The (Parkland) kids are alright

Abstract

Wounds materialize in the wake of the event, when rhetoric inadequately indexes what is present in a situation. Such a position bypasses ethics from the transcendental ought or the purely descriptive is to an ethics grounded in an immanent occurrence. To give an example of this kind of rhetorical ethics, I turn to an example of a recent wound, the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the pathology of gun violence has created a wound that shattered our rhetorical sensorium. In the immediate aftermath, Emma Gonzales, a student and survivor of the Parkland shooting, seized upon this perspective on the wound to forge a new figure, the Parkland Kid, and with it new lines of argument. I argue her capacity to turn a wounding into a new subject illustrates a new rhetorical ethics that is inclusive; she became a subject of the shooting, the new Parkland Kid, that anyone is welcome to join. My contribution departs from the wound as a damaged attachment for its understanding as a productive force.

“Our Pain Makes Us Family”: March For Our Lives and the constitutive role of gun violence trauma in youth publics

“…Scholars have considered questions of racial difference in public and counterpublic formation (Davis, 2018;Jackson et al, 2020;Kuo, 2018); in this essay, I suggest youth publics must negotiate tensions across members' racial differences to account for the racialized dynamics of gun violence. Scholarship on publics has considered the ways that gun violence prevention discourses mobilize collective action around gun control legislation (Eckstein, 2020;Frank, 2014;Hayden, 2003;Rood, 2019). I contribute to this by asserting that gun violence trauma functions as a shared basis for participation to constitute diverse youth publics.…”