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The visual rhetoric of the family photo: One cyborg's story
THESIS

, Michigan State University, United States

Michigan State University . Awarded

Abstract

In this partially autobiographical text that challenges the "invisible" intellectual gaze, the author explores how beginning in the early 1900's United States, her "white middleclass" family attempted to seamlessly construct a neatly packaged vision of "Our Family," a vision that intertwined family stories and mythologizing and supported dominant ideologies. However, as the author rhetorically reads her family photographs, she also "reads" acts of resistance by her family members. But the agency needed to resist, is enough for those same family members to visually erase "Others" who supported and labored, others who allowed to come to light the "whole" vision of "Our White Family." Relying on theorists such as Lacan, Haraway, de Certeau, and Spivak, and scholars such as Porter, Powell, Johnson and DeVoss, the author uses rhetorical intervention, animation, and rehabilitation to deconstruct and reconstruct her family story in answer to Malea Powell's call to acknowledge history and attempt whatever redress is possible. As a call to the discipline of Rhetoric and Writing, the author, as she crosses disciplinary boundaries, asks for a more inclusive, interdisciplinary Visual Rhetorics trajectory that maps onto Visual Culture Studies, Critical Theory, and Visual Rhetoric/Technical Writing. After cautioning Rhetoric and Writing scholars writing on Digital Rhetoric and Technology against cognitively fetishizing the term "Cyborg" the author ends by answering the question, what can rhetoric as techne, through the technology of writing, do for the world?

Citation

Rife, M.C. The visual rhetoric of the family photo: One cyborg's story. Master's thesis, Michigan State University. Retrieved March 28, 2024 from .

This record was imported from ProQuest on October 22, 2013. [Original Record]

Citation reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC.

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Keywords