Kate Siegfried | University of Nebraska Lincoln (original) (raw)
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Papers by Kate Siegfried
Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture, 2024
In 1952, Paul Robeson and the Canadian Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter workers held a concert at ... more In 1952, Paul Robeson and the Canadian Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter workers held a concert at Peace Arch Park on the border of the United States and Canada to protest the State Department’s revoking of Robeson’s passport for his condemnation of U.S. imperialist foreign policy, racism, and colonialism. Through his entangled use of place-as rhetoric and place-based rhetorics at the concert, Robeson charted a Black internationalist rhetorical cartography. Robeson’s cartography contested the existing imperial world-order that is itself configured through Westphalian logics oriented around maintaining and projecting the European balance of power. Robeson’s Black internationalist cartography hinges on freedom of movement as a teleology that circumvents imperial constructions of national sovereignty. This Black internationalist cartography offers a vision of a new world detached from imperial and colonial nationhood, ultimately demonstrating how space can be reimagined within contexts of racialized containment.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2024
In this essay, I follow sound across hegemonic geopolitical boundaries to map its place-making fo... more In this essay, I follow sound across hegemonic geopolitical boundaries to map its place-making force in the emergence of new forms of nationhood. Through an analysis of Mabel and Robert F. William's radio show, Radio Free Dixie, I argue that racialized Southern culture was respatialized and reimagined, positioning the Black Belt as a Black nation where citizenship is rooted in self-determination. This analysis demonstrates that utilizing sonic rhetorics as a mode through which to uncover Black geographies offers insight into practices of nation building that diverge from existing forms of Westphalian sovereignty that manifest as colonial and racialized domination.
Cultural Critique, 2023
In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebel... more In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebellion, utilizing it to halt capitalist production. Through this process, struggles over, for, and through fixed capital enable the prefiguring of new modes of (re)production, raising the fundamental political question of who governs the infrastructures at hand. I turn to the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 as an example of dispossessed people utilizing fixed capital to interrupt the continuation of an exploitative prison system. Finally, I offer an assessment of how explicit engagement with fixed capital and other material objects or built environments clarifies the ways that antagonistic compositional power might irreversibly damage the logics of capture within and against which rebellious potential emerges.
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2021
In this essay, we explore the logic behind restrictions on abortion and seek possible rhetorical ... more In this essay, we explore the logic behind restrictions on abortion and seek possible rhetorical alternatives by turning to an analysis of women’s later abortion narratives published between 2016 and 2020 in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s two most nationally visible remarks about “late-term” abortion. Because arguments for later abortion rights have implications for all women’s reproductive lives, we approach these narratives from a critical perspective rooted in intersectional feminist theory and praxis and reproductive justice. We argue that the narratives develop an idealist rhetoric of self-sacrificing maternity that emerges from an orchestration of racialized discourses of good motherhood and the gendered liberal political tradition. Later abortion narratives limit women’s reproductive freedom by constructing a motivational vocabulary for understanding (and supporting) later abortions based on mercy and good motherhood.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2020
Through home sealing in Palestine, the Israeli state utilizes the agentive materialism and politi... more Through home sealing in Palestine, the Israeli state utilizes the agentive materialism and political valence of concrete as settler colonial state building tools. By rendering the home uninhabitable, the walls of the home are transformed into border walls, while the sealed home rhetorically functions as a relic of collective punishment. Home sealing is an expression of the Israeli state's permanent anxiety surrounding Palestinian compositional power. This essay demonstrates the urgency for approaching settler-colonial state logics through a lens rooted in decolonial approaches to materialist rhetoric and rhetorical studies of space and place.
Women's Studies in Communication, 2019
The Riot Grrrls were an underground, decentralized movement made up of young people who worked to... more The Riot Grrrls were an underground, decentralized movement made up of young people who worked to channel feminist and queer politics through mediums of cultural production. To turn toward the affective and emotional dimensions of Riot Grrrl, I offer an analysis of the zine I <3 Amy Carter. Focusing specifically on expressions of
intimacy, I trace the contours of queer modes of being across the Riot Grrrl movement as a political force for imagining new relationalities. Mobilizing queerness as a possibility within their interpersonal relations, the Riot Grrrls embodied queer intimacies alongside a queering of intimacy through what I broadly identify as a “grrrl crush,” or an overlap and oscillation between friendship, admiration, and desire. As a specific articulation of queer intimacy, the grrrl crush offers a mode of belonging that is decidedly political, enabling greater theorizations of queer and feminist solidarity.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influe... more Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential Marxist philosophers associated with the structuralist turn in the middle of the 20th century. The ongoing publication of scholarly monographs that develop his conceptual legacy, the depth of his impact in disciplinary debates in fields across the humanities and social sciences, and the continued translation of his work from French into multiple languages, to offer only a few examples, testify to the consensus regarding the enduring importance of his theoretical innovations and often controversial interventions. He devoted tremendous intellectual energy toward a critique of humanism and phenomenological-based Marxism even as he eschewed traditional positivist economic explanations of history and exploitation—engaging in what amounts to nothing less than an effort to fundamentally shift the way the West reads and interprets Marx. Despite the controversial aspects of his interventions, there is little disagreement that the concepts produced by Althusser irreversibly affected and continue to affect the trajectory of Marxist and post-Marxist thought throughout the world, albeit often through the back door, smuggled in and unrecognized—in his lexicon: as an embedded but nevertheless absent cause.
Book Reviews by Kate Siegfried
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2019
In this series of essays written over the last decade, AK Thompson offers a critical assessment ... more In this series of essays written over the last decade, AK Thompson offers a critical assessment of the analytical foundation underwriting contemporary social movement politics. Methodologically and conceptually influenced by Walter Benjamin, Thompson looks to visual culture, everyday life, and collective street actions as crystallizations of the logics saturating our culture of revolt. Through generative critique, creative conceptual development, and a consistent orientation toward identifying politically possibility, Premonitions lays the groundwork for social movement scholars and activists alike to develop a conceptual toolkit for moving beyond the mere existence of struggle as an end in itself.
Media, War & Conflict, 2015
Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture, 2024
In 1952, Paul Robeson and the Canadian Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter workers held a concert at ... more In 1952, Paul Robeson and the Canadian Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter workers held a concert at Peace Arch Park on the border of the United States and Canada to protest the State Department’s revoking of Robeson’s passport for his condemnation of U.S. imperialist foreign policy, racism, and colonialism. Through his entangled use of place-as rhetoric and place-based rhetorics at the concert, Robeson charted a Black internationalist rhetorical cartography. Robeson’s cartography contested the existing imperial world-order that is itself configured through Westphalian logics oriented around maintaining and projecting the European balance of power. Robeson’s Black internationalist cartography hinges on freedom of movement as a teleology that circumvents imperial constructions of national sovereignty. This Black internationalist cartography offers a vision of a new world detached from imperial and colonial nationhood, ultimately demonstrating how space can be reimagined within contexts of racialized containment.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2024
In this essay, I follow sound across hegemonic geopolitical boundaries to map its place-making fo... more In this essay, I follow sound across hegemonic geopolitical boundaries to map its place-making force in the emergence of new forms of nationhood. Through an analysis of Mabel and Robert F. William's radio show, Radio Free Dixie, I argue that racialized Southern culture was respatialized and reimagined, positioning the Black Belt as a Black nation where citizenship is rooted in self-determination. This analysis demonstrates that utilizing sonic rhetorics as a mode through which to uncover Black geographies offers insight into practices of nation building that diverge from existing forms of Westphalian sovereignty that manifest as colonial and racialized domination.
Cultural Critique, 2023
In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebel... more In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebellion, utilizing it to halt capitalist production. Through this process, struggles over, for, and through fixed capital enable the prefiguring of new modes of (re)production, raising the fundamental political question of who governs the infrastructures at hand. I turn to the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 as an example of dispossessed people utilizing fixed capital to interrupt the continuation of an exploitative prison system. Finally, I offer an assessment of how explicit engagement with fixed capital and other material objects or built environments clarifies the ways that antagonistic compositional power might irreversibly damage the logics of capture within and against which rebellious potential emerges.
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2021
In this essay, we explore the logic behind restrictions on abortion and seek possible rhetorical ... more In this essay, we explore the logic behind restrictions on abortion and seek possible rhetorical alternatives by turning to an analysis of women’s later abortion narratives published between 2016 and 2020 in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s two most nationally visible remarks about “late-term” abortion. Because arguments for later abortion rights have implications for all women’s reproductive lives, we approach these narratives from a critical perspective rooted in intersectional feminist theory and praxis and reproductive justice. We argue that the narratives develop an idealist rhetoric of self-sacrificing maternity that emerges from an orchestration of racialized discourses of good motherhood and the gendered liberal political tradition. Later abortion narratives limit women’s reproductive freedom by constructing a motivational vocabulary for understanding (and supporting) later abortions based on mercy and good motherhood.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2020
Through home sealing in Palestine, the Israeli state utilizes the agentive materialism and politi... more Through home sealing in Palestine, the Israeli state utilizes the agentive materialism and political valence of concrete as settler colonial state building tools. By rendering the home uninhabitable, the walls of the home are transformed into border walls, while the sealed home rhetorically functions as a relic of collective punishment. Home sealing is an expression of the Israeli state's permanent anxiety surrounding Palestinian compositional power. This essay demonstrates the urgency for approaching settler-colonial state logics through a lens rooted in decolonial approaches to materialist rhetoric and rhetorical studies of space and place.
Women's Studies in Communication, 2019
The Riot Grrrls were an underground, decentralized movement made up of young people who worked to... more The Riot Grrrls were an underground, decentralized movement made up of young people who worked to channel feminist and queer politics through mediums of cultural production. To turn toward the affective and emotional dimensions of Riot Grrrl, I offer an analysis of the zine I <3 Amy Carter. Focusing specifically on expressions of
intimacy, I trace the contours of queer modes of being across the Riot Grrrl movement as a political force for imagining new relationalities. Mobilizing queerness as a possibility within their interpersonal relations, the Riot Grrrls embodied queer intimacies alongside a queering of intimacy through what I broadly identify as a “grrrl crush,” or an overlap and oscillation between friendship, admiration, and desire. As a specific articulation of queer intimacy, the grrrl crush offers a mode of belonging that is decidedly political, enabling greater theorizations of queer and feminist solidarity.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influe... more Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential Marxist philosophers associated with the structuralist turn in the middle of the 20th century. The ongoing publication of scholarly monographs that develop his conceptual legacy, the depth of his impact in disciplinary debates in fields across the humanities and social sciences, and the continued translation of his work from French into multiple languages, to offer only a few examples, testify to the consensus regarding the enduring importance of his theoretical innovations and often controversial interventions. He devoted tremendous intellectual energy toward a critique of humanism and phenomenological-based Marxism even as he eschewed traditional positivist economic explanations of history and exploitation—engaging in what amounts to nothing less than an effort to fundamentally shift the way the West reads and interprets Marx. Despite the controversial aspects of his interventions, there is little disagreement that the concepts produced by Althusser irreversibly affected and continue to affect the trajectory of Marxist and post-Marxist thought throughout the world, albeit often through the back door, smuggled in and unrecognized—in his lexicon: as an embedded but nevertheless absent cause.
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2019
In this series of essays written over the last decade, AK Thompson offers a critical assessment ... more In this series of essays written over the last decade, AK Thompson offers a critical assessment of the analytical foundation underwriting contemporary social movement politics. Methodologically and conceptually influenced by Walter Benjamin, Thompson looks to visual culture, everyday life, and collective street actions as crystallizations of the logics saturating our culture of revolt. Through generative critique, creative conceptual development, and a consistent orientation toward identifying politically possibility, Premonitions lays the groundwork for social movement scholars and activists alike to develop a conceptual toolkit for moving beyond the mere existence of struggle as an end in itself.
Media, War & Conflict, 2015