A Story To Tell: Seeing Through the Minds of Two Admirals

Visual-material rhetoric is a methodological framework developed by Amy D. Propen (2012) to analyze and understand visual artifacts, as explained in her book  Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, The Mill, & The GPS. By combining Foucault’s theory of heterotopias with Blair’s material rhetoric, Propen proposes her own methodological framework called visual-material rhetoric of heterotopias. She explains that in visual-material rhetoric, Foucault’s theory of heterotopias functions with a focus “on understanding spaces as heterogeneous, selective, contested, and culturally situated. Blair’s theory of material rhetoric then helps us better understand the consequences of different spaces on the body” (p. 21). In this sense, visual-material rhetoric does not only focus on the cultural context of heterotopias; it also considers the bodily experiences connecting space with place. In another term, visual-material rhetoric sees heterotopic spaces as embodied territories with a focus on the socio-cultural context of formal elements and bodily experiences connecting space and place.