A Summer Back Home

2023 Cody Harris Allen Fund, Second-Runner Up

I didn’t plan on it. Going out. In the absence of my college town’s dancing landmarks, silent disco became home on the weekends, nestled in historic Five Points between the Sunray Cinema and a boutique. I’m all too familiar with Park Street from the countless antique shop visits and my friends stashing rings in their pockets from Midnight Sun. When the headphones weigh heavy, we tumble into Birdie’s where the patrons are flushed from liquor and the red lights. I always left with a black-and-white photo booth strip of whoever was honored and enervated by my presence that night. The air lies murky from the afternoon shower with no breeze to help us out. My hair sticks to my skin. It was routine.

Tonight began the same. We gossip and apply mascara and drink courage hastily to pile in the car of the night’s sober sacrifice. The backseat window plays me a swift reel of life here before I left: my first house show, the overpass a date took me to, the park I took homecoming photos at. Music and laughter reverberate in the car and I lose focus of the scenes, it’s more fun this way. To be present.

The headphones have a switch to change channels: red, green, or blue. The crux of a silent disco is that everyone can dance to different music, but everyone can dance. Yet when you see your friends’ headphones light up blue and yours are red, there’s unspoken coercion, a curiosity, that makes you pull the switch. Amidst the crowd, I see girls I went to high school with and family friends who babysat me. Jacksonville is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States, but it’s too small to never see your sophomore year chemistry partner again. Inebriation dissipates any care for perception.

It’s the second part of the routine, where we tumble into Birdie’s.

“Let’s stay longer.”

“How about Alexis? She wants to leave now.”

“She can drive back and we’ll just Uber. It’s $10 and we’re splitting it three ways.”

That’s all the convincing Julia and I need to stay. Livvy’s good at that. We stagger out of the hot restroom and dance as the TV plays The Lighthouse. It reminds me of when I watched it on a plane ride home. What an odd choice, I think.

Julia’s nowhere to be seen and Livvy’s dancing with a man someone would find attractive at a Home Depot, enough to make you look twice in the light fixture aisle, but not anywhere else. I would learn later that his name is Jack and his friend who’s about to approach me is Mac. He’s drunk and wearing flip-flops.

“Where do you go to school?” Mac asks in that familiar cadence of a man talking to you in a club, almost yelling.

“FSU, how about you?”

“I just graduated from Washington & Lee.” I swore he said “Washington Elite” all night.

“Where’s that?”

“Virginia. My girlfriend lives in North Carolina. Do you want a drink?”

“Sure.”

The platonic aura of the conversation soothes the guilt of accepting his drink. When your friend is busy with a guy, the least you can do for her is to entertain his friend. It’s a unique vacuum forged by two individuals conscious of their respective friend’s concupiscence and drunkenness. Two people brought together by the chemistry they don’t personally feel.

We leave Birdie’s and find Julia laying in a patch of grass by the dumpster. “Hey, I’m going back with Jack. He said you and Julia can come, too,” Livvy says. Cheap liquor peregrinates from my veins to the brash brain that concedes to the offer. My mom’s words echo in me but are not loud enough for me to listen. “Don’t leave with strangers.” “Don’t talk to strangers.” “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”

Jack drives us in his truck back to his house. The backseat reel resumes as we enter Historic Riverside: the picturesque neighborhoods my mom would drive by that made me think “if I stayed here, this is where I’d live” and the yellow house from summer camp years ago. The reel pauses when he parks in front of a white brick house with rounded bushes and a balcony. There’s a bench by the guest house where I imagine the Downtown Fourth of July fireworks scintillate over. Jack and Mac lead us to the pool overlooking the St Johns River, the winding freshwater that links every neighborhood, each crevice of my hometown.

As time submerges into the pool, we lose one too many garments from our downtown rendezvous. Livvy and Jack swim towards the end of the pool but we aren’t interested in that. Julia and I are too busy giggling at the circumstance, swimming with strangers so late in the night, asking one another “is this real?” every couple of minutes. Mac flips me underwater like my friends would at an Adventure Landing birthday party. The feeling is similar, too. Delirium that transpires after 3:00 AM is reminiscent of riding the Eye of the Storm, over and over again until the lifeguard closes the gate.

Picking up the pieces of the night before is a feminine ritual, like sharing lipgloss or lending your favorite top to a friend for the bar. We pick apart the night like a month old manicure, filling in blanks that fell victim to wilted anamnesis. “I need to remember I can’t do the same things here that I do in college,” Livvy says as she recollects her judgment. The sentiment sticks. But maybe you can. What stops you? Your hometown is not the same place you left before college. It doesn’t wait for you. You don’t go to Memorial Park for homecoming pictures anymore or summer camp in Riverside. You aren’t relying on Mom for a ride or picking out Barbies for birthdays or overcoming a waterslide. Home changes as you change, even if it’s the same zip code you’ve rehearsed for 18 years. Redundancy metamorphoses into nostalgia, a nostalgia that arouses the occasional “I came here with my friends once,” but fuels adult curiosity for the unknown in the most known place in your world.

“Girlboss, Gaslight, Gatekeep: The Implications of Neoliberal Feminism on Women in the American Workplace”: A Rhetorical Analysis

2022 McCrimmon Award for Outstanding College Composition Nominee

Introduction

No definition of “girlboss” would be complete without the mention of Elizabeth Holmes, the former female entrepreneur that frauded the United States healthcare industry with her feigned blood-testing technology. Epitomized as an emblem of female corporate success in a male-centric field, her ultimate collapse rather exemplifies the hollow promise of neoliberal feminism and its championship of women in the American workplace. As defined by Professor Catherine Rottenberg, neoliberal feminism acknowledges gender inequality yet denies the role of socioeconomic and cultural structures in women’s lives (Rottenberg, 2017). When observed in retrospect, Elizabeth Holmes’ CBS This Morning interview and Catherine Rottenberg’s article, “Neoliberal Feminism and The Future of Human Capital,” function not only as a comparison of two mediums but also as an example and a critique, respectively. Due to its palatability towards a general audience with its use of emotional appeals, Holmes’ interview performs more effectively than Rottenberg’s study in terms of rhetoric. The wider magnetism of the interview also reflects the congenial nature of neoliberal feminism in the current socio-economic environment, where the quantity of female corporate success is used as a measurement of modern women’s liberation, a recurrent critique in Rottenberg’s article that predicts the rise of figures like Elizabeth Holmes.

Artifact #1

In a CBS This Morning interview, Elizabeth Holmes reveals her mission to make blood testing more accessible and affordable at drugstores through her now-defunct biotech startup, Theranos (CBS Morning, 2015). Posted in April 2015, the video is examined in retrospect to her nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for the administration of falsified blood test results. The visual constitutes an interview because of the questions asked by journalist Norah O’ Donnell regarding Holmes’ background and the impetus for her invention that Holmes touted would require only one drop of blood for tests. Aired on CBS, the segment delivered its narrative through television and accessible through YouTube. Norah O’ Donnell rose to fame as a television journalist and was the co-anchor of CBS This Morning at the time of the video’s broadcast. Now, the Georgetown University alumni appears as the anchor of CBS Evening News and Chief White House Correspondent for the network. CBS News remains the news division of CBS Television Stations and is positioned center-left in terms of political bias. Therefore, much of its audience includes liberal Americans or moderates who lean left that resonate with CBS’ reporting. The interview occurred as a response to Elizabeth Holmes’ new title as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire and to share her ambitions with their audience.

Artifact #2

In Artifact #2, Catherine Rottenberg explores the role of neoliberal feminism in the careers of middle-class women (Rottenberg, 2017). Rottenberg cites phenomena such as hookup culture and companies encouraging the freezing of eggs to indicate that this postfeminist movement emphasizes future-oriented choices. Furthermore, she states that rather than empowering women, these tactics transition women into human capital. Her article constitutes academic writing with its use of jargon specific to her discourse community of feminist theorists, such as “masculinist feminism” and “homonationalism.” Because the article was published through the University of Chicago Press, its medium is an academic journal. Operated by the University of Chicago, they print over 80 scholarly journals that vary from humanities to physical sciences and remain one of the oldest operating university presses in the United States. Rottenberg published her book, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, and is an Associate Professor in American & Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Previously, Rottenberg served at numerous prestigious institutions as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting professor at Columbia University. Catherine Rottenberg’s work relies on the college-educated audience and fellow experts within the feminist, critical race, and urban theory research field. In “Neoliberal Feminism and The Future of Human Capital,” Rottenberg cites modern, feminist manifestos such as Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” as momentum for her research. The notions within these works that inspire the “add women and stir” method and work-life balance myths embody her definition of neoliberal feminism; Catherine Rottenberg’s publication refutes these concepts and refers to the commodification of the female body as a repercussion.

Ethos

Through varying methods, both the interview and the academic article refer to the credibility of their organization and expertise to demonstrate credibility. In the CBS interview with Elizabeth Holmes, Norah O’Donnell establishes Holmes’ educational history as a Stanford student who left her elite university to revolutionize the laboratory diagnostics industry. O’Donnell also discloses that Elizabeth Holmes became the youngest member of the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit educational organization (CBS Morning, 2015). Author Catherine Rottenberg does not explicitly broadcast her qualifications to deliberate neoliberal feminism, however, her background as an Associate Professor in American & Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham and visiting professor at Columbia University indicates her knowledge on the subject (Rottenberg, 2017). Though Rottenberg remains more credible within her field, the emphatic ethos within Holmes' interview creates a more cogent appeal to the audience; her choice to leave Stanford University to pursue entrepreneurship adds the complexity of grit in conjunction with institutional affirmation.

Pathos

To create a sense of innocence, CBS This Morning includes a letter Elizabeth Holmes wrote to her dad as a child where she dreams of achieving the impossible. She links her success as “living proof” of female, corporate progress to young women as an appeal to the neoliberal feminist trend within the United States. Most notably, Holmes sports a black turtleneck and a distinct, deep voice that draws visual parallels to revolutionaries such as Steve Jobs, perhaps to stir nostalgia (CBS Morning, 2015). In terms of pathos, Catherine Rottenberg’s “Neoliberal Feminism and The Future of Human Capital” lacks the factor but it must be noted that the article contains research and acts as an academic piece. Because her article relies on the college educated audience and fellow experts within the feminist, critical race, and urban theory research field, emotional enticements remain rare within the text (Rottenberg, 2017). The wider appeal of Holmes’ interview reflects the exact phenomenon Rottenberg refers to in her work; the idolization of powerful, female figures and the advertisement of its attainability remains more beguiling than fixing the systemic obstacles that less-privileged women face.

Logos

As a logos appeal, O’Donnell provides insight into current blood testing prices and subsequently reveals a visual of Theranos’ affordable option in comparison to other labs (CBS Morning, 2015). Elizabeth Holmes establishes relevancy by recognizing her doubts by critics but citing such appraisals as an indication of “[doing] something that’s transformative.” Likewise, Catherine Rottenberg utilizes logos appeals with data from surveys of women and their desire for work-life balance and statistics of how many women can truly reach that goal. She highlights the urgency of the spread of neoliberal feminism in the United States to underscore the necessity to focus on working-class and poor women (Rottenberg, 2017). Rottenberg’s expertise within gender studies gives her indisputable dominance in the field of reasoning and explains that neoliberal feminism emerged as a feminism that neoliberal governmentality regurgitated in their image, where individual, middle-class women become both the problem and solution within their professional sphere. However, if neoliberal feminism easily acquiesces within the socioeconomic mores of the United States, then Holmes’ interview performs better within logical appeals because of its digestible ambition of female, corporate success.

Conclusion

As previously stated, the general palatability of Holmes’ interview reflects the effectiveness of rhetorical appeals and examples of achievement in the corporate setting rather than the critique of said circumstances. In future criticisms of neoliberal feminism, authors must utilize the mainstream media and more accessible vocabulary to resonate with the general public and stir reconsideration of America’s idolization of female CEOs as a marker of progress. Short videos such as Holmes’ interview and visual conjurations require less effort by the audience and therefore are more persuasive than lengthy academic studies. However, realistically, members of the audience should focus on research and question widely accepted messages because of the ubiquity of deception by not only the mainstream media but figures such as Holmes that tout promising concepts with hollow execution.

References

CBS. (2015). Youngest self-made female billionaire takes high-tech approach to blood testing. CBS Mornings. United States. Retrieved October 26, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiNFXcI9Rb8.

Rottenberg, C. (2017). Neoliberal feminism and the future of Human Capital. Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol 42, no 2. Retrieved October 26, 2021, from https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/688182.