Ashley Noel Mack

I first came to Louisiana State University in 2013 after I received my Ph.D. in Communication Studies with a portfolio certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. I served as an Instructor in our university’s interdisciplinary Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies program. I left for one year to accept a position as an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Southern Mississippi but returned in 2015 to LSU.

I presently am an Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at LSU. I also serve as an affiliate faculty member in the Department of African & African American Studies, as well as in the Screen Arts and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies programs. I presently serve as Director of the LSU Speech & Debate Team.

I am a 2026 recipient of the LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award. The award recognizes faculty members for outstanding teaching, research, and/or service.

CMST 2063 - Argumentation and Debate
CMST 3115 - Gender and Communication
CMST 4107 - Communication and Culture
CMST 4163 - Rape, Communication, & Culture
CMST/WGSS 4164 - Love, Coalition, & Community
HNRS 2033 - Rape in US Culture

CMST 7972 - Rhetoric, Ideology, & Hegemony
CMST 7971 - Feminist Critique
CMST 7966 - Queer Futures.

Methodologically, my research exists at the intersection of critical rhetoric and cultural studies. I understand rhetoric as constitutive and instrumental—it is suasive communication that constitutes normative values and beliefs, social notions of common sense, power relations, and is also a resource for symbolic action. Broadly, my research explores how differences and disparities are communicated and naturalized through rhetoric in contemporary US Culture, and how rhetoric is wielded by historically marginalized bodies and communities as a resource for creating a more just and equitable world.

My scholarly work is driven by several questions, including: How is difference (at the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and ability) constituted through rhetorics in the US? How do media representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and ability produce naturalized myths of difference (such as stereotypes)? Whose interests do such myths serve? How are these myths of difference used in rhetoric to rationalize disparities or inequalities in social and political contexts? How are ideological values and ethics communicated vis-à-vis rhetorics? How do historically marginalized bodies resist or challenge dehumanizing rhetorical framings and oppressive systems?

At the core of this work are also questions concerning the cultivation of intimacy and belonging amongst individuals and collectives through rhetorics. How is intimacy with “Others” produced and/or constrained through rhetoric? Who is included in the rhetorically produced “us” versus “them”? How is our social world manifested through this symbolic negotiation of intimacy and belonging?

Gouws, Katherine & Ashley Noel Mack. “The Price of Intimacy: OnlyFans and Erotic Labor in the (Hetero)sexual Contract.” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking (Forthcoming 2026).

Self, Rico & Ashley Noel Mack, “Gather the Children: Trans of Color Liberation Rhetoric as Provision.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 28:3-4 (2026), 31-48. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.28.3-4.0031

Self, Rico, Ashley R. Hall, & Ashley Noel Mack. “Black Queer Studies in Communication Studies.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. (2026).

Mack, Ashley Noel. “Transantagonisms and the “woman” in U.S. settler reproductive rhetorics.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 110:3 (2024), 470-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2024.2368563

Mack, Ashley Noel. “Erotics of Epidemicity: Captivity and Refusal in the Mediation of Black Trans Life and Death.” Women’s Studies in Communication 46:2 (2023), 252–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193549

Self, Rico, Ashley Noel Mack, Bryan J. McCann, “BbyMutha’s Refusal as Black Queer Feminine Fugitivity.” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 8:2 (2021): 1-24. Lead Article. Recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Article Award from the Feminist & Gender Studies Division of the National Communication Association.

Mack, Ashley Noel, & Tiara R. Na’puti. “Publicity as Containment.” Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture 1:1 (2021): 97-104.

Mack, Ashley Noel, & Bryan J. McCann. “‘Harvey Weinstein, Monster’: Antiblackness and the Myth of the Monstrous Rapist.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18:1 (2021): 103-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1854802

McCann, Bryan J., Ashley Noel Mack, & Rico Self. “Communication’s quest for whiteness: the racial politics of disciplinary legitimacy.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17:2 (2020): 243-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1770822

Mack, Ashley Noel, & Tiara R. Na’puti. “‘Our Bodies are not Terra Nullius’: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence.” Women’s Studies in Communication 42:3 (2019): 347-370. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2019.1637803
Reprinted in the edited volume, The #MeToo Rhetorical Zeitgeist (Routledge).

Mack, Ashley Noel and Bryan J. McCann, “‘Strictly an Act of Street Violence’: Intimate Publicity and Affective Divestment in the New Orleans Mother’s Day Shooting.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14:4 (2017): 334-350. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2017.1366661
Received the 2018 Outstanding Article Award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association.

Mack, Ashley Noel. “The Self-Made Mom: Neoliberalism and Masochistic Motherhood in Home Birth Videos on YouTube.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39:1 (February 2016): 47-68 https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2015.1129519

Mack, Ashley Noel. “Destabilizing Science from the Right: The Rhetoric of Heterosexual Victimhood in the World Health Organization’s 2008 HIV/AIDS Controversy.” Journal of Homosexuality 60:8 (August 2013): 1164-1180. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2013.784109