Harlot wants you!

Now in its third year of publication, Harlot is looking to expand its consortium — a group of reviewers who work hard to make sure all published submissions are smart, fun, provocative, and a good fit for Harlot. Harlot is open to all people who are interested in acts of persuasion, and we are currently most in need of individuals outside academia.

Reviewing is easy. Just as we ask creators to mind five particular goals in mind, we ask reviewers to answer the same questions in their responses:

1. Success: Is the piece appropriate for Harlot? Does it achieve its goals/potentials? Is the production quality high?
2. Significance: Are the ideas relevant, interesting, and provocative to broad audiences?
3. Accessibility: Is the piece welcoming and appealing to audiences’ varying reading abilities and assistive technologies?
4. Personality: Does the piece exhibit wit, charm, humor?
5. Ethics: Is the work respectful and inclusive of diverse individuals and communities? Does it abide by legal and moral codes of copyright and fair use?

If you’re interested in joining, please visit Harlot’s registration page, click the box next to “Reviewer,” and enter your interests. And then tell your friends!

Begging burro, by Gottolson

We want you.

Intrigued? Excellent. Don’t forget to post your thoughts in response—just hit “Add Comment” to keep the conversation going!

We’re currently accepting submissions for our spring 2011 special issue, focused around the theme of family rhetoric. The deadline isn’t until January 15th, so you’ve got plenty of time to ponder why your brother flushed your favorite toy down the toilet when you were 6… how your parents managed to convince you to sit for that sibling portrait in the 80s… or what strategies you rely on to survive the holiday onslaught of aunts. You figured out early on to ask Dad for certain things and Mom for others–how did you know to do that? What were the differences between those approaches?

For more ideas, check out the full call on the announcements page, where you can also see some highly embarrassing shots of yours truly. As always, feel free to shoot us a line to chat about your inspirations, hesitations, or just to say howdy!

And of course, don’t forget that we accept pieces for consideration throughout the year. We’ve got reviewers standing by to help you polish that rant or sharpen that observation into the next Harlot masterpiece.

Speaking of: We want to extend a hearty congrats to contributor and blogger Ben McCorkle on being awarded Computers and Composition’s Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Production/Scholarship Award for his “The Annotated Obama Poster,” which appeared in Harlot‘s second issue. Honored for its intellectual and creative awesomeness, McCorkle’s piece exemplifies the smart, accessible rhetorical criticism Harlot was designed to share.

In other news, we’re delighted to announce our shiny new ISSN: 2156-924X. Yup, that means the Library of Congress now has a listing for a journal named Harlot. And so does the Modern Language Association (MLA) Directory of Periodicals! Sa-weet.

And finally, we’re partnering with some design peeps to develop a new, more inviting look for Harlot. Of course, we’d like you to have a say in that re-vision… so let us know what you’d like to see!

Remember when you asked Dad instead of Mom to see Basic Instinct in the theatre when you were twelve? Remember when you learned to wait for planes to fly overhead so that the noise would drown the sound of your creaking window when you were sneaking out? Remember the time your grandma told you that “this place is nice for how you live”? And remember the time your grandpa said, “you’ll understand when you’re older”?

Now, remember when you saw the Keatons, Huxtables, Seavers, Tanners, and Winslows. The Taylors, Bluths, Barones and the Gosselins and Duggars. Remember these families? Remember how they taught you about being moms, dads, brothers, and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents?

For this issue of Harlot, we are calling for rhetorically reflective stories (rhetflections, if you will), analyses, and critiques of family. We want to learn about communication in that pervasively hidden community where you use rhetorical tactics to negotiate spaces, passive aggressive behaviors, and statements that foreclose argument with an audience of relatives. We want to learn about the rhetorical practices of moms, dads, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents; we want to know about the rhetorical moves that make them what they are. In other words, we want to learn about the rhetoric of family.

This Special Issue provides an opportunity for exploring family rhetorics and the ways in which your own experiences or the ones you see around you rhetorically construct family. Areas of interest for this special journal issue include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Submissions due:
January 15th, 2011

But don’t worry, she’s a Harlot for life.

EXTENDING THE CONVERSATION (our comment on How Genders Work: Producing the J.CREW Catalog):

To be fair to J.CREW, they did “follow up” the Real Guys Relate feature with another issue that featured “real” women—women and their jobs. However, the feature is titled Who’s that Girl? rather than Who’s that Woman?. When women work, they are just girls. This sends the message that women’s jobs are really not equal to men’s.

Besides being called “girls,” these women are referred to as “muses” and “muse-worthy” in the introduction to the feature. This means they are sources of inspiration for others. In this context, the women inspire more than the job descriptions offered. What is striking is how these “real” women display behaviors consistent with women in How Genders Work. Though women are named and their jobs are listed, “girls” continue to be posed like the models in the magazine rather than the men who are aware of their positions and surroundings. Women’s posturing is still flirty as their toes are pointed inward, and they often look off to the side unaware of their surroundings and out of context. In addition, as if to counteract the effect women with jobs would have on a reader by unsettling a stereotype, J.CREW profiles the men who work at the British journal Monocle. These men become even more real as they are positioned in contexts of offices, city streets, and studios. The lesson we learn from this issue is that real men do real work—they exist in a real world, in context. Real women, on the other hand, may have real jobs but their work is to [a]muse.

To make matters worse, the issue following Who’s that Girl? once again features “real” men as workers and women models as flirtatious and air-headed. There are no “real” women in this issue. The theme for the issue is nature (as in landscaping, farming, and gardening). The instructions show us that women are incompetent and disengaged with regards to nature. Nature, for them, is an accessory. One model, for instance, looks as if she doesn’t know how to pot a plant. She holds it as if waiting for someone to help her. Another holds flowers—doesn’t do anything with them. Flowers are part of her “look.”

Men, in contrast, work with nature; they are competent and engaged. Rather than presented as an accessory, nature is presented as part of work and their livelihoods. In this feature, we return to the studio to learn about “The Naturals.” These “real” men are landscape designers, landscape photographers, agricultural directors, goat farmers, and agricultural farmers.

As these catalogs demonstrate, J.CREW has not changed their representation strategies. Though J.CREW attempted to represent “real” women, they failed. Our instructions still produce the J.CREW catalog. A second edition of our textbook would have a section for girls, muses, and jobs.

Contribute to the conversation!

We hope you’re having fun with Issue 4 — drop us a line or comment and let us know what’s working (or not) for you. And we’re already looking forward to your submissions for the fall issue…