Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This piece began in the heat of a real-life dilemma: the real-estate market tanked and I was stuck with a house in Columbus, Ohio, long after I moved to Georgia. Neurosis and anxiety demanded that I think of every possible way to get rid of the darn house, and as I became more desperate, I became willing to sell it even for scrap materials. Luckily it sold (finally) after a year on the market. I used this essay to joke about some real-life challenges, including the fact that someone broke into the vacant house and stole all the copper plumbing. The idea of real estate "investment" was a good target, because I will never, ever, ever again believe the idea that owning a huge chunk of earth, boards, and wiring is a good investment for me personally.

I'm interested in the problem of what to call this. Some have called these kinds of essays "lyric" or "speculative" because they are rooted in the real but are clearly a product of the writers' imagination. It seems like there's a link to what happens in the madness and hyperbole of prose poetry. The terminology attached to this kind of stuff (see McSweeney's for much more of it) drives a lot of people to extreme irritation—why not just call it fiction? You, my good friend, can call it fiction if you want to, and I won't mind. I've written fiction, too, and I will say for myself that this feels different, because the exaggeration sounds like me--in my real life and my real voice—as I complain and obsess to excess and then for sheer enjoyment. I do know that I resist calling it fiction because—although I'd like it to be completely untrue--this exactly captures the state of mind and range of options I contemplated.

I mull over the increasing interchangeability of queer with lesbian/gay (which ends up domesticating queer's radical potential) and call for queer to be liberated from the mainstream forces and institutional structures that have appropriated it.

I wrote this piece as a sort of Harlot test run. When we began talking about the need for public-oriented rhetorical criticism, Jim Fredal challenged me to figure out what that might look like. I'd recently written a rather academic analysis of Hans Christian Andersen's original ";Little Mermaid"; and was hoping to make it relevant/current; Disney's version had just been rereleased in a ";Platinum Edition"; DVD and was being adapted into a Broadway show. So it made sense to put it all together, using my sister as my ideal audience: smart, fun, feminist. . . and concerned about her new baby's exposure to the dangers of Disney rhetoric. This has been the most enjoyable writing experience I've ever had.

As a scholar in rhetoric and composition and a media artist, I am primarily interested in exploring how people compose with digital technologies, as well as what these compositions mean for their many and varied senses of self, individually and collectively. I also work at the intersection of writing studies and sexuality studies, exploring what it means to "compose queerly," as well as what theories of sexuality, particularly queer theory, have to teach us about literacy in pluralistic democracies.

These interests permeate the two digital compositions that Harlot has graciously agreed to publish.

This piece is a brief rant about the current gender stereotypes that play out in commercials and other forms of advertisements. While sarcasm constantly reigns in this rant, there is also a grain of truth to these complaints. Yet there is also an amount of truth in these commercials, as they are not unintentionally addressing these stereotypical audiences.

I was inspired to write this piece after seeing endless commercials trying to sell me, a woman, various cleaning and cooking products. I was especially bothered because these commercials, by appealing to women, are really confirming that women are still the primary cookers and cleaners of households despite women’s prevalence in the workforce; advertisements know their target buyers. Perhaps my anger toward these commercials is indirect in that advertisers still have reason to advertise these products to women because the division of labor is still steeped in inequality.

While sitting through endless political speeches and pundit commentary this election cycle, one would be hard pressed to miss the continuous expressions of careless racism and sexism that is an under-theme to this presidential election. Moreover, with the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin for McCain's VP, I find myself in awe over the assumption that the simple election of a woman to an office of power equates the breaking of the glass ceiling. As such, I felt compelled to revisit Hélène Cixoius' suggestion that we need a new feminine language to combat both institutionalized and careless sexism. But what would this language look like today? "Playing Heads or Tails with My Diaphragm" comically and poetically explores this question. From mythological goddesses to Rousseau, the Mona Lisa, and John McCain's fascination with my diaphragm, my conversation with Cixous leads me to form my own rhetoric, while reclaiming my diaphragm from a "Viagracentric" obsessed language and culture.

If you listen to enough old poets, they will tell you that these ekphrastic poems that are about art and about painting need to be able to exist independently of the painting or visual art itself. I always sort of questioned that idea—why? I think it's a physical limitation that journals don't have photographs—that it's too expensive to put the photograph with the poem. But why you can't do that is beyond me.

"Caroling Commercialism" focuses on the tiny topic of Christmas music and uses this as a lens through which the author examines the growing commodification of the Christmas holiday.

At the surface, the expanding season during which radio stations play holiday music seems more like an annoyance than a problem. But the practice is actually a harbinger of a more dastardly intention. In short, there is economic incentive for retailers to pay more money for advertising during the holiday season. Because Christmas music puts consumers in the holiday spirit, stations are more likely to comingle holiday advertising with holiday music. And Christmas as a holiday is becoming more entangled with Christmas as a shopping season, which has a significant effect on the audience of "Christmas" as well as the holiday's impact for true believers of the Christian faith.

While it is true that Christmas is not the only holiday that is becoming increasingly commercial (Valentine's Day, anyone?), it may be true that this trend as a whole is becoming more and more true of American society. There is a rising debt crisis in America, and many consumers already spend more than they can really afford. If there is a purpose to this article, it is to help people think about becoming conscious consumers and to limit their holiday spending to what is within their budgets.

Isn't it hard to believe that all of this came out of hearing "Jingle Bell Rock" one too many times??