Books by Nathan Stormer
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Our reading group collectively wrote this volume, written as a multigraph, so we are a group auth... more Our reading group collectively wrote this volume, written as a multigraph, so we are a group author of sorts although Chris Ingraham was the lead instigator and organizer and he and Candice Rai did mighty work bringing it through production. Thanks to all for our time together, the great conversations, and the work.
The site does not accurately portray the authorship - there are six of us listed in this order: Chris Ingraham, John Ackerman, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Bridie McGreavy, Candice Rai, Nathan Stormer - Chris first because of his lead role, but then alphabetical.
The blurb from the book:
What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.
https://msupress.org/9781611864793/rhetorical-climatology/
Sign of Pathology demonstrates that from the nineteenth century forward abortion became a sign of... more Sign of Pathology demonstrates that from the nineteenth century forward abortion became a sign of social pathology within U.S. medicine, indicating to physicians that the culture was ill, attacking itself during and through pregnancy in a wrong-headed attempt to cope with reproduction. To know the extent and character of abortion was to place the United States in history; accordingly, medical discourse required a collective memory of the state of abortion not only to affect a remedy, but also to estimate the nation’s future and to take its measure across time.
“In Sign of Pathology, Nathan Stormer provides an original genealogical reading of the U.S. medical profession’s public discourses about abortion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone who appreciates Foucauldian perspectives should find admirable Stormer’s precisely developed argument that these medical discourses ‘made the chaotic material conditions of abortion’s morbidity rhetorically capacious for biopolitics.’”
—Celeste M. Condit, University of Georgia
“Nathan Stormer has written a stunning book, beautifully illustrating how rhetorical struggles over and through abortion have long been about situating ourselves—and pregnant women—in time and place. Civilization is recursive to the maternal body, with abortion positioned as a sign of collective disorder. It is precisely because abortion is a medicalized national metric that the issue is so intractable. Defined through biopolitics, abortion is perceived as a collective, irreparable wound, and ongoing political struggles reliant on familiar frameworks only deepen this intractability. Stormer’s elegant genealogy, both diagnostic and gently prognostic, has the capacity to shift how we see human reproduction and our place in it.” --Monica J. Casper, University of Arizona
Articulating Life's Memory offers a unique view of the history of abortion in early America. Nath... more Articulating Life's Memory offers a unique view of the history of abortion in early America. Nathan Stormer's work moves beyond general histories of medicine, science, and women; it provides specific insight into how the earliest medical writings on abortion served to create cultural memory. Nineteenth-century medical texts presented the act of abortion as a threat to the carefully circumscribed concepts of nation and race. Stormer analyzes a wealth of literature (and illustrations) from the period to explore the rhetorical techniques that led early Americans to presume that abortion put the integrity of all of American culture at risk. The book's first part provides a layered context for understanding medical practices within the rhetoric of memory formation and sets early antiabortion efforts within the wider framework of nineteenth-century biopolitics and racism. In Part II of the study, Stormer examines the substance of the memory constituted by these early medical practices. Making a major contribution to the study of rhetoric, Articulating Life's Memory will be invaluable to scholars researching reproductive rights and feminist and cultural histories of medicine.
Reviews:
Articulating Life's Memory is a timely and provocative book that restores a now-forgotten history to contemporary rhetoric and debates about abortion. Not only does this book give us new insight into the historical development of antiabortion rhetoric, it also illustrates how physicians and medical practices contributed to an understanding of abortion as a central threat to the national, racial, and sexual 'integrity' of the United States. (Carol Stabile, University of Pittsburgh )
This book contains a number of fascinating themes, particularly with respect to the evolving relationship of male physicians to their female patients, as they read the body using new instruments and techniques. (Journal of American History )
This book is a fascinating read and makes a major contribution to the history of the abortion debate and to application of rhetorical theory. (Rhetoric & Public Affairs )
This book does an admirable job of synthesizing significant works written on the wider topics of gender, women's bodies, and women's health. (Deborah Kuhn McGregor, University of Illinois, Springfield )
The book is rich with historical evidence, complex arguments, and critical insights. (Women and Language )
This book is a very important contribution to the ongoing work in the cultural dynamics performed by biomedical discourses of the nineteenth century. It is also an important case study into the value of post-humanist rhetorical methodologies for generating new knowledges about the constraints placed on traditional forms of public argumentation. (Ron Greene, University of Minnesota )
(from Amazon.com)
Articles by Nathan Stormer
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2024
Recipient of the Charles Kneupper Award for best article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly the previo... more Recipient of the Charles Kneupper Award for best article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly the previous year, Rhetoric Society of America, 2025
The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric's relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast "world" as "worlds" to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric's investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis) continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric's troubled place.
Rhetorical Climatology: By A Reading Group, 2023
This chapter is part of a multi-graph. I am lead author on it but we collectively composed the b... more This chapter is part of a multi-graph. I am lead author on it but we collectively composed the book. I suggest the following author attribution for this chapter: Nathan Stormer, Chris Ingraham, John Ackerman, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Bridie McGreavy, and Candice Rai. The usual practice would be to treat the group as the book's editors, but you will see we each comment within the chapters (the initials on footnotes indicate the co-author making that comment). There really isn't a convention that applies for a book like this so do as you think is best, but I would prefer having my co-authors on any citation for this chapter, i.e. Stormer et al.
Something like an abstract for this chapter:
Writing this, I am motivated by the exigent need to account for Whiteness, which scholars of color and allies have repeatedly demonstrated is constitutive of the study of rhetoric and by the simultaneous need to account for anti-Blackness, which Black scholars, writers, and artists have repeatedly demonstrated is constitutive of Whiteness. At first glance, this seems dyadic, recentering Whiteness against Blackness, rather than thinking triadically perhaps (“European-Negro-Indian”) as Sylvia Wynter advocates, or figuratively as Anne Anlin Cheng does regarding “Asian/Asian American women in American culture," or intersectionally as Kimberlé Crenshaw and many others have argued for. However, I am intent on accounting for anti-Blackness as decentralized within a Whitened environment, not dyadically, such that it variably affects power configurations. I ask, how to think about Whiteness in its anti-Blackness and in terms of rhetoricity if antagonisms are racialized and highly configurable? How to talk about race, rhetoric, and anti-Blackness without making White identity formation against otherness primary, or blurring dispossessive, territorializing projects and their violence into one another, or perhaps worse, establishing hierarchical “taxonomies of violence”?
Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2020
Discussion of this article on Live Theory podcast (thanks to Ryan Leack, Ellen Wayland-Smith, and... more Discussion of this article on Live Theory podcast (thanks to Ryan Leack, Ellen Wayland-Smith, and Vorris Nunley): https://www.livetheory.org/podcast/episode/314032bd/ep9-nathan-stormer-rhetoric-by-accident
This essay presents a concept of rhetoric by accident, which understands accidents in regard to the materiality of affection (i.e., the condition of being affected) and in regard to the unconditioned rhetoricity of affectability. The concept of accidental rhetoric put forth depends on the ontological condition of openness, so first affect is stipulated in relation to the porousness of material life to explain the inevitability of affection and provide the basis for understanding rhetoric by accident. Then the accident is defined in alignment with material openness. Rather than consider accidents in terms of human control over contingencies, accidents are defined by the contingency of purposiveness to affection. That affect occurs without purpose means that beings experience rhetoric without a plan (i.e., by accident). The essay then considers how rhetoric by accident is part of any particular rhetoric's existence, namely as a horizon of evolution and diversification for rhetoric.
Communication and the Public, 2020
This essay argues that pathology as an analytical form functions as the ethical critique of mutua... more This essay argues that pathology as an analytical form functions as the ethical critique of mutual vulnerability. In the broad sense of assessing what is life-giving and life-taking, a sustained critical engagement with pathological forms circulating through public life positions the study of rhetoric as a kind of immunotherapy for democracy. In that sense, embracing pathology as a critical analytic accepts biopower (expansively construed) as the operative framework for politics, which would seem like a kind of surrender to life-under-assault as the landscape of power. However, if wounds and their pathologies are understood as ethically ambiguous, it is possible to envision the critical potential of pathologia not only as immunotherapeutic but also as constitutive of new configurations of being together. Contrasted with a conception of pathology that presupposes a fixed difference between vital and morbid conditions, it is suggested that pathology be more precisely considered as the ethically ambiguous project of defining vitality and life that is “more than normal.”
Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, eds. Bridie McGreavy, Justine Wells, George F. McHendry, Jr., and Samantha Senda-Cook (New York: Palgrave), 2018
"Even within the circle of the special science we may find diversities of functioning not to be e... more "Even within the circle of the special science we may find diversities of functioning not to be explained in terms of that science. But these diversities can be explained when we consider the variety of wider relationships of the pattern in question."
-Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought
Not everything within the circle of ecology is ecological and, similarly, not everything within the circle of rhetoric is rhetorical. As discussion of ecology within rhetoric blossoms, this volume demonstrates that each functions within the other so we ought to "consider the variety of wider relationships of the pattern in question," as Whitehead advises. One can and should view this collection as a series of steps in a rapidly moving dance between two fields, but I prefer to consider the way this volume epitomizes a distinctively fluid, transitional space that brings together scholars who would not normally collaborate. Doing so, I discuss the commingling of rhetoric and ecology as a fluctuating margin that forms its own environment.
[Afterword to Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life - https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319657103]
Lisa Meloncon and J. Blake Scott (Eds.), Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (New York: Routledge)
Susan Wells and Nathan Stormer: This paper discusses the state of histories and historiography wi... more Susan Wells and Nathan Stormer: This paper discusses the state of histories and historiography within research on the discourses of health and medicine. Regarding histories, we trace the relative decline of research on previous eras in our field and consider the reasons for it. We consider what our field might learn from study of medicine before and during the professionalization of the field in the mid-nineteenth century. The abandonment of historical work, we argue, could cut our field off from critical conceptual resources. We describe how some obstacles to historical work are being removed and suggest some ways of incorporating historical work into the ongoing conversation of medical rhetoric and health communication. Regarding historiography, we consider the value of situating discourses of health and medicine in time and place, which includes what is typically understood as history as well as the employment of historiographic methods to situate the present as a historical moment. We demonstrate not only that rhetorical histories are important works for research on the discourses of health and medicine, but also that the connection between histories and historiography should not be overlooked. It is unwise to borrow historiographic practices without deepening our understanding of the past.
Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and an... more Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and any particular rhetoric is highly adaptable to the point that what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B. It is not safe to assume that we can account for rhetoric as a multiplicity or in its mutability. Despite an arsenal of terms to characterize rhetoric, how to talk about it as diverse?
This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence and changeability.
Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2017
Rhetoric teems with ecologically-inclined thoughts. This essay’s interest in ‘ecology’ concerns r... more Rhetoric teems with ecologically-inclined thoughts. This essay’s interest in ‘ecology’ concerns rhetoric’s multiple ontologies. The authors revise three commonplaces of theory to support discussions that follow from understanding rhetoric’s ontology as an emergent, materially diverse phenomenon: from agency to capacity, from violence to vulnerability, and from recalcitrance to resilience. The proposed commonplaces treat ecology as an orientation to patterns and relationships in the world, not as a science. The essay is organized by the three, interrelated transitions. The first transition defines capacity more fully in contrast to symbol-use as human agency. The second moves from thinking of rhetorical force as imposition, which is tied to violence, to a distributed sense of capacity derived from mutual vulnerabilities between entities. The third suggests that the persistence of rhetorical capacities stems from systemic adaptability and sustainability (resilience), rather than individuated abilities to resist (recalcitrance).
Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2015
This paper explores the material relationship of hunger to rhetoric.
Environmental Communication, 2013
Land-use changes can interrupt relationships to place, threaten community identity, and prompt i... more Land-use changes can interrupt relationships to place, threaten community identity, and prompt instability, altering the social and physical context and impacting the present and future state of the social ecological system. Approaches that map system changes are needed to understand the effects of natural resource decisions and human nature interactions. In this article, we merge theories of articulation, the event, and symbolic territory into a critical framework to analyze online newspaper article responses and blogs referencing a land-use controversy in the State of Maine, USA. Application of this framework reveals land-use controversies as place-making events that alter contexts and sense of place, and precipitate the re-articulation of identity in relation to, and through,symbolic territory.
This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical ... more This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical capacities that enable discourse to place itself in an ever-changing present. Mnesis is a meta-concept for the arrangements of remembering and forgetting that enable rhetoric to function. Most of the essay defines the materiality of mnesis, first noting the limitations of studying recursivity within dominant approaches remembering and forgetting in rhetorical studies, then describing mnesis as the performative necessity to fold the past into the present so as to provide “now” with a sense of place. After setting a foundation, the essay closes with a sketch of how to produce a genealogy of recursion.
This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Par... more This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Parenthood’s 1955 conference, _Abortion in the United States_. Conferees recalled a culture that was diseased, remembered both through social data on abortion pathology and epidemiology. The essay conceptualizes how to think of social data as a collective memory of secrets that is incumbent to biopower, particularly regarding statistical anonymity as a form of strategic amnesia. Although primarily a study of this conference, the essay notes the broader importance of collective memory and secrecy for the study of biopower.
This essay argues for articulation as a mediating logic for the analysis of biopower. Prenatal sp... more This essay argues for articulation as a mediating logic for the analysis of biopower. Prenatal space, particularly as it emerged around biomedicine and abortion, is used to demonstrate this idea. Prenatal space divides life within itself, forming a heterotopia “before life” where regimes of living converge in new and sometimes threatening ways around how to reproduce ethically. However, the history of abortion indicates a general strategy for controlling the political contingencies made possible through prenatal space. Relying on modernist space-time logic, nineteenth and twentieth century physicians reduced the practice of abortion to a sign of civilization, with some physicians contending abortion befitted savagery of the past, and others contending criminalized abortion was a relic of outmoded moralism. Wanted and unwanted regimes of living were reduced spatially to representations of time and segregated on a historical scale of value. From this example it is argued that mistaking the mediation of biopolitics as essentially representational diminishes the materiality of space and mutes biopolitical analysis.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Jan 1, 2008
This essay argues that popular images of the unborn by Lennart Nilsson and Alexander Tsiaras cons... more This essay argues that popular images of the unborn by Lennart Nilsson and Alexander Tsiaras constitute a rhetorical commonplace, “life.” The condition of that commonplace is a relationship of sublime wonder with the unborn that aesthetically demarcates topography for discourse on the order of life. However, that sublime relationship is enacted through an indirect mode of address that does not require the feeling of awe to function. Further, it is not an ordinary commonplace but a heterotopic one that establishes a terminal through which one can locate each life in relation to genes, galaxies, forces of creation, and any other living creature.
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Books by Nathan Stormer
The site does not accurately portray the authorship - there are six of us listed in this order: Chris Ingraham, John Ackerman, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Bridie McGreavy, Candice Rai, Nathan Stormer - Chris first because of his lead role, but then alphabetical.
The blurb from the book:
What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.
https://msupress.org/9781611864793/rhetorical-climatology/
“In Sign of Pathology, Nathan Stormer provides an original genealogical reading of the U.S. medical profession’s public discourses about abortion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone who appreciates Foucauldian perspectives should find admirable Stormer’s precisely developed argument that these medical discourses ‘made the chaotic material conditions of abortion’s morbidity rhetorically capacious for biopolitics.’”
—Celeste M. Condit, University of Georgia
“Nathan Stormer has written a stunning book, beautifully illustrating how rhetorical struggles over and through abortion have long been about situating ourselves—and pregnant women—in time and place. Civilization is recursive to the maternal body, with abortion positioned as a sign of collective disorder. It is precisely because abortion is a medicalized national metric that the issue is so intractable. Defined through biopolitics, abortion is perceived as a collective, irreparable wound, and ongoing political struggles reliant on familiar frameworks only deepen this intractability. Stormer’s elegant genealogy, both diagnostic and gently prognostic, has the capacity to shift how we see human reproduction and our place in it.” --Monica J. Casper, University of Arizona
Reviews:
Articulating Life's Memory is a timely and provocative book that restores a now-forgotten history to contemporary rhetoric and debates about abortion. Not only does this book give us new insight into the historical development of antiabortion rhetoric, it also illustrates how physicians and medical practices contributed to an understanding of abortion as a central threat to the national, racial, and sexual 'integrity' of the United States. (Carol Stabile, University of Pittsburgh )
This book contains a number of fascinating themes, particularly with respect to the evolving relationship of male physicians to their female patients, as they read the body using new instruments and techniques. (Journal of American History )
This book is a fascinating read and makes a major contribution to the history of the abortion debate and to application of rhetorical theory. (Rhetoric & Public Affairs )
This book does an admirable job of synthesizing significant works written on the wider topics of gender, women's bodies, and women's health. (Deborah Kuhn McGregor, University of Illinois, Springfield )
The book is rich with historical evidence, complex arguments, and critical insights. (Women and Language )
This book is a very important contribution to the ongoing work in the cultural dynamics performed by biomedical discourses of the nineteenth century. It is also an important case study into the value of post-humanist rhetorical methodologies for generating new knowledges about the constraints placed on traditional forms of public argumentation. (Ron Greene, University of Minnesota )
(from Amazon.com)
Articles by Nathan Stormer
The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric's relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast "world" as "worlds" to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric's investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis) continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric's troubled place.
Something like an abstract for this chapter:
Writing this, I am motivated by the exigent need to account for Whiteness, which scholars of color and allies have repeatedly demonstrated is constitutive of the study of rhetoric and by the simultaneous need to account for anti-Blackness, which Black scholars, writers, and artists have repeatedly demonstrated is constitutive of Whiteness. At first glance, this seems dyadic, recentering Whiteness against Blackness, rather than thinking triadically perhaps (“European-Negro-Indian”) as Sylvia Wynter advocates, or figuratively as Anne Anlin Cheng does regarding “Asian/Asian American women in American culture," or intersectionally as Kimberlé Crenshaw and many others have argued for. However, I am intent on accounting for anti-Blackness as decentralized within a Whitened environment, not dyadically, such that it variably affects power configurations. I ask, how to think about Whiteness in its anti-Blackness and in terms of rhetoricity if antagonisms are racialized and highly configurable? How to talk about race, rhetoric, and anti-Blackness without making White identity formation against otherness primary, or blurring dispossessive, territorializing projects and their violence into one another, or perhaps worse, establishing hierarchical “taxonomies of violence”?
This essay presents a concept of rhetoric by accident, which understands accidents in regard to the materiality of affection (i.e., the condition of being affected) and in regard to the unconditioned rhetoricity of affectability. The concept of accidental rhetoric put forth depends on the ontological condition of openness, so first affect is stipulated in relation to the porousness of material life to explain the inevitability of affection and provide the basis for understanding rhetoric by accident. Then the accident is defined in alignment with material openness. Rather than consider accidents in terms of human control over contingencies, accidents are defined by the contingency of purposiveness to affection. That affect occurs without purpose means that beings experience rhetoric without a plan (i.e., by accident). The essay then considers how rhetoric by accident is part of any particular rhetoric's existence, namely as a horizon of evolution and diversification for rhetoric.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought
Not everything within the circle of ecology is ecological and, similarly, not everything within the circle of rhetoric is rhetorical. As discussion of ecology within rhetoric blossoms, this volume demonstrates that each functions within the other so we ought to "consider the variety of wider relationships of the pattern in question," as Whitehead advises. One can and should view this collection as a series of steps in a rapidly moving dance between two fields, but I prefer to consider the way this volume epitomizes a distinctively fluid, transitional space that brings together scholars who would not normally collaborate. Doing so, I discuss the commingling of rhetoric and ecology as a fluctuating margin that forms its own environment.
[Afterword to Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life - https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319657103]
This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence and changeability.