BOONE, N.C. — Scissors snip close to an ear. A spray bottle hisses. Damp hair drifts onto the dorm-room tile, and the person in the chair laughs too hard to sit still. Jameson Hodges tilts their head back into place with two fingertips and keeps the conversation going. An hour ago, they were a stranger, a friend of her roommate's. By the time she brushes the last strands off their shoulders, they're just a friend.
Hodges came to Appalachian State University as a 17-year-old first-year student, already holding a cosmetology license. She still works the same way: paying attention to whoever is in front of her and finding the words that reach them.
Today, Hodges is a senior double majoring in English and gender, women's and sexuality studies (GWS). Her English concentration is rhetoric and technical writing. “Rhetoric is the study of the effect of language,” she said.
Many people hear “rhetoric” and think of persuasion, the language of campaign speeches. Classical models put the speaker at the center and treat the audience as a target. Feminist rhetorical theory, Hodges' focus, looks at the audience differently. She said it centers “the inclusion of everybody in the situation.”
That attention to audience is what connects her two majors. It also shapes her technical and professional writing, which she said comes down to “how to speak to people.”
Hodges grew up in a small town in upstate South Carolina and spent much of her childhood in a salon. Her grandmother and aunt, both hairstylists, helped raise her. After school, she ran around her aunt's salon with her cousins. Hair became the way she connected with the women in her family.
She trained in cosmetology during her junior and senior years of high school, spending afternoons in the salon answering phones and shampooing clients. After graduating early, she took her practical exam and earned her license by the end of summer.
Around this time, her father moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A family friend had attended App State, so Hodges decided to check it out. “I just came in,” she said. “It made a lot of sense.” She liked the feel of campus, how far it was from home and the way it “just felt right.”
Choosing a direction took longer. Hodges weighed going all in on hair and opening her own salon. But years in the salon had shown her how hard the work is on stylists, physically and emotionally. Hair would stay a way to connect, not a career.
“I couldn't do business because I'm terrible at math,” she said. English, one of her biggest interests, made more sense. She started there, focusing on creative writing, but she didn't love it.
She moved to professional writing, a concentration later renamed rhetoric and technical writing. In her introductory professional writing class, which traced the history of rhetorical theory, something clicked. “Then it all started making sense,” she said.
Through every switch, her GWS minor stayed. In late 2025, Hodges needed more hours for her English major, and she was told she could fill them with anything she wanted. However, that lack of structure didn't appeal to her.
“I need some direction in my life,” she said. “I will take underwater basket weaving if you tell me I can take whatever I want.” She considered adding a communication minor. Instead, she declared a second major in GWS.
“I am always using both of those at the same time,” she said. “I'll go all in on GWS as well.” Emily Lutenski, director of the GWS program, helped with that decision. “Emily's very convincing,” Hodges said.
To Hodges, Lutenski is deeply compassionate, listens to students and wants them to succeed. “I know that under Emily, I will succeed,” she said.
The two majors feed each other. Her English and GWS classes often cover similar readings and topics from different angles, and Hodges brings ideas back and forth between them. “I can bring something up and it just kind of blows everything out of the water,” she said. “It broadens your perspective.”
Between her rhetoric courses and Feminist Theories, where she read Hélène Cixous and Simone de Beauvoir, she found the lens that now ties her work together: feminist and queer rhetorical theory. “It's the framework of all of my thinking,” she said.
As a fan, she noticed how often women athletes got hurt, especially with knee and ligament injuries. For her Rhetorics of Health Justice course, she turned that into an infographic on women's higher risk of ACL tears. She designed it for WNBA players, down to the league's colors.
The infographic opens with a recent, recognizable injury and builds from there, saving the densest research for last. Along the way, it traces how injury research long centered on men's bodies.
In Rhetorics of Resistance, taught by Belinda Walzer, she turned the lens on the industry itself. She studied Togethxr, a women's sports media company founded by four Olympians and known for the slogan “Everyone Watches Women's Sports.”
Her project focused on “capitalist structures that claim to empower, try to empower, women in sports,” and how those same structures complicate the message. She argued that partnerships with brands like Nike and Gatorade tie the message to the very systems it pushes against. “I'm interested in sports writing,” she said, “[and] how I can maybe bring that into a job.”
This semester, she is writing for a different audience as a writing intern with GWS. The internship counts toward her English degree, but Lutenski and her English adviser both saw the department as the right fit. Now she handles much of the department's writing.
Much of that writing is for the campus LGBTQ+ and women's centers GWS oversees. Hodges is writing a volunteer handbook meant to “effectively and concisely get across to everyone in the centers what we do and how we do it.”
She is also about to begin a brochure for faculty. It will guide them in how to respond when a student comes to them with an experience of sexual assault.
In work like this, the audience is everything. A reader may pick it up in a hard moment, and the words have to meet them there. The work isn't always easy, but she said it's worth it. “It gives you something to be proud of,” she said.
Hodges is already looking past graduation. She has started App State's accelerated master's program in rhetoric and composition and is taking a graduate rhetorical theory course this semester.
Her goal is to write for a publication whose mission matches her own. “I would love working for any type of publication company with a mission that is involved with gender, women's and sexuality studies,” she said.
She is open to what that looks like. Editing, magazines and women's sports writing all appeal to her. “There's publication for everything,” she said.
Wherever she lands, she will bring a skill she already uses for GWS. For a program like hers, careful language is a form of care. “We are all very meticulous about the rhetoric that we use for advertising, for the program, for our events,” she said. “We're not careless about the safety of each other and the program as a whole.”
As a first-year, she brought the same instinct to a dorm-room haircut. Pay attention to the person in front of you. Find the words that reach them. Send them back out the door a little more connected than when they came in.
###
About the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies
The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies offers graduate and undergraduate degrees in four program areas: Appalachian studies; gender, women’s and sexuality studies; global studies; and interdisciplinary studies. The department is also home to Watauga Residential College, an interdisciplinary, alternative general education program. The department promotes creative and imaginative engagement through a cross-disciplinary investigation of complex systems and problems. Learn more about the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies
About the College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Appalachian State University is home to 17 academic departments, two centers and one residential college. These units span the humanities and the social, mathematical and natural sciences. CAS aims to develop a distinctive identity built upon our university's strengths, traditions and locations. The college’s values lie not only in service to the university and local community, but through inspiring, training, educating and sustaining the development of its students as global citizens. More than 6,800 student majors are enrolled in the college. As the college is also largely responsible for implementing App State’s general education curriculum, it is heavily involved in the education of all students at the university, including those pursuing majors in other colleges. Learn more about CAS
About Appalachian State University
As a premier public institution, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives. App State is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System, with a national reputation for innovative teaching and opening access to a high-quality, cost-effective education. The university enrolls more than 21,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and 80 graduate majors at its Boone and Hickory campuses and through App State Online. Learn more about App State
By Evan Atkins (evancreation@proton.me)
October 19, 2026
BOONE, N.C.
A person with brown hair wearing a brown shirt smiles and leans against a bookcase.
Jameson Hodges