%0 Journal Article
%T The Rhetoric of Self
%A Torrey Shanks
%J Political Theory
%@ 1552-7476
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0090591718786471
%X This essay considers self-ownership as a rhetorical and political practice. Scholarly attention to the rhetoric of self-ownership, notably in feminist theory, often rejects the term for its capacity to distort and fragment notions of the self, the body, social relations, and labor. The ambiguous character of self-ownership, in this view, carries the risk of subversion of more inclusive and relational uses. Adopting a broader notion of rhetoric as creative and effective speech, I recast self-ownership from this critical depiction through a revised understanding of C. B. Macpherson¡¯s possessive individualism and then to the texts of John Locke, the Levellers, and the Putney Debates. These early-modern exemplars offer insights into the political promises and risks of the rhetoric of self-ownership that contemporary critics obscure. The ambiguity and plurality too often rendered as a liability for self-ownership instead offer conditions for its agonistic invocation for novel claims and emerging audiences
%K self-ownership
%K rhetoric
%K property
%K the Levellers
%K possessive individualism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0090591718786471