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Visual Rhetoric - Visual Culture - Pedagogy
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sportsViolent Encounters
Submitted by Laura Thain on Fri, 2013-04-19 17:39
Louisville Cardinal players react to Kevin Ware's leg injury during March Madness. Image Credit: Yahoo Sports I’ll admit, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night listening to the Boston police scanner, following as closely as I could the developments in the Boston Marathon bombing. In the wee hours of this morning, I thought about documenting the dozens of news items (as well as widespread speculation across message boards and social media) to take a tally of how much of the information proliferating in the uncertainty of Friday morning would be disproved by Friday afternoon. As I began the project, it soon proved futile—there was far too much information and I ran into (as I might have anticipated) problems discerning journalistic fact from fiction right from the get go. It was only when I stopped documenting and trying to quantify the evidence that I began to think about the relationship between violence and speculative practice and assemble a quite different archive. [GORE WARNING: the images beyond this cut are NSFW and may shock and disturb some viewers. Discretion is advised.]
Wallace as Visual Experience
Submitted by Eric Detweiler on Fri, 2012-04-06 08:00
"David Foster Wallace mii Playing Tennis" — Image Credit: Nick Maniatis, via Kottke.org My first spring in Texas left me nostalgic for my Kentucky roots. This, of course, meant I’ve spent the last few weeks watching entirely too much March Madness. For Kentuckians, without a single professional sports team to call their own—and without Texas-sized performance and investment in college football—college basketball is a powerful source of sports identity. The showdown between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky in this year’s Final Four was an epic, almost state-shattering event. I’m not much interested in halftime banter or commercial breaks, however, so the last few weeks have also included a good deal of channel surfing. As I surfed, I found myself catching glimpses of another sport I’ve always wanted to watch more of but never have: tennis. My potential interest in tennis has nothing to do with fond remembrances of my single season as a high-school tennis player (I was horrible). It’s a theoretical interest that is largely indebted to David Foster Wallace. Tennis figures prominently not only in Wallace’s well-known novel Infinite Jest, but in his essays.
Kiss and Cry: The Problem of Portraying Masculinity in Men’s Figure Skating
Submitted by Rachel Schneider on Wed, 2010-02-17 15:48
Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website I’ve loved watching figure skating since I was a kid enjoying the movie The Cutting Edge. This meant that I used my free time last night watching the men’s figure skating short programs. My attention was drawn not only by free time, but also by the extensive press coverage given to the American figure skater Johnny Weir in the last month, especially related to his decision to wear fake fur to the Olympics after PETA threatened to protest him. Tags:
You've never seen sports bras like these.
Submitted by erinhurt on Wed, 2008-02-27 22:16
I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:
See the other two ads after the jump: Shirts deemed in bad taste because of "Animal rights, stuff like that"
Submitted by Jillian Sayre on Mon, 2007-10-15 20:21
Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope: corny monuments
Submitted by Jillian Sayre on Wed, 2007-10-03 13:37
Building off of John's blog about naval barracks, I offer another form of visual rhetoric made possible by the aerial shot: Tags:
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Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of 
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