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Isaac West

Assistant Professor

My academic interests are located in the discursive circuitries associated with rhetorical, legal, cultural, and queer studies. As a rhetorical critic interested in the ways individuals negotiate the constitutive and sometimes antagonistic elements of liberal-democratic culture (including the rule of law, equality, difference, and liberty), the integration of these interdisciplinary perspectives productively complicates and interrogates the rhetorical tradition while also affording me the opportunity to interject a more robust understanding of rhetoric into the conversations of our disciplinary cousins. In the future I plan to teach courses focused on rhetoric, law, and culture, argumentation and advocacy, and feminist/queer rhetorics.

In terms of my research, I am currently working on a book manuscript titled Legal Trans/scripts: Transgender Rhetorics of Law and Everyday Life. Operating at the intersection of rhetoric, law, and everyday life, I examine how transgender individuals, or transpeople, make their lives more livable within heterosexual and bigendered hegemonies. While many rhetorical legal studies isolate the practice of the law to the courtroom, I suggest that if we want to truly understand the rhetorical effectivities of the law, they cannot be understood apart from the ways in which individuals invoke the law and notions of legality in their quotidian practices. To narrow this broad topic, I examine the experiences of transpeople to demonstrate how individuals who are strangers to the law—they generally do not enjoy the privilege of legal protection or recognition—employ the law as a way to manage stranger relationalities. These negotiations suggest that the law is performatively reproduced, and our identities and the law are not hegemonically prefigured; rather, the law and our sense of self is continually undone and reconstituted through these dialectical exchanges. The textual bases of my manuscript include archival materials, interviews, documentaries, and city council meetings—a diverse set of texts that engage the obvious and not-so-obvious ways that the law implicates and is modified by quotidian practices.