Introduction

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion is a digital magazine and web forum that solicits and publishes smart, playful, and accessible conversations about rhetoric in everyday life. As a netroots campaign in rhetorical literacy, Harlot is meant to engage, inspire, and connect public as well as academic audiences in critical and creative discussions of the subtly persuasive communication that surrounds us every day.

Last year, Harlot put out a call for submissions for a special issue on family rhetoric. The sixth issue of Harlot, this special issue attracted a record number of submissions for our journal.  For some, the connection was deeply personal; for others, cultural representations of family and/or the role of various communities on family drew shrewd attention.  Ultimately, the pieces submitted for this issue offered critical and creative insights about family rhetoric (how family members communicate with each other) and the rhetoric of family (how culture and society inform us about the meaning of family). They represent an array of perspectives, experiences, and forms of expressing our connections and disconnections with family. 

As special issue editors and Editorial Board members, in the course of reviewing the submissions, we were struck by the makeup of the creators and their topics and by the personal perspective many of them took. An overwhelmingly high percentage of works were composed by women or focused on women’s experiences, such as mothering and motherhood, and a large percentage were composed in the form of a personal narrative. What does it mean, we wondered, that a 21st-century call for exploring family rhetoric invokes more responses from women – particularly from women concerned with the perceptions, definitions, and expectations of motherhood?  We started wondering if the large number of submissions about mothering and motherhood weren’t telling us something important about the discursive spaces created by digital publishing or about how our space was being received and considered by authors.

The Call For Submissions

Remember when you asked Dad instead of Mom to see Basic Instinct in the theatre when you were twelve? Remember when you learned to wait for planes to fly overhead so that the noise would drown the sound of your creaking window when you were sneaking out? Remember the time your grandma told you that "this place is nice for how you live"? And remember the time your grandpa said, "you'll understand when you're older"?

Now, remember when you saw the Keatons, Huxtables, Seavers, Tanners, and Winslows. The Taylors, Bluths, Barones and the Gosselins and Duggars. Remember these families? Remember how they taught you about being moms, dads, brothers, and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents?

For this issue of Harlot, we are calling for rhetorically reflective stories (rhetflections, if you will), analyses, and critiques of family. We want to learn about communication in that pervasively hidden community where you use rhetorical tactics to negotiate spaces, passive aggressive behaviors, and statements that foreclose argument with an audience of relatives. We want to learn about the rhetorical practices of moms, dads, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents; we want to know about the rhetorical moves that make them what they are. In other words, we want to learn about the rhetoric of family.

This Special Issue provides an opportunity for exploring family rhetorics and the ways in which your own experiences or the ones you see around you rhetorically construct family. Areas of interest for this special journal issue include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Family in media representations
•• TV
•• Film
•• Web
•• Portraits
•• The White House

Family in social networking communities
•• Forums
•• Blogs
•• Facebook
•• myspace
•• Twitter

Family and
•• gender
•• race
•• class
•• disability
•• transgressions

Expose your insights traditionally (words coupling with other words like an essay, poem, or short story) or non-traditionally (words coupling with video, pics, sounds or multimedia like a film, a website or a speech).

Submissions due: January 15th, 2011
Submit at www.harlotofthearts.org

Our Purpose

Wanting to know more about why this call had such an impact and resulted in the responses it did, we contacted our authors and created a secure online database where they could login and anonymously respond to several survey questions, and see and comment on each others’ responses. Together, the submissions we received and creators’ responses to the survey teach us something about contemporary ideas and concerns about family and about how calls for submissions, publishing spaces, and intended audiences are being considered and imagined by writers. Today, we share with you what we learned.