SUASIVE VIOLENCE INQUIRY: THEORIZING VISUAL CORPOREAL RHETORIC

Abstract

This project creates and develops suasive violence inquiry to identify, evaluate, and address physical violence that acts as visual, corporeal rhetoric. The dissertation fills a gap in theorizing physical violence and rhetoric and extends a call to scholars of rhetoric and composition, communication, and allied disciplines to consider the suasive effects of physical force. Rhetoric and violence have long been conceptualized in opposition. Rhetoric is often juxtaposed with violence as two available, but contrary, choices leading one to make one’s preference for either influence or compulsion a symbol of ethos or opportunity. Rather, rhetoric and violence may exist in tandem, not in opposition but in purposeful accord, doing similar work in different ways. I contend that the bodied presentation of violence, like that asserted by the domination of others through their injury and/or destruction, is an important site for research and theory. The dissertation posits that physical violence is a site of visual rhetoric and has been used in wide and varying suasive efforts from the geopolitical to the interpersonal. An exploration of how bodies of unwilling participants are deployed is drawn from the case study of the public display of a murdered woman in 1947. While media reports contemporary to the murder prefer to suggest a disposal of the body, the treatment of the body can be read, instead, as a strategic display. The project builds upon the theoretical intersections between rhetoric, violence, strategy, embodiment, visual imagery, and ethics. The study identifies a suasive actor defined as a perpetrator/rhetor and considers how the violent perpetrator/rhetor engages ongoing conversations and appeals to audiences through bodied work. The reception of these appeals by audiences, such as media, authorities, culture, and community, is explored. The study also interrogates the ethical complications of research related to unwilling bodies in a meta-analysis. The findings complicate traditional notions of rhetoric and force and offer theoretical and methodological insights for suasive violence that is urgent and ongoing in the present.