Project Blog #1

In terms of progress I can officially claim that I’m almost through with my “shitty first draft.” Rather than finishing it out, though, I think I need to just jump into my better second draft and try to get that evened out with a real organization and all. Reading all of your comments about the various cannons of rhetoric has helped, and I think I’m going to focus one section on the idea of delivery. Why a pornographic magazine? How is this more effective/affective than speeches or newsletters? What gets achieved through this delivery method that would not have been through a more traditional kind? How does this delivery method choice signify the social identity that On Our Backs is speaking to? I also need to do some reading on Burke because I think that rhetoric of identification is going to be important in how I make my arguments.

I am having trouble, as my topic continues to evolve and grow, getting any of the scholarship that I’ve already read to fit into what I’m trying to do now. I did read a great article on the importance of bodies in social protest rhetoric that looked specifically at Earth First, ACT UP, and Queer Nation (“Unruly Arguments” Argument and Advocacy Summer 99). The groups had no control over how or whether their words would be heard, but they could control how their bodies would be seen (though this is thinking in terms of modern televised news coverage). There was also a really interesting statement from one of the ACT UP leaders that I feel fits into my project nicely where he says: “To analyze its impact, don’t look at how many people show up at ACT UP’s meetings. Look at how many people took ACT UP’s values into their lives.”

Another idea might be to look at style in terms of the articles, specifically in terms of the importance of irony within the queer community. I’m not sure how far I want to go with that, or even if I do want to go there, but it’s a possibility I’m tossing around.

So at this time I’m just trying to get some of my ideas really fleshed out and see what’s working and what’s missing, etc.  I think I’m going to structure the next draft as:

contextualize artifact with feminist movement and the scholarly emphasis of pornography debates, show how the magazine rhetorically constructed it’s audience, discuss what the magazines major goals were and how those were accomplished,  how those goals were intended to compliment feminist agenda, and then ultimately how all of these elements functioned together to create a new sense of lesbian-feminist community.