This class explores the materiality of the body and the ways in which it participates in the persuasive process from multiple perspectives: The orator’s body as a site of rhetoric (appearance, gestures, style); representations of the body in language as well as in visual media (still photos, video, nonhuman photography and virtual reality). We will examine the ways in which different technological apparatus and media as means of representation and alteration of the body shape the perception of the body, the perceived relation between body and mind and consequently, our understanding of the rhetorical process itself. The realms in which we will examine these questions are representations of pain, trauma, sexuality, mysticism and politics.