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The body positive movement—which initially set out to positively represent, humanize, and liberate fat, nonnormative, and multiply marginalized bodies—has been co-opted, commodified, and depoliticized. For the movement to have any chance of returning to its radical fat activist roots, it must shift to center intersectionality in both the forms of rhetorical labor engaged by body positive rhetors as well as the bodies on and through which body positive rhetoric gains visibility. Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity. I analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s celebrity persona engages two forms of rhetorical labor that recenter the body positive movement back onto multiply marginalized bodies like hers and envision the possibility of a fat-positive world: (1) assemblaging the big butt and the fat, Black body, and (2) resisting dominant gazing and representational practices through performances of feeling herself. In doing so, I theorize intersectional assemblaging and feeling herself as two rhetorical maneuvers of intersectional visibility that reclaim power, agency, and humanity outside of the terms offered by coloniality and the white heteropatriarchal gaze.

Organizations have been increasingly paying attention to their myriad economic, ethical, social, and environmental responsibilities, partly driven by consumer pressure. It is imperative for organizations to identify who these socially responsible consumers are so that they can respond appropriately to their demands. Adopting the theoretical lens of hypermodernity, this study sought to develop a measurement to identify socially responsible consumers by their personality traits and behavioral intentions along five dimensions of hypermodernity. The study combined a systematic review of journal articles within business ethics, consumer psychology, and communication studies to propose a measurement, which was subsequently tested and refined. This study first offers a set of theoretically grounded psychographic variables that give robust insights into socially responsible consumers with high corporate social responsibility expectations. Second, the article offers practitioners a toolkit to identify socially responsible consumers.

Covid and . . . How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic (Michigan State UP, 2023. Edited by Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland and Jennifer Malkowski) is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory. Arguing that the circulation of any virus must be understood in tandem with the public communication accompanying it, this collection converses with interdisciplinary stakeholders also committed to the project of social wellness during pandemic times. With inventive ways of thinking about structural inequities in health, these essays showcase the forces that pandemic rhetoric exerts across health conditions, politics, and histories of social injustice.

Contributions include:

"Introduction: An Agenda for Pandemic Rhetoric," Allison L. Rowland, Emily Winderman, and Jen Malkowski

Part One: Pre-existing and Chronic

"Covid and Racialized Myths: Pre-existing Conditions and the Invisible Traces of White Supremacy," Raquel M. Robvais

"Covid and Environmental Atmospheres: Pulmonary Publics and Our Shared Air," Sara DiCaglio

"Covid and Science Denialism: The Rhetorical Foundations of US Anti-Masking Discourse," Kurt Zemlicka

"Covid and Vaccine Hesitancy: Tracing the Tuskegee-Covid Straw Man Fallacy as a History Presently Unfolding," Veronica Joyner and Heidi Y. Lawrence

Part Two: Essential and Disposable

"Covid and Essential Workers: Medical Crises and the Rhetorical Strategies of Disposability," Marina Levina

"Covid and Being a Doctor: Physicians' Published Narratives as Crisis Archive," Molly Margaret Kessler, Michael Aylward, and Bernard Trappey

***"Covid and Fatphobia: How Rhetorics of Disposability Render Fat Bodies Unworthy of Care and Life," Hailey Nicole Otis***

"Covid and Intersex: In/Essential Medical Management," Celeste E. Orr

Part Three: Remedy and Resistance

"Covid and Shared Black Health: Rethinking Nonviolence in the Dual Pandemics," DiArron M.

"Covid and Masking: Race, Dress, and Addressivity," Angela Nurse and Diane Keeling

"Covid and Disability: Tactical Responses to Normative Vaccine Communication in Appalachia," Julie Gerdes, Priyanka Ganguly, and Luana Shafer

"Covid and Doubt: An Emergent Structure of Feeling," Jeffrey A. Bennett