ONE Reembodying Circulation

When I began thinking about circulation and its relationship to rhetoric, the study of circulation was nascent. Digital circulation was a particularly small area of focus, limited to work on delivery.¹ Rhetorical delivery studies usefully centered on the writer’s ability to engage and affect circulation. Now, years later, circulation studies has become a burgeoning field dedicated to “[investigating] not only how discourse is produced and distributed, but also how once delivered, it circulates, transforms, and affects change through its material encounters.”² Indeed, scholars from a variety of disciplines have taken up circulation as a site of inquiry, including transnational studies, political economy, contagion theory, memetic theory, affect theory, and public sphere theory.³

One of the most important moves in circulation studies has been the shifting of focus from “rhetorical situation” to “rhetorical ecologies.” In viewing rhetoric as an “ecological” model, Jenny Edbauer-Rice argues that rhetorical action operates as “a process of distributed emergence” within a “circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events.”⁴ “A given rhetoric,” she suggests, “is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field.”⁵ This ecological metaphor has remained one of the most compelling and highly prominent avenues for discussing circulation, particularly digital circulation, as it allows scholars to consider the various ways rhetorics permeate each other and construct networks of interaction.

The latest work in both circulation studies and digital rhetorical studies—work focused on big data, algorithms, activity theory, computer-mediated networks, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontologies—has moved rhetorical studies into newly important and relevant arenas.⁶ It is no coincidence that these fields of study have gained more traction in the last decade. In contrast to earlier print-based media, the widespread integration of digitality into everyday life has rendered circulation a central analytical concern, a shift made especially apparent through social media. However, this work is also characterized by an emphasis on circulation and textuality as embodying their own agency in ways that make it more Page 19 →difficult to consider questions of power and even more difficult to take up how writers might circulate texts to promote social change. While the move from a focus on the writer’s potential interventions (in rhetorical delivery) has usefully problematized the agency of the writer, it has done so at the cost of disembodying circulation.⁷

Much of this work comes out of the “new materialist” turn in rhetorical studies. A number of scholars, led by Laurie Gries and her renowned book Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, have taken up this new materialist approach when studying digital texts and circulation. Gries’s use of “thing-power,” a concept described by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter as the “force of things,” has been widely used in rhetorical studies on circulation to account for the ways in which objects move and perform rhetorical work on their own.⁸ Thomas Rickert, in Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, the first collection of essays focused solely on circulation, goes so far to suggest that we re-envision rhetoric as something object-oriented: “Rhetoric is ontological, and material things, as they circulate in their specific ways, become a site for conjoining and disclosing the world. To study circulation is to study how the world and the things in it, as they move and assemble, bring their own light—and their own pulsions.”⁹ This theory is premised on the belief that rhetoric, as it relates to mind and matter, cannot be based on the body—on the human subject—because rhetoric itself is “ambient” and thus defined by the interrelations of the environment. Therefore, the study of object-oriented rhetoric—with the understanding that “object” signifies all matter—supplants and ultimately replaces the human body’s role as rhetor.

While I agree that the circulation of objects elicits rhetorical meaning, such meaning is always already caught up in social relations and human interactions. I would argue further that such meaning is propelled by human bodies. To ignore those relations and interactions is to ignore power. Take the hashtag, for example. Dustin Edwards and Heather Lang adopt “a new materialist framework [that] allows [them] to examine hashtags as actors in their own right, to account for their ability to affect and produce affects in a diverse range of other bodies inside and outside of their networks of origin.”¹⁰ In echoing Bennett and Gries’s conceptual use of “thing-power,” Edwards and Lang place that power—the transformative agency—in the hashtag itself, not in the stories of women’s lived experiences that were produced and circulated by those same women. To say that “these transformations were all animated by #YesAllWomen’s thing-power” obfuscates the relation between the person and the “thing.”¹¹ It undermines the embodied exigence that Page 20 →led to—and continues to lead to—the (re)production of the “thing.” The rhetorical work emerging from the lived experiences of human bodies—hashtags accompanied by statements, arguments, and stories addressing sexual violence against women, white feminism, racism, sexism, classism—is an act of labor fueled by rhetors engaging in social discourse and social change. Such labor—the production and circulation of hashtags—cannot be reduced to metaphysicality. To continue to privilege the “thing” over the human body that creates, moves, and is necessarily impacted by that “thing” is to lose the exigence for rhetorical efficacy. Furthermore, this minimizes, and ultimately obscures, the uneven power relations at play in circulation. I argue that this obscuring of power relations—the dematerialization of lived experiences—is a product of the “new materialist” turn in circulation studies. “New materialists,” Gries claims, “specifically wonder, ‘What happens when the propensities, affordances, and affectivities of nonhumans are included in the action of assembling our collective common world?’”¹² My answer to this question is simple: you risk losing the body. To put it another way, such an approach affords too much attention to “nonhuman activity” and, in doing so, negates the bodies involved in that activity.

One of the reasons circulation studies has shifted its focus to the study of “object-oriented rhetoric” is due in part to the nature of digitality. Brett Lunceford focuses mostly on public sphere theory, but he makes a salient point that warrants attention: digital technologies have become “extensions” of the body to such a degree that those technologies have become personified as a kind of acting body—a “thing” with agency.¹³ The nature of digital media—social media, in particular—is such that hashtags appear to have their own agency. Like Lang and Edwards, I acknowledge that other factors—nonhuman factors—affect circulation. However, those nonhuman entities are still tied to human beings, still tied to social relations (hence “social media”). Human beings write the algorithms that determine the status of my tweet, the optimization of my hashtag. Human beings develop the platforms and digital genres that allow for something like the hashtag to become a “thing.” And yet, when I look at my Twitter/X feed or my Facebook feed, the bodies behind that work are often invisible. The authors/rhetors of tweets and posts get lost in the circulation of texts mainly due to the speed of circulation and the virality of the web. That virality has led to reactive rhetorical practices—immediacy undergirding response. We see a meme or a video on YouTube and we circulate it without knowing the origin or context. We see an image and not the photographer. We see human bodies in an image but we tend to think of them as just an image.

Page 21 →From a methodological standpoint, tracking the movement of a hashtag or an icon (as Gries does in Still Life with Rhetoric) can push rhetoricians to ask important questions about the circulation of visual rhetorics and about the viral, unstable nature of digital culture. Gries’s methodology for tracing and describing the movement of the Obama icon is a cogent one, and like many scholars in circulation studies, I see the significance in attending to the rhetorical transformations that take place within the digital sphere. However, if the methodological goal, as Gries states, is to “describe just a few of the multiple transformations and functions Obama Hope has experienced and taken on since entering into circulation,”¹⁴ such an approach falls short in that it privileges an infinite and boundless method of description at the expense of analytical, critical explanation. In forgoing explanation—in neglecting the “why” question—an account of historical and social relations of power is ultimately forestalled.

Once again, the tendency to focus more on description and objectivity is a result of the viral nature of digital circulation. In Gries’s work, for example, “virality” is defined as “the tendency of things to spread quickly and widely” and also a “consequence of the thing’s design, production, distribution, circulation, transformation, collectivity, and consequentiality.”¹⁵ In this sense, human activity gets disguised as “thing activity,” and the human as rhetorical actor gets displaced in favor of the object as rhetorical actant. As I explain in my earlier discussion of the hashtag, assigning consequentiality to objects—to things—eschews the lived experiences of the bodies that create, produce, distribute, circulate, and are impacted by those things. It also muddles what the field of rhetorical studies believes to be a vital and necessary consideration in the study and practice of rhetoric: ethical responsibility. To my mind, the flattening out of agency and actancy as distributed to all ends of an ecology distorts the relationship between the subject and object, the rhetor and the text, the mental and the material, and therefore deprioritizes the human body’s capacity to act ethically. This kind of logic, I would argue, is central to a neoliberal ideology.¹⁶ And here is why: in describing the relationship between rhetoric and the world through an ontological framework, one must assume an indeterminacy of scope and scale. As Gries points out, “a new materialist rhetorical approach focuses the most attention on the consequences that emerge once matter is initially produced, has been perceived as relatively stable, and enters into circulation.”¹⁷ Such an approach buys into a “free market mindset,” as it is predicated on a production process that is free of social and historical conditions, and therefore free of ethical concerns. And this kind of production process inevitably Page 22 →promotes a naturalizing view of “the market,” and thus a naturalizing view of a neoliberal economy of information where human agency and choice become less and less relevant. For example, it is easy to think about the “agency” of a hashtag because it is impossible to imagine that the hashtag would ever “act” with (or without) ethical intentions.

One can think about this distinction in the way we discuss digital texts, particularly in the way the nonhuman stands in for the human body: “blogs,” “tweets,” or “memes,” for example, stand in for bloggers, writers, and designers. But it is not the generic platform that works to ensure the virality of a text—it is the bloggers, the writers, the designers, the hands that create the platform and the algorithms that accompany those platforms. Yes, certain texts and digital platforms with higher levels of readability can and should be credited for their role in circulation; however, the idea of readability—visibility—is still very much reliant on the actions of human bodies. Visibility in digital spaces and in digital circulation is actually one of the most important reasons for studying bodies: visibility is a marker by which human bodies retain, maintain, increase, or lose value. Such visibility is also the product of human actors, particularly actors in power, with vested interests in economic, corporate, political, and global agendas. And many times, it is those bodies in power who remain invisible and do so on purpose. As political writer and activist George Monbiot eloquently states in his essay on why neoliberalism is the root of our problems, “The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers.”¹⁸ In my view, promoting a rhetorical framework of circulation void of ethical responsibility within a market system that falsely purports an equal bearing upon all matter—humans and objects alike—involves promoting a dematerialization of rhetoric. The “free market” is not free from social and historical conditions, nor is it free from power relations and ethical concerns; it is immensely fraught with them.

Scholars Alisa Hardy, Matthew Salzano, and Damien Smith Pfister problematize the relationship between power and digital spaces in a critical examination of how the transformation of Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership intersects with histories of race and systems of power through the lens of Black Twitter. They remind us that “every communication platform is owned, even if the identity of that owner is often ignored.”¹⁹ Black Twitter, they argue, functioned not only as a site of cultural production and community-building but also as a rhetorical force that challenged dominant narratives and asserted agency in digital public discourse. Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to “X” can be read as a symbolic and material shift that Page 23 →destabilizes the affective infrastructures—such as shared values, humor, resistance, and collective grief—that made Black Twitter powerful. This study directly connects to this book’s analysis of affect and digital circulation, as it reveals how emotions and cultural meaning are not just expressed but also mobilized and shaped through platform architecture and policy. The circulation of affect—memes, hashtags, reactions—becomes a site of struggle, as Black digital expression is increasingly commodified, erased, or policed under new platform regimes. Thus, one can argue that digital circulation is always entangled with structures of power, identity, and technological design, highlighting the stakes of who controls platforms and the flows of affective public discourse. ²⁰

Because of these stakes, it behooves scholars to address the dematerialization of rhetoric and, more specifically, circulation, as it unavoidably assumes a notion of passive agency. Human bodies become players in and of the system, passively moving and circulating objects—rhetorical actants such as hashtags—in order to ensure that those objects gain more and more rhetorical traction and thus more and more rhetorical value. This way of thinking situates rhetorical practices in terms of market practices, in terms of consumerism and competition. To be a digital citizen is to be a passive consumer, not a critical, engaged activist who plays a role in the what, the why, and the how of circulation. This is why certain political scholars like Jodi Dean are less hopeful about the web’s potential for political and rhetorical action.²¹ Dean has suggested that the web, in its globalized form, functions as a falsified notion of the public sphere. We come to the web to engage, to learn, to gather more information, and yet in our knowledge-seeking endeavors, she claims, we further postpone action because we never think we “know” enough.²² Thus, action becomes a perpetual delay while that delay becomes a kind of capital generation (in our continued search for more knowledge and information). Ultimately, Dean is suggesting that in our very desire to communicate, question, learn, and “know” things on the web, we become complicit in the power structures of global capitalism, an ideology with a vested interest in extending our inaction. This kind of participation, she claims, “sucks life out of political action. Action is postponed. ... This postponement is a permanent deferral.”²³ In the context of circulation, we chase the “deferral” without understanding why the deferment continuously occurs. While we might discuss “where” the text resides or offer insights on “how” it moves within its interconnected environment, we rarely delve into the question of “why” the text circulates. As a result, we fail to achieve a deeper comprehension of “how” the text gains Page 24 →momentum and enters into circulation. Descriptive research is important, but it is not enough to institute revision and social change in a system that deeply needs it.

To be clear, I am not arguing against the study of nonhuman activity. What I am advocating for is a shift in perspective—one that acknowledges social relations, the human labor and the bodies behind the “thing,” and one that acknowledges the human and embodied practices and effects involved in the circulation of those “things.” Catherine Chaput, too, has argued for this shift: “Rather than theorize materiality and sensation apart from institutional and ideological structures, contemporary theory would do better to draw new materialist insights back into the critical fold and to do so at a level of the physical body.”²⁴ Often, studies attending to “nonhuman” activity end up reinforcing ideologies that are detached from the human body altogether, and this detachment hinders any potential focus on power. Ignoring power absents us from responsibility, and this reality is a dangerous one for rhetoricians, writers, and activists. Digital circulation, now more than ever, is entrenched in a global capitalist system undergirded by neoliberal logics that delineate bodies in uneven and asymmetrical ways. To disembody circulation is to dematerialize the way we theorize rhetoric in relation to power and social relations, to agency and ethical responsibility.

When it comes to theorizing rhetoric within the context of circulation and power, Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson’s influential essay “Redefining Rhetoric: Why Matter Matters” (2019) serves as a useful reference. They argue for a reconceptualization of rhetoric by emphasizing the suasory power of matter-energy—what they call the “thing-symbol” that is simultaneously affective and meaning-bearing (similar to Chaput’s call for bridging the material with the ideological). They argue that rhetoric isn’t just a matter of signs and discourse; it is also material—that is, embodied in textures, atmospheres, spaces, and objects that modulate our sensory experiences and evoke affective responses through their aesthetic qualities. By bringing matter—the physicality of media, objects, and built environments—into rhetorical analysis that maintains the importance of ideological meaning-making, Ott and Dickinson underscore how these material aspects generate presence, contribute to how people move through and inhabit spaces, and facilitate rhetorical induction in ways that traditional symbolic-focused criticism overlooks. For rhetorical studies in general, and digital rhetoric in particular, this attention to affect and materiality is vital because it emphasizes the co-constitutive nature of materiality and human action. In digital spaces—whether apps, interfaces, immersive environments, or social media Page 25 →platforms—the material (e.g., interface design, haptic feedback, visual texture) and affective dimensions of the material profoundly shape user engagement, persuasive power, and community formation. Understanding rhetoric in the digital age thus demands attending not only to words and images, but also to how matter matters—how affect is transmitted bodily and digitally, influencing cognition, emotion, and action in interwoven sensory-cognitive processes.²⁵

As I have tried to make clear thus far, the study of digital circulation necessitates an analysis of power because the digital sphere functions as a neoliberal site of influence and control: power circulates in and through bodies and through the affective energies produced in those moments of encounter and movement—the affectual relations between bodies. Throughout the last few sections, I have referred to the neoliberal landscape that demarcates our worlds, our bodies, and the social relations in which we find ourselves. I have argued that, because neoliberalism relies on the body as a subject in need of governmentality,²⁶ attention to the human body within the circulation process is more important in the digital era than it has ever been before. It is fair to consider that the word “neoliberalism” itself is a kind of neologism in that it has been used to discuss, define, critique, and comment on an array of factors shaping both public and private life: capitalism and the economy, market fundamentalism and ideology, government and policy, and the self as commodity. Considering this neoliberal word cloud seems extensive and overbearing, and yet considering Kim Hong Nguyen’s neoliberal subject alongside embodied practices seems much less complicated: “Neoliberalism,” Nguyen claims, “produces a subject that participates in ways of thinking and acting that are in accordance to capitalist structures without having to evaluate how their thinking and actions compete or contradict other ideologies they may have.”²⁷ Thus, neoliberalism is found, supported, circulated, and felt in embodied practices.

I think of my own embodied practices. As I sit here at my computer, writing this chapter, for example, I receive a calendar alert reminding me of my department meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning. I then receive a notification, for the second time, indicating that I have three responses to the post I made yesterday about voting and the upcoming election. If I were to stop writing and move to my Facebook for a two-minute break, I would most likely see advertisements for table lamps or desk chairs in my newsfeed, which I would then couch as a calculated algorithmic move based Page 26 →on my Google search history (I have been redecorating my home office). In just three sentences describing my current writing experience, I have connected all four facets described above and I have illustrated the various ways my public and private life are entangled: personal writing time that is also tied to professional work and tenure and promotion requirements; professional/academic duties; personal and public social media connections; personal politics in relation to public democracy and voting; my personal shopping interests mined for public data. In some ways, these practices are automatic. I move between my Microsoft Word documents, my email, and my Facebook without even thinking about it. But I also realize the effects of these practices. If I spend too much time on Facebook, I feel anxious about neglecting my writing and research, or I feel anxious or angry about other things gleaned from my Facebook friends and newsfeed (e.g., the article about Trump and sexual assault accusations). If I spend too much time writing—“working”—I feel guilty for ignoring my email, where my work and “labor” appear to be more visible than my research to those in power, even though those in “power” are the ones who vote on tenure and promotion, and tenure and promotion are really about one’s writing and research.

These contradictions are key to a neoliberal logic. We seek out ways to make our lives appear as our very own enterprises, and this process is cyclical: neoliberalism operates as a governmentality that seeks to control and manage our feelings and affects through our everyday interactions, particularly the interactions that take place within and through digital media, and we, in turn, respond and reproduce these affects in our everyday embodied practices. As Chaput argues, these “affects” become a practice of automatic routine: “As we move, almost instinctually, among many different sites, we perform embodied practices routinized by the affect flowing throughout the television, telephone, and computer screens that litter our professional and personal landscapes.”²⁸

In circling back to Nguyen’s notion of thinking and acting “without having to evaluate” one’s thoughts or actions, which the embodied practices just described certainly illicit, I want to emphasize that such a perspective does not imply that evaluation is not possible. Without the ability to critique the ecologies we are in, we fall prey to the relations they create for us. Such relations, I argue, are best understood as affectual. And as I discuss in the following pages, such relations can and do allow for evaluation and agency.

Affect, as defined throughout this book, is an interactive corporeal process involving bodily responses, reactions, associations, interpretations, and orientations. It is produced relationally because it is socially mediated by Page 27 →bodily encounters with other bodies, with texts, with objects. While affect is similar to new materialist scholars’ interests in environments and ecologies, its concept of relationality is emergent but not necessarily unconscious or without agency. Affect is bodily in that it resembles a kind of gut feeling one experiences when faced with an interaction of some sort but extends beyond bodily feeling in that it continues and manifests in all different ways, through processes of emotion, through memories and histories, through cultural understandings connected to the root of that gut reaction. While circulation studies recognizes affect, it does so in a way that sometimes excuses humans from responsibility instead of pointing to the nexus through which humans might act.

For example, in studies on circulation, affect is usually described as an environmental force, embedded in an ecology. (Edbauer-Rice, in her inaugural essay, even uses the label “affective ecologies.”²⁹) Rather than a source of agency, though, affect is depicted as limiting our actions. For example, Gries herself refers to affect in ways that suggest it is impenetrable: “Things are especially contagious when they propagate affective desires that induce unconscious collective identifications and unconscious imitative feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.”³⁰ Here affect is attributed to objects—it is something that “happens” to bodies. Gries further describes this kind of action as “affective labor”: “Via affective labor, then, we might say, visual things especially acquire the ability, if even for a short time, to induce incorporeal and rhetorical transformations. ... In fact, I would argue it is because of such recognized thing-power that the image-invention not only went viral but also continues to circulate so broadly.”³¹ Here affect gets disguised as a metaphysical phenomenon. Affect finds us. It is forced upon us. We are interpellated by the affective agency of objects. Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit, in their introduction to Networked Affect, an edited collection on the relationship among humans, machines, and affect, note that “new materialist scholars detach affect from the specific materiality of human bodies and address it on a more abstract level of intensity, sensation, liveliness that animates and moves all kinds of bodies. This line of intellectual inquiry decenters the human subject—especially the individual—as the main focus of scholarly exploration.”³² Again, it is easier to label abstract intensities and objects as affective agents because it is easier—almost effortless—to assign affective agency to the visible “thing” circulating and not the human behind the screen circulating the “thing.” In that reassigning of agency, however, we arguably forgo any human responsibility in circulation, and thus we forgo any discussion of power.

Page 28 →This uneven process is a result of a neoliberal system of power, what Ahmed refers to as an “affective economy.”³³ Other political scholars have labeled it the “engineering of affect” or described it as a form of biopolitics.³⁴ In this way, affect can seem to transcend situations, tying together seemingly disparate encounters that are connected only by emotion. For example, Chaput sees affect as the “energy” that tethers and connects situations so that they are rendered transsituational.³⁵ She sees affect as the current that “binds separate events and gives shape to the world, amounting to a discursive process whereby energy runs through and connects an event to different, sometimes isolated and often unrecognized, moments comprising its overdetermination.”³⁶ I, too, see affect as transsituational—as the linkage between situations and events—but I am hesitant to go so far as Chaput does in overlooking the materiality of those transsituations, particularly because the digital is deeply bound up in a neoliberal economy of production and consumption. Instead, transsituationality should be considered a material facet of neoliberalism. As Chaput puts it, “neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.”³⁷

While Chaput does indeed take up the role of affect in circulation, she theorizes affect within the political economy, stopping short of considering how the digital and the economic play into that economy. I argue that affect must be thought of as the neoliberal currency of digital culture. Ahmed writes, “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.”³⁸ For my purposes, “affect” refers to the assemblage of emotion, bodily intensities, ideology, and place. Affect is the force, the “push,” and the projection of one’s bodily attunements and feelings onto a text in response to a specific idea, and thus a specific ideology. The “affect” is the emotional attachment or detachment to that idea—an idea that does not seem capable of being questioned, and thus an idea that becomes a belief and judgment deeply embodied in one’s personal experience.

In thinking ahead to the case study discussed throughout the subsequent chapters, I use the following example: when a white woman from the United States encounters an image of a veiled Muslim woman (regardless of the context from which the image emerged), that text may trigger an emotional response involving patronizing desires for solidarity in terms of women’s liberation (e.g., the belief that the veil signals oppression, and thus Page 29 →the need for liberation). That desire, though, is not just a result of their own subjective emotional feelings; it is a result of the cultural construction of liberation as a particular ideology, one that is grounded in Western contexts (i.e., white Western feminism). It is also a result of what Lila Abu-Lughod describes as a kind of Western superiority, enabling audiences in US contexts, for example, to feel “innocent, moral, and purposeful.”³⁹ When emotion (e.g., righteous pity), ideology (e.g., liberation), and place (e.g., the United States) merge, one’s response to a text becomes an affective projection, and thus what circulates is the affect—the belief that veiled Muslim women are oppressed and thus in need of “saving.”⁴⁰ That affect, as it increases in exposure and dissemination, has a polarizing effect, which ultimately results in the formation of exclusive groups comprised of those who relate and those who do not. In other words, some Western feminists may relate and respond similarly to the affective circulation of a righteous, “compassionate” reading of a veiled Muslim woman, while other feminists might see that projection as a problematic, colonizing move, and thus one entirely unrelatable.

As Ahmed illustrates, the languages through which we model expression operate as forms of power, shaping “how bodies are moved by the worlds they inhabit” and aligning “some bodies with others, as well as stick[ing] different figures together.”⁴¹ Words—signs—become collapsed into certain emotions and beliefs, obfuscating the materiality and contextual situation from which those words and signs emerged. Eventually, if the word/sign, along with its affective association, is repeated enough times, it fully detaches from its original histories and contexts, producing a disjuncture between signification and context/history. This disjuncture, Chaput would say, is both an example and a result of the “overdetermination of affect.”⁴² In fact, this historical and contextual detachment, seen in the image of a veiled Muslim woman, is what allows one to “fill” that empty space with their own affective energies. Affect both evacuates the image from its material grounding and provides the means through which it can recirculate within a different affective economy. In mainstream media, the veil, as it is usually depicted on a brown woman’s body, has become a symbol of oppression in the Arab world. (Consider the images that circulated in the media after 9/11.⁴³) Regardless of the context, or the goals and intentions undergirding the circulation and repetition of such an image (e.g., the image might have been posted as a celebration of Islamic customs), the symbolic association of oppression is always already culturally tied to the figure of a veiled Muslim woman, and thus that association is what gets affectively circulated, Page 30 →rendering the image’s underlying context and goals irrelevant. As a result of this continued disjuncture, Ahmed notes, “emotions, as signs, appear natural, personal, and ahistorical.”⁴⁴ Thus, affect is, in many ways, the attitude, evaluation, or “impression,” to use another one of Ahmed’s terms, of our bodily response that prompts us to either connect to or distance from the sign or object that carries the affective weight. This affective exchange is what produces material consequences for bodies. In fact, looking at affect as if it transcends materiality is really looking at affect as if it transcends power, as if power no longer matters. Instead, it is important acknowledge that one’s affective reactions are very much dependent on their experiences and dependent on their material contexts and locations.

Moreover, examining the ways feelings and emotions blur and mix between people, as described by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth as the “in-between-ness” or “accumulative beside-ness,”⁴⁵ is not enough unless we also consider how material, historical, and ideological relations and contrasts influence their dynamics, which in turn shape personal experiences. Lauren Berlant reminds us that “affective atmospheres are shared, not solitary” and that people are constantly assessing their surroundings and reacting to the emotional atmosphere they encounter.⁴⁶ Expanding on Berlant’s insights, it is important to recognize that reactions are seldom neutral, and fleeting moments are not without significance. Personal experiences of interconnection—such as sensing whether you are welcomed or excluded in a space—is deeply tied to broader systems of power, ideologies, histories, and narratives shaped by social hierarchies. For example, Maya Mikdashi, in her discussion of citizenship as an affective and performative category, argues that “it is only through repetition across a disciplinary matrix that the stability of the category of the citizen appears (and disappears).”⁴⁷

Indeed, the way these affective exchanges work in digital spaces is very frequently hidden from conscious attention (i.e., an ecology), which can lead, as it does for Chaput, to disregarding the materiality of affect and couching it as overdetermined energies. Moreover, the cyclical relationship between knowledge production, affect, and digital circulation poses many questions about the preservation of a status quo related to issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, geographic locations, and so on and how such preservation oftentimes remains invisible. It can be argued that web users do not necessarily “see” how the material effects of peoples’ lives are inextricably linked to our everyday interactions with digital technologies; they assume the opposite—that the web provides an outlet to read about these issues, to be informed, to take action. This phenomenon occurs as a result of global Page 31 →capitalism’s very reliance on and continual reproduction of what feminist scholar Rosemary Hennessy has described as “ways of knowing and feeling that conceal the exploitive human relations that the accumulation of profit requires.”⁴⁸

If we are to understand how capital leverages the affectual actions of everyday rhetors, writers, and activists, as Dean and Hennessy assert, I posit that we need to consider the system of production in its entirety—that is, the economic notion of use and exchange value. Whether or not users are reinforcing global capitalism in their decisions to engage on the web and produce user-generated content, this engagement is occurring and at rapid speed through processes of circulation. As compositionist Donna LeCourt has suggested, “If the knowledge economy is located in the manipulation of data into socially useful (or economically valuable) knowledge, then it is also a relation in which we can play a role ... How we circulate information, use it collectively with others, and leverage it to form collectivities can produce other exchange relations.”⁴⁹ Thus, by questioning the system of production on the web and the ways in which we play a role in that production, we can begin to understand the potentialities for the web to function as a space for social action. And furthermore, by interrogating the labor involved in that process, we can begin to understand further how social relations are formed, controlled, and maintained in that system of production. To Chaput, envisioning a response to the overdetermination of affect involves what she calls “communicative labor”—that is, the work of “[increasing] communicative exchanges that circulate positive affects.”⁵⁰ As the lynchpin on which neoliberalism turns, affect can indeed be a route to agency. Affectual relations need not work only in favor of capital; they can also work in favor of social change. And yet if agency and social change are the goals we aim to achieve, generating positive affects is simply not enough.

Instead, leveraging affect for social change is predicated on understanding why and how affect actually works within digital ecologies. If Hennessy is right in claiming that “subjectivity is constructed out of the available knowledges in a culture as they circulate in discourses and institutional practices,”⁵¹ then questioning the ways in which circulation on the web engages in, revises, and/or resists dominant discourses through affective energies is imperative, as such circulatory processes—the processes in which we participate—affect actual bodies and lived experiences. I suggest that we begin by acknowledging that circulation cannot be theorized effectively without taking into consideration globalized systems of power and their effects on bodies. We also must acknowledge that neoliberal logics manifest Page 32 →as affective energies undergirding our rhetorical practices of circulation and that those logics, and thus affects, are often concealed and invisible. And finally we must recognize that theorizing circulation within spaces dominated by neoliberalism, like that of the digital, demands a transnational analytic that enables us to see the transsituational nature of circulation materially. As circulation studies has suggested, the movement of digital texts cannot be understood through a single moment of rhetorical activity or a single emergence of a given text. Rather, the entire ecology of relations must be analyzed to understand the why and how of digital circulation. Rather than tying these questions to the material object, however, I am arguing that we take on an ecological view of affect—how affect connects multiple rhetorical situations, moving across time and space to instantiate global relations undergirded by affective rather than bordered relations. To my mind, an understanding of affective relations within the process of circulation can lead to affective agency.

In Chaput’s most recent work, Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates, she explores the significance of affect in relation to rhetorical agency, arguing that affect can be located somewhere in the middle of preconscious and conscious action: at times, we may not be fully aware of the roots of our affective responses or reactions, but this does not mean we cannot become aware of those roots. In her discussion of affect’s relationship to structures of power such as capitalism, she argues that capitalism’s resilience is not solely due to individual choice or material resources but significantly influenced by “market affect.” She defines market affect as a force circulating through and by individuals and groups, which operates physiologically yet traverses cultural, material, and environmental boundaries. This kind of affect functions in three ways: it opens or closes individual receptivity, pulls or pushes individual identification, and raises or lowers individual energies.⁵² Where agency lies, then, is understanding the roots of these affective charges. “To investigate persuasion from its affective core,” she argues, “the critic must begin with the effects and work backwards to find their embodied rhetorical provocations. Further back than appeals, lines of argument, and rhetorical frames, such work takes us to the question of what enables these signifying structures to work their magic in the first place.”⁵³ In considering Chaput’s call, what follows is my endeavor to seek out such “embodied rhetorical provocations”: the development of a rhetorical framework that examines the embodied relationality of affective circulation within a transnational context and its impact on bodies.

Page 33 →As I have explained thus far, reembodying circulation involves reseeing the process of circulation through a theoretical lens that centralizes power and social relations. I have argued that the relations in which we find ourselves are highly affective and that the affective energies that mediate those relations are always in transit—moving and circulating through our bodies inwardly and outwardly, connecting, aligning, and separating our bodies to, with, and from other bodies. Therefore, I propose that we bring a transnational feminist rhetorical lens to the study of circulation because, unlike other approaches to circulation, a transnational feminist rhetorical approach serves as an “interdisciplinary analytic, attentive to the constraints of neoliberalism and to the power differentials and inequalities that shape geopolitical alignments.”⁵⁴

In feminist rhetorical studies, in particular, a transnational framework has allowed for deeper examinations of the ways in which writing, rhetorics, literacies, and texts are always already involved in the transnational flows of people, ideas, policies, technology, and communication across national boundaries; transnationalist perspectives, in short, provide a vocabulary through which to understand rhetoric as transsituational. Wendy Hesford and Rebecca Dingo, in particular, have pointed to these movements through their transnational feminist analyses of public policy documents and human rights law, exploring specifically how narratives and arguments surrounding women and gender get constructed in such texts. In Networking Arguments, Dingo traces the various ways terms like “gender mainstreaming,” among others, are networked into new, oftentimes conflicting ideologies. Such examinations reveal how rhetorics shift in meaning “and thus have drastically different material effects.”⁵⁵ In Spectacular Rhetorics, Hesford examines the rhetorical frameworks and narratives undergirding global human rights discourse, pointing to the ways in which textual and visual rhetorics about human rights produce and construct new, and arguably problematic, subjects. Echoing the words of Dingo, neoliberalism has indeed made it “necessary to employ a transnational feminist lens to consider the vectors of power (often present within textual production through representational practices) that impact categories of identity, state sovereignty, and the markers of citizenship.”⁵⁶ When applied to the digital sphere, however, and when applied to digital circulation, I posit that these categories of identity are not so easily distinct as categories. Digitality itself appears on the surface to be Page 34 →so dematerialized that identity appears absent; a feminist lens rematerializes identity as part of its analytic.

Moreover, a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic captures and exposes the processes of movement arising from contemporary forms of globalization (on both micro and macro levels) and therefore can provide a lens for looking at how affect works beyond borders to instantiate neoliberal affectual relations that ultimately keep borders and power intact. While the term “transnational” can be thought of as a descriptive term for thinking about the literal movement of texts, people, ideas, and so on across (national) borders, I deem it necessary—and more useful when thinking about digitality—to consider these movements in terms of power, as contemporary forms of globalization operate more from the basis of supra-national agencies, corporations, and institutions, rather than from interactions between nation-states. In other words, in viewing the “transnational” as a kind of analytical lens, we can acknowledge the importance of power and borders (e.g., the “nation-state”) while simultaneously recognizing its limitations in understanding the relations between bodies that result from the proliferation of globalized systems dominated by neoliberal ideologies.⁵⁷

For rhetoricians and activists interested in social justice and social change, a transnational feminist rhetorical mode of analysis can allow for the examination of how subjects (e.g., women) are constituted globally through the circulation of affective rhetorics. In addition to an analytic, I see the “transnational” as an active, transformative site of encounter, connection, and collision. In viewing digital circulation from a transnational feminist rhetorical lens that is attentive to both critical analysis and possibilities for rhetorical efficacy, I explore how writing and rhetoric both reproduce and frustrate ideologies and power relations in certain spaces, so that we can better understand how to use our rhetorical agencies to leverage affect and construct more productive affectual relations within those spaces. But this understanding cannot be solely theoretical. If we want to bring bodies and power back into circulation studies, we also need to do so in a way that attends to the specificity of bodies within specific transnational flows. Reembodying circulation through affect means attending to the transsituational aspects of affect, as Chaput has argued, but in a way that also recognizes that affect is produced by bodies in real, material situations and uneven power relations. The “fixity” of the rhetorical situation may no longer be relevant, but material locations of bodies still matter. As a result, in the following chapters, I turn to the case study analysis of digital circulation across borders Page 35 →but with real material consequences for bodies. In doing so, I outline a theory of circulation—what I call “affective circulation”—that situates the body as integral to its process.

Revisiting the events introduced at the start of this book, the case study begins in March 2013, with Amina Sboui who, at the time, was a nineteen-year-old citizen of Tunisia and former member of the international group femen, and who circulated two topless photographs of herself on social media as a response to her nation’s policies regarding the curtailing of women’s rights and protections. In the first photograph, Sboui is holding a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other with the message “My body is mine, not somebody else’s honor” written in Arabic across her chest. The other photograph shows Sboui raising her middle fingers to the camera with the message “Fuck your morals” scrawled across her chest, this time in English. Both images moved rapidly through the digital sphere, sparking a series of debates, deliberations, and discussions with far-reaching implications. Following the initial circulation of her images and their subsequent rapid circulation by Sboui’s friends (and friends of friends) on Facebook and X, Tunisian officials threatened Sboui with physical punishment and then death for posting “nude photos.” In the ensuing months, this story and other closely related events would become the subject of many news articles, blogs, and social media posts across the globe. As the images circulated (by groups such as femen, MWAF, and the mass media), so too did rhetorics related to the body. This subsequent circulation involved changes and shifts in meaning, prompting a further circulation of new texts and thus new kinds of arguments that often came into conflict with the rhetorical goals of Sboui’s original texts.

In tracing these channels of circulation over an extended time frame, I examine not only which texts circulate and where they go, but how and why they circulate. Through this analysis, I offer a theory of affective circulation, a transnational feminist rhetorical framing of circulation that is grounded in an analysis of power, affect, and social relations. I do this by attending to affective circulation as a three-layer process:

1. the amplification of rhetorical arguments that emerge within the first four weeks of Sboui’s initial circulation;
2. the velocity of certain rhetorics that gain traction over the three months following the original posts; and
3. the endurance of the rhetorics that remain in circulation over extended periods, even spanning a decade into the present day.

Page 36 →Building on the work of other transnational feminist rhetorical scholars,⁵⁸ I rely on Inderpal Grewal’s methods of interarticulation and transcoding—terms that describe the ways in which discourses permeate rhetorics and change their meaning—to help explicate my analysis of digital circulation and its relation to power and social relations.⁵⁹ I show how, on the web, events and arguments get repurposed through their attachments to affect. This analytical process involves, for example, examining claims tied to premises—premises that are sometimes explicitly stated and at other times implicitly assumed or felt. To examine these premises, and to identify the intertextual and interarticulated ideologies undergirding those premises, I ask questions: “who is making these claims?”; “why are these claims being made?”; “how and where are these claims being presented and circulated?”; and finally, “who/what might be affected and impacted by these claims?” By attending to the effects of time, the interarticulation of ideology, and the transsituational movement of affect, this methodology allows me to look at both the conflicts and connections that emerge through circulation, as well as both the possibilities and limitations for other rhetorics to enter into the more established affective channels of circulation.

As I will discuss throughout the following chapters, what the amplification of Sboui’s images shows us, is that texts do not always circulate in their entirety; often they circulate in parts due to the circulator’s affective attachments to particular beliefs and ideologies. Such attachments can ultimately decontextualize and erase the original meaning of a text, giving that text a completely new and different message. Velocity allows us to see how some rhetorics travel faster and farther than others due to the urgency of the affective charges present in their movement. And endurance enables us to see how certain rhetorics retain powerful lengths of circulation such that their affective attachments become habituated feelings and emotions that ultimately solidify as normative beliefs and knowledge in the social and cultural imaginary.

Because circulation functions as an unstable process, it necessarily performs a kind of decontextualization of texts. Consequently, it is important to situate Sboui’s original text within the context from which it emerged to understand and remain aware of how that context gets dismantled through the very act of circulation.

At the time of Sboui’s protest, Arab uprisings had been occurring throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for some time. Page 37 →Reasons for these uprisings included resistance to authoritarian regimes, economic inequalities, and violence against women.⁶⁰ With new regimes often failing to address these issues adequately, Arab women, in particular, demanded change through protest. Scholars such as Marwan Kraidy, Frances Hasso, and Zakia Salime have written about the Arab uprisings in complex ways, arguing that an understanding of Arab women’s involvement in these uprisings requires the acknowledgment of preexisting feminist movements across the Arab world.⁶¹ In these complex landscapes, women find themselves navigating between entrenched political powers and emerging religious and cultural influences, many times with neither offering a clear path to gender equality. The envisioned transformation following the 2011 uprisings was about grappling with socioeconomic issues and political instability as well as the precariousness of women’s rights. Global interventions (and US interventions, in particular) exacerbated local tensions rather than alleviated them. Therefore, Hasso and Salime remind us that “these are multisited struggles with many historical precursors. Their conclusions have not been written.”⁶²

In Sboui’s case, and based on the published texts on the web, here is what’s publicly known about her rhetorical situation: Sboui, a citizen of Tunisia and an outspoken member of femen, a Ukrainian-born international feminist group, posted photographs on her Facebook page with the messages “Fuck your morals” (in English) and “My body is mine, not somebody else’s honor” (in Arabic) written across her bare chest (see figure 1). Within twenty-four hours of the initial posting, the images disappeared from her Facebook wall, and her social media accounts were deleted. Reports from femen and mainstream media sources, such as the Huffington Post UK and Jezebel, stated that Sboui had received death threats from Tunisian government officials for posting defiant “nude self-portraits” and was as a result forced to flee Tunisia and go into hiding.⁶³ In addition, for reasons unknown, reports on Sboui’s case use the name “Amina Tyler” instead of “Amina Sboui.”⁶⁴

According to several published interviews, Sboui posted the images as a response to her nation’s policies regarding women’s rights.⁶⁵ At the time of her posting, the government of Tunisia was in the process of drafting a new constitution, one that would allegedly alter, and perhaps take away, some of the rights already in place for Tunisian women. After the most recent draft of the Tunisian constitution was ratified in 1993, women’s rights in Tunisia were considered quite “progressive” in comparison to other Muslim countries. In many cases, Tunisian women had similar privileges to those of men: women had voting rights, authoritative positions in government roles, self-chosen careers, and more flexibility in their own interpretations of Islamic traditions and practices. In early 2012, the University of Manouba in Tunisia shut down over several disagreements involving “Islamic feminism” and the hijab. Many women identifying as Muslim feminists sought to redefine what it meant to engage in the religious practices of Islam while also staying involved in feminist praxes and feminist pursuits. According to Jeremy Farrell, writer for Jadaliyya (an ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute), these conversations between Muslim women in Tunisia contributed to “shaping a new discourse about what feminism actually means in its Tunisian context.” He goes on to quote a subject involved in those conversations, reaffirming just how serious Tunisian women were in disputing and scrutinizing notions of “feminism”: “‘Traditional feminism has been associated with the foreign, with the Western thought, with a certain attitude about women, and it is not welcomed’ [224]. A dichotomy had developed wherein the bulwark of secular feminism in Tunisia began to lose ground to a type of feminism—often espoused by men and women alike—emphasizing religious freedoms and rights.’”⁶⁶

Page 39 →In early 2013, Tunisian citizens were made aware that their constitution was to undergo significant change. At the time, various political parties had become more involved in the state’s national policies (particularly the Ennahda Party, a moderate Islamist political party, as well as politically active Salafi-influenced groups). Such parties began circulating new models regarding women, religious symbols, and a woman’s place/role in societal practices. This led to increased debate, particularly surrounding the newly proposed article regarding the relationship between men and women, which, according to Farrell’s translation, positioned women as “man’s associate” and “complementary” to men. The proposed, revised constitutional article reads:

The state shall guarantee the protection of women’s rights and support for their gains, in considering her a true partner with man in building the nation; the role of these two is complementary within the family. The state shall guarantee the parity (takāfu’) of opportunity between the woman and the man while accepting different responsibilities. The state shall guarantee prosecution of every form of violence against women. The content of these statutes does not differ significantly. They all ascribe a type of “complementarity” between men and women within the space of the family, with both forms of the personal status code making Page 40 →women explicitly subservient to the man, who is “head of the household.”⁶⁷

In describing the responses to this proposed amendment from Tunisian citizens, Farrell writes: “Reaction from secular feminists and the Western press was swift and damning, as it has since been in more liberal circles of the Arab world. Salma Hajri, of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women as quoted in a Tunisia Live piece, said, ‘I am distraught and worried. Women are not given rights as individuals, only in reference to men.’ The public debate spurred massive demonstrations throughout the country.”⁶⁸ Sboui’s protest can certainly be understood within the latter context. And I would argue that her response, in particular, moved this public debate beyond the borders of Tunisia. As a reader of Sboui’s text (I encountered her images of protest through stories from the Huffington Post and Jezebel), I initially viewed Sboui’s moment of rhetorical action not as an isolated moment of protest, but as a part of an ongoing global conversation. Her act arose from a specific, timely political moment, a moment in which discourses on women’s rights and specifically women’s roles within Islamic communities had been circulating for some time. Since 9/11, the United States, in particular, has made violence and oppression against women in countries that make up the MENA region a concern for NGOs, the United Nations, human rights organizations, and other globally focused institutions. Certain feminist organizations have contributed to these discourses as well, although in very different ways. Some have attempted to “reclaim” women’s rights issues as “their own” through active movements and protests both on and offline (Pussy Riot, SlutWalk). Two years before Sboui’s nude protest appeared on our computer screens, Egyptian Ailaa Magda Elmahdy posted nude self-portraits on her personal blog along with the accompanying phrase: “Screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy.”⁶⁹ In her chapter on Aliaa Elmahdy’s body activism, Karina Eileraas situates Elmahdy’s activism as an intentional effort to “use digital circuits to express and incite rage against the gendered and sexual status quo in Egypt.”⁷⁰ Several other posts similar to Elmahdy’s circulated the web in the years that followed, but none had quite the same kind of global response as Sboui’s.⁷¹ However, all of these bodily protests can certainly be considered as part of what Eileraas calls a “transnational genealogy of radical artists who use their bodies to disrupt the normative social order by challenging exploitation.”⁷²

Page 41 →Why did Sboui’s text receive such a massive global response? In her discussion of Tunisia and Tunisian subjects as “postcolonial subjects,” Lamia BenYoussef reminds us that “Across ideological divisions, anxieties about national identity and life itself are often expressed in gendered and sexual representations and attachments.”⁷³ Perhaps one might postulate that, given the messages written across her chest—“My body belongs to me and is not the source of anyone’s honor” in Arabic and “Fuck your morals” in English—Sboui may have been attempting to speak out against certain patriarchal norms and policies both within and beyond the nation of Tunisia. She also may have been engaging in a discourse of feminist critique already present in Tunisia. Even more interesting, though, is her decision to write those provocative, controversial messages in both Arabic and English—a choice that speaks to a rhetorical attunement regarding audience and readership, which seems crucial here, since it certainly invokes a transnational audience. In speaking to audience and rhetorical purpose, Eileraas reminds us that “such performances force audiences to consider the sexual, gendered, and vulnerable body,” and in doing so, audiences cannot really consider these performances outside of political contexts.⁷⁴

That said, while Sboui’s reasoning for posting such an image is certainly of importance, the point here is to look at its subsequent circulation and the meaning and justification implied through the text’s movement by and encounters with other bodies. For one thing, the posting and circulation of this text—Sboui’s individual confrontation—led to death threats from government officials. But it also provoked something else in the digital sphere: as it circulated throughout various social media and digital news outlets, it sparked other acts of rhetorical engagement. Her embodied text, once life-threatening, became a transnational rallying point, a symbol for other forms of rhetorical action. For some—particularly femen and femen supporters—Sboui’s naked protest symbolized an effort to combat patriarchal regimes, particularly those regimes associated with religion and the nation-state. For other feminists and activists, Sboui’s naked protest served as a transnational “standing up” act in the name of feminist solidarity and support for women’s rights. For others, however, Sboui’s bodily rhetoric signified claims about—or even more so, representations of—certain ideologies: namely, ideologies concerning a specific kind of feminist, a specific kind of gendered subject, a specific kind of place, and a specific kind of culture. Over the course of four weeks, Sboui’s text, and particularly her physical body, became a catalyst for constructing global narratives about the Page 42 →body with regard to several themes, four of which I discuss in the following chapter: the body-as-protest, the body-as-object, the body-as-madness, and the body-as-nation-state.

Through this chapter analysis, I take up the concept of amplification to explore and understand how these four themes evoke affective responses during their embodied circulation and encounters. Using Sboui’s case, I highlight how the interplay between a human body, a text, and the act of (re)reading and thus recirculating creates the affective moment that reshapes and redistributes a text and its rhetorical significance into new forms. This dynamic process is central to understanding the role power and social relations play in the process of digital circulation.