Stiletto Gas Pedals and Back Alley Parking:

Exploring Audience, Space, and the Rhetorical Construction of

Female Reproduction

IN THE BEGINNING. . . Teaching Chevy Equinox as audience invention

carved-out door panels, to help keep diamond rings from getting whacked

when window switches are used

center console spacious enough to stow a handbag

tilted accelerator pedal “that makes driving in high heels safer

and more comfortable”(Fetini 2010).

SPACE AS RHETORIC

OLD EPISTEMOLOGIES AND NEW RHETORIC:

BUILDING A THEORY OF FEMININE NEGOTIATION OF

AUDIENCE

Ong

Lundsford/Ede

Burke

Epistemology of Experience

Recovering silenced rhetoric of reproductive rights

movements illustrate the ways in which particularly

female concerns and goals get accomplished by

successfully inventing bot

Female rhetor/audience

Male audience

NEW THEORY FORMED:

BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN RHETORIC

CONCERNING CHOICE IN MOTHERHOOD

AMERICAN RHETORIC OF REPRODUCTION:

DISRUPTIONS OF SILENCE

First Wave

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Susan B. Anthony

Margaret Sanger

MOVEMENTS ATTEMPTING TO GIVE VOICE TO

THE ABORTION

Second/Third Wave:

Steinmem’s List

Red Stockings

“I had an abortion” Campaign

A HISTORY REFLECTED THROUGH DESIGNED

SPACE

Planned Parenthood Clinics negotiate multiple

audiences

Images/Analysis

SCHOLARLY AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Designed spaces can help teach audience – and

particularly how audience is invented and subjects

asked to understand themselves

Space can illustrate the ways in which institutions

“other” individuals and even their own function/role

in a society

Providing visual and material examples of how

rhetoric and audience interact to produce meaning,

often meaning that is repressive, can engage

students and give them a way to understand

traditional texts through similar theoretical frame