmlen-USBlack Diasporas Are a Call and Response to the Continent2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®97092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Conclusion: “Can’t let nobody take it away from you, from me, from we”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976977
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To explore the ways Black women have used expressive culture to claim a voice in the public sphere . . . I start with the Hip-Hop concept of a cipher as a place where people gather to create Knowledge and exchange information. To cipher means to understand, to figure out. In Hip-Hop the cipher is built when people shape and build knowledge together. The cipher is in constant motion, created throughout U.S. history whenever Black women—whether expressing themselves through writing, public oratory, music, or club activities— come together to discuss issues of importance to themselves and the Black community.The Cypher can be the closest thing to a Hip Hop prayer. It is a meditation of sorts, a place to lay down your
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallConclusion: “Can’t let nobody take it away from you, from me, from we”2025-12-13text/htmlen-USConclusion: “Can’t let nobody take it away from you, from me, from we”2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®154122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13The (Un)Freedom of Reproductive Care and Its Economic Impact
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976978
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When this call for reflections came across my desk, I saw this forum as an opportunity to talk about how my personal experiences with reproductive care have affected my professional life since the Dobbs decision. While the political climate of recent years, and especially the last election cycle, has affected me in more ways than one, I am not the first or the last to talk about the economic impacts of reproductive health laws on women in the United States.1 However, I did want to share my own experiences with pregnancy while on the job market after the fall of Roe v. Wade to focus mainly on how we can better engage with such issues. I would like to acknowledge that my perspective is privileged as I am a white
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallThe (Un)Freedom of Reproductive Care and Its Economic Impact2025-12-13text/htmlen-USThe (Un)Freedom of Reproductive Care and Its Economic Impact2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®125482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Fostering Grit, Designing Debates
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976979
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The deterioration of American civic culture has reached a critical inflection point that demands urgent scholarly intervention, particularly within higher education. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences documents a troubling constellation of civic ailments, with the growing diploma divide emerging as a central fault line in our democratic discourse.1 This educational stratification has evolved beyond mere demographic sorting to fundamentally reshape how Americans engage with expertise, institutions, and democratic deliberation itself.2 While universities have inadvertently contributed to this polarization— creating distinct epistemic communities with divergent approaches to knowledge and authority— they also
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallFostering Grit, Designing Debates2025-12-13text/htmlen-USFostering Grit, Designing Debates2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®152882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Annihilation: A Public Feeling
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976980
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In the closing argument for the US Presidential Debate of 2024, President Donald J. Trump expresses a feeling of annihilation. Journalist Linsey Davis voices a stern response:We’re being laughed at all over the world. All over the world, they laugh. . . . We’re going to end up in a Third World War. And it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry. . . . What these people have done to our country, and maybe toughest of all is allowing millions of [hesitates] people to come into our country, many of them are criminals, and they’re destroying our country. The worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country.President Trump, thank you.1Facing a feeling of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallAnnihilation: A Public Feeling2025-12-13text/htmlen-USAnnihilation: A Public Feeling2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®207522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Reflecting on the Political Climate and 2024 Election Cycle: Graduate Student Perspectives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976981
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On Thursday, November 21, 2024, at approximately 12:21 pm, a mass shooting took place in the French Quarter of New Orleans that resulted in one person’s death and left three others critically injured.1 I, like many other attendees at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, unknowingly stumbled on the crime scene as I walked to my hostel over lunch, stepping over blood and listening to the cries of distraught community members as the chaos unfolded not a block away from the conference hotels. Those cries haunted me as I sat through another round of presentations on communicating for greater regard while the street outside flowed red. The woman who died was only 27 years old. None of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallReflecting on the Political Climate and 2024 Election Cycle: Graduate Student Perspectives2025-12-13text/htmlen-USReflecting on the Political Climate and 2024 Election Cycle: Graduate Student Perspectives2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®205872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13Stop Bringing Citations to a Knife Fight
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976982
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“Where is your blue hair?!”A man stopped abruptly on the sidewalk, forcing other passersby into the grass. He scanned me head to toe, face contorted in genuine bewilderment, and stammered, “I-I don’t understand.”Taken aback at the genuine curiosity in this man’s voice— and completely forgetting that I have not had hair since at least 2013— I hesitated and began to rub the top of my head.“You’re not like the Democrats I see on TV!” he exclaimed, “You’re a bald, white guy like me!”This, unfortunately, unembellished exchange occurred in late October 2024 when I was volunteering as a poll greeter in Burgaw, North Carolina. After the man’s initial shock that someone who looked like him could indeed be wearing a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/781/image/coversmallStop Bringing Citations to a Knife Fight2025-12-13text/htmlen-USStop Bringing Citations to a Knife Fight2025-12-132025TWOProject MUSE®123902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-13