Resistance: Taking a Stand, Struggling to Matter

Abstract

Often paying attention to dominant voices and events, the field of rhetoric appears to have had a fraught relationship with resistance. Contemporary rhetorical theory has moved to embrace resistance as a key term, however, particularly to underscore the embodied politics of the rituals of everyday life, as well as how collective acts assemble to negotiate power and public goods. This essay provides a brief etymology of the term and surveys three dominant articulations of it within this journal: writing, embodiment, and ecologies. Reflecting on cultural histories and contemporary cultural conjunctures, we argue resistance is better appreciated as a practical, vulnerable, and collective articulation of opposition and struggle.

Keywords:

• bodies
• ecologies
• power
• resistance
• standing
• writing

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Nathan Bedsole for his research assistance and wit, as well as the editor for the invitation to join this conversation.

Notes

¹ Environmental communication, as Pezzullo and Cox define it, is “the pragmatic and constitutive modes of expression—naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiating—our ecological relationships in the world, including nonhuman systems, elements, and species” (13).