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Abstract
Partisan rhetoric surrounding COVID-era face-masking has reshuffled traditional stasis hierarchy, allowing the middle stases of definition and quality, which emphasize epideictic motives of cultural affirmation, to supersede conjectural questions of medical efficacy. Viral images positioning masks as metonymic approximations of “authoritarianicity” and government overreach illustrate how right-wing masking rhetoric circumvents scientific concerns, instead rooting discourse in questions of cultural essence. Science communicators, in response, must embrace the inherently tropological and epideictic dimensions of the mask and work to recode the symbol as a metonym for citizenship and personal responsibility.
Notes
1 We thank RR reviewers Emma Frances Bloomfield and Michael Zerbe for their generous, insightful comments on this essay.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Genevieve Gordon
Genevieve Gordon ([email protected]) is a master’s student and a graduate teaching assistant at Penn State University. Her research interests include rhetorical theory, rhetorics of science and technology, and technical communication. She has presented research at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, among others. Her work appears in Metamorphosis and other undergraduate research fora.
Ben Wetherbee
Ben Wetherbee ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, where he also serves as Coordinator of Writing and edits the undergraduate research journal The Drover Review. His work on rhetorical theory and history, writing pedagogy, and film theory has appeared in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, The Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Present Tense, Literacy in Composition Studies, the Henry James Review, and the Rhetoric Society of America collection Reinventing Rhetorical Scholarship, among other journals and volumes.