On April 27, Dr. Jennifer Lin LeMesurier will deliver a Rhetoric Unbound lecture. Dr. LeMesurier’s talk, entitled “’They’re Eating the Pets’ as Rhetorical Strategy,” will take place at 8.00 p.m. Eastern. The lecture will last 30 minutes and will be followed by discussion.
Lecture Description
The run-up to the presidential election in 2024 was marked by increasingly chaotic rhetoric, including rumors about Haitian immigrants eating neighbors’ pets. Although unfounded, these rumors gained remarkable traction and continued to circulate as memes and shorthand for political alignment. More than just distasteful rhetoric, these rumors were also directly linked to threats of physical violence against immigrant communities. In this talk, I demonstrate how the now established genre of pet-eating rumors aims to increase inter-racial distance, manifesting anti-immigrant rhetoric in recommendations for more space between ‘native’ bodies and ‘foreign’ guts. The durability of these instances is revealing not just of an audacious rhetorical flourish but of long-seeded beliefs about identifying outsiders through their appetites. After briefly tracing some of the historical roots of these rhetorics and how they are recurrently weaponized against a range of ethnic and racial groups, I turn to a small scale incident of the killing of a Central New York village’s mascot, a swan, in order to more closely parse the undercurrents of xenophobia, whiteness-as-property, and heteronormative nostalgia that make consumptive rhetorics so persuasive to many.
Register for Dr. LeMesurier’s Lecture
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Rhetoric Unbound 