Table of Contents
From the Editors
In This Issue
This excerpt from the first chapter of a memoir-in-progress is an attempt to capture my thoughts and emotions at the moment I realized I was being called to war. I left the U.S. Army to attend graduate school in 1999 only to be involuntarily called back into active military service one year into the War on Terror. Instead of painting a static picture of what I must have felt like when I received the news, I use my mobilization orders (the document itself) as the focus of a sort of running rhetorical critique that allows those thoughts and feelings to manifest in time. You’ll find every stage of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) in this excerpt, each one liberally coated in the tertiary A of Absurdity.
When a controversial event forces the contemporary American public to engage with important socio-political issues that intersect with constructions of race, gender, and class, the underlying social conditions too often remain unexamined. Our public discourse instead works to sensationalize and polarize discussion of such events; as an effect, participants in the discourse engage in rhetorical strategies that rely on the emotions of indignation, anger, and blame. This essay looks back to the discursive exchanges that arose in response to the Duke lacrosse scandal of 2006. I analyze three “representative” patterns of public response, while also interpreting the cultural conditions that enabled these responses. In doing so, I highlight unproductive patterns of discourse and offer strategies that might help us to move toward more democratizing communication in the future.
This Creative Nonfiction piece, written two years ago and before my promotion to the Harlot editorial board, describes the personal growth I experienced through this project and the wonderful people involved with it during that time. I'm hoping that I can get you to read it without being teased absolutely relentlessly for it, but I know the chances of that are fairly slim. It's worth a shot anyhow, don't you think? Here's to making a fool out of myself.
In an effort to understand how the internet was used to bring the youth voter to the polls on Election Day and why it is not being used to bring that same constituent into the healthcare reform debate, this article examines one of the most intriguing pieces of online political dialogue to circulate YouTube during the last few weeks of the presidential campaign. The widely circulated YouTube video known as “5 Friends” features high-profile celebrities ironically encouraging viewers to see the act of voting as a “trendy,” even “hip” behavior. In this article, I refute the assumption that youth voters lack political stamina beyond the ballot boxes, and I reframe our assumed disengagement with healthcare reform as being, instead, a response to the absence of multimodal political discourse being aimed our way.
In 2008, Frank Donoghue, associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, published The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, a no-holds-barred examination of the history and future of humanistic education in the U.S. Donoghue eschews the commonly touted position that the humanities are in a crisis. Corporate influence, he argues, has had the humanities in a defensive position since at least the late 19th century, and we are now on the ropes. Since its publication, this book has garnered praise for its brave insights and critique for its even braver refusal to provide a rose-colored conclusion. (Click here, for example, to read its New York Times review by Stanley Fish.)
Dr. Donoghue graciously agreed to sit down with Harlot for a candid discussion of the book’s arguments and their implication for those within and, more importantly, beyond academia. We hope his honesty and openness prompt the same from you—add a comment on this page if you've got some thoughts to share.
