Mari E . Ramler | Tennessee Technological University (original) (raw)

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Peer-reviewed articles by Mari E . Ramler

Journal of Communication and Religion, 2023

This article examines a specific Tunisian Muslim woman's nude protest on social media and its mis... more This article examines a specific Tunisian Muslim woman's nude protest on social media and its misinterpretation by FEMEN, a Ukrainian radical feminist activist group intended to protect women's rights. I argue that, although digital media seems to offer more inclusivity in the material world, subaltern bodies who use technology to transmit their message still cannot be heard. Thus, I offer actor-network theory as a different framework for tracking these types of conflicts, one that allows for intersectionality and non-Western religions to be recognized and acknowledged. Finally, I conclude that flexible solidarity is the logical relation of religion as a networked performance.

Covid Communication: Exploring Pandemic Discourse, 2023

This chapter reimagines social distancing as border performance using the international Covid loc... more This chapter reimagines social distancing as border performance using the international Covid lockdowns as a case study.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2023

This essay examines religious trauma by introducing two critical terms to rhetoricians, especiall... more This essay examines religious trauma by introducing two critical terms to rhetoricians, especially those working in mental health rhetorics: testimonial silencing and hermeneutical marginalization. Since Marlene Winell wrote about Religious Trauma Syndrome nearly three decades ago, the emergent field of religious trauma has only grown. However, we still lack critical vocabulary to describe various types of religious harm, especially epistemic injustice. By examining religious trauma through the lens of epistemic injustice, I center marginalized bodies who have been historically harmed as knowers. I also offer epistemic associative pleasure as a digital intervention. Now, new religious speakers can create their own good words and other ways of knowing by speaking back on social media.

Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 2023

To take incarnation seriously, Creation Care Christians, such as Douglas and Jonathan Moo, focus ... more To take incarnation seriously, Creation Care Christians, such as Douglas and Jonathan Moo, focus on Jesus' divinity in incarnation. If the divine Jesus was fully flesh, then creation must be good. And if we do not take care of it, we are sinning, they reason. Laurel C. Schneider's promiscuous view of incarnation insists on a porous flesh, one that is materially entangled with the world. This is beyond Sallie McFague's model of the world as God's body. Applying Schneider's promiscuous incarnation, Mary-Jane Rubenstein claims that the world is God's body, and, as such, God does not transcend matter as Ernest Simmons suggests. For Catherine Keller, unknowable divine interdependence must move us to civic action. In the middle of this conversation, I offer the term wicked incarnations to make explicit the intra-action of divinity and the world in its incarnations. To take incarnation seriously is to acknowledge incarnations as a dynamism of divine and material forces, neither of which pre-exist their relationship. I join Keller in hoping that this moves us to care about and for the material world, its changing climate, and our intra-active relationship with nonhuman, divine presence.

Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, 2022

How does a person come out of the closet if they don't know that they're in one? That is to say, ... more How does a person come out of the closet if they don't know that they're in one? That is to say, how do people know their identities when those identities are not allowed and there is no language in their life to describe them? Compulsory belief constrains compulsory identity. In Queer Religiosities , Melissa M. Wilcox underscores compulsory cisheterosexuality as a complication to identification. Wilcox suggests that, within a religious context that does not allow anything other than cisheterosexual identity, queer identity is sometimes constructed after early life when one has the hermeneutical tools to understand their experience (127). Further, when one considers the silencing of minorities when they try to speak about their experiences that often takes place within fundamentalist religious communities, the potential for queer identity construction can be further deferred. Jos é Esteban Mu ñ oz offers disidentification as a survival strategy for minorities in a majority setting. Disidentification allows minorities to use the cultural norms that they know for their own purposes, investing old expectations with new life. I argue that Mu ñ oz's concept of disidentification can serve as a survival strategy for queer people, especially queer of color people, who have experienced religious trauma, including testimonial silencing when they are not believed and hermeneutical marginalization when they don't know what or whom to believe. Disidentification is an important intervention in the flourishing queer rhetoric conversation because it gives minoritized people a survival strategy during a critical phase in their lives-their coming out.

Technical Communication Quarterly, 2020

This article introduces the term “queer usability” to technical communicators. Queer usability is... more This article introduces the term “queer usability” to technical communicators. Queer usability is the anticipation of marginalized communities and the application of this anticipation to user-centered design to create a digital space in which marginalized populations are centered. In short, queer usability anticipates and centers marginalized users and their anticipated needs. To ethically create social media worlds, we must embrace and implement queer usability.

Screen Bodies, 2019

Breastfeeding mothers and their babies are simultaneously in the public sphere and hidden from pu... more Breastfeeding mothers and their babies are simultaneously in the public sphere and hidden from public view. Although social media has the potential to normalize attitudes toward breastfeeding by increasing visibility, Facebook and Instagram maintain an unpredictable censorship policy toward “brelfies”—female breast selfies—which has undermined progress. Combining Iris Marion Young’s “undecidability” of the breasted experience with Brett Lunceford’s rhetoric of nakedness, this article investigates what breastfeeding mothers communicate online via digital images when they expose their breasts. By deconstructing controversial case studies, this article concludes that brelfies have increased breastfeeding’s accessibility and acceptability in the material world.

Capacious, 2019

For centuries, humans have been afflicted with an existential fear that their lives are on the wr... more For centuries, humans have been afflicted with an existential fear that their lives are on the wrong track or that they would need multiple lives to experience the one, perfect life. Interweaving personal memoir with critical theory, this essay argues that St. Augustine of Hippo solves this dilemma by creating multiple versions of himself in his autobiography Confessions. Self-invention by way of affective confession is our unexpected yet productive methodology.

Constellations, 2018

This article argues that Beyoncé's performance of New Orleans' post-Katrina trauma in her award-w... more This article argues that Beyoncé's performance of New Orleans' post-Katrina trauma in her award-winning, top-twenty hit "Formation" was not cultural appropriation but rather appropriation-as-identification.

Textshop Experiments, 2018

This article analyzes two controversial hit pop songs by Beyoncé and then applies a hermeneutic o... more This article analyzes two controversial hit pop songs by Beyoncé and then applies a hermeneutic of susceptibility to the artist herself in order to argue that feminism is a performance of empathic ethical reach.