Rhetoric and Gender Violence

We explore in this seminar rhetorics of gender violence, resistance, and abolition. Taking a rhetorical approach, we explore “tropes” of gender violence: how social discourses focus on gender violence, how public beliefs about gender are produced through rhetoric and can set or eliminate conditions for gender violence. Drawing on both classical and contemporary rhetorical and cultural theories, we explore how tropes turn attention to definitions, contexts, cases, causes, and effects of gender violence, along with means of resistance to and abolition of gender violence. We bring our explorations to bear on considerations of contemporary gender violence crises in the aspiration of developing a praxis of living that is free from gender violence.