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Project Three: Creating Visual Rhetoric.

Christina Giarrusso

This text was supposed to make a statement about stereotypes that are associated with people who
look Asian, like me. People can generally tell from looking at me that I am not white, but they do not
know how to label me, so they ask, What are you? or Where are you from? perhaps in their
mind, a polite way to get to my race. Using a double exposure photoshop effect, I meant to tie
together my race, which people so frequently wish to know, and a photo of myself, the reason that
people wish to know where I am from, so that they can place me. In any picture of me, I feel like my
race comes to the forefront of the picture. It is clear that I am different. That is why I like how this
double exposure at once showed my features and obscured them, at once presented the flag and made
it dim. What I look like and my race are existing together, one sometimes showing up clearer than the
other, both distinguishing me as different and to some degree, unknowable. And this is a problem.
Alone, the image is probably more visually rhetorical for me than anyone else, but I have decided to
place it in a specific situation to better describe how it is rhetorical. As we have discussed in class,
context for the visual matters, and I would like to think about the site of audiencing to explore that.
To do so, I created a fake recipe blog, posting about food that is a mix of cultures (like me). As such,
one of the contexts for this text is public. This post is meant to be a noticeable departure from the
typical posts, using whatever following I might have amassed to speak on an issue related to the
purpose of the blog: to share recipes that are a mix of cultures to celebrate identity and a variety of
cuisines. I think the visual is rhetorical in that it is circulated to people who might identify with me
(and the difficulty of being judged and stereotyped on sight) or might not at all. It could spark people
to share their own stories in response to mine, or it might be an eye-opening visual for people who
might not understand what it is like for people to focus so much on how you look different, and how
looking different must correlate with certain stereotypes and ways of comprehending your difference.
There are multiple ways, then, that this text could be significant for the readers of this fictional blog.
I would call this a Bitzerian change in reality, with the possibility of an Edbauer-Rice-esque
rhetorical ecologywhat if readers created their own double exposures with their own flags, sharing
their own experiences of racism? It could be a way of taking back racism, and associating race with
pride instead of oppression. What if readers commented that they had no idea that people acted this
way toward me because of my race? The medium, then, makes this visual text rhetorical. If it had not
been (hypothetically) circulated digitally, and had just been an image I taped to the front of my
folder, or had just existed alone on my computer of photoshop creations, it would not have the same
rhetorical effect (or perhaps any rhetorical effect, unless someone interacted with it).
It might not be an argument on its own (as per Fleming), to audiences who do not know the context,
but I would like to say that another context it inhabits is argumentative. I want it to argue that race
is entwined with physical appearance, which leads to stereotypes, but Im not sure it can
simultaneously make a claim and support it. In that way, we might be able to say that it surely
represents something and becomes argumentative with context. I imagine, to someone who had not
read the blog post, it functions to say that I am a Filipina or that I identify strongly with a certain
country, which is not necessarily my purpose. With the blog post, the image might move toward an
argumentative context: because I look different, like I am from a different country, I am treated
differently. My physical appearance leads to questions about my race, which leads to a different kind
of treatment. But that I am also proud of my racial identity.

To me, the significance of this text is threefold: (1) it is an outlet for me to, using digital, visual tools,
creatively work through feelings about race that have bubbled to the surface in light of recent events
(2) it is personal, using an image of myself to convey how my appearance, race, and difference define
me, both to myself and to others, and (3) it is a type of activism, I think, that seeks to show and
challenge the ways that Asian-American women experience racism in America. While drafting this
project, I had trouble deciding whether to include words in the visual text. The words never felt right
to me. The significance for the class, then, might be that we must explore the ways that the visual
works with and without text. The ambiguity of the visual needs more study. What would this visual
say to someone who didnt plan, design, create, and post this visual text? Who isnt an AsianAmerican woman? Who didnt read the blog post? Would it be visual rhetoric at all, then? If I had
decided to not put this in a blog, but just post the image on its own, what words would work to create
the rhetorical effect I wanted to go for? We cannot control the function of the visual text, but we can
imagine what rhetorical effects it might spark. Is this enough justification for the claim that this
visual text is rhetorical?

Figure 1: The first draft, made on Canva. I

never put the words in because the visual
didn't seem right yet. I wanted to correlate
certain parts of the physical appearance (like
a science textbook diagram of the human
body) with stereotypes.

Figure 3: The final draft for this project.

I took out the text, creating instead a recipe
blog on Weebly. I wrote a blog post to
Figure 2: The second draft. I added in words because I
correspond with the visual. I think it looks
wanted to contrast common stereotypes (less opaque
cleaner now, and though it becomes more
because not true) with true facts about myself. I was never ambiguous without text on the image itself,
happy with this design. I couldnt make use of the space in I think that the blog post better conveys the
the ways that I wanted, and I never found font
context that I wanted to give this image,
comparisons/alignment that I was happy with.
and opens up the function of the image.