Price pulls as an example of how she is using material rhetorics the discussion of a smartphone by Lavinia Hirsu in an article in Precarious Rhetorics. In particular, Hirsu points out how for Syrian refugees the rhetorics in the often American and European imaginations around photos of Syrian refugees with smartphones mean that the smartphones aren't just tools for those who own them but are entangled in the discursive and rhetorical relations that make up the lives of the refugees. When uniformed others see a refugee holding a smartphone they question refugee status or need, in this way the smartphone is entangled in how the refugee is read in ways that can cause their bodyminds to be misunderstood, sometimes with fatal ends. 

Example of Material Rhetorics

Price posits that crip spacetimes relies on a material rhetoric because inhabiting crip spacetime means being in a reality where meaning is make between the relationship between your body, the bodies of others, objects, technologies, and environments in particular because of the inaccess/access created through existing in certain environments or with certain technologies. Price also posits that material rhetoric in how rhetoric is used to reaffirm the power of oppressive systems as trying to challenge some of the oppression that has led to the creation of pluriverses like crip spacetime. 

Crip Spacetime and Material Rhetoric

Price is using Material Rhetorics to look at how power and oppression has governed how things are given meaning and how that meaning is understood. 

This idea of breaking down brain-body and logic-emotion binaries also serves to counter ableist messaging often these binaries are contrary to disabled experiences. Disabled, especially chronically ill, bodyminds know that stress can set of flares and affect physical symptoms just as much as isolation from inaccessible social spots can affect mental health. Many individuals within Mad studies counter the idea of logic-emotion binaries when mental illness is weaponized against people to say they are not rational or capable of complex thought. 

Material Rhetorics and Challenging Ableism

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

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