Neoliberal Rhetorics and Body Politics: Plastinate Exhibits as Infiltration uses transnational feminist rhetorical analyses to understand how the global force of neoliberalism infiltrates all parts of life from nation-state relationships to individual subject formation. Focusing on the hugely popular and profitable exhibits of preserved, dissected, and posed human bodies and body parts showcased in Body Worlds and BODIES…The Exhibition—plastinate shows offered by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens and the US company Premier Exhibitions—the book analyzes how these exhibits offer examples of neoliberalism’s ideological reach as they also present a pop-cultural lens through which to understand the scope of that reach. By rhetorically analyzing the details of the exhibits themselves, their political and cultural contexts, their marketing literature and showcased artifacts, and their connection to historical displays of bodies, the book articulates how neoliberalism creates a grand narrative while simultaneously permeating daily living. As such, Neoliberal Rhetorics and Body Politics argues that these public, for profit exhibitions offer familiar, tangible, and rich sites within which to understand neoliberalism’s impact beyond the purview of public policy and economics. Predicated on the idea that neoliberal practices are not uniform, the book not only articulates how neoliberal discourses are embedded in these shows, but it also traces the ideological and material consequences of that inculcation. It focuses its analysis on the shows’ rhetorical deployment of necropolitics, biopolitics, intimacy, and affect, and details how the exhibits communicate neoliberalism’s guiding principles of self-reliance, individual choice, and freedom through market participation. In doing so, it answers a number of challenges posed by feminist transnational rhetorical studies; namely, that scholars extend their analyses to understand how information circulates, that we pay more attention to the affective aspects of transnational rhetorics, and that we recognize how pedagogy functions outside the classroom. In attending to these concerns, the book ultimately illustrates not only neoliberalism’s strong rhetorical force, but also reveals its deep cultural infiltration.

Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal Nation-State, by Dr. Jennifer Wingard, explores how neoliberal economics has affected the rhetoric of the media and politics, and how in very direct, material ways it harms the bodies of some of the United States' most vulnerable occupants. The book is written at a moment when the promise of the liberal nation state, in which the government purports to care for its citizens through social welfare programs financed by state funds, is eroding. Currently, state policies are defined by neoliberal governmentality, a form which privileges privatization and individual personal responsibility. Instead of the promise of citizenship and the protections that come with it, or "the American Dream" to use a more common euphemism, the state uses certain bodies that will never be accepted as citizens as an underclass in service of capital (think "Guest Worker Programs"). And those underclassed "bodies" are identified through branding. In order to demonstrate just how damaging branding has become, Wingard offers readings of key pieces of legislation on immigration and GLBT rights and their media reception from the past twenty years. By showing how brands are assembled to create affective threats, Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal Nation-State articulates how dangerous the branding of bodies has become and offers rhetorical strategies that can repair the damage to bodies caused by political branding. Branded Bodies, then, is an intervention into the rhetorical practices of the nation-state. It attempts to clarify how the nation state uses brands to forward its claims of equality and freedom all the while condemning those who do not "fit in" to particular categories valued by the neoliberal state.

This volume examines and applies classical and contemporary concepts of rhetorical theory and criticism to the context of late capitalism. Each contributor shows how discourse, its subjects, and power relations are irrevocably transformed by neoliberalism. The collection analyzes a range of discourses and phenomena in neoliberalism including: higher education reforms, computational culture, Occupy Wall Street protests, the activism of Warren Buffett, and the 9-11 Truth Movement. Together, these chapters explore the contemporary rhetorical production of homo economicus and the various ways in which neoliberalism has become a way of thinking, orienting, and organizing all aspects of life around economized metrics of individualized and individuated success. This book will be of use to students and scholars crossing the fields of media and communication, political science, and sociology.

Winner of the 2015 FWSA Book Prize The body is a site of impassioned, fraught and complex debate in the West today. In one political moment, left-wingers, academics and feminists have defended powerful men accused of sex crimes, positioned topless pictures in the tabloids as empowering, and opposed them for sexualizing breasts and undermining their natural function. At the same time they have been criticized by extreme-right groups for ignoring honour killings and other culture-based forms of violence against women. How can we make sense of this varied terrain? In this important and challenging new book, Alison Phipps constructs a political sociology of womens bodies around key debates: sexual violence, gender and Islam, sex work and motherhood. Her analysis uncovers dubious rhetorics and paradoxical allegiances, and contextualizes these within the powerful coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative frameworks. She explores how feminism can be caricatured and vilified at both ends of the political spectrum, arguing that Western feminisms are now faced with complex problems of positioning in a world where gender often comes second to other political priorities. This book provides a welcome investigation into Western politics around womens bodies, and will be particularly useful to scholars and upper-level students of sociology, political science, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in how bodies become politicized.

This book examines human-interest stories, unpacking from them violence inherent to neoliberalism, and considers if it is possible to find in these stories hints of people and labour that suggest other narratives.

As part of the emerging new research on civic innovation, this book explores how sexual politics and gender relations play out in feminist struggles around body politics in Brazil, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, Nicaragua, as well as in East Africa, Latin America and global institutions and networks. From diverse disciplinary perspectives, the book looks at how feminists are engaged in a complex struggle for democratic power in a neoliberal age and at how resistance is integral to possibilities for change. In making visible resistances to dominant economic and social policies, the book highlights how such struggles are both gendered and gendering bodies. The chapters explore struggles for healthy environments, sexual health and reproductive rights, access to abortion, an end to gender-based violence, the human rights of LGBTIQA persons, the recognition of indigenous territories and all peoples’ rights to care, love and work freely. The book sets out the violence, hopes, contradictions and ways forward in these civic innovations, resistances and connections across the globe.

In Rhetorics of Insecurity, Zeynep Gambetti and Marcial Godoy-Anativia bring together a select group of scholars to investigate the societal ramifications of the present-day concern with security in diverse contexts and geographies. The essays claim that discourses and practices of security actually breed insecurity, rather than merely being responses to the latter. By relating the binary of security/insecurity to the binary of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, the contributors to this volume reveal the tensions inherent in the proliferation of individualism and the concurrent deployment of techniques of societal regulation around the globe. Chapters explore the phenomena of indistinction, reversal of terms, ambiguity, and confusion in security discourses. Scholars of diverse backgrounds interpret the paradoxical simultaneity of the suspension and enforcement of the law through a variety of theoretical and ethnographic approaches, and they explore the formation and transformation of forms of belonging and exclusion. Ultimately, the volume as a whole aims to understand one crucial question: whether securitized neoliberalism effectively spells the end of political liberalism as we know it today. Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Marcial Godoy-Anativia is Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, where he serves as coeditor of its online journal e-misférica.