Casey Kelly
Dr. Casey Ryan Kelly is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His broad research interests in rhetoric, critical media studies, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies include the rhetoric of white masculinity, white supremacy, and the rhetoric of the far-right. He has also publish work on the rhetoric of indigenous activism and political antagonisms over race and sexuality in contemporary media culture.
He is author of four books, including Apocalypse man: The death drive and the rhetoric of white masculine victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization (Lexington Press, 2017), and Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film (Rutgers University Press, 2016). His forthcoming book Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment (Oxford University Press) draws from rhetorical and psychoanalytical theories of spectatorship to theorize unsublimated white masculinity as its excesses irrupt into public life—including the infamous Access Hollywood Tape, celebrity racist rants, Donald Sterling's racist confession tapes, and the doom scroll of racist rants and public freak outs on YouTube.
Kelly's work regularly appears in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Kelly was the 2018 recipient of the National Communication Association's Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award.
Address: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Department of Communication Studies
361 Louise Pound Hall
Lincoln, NE
68588-0329
He is author of four books, including Apocalypse man: The death drive and the rhetoric of white masculine victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization (Lexington Press, 2017), and Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film (Rutgers University Press, 2016). His forthcoming book Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment (Oxford University Press) draws from rhetorical and psychoanalytical theories of spectatorship to theorize unsublimated white masculinity as its excesses irrupt into public life—including the infamous Access Hollywood Tape, celebrity racist rants, Donald Sterling's racist confession tapes, and the doom scroll of racist rants and public freak outs on YouTube.
Kelly's work regularly appears in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Kelly was the 2018 recipient of the National Communication Association's Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award.
Address: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Department of Communication Studies
361 Louise Pound Hall
Lincoln, NE
68588-0329
less
InterestsView All (35)
Uploads
Books by Casey Kelly
Journal Articles by Casey Kelly
speakers on college campuses are an opaque vehicle for White
supremacy. Revisiting Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance
through the lens of Critical Race Theory, this essay sketches
the features of repressive victimhood: the advancement of categorical
minority status orchestrated to shield white people from
charges of intolerance while reframing counterspeech as commensurate
with overt bigotry.
political ads. We argue this genre represents the enactment of White
masculinity through the spectacle of violence that capitalizes on the
spectacular qualities of networked media environments to spread and legitimize a recuperative White male politics. We contend such ads operate as a form of inferential racism and racial code of Whiteness. We suggest they do so by trafficking in the hypermasculinity and phallic symbolism of gun culture, standing up to threats to hegemonic masculinity, and reserving the possibility of violence against those who challenge White male dominance.
assessments of President Donald J. Trump’s appeals to rage,
malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an
underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization,
resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on
the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a
subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent,
subjugated and unable to act on or adequately express
frustration. Though anger and resentment capture part of Trump’s
affective register, I suggest that ressentiment accounts for the
unique intersection where powerful sentiments and self-serving
morality are coupled with feelings of powerlessness and
ruminations on past injuries. Thus, shifting focus from the rhetoric
of resentment to that of ressentiment explains how Trump is able
to sustain the affective charge of animus without forfeiting the
moral high ground of victimhood to his audience’s “oppressors”—
Democrats, the press, criminals, immigrants, foreign adversaries,
welfare recipients, the Me Too movement, “globalists,” and racial
Others.
Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity
balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to
remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the
subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and
daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural
landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrangement of narratives
and frontier aesthetics invites audiences to attend to the
mythic relationship between conquering frontiers and subjugating
women’s bodies. Purity represents a subversive deployment of
metonymy and enthymeme to infer spectator complicity in the associative
connections between frontier mythology and purity culture.
standardize the white masculine ideal by “outing” its putatively spectacular perversions. This article offers insight into how incredulity, as a response of so-called compensatory or hypermasculinity, draws on a standard of (hetero)normalcy that ultimately exonerates more commonplace but nonetheless harmful expressions of hegemonic white masculinity.
speakers on college campuses are an opaque vehicle for White
supremacy. Revisiting Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance
through the lens of Critical Race Theory, this essay sketches
the features of repressive victimhood: the advancement of categorical
minority status orchestrated to shield white people from
charges of intolerance while reframing counterspeech as commensurate
with overt bigotry.
political ads. We argue this genre represents the enactment of White
masculinity through the spectacle of violence that capitalizes on the
spectacular qualities of networked media environments to spread and legitimize a recuperative White male politics. We contend such ads operate as a form of inferential racism and racial code of Whiteness. We suggest they do so by trafficking in the hypermasculinity and phallic symbolism of gun culture, standing up to threats to hegemonic masculinity, and reserving the possibility of violence against those who challenge White male dominance.
assessments of President Donald J. Trump’s appeals to rage,
malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an
underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization,
resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on
the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a
subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent,
subjugated and unable to act on or adequately express
frustration. Though anger and resentment capture part of Trump’s
affective register, I suggest that ressentiment accounts for the
unique intersection where powerful sentiments and self-serving
morality are coupled with feelings of powerlessness and
ruminations on past injuries. Thus, shifting focus from the rhetoric
of resentment to that of ressentiment explains how Trump is able
to sustain the affective charge of animus without forfeiting the
moral high ground of victimhood to his audience’s “oppressors”—
Democrats, the press, criminals, immigrants, foreign adversaries,
welfare recipients, the Me Too movement, “globalists,” and racial
Others.
Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity
balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to
remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the
subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and
daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural
landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrangement of narratives
and frontier aesthetics invites audiences to attend to the
mythic relationship between conquering frontiers and subjugating
women’s bodies. Purity represents a subversive deployment of
metonymy and enthymeme to infer spectator complicity in the associative
connections between frontier mythology and purity culture.
standardize the white masculine ideal by “outing” its putatively spectacular perversions. This article offers insight into how incredulity, as a response of so-called compensatory or hypermasculinity, draws on a standard of (hetero)normalcy that ultimately exonerates more commonplace but nonetheless harmful expressions of hegemonic white masculinity.
fatal curse that passes from victim-to-victim via sexual intercourse.
The subject of the curse is relentlessly pursued by vacant-minded
assassins that take the form of friends, loved ones, and strangers.
The film is set near the infamous dividing-line of Detroit’s 8 Mile
Road, between what remains of the suburban working-class and
the sacrifice zone of post-industrial urban triage. I argue that It
Follows confronts audiences with the spectral manifestation of
precarity: the deliberate and unequal redistribution of human
fragility to populations who are the most socially and
economically vulnerable. First, the generic shift from a specific
monster to an anonymous and relentless force redeploys horror
convention to draw attention to the conditions that induce horror
within the prevailing socioeconomic order. Second, the film
renders such precarity visible by contrasting the mise-en-scene of
the suburban enclave with zones of postindustrial ruin; the
relative comfort of the former predicated on the vulnerability of
the latter. The film maps a landscape of postindustrial ruin,
enacting a visual and narrative critique of thanatopolitics, the
biopolitical organization of death under late capitalism.
preparedness in reality television recuperate a preindustrial model
of hegemonic masculinity by staging the plausible “real world”
conditions under which manly skills appear necessary for
collective survival. Representations of masculinity in uncertain
times intensify the masculinity-in-crisis motif to cultivate
anticipation of an apocalyptic event that promises a final
resolution to male alienation. An examination of Nat Geo’s
Doomsday Preppers illustrates how these staged performances of
everyday life cultivate a dangerous vision of apocalyptic manhood
that consummates a fantasy of national virility in the demise of
feminine society.