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.
