By Jan Osborn, Chapman University

Bernadine Cortina’s project, “Beauty in the Philippines: A Materialized Oppression,” was conceptualized and initially achieved in ENG 270 Foundations of Rhetorical Studies at Chapman University in Spring 2021. Working with Laurie Gries’ Still Life with Rhetoric, as well as Scott Richard Lyons’ “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing,” rhetorician Cortina brought two important theorists to generate an analysis of the ideology of beauty in the Philippines. With her lived experience with this ideology, Cortina focused on visual rhetorics, an element in her earlier rhetorical analysis project examining the rhetoric of the Duterte administration in what is known as the “Philippine Drug War.” In both cases, Cortina found that the visual element played a powerful role in perceptions.