Harlot Runs in the Family

Much to our delight, our call for this special issue on family rhetoric attracted a record number of submissions.  For some, the connection was deeply personal; for others, cultural representations of family and/or the role of various communities on family drew shrewd attention.  Ultimately, the pieces in this issue were selected not only for their brilliant and creative insights about family rhetoric (how family members communicate with each other) and the rhetoric of family (how culture and society inform us about the meaning of family), but also because they represent an array of perspectives, experiences, and forms of expressing our connections and disconnections with family.  They teach us what “runs in the family” means and how family is manufactured, lived, understood, and reproduced.

Noticeably, many of the pieces speak to the issue of motherhood (representative of the large number of submissions we received focusing on this perspective).  What does it mean, we wonder, that a call for critiquing family rhetoric invokes more responses from women--and particularly from women concerned with the perceptions, definitions, and expectations of motherhood? We invite you to reflect on this  phenomenon and any others you may find significant in this edition by entering the conversation.  We encourage you to click the “Add Comment” tab following each piece. 

Thanks to the high number of submissions for this issue, our pool of smart, rhetorically-savvy reviewers--our Harlot family, if you will--grew dramatically.  We graciously thank all our reviewers who impress us with their close reading and thoughtful, engaged responses.  Without their help, this issue would not be published until sometime next decade.

Join us in the fun and help us make Harlot’s family even larger by submitting your work for consideration in our upcoming general issue (Issue 7), to be published Oct. 15th, 2011.  As you’ll discover in this issue, Harlot is not a print-biased publication.  We accept and encourage multimedia submissions.   After all, rhetoric in every day life exceeds the boundaries of print.  The deadline for submissions for Issue 7 is July 15th, 2011.

 

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