C. Wesley Buerkle's Research

I love research. If you want to discuss shared interests, possible collaboration, or questions about my work,
drop me a line. I always like talking shop.

Current Projects and Interests

Seinfeld and Economies of the Masculine Body
Looking at the well-known episode "The Contest" (the "master of your domain" episode), I discuss the shift from industrial (i.e., productive) orientations toward masculinity to neo-liberal (i.e., consumerist and non-governmental) understandings of masculinity. In discussing the tensions between such a transition, I note that neo-liberalism replaces one set of disciplines with another rather than offering freedom and unadulterated pleasure. Selected for inclusion in the edited volume Sexualized Bodies.

Larry Craig and The Daily Show
You remember him: He's the senator from Idaho arrested for soliciting sex in a men's room. Looking at responses to him from Comedy Central's The Daily Show, I discuss left-oriented media that sought to punish Craig for homophobia by using the possibility of him as a repressed homosexual as a slur—ironic, no?

Margaret Sanger on Issues of Class and Birth Control
Also from my dissertation, I look at the ways that Sanger constructs class relations in her early birth control rhetoric. I find that she initially calls for working class women to engage in revolt against the upper classes by practicing contraception. As she courts middleclass women by developing sympathy for lower-class women, Sanger speaks down to working class women as daughters who need to follow the example of their middleclass sisters.

Presidential Women
Ok, now I'm just being a tease. When I have this piece much further along (like submitted to a conference), I hope to share.

Publications

Buerkle, C. Wesley. "Metrosexuality Can Stuff It: Beef Consumption as Hetero-Masculine Fortification.” In press Text and Performance Quarterly.
In this essay I investigate the ways meat consumption, especially hamburgers and beef in general, has become a means of performing masculinity. Look at the "Manthem" commercial Burger King aired, to see my primary text. In their commercial Burger King presents eating a large hamburger as a rejection of metrosexuality in favor of a retrograde masculinity.

Buerkle, C. Wesley. "From Women's Liberation to Their Obligation: The Tensions Between Sexuality and Maternity in Early Birth Control Rhetoric." Women and Language 21 (2008): 27-34. PDF version
Coming from my dissertation, I focus on the way that Sanger moves from framing birth control as providing women autonomy and sexual pleasure to emphasizing contraception as a means for women to better care for their children, husbands, and nation.

Buerkle, C. Wesley , Michael E. Mayer, and Clark D. Olson. "Our Hero the Buffoon: Contradictory and Concurrent Burkean Framing of Arizona Governor Evan Mecham." Western Journal of Communication 67 (2003): 187-206.
In this essay we discuss the contrasting responses Arizonans has to their infamous governor, Evan Mecham. Letters tot he editor demonstrate citizens having polarized responses to the same events, demonstrating the importance of considering the ways that audience understand an event in radically different terms.

My Dissertation
"The Discipline and Disciplining of Margaret Sanger: US Birth Control Rhetoric in the Early Twentieth Century"
http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-10262004-151149/ For those so interested, here you go.

For my dissertation I used Michel Foucault's approach to history and language to analyze the arguments made for women's access to birth control, primarily from 1914-1935. I find that in Margaret Sanger's rhetoric, women begin as agents (having control of their bodies and serving their own interests) but become subjects (under others' control to benefit others). The arguments Sanger provides range from concerns for working class women and women's right to sexuality and selfhood to women's need to better care for their families, the value of "feebleminded" women not reproducing (and even being sterilized), and concerns for world overpopulation.
 

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