| In recent years, Cincinnati, Ohio's downtown neighborhood Over-the-Rhine (OTR) has received national spotlight with feature stories in publications such as National Geographic and The Huffington Post , praising the neighborhood for its progress. What many of them tend to leave out is the immense gentrification that has taken place over the last decade. Many people who were once fearful of spending time in OTR are now flooding the streets. Something had to happen rhetorically in order for people, who once viewed OTR as fearsome, to now consider the neighborhood safe and secure. This essay explores how the media's discourse rhetorically removes the emotion of fear from OTR and instead, attaches security. Secondly, this project attempts to uncover whether or not the material rhetoric of OTR mirrors the discourse (of security). After attempting to identify what language is used to portray OTR as no longer fearsome and then highlighting that the material rhetoric echoes the same sentiments of security, this essay suggests that there is an overarching privileging of some people and not of others. The material qualities of OTR become symbols of the amount of care extended to the people living there; in turn, the implications of this reflect the ongoing issues of racism and classism in the United States. This paper argues that by acknowledging the power in the material, perhaps we can create communities that serve all residents equally. |
