A Communicology of the Oval Office as Figural Rhetoric: Women, the Presidency, and a Politics of the Body

• In Event: Rhetorical Practice and the Politics of Gender

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Oval Office as figural rhetoric and critiques the trope, “it’s only a matter of time” before a woman ascends to the presidency. We explicate how the semiotics of such a rhetoric constrains conscious experience by forming a pattern of omission. We contend that productive agency and efficacy for women in politics resides in the communicative praxis of "versioning,"  a concept that acknowledges the tropological qualities of phenomenological semiosis.

Authors

• Deborah Eicher-Catt, Penn State University, York

• Jane Sutton, Penn State University, York