almac82

In the article "Moral Panic and the Nasty Girl", paragraph 31 demonstrates the use of the rhetorical strategy logos. The authors illustrate how the nasty girl has become a "folk devil" that society has projected their anxieties onto. In this paragraph the authors use the psychoanalytical perspective to show their point. In psychoanalytical terms, the nasty girl is "more likely to be the object of projection rather than the source of concern and fear". This is to say that society has gone through huge changes in the last few decades; these changes has left people not knowing what to expect from the world anymore. These large, generalized anxieties tend to find a specific focus and create the phenomenon of moral panic.
This article specifically focuses on the gender issues that surround the increase in female violence and how this increase has deeply challenged the ingrained societal beliefs that girls are supposed to be "nice". Women have gone through huge changes in gender roles since the industrial revolution due to many shifts in society as a whole. These shifts have affected everyone in society, and are particularly visible when we look how roles and expectations have changed for women, because of this it becomes an easy area to project ones fear. This paragraph's use of logos to break down the reasons for the moral panic towards the nasty girl allows the reader to reflect upon their own fear projection and how the issues we tend to focus on are often symptoms of a much larger, more complex problem.

In Stephen Lewis's article, Pandemic: My Country Is On Its Knees, he uses a combination of logos, ethos, and pathos to demonstrate his argument. As a person who is most effected by appeals to emotional senses I found his use of pathos to be most convincing, though I must mention that his use of ethos in describing his long term involvement, connection and understanding of African culture made me more inclined to be open to his perspective. I believe that for most people to be convinced of an argument that they were either previously against or neutral towards, a writer must make use of all three appeals, though depending on the topic and the audience, focusing on one a appeal over the others may be key. In this article I found the focus to be the use of pathos, which because of the nature of the topic, I found it to be very effective.
Early in the article Lewis reflects on the time he spent in Africa in the early 1960's, he described a very different Africa from the one we know today. He speaks of Africa being "a continent of vitality, growth, and boundless expectation" and how though Africa was poor it "wasn't staggering under the weight of oppression, disease, and despair" as it is today. Lewis then reflects on one the "saddest, most wretched experiences of his life" when he returns to the Eastern Region in the late 1960's to find that many of his former students had died in the civil war, which "proved to be a premonitory glimpse of things to come". In terms of the present day situation in Africa, Lewis uses a number of individual stories to demonstrate his argument. He describes how the AIDS Pandemic has decimated such a large part of Africa's population that many children are left orphans to be cared for by their elderly grandparents or in some situations, taken care of by other orphaned children. Lewis has conducted a number of interviews with these grandmothers and shares some of their stories in the article. One he shares is of a 73 year old woman who initially had refused to speak until the women collectively sang a song of solidarity and love. After the song, Agnes shares a short story of unbelievable heart break. She had lost all five of her adult children in a few year span and was left with four orphan grandchildren, all of which are HIV-positive. If this story doesn't appeal to a persons' emotional sensitivities, I don't know what would. Later in the article he describes an experience he had while visiting a pediatric hospital in Zambia where after hearing "otherworldly wail" he turns to see a young mother "crazed by loss" as a nurse places a sheet over an infants body and carries it away. He saw this same episode twice more in his forty minute stay. He then describes how coffins are in such high demand that a Catholic AIDS organization in Namibia has an income generating project of making paper maché coffins for infants and how they "can't keep up with the demand".
Lewis begins by providing the reader with a picture of what Africa once was, a place of hope and promise, and then paints a picture of the present day situation, "a quagmire of despair". Many of the examples Lewis provides demonstrates his use of the appeal of pathos to prove his argument that many countries in Africa are in great trouble, but there is hope if we can explore how such a promising continent got into this situation.

Discussion Question- Pathos is a common appeal used in humanitarian arguments, do you find that you are less affected by these stories than you think you should be? Why do you think that might be?

In the Ted talk given by Chimamanda Adichie, "The danger of a Single Story", and Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail", they speak of how the stories we tell have the power to oppress or empower. Chimamanda Adichie begins her talk by reflecting on her first experience of how stories influence our world view. As a child growing up in Nigeria, she read British children's books that spoke of white British children who ate apples, drank ginger beer and had snow, none of which reflected her experiences in Nigeria. This left Chimamanda to believe that Nigerian's were not involved in the world of literature, a story she learnt to be untrue as she got older. The next story That Chimamanda speaks of the story of her family's house boy, Fedai; As a child, Chimamanda continuously heard of how Fedai and his family were very poor, and because "all [she] ever heard about them was how poor they were [it] became impossible for [her] to think about them as anything but poor". Through meeting Fedai's family she learnt how having a single story of people was not only incomplete, but has the ability to "rob people of their dignity". In Martin Lurther-King's letter he speaks of the single story in terms of the experience of African Americans, and how the "southland [has] been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue", showing that when a story is being told from only one side it most often is oppressing the side that is not being heard. When speaking of the southern segregation laws he shows the single story of segregation in how "the segragator [is given] a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority".
Both Adichie's Ted Talk and Martin Luther King's letter demonstrate how our stories have the ability to flatten peoples experience and oppress, or see people as dynamic and empower them. King speaks of African Americans being reminded "of [their] birthright of freedom", which subsequently empowered them to change their story. This also demonstrates that when people stop believing their own stories of oppression, new stories begin to emerge.

Question - Can you think of stories in your own life that oppress yourself or others? How can you change those stories to be stories that provide empowerment?