Department of Rhetoric and Writing

The University of Texas at Austin

Visual Rhetoric

“Kids These Days”: The Not-at-all New Phenomenon of Fashionable Childhood Sexualization

Last year, when Miley Cyrus gave us this delight:
Miley VMA
Image Credit: Mirror
the interwebs exploded with home critics—often sloppy analyses of Cyrus’s performance, rife with moral judgment and fear for the future. The outrage regards not whether the singer is talented, or whether her show was successful, but over her behavior, and, especially, her clothing.

"Most Adorable Accessory": Celebrity Kid Fashion

Apparently, Kim Karshasian and Kanye West dragged their toddler to Fashion Week. The dubious wisdom of doing such a thing is beyond the scope of this post—North West’s misery has already been catalogued.
North Squirming
Image Credit: Gawker

Fitness Trackers and Carrot-and-Stick Motivation

This is not an ad.

It is, however, a shameless account of my fixation on the Jawbone UP24 fitness app. I'll admit, I love data, especially highly specific digital data. Admittedly, some of my organizational tendencies are old-school. Every day, I make a note card filled with every single thing I'll do in the next twenty-four hours, including "drink 3/4 gallon of water" and "exercise." I'm not sure why I like the note cards in spite of my plethora of technology--all of which is capable of organizing and replicating my to-do lists. I think maybe I fetishize the documentation of it. I really like running a nice line through each of my tasks. The actual exercise from the list, though, I need to be as techy as possible. I want records of my heart rate, my sleep cycles, my weight training routines. And I want them to be pretty.

So a little over a year ago, while recovering from spinal surgery, I bought an UP24. For anyone who isn't familiar with fitness wearables, I give you the UP:

Jawbone Up

Image Credit: Jawbone 

Reading Empathy, Hypocrisy, and Hope? in Chipotle’s The Scarecrow

Image credit: Chipotle 

What do Chipotle’s animated ads tell us about contemporary food discourse, animal rights, and Chipotle itself?

Food Porn Roundup: The Seven Deadly Desserts

It seems to me that we can canvas each of the Seven Deadly Sins with food. Specifically, with dessert.

 Midnight Mousse Cake

 Image Credit: Not So Humble Pie

Read more about Food Porn Roundup: The Seven Deadly Desserts

Longhorns and Ovaries

Five days before a significant Texas, and Austin, Election Day, I’m stepping back to consider the visual rhetoric employed during Wendy Davis’s famous filibuster and the subsequent protests for women’s reproductive rights at the Texas capitol. I’m particularly interested in the claiming of UT’s particular shade of burnt orange in support of Davis and the revision of the longhorn symbol into a uterus and ovaries.

We Should Maybe Stop Putting Babies in Pumpkins

As a child, I dressed up for Halloween only once. 

 It looked like this:

 Aubri Clown

Image Credit: Aubri's Mom 

Pet Costumes & Staging Human-Animal Relations

black and white photo of a dog and cat in turn of the century clothing

from buzzfeed.com

In his 2010 text, Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography, Matthew Brower considers the constructed nature of wildlife photography and what it tells us about historical understandings of human-animal relations. Brower is the curator of the University of Toronto Art Centre and a lecturer in museum studies in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Beginning with an analysis of early American photographs of taxidermy, his text examines the practice of “camera hunting” in the nineteenth century, the invention of the photographic blind and Abbott Thayer’s use of photographs to make arguments about animal coloration and camouflage. Brower argues that examining these photographic practices illustrates how they construct a particular narrative of the relationship between animals and humans. Brower suggests that photos of perceived “wild animals” are staged to tell a particular story about the historical constitution of the animal and human-animal interaction.

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