Visual Rhetoric and Language Choices

Visual Rhetoric and Language Choices

As in introduction to visual rhetoric, I show my students images from Pawel Kuczynski. His illustrations satirize mainstream issues from war to social media, from animal rights to poverty. Here’s his website: http://pawelkuczynski.com/Prace/Cartoons/

The artist’s work is so persuasive and the message of each illustration obvious.  “Islands” shows people in isolation and stranded on their sandy smartphone beaches, harkening back to Donne’s “No (wo)man is an island.”  “Book” startles the viewer into questioning the abuse of rigorous academic studies.  

I showed my students “Monument,” an image of wartime men with guns drawn mounted atop a concrete pedestal with a woman and child huddled on the ground below.  The illustration speaks to those unsung heroes and victims of war, the women who care for children alone and the children who may feel abandoned by consequence of daddy’s call of duty.

I’ve shown this image for many semesters, and students immediately get it, pleased with their ability to interpret visual rhetoric, a fancy term for a skill Kuczynski elicits seamlessly.

But this semester (fall 2016), I was struck by a personal bias I (and perhaps Kuczynski too) had missed.  I arrived to class as normal, lesson plan and images prepared, and noticed a young woman, one of my students, donning her navy khaki uniform.  As the class and I sifted through Kuczynski’s illustrations, we came to “Monument,” and I immediately became conscious of my language choices.  As with the other images, I asked the class, “What does this image mean?”

After a few seconds, they replied “Women and children aren’t celebrated in war monuments.”

“Yes!” I replied.  “Only the men, and women,” I said for the first time in explaining the image, “who face combat are memorialized, while those who make sacrifices back home are not.”

After class, I remembered my experience as a student of Dr. Janet Bing, linguist and feminist, in her class Language, Gender, and Power.  I remembered how we learned that the idioms and common-speak of people actually reflect cultural attitudes and norms, think "Look out for number one" as evidence for American individualism.  

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) renders interesting contrast in the usages of “men in uniform” vs. “men and women in uniform” through time.  In a quick perusal of the former, nearly half of the entries were spoken before 2000, (44 of 100); by contrast, 72 of the 100 utterances of the were recorded after 2000.  A more comprehensive analysis of all entries in COCA is needed to be certain, but a cursory look illustrates a shift in the popular language away from the arguably sexist omission of women in uniform.

The point being, popular language may be in the process of redeeming itself alongside my language choices in the classroom.