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The United States Armed Forces have been in continuous conflicts since September 11, 2001. For the veterans returning from combat deployments, the human costs have been immense and long lasting. Each of the military departments has developed media campaigns to encourage mental health treatment. This essay introduces the rhetorical issues associated with mental disability as part of the broader genre of disability rhetorics. It then examines the media developed by the U.S. Army in its campaign to encourage mental health treatment by employing the schema of analysis developed by Sonja Foss and situating it within the works on visual rhetoric by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Kimberly Emmons, and Riki Thompson. The article next contextualizes the images used by the Army into the cultural environment faced by soldiers. Finally, it concludes that far from encouraging all soldiers to seek mental health treatment, the Army's media campaign is stigmatizing the majority of those it seeks to assist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This performative essay uses the anticipated 25th anniversary of Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin's essay, "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric," as a pivot point to explore the notion of invitational rhetoric applied variously and processed through the embodied experiences of the two authors: A Black gay identified male and a White queer identified woman in what some might construct as a hierarchical relationship as academic dean and faculty. This is important for the reader to know—relative to a particular performed academic/administrative/intellectual/collaborative project that penetrates the political and power structures of academic relationality—modeling an aspect of invitational rhetoric in which both authors maintain immanent value and an openness to each other as collaborator and audience invoking possibility and potentiality within, across, and beyond the categorical distinctions of their persons that have historically both divided and conjoined them. In addition, the essay embodies a version of assemblage/collaborative writing to explore issues of performance, race, gender, culture, and violence in academic and everyday contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the philosophy of author Jurgen Habermas on public sphere. The author mentions that Habermas, who is a successor of Enlightenment, has interpreted public sphere imperatively emphasizing its history of shifting from rational debate to impression management and violence. The author states that authors Sonja Foss and Martha Solomon, who created the rhetorical readings of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) movement, feature the inadequacy in the approach for public sphere.

This essay locates the subject of feminist inquiry within two articulations of power feminism: Foss and Foss's and Anzaldúa's. I argue that the former employs an individualistic notion of feminist subjectivity, while the latter presumes a subject embedded in, and hence accountable to, community. Parsing out these underlying assumptions enables a critical and recuperative reading of power feminism, proposing empowerment as a collective undertaking in which subjects are unevenly linked through global power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]