Search

This article situates reproductive applications as an emerging “do-it-yourself” health technology in need of feminist technical communication action. The authors focus on Glow, a fertility and peri...

This article critically responds to the collection of data drawn from the body and the surveillance of everyday experiences via the use of wearable technologies. Bringing together feminist methodologies in rhetoric and writing with feminist conversations in surveillance studies, Hutchinson and Novotny argue that a feminist surveillance as care pedagogy teaches professional writing students a user-centered design practice that supports consent and user agency, and resists ubiquitous, non-consensual surveillance of user’s bodies. Their pedagogy centers on acquisition of critical digital literacies as necessary for teaching students to engage with emerging technological issues, specifically ones raised when considering the ethical implications with surveillance and privacy. The two courses outlined in this article approach wearable technologies through the lens of rhetorics of health and medicine, enabling the kind of critical digital literacies needed to interrogate privacy and surveillance concerns that impact students—a demographic most often targeted as users of these technologies.

This chapter argues that doxing enacts a rhetorical function of persuasion when a person attempts to wield power over another through the exploitation of personally identifying information through analyzing three real-life examples. The examples are: doxing and subsequent harassment of anti-gamergate activists Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian; outing of Jeremy Becker, a critic of the anonymizing Internet browser Tor; and smear campaign against Taren Fivek, a communist humanitarian worker who dared to report on celebrity activists. The chapter proposes decolonial approaches that help us understand doxing as a Western cultural practice. The practice of doxing has evolved over the last couple of decades in various ways depending on persons involved and the particular situation of the moment, sometimes concerning an individual, a group of individuals, or a corporate or government entity. Identifying doxa and doxing as Western cultural practices does not do enough; rather, a scholarly obligation of rhetoric is to assess the meaning made in this identification.