Developing insights from decolonial theory, trauma theory, and critical pedagogy, my project offers a historical genealogy of the rhetoric of the body by focusing on the phenomenon of wounds and the condition of semi-ness. I link late-medieval and Early Modern female Iberian Christian devotional rhetorics to a larger exploration of self-representation of fragmented bodies in contemporary Chicana textual, cultural, and visual rhetorics. More exactly, I examine an Iberian and Ibero-American rhetorical strategy of entering the wound in representations of the Virgin Mary’s abstracted body and its impact on Ibero-American female perceptions of body and identity. I trace connections between this Iberian genealogy and Mesoamerican concepts of securing stability during metaphorical earthquakes of lived turmoil and sacrifice as these connections interweave in the construction of Chicana rhetorics of woundedness. I propose that a ubiquitous form of Chicana self-representation strategies, notably manifested in later-twentieth-century Californian print media and art, positions wounds and fragments in such a way as to generatively confront and transform the self. To conclude, I consider feelings of academic woundedness in Californian Chicana students and tactics whereby university composition instructors might stimulate more inclusive classrooms.

“Bad Writing: Responses to Early Gothic Fiction and the Cultivation of Emotional Taste” analyzes portrayals of emotion in early gothic fiction, using the particular features of these portrayals to explain variations in reception. Focusing on eighteenth-century British gothic works that have been harshly criticized either in their day or in ours, I discuss Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach, Matthew Lewis’s Monk, Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, novels whose tumultuous reception histories especially beg questions about how and why readers judge and feel differently about literature. For instance, early reviewers of Udolpho express sorrow and terror in response to what they describe as the novel’s well-wrought scenes, but a recent Goodreads reviewer writes that she would like to slap its heroine. I consider these kinds of responses to be a function of what I call “emotional taste,” and I propose explanations for differences in emotional taste by closely analyzing how the novels construct affective experiences using tools with variable associations. In doing so, I attend to the way formal, linguistic, and mechanical features gain or lose emotional relevance depending on a reader’s historical positioning and attitude toward the text. I argue that because the craft of gothic fiction carries complex histories of emotional relation within and beyond the text, when critics judge the writing of these novels as good or bad, their judgments reveal less about the quality of the writing and more about the affective norms of literary and critical expression that inform the judgment. In turn, when critics argue that certain kinds of reading are good or bad, they draw attention to the ways these affective norms are in flux. Using a broad range of responses from professional and amateur critics, I demonstrate how the emotional rhetoric and conventions of diverse critiques, when put in conversation with the details of the text, can offer new perspectives on the novels and on the practices of literary criticism themselves.

This project explains how the extracurricular and curricular function together: We know that the interaction of informal and formal rhetorical learning determines how college students write their way into communal and civic life. I investigate how this learning happens on and near campus but outside the college writing classroom, in sites created out of students’ desires to feel like they belong. These sites provide students the opportunity to extend and respond to their curricular work in ways attuned to the social and political dimensions of their learning. Students shape extracurricular spaces that envision and model communities in which those who have been historically marginalized can meaningfully participate. I argue that their collaborative efforts define both their identities as writing/speaking subjects and the spheres of their rhetorical participation.

Specifically, I look at students’ group-sponsored literate activities at the University of California, Irvine and UC Davis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I examine student newspapers that were produced during the late 1980s and early 90s: the alternative media at UCI and the Third World Forum at UCD. I further analyze my ethnographic research, conducted between 2018 and 2020, with Asian American student organizations at UCI. These archival materials and participant observations demonstrate how students engage counterpublics, as they critique dominant narratives and draw energy from activist legacies. In this way, I flesh out the relationships among the curricular, extracurricular, and co-curricular, affirming the notion that the latter terms’ prefixes do not indicate their subordinate status. “Extracurriculars” are not exclusively resumé fodder or ways to fill time outside of class. The intellectual work that occurs in these nominally recreational spaces in fact marks the urgency of the “extra” and “co” for both students and rhetoric/composition researchers. I deem much of the student activity I examine “countercurricular”: providing an alternative or oppositional view of curricular learning.

Critical race theory's dire account of the prison-slave throws the hopeful pragmatisms of rhetoric and composition into stark relief, urging us to consider the extent to which writing about, with, and for imprisoned writers fulfills the discipline's civic and progressivist aims, or retrenches structural oppression. Using a suite of rhetorical and qualitative analyses, this project looks at a detention-based community publication serving youth and adults to understand how public writing and prison-based literacy sponsorship operate in ways not accounted for in the discourses of transcendence, resistance, and suffering that pervade prison writing scholarship. In so doing, I offer a set of curatorial practices that rhetorical field researchers, community engagement scholars, teachers, and activists might employ to render vernacular rhetorics in ways that both respond to critical race theory's critiques, and help them stand in more ethical solidarity with the communities and causes they take up in their work.

After examining prison scholarship's affinity with nineteenth-century abolitionist rhetorics of whiteness, I propose a set of rhetorical-representational correctives to prevent extending what Spillers might call a "grammar" of prisoner suffering. Taking up an exercise in phronēsis that honors public writing pedagogy's debt to the classical rhetorical tradition, I turn to the prudential reasoning and situated experience made available by qualitative method to reveal what radical critical theory does not. I do so by first conducting an archival analysis of a detention-based community publication known as The Beat Within. I then triangulate those findings through a rhetorical field study designed in partnership with Beat members. Noting the affinities between The Beat's practices around writing emotion and ascetic truth-practices described by Foucault, I suggest The Beat's cultivation of a kind of ethopoietic training serves as a precondition for public engagement, whether that engagement follow the contours of civil society as defined by the institution, assert counter-public spaces writers create for (and among) themselves, or embrace both domains simultaneously.