Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies 9780809330690, 0809330695

Citation preview

Royster and Kirsch

rhetoric   “Feminisms and rhetorics has been waiting for this kind of work. Royster and Kirsch show how feminist rhetoric has changed the foundation of methodology, ethics, and research in the whole field. They take us beyond the rescue, recovery, reinscription that almost every author in women’s rhetorics claims to desire but few achieve. Their scholarship and writing are meticulous, beautifully organized, and exciting to read.” —Kate Ronald, Roger and Joyce L. Howe Professor; director, Howe Writing Initiative, Richard T. Farmer School of Business at Miami University

FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES

T

he field of rhetorical studies is shifting. Feminist Rhetorical Practices reviews major developments in feminist rhetorical studies in recent decades and explores the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impact of this work on rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. Royster and Kirsch argue that there has been a dramatic shift in what rhetorical subjects are addressed, how these subjects are studied, and how work in the field is evaluated. To help contextualize these shifts, the authors use four critical terms of engagement—critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization—and offer an enhanced analytical model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating not only feminist rhetorical inquiry but also rhetoric studies in a broader sense.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is a professor of English and the dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her previous books include Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women.   Gesa E. Kirsch is a professor of English and a cofounder of the Women’s Leadership Institute at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her previous publications include Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication and Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation.

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RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND LITERACY STUDIES

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JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER and GESA E. KIRSCH

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Southern Illinois University Press

Cover illustration: Kitty Tatch, a maid and waitress at the Sentinel Hotel in the late 1890s and early 1900s, and her friend Katherine Hazelston dressed in long, wide skirts and danced and did high kicks at Overhanging Rock, three thousand feet above the Yosemite Valley, on Glacier Point as George Fiske photographed them. Department of Interior, National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.

Printed in the United States of America



$35.00 usd isbn 0-8093-3069-5 isbn 978-0-8093-3069-0

NEW HORIZONS FOR

Foreword by Patricia Bizzell

studies in rhetorics and feminisms southern illinois university press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siupress.com

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FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES

12/12/11 12:39 PM

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series Editors, Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan

FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES

FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES NEW HORIZONS FOR RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND LITERACY STUDIES

 JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER and GESA E. KIRSCH WITH A FOREWORD BY PATRICIA BIZZELL

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville

Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Publication partially supported by a grant from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a grant from Bentley University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Feminist rhetorical practices : new horizons for rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies / Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch ; with a foreword by Patricia Bizzell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-3069-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-3069-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-3070-6 (ebook) ISBN-10: 0-8093-3070-9 (ebook) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—United States. 2. Feminism and education—United States. 3. Feminist theory. 4. Rhetoric—Social aspects. 5. Women—Education—United States. I. Kirsch, Gesa. II. Title. PE1405.U6R65 2012 808.0082—dc23 2011019609 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

Foreword ix Patricia Bizzell Acknowledgments xiii

Part One. A Call for Action in Research, Teaching, and Learning 1. Our Own Stories of Professional Identity 3 2. Documenting a Need for Change in Rhetorical Studies 13 PART TWO. Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice 3. Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices 29 4. Feminist Rhetorical Studies as a Robust Interdisciplinary Framework 40 PART THREE. Recasting Paradigms for Inquiry, Analysis, and Interpretation 5. Critical Imagination 71 6. Strategic Contemplation 84 7. Social Circulation 98 8. Globalizing the Point of View 110 PART FOUR. Conclusion 9. Charting a New Course for Research and Practice 131

Notes 155 Works Cited 159 Index 171

F ore w or d Patricia Bizzell You are about to read a comprehensive and forward-looking account of what feminist research in rhetoric has accomplished over the last three decades—a period that happens to coincide with the core of my own professional life. I remember the mounting excitement as feminist work gradually unfolded over the years, and I waited eagerly for the next publication by many of the scholars whose work is represented here. I remember the mood of intense energy that vibrated among the participants in the 2007 symposium at Virginia Tech, where this book project began. I think we all had a sense that feminist research in rhetoric had reached a life-cycle milestone, that its theories and methods were ready to be consolidated and applied more broadly. Now Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch have done the work needed to launch these new applications. They not only gather key representatives of feminist work in these pages but also offer an original formulation of what this work has meant to scholarship in rhetoric more generally, a formulation that perhaps no one else in the field could have provided but that struck me as eminently and obviously right as soon as I read it. Before I introduce this book in a bit more detail, a feminist footnote: I spent some time thinking about how to refer to its authors here. Once their full names are given, Royster and Kirsch seem too brusque and formal as references to women I have known for a long time and hope to count among my friends. In the end, I decided that I might invoke an old-fashioned spirit of feminist sisterhood and call them by their first names, as I naturally do when I see them—with all due respect! In the beginning, as Jackie and Gesa explain, scholars felt that it was important simply to rescue women rhetors from historical obscurity and insert them into the rhetorical canon. As this work proceeded, feminist research found itself cross-fertilizing with many other fields, becoming interdisciplinary or perhaps even postdisciplinary like so many other contemporary ix

Foreword

intellectual endeavors. Professional organizations and conferences dedicated to work on women and rhetoric emerged. Collaborative projects became normative, first perhaps in feminist work and soon in the field of rhetoric, composition, and literacy more generally. Gesa and Jackie outline key foci that have been developed in sophisticated ways in feminist research: gender, race, and ethnicity (these three never essentialized in biological terms), status (a more productive notion than social class), geographical sites, rhetorical domains, genres, and modes of expression (see chapter 4). All of this work tended to be “dialogic [balancing multiple interpretations], dialectical [seeking multiple viewpoints], reflective [on intersections of internal and external effects], reflexive [about unsettling one’s conclusions and deferring argumentative closure], embodied, and anchored in an ethos of care, respect, and humility” toward the research subjects and toward what one could hope the scholarship could accomplish (67). Scholars soon realized that research on women and rhetoric needed to go beyond traditional scholarly methods, once “we have . . . established the existence of women in rhetorical history in an evidence-based way” (131). The first of four methodological concepts that Jackie and Gesa articulate, “critical imagination,” invites hypothesizing beyond what traditional scholarship might regard as rigorously demonstrable, a technique made necessary by the fragmentary and faint character of much evidence on women’s rhetorical activities. The goal of this method is “to speculate methodically about probabilities, that is, what might likely be true based on what we have in hand” (71). “Tacking in” (the metaphor is Clifford Geertz’s) to the material by using traditional scholarly methods is thus supplemented by “tacking out” with alternative perspectives (see page 72). As is typical throughout this book, the authors use rich metaphors of their own as well to make their theoretical points vivid: in this case, suggesting that “tacking out” provides perspectives like that of seeing Earth from orbit where now-vanished rivers once flowed. “Critical imagination” also enables hope for the future, to visualize what could and should be and thus to find the energy to work for it. The second methodological concept developed here is “strategic contemplation.” I believe that Gesa and Jackie chose the term contemplation to emphasize their advocacy of critical moments of silence and reflection, pausing, ruminating, and reconsidering judgments that are forming. If the researcher will “linger deliberately,” as they put it, intuitions about the subjects of research can emerge (84). Here the authors discuss what is to be gained from visiting locations where one’s research subjects once lived, handling their actual manuscripts and artifacts, and attending to one’s own embodied experience as a researcher. From “deliberately taking time away from the x

Foreword

relentless march” to complete a scholarly project, passionate commitments to and serendipitous discoveries about one’s research subjects may emerge. While the first two methodological concepts encourage an intimate look at research subjects and one’s imaginative and spiritual relationships with them, the third concept, “social circulation,” takes a broader view (it is adapted from Stuart Hall). This method focuses on where women’s writing and speaking take place, where the work goes and what it does, who encounters it and how they respond, and more. Concentric circles of social contact and transmission are highlighted, as well as connections across generations and geographical distances. Jackie and Gesa contend persuasively that this theoretical model supersedes a less-productive view that attempts to track boundaries between public and private domains. Taking an even-broader view is the fourth methodological approach promoted here, namely globalization. Gesa and Jackie observe that as Western nations extended their imperialist conquests over much of the globe, Western rhetoric invaded with them, devaluing local discursive practices. Today’s postcolonial moment sees the stirrings of new forms of rhetorical practice worldwide. The field of women’s studies generally has been more successful than feminist work on rhetoric at achieving the needed global perspective in part, the authors suggest, because it was born amid political struggle and has kept this politicized energy in its work, while feminist work on rhetoric has had to heave out from under the traditional masculinist account of rhetoric. It is clear that globalization has produced, as yet, much less work than the other three methods. I suspect that U.S. scholars will not be able to employ this method fully until more of us become fully multilingual. But at least Jackie and Gesa have erected a marker over the spot where the edifice, now existing only in framework, will be constructed as time goes on. The analysis that Gesa and Jackie provide in this book answers the question: What makes research in rhetoric “feminist”? I hope it’s clear that the answer to this question is not simply that the researcher or research subjects are biologically female or gendered feminine. To discover that a woman somewhere has used language somehow is not to do feminist research on rhetoric. Rather, I think we can learn from this book that feminist research is characterized by distinctive methodologies that although they draw on work being done in other fields come together in ours in synergistic ways. The braid of thematic frameworks, inquiry strategies, and leverage points for data gathering, analysis, and interpretation is densely stranded and complex, as indicated by the figure graphically summarizing the authors’ argument in their concluding chapter (148). Indeed, given the persuasive power of the xi

Foreword

methodological analysis provided in this book, I am surprised that Jackie and Gesa only occasionally suggest more-ambitious goals for these methods (see, for example, their discussion of Malea Powell’s work on Charles Eastman [88]). The inquiry model they lay out can be, should be, and is already being applied to work in rhetoric, composition, and literacy more broadly, in areas where neither researcher nor research subjects are female or feminine and where feminist political agendas are less important than other motives. I dare say that anyone who wants to do research in rhetoric, composition, and literacy, in any subfield, from now on will need to read this book.

xii

A ckno w le d gments Together, we thank Katrina M. Powell for organizing a gathering of feminist rhetoricians at Virginia Tech University that provided us with extended time for conversation and eventually led us to collaborations on an article and this book. We greatly appreciate the many colleagues who attended and inspired our work, as well as the many scholars who have embarked on exciting new work in the field of feminist rhetorical studies. It is the rich and diverse nature of this groundbreaking work that motivated​ this book. We are mindful of and deeply indebted to the many women who went before us—scholars and rhetors in their own right—whose voices and visions continue to inspire us and help us image a brighter future. We are grateful for the valuable feedback and suggestions the reviewer of this manuscript and Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan, editors of the Studies in Feminisms and Rhetorics series, provided. Many thanks go to Patricia Bizzell for introducing this volume so thoughtfully and to Karl Kageff, editor-in-chief, Southern Illinois University Press, for his support and enthusiasm. Finally, we thank Vanessa Rouillon for suggesting the cover image for our book. Jackie Royster: I thank the Ohio State University for the gift of time. A muchlonged-for faculty professional leave permitted me the privilege of research, contemplation, and time to write. There is no better gift than time. I thank the Georgia Institute of Technology for a research grant that enabled me to take care of some final logistics that were critical to publication. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to students over the years whose passion for knowledge, surprise at what might be knowable about women’s work and achievements, and efforts to pursue research on women have constituted the very best reason for even trying to develop a volume like this. The questions remain always: How can we make the pursuit of knowledge—even about “nontraditional” subjects more manageable? How can we bring our needs to know into the circle of academic regard in a way that actually furthers xiii

Acknowledgments

the work and inspires the worker? For me, this volume is the best answer that I have managed so far, and I am eternally grateful to the students who made me ask myself some pretty tough questions. I am also grateful to my family, who after all these years understand that there is work that I must do. I take great pleasure in saying that Patrick Royster offers me unconditional love, support, and patience and helps me to know that the desires of my heart and mind are possible and necessary. I take equal joy in knowing that my children, Rebecca and Giles, are discovering in their own unique ways that finding their own passions, no matter what the pursuit happens to be, is what makes life worth living. I am incredibly grateful that no explanations are necessary to Lilla Ashe Mitchell, who at this point in the course of our mother-daughter relationship no longer even needs to ask what I’m doing now. She just accepts that whatever it is, it is important. I add to this list my gratitude for the privilege of working on a project that I care so much about with a long-time colleague who cares just as much. This collaboration has been a blessing—exemplifying to incredible effect the importance of a complementarity of strengths, mutual respect, a sense of goodwill, and a love of intellectual synergy. Gesa Kirsch: I thank Bentley University and the English and Media Studies Department for travel and research support for work on this book, as well as colleagues at Bentley for their interest in and support of my work. Many thanks go to Liz Rohan and contributors to Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, whose work continues to inspire and fascinate me. A special note of thanks goes to Gail Hawisher for inviting me to visit, teach, and pre­ sent my work-in-progress at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign during the spring 2010. I am also grateful to the graduate students in my seminar at UIUC for the many rich conversations we shared about alternative sites of rhetorical education. A special thanks to my writing group in Boston—Rosaleen Greene-Smith, Jim Webber, and Sara Shukla—for close readings, lively discussions, excellent feedback, and lots of laughter during our Friday afternoon meetings. And finally, it has been a great honor and privilege to work with Jackie on this project. I am grateful to her for the wonderful opportunity to explore our mutual interests and for sharing her wisdom, passion, and care. Friends and family are always close to my heart. Thank you for sustaining my spirit with generosity, friendship, laughter, and love. A very special thanks goes to Tony Schreiner for his support, love, patience, encouragement, and wonderful company. I couldn’t have done it without you.

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FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES

P art O ne A Call for Action in Research, Teaching, and Learning

1

Our Own Stories of Professional Identity

[R]hetoric can be studied not by asking if women say anything important, or if there are any great women speakers, but by asking what women say, how women use the public platform, how women speak. If, however, women’s concerns and styles are granted no place in cultural discourse, they will retain the mistaken status of academic “museum pieces”—interesting to observe but where essential function is missed. —Carole Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, “Women in Communication Studies”

Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is designed to explore and engage the terrain of feminist rhetorical studies as an arena for intellectual work that is coming more clearly into its own. As the coauthors of this volume, we have come to our interests in this area from our work in rhetoric, composition, and literacy (RCL) and from our sense of the community of scholars in which we have been participating for over three decades. We have fashioned our professional identities and laid out paths for research, scholarship, and teaching within this vibrant context, and we have found (and especially so with the development of this project) that stories matter. Consequently, although we might have chosen to introduce this analysis in more-traditional ways, we have chosen instead to begin with our own stories of commitment and connection. We take into account the roads that we ourselves have traveled, sharing reflections and 3

A Call for Action

key professional connections from each of us. In doing so, we claim and celebrate feminist rhetorical studies as a professional identity while underscoring, as the volume continues, how important it is—as professionals in this field—to critique this work and to fashion and sustain a strong sense of professional accountability. Moreover, given the feedback that we received at various stages of the production process, not only are we starting with our own stories but we also will continue to build into the analysis occasional reflective/reflexive moments as we focus throughout this volume on making a persuasive case for new directions for rhetorical practices, feminist-informed paradigms for research and scholarship, and deeper understandings of the impact of feminist rhetorical studies in the field at large and perhaps even with an eye toward the potential for impact in fields beyond our own. In doing so, we are sobered by the sentiment captured in our opening quotation from Carol Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, words that remind us that as professionals in rhetorical studies, we must learn to ask new and different questions and to find more and better ways to listen to the multidimensional voices that are speaking from within and across many of the lines that might divide us as language users—by social and political hierarchies, geography, material circumstances, ideologies, time and space, and the like. The two of us, in fact, reflect some of these differences. Gesa is a European-born, white woman; Jackie is a U.S.-born, black woman. Our life experiences have been different, but what we have in common is a love of language and the highest regard not just for the ways in which women have used language but also for the circumstances and conditions of these uses, as women, diversely defined, have managed to accomplish their goals, impact their lives and the lives of others, and reform their worlds. Gesa’s Story I have had a long-standing interest in and concern for including women’s voices, visions, and experiences in our work, for allowing them to speak— and be heard—in their manifold expressions, well beyond the “museum pieces” they so easily become when we impose our values, views, and judgments upon them, speaking only for or about them, not with them. This concern for representing women’s voices in all their richness was brought home for me when I conducted and published an extensive interview study with academic women across different disciplines and academic ranks (Women Writing the Academy). I was concerned with navigating the tension between two efforts: one focused on including interview excerpts long enough to represent women’s experience, voices, and visions broadly; the other on 4

Our Own Stories of Professional Identity

engaging in the scholarly, analytical work necessary to identify patterns, make connections, illustrate case studies, and draw—however tentatively— conclusions about the information I had gathered. That is, I understood and wanted to honor the richness of women’s voices, perspectives, and lived experiences that they so generously had shared with me during interviews at the same time that I wanted to honor readers’ expectations that, as the researcher, I would offer an analytical, critical, and interpretive framework in order to reveal new insights, knowledge, and a better understanding of academic women’s writing and research experiences. It is this tension I have tried to negotiate, both in that book and in subsequent publications. In Women Writing the Academy, I decided to include long segments from interviews between chapters, called “portraits of writers,” which allow readers to hear a variety of women’s voices unfiltered by my interpretive comments. Obviously, I am still the one staging these portraits of writers in the book, at critical intersections, and selecting which writers to feature. (My criteria were breadth and variety.) My concern was particularly heightened because academic women, like women in the history of rhetoric, have most often been relegated to the margins, ignored, silenced, or viewed as “museum pieces,” curious objects to be noted but not central actors in shaping and changing academic institutions. Academic women were—and often still are—the exception, not the norm (especially at the full-professor rank in such fields as medicine, law, engineering, and many of the natural sciences). Thus, academic women’s voices, visions, and experiences have not been fully heard, represented, or taken into account in writing the history of academic institutions or in imagining their future. Several important publications highlighted this fact for me. In Women of Academe, a book that is much broader in scope than my study, and more startling, authors Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington tell many stories of abandoned careers, missed opportunities, unfair rejections, and blatant discrimination. Carol Tavris’s Mismeasure of Woman is another book that stands out for me. It chronicles the history of many academic disciplines, demonstrating how supposedly objective research in each field—from biology to medicine to theology and law—set out to prove women’s inferiority. Many of the research methods and claims are absurd by today’s standards (e.g., measuring women’s brain sizes, linking menstrual cycles to intellectual inferiority, and so on). What troubled me most, however, was the way each discipline deliberately and systematically excluded, silenced, or belittled women’s accomplishments.1 Women Writing the Academy shaped my professional identity and commitment to activist work in two important ways. One, I remember distinctly 5

A Call for Action

the many questions I was asked about my project (sometimes skeptical, sometimes meant as helpful advice): Why study women? Why only women? Why academic women? Was I going to be “doubly marginalized” by working in rhetoric/composition studies and by focusing on gender? How would I be able to draw conclusions without including men in my study? These questions made clear to me the need to claim a space for research at the edges (rather than the center) of the field, to claim my interdisciplinary professional identity, and to help others with such efforts. Two, the interviews with academic women had a lasting impact on me—I got glimpses into the lives of women professors, across the academy and across a range of different disciplines. These glimpses were instructive for me as a young assistant professor, giving me a sense of the many obstacles women had and have to overcome, the path so many had traveled before me, and the possibilities they had created for my generation. I was inspired to discover that many women conveyed a positive outlook on life, a get-up-and-try-again attitude that I still remember to this day when I face professional challenges. They also shared their priorities and values with me—how they make time for what’s important, for their families, children, and friends—something I often remember when professional demands encroach on my time. Perhaps most important, they conveyed a sense of optimism, sharing stories of success, triumph, and determination in the face of obstacles, something I have tried to emulate and share with my students. My administrative work in the academy, specifically building and directing several women’s studies programs at different institutions, provided me with great opportunities both for enriching students’ education and working collaboratively with colleagues from across the disciplines. This work reinforced my identity as an interdisciplinary scholar and my commitment to activist work. Finally, my work for the National Council of Teachers of English allowed me to shape educational policy and deepened my commitment to programmatic efforts to create a more inclusive, diverse membership in organizations and institutions. All of this is to say that I have been intrigued—and troubled—by questions of gender, diversity, ethics, and representation for a long time. Questions of how to include the voices of those we study thoughtfully, honorably, and with care have been the focus of my work in a number of publications, particularly in Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, an edited volume that addresses these questions in the context of qualitative research, and in Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication, a single-authored volume that takes up these questions in feminist work. 6

Our Own Stories of Professional Identity

These questions emerged once again when I began to study women in the history of rhetoric, specifically the life and work of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter, a physician, women’s rights advocate, and civic leader working from the late 1880s to 1909. I realized that when we study women who are no longer alive, who can no longer speak back, explain, or set the record straight, questions of ethics and representation take on an increased urgency. Like Anne Ruggles Gere, I was struck by the fact that “these now dead and defenseless women depended upon my ethical choices in textualizing their interior lives” (214), and as I continue to research and write about Dr. Ritter, I keep these concerns foremost in mind. These concerns led me to an ongoing conversation with Jackie. Her methodological principles, articulated so clearly in her essay “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric” and in the last chapter of her book Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women, have greatly influenced my thinking about research methodology, epistemology, and ethics, both in the conduct of rhetorical studies at large and in the ways afrafeminist and feminist approaches challenge us to rethink familiar paradigms, and about ways of proceeding, listening, and representing others. Our ongoing dialogue, begun over many years at professional conferences and coming into focus at the feminist symposium held at Virginia Tech in 2007, led us to write this collaborative volume. An additional dimension to this ongoing conversation emerged from our very different lived experiences as women born and raised in different parts of the world. Our differences, as well as our common concerns about the necessity of trying to do good work together, have centered on the challenges of engaging historical women’s lives respectfully and meaningfully—for their day and for our own. Our efforts are rooted in a professional respect for each other’s work that has developed over more than twenty years of collegiality and also in our certainty during those conversations at the Virginia Tech symposium2 that we had no template for collaborating in this way and would inevitably need to struggle to cross our own boundaries in order to figure out how to come from our different standpoints to a deeper understanding of the women whom we seek to know better and to honor, not just to illuminate the qualities of their lives but also to highlight their specific contributions to our field. Jackie’s Story The Virginia Tech symposium was a catalytic moment for me. Having the luxury of extended conversations with Gesa triggered reflections on what my work has meant to me and what sorts of beliefs and values have 7

A Call for Action

constituted its imperative and inspiration. In the beginning, unequivocally, my desire was to learn some things that I was amazed that I didn’t already know and had had no opportunity to know. This desire quickly morphed into rage. Even though I actually knew the answers quite well, I remember asking myself at the time in utter frustration: Why is it that I have to learn about the remarkable African American women whom I’m coming to know and admire inside a circle of women friends and colleagues (mostly African American), rather than inside traditional classrooms and other anointed academic structures? Why is it that the learning process has to be extracurricular—what I would now call “lyrical,” in keeping with Marcia Farr’s explanation of a type of literacy learning that occurs outside of formal schooling or lírico? While I understood that such lyrical venues can be powerful, I wondered why “alternative” spaces were the only venue choice in this case. Despite the fact that I knew these answers, I was morally outraged by the reality of the situation and determined to dedicate myself from that point (the early 1980s) forward to helping to make it possible for young African American women (and others) to learn by more-normalized, more easily accessed learning experiences what I was struggling to learn. I wanted other people not to be yoked to serendipity, having to wait for or hope for an educational option based mainly on the vision, dedication, courage, and/or acts of kindness within a circle of friends. My involvement for fourteen years (1983–97) as an editor with SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women was a critical phase in my professional development that permitted me to honor this goal. By that point, I was defining myself as an academic activist. Through my work on the journal, I was able to think about challenges and issues more holistically across disciplinary areas and to develop an interdisciplinary expertise in the company of women with complementary interests, concerns, and scholarly energy. I was also able to work with the coeditors to create a mechanism for the education of others—that is, to publish for fourteen years a scholarly journal that we were quite deliberate in wanting to make readable by women across several walks of life. Perhaps more important, I was able to engage in my own learning experiences with self-defined intentions—toward my self, my own legacy, my world of origin, rather than always away from myself, in keeping with Carter G. Woodson’s eloquent explanations of educational oppression in The Mis-education of the Negro and W. E. B. DuBois’s equally eloquent explanation of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk. Complementing this interdisciplinary context for learning was also my work as a writing program administrator. At my institutional home at this time, I was the founding director of the writing program, a program defined 8

Our Own Stories of Professional Identity

quite essentially as a thinking/writing/research across the curriculum program. Within the context of a small historically African American liberal arts college for women, I was working with faculty and students across the full spectrum of the arts and sciences to enhance the capacity of students to bring their critical abilities to bear in inquiry processes and to function well as language users with specific contexts. Amid this work, I became quite enamored with the idea that knowledge creation and the use of knowledge to address complex problems in what we referenced at the time as “the real world” should not and could not be bound by the quite arbitrary construction of disciplinary lines. I developed, therefore, a deep affection and commitment for defying the gravity of such disciplinary boundaries in order to pursue inquiries and to form provocative, innovative, cross-disciplinary perspectives and connections. Moreover, it was during the convergence of this work that I was simultaneously beginning my own research on the rhetorical history of African American women, a confluence of circumstances that made me painfully aware of how uphill the struggles would be for the type of research and scholarship that I wanted to do in RCL. At that time, the primary resources for the study of the lives, conditions, and accomplishments of women of African descent were not widely known or easily accessible; scholarly attention to these women as community leaders was just beginning; and very little scholarly attention had been given to them as rhetors. Exacerbating my challenges was the fact that traditional scholarly frameworks, and certainly those in rhetorical studies, were not set in ways that would easily position the experiences and contributions of women of African descent as worthy of interrogation or the women as worthy rhetorical subjects. I marveled, in fact, at the number of times after a panel presentation of my research that I would receive a line of response like: How can what you’re saying be true? African American women in the nineteenth century were slaves. They couldn’t really read and write, could they? They didn’t publish anything, did they? Where would they have done that? Where/How did you find any evidence for these sorts of claims? In other words, the lives, work, and contributions of women of African descent were functioning during that time within what I came to call an atmosphere of deep disbelief. Such questions suggested that as a group, African American women were perceived as a monolithic blob of humanity with inferior prospects and quite questionable value, except, in keeping with the opening quotation by Spitzack and Carter, as rare, exceptional, and quite curious “museum pieces.” With the growth of the historical documentation of the lives and contributions of women of African descent (including our work on SAGE), 9

A Call for Action

however, the base of scholarship countering such disbelief was building exponentially during these years and offering to researchers like myself a steady source of encouragement and inspiration. Further, there was the testimony of the landmark publication, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies,3 edited in 1982 by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith.4 Brave was a particularly eye-opening volume. It drew together issues, challenges, and information related to black women and inspired a recognition among many during this time frame that there was a critical need to reset the terms of academic engagement in more-inclusive ways. To be noted, as the title of the collection suggests, the rise of black women’s studies as an intellectual domain brought critical attention to the need for sets of methodologies capable of defying discrete, disconnected renderings of knowledge and producing instead an analytical convergence at the intersections of gender, race, class, culture, sexuality, ideology, and the like. Another seminal volume was Wild Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin. I was haunted for many years, in fact (and likely still so as suggested by this account), by a statement from Audre Lorde’s foreword to the collection. Lorde opened the foreword, “It’s not that we haven’t always been here, since there was a here. It is that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not totally erased, and our fingerprints upon the handles of history have been called the random brushings of birds” (xi). The image that Lorde creates is compelling. The quotation became a provocative springboard for my 1995 chair’s address at the annual convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (“When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own”). Such collections as Brave and Wild Women helped us to see that dynamic, rather than static, analyses add value, analyses that have a more multidimensional scope and more-generative power in accounting for a deeper and fuller range of human endeavors and accomplishments. Even so, what I had to contend with at the time was that these types of methodologies were gaining visibility and momentum, not so much in rhetorical studies as in women’s studies, as indicated, for example, by the work of Patricia Hill Collins, Patricia Williams, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, scholars who were providing provocative tools for rethinking and reforming their traditional academic areas—in their cases in sociology and law. As a consequence of these types of efforts, though, I began to claim an interdisciplinary professional identity: in rhetorical studies (with interests in rhetoric, composition, and literacy), in women’s studies (with interests in

10

Our Own Stories of Professional Identity

gender, race, and class), and in cultural studies (with interests in the lives, conditions, and contributions of women of African descent wherever they may reside—but especially in the United States of America). My identity with black women’s studies provided me with a new framework for understanding the silencing and invisibility of women of African ancestry in rhetorical studies. It was quite evident to me that, beyond Sojourner Truth, who was historically defined as illiterate, there was little presumption of presence in rhetorical studies for women of African descent and even less presumption of their value as rhetors, except as “museum pieces,” as arbitrary, serendipitous, and quite rare examples of rhetorical eloquence. In other words, within this type of epistemological and even cosmological context, I came to see that RCL was an area in desperate need of reform, and I was able to enrich my definition of myself as an academic activist. The consequence, however, is that I consider Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women to be a key demonstration of my desire to be steadfast in participating actively in the process of disciplinary reform. What the Traces project accomplished for me, however, in taking seventeen years to complete and publish (from 1983 when I first started thinking of the project as a coherent plan and 2000 when it actually saw the light of day) was to underscore how very far we had to go in this field in order to reset frameworks and make better room for women’s rhetorical practices, including the practices of women of color. During the years of working on Traces and presenting other work that I believe helped to create a more positive reception for Traces, I became committed with equal passion, not only to documenting and analyzing the rhetorical practices of women of African descent and to doing so fairly, respectfully, and meaningfully but also to the need for the sorts of disciplinary reformation in RCL that would make more and better breathing room for the types of work in the field that I (and others) wished to do. I was able to convey such concerns through two projects, an article, “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric,” and a coedited volume, Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture. The metaphor of landscaping that I chose for “Disciplinary Landscaping” served as a springboard from which I started thinking in a more coherent way about the need in RCL to incorporate deliberately into our theoretical and methodological approaches mechanisms for moving beyond the constraints of habitual paradigms in order to notice conceptual and ecological features that might otherwise go unnoticed.

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A Call for Action

The search is not just for the facts and features in the presentation of discovered or recovered information, but also the representation of this information through frameworks that facilitate re-thinking, and the communication of it as well, that is, the clear and effective transmission of knowledge through words, images, and genres that permit it to be seen, appreciated, and valued. (161–62)

Or, differently said, my search for a more generative paradigm for research and practice began with the recognition that broadening the scope of our scholarly agenda, by whatever dimensions, requires the frameworks that support those agendas to be dynamic rather than static and versatile enough to accommodate vibrancy and expansion. So, at Virginia Tech when Gesa and I found ourselves in constant conversation about our mutual interests and concerns, I saw that doing a volume that would permit us to share our thoughts and make an attempt to ferret out such a paradigm in RCL (given all the work that so many scholars, researchers, and teachers have been doing over the last thirty years) to be a totally compelling idea. I concluded that it was far past time to think about and discuss in a more coherent and explicit way how, through this matrix of interests and concerns, I was fortunate enough to find an intellectual home—in a field that we now name feminist rhetorical studies—and to understand that the tools and processes for re-forming rhetorical studies were already in motion. Occasion Although more could be said about the rationales that bring each of us to this project, our two stories indicate the ways in which our personal and professional experiences created a kairotic moment. They became occasions for action with the Virginia Tech symposium merging with them to provide a striking opportunity for actually doing something in which we both could invest time and intellectual energy. Feminist Rhetorical Practices stands, therefore, as the enactment of this investment in the sense that the chapters that follow bring substance and definition to what may otherwise be viewed, quite simply, as professional narratives. Our view, of course, is that most certainly our stories are our own professional narratives, but, alas, they are not simply so.

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2

Documenting a Need for Change in Rhetorical Studies

[F]eminist rhetorical research is alive and well, multifaceted and in motion, reaching into continuing and new branches of inquiry, places, and spaces. . . . We, feminist scholars in rhetorical studies, are constantly in motion, “working within, against, and across” methods and methodologies, “combining elements from different perspectives” and different disciplines, addressing questions about the value and purpose of the work we do, and working to reconcile our methodological differences even as we realize that some of those differences cannot be reconciled. —Eileen E. Schell, Rhetorica in Motion

In this volume, we focus primarily on the history of rhetoric (as compared with composition and literacy) and undertake four critical tasks. First, we delineate major shifts in recent decades in rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape for narratives in the history of rhetoric. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted the landscape, they have also been instrumental in expanding the scope and range of factors that we now perceive as significant in determining the highest qualities of excellence in both performance and professional practice. Third, we create a topology for feminist rhetorical practices that is designed to be a springboard for articulating how researchers and scholars are stretching the boundaries of our work to reach beyond the basics (i.e., re-forming the master narratives in the history of rhetoric simply to include 13

A Call for Action

women) toward the development of new paradigms for how our work itself might be shaped and how we as proponents of it might serve as a vanguard for knowledge making and knowledge using in the field. Fourth, from this type of enhanced rhetorical landscape, we propose a polylogical analytical model, an inquiry framework, for understanding, interpreting, and assessing feminist practices in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies.1 This combination of tasks has lead us to proclaim that at the hands of teachers and scholars in feminist rhetorical studies, research and practice in rhetorical studies have changed—and to the benefit of the whole. We now see more about the nature, impact, and consequences of language use. We recognize the importance of contexts and conditions in performance. We understand more about how rhetorical actions function in the human enterprise. Goals and Intentions A centrally important goal for Feminist Rhetorical Practices is to articulate a new analytical model, using feminist practices, for rendering women’s rhetorical performances in research, scholarship, and teaching that is based directly on the organic growth of the knowledge and understanding gained over the last few decades. Our core intention, however, is not to prescribe a singular path for analysis or knowledge making or pedagogical decision making. Instead, it is to embrace a set of values and perspectives, first of all, that honors the particular traditions of the subjects of study, respects their communities, amplifies their voices, and clarifies their visions, thus bringing evidence of our rhetorical past more dynamically into the present and creating the potential, even with contemporary research subjects, for a more dialectical and reciprocal intellectual engagement. Beyond this core intention, we consider it important also to pay attention, not just to ethics and representation but specifically to ethos, to the ethical self, both in the texts we study and the texts we produce. Another goal is to showcase critical and creative practices that center not just on work that involves rescue, recovery, or (re)inscription—as we normally talk about the three Rs of our work—in recognition of women as rhetors but also on finding innovative ways to engage in an exchange with these women both critically and imaginatively in order to enable a more dialogic relationship between past and present, their worlds and ours, their priorities and ours.2 From our perspective, modern researchers and scholars are fully challenged to learn how to listen more carefully to the voices (and texts) that they study, to critique our analytical assumptions and frames, to critique guiding questions reflectively and reflexively. We are also well 14

Documenting a Need for Change

challenged to account for the impact and consequences of both the navigational tools and strategies that the women used to negotiate their lives, as well as ones that we ourselves use to negotiate academic tasks in studying, interpreting, and teaching about these women. This volume seeks to address these challenges. A Feminist-Informed Organizational Framework A Rhetorical Assaying Process To organize this volume, we selected a metaphorical anchor, recognizing as Kenneth Burke recognized, the importance of noting consciously that human beings are “symbol-using animals” (Language as Symbolic Action 3). We have the habit of choosing for ourselves symbols from our past experiences that help us translate and align new experiences and to transform them into knowledge and insight. By such transformative connections, we can see more clearly where and how we stand, how we interpret what we see, and consequently how we make sense out of the chaotic effects of various encounters and observations in creating new knowledge. A metaphor that seemed promising as a transformative symbol in this analysis was related to geological processes. We were attracted by the potential revelatory power of connecting rhetorical analysis to the concept of mining for gold (and other precious metals) and connecting analytical processes to the metallurgical process of assaying. In using geological metaphors, we intend them to function as terministic screens, also in keeping with Burke’s concepts (44–62), for filtering through and making sense of the practices, values, properties, and processes by which feminist rhetorical studies as an asset in RCL might be made more visible and deemed worthy and valuable not only to RCL but perhaps even beyond. Using geological metaphors affords several advantages. They offer a generally familiar and accessible language for describing a historically underinterrogated academic terrain. They focus inquiries on determining presence, absence, and viability as we identify known, unconsidered, and even unnoticed properties, elements, conditions, and structures. Specifically, this type of rhetorical assaying takes into account two important analytical processes. One is the growing sophistication of the interrogations that are occurring at specific points of focus, using feminist practices as tools, for example, examinations of rhetorical contexts, performances, impacts, and consequences. Metaphorically, feminist practices have brought specific attention to various combinations of these sites as productive in the search for rhetorical assets, that is, in the search for our disciplinary and interdisciplinary “gold” and other “precious metals.” In other words, the “digging” 15

A Call for Action

processes of feminist rhetorical inquiries have helped to make clearer the expectation, not only that there may be gold but also the distinct possibility that gold or the gold standards of traditional rhetorical expectations may not always be the only precious metals to be sought, found, desired, or valued. The second analytical process is the interrogations that form and re-form specific patterns of evaluation, that is, the patterns by which we assess, interpret, and critique findings (the assaying processes that permit us to determine quality and value). Feminist rhetorical practices focus questions persistently on the adequacy of our own actions and judgments, rather than questioning more unidirectionally and without reflexivity the quality and value of our subjects and their performances. The intentions of such interrogations have been not simply to find gold but to make sure that we have flexible mechanisms for recognizing gold when we see it, as well as for recognizing valuable assets that may not be gold but also equally precious in understanding excellence in rhetorical behavior. By such dialogic relationships between points of focus and processes of critical evaluation, an assaying metaphor offers a symbolic mechanism for constructing a descriptive base for understanding rhetorical behavior (i.e., looking for and expecting to find gold and other precious metals in an underexplored academic territory) and for understanding as well the ways in which we make sense of that behavior and value it—or not (i.e., bringing all of our critical sensibilities to bear as we assay the quality and value of whatever elements we find in context—over time, space, conditions, and circumstances). From the well-textured, descriptive base that results, we enhance our capacity as teachers and scholars to ground our research, teaching, and learning in evidence as we keep our eyes, minds, and hearts open for a broad array of possibilities by which we might come to new insights about the nature, ways, and means of rhetorical action. Ultimately then, using rhetorical assaying as a metaphor emphasizes the necessity of constructing an evidence-rich descriptive base and linking it by multiple mechanisms within the complex global matrix of normative, and perhaps nonnormative, rhetorical action. In effect, the symbolic move to name, describe, and assess more thoroughly what we observe and interrogate as rhetorical action encourages us to set aside our disbeliefs about who rhetors are and what constitutes, with meaning and consequence, rhetorical action. Rhetorical assaying encourages us to focus on how language in all of its complexity might actually be functioning in the conduct of human endeavors and in setting the range of cultural norms and expectations that we deem valuable globally—across time and space. Included, of course, in these norms and expectations is the affinity in RCL to honor effectiveness 16

Documenting a Need for Change

in the powers of persuasion, communication, and social and civic engagement, especially with regard to the long-standing agenda of changing hearts and minds; bringing enlightenment; forging social, political, and cultural relationships; getting problems articulated and solved; and addressing geopolitical concerns and challenges. Tectonic Shifts In continuing the geological metaphors, this process of inquiry, analysis, interpretation, and reflexive/reflective critique draws critical attention to the reality that after more than thirty years of research and practice, feminist studies is showing itself to be a richly endowed scholarly terrain. This volume offers an accounting of this vista with the intention of charting a useable topology for how practices might be perceived, understood, and magnified. We argue that trends and practices in feminist rhetorical studies have broken through habitual expectations for rhetorical studies to be overwhelmingly about men and male-dominated arenas, with the consequence of creating volatility in research and practice, tectonic shifts on the rhetorical landscape. We argue further that this shifting process has not been arbitrary or mystical but the result of specific strategies and methodologies that are forming now-coherent patterns for well-grounded action. Based on such propositions, there is a specific need to articulate more forthrightly and explicitly an operational framework within which these patterns seem to be working, that is informed by intersections of feminist studies and rhetorical studies. There is also a need to incorporate in our endeavors regularized opportunities to stand back from these tasks to assay the practices and reflect on what we are seeing and not seeing and on what our assessments mean with regard to the status of this work within the field at large. In reviewing the intersection of feminist and rhetorical practices in RCL, therefore, we are asserting that a feminist-informed operational framework has emerged organically from well-regarded work in the field. The effort, then, is to calibrate through the work itself the alignments of feminist studies in rhetorical studies and rhetorical studies in feminist studies. The general challenge is not to create a new system for research, scholarship, and practice in the field but to bring visibility and animation to what teachers and scholars are currently doing deliberately and self-consciously but not always paradigmatically. The questions to be addressed are how these two areas are converging in a generative way and whether we can identify elements and processes that we might envision more holistically and articulate more forthrightly in creating a well-deliberated set of tools that is both affirming for the current work and generative for ongoing agenda. 17

A Call for Action

The imperative is to articulate a framework that is both recognizable to the people engaged in the work and simultaneously useable in a dynamic, flexible, and enlightening way as we move beyond the core agenda of rescuing, recovering, and re(inscribing) women into the history of rhetoric (the three Rs) to work that is more transformative for the field. The idea is to use what we know to greater effect in gaining clarity about sets of agendas going forward. In recognizing tectonic shifts and posing paradigmatic changes, we reemphasize that we do not view the model that we present in part 4 of the current volume as the only pathway possible. Instead, we are proposing it as a specific example of the effort to incorporate knowledge gained from feminist values and perspectives, as indicated by the sections that precede part 4, into the expansion and re-formation of rhetorical practices, bringing attention to the capacity that we are building as a field of inquiry in enhancing our understanding of how language works in people’s lives broadly defined. Values The idea in developing a feminist-informed operational framework is not simply to make a clearer, more coherent place for feminist work in rhetorical studies but also to bring a better balancing for how qualities of excellence are negotiated and constituted in the field generally, given the values added by feminist methodologies. We begin the process, therefore, with a basic principle: We accept the notion that there is indeed value to be recognized and appreciated in the lives, words, participation, leadership, and legacies of women. In addition, we suggest that through the critical practices that we are showcasing in feminist rhetorical studies, there is evident the capacity also to propel general knowledge-making processes in the field at large—if not forward—at least to another, better-informed, more inclusive conceptual space. Imbedded in these suppositions are values, with a key value being the importance of paying attention to the ethical self in the texts we study, the texts we produce, and the pedagogical frames that we use to instruct and train our students. Such values take seriously the interplay of who we personally are as scholars, teachers, and human beings, what our vantage points are, what we see, how we are conditioned to see, how we engage in sense-making processes, and how we turn those sensibilities into actions. Terms of Engagement In order to present a feminist-informed apparatus that takes advantage of a dialogical and dialectical approach, we survey the terrain of current 18

Documenting a Need for Change

scholarship in order to articulate patterns in motion and patterns of change. We developed a set of questions that helped us to shape an assaying process for examining elements, properties, processes, conditions, contexts, and the like in order to interrogate and assess the publications chosen. We go reflexively from practice to theory to practice to theory in order to gain clarity about shifts in ways of being and doing in the field that seem to be becoming habitual. We use these assessments to identify shifts in focus and/or values that seem tectonic in the field. We configure each of the shifts schematically to take into account both the general contours of the evolving landscape and make clearer our aesthetic consciousness of what constitutes, not so much standards of excellence as qualities of excellence in these practices. Using this process of rhetorical assaying, four critical terms of engagement, as defined below, gained particular traction and integrity: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization. We found these terms to be particularly useful in recognizing and making sense of the sets of tectonic shifts that we see to be taking place and reconstituting the terrain of our work. While some readers might find the strategies and examples described decidedly familiar, we believe that in such an analysis they should seem familiar. In keeping with Geertz’s view, this schema functions to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar in order to call forward what we believe now constitutes a more clearly articulated vista of feminist rhetorical practices. In other words, our intention in laying out a range of feminist rhetorical practices is to make more explicit how topological shifts in this intellectual arena have occurred and how these changes have implications not only within feminist circles but for rhetorical studies as well. Critical Imagination In Traces of a Stream, Royster defines critical imagination in this way: This strategy for inquiry claims a valuable place for imagination in research and scholarship—imagination as a term for a commitment to making connections and seeing possibility. So defined, imagination functions as a critical skill in questioning a viewpoint, an experience, an event, and so on, and in remaking interpretive frameworks based on that questioning . . . The use of critical imagination does not at all negate the need to do the hard work of engaging systematically in theoretically grounded processes of discovery, analysis, and interpretation . . . Beyond this, the necessity is to acknowledge the limits of knowledge and to be particularly careful about “claims” to truth, by clarifying the contexts and conditions of our interpretations and by making sure that we do not overreach the bounds of either reason or possibility. 19

A Call for Action

The fundamental point is that this paradigm for the recovery and reenvisioning of experience recognizes not just the potential for knowledge-making but also the potential for an understanding that exists at the intersections of scholarship and creative imagination. (83–84)

This definition brings forward the concept of critical imagination as an inquiry tool, a mechanism for seeing the noticed and the unnoticed, rethinking what is there and not there, and speculating about what could be there instead. Royster sees in this view the potential advantage of opening up our critiques, taking into account the murky and mysterious as well as that which is easier to document and know. By this definition, these types of queries would depend on both imagination and more-traditional habits of critique, whether we are considering underlying assumptions, the focal points that we choose for our work, the frameworks and processes that we use to analyze and interpret our findings, and so on. In highlighting a place for critical imagination, we seek, therefore, to leave open the possibility of rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription while bringing attention to the challenge of expanding knowledge and re-forming not only what constitutes knowledge but also whether and how we value and accredit it. Recognizing that feminist rhetorical practices have been honed particularly on historical rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription, we use critical imagination to illuminate some important questions designed to clarify the scope, nature, and principles of our work. The questions include these: When we study women of the past, especially those whose voices have rarely been heard or studied by rhetoricians, how do we render their work and lives meaningfully? How do we honor their traditions? How do we transport ourselves back to the time and context in which they lived, knowing full well that is not possible to see things from their vantage point? How did they frame (rather than we frame) the questions by which they navigated their own lives? What more lingers in what we know about them that would suggest that we need to think again, to think more deeply, to think more broadly? How do we make what was going on in their context relevant or illuminating for the contemporary context? With such questions, the objective is to develop mechanisms by which listening deeply, reflexively, and multisensibly become standard practice not only in feminist rhetorical scholarship but also in rhetorical studies writ large. By such commitments, we gain a deeper understanding by going repeatedly not to our assumptions and expectations but to the women—to their writing, their work, and their worlds, seeking to ground our inquiries in the evidence of the women’s lives, taking as a given that the women have much to teach us if we develop the patience to pay attention in a more paradigmatic way. 20

Documenting a Need for Change

Embracing this type of inquiry framework for exercising the critical imagination, we focus on: listening deeply, reflexively, and multisensibly; grounding inquiries in historical evidence with regard to both texts and contexts; creating schemata for engaging critical attention; and disrupting our assumptions regularly through reflective and reflexive questions. Such a framework helps, in our opinion, to bring clarity and substance in rhetorical studies to evolving qualities of excellence. The challenge is to seek answers within such a framing while being fully aware that both questions and answers shift as knowledge shifts, as we think dialectically and dialogically, and to take notice of different features of the landscape. It is our contention that such inquiry strategies allow us to engender an ethos of humility, respect, and care—an ethos we consider critical to achieving qualities of excellence. Strategic Contemplation Using critical imagination as described above is not an endpoint. It is a mechanism for enabling and energizing within scholarly processes a space for rigorous contemplation, with the effect actually of creating a generic space in which to use a literate form designed to draw methodically, vibrantly, and creatively from well-grounded scholarly work. Essentially, the effort is to enact more conspicuously what it means to think critically and innovatively and to pursue actively a robust, intellectual agenda. We link the protocols for this more consciously enacted contemplative process to a long-standing deliberative practice associated with what earlier scholars referred to as meditations. In doing so, we seek to reclaim the genre of the meditation in current scholarly practice in order to claim strategic contemplation deliberately as taking the time, space, and resources to think about, through, and around our work as an important meditative dimension of scholarly productivity. Moreover, we suggest that strategic contemplation becomes especially useful when traditional, more publicly rendered sources of information are in short supply, as is often the case with the documentation of women’s experiences, or when the ecologies of person, time, and space stretch beyond anointed assumptions about the ways and means of rhetorical performance.3 Strategic contemplation involves engaging in a dialogue, in an exchange, with the women who are our rhetorical subjects, even if only imaginatively, to understand their words, their visions, their priorities whether and perhaps especially when they differ from our own. As Cheryl Glenn suggests in her groundbreaking work on the rhetoric of silence, it involves recognizing—and learning to listen to—silence as a rhetorically powerful act. It entails creating a space where we can see and hold contradictions without rushing to 21

A Call for Action

immediate closure, to neat resolutions, or to cozy hierarchies and binaries. The intent of such strategic contemplations is to render meaningfully, respectfully, honorably the words and works of those whom we study, even when we find ourselves disagreeing with some of their values, beliefs, or worldviews. Strategic contemplation further suggests that we pay attention to how lived experiences shape our perspectives as researchers and those of our research subjects. We call for greater attention to lived, embodied experience because we consider it to be a powerful yet often-neglected source of insight, inspiration, and passion. As chapter 6 details, scholars have only recently begun to value the different layers of knowledge and understanding that can emerge when we attend to the world around us and in us: paying attention to the material realities of scholarly work, being mindful of the locations we visit (both archival sites and places where historical subjects lived) and to our own embodied experiences, the responses invoked in us by visiting historical sites and handling cultural artifacts. By claiming a space for contemplation, reflection, and meditation, by observing without rushing to judgment, by noticing without the immediate need to analyze, classify, and establish hierarchies, we allow new vistas to come into view, unexpected leads to shape scholarly work, and new research questions to emerge. Central to such an open, contemplative stance are questions such as these: What do we notice when we stand back and observe? What emerges most prominently? How do we imagine, connect with, and open up a space for the women—and others—we study? How does their work, their rhetorical prowess, their activism speak to us, inspire us, and help us understand the past as well as the present? How does their work speak to our minds, our hearts, and our ethos? What lingers at the margins that we might not see immediately? What can our own lived experience teach us? What else might enter our consciousness when we temporarily postpone the analytical, critical processes of scholarly research? How do we respond to—and represent—historical subjects when we discover that we may not share their values or beliefs? How do we honor, or do justice to, those who no longer can speak back to us? How can an ethos of humility, respect, and care shape our research? How do past and present merge to suggest new possibilities for the future when we create time and space for contemplation, reflection, and meditation? These questions suggest rich, new dimensions in scholarly work when we deliberately seek to attend to the places where past and present meet, where our embodied experience, intuition, and quiet minds can begin to notice the unnoticed. Finally, strategic contemplation means recognizing what was made possible for us as feminist rhetorical scholars through other women’s work, how 22

Documenting a Need for Change

their efforts have enabled us to stand where we are today, and how their visions make it possible for us to imagine a future worth working for. It entails reflecting on how we become “witnesses” to another’s life4 and how we carry that new knowledge forward into the future. It entails reflecting deliberately and consciously on how we ourselves are shaped by our projects, how our understanding and knowledge evolve, and how work can help us envision the future. Social Circulation The notion of social circulation invokes connections among past, present, and future5 in the sense that the overlapping social circles in which women travel, live, and work are carried on or modified from one generation to the next and can lead to changed rhetorical practices. Here we are talking about evolutionary relationships—not just revolutionary ones—and moremediated legacies of thought and action, such as, things that we absorb even without conscious awareness rather than a static sense of direct inheritance. We chose the term “social circulation” as leverage for understanding these complex interactions: reimagining the dynamic functioning of women’s work in domains of discourse, re-envisioning its various impacts and consequences within these localities, and linking these analyses in an informative and compelling way to forward a larger understanding of rhetoric as a cultural phenomenon and very much a human enterprise. We wanted to have an operational metaphor in this case for rethinking how such performances ebb, flow, travel, gain substance and integrity, acquire traction, and not, in resonance with theories espoused by Stuart Hall related to the circulation of culture. Essentially, we wanted a useful metaphor for re-anchoring in a more generative way the convergence of both the values added by the use of feminist ideologies in rhetorical analyses and the use of rhetorical theories and criticism in feminist analyses, all well considered within a thickly rendered social, political, economic, cultural context. With this convergence, we see the ongoing need to use feminist analyses to get a better hold of how women have participated actively in setting, shaping, and deploying rhetorical trends and practices writ large, and we see simultaneously the need to bring more critical attention to how deliberately employing feminist analyses seems to be informing and enhancing qualities of excellence in rhetorical scholarship more generally. We consider questions such as the following as levers for underscoring and addressing these issues: Are affection and admiration possible without sentimentality? What are the cautions and safeguards? Who responsibly occupies center stage in scholarship: the author, subject, task, or some sort of 23

A Call for Action

convergence of these perspectives? How do we locate both writers and readers in relation to new textual forms? What are the writer-scholar’s options and obligations associated with acknowledging passionate attachments? What makes the consideration of such questions feminist? What do such questions invite or make a place for? This array of questions can be clustered rather conspicuously into categorical sets that help to mark the fertile ground for ongoing research and scholarship, the ongoing need to articulate and refine best practices for our ways of working, and the importance of recognizing that the social swirls within and across rhetorical arenas matter. With the concept of social circulation, our move is also to disrupt the public-private divide by suggesting a more fully textured sense of what it means to place these women in social space, rather than private space or public space. We flesh out the contours of social spaces (communities of various kinds, including professional communities, activist communities, and the like) so that we can see, hear, and understand more ecologically the contours of both women’s public lives and their private challenges. In other words, we need to make more visible the social circles within which they have functioned and continue to function as rhetorical agents. In using the term “social circulation” metaphorically as a term of engagement, we note, however, the limitations of metaphorical language. As with all metaphors, this one inevitably pales with the application of it both to women’s lived experiences and to the conduct of this type of research and scholarship. Ultimately, it becomes inadequate and loses its direct conceptual alignments. Nevertheless, what we consistently embrace with this choice is the notion of mutable and robust discourse arenas and compelling convergences within and across these areas between rhetorics and feminisms. In effect, the basic utility of this term is that it casts a brighter, more focused light on the importance of rendering women’s rhetorical practices across space and time more richly, envisioning the conditions, impacts, and consequences of those practices more generatively, and casting this work as research, scholarship, and knowledge that are worthy and worthwhile. Globalization The intellectual vibrancy of feminist rhetorical studies is stretching the imagination well beyond the places where we began as an area of inquiry thirty years ago in concentrating mainly on making a more substantive place in the history of rhetoric for women’s participation, contributions, and leadership. When we look now at this vibrancy, however, one dimension of it that still remains very much in shadow is how we are connecting the dots. The concern is not just about highlighting and magnifying connections and 24

Documenting a Need for Change

disconnections between the classical traditions of Greece and Rome and our own contemporary national scene in the United States or across disciplines, genres, and arenas but also between the varieties of work that is happening here and varieties occurring around the globe—across both time and space. Feminist rhetorical scholars are actively engaging in the push toward better-informed perspectives of rhetoric and writing as global enterprises, addressing various practices in other geographical locations through feminist-informed lenses; rescuing, recovering, and (re)inscribing women rhetors both distinctively in locations around the world and in terms of the connections and interconnections of their performances across national boundaries; and participating in the effort to recast perspectives of rhetoric as a transnational, global phenomenon rather than a Western one. A particular emphasis in this volume, therefore, is on assaying a compelling set of publications that are pushing us to globalize our points of view. From using these four terms of engagement, we have the sense that current work in feminist rhetorical studies has indeed been tectonic, as the following discussion illustrates. Generally, this work is taking on a more deliberate global perspective and doing so in combination with work that incorporates critical imagination and strategic contemplation. Further, we’re coming to understand the dynamic effects of social circulation in creating knowledge and legacies of action and performance. Last, but certainly not least, these four focal points now seem quite instrumental in affirming, as subsequent chapters suggest, that feminist rhetorical practices are making a difference, not just in building identity and credibility for this area but also in shifting values and expectations in the field itself.

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P art T w o Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice

3

Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices

What is the present content, scope, and methodology of this discipline? . . . How would this discipline need to change to reflect the fact that women are half the world’s population and have had, in one sense, half of the world’s experience? —Peggy McIntosh, “Interactive Phases of Curricular Revision”

Picking up on the terms discussed in chapter 2, this chapter focuses more closely on mapping out the shift in rhetorical studies from traditional paradigms based largely on Western cultural expectations and values to paradigms that make considerably more room, as Peggy McIntosh states above, for “the fact that women are half the world’s population.” Further, as previously stated, we claim that the impact of this conceptual and methodological shifting has been dramatic in setting in motion practices that have been engendering over the last three decades new, different, and more-inclusive insights about the scope and nature of rhetorical enterprises. Informed not only by the existence of women’s experiences but also the impact and consequences of women’s lived realities, these tectonic shifts are producing two specific changes in the rhetorical landscape. One is breaking through the persistently elite, male-centered boundaries of our disciplinary habits, and the second is re-forming that terrain to create a much more open and expanded view of rhetorical performance, accomplishment, and rhetorical possibilities. 29

Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice

A Traditional Paradigm for the History of Rhetoric For centuries, the world of rhetoric has been anchored by Western patriarchal values, an assertion that is easily documented by a review of rhetorical scholarship over time. Invariably, any review of this scholarship shows historical patterns of exclusivity. These patterns include a focus on men as rhetorical subjects; a focus geographically on the Europeanized/Western world; attention centered on power elites, by class, race, and gender, that is, rich, famous or infamous, white males; and attention directed toward public domains (political, judicial, religious, academic),that is, arenas in which white, elite males have dominated historically, rather than in what we refer to currently as counterpublic arenas that draw from social and political networks that have not been shaped or controlled by power elites. Using such patterns historically, European-based cultures have deemed the fifth-century b.c.e. in Greece to be the provenance of excellence in rhetorical theory, criticism, and practice and deemed figures such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and a long list of other mostly male rhetors over the centuries to be exemplary and pacesetting. These valorizing processes have thus constituted operational paradigms that have become highly entrenched, powerful, and culturally persuasive in setting the terms of engagement in rhetorical theory and criticism and in establishing criteria for worthiness. On one hand, a basic consequence of these paradigms has been positive in that we know this particular view of rhetorical studies very well and better than other possible viewpoints (e.g., viewpoints that might contrast by geographical location, race, class, gender, discourse arena, and the like). Another consequence, however, is that these processes have also established the primacy of Westernized traditions in our field and set in motion a tendency toward us-and-them expectations that are binary and hierarchical, based on the assumption that Western traditions are a superior manifestation of civilization and sophistication, above and beyond all other options or sometimes above and beyond even the likelihood of other options. Malea Powell notes poignantly in her article “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing”: [W]hat has become clear to me as a participant in the discipline of composition and rhetoric is that whether “we” are focusing on cultural and intellectual history or on pedagogical and institutional history, “we” are still often doing so in regards to The Rhetorical Tradition. Typically this Tradition begins with the Greeks, goes Roman, briefly sojourns in Italy, then shows up in England and Scotland, hops the ocean to America and settles in. Additions to the Tradition are rare, though the Tradition itself is often supplemented by writings from Other rhetorical traditions so that we end up with a sort 30

Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices

of smorgasbord of traditions distinct and whole unto themselves who nonetheless sometimes “visit” the big house of Tradition for a night or two. (397)

Within the primacy of such a deeply entrenched paradigmatic framework, we do not expect this volume to totally dismantle this power base. Instead, it is our intention to create a basic topology of the patterns of work done by scholars who use feminist methodologies, along with an acknowledgment that, overwhelmingly, the researchers who are doing this work are women. In doing so, we recognize the extent to which these practices seem now to be gaining coherence and normalizing in the field and thereby marking a moment of evolution in methodological patterns, if not altogether a revolution, with regard to our ways of seeing, doing, and being as teachers and scholars in rhetorical studies. We suggest that this normalization is evidence of a shifting in operational paradigms, not simply in our focal area but in the field more generally. The idea is that feminist rhetorical scholarship is now moving far beyond the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription of a diversity of women participants and on to the establishing of new watermarks of regard and worthiness in rhetorical studies more generally for the methodologies that we have been using and the types of insights that such methodologies have the capacity to yield. We also acknowledge the importance of actually articulating the nature of the paradigmatic shifts so that as teachers and scholars in the field we can function not just with cognitive awareness, as we have certainly been doing, but also with a well-grounded metacognitive awareness about the ways and means of the work and about its dynamic potential for engendering qualities of excellence. The potential of feminist rhetorical studies to engender qualities of excellence is particularly salient in that feminist researchers and scholars have been working quite deliberately and consciously to add insight and value. A reasonable springboard for determining the impact of this effort entails taking the time to assess this productivity by considering elements, properties, conditions, contexts, values, and practices. The task is to be reflective and reflexive, not only about the extent to which these scholarly actions are actively participating in the shaping, growth, and development of feminist rhetorical studies but active also in forming an innovative vanguard for general practices in rhetorical studies, rather than functioning mainly at its periphery. A General Overview of Feminist Rhetorical Scholarship Since the 1980s, feminist rhetorical scholarship has been coalescing to form a coherent body of research and practice. With this growing collectivity, we are now well positioned to compose an intelligible narrative of the ways in 31

Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice

which the work in feminisms and rhetorics are converging and offer a view of the spectrum of this multivariant productivity and its capacity to inform, generate, and support the ongoing enterprise in rhetoric, composition, and literacy. This convergence covers a wide-ranging collection of ideological positions related to gender, race, class, sexuality, identity, image, place, and more. So far, it has not given rise to labels that work without the specter of politics or offense. We acknowledge, therefore, the necessity of signaling inclusion in this important work by using the plural form for both feminisms and rhetorics, terminology that the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition adopted for its biennial conference Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s). With this cautionary point in mind, we move forward to recognize the steady stream of pioneering work accomplished over the last three decades. Although we cannot possibly include every publication related to feminist rhetorical studies, we cite as examples the following: • Reframing Westernized traditions: Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance; Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured; C. Jan Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies • The nature and sponsorship of literacy, reading and writing practices, rhetorical education, and the nature of authorship: Katherine H. Adams, Progressive Politics and the Training of American Persuaders; Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives; Beth Daniell and Peter Mortensen, Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century; Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words; Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1920; Shirley Wilson Logan, Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America; Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Societies; Beverly J. Moss, A Community Text Arises: A Literate Text and a Literacy Tradition in African American Churches; Literacy across Communities; Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness; Wendy Sharer, Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930; Susan Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 • Rhetorical and literate practices in various contexts and communities: Sandra Adickes, The Legacy of a Freedom School; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her; Jessica Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911; Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: 32

Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices

Literacy and Cultural Work in US Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920; Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence; Charlotte Hogg, From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community; Susan Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885–1937; Shirley Wilson Logan, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women and We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women; Paula Mathieu, Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition; Carol Mattingly, WellTempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric; Vorris Nunley, “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition”; Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writer in the North (1830–1880); Katrina M. Powell, The Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park; Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States; Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women; Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture; Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Inventing a Voice: The Rhetoric of American First Ladies of the Twentieth Century; Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity • Individual women rhetors: Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign; Carolyn De Swarte Gifford and Amy R. Slagell, Let Something Good Be Said: Speeches and Writing of Frances E. Willard; Jacqueline Jones Royster, Southern Horrors and Other Writing: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett • Practices in technological environments: Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces; Laura J. Gurak, Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness; Gail Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction and Global Literacies and the WorldWide Web; Kathleen Welch, The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse and Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy Included also are now a rising numbers of scholars who are paying attention, as we are, to the ways in which feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition is being done and transforming the field, some of whom are 33

Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice

also paying particular attention to the implications, not only for knowledge making but also for innovations in pedagogical theories and practices. Pioneers in the area include, in chronological order, Andrea A. Lunsford, editor of Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, the first volume to offer, as stated in the foreword, “not a history of women rhetoricians, or women orators, or women writers . . . [but] a glimmer of possibilities . . . this set of essays holds that everywhere you look you find surprises of womanly rhetorical capacity” (ix). Other edited collections include: Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig, Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric; Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric; Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s); Jane Donawerth, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology; Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee NickosonMassey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau, Feminisms and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook; and Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin, Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Such volumes have helped to stake out territories for acknowledging and understanding the contributions in rhetoric and composition of women who have helped as well to push us beyond their own levels of knowledge making in search of other lines of inquiry that continue to reaffirm feminist and rhetorical practices as vibrant intellectual enterprises. Changing Research Methods and Methodologies Feminist rhetorical practices are not only changing research methods but also research methodologies—the guiding assumptions and theoretical principles that underlie all research methods—what counts as data, how we gather and interpret data, what role researchers play in relation to participants, what ethical stance they assume, and so on.1 Many of these changes—toward more reciprocal, collaborative, mutually beneficial research methods—have been brought about by feminist scholars. Having been at the margins of the disciplines, of academe, and often at the margins of society, women scholars have insisted, time and again, that participants’ voices need to be not only included but also amplified and represented respectfully. In other words, feminist scholars have made the case for designing research that can enrich the lives of those whom they study, whether the rhetorical agents are women, students, historical figures, Internet users, or other groups. Three recent collections on feminist and archival research methods add to the richness of discussion on changing research methodologies. In Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, 34

Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices

Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson draw together essays with the purpose of expanding on Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica. Like Reclaiming Rhetorica, this volume began in a graduate seminar in upstate New York, centered around provocative questions: How do feminist researchers make decisions about what to study and under what conditions? How does one undertake the work of feminist rhetorical analysis? What counts as feminist rhetorics? How should feminist rhetoricians combine rhetorical methods, feminist methods, and methods from other disciplines? What difficult choices do feminist rhetoricians face as they navigate the uncertainties of working across disciplines or at the edges of multiple disciplines? How does one engage work that is truly interdisciplinary and at the same time maintain ties to a home discipline? What might constitute a productive attitude and practice toward questioning and being self-critical about one’s own methods and methodologies? (1–2)

This group of contributors, expanded from the class to include others in the field, explores such questions, offering compelling analyses and reflections about methods and methodologies, and they inspire us anew to question how we are defining our work and why, how we are combining and recombining elements from across disciplines and forging new theoretical and intellectual pathways. Turning their attention to historical research in Working in the Archives: Practical Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, Alexis Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo respond to John Brereton’s call for more attention to what archives are all about as research resources and to what it means to conduct research in them. They assert that they “write this book, then, for the scholar new to the archive in the hope of helping prevent archive fever, while at the same time enabling them to more systematically ‘play’ in the archives” (3). In this edited collection, they gather essays from a range of active researchers and scholars in the field. The collection functions as a thoughtful and accessible resource for newcomers, offering advice about archival research from finding and accessing materials to working with and through the materials one finds, to the ways and means by which one might compile materials upon which knowledge and understanding can be built. The collection opens up both the wealth of materials that are available in archives and endow this work, as well as the mystery that often surrounds the doing of this work. Through the stories told in the volume and the accounting of individual experiences, this collection of practical wisdom offers an operational boost to researchers who are new to these types of projects 35

Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice

and was written with the intention of helping to keep them from flailing and floundering unnecessarily. In a collection of essays that focuses less on practical methods for mining the archives and more on the creative, intuitive processes of historical research, Kirsch and Liz Rohan, in Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, illustrate how virtual, historical, and lived experiences intersect in the archives, particularly as researchers extract meaning from sources in locations often associated with isolation and loneliness. This volume illustrates the range of research methods and strategies available to scholars, such as, using space and location as a way to understand the sites where a historical subject lived; using oral histories and interviews with local informants or relatives to better understand the actors involved in shaping the politics, culture, and history of the times; and being attentive to chance encounters that can enrich a research project as well as change its direction and scope. The collection enhances our notion of what constitutes an archive: Contributors use materials from regional and local sources, family records and artifacts, FBI and other government documents. By doing so, they highlight how using these less frequently consulted resources can enrich our understanding of history, culture, and rhetoric and offer glimmers of possibilities for future research. In many ways, these volumes illustrate how new understandings of research methods and methodologies have become the norm not only in feminist work but also in RCL more generally. Other notable recent publications that seek to articulate new methodological patterns and expand the “glimmer of possibilities” (Lunsford ix) are: Nickoson and Sheridan, Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies; K. M. Powell and Takayoshi, Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research; and Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process. What we aim to do in this project is to push these boundaries even further, by exploring questions such as: What are the new, evolving qualities of excellence in feminist rhetorical inquiry that come along with the tectonic shifts we are describing here? How do we study and write about those whose values and worldviews we may not share? That is, how do we engage respectfully and thoughtfully with others? How do we answer questions of ethics and representations under these challenging conditions? How do we include—and value—ordinary women’s rhetorical activities, activities that often have been called mundane, not noteworthy, or extracurricular? How do we reclaim the genre of meditation, what we call strategic contemplation in this book, as a means to enrich our research? How do we understand the rich connections among the rhetorical activities 36

Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices

of women past, present, and future, what we call social circulation? How do we account for global and transnational rhetorical activities in diverse contexts and cultures? Globalizing the Point of View The rich diversity and range of work documented above suggest that feminist rhetorical scholarship has indeed been experiencing tectonic shifts in recent decades. One area where we are just beginning to see the impact of feminist rhetorical work is in global, international, and transnational contexts. Only recently have scholars moved beyond U.S.-centered work to examine women’s rhetorical engagement and activism around the globe, asking what it means to analyze the many vectors—economic, political, religious, cultural, educational—that intersect with rhetorical activities and social change. Notable examples include Wendy Hesford, “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition”; Hui Wu, “The Paradigm of Margaret Cavendish: Reading Women’s Alternative Rhetorics in a Global Context”; a special College English issue edited by Hesford and Schell; Daniell and Mortensen, Women and Literacy; and Lunsford, Robert Harriman, Jarratt, LuMing Mao, Thomas Miller, and Royster, in the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing. In the College English special issue on transnational feminist rhetorics, guest editors Hesford and Schell set out to reframe current terms, such as, postcolonial studies, globalization, and comparative rhetoric, terms that, they argue, still presume a Western, patriarchal framework at their core. In their framing article, “Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics,” Hesford and Schell explain that scholars working from a transnational perspective challenge “the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship, including the focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe” (463). They suggest that by focusing on the intersections of feminist work, international contexts, and rhetorical inquiry, we may have arrived at a point where we can challenge and transform the basic methods, subjects, and standards of judgment shaped by the Western rhetorical tradition and where we can move toward more-collaborative, reciprocal, knowledge that transforms our understanding and subjects alike. Transnationality refers to movements of people, goods, and ideas across national borders and, like the term borderland, it is often used to highlight forms of cultural hybridity and intertextuality. To bring a transnational focus to our 37

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field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift the objects and areas of study. (463)

These kinds of shifts in terms of methodology, subjects, contexts, and cultures are precisely the kinds of shifts we are calling tectonic because they reframe not only work in feminist studies, rhetorical studies, and global studies but also challenge us to reframe our basic understanding of all three areas of intellectual inquiry. Hesford and Schell note that much previous work with a global or international focus, published under the auspices of “comparative rhetoric” (464 ), “contrastive rhetoric” (465), and “intercultural communication” (465), still assumed the mantle of Western norms, whereby scholars sought to understand the rhetorical strategies of others so that they could better understand, interpret, and explain—and some would say manage or manipulate—these others. Rarely, however, were such studies designed to be of mutual benefit to researchers and subjects, nor was the goal to transform the perspectives, worldviews, and politics of those who use power for coercive purposes. Only recently has feminist rhetorical scholarship begun to explore these major shifts. Hesford and Schell point to examples “emerging both outside and inside the academy: in international and transnational advocacy organizations; in the work of transnational writers, artists, filmmakers, and dissidents; and in graduate programs and classrooms, recent dissertations, professional conferences such as the biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, and the work underway in recently convened groups such as the 2007 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on rhetoric and transnationalism” (466). Contributors to the special issue continue this important work by studying such topics as “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World” (Queen); “Linking Transnational Logics: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Public Policy Networks” (Dingo); and “Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of Empathy” (Kulbaga). Another example that illustrates a new focus on global perspectives in writing and rhetorical studies is the Writing Research Across Borders Conference, first organized by Charles Bazerman, which meets every three years. The organizers explain their rationale for convening the conference. Recent decades have seen the growth of writing studies in many nations, focused on all levels of education, and all uses of writing in society, using the resources of many different disciplines. This increased research attention to writing reflects an increased recognition of the importance of writing in modern societies. Yet to a large extent the many emerging traditions of writing research have neither connected fully nor shared their work. (“Writing Research Across Borders Conference Overview,” n.p.) 38

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This conference attracts an array of international scholars who share an interest in RCL but bring very different disciplinary knowledge, frameworks, and perspectives, as well as different cultural and language backgrounds to this interest. These scholars are housed in a wide range of disciplines, such as journalism, education, sociology, psychology, history, communication, international studies, interdisciplinary studies, geography, writing studies, and women’s studies. The different disciplinary and cultural affiliations of conference attendees simultaneously enrich and challenge many of the most basic of assumptions that have guided scholarly inquiry and research in RCL and highlight the tectonic shifts currently underway. While only some of this work is explicitly feminist and rhetorical in nature, the international dimension of this conference and its participants raises important questions about basic assumptions, methodologies, and cultural frameworks of U.S.-based rhetorical inquiry. Implications What seems most obvious in this account of feminist rhetorical practices across time is that over the last three decades, there has indeed been a rising sea of research and scholarship on women in the history of rhetoric, composition, and literacy. What is also evident is that among the work being produced is an increasing emphasis on creativity and innovation in research methods and methodologies in support of fashioning more-inclusive points of view and more-robust opportunities for engagement both cognitively and metacognitively with women’s practices and contributions. Beyond these types of enrichments to the rhetorical landscape, however, we are also seeing an escalating amount of work focused more explicitly toward expanding possibilities even more and making the global connections and implications of our work more evident. It is, in fact, the combination of concerns between local and global interactions that is helping to mark an important milestone. Feminist rhetorical studies in the United States (and by extension rhetorical studies more generally) is well challenged to demonstrate in more-substantial ways that our contemporary work is functioning vibrantly and well in transnational, international, and global contexts. What we see with this volume is that facing these challenges well does not permit us simply to tack on an extra layer of concerns as an afterthought. Instead, we are compelled to recast our whole ways of thinking and doing and to situate ourselves more deliberately in the company of others as we reach for morecomprehensive and more-nimble views, attitudes, and expectations and as we actually enact the belief that rhetoric is a human enterprise variously practiced around the world. 39

4

Feminist Rhetorical Studies as a Robust Interdisciplinary Framework

The world has had to limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the whole body is filled with light. It sees a circle where before it saw a segment. The darkened eye restored, every member rejoices with it. —Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South

The interdisciplinary means by which feminist rhetorical studies occurs take advantage of contextual and textual knowledge, resonating with the ways in which similar work has been occurring in other areas in English studies and beyond, including studies focused on women, communication, race, class, ethnicity, culture, postcolonialism, globalism, digital media and other technologies, and more. The very echoic nature of this contemporary work suggests at least two basic points regarding this volume. First and foremost, the changes in rhetorical studies that we have labeled tectonic shifts—in light of the ways that researchers, scholars, and teachers in feminist rhetorical studies have been working—have not had a singular line of development. Instead, they have been emerging from the converging interests of professionals in our field who have forged bountiful connections between rhetorical studies and other areas. We have benefited from dynamic intersections, including not only the interdisciplinary fields mentioned above but also from more-traditional areas, such as, history, 40

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sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, biology, computer/computational sciences, and more. Second, within such a highly charged and diversely rendered intellectual environment, we cannot claim sole credit for growing expertise and insights in this academic work. Rather, we claim active participation, especially in the multiple ways in which we have embraced as standard practice the critical importance of thinking, reading, writing, and learning from varying perspectives and in the company of others. Moreover, we also claim strength and traction in turning this commitment toward building a lively discourse community for feminist-informed rhetorical practices. As Anna Julia Cooper suggests in the epigraph, we recognize that the regular crossing of disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries helps us to remove the bandages of our habits and predispositions, to restore our “darkened eye,” and to transform our capacity to see the possibilities and potential of rhetoric more richly and more dynamically. What we do take credit for in feminist rhetorical studies, then, is the vibrancy of the multidimensional discourses that have evolved in our area through the creation of professional organizations and alliances. Beyond our ongoing participation in long-standing professional organizations, such as the Rhetoric Society of America, the International Society of the History of Rhetoric, the Modern Language Association, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and other major national organizations, have been three milestone developments at the national level. One is the formation of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CWSHRC), a scholarly alliance that celebrated in 2011 its twenty-third anniversary. The second is the establishing of the biennial conference on Feminisms and Rhetorics, which was first convened at Oregon State University in 1997 by Cheryl Glenn and Lisa Ede. This conference is now officially connected with CWSHRC and celebrated in 2011 its seventh conference and its fourteenth anniversary year. The third is the annual feminist workshop at CCCC, first organized by Patricia Sullivan and Gesa Kirsch in 1991, which addresses feminist research, theory, and pedagogy in rhetoric and composition studies. This group celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2011. These three national moments form in some respects the tip of an iceberg of growing concerns that suggest vibrancy and vitality, offering evidence of the consistency with which feminist-informed research and scholarship have continued into their third decade to open up new and invigorating points of inquiry. These moments also offer signs of interdisciplinary life. Indeed, professionals in the area are convening regularly to exchange ideas, 41

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cross-fertilize interests, critique theories, practices, and insights, and reflect generally on the ways and means of critical engagement, thereby reinvigorating feminist rhetorical studies as an academic enterprise. In other words, since the 1980s, these national conferences (and other local and regional ones as well) have been sustained as professional arenas within which to showcase the substantial and ever-evolving knowledge base upon which this volume is drawing. Currently, the national events serve to illuminate annually and/or biennially new vistas on the rhetorical landscape1 and offer simultaneously compelling occasions, in keeping with our purposes in this volume, to consider the coherence of rhetorical studies as a scholarly narrative, the nature of its impact on knowledge creation, the ways in which feminist-informed practices enrich that creation, as well as what constitutes excellence in this academic realm, how, and why. An Assaying Process In order to manage the exploration of dynamism in feminist rhetorical studies more handily, we have turned to a recurring anchor—our focus on inquiry strategies and on sorting through the impacts and consequences of the historical emphasis in scholarship and teaching on rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription. The effort is to use this anchor to examine the “yield” of the shifts in practices that we have identified as tectonic, to determine how such practices are permitting us to break through old ground, and to see new possibilities for understanding rhetoric as a lived and thereby embodied experience. Further, the move to bring more specificity and texture to this inter/ disciplinary dynamism is a process that leads us quite necessarily toward a rather basic and categorical definition for what constitutes excellence in this area. In our view, it is work in history, theory, criticism, and pedagogy that is helping us to know more broadly and deeply the nature, scope, impacts, and consequences of rhetoric as a multidimensional human enterprise, with multidimensionality being defined as engagement across one or more boundaries, whether the crossing entails sectors of knowledge, forms and genres, modes of expression, sociocultural logics, material circumstances, or other possibilities. With this framework in mind, we use the terministic screens presented in chapters 5 through 8 to create a data set that indicates the ways in which feminist rhetorical practices have expanded the view in our field of what counts as acceptable data. In turn, these data have informed, enriched, and currently direct the assaying process that we present below. The goal of the process is to develop an enabling matrix for understanding patterns of action across these data that make the vitality and value 42

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of feminist rhetorical studies more evident. As in previous chapters, we use geological metaphors to identify elements, properties, processes, and conditions in feminist rhetorical studies that are functioning tectonically to re-form knowledge and make qualities of excellence with this scholarship more visible. In showcasing groundbreaking work in this chapter, we move beyond notions of rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription to consider the specific edges that this work has formed in remaking the landscape. We then draw implications from these findings as we pay attention to the extent to which the exemplars that we have chosen (from the multitude of possibilities in this area) are actually re-forming the view. By this assaying process, we assert that the exemplars are crucial for seeing the shifting of paradigms in two ways. One, they illustrate how combining various inquiry mechanisms (as discussed further in chapters 5 through 8) are creating, in effect, strong, generative, more-flexible instruments (alloyed touchstones as it were). These tools facilitate the interrogation and interpretation of a wider variety of rhetorical contexts and performances than we have in the past and doing so with both rigor and sociohistorical respect. Two, they function also to link the descriptive base that results from these interrogations to patterns of habitual action in building knowledge about rhetoric as a broadly definable human behavior. We emphasize that this increasingly diverse range of work is not being done by women professionals alone, or only by scholars who label themselves as operating within feminist rhetorical studies, or even by single scholars alone in the attic, as it were. We are suggesting instead that despite the numbers of women researchers, scholars, and teachers who are indeed doing this work, there are, of course, women colleagues who do not specifically identify themselves as feminist scholars, and there are male colleagues who are actively using the same strategies with similar goals and with an inclusive viewpoint. Moreover, we are also proclaiming that feminist rhetorical scholarship (and other work as well) is being done quite regularly by colleagues working together rather than alone, as indeed we are doing in this volume, thus defying a dominant image in the history of rhetoric, that is, an individual genius at work alone and often in solitude.2 In contrast to the solitary figure, the vibrancy in rhetorical studies with which colleagues are working together is creating a much-enlivened space in scholarship for various forms of collaboration. In recent years, especially, this method of engagement has gained recognition as a critical analytical tool in RCL and has been deemed worthy of honor and respect, as indicated, for example, by the number of Braddock 43

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Awards (for the best article in College Composition and Communication) that have been given to coauthored work (twelve out of thirty-five awards from 1975 to 2009). The editors of a new research-methods collection, Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan, also comment on the growing trend of collaborative work in the field. They note that many of their contributors regularly engage in collaborative research; coauthor articles with colleagues, students, and research participants; and have written joint chapters for their edited volume. Elements and Properties In chapters 2 and 3, we started with the assertion that the dominance of Western traditions in rhetorical studies over the centuries has normalized scholarly attention toward white, elite, male, Westernized practices in public domains. In this chapter, we address that assertion more directly by bringing forth work in feminist rhetorical studies that counters those boundaries. To illustrate the shifts from white, elite, male performances in public domains, consider the elements and their properties for rhetorical engagement listed below as they mirror, reflect, and refract those original boundaries. Note, however, that this list serves in the current analysis not in binary opposition to long-standing defaulted disciplinary frameworks but as levers for creating a more inclusive organizational schema, a matrix, for seeing and understanding paradigmatic shifts and changes of varying kinds. Gender Most certainly in feminist rhetorical studies, we have examined with multilayered complexity the rhetorical lives and contributions of women as indicated in chapter 3 of this volume. Beyond female-male binaries, however, the work with issues related to identity and representation has gone well beyond binary gender categories and more toward gender as performance and as a more fluid postmodern concept. Colleagues in gender studies (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender studies; queer studies; men’s studies; women’s studies) have brought considerable insight to the social, political, and cultural realities of gender. Consider, for example, Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer. Ringer draws together twenty colleagues (including himself) to accomplish multiple goals for the volume: The first is to provide current substantive research findings for those interested in viewing homosexuality from a communication perspective. The articles reflect five different areas of the communication discipline: gay and lesbian rhetoric; interpersonal communication among lesbians and gay men; 44

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portrayals of gay men and lesbians in language and text; portrayals of lesbians and gay men in the media; and a specific issue related to instructional communication—coming out in the classroom. The second goal is to identify how research into gay and lesbian behavior informs communication theory in general. The third is to provide a research agenda for the future. And the fourth is to provide a supplemental textbook for courses that desire to explore the issues raised by the human response to homosexuality. (3)

The range of the discussion is noteworthy, as marked by the foci indicated in the following examples: Karen A. Foss, “The Logic of Folly in the Political Campaigns of Harvey Milk”; Larry Gross, “What Is Wrong with This Picture? Lesbian Women and Gay Men on Television”; Karen Peper, “Female Athlete = Lesbian: A Myth Constructed from Gender Role Expectations and Lesbiphobia”; Jacqueline Taylor, “Performing the (Lesbian) Self: Teacher as Text”; Julia T. Wood, “Gender and Relationship Crises: Contrasting Reasons, Responses, and Relational Orientations.” This collection of articles examines critical issues at the intersections of sexuality, language use, and social action and interaction and opens up lively spaces for the interrogation of a provocative range of issues and concerns related to identity, presentation, and representation of self and for the interpretation of rhetorical action as a human enterprise. In doing so, it participates in what Andrea A. Luns­ ford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly describe in The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies as “feminist boundary work” that is transforming traditional institutional practices and intellectual categories (268). From a more recent postmodern perspective, another collection that exhibits a deliberately designed effort to disrupt traditional categories and to focus on the material conditions and language practices related to gender as a fluid and quite variable concept is The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. This collection is rather comprehensive in including landmark publications, such as, Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” as well as a substantial body of articles that question/queer all manner of issues and concerns related to identity, presentation, and representation, thus clearing space for new rhetorical subjects, relationships, and performances. Examples of articles in the collection include: Cheryl Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism”; Jason Cromwell, “Queering the Binaries: Transsituated Identities, Bodies, and Sexualities”; Leslie Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come”; Emi Koyama, “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate”; Janice Raymond, “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist”; and Robert Stoller, “Biological Substrates of Sexual Behavior.” 45

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Clearly, in the twelve years between the publication of Queer Words, Queer Images and The Transgender Studies Reader, colleagues have accepted the challenge of setting robust agenda for investigations across the general categories of rhetorical engagement (history, theory, criticism, pedagogy). Another recent example is K. J. Rawson, who has directed research toward the ways in which queer people participate in the history of rhetoric, as indicated in the article “Queering Feminist Rhetorical Canonization.” Rawson begins with a statement of the problem: While these two approaches—recovery and gendered analysis—have been extraordinarily productive and have essentially created and established a field of rhetorical study where there wasn’t one before, both have relied upon normative notions of gender to identify and categorize what counts as feminist rhetoric. Feminist rhetorical recovery work has thus far used fixed identity categories, typically “woman” or “female,” and has mostly recovered a gender-normative body of texts—those produced by biologically born, self-identified, or historically identified women. What Jarratt (2002) calls “gendered analysis” has similarly normativized the feminist rhetorical canon; while it has engaged with oppressive gender roles and stereotypes (i.e., male and female), it has not yet challenged gender binaries and logics (i.e., masculinity and femininity). (40)

Rawson goes on to analyze the ways in which authors normativize gender and heterosexuality and to interrogate the emergence of a feminist rhetorical canon that evidences some of the same issues of primacy as the traditional rhetorical canon. Rawson suggests that we might benefit from using gender as an analytic, rather than an identity category and asks some provocative questions, such as: If we work from an understanding of gender that insists on the cultural constructions and productions of gender, that recognizes transgender and gender nonnormative subjectivities, and that pushes against the naturalized categories of man and woman, what happens to feminist rhetorical recovery? . . . How does one rhetorically advocate for gender expression from differing historical, racial, social, class, and sexuality contexts? (46–47)

Rawson discusses the ways in which work in feminist rhetorical studies does and does not destabilize female/male binaries, emphasizing how conceptualizations often enable and disable voice and visibility simultaneously and asserting, “While some scholars may still use the concept of woman in strategic and productive ways, such scholarship could be strengthened by a thorough consideration of who and what is made silent in taking that 46

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approach” (52). Thus, Rawson helps us to see beyond one of our most-basic underinterrogated assumptions, the concept of “woman/female–man/male” and helps us to notice new terrains for exploration, documentation, analysis, and interpretation that push us to a more richly rendered view of rhetoric as a diversely articulated human enterprise. In our view, we might be well positioned if we accept Rawson’s advice to use gender (and similar concepts) as analytics, as socially constructed filters for analyzing and interpreting performances and situations, rather than naturalized categories of identity. Race and Ethnicity Another of our most challenging rhetorical categories is race. Research and scholarship that have explored the nature, scope, impacts, and consequences of this complex dimension of work in RCL studies have been substantial, bringing forth insights that have pushed us to see well beyond the surface of biological distinctions, such as, color or phenotype or historical origin to the multiple ways in which contexts, material conditions, sociopolitical states and relationships, and the like, matter and matter greatly in the use of language. Consider, for example: Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America; Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color; Linda Brodkey, “Writing on the Bias”; Catherine Prendergast, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education; and Joyce I. Middleton, “Toni Morrison and ‘Race Matters’ Rhetoric: Reading Race and Whiteness in Visual Culture,” as well as a sampling of anthologies, including: Tapping Potential: English and Language Arts for the Black Learner, edited by Charlotte K. Brooks; AltDis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy, edited by Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell; Rhetoric and Ethnicity, edited by Keith Gil­ yard and Vorris Nunley; Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education, edited by Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva; Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, edited by LuMing Mao and Morris Young; and Affirming Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Bridging Language Policies and Pedagogical Practices, edited by Jerrie Cobb Scott, Dolores Y. Straker, and Laurie Katz. Just this short list of publications indicates the escalating degree to which researchers and scholars have been engaging directly and actively with issues related to race, rhetoric, literacy, and writing. To the focus of this volume, as publications cited in earlier chapters demonstrate, colleagues in feminist rhetorical studies have participated actively in interrogating racial paradigms mainly from an intersectional perspective, using, as it were, a “plus” approach, as in a convergence of gender plus race, or 47

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gender plus race plus culture, or gender plus race plus technology, or gender plus race plus class plus time, and so on. The dynamic effects of these types of intersectional approaches have functioned to push conceptual frameworks for rhetorical action well beyond establishing the existence of basic issues of identity and representation toward ever more complex analyses of the social, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of analytical paradigms as they are infused with complicated relationships and interrelationships in light of various contexts, conditions, and processes. We site, for example, Terese Guinsatao Monberg’s “Listening for Legacies, or How I Began to Hear Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the Pinay behind the Podium Known as FANHS.”3 In this essay, Monberg discusses the “legacies of erasure,” as they apply to the ways in which Filipina and Filipina American women are muted, cast in shadow, and ignored as rhetorical agents. Her study focuses on Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the founder and executive director of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), a community-based research organization. She identifies FANHS as an important rhetorical space to which she, as a feminist researcher and scholar, has listened actively in order to gain a clearer sense of presence for Filipina/ Filipina American women’s rhetorical participation in their communities. Her goal in the essay is: not just to recuperate the voice of a single Asian Pacific American woman, but to highlight how certain approaches may prevent an entire legacy of Asian Pacific American women rhetoricians from being heard . . . In working toward a more culturally contingent model of feminist historiography, I argue that certain methods of listening—because they are attentive to interdependencies among rhetorical space, memory, and history—are central to the makings of an Asian Pacific American “feminist” rhetoric. (85–86)

In essence, Monberg proposes a form of listening that takes into account the intersectional realities of gender, race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality and that uses, in particular, listening strategies that are not yoked to sight as the lever for insight. She asserts that in feminist historiography in rhetoric, “most forms of listening have largely rested in seeing women at the podium, seeing women’s texts, seeing women’s words in print before they can be heard. But seeing is only one part of the dynamic equation when listening for/to women’s voices that have been institutionally marginalized in multiple, intersecting ways” (86–87). In an effort to go beyond what is immediately visible, Monberg listens actively and recursively to Cordova. She concludes that via her founding of FANHS, a space in which work is not always at a podium or in published documents, Cordova succeeded in creating a 48

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rhetorical space for women’s agency. With FANHS being built institutionally upon community-based research and activism, Monberg suggests that the rhetorical actions that take place in FAHNS often function invisibly in the shaping of a culturally informed “public” space in which knowledge is articulated and conveyed. In other words, important rhetorical work in this organization is occurring around the collecting of oral-history narratives as a primary instrument for amplifying the voices of the community, in recognition that these voices carry history, memory, and cultural traditions and should be documented, heard, and accredited. Monberg asserts that “while these rhetorical activities may not always result in (what we traditionally see as) a published document, especially of her [Cordova’s] explicit authorship—there is an important shaping of a public sphere happening here” (89). In making this assertion, Monberg takes into account the importance of oral history and the memories of communities; the need to study living women, rather than only deceased ones, as they are performing in progress; the need to address in more-profound ways what constitutes authorial intention, rhetorical agency, history, rhetoric, and public participation; the need to excavate the history of U.S. imperialism and its residual force in the lives of formerly colonized people; the need to expand the definition of researcher to include a capacity to move “recursively through space, across the beach, connected to the landscape, listening to the story under every rock” (99). Monberg offers a demonstration of these principles and values through the use of a culturally informed research agenda as she listens to the work of Cordova in its various places and as she honors that work and points out its distinctiveness. About Cordova, she says: Cordova’s approach to oral history is to document the way women (and men) have “led different lives at different times,” rather than focusing narrowly on how one research participant can contribute to a narrow research project on, for example, war brides. War brides, in Cordova’s model, have lives and histories that cannot be solely defined by their relationship to their husbands. In emphasizing the connections among women across immigration waves, Cordova also stresses the important role women have played in their communities: “As guardians of Filipino culture in America, the women played an important role. They sought to preserve language, traditions such as folk dance and music, and a sense of family and community” (Cordova 1989, 49). (100)

About Monberg, we say that this study is an example of how colleagues in feminist rhetorical studies are using race, gender, culture, and ethnicity as core analytics in an expanded view of rhetorical behavior. Moreover, in this 49

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particular study, Monberg is using a matrix of analytics, including race, to move beyond the recovery of Filipina/Filipina American women rhetors to help us question some of our most basic concerns about how a researcher engages with research subjects, what constitutes authorship, how rhetorical spaces are shaped and used, and how we might actually listen before seeing. Another example of colleagues who are interrogating racial paradigms in an intersectional way is Carmen Kynard and Robert Eddy, “Toward a New Critical Framework: Color-Conscious Political Morality and Pedagogy at Historically Black and Historically White Colleges and Universities.” In this article, Kynard and Eddy examine historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Using a frame articulated by Teresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard in Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American Students, they identify HBCUs as “‘intentional educational communities’ that have served as ‘counterhegemonic figured communities’ on the American educational landscape” (W25). With this frame, they focus on disrupting: the general tendency to categorize the only salient difference between HBCUs and historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) as one where students have checked different Race boxes on their applications. The racial and ethnic makeups of our classrooms and institutions have not resulted from historical or contemporary political coincidences, and as such, HWCUs and HBCUs even after accounting for the varied institution types as we have discussed, varieties that run across both HWCUs and HBCUs, have considerably different histories in how they have defined who the college student is, should be, and can be. (W26)

From that point, Kynard and Eddy assert that HBCUs, tribal colleges, and Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) serve as “a primary locus [not to the exclusion of HWCUs, as they explain, but with primary being the operative term] of defining and constructing an education for racially/economically subordinated students in the United States” (W27). The point to be emphasized for this volume is that Kynard and Eddy cite both Spelman College and Bennett College (the only two HBCUs for women) as a specific part of their framing, thus including a convergence of race and gender as a “normal” part of their analysis, rather than a supplement or exception for default male definitions of educational experience. Moreover, they include seamlessly women’s racialized experiences as a credible perspective within storytelling about issues of race in the classroom. Through these classroom narratives, their intention, though, is to articulate three principles of action in the formation of a new color-conscious 50

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critical framework by examining how “color conscious” paradigms intersect with racialized notions of rhetorical agency to shape the theories and practices of literacy pedagogies in their classrooms as faculty who work with working-class students of color. They discuss writing ethos, anti-colorblinded composing, and rhetorical freedom/survival movements and what it means to work productively with working-class students of color. Borrowing from Rochelle Brock the notion that our ideological constructs hold our minds hostage, they develop a theory of “hostage negotiation work” as part of an ideology of antiracist teaching, critical literacy, and critical pedagogy. Their discussion of the basic principles of “hostage negotiation work” goes far beyond our general ways of talking about the teaching of rhetoric, writing, and literacy as a progressive, liberal, or critical practice, and for the purposes set forth for this volume, they go even further by doing so with women students as a vital, normal, and seamless part of the story. This study enacts, therefore, a dramatic shift in perspective, one in which race, gender, and class are not naturalized as white, or male, or elite. Status Depending on the definition of eliteness used, almost all of the examples that we have presented so far serve to illustrate tectonic/paradigmatic shifts in the status of rhetorical subjects that are deemed worthy of attention and study. The core idea that we are using for eliteness is tied to systems of power, prestige, and privilege in relation to others. In Westernized cultures, which have set the pace in the history of rhetoric, eliteness has been tied essentially to white males who inherit or acquire sociopolitical privilege and authority and who are entitled, therefore, to function with power in social, political, and professional domains. Consequently, as an analytic measure, elite status has necessarily deemed women, people of color, ordinary citizens who are not wealthy, and those whose places of origin are not the geographically preferred European areas to be found lacking—although there are obviously shades of power, authority, privilege, and entitlement that might be articulated within each of these traditionally defined lesser groups in reflection of their degrees of alignment with characteristics of white, elite males. For example, women can be of a privileged class, people of color can be stratified by gender (with men deemed more privileged) and by class, non-Europeans can likewise be stratified by gender and class, and so on. The implication is that in rhetorical enterprises status matters in ways that are comparable to gender and race. As suggested in the studies by Monberg and Kynard and Eddy (and others discussed in chapters 5 through 8, e.g., Charlotte Hogg and Malea Powell), 51

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the attention that researchers and scholars in RCL have been directing toward the impacts and consequences of status in the analysis of rhetorical actions constitutes yet another habitual element of rhetorical analysis where tectonic shifts have been occurring with increasing intensity over the last thirty years. First of all, such work acknowledges more forthrightly than ever before the existence of status as a factor of analysis. Secondly, these studies also recognize in ever more complex ways that neither eliteness nor the public domains in which such performances dominate are the default measure of qualities of excellence. Such a recasting of the terms of engagement can be demonstrated, for example, by Kynard and Eddy’s discussion of the need for a new critical framework, one capable of envisioning classroom pedagogies that understand the implications of hegemonic strictures that working-class college students face in writing classrooms. In using this lens to look, listen, and think again, they propose an alternative theory for composition pedagogy and acknowledge that there is much to be learned from colleges and universities that are dedicated to minority-serving populations (i.e., historically African American, Hispanic, and tribal colleges), all of whom are quite substantially shaped by their histories of marginalization within the larger higher-education community. One additional example of research that takes us beyond elite populations is Literacy in American Lives by Deborah Brandt. In this study, generally, Brandt explores the literacy-learning experiences of ordinary American citizens across many walks of life, but to the point of the discussion at hand, she begins this analysis by making a compelling case for literacy as a common practice, rather than an elite one: To think of literacy as a staple of life—on the order of indoor lights or clothing—is to understand how thoroughly most Americans in these times are able to take their literacy for granted. It also is to appreciate how central reading and writing can be to people’s sense of security and well-being, even to their sense of dignity. At the same time, these analogies ask us to take a deeper look. They remind us that, as with electricity or manufactured goods, individual literacy exists only as part of larger material systems, systems that on the one hand enable acts of reading or writing and on the other hand confer their value. Changes in these systems change the meaning and status of individual literacy much as the newest style of shoes—or method of producing shoes—might enhance or depreciate the worth of the old. (1)

Brandt moves on from that positioning of literacy as an ordinary staple of life to present the perspectives of eighty Americans born between 1895 and 1985, using a contextual analysis of their experiences that takes into account 52

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connections between individual literacy learning and the larger economic and other material influences that affect learning. She drew participants for the study based generally on “the 1990 U.S. census profile of the county [the Wisconsin county in which she conducted the study] in terms of ethnicity, education level, occupation, and region of birth” (14–15)—which means, quite notably, that gender was not a specifically identified analytic category for the study. Even so, the impact of gender as an analytic point of convergence arises anyway in the context of race and ethnicity, class, community, and other dimensions of the material systems that surround learning. Consider just one excerpt. On literacy as a force in economic productivity and the connections between literacy and class stratification, Brandt reflects: The inquiry into this dynamic begins with two individuals, Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez, whose differences in family background and literacy achievement embody the familiar breakdown along categories of gender, race, and class. Both Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez were born in 1969, he in Silicon Valley in Southern California and she in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. Raymond Branch’s grandparents had been farm owners and ranchers. Dora Lopez’s grandparents had been migrant farm workers. When they were young children, both Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez moved with their parents to the same city in the upper Midwest, where both their fathers took work at a state university. Raymond Branch’s father, who had a doctoral degree from an Ivy League university, was a member of the science faculty. Dora Lopez’s father, who had a two-year community college degree in accounting, worked as a shipping and receiving clerk. (172)

Brandt goes on to present a highly texturized discussion of remarkable differences in the contextual factors that supported the learning opportunities and status of these two individuals—one male, one female; one European American, one Mexican American; one a child of power and privilege, one not; and so on. In doing so, she enables the reader to understand the functioning of literacy through an on-the-ground view of the difference that material differences make. While, again, Brandt does not name gender as a specific analytic category in her study, she does present many stories of women’s literacy-learning experiences and references the implications of gender as a material factor. The consequence of inclusion is that despite the fact that the study does not present itself to be a gendered analysis, gender helps exponentially at various points to bring insight to Brandt’s viewpoints and conclusions as she imbeds a clearer sense of the strong and vibrant connections among gender, literacy learning opportunities, and economic productivity. 53

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In other words, Brandt takes a deeper look into the nature, scope, and contours of literacy learning as a human asset, imbedding women’s experiences in this analysis in a normalized way, instead of as an exception to or distinction within Westernized habits for assigning worth and value. At the same time, she leaves provocatively open the question of the values that might be added by another look at the terrain, a more dedicated gendered analysis in which gender could be recast as the anchoring analytic, the terministic screen, for rendering an alternative view of the larger analysis. This latter study, of course, is not Brandt’s central focus, so our bottom line in discussing her study is that she succeeds in constructing literacy in its variable human conditions, and we experience by that mechanism a dramatic shift from what constituted worthy subjects of study by traditional Westernized perspectives (white, male elites) to a much more diversely articulated account. Brandt renders a definition of human that includes women and pushes provocatively the envelope of what happens to our understanding of literacy when multiple factors—including gender, class, race, place, and the like—converge. Her conclusion and ours is that we gain a much-enhanced understanding of this concept. Geographical Sites At this point in the history of RCL, we see rhetorical enterprises more clearly than ever before as going well beyond Western traditions. Rhetorical action is global and transnational, that is, wherever human beings reside around the world, they use language and other symbolic representations intentionally to accomplish various goals. In the United States, we connect to this global reality in multiple ways. First and foremost, we experience globality at home through the widely ranging diversity of our resident, immigrant, and visiting populations. Our resident groups alone are constituted by a considerable number of heritage groups and make up thereby a multivariant cultural landscape. In addition, we remain a world power, even in a complicated geopolitical world; we live in a complex global economy; and we have formed and re-formed innumerable multileveled social, political, and cross-cultural relationships with peoples and nation-states around the globe. In the history of rhetoric, as discussed in chapter 8, we have been quite slow in extending the scope of our scholarly and pedagogical interests beyond default Westernized conceptual boundaries, but in the last few decades, we have indeed been gaining momentum. Presently, many colleagues are resisting the habit of operating so narrowly within the confines of Western views of performance and value systems. Instead, there is evidence of a range of efforts to see Western practices in broader transnational context whether 54

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the approach for doing so uses Western strategies in comparison and contrast with the practices of others, or deliberately decenters Western-based practices to explore other traditions of performance, or concentrates on plotting out descriptive matrices of various sorts to ground the perspective of what is happening and not happening and why. In feminist rhetorical studies (again, as evidenced by the range of work discussed in chapter 8), this work is shaped in part by issues related to indigeneity, migration, and immigration, with some colleagues being drawn variously to cross-national linkages with heritage communities, related, for example, to diasporic relationships and particularly to the challenges of negotiating multiple cultural identities. Other colleagues may be drawn to the study of practices in Third World contexts as distinctive rhetorical enterprises. Still others may be drawn by the desire to test the salience of their local interpretations in a more expanded view of the geopolitical context and more. One example of the way in which feminist rhetorical studies is breaking new ground in bringing to light the practices of women who are negotiating multiple national identities is Cristina D. Ramírez’s “Forging a Mestiza Rhetoric: Mexican Women Journalists’ Role in the Construction of a National Identity.” In this article, Ramírez explores the writings of Mexican women journalists during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She posits this writing as functioning at the intersection of Mesamerican and Western perspectives, situating the discourses within a “non–Greco-Roman (or quasi–Greco-Roman) historical tradition in Mexico” (606): A mestiza rhetoric contains a discourse that emerges from a cultural background that recognizes its multiple subjectivities, adapts ideas and logics from various cultures, and “creates a symbolic space beyond the mere coming together of two halves” (Baca 5). Mestiza rhetorics can represent this symbolic space by calling on indigenous cultural symbols . . . Mestiza rhetoric emerges from a place of suspension between cultural worlds, a mestiza consciousness, which does not necessarily mean that the writer considers herself to be from an indigenous background, but that she is able to conceptualize a different reality of herself and her behavior, making for an ontological shift. (607)

In the pages that follow, Ramírez documents the contributions of several women journalists as both writers and activists and builds a view of their rhetorical performances that counters the notion that rhetorics from non-European based cultures are anomalies: “Mexican women journalists who engaged in mestiza discourses knew that they were not purely European; their historical memory was alive with the conquest. They engaged in 55

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mestiza rhetoric that recognized both cultures [European and indigenous] as contributing to their identity” (625). Another example of edges for research, scholarship, and teaching related to geographical sites is the research of scholars such as Hui Wu. First of all, Wu’s work has been a critical factor in helping us to understand women’s rhetorics in Third World sites—in her case in China. In “Lost in Translation: The Modern Chinese Conceptualization of Rhetoric,” for example, Wu insightfully chronicles the historical context that has informed the way in which Chinese rhetorical studies has developed and currently occurs. Providing this type of context immensely helps Western scholars to have a clearer view of women’s rhetorical practices within this particular geopolitical area. Beyond this general context, however, Wu’s research focuses specifically on post-Mao women’s rhetorical history and particularly on their use of the essay to express their views on gender. We direct attention, therefore, to another of her essays, “Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks.” In this latter article, Wu does a stellar job of laying out quite a provocative view of some rather thorny challenges in taking a more global view for feminist rhetorical studies. First, she invites us to rethink the whole nature of contemporary historical study (and particularly the influence of postmodernist theoretical frameworks) and the ways in which contemporary historians (including rhetorical historians) may be trained to engage in research. As she might emphasize, a challenge emerges from a seemingly persistent desire to universalize and neutralize perspectives and to extrapolate externally documentable truths, rather than to contextualize perspectives and use a fuller range of evidence in establishing what might be considered immutable truth authenticated by the lived experiences of those affected by it: The postmodernist is a free agent who progresses toward the end of exploration along the path paved by his/her own rationalization. . . . Though the findings from the contemplation may be creditable, they merely point to multi-faceted realities, relative and open to further interpretations with no way of justifying. But woman and women’s history can not be read as undecidable and relative. If the analytical category “woman” is fundamentally undecidable, Alcoff posits, then “we can offer no positive conception of it that is immune to deconstruction and, thus, nominalist once again” (421). As a result women’s history would turn out to be an idea, or a notion, rather than a distinct past containing real stories of women. (87)

Regardless of the inherent controversy imbedded by this assertion, Wu illuminates the need for analyses to take into account the specific material 56

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conditions of women’s lives in particular places. In providing evidence for this perspective, she uses her own experiences as a professional woman who was living in China and working as an associate department chair at a Chinese university when she experienced rather dramatically the impact of a specific authentic truth: [I] was ordered by one of my male colleagues, the Chair, to clean the office for him. When asked “why?” he simply said, “this is a woman’s job.” Marked by this kind of gender politics is my history as a woman who has the same lived experience as my subjects and as my writing of post-Mao women’s rhetorical history. How can I leave these facts and realities open to interpretation? How can I just play with the idea of “woman” or “history” without the commitment to telling true stories? My history does not allow me to read Chinese women’s history as some literary works with undecidable meanings. I must read women’s rhetorical history in and after the Maoist period (1949–1976) as facts and record it as facts, because any contingency in my methods would result in historical distortions. (87)

Wu’s analysis takes into account that the assumption of a feminist standpoint requires a conscious and active struggle with material realities and the effects of multiple oppressions that are enacted variously in different cultural contexts (in her example, against the effects of institutionalized sexist oppression and exploitation). She speaks particularly about the way in which Chinese women’s rhetorical practices might fall through the analytical cracks in global rhetorical history given the realities of the Chinese sociopolitical context and the dilemma that most feminist rhetorics do not talk about Chinese women and most Chinese rhetorics do not attend to gender, a view that is quite mindful of the dilemma of voice and presence articulated by African American women as captured by the seminal publication All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith. Further, among her list of challenges, Wu points out also two additional ones that strike us as constituting a very sharp edge for feminist rhetorical research from a global perspective. One is that she underscores how contributions to rhetorical history by women around the globe, particularly the contributions of Third World women, have a tremendous capacity to enlighten and enhance Western scholarship, but she emphasizes as well how difficult it is for these contributions to function in that capacity since so much of Third World women’s practices is not in English. The challenge, then, is the challenge of translation. We agree with Wu that our understanding 57

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of women’s practices globally suffers greatly from language barriers that need to be transcended and the translation work that needs to be done and credited as worthy scholarly work. The second point is closer to home, with regard to basic assumptions about our scholarly habits in feminist rhetorical practices in the United States. Wu emphasizes the point that much of what we do in feminist rhetorical studies, as we have emphasized in earlier chapters, has centered on rescuing, recovering, and (re)inscribing what has been missing in rhetorical history (i.e., the practices and accomplishments of women and the impact and consequences of women’s presence and participation). As Wu points out, however, this focus tends to keep us gazing habitually toward the past, without directing adequate attention to a second part to this work. We must also be vigilant about preventing what may become missing in recognizing that historical work on women must inevitably include ongoing attention or the problem continues. We take Wu’s advice as well rendered as we look over the current terrain of rhetorical research, teaching, and scholarship. We need to pay attention also to living women, which includes women whose lives and experiences may not be visible when the departure points for analyses are white, elite, Western women, whether the time frame is historical or contemporary (92–93). Rhetorical Domains The historical dominance of public domains (politics, religion, business, academe, law, and the like) as the appropriate sites for rhetorical analysis and claims about what constitutes excellence in rhetorical performance have been countered persistently by work in feminist rhetorical studies. In particular, feminist rhetorical scholars have brought voice and visibility to counterpublic arenas (e.g., the clubwomen’s movement and the Women’s Temperance Movement), to the study of the rhetorical practices of ordinary women in social spaces (e.g., women in rural Virginia or Nebraska), and to the study of cross-boundary practices (e.g., how the failures of women in traditional public domains, such as courts of law, get reused within other contexts for social action). The collective of this work has indeed been groundbreaking, opening up new vistas for noticing a broader range of rhetorical contexts than ever before from which impact and consequence have been emerging. One particularly interesting example among more recent publications is Jessica Enoch’s Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911. In this volume, Enoch recasts the work of women teachers, their pedagogical practices, as 58

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a form of rhetorical practice that can challenge conventional mores, cultural expectations, and gender norms. Enoch shows how women teachers working at the turn of the twentieth century with students from marginalized or minority groups often challenged, in small and large ways, the givens of what they were supposed to teach: obedience, good work ethics, compliance, and cultural assimilation. Instead, these women teachers, many from minority groups themselves, engaged their students in complex ways, showing them avenues to value and reclaim their ethnic and cultural heritage and promoting positive images of past and present members of those cultural groups. Enoch moves among case studies, specifics of teachers’ pedagogies, and larger claims about situating these pedagogical practices as rhetorical activities. She thereby revises our understanding of rhetorical history, rhetorical education, and public domains. Enoch suggests that although we cannot simply imitate the pedagogical practices of these women teachers—they were developed in response to specific historical exigencies—we can learn to claim rhetorical agency by understanding pedagogical practice as rhetorical practice, by engaging with the issues of our own culture, and by allowing us to imagine possibilities for social change. Beyond these shifts, however, feminist rhetorical scholars have also been exploring in finer detail the notion of “public,” with an interest in gaining, again, an enriched view of the sorts of performances, especially writing performances, that are actually happening in the “public eye.” Perhaps more important, they have been looking at the existence of public writing/rhetoric with regard to its implications for the ways in which we teach. One example of this type of work is an article by Paula Mathieu and Diana George, “Not Going It Alone: Public Writing, Independent Media, and the Circulation of Homeless Advocacy.” In this article, they acknowledge the rationality of teaching about what it means to write in public, that is, for public audiences (as compared, for example, with the more narrowly defined peer audiences of classrooms), but they encourage us simultaneously to take into account audience response and the circulation of ideas (see chapter 7 for a more extended discussion of the social circulation of ideas)—issues related not only to the production of writing but also to the challenges of an actual delivery of speaking and writing in particular contexts, a rhetorical canon to which we have given little attention in recent decades. Mathieu and George use a series of case studies to illustrate the challenges and raise critical questions about pedagogical planning and implementation. They ask what is becoming in feminist rhetorical studies the anchoring question for critical interrogation, “What if?” They ask, “What would change in a writing classroom if one were to understand public writing as an act 59

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equally dependent on composition and tactical acts of circulation?” (145). Their response to the question offers specific ways for how we might enact these values in the planning and implementation of classroom activities. What we are suggesting here is that teaching public writing means we pay attention to more than the language used, the way the argument is made, and the author’s bio. Teaching writing should also be about understanding what role a piece of communication plays, can play, or has played in the world outside as well as inside our classrooms. (146)

Mathieu and George are opening up rhetorical vistas in two ways. One is with the insights that they are offering for classroom instruction in helping students to make substantive connections between writing/rhetoric/literacy development and action. Further, however, they are helping also to reopen the rhetorical canon of delivery as a much more vibrant and vital undertaking than in more recent decades, which in turn creates a more diverse sense of what constitutes rhetorical domains—that is, sites that are deemed appropriate and worthy for taking rhetorical performances seriously and for expecting in those sites a potential for excellence to occur. Genres Feminist scholars have paid attention to genre for a long time, partly because women’s social locations (historically in the private or semi-private sphere) called for writing in different genres, such as letters, diaries, children’s stories, poetry, and other private communications because of the social circles in which women traveled—or to which they were confined—and partly because women’s social circles have focused on different kinds of leadership—in the social-aid societies, in church communities, in literary societies and garden clubs, in public libraries and historical societies and many other kinds of organizations. Women active in these kinds of organizations used writing appropriate to their intended outcomes and included such activities as the sharing of recipes, keeping of minutes for social and church clubs, recording of local histories, presentations for other club members, and so on. Hence, feminist scholars in the history of rhetoric have paid close attention to where women’s writing has appeared and how it has traveled across time and space (discussed in chapter 7)—often in very different channels and genres than the public discourse of the male establishment. Now, feminist scholars are pushing the boundaries of genre even further, as are other scholars interested in new sites of rhetorical education (e.g., Enoch; Gold), in new forms of digital communication (e.g., Hawisher and Selfe; Gurak), and in the transnational aspects of rhetorical activities (e.g., Lu; Horner and Trimbur; Canagarajah). 60

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Two examples of ways of investigating—and identifying—new genres illustrate the point. The first one is particularly striking because it involves a material practice that is not anchored in writing per se yet clearly constitutes a rhetorical practice—the centuries-old tradition of crafting needlework samplers. In her essay “An Essamplaire Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler-Making: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Praxis,” Maureen Daly Goggin provides an interesting look at the transformation of “needlework samplers” over a four-hundred-year period. Early needlework samplers, Goggin explains, functioned as heuristics, as models of innovation and inspiration, illustrating the different effects of various stitches, patterns, threads, and colors for other practitioners of the needlework trade. These early samplers were anonymous, a tool of the trade, passed on with additions and changes from one generation to the next. Later on, however, sampler making became a more clearly gendered activity. Goggin reminds us that early on, some groups of men, such as, sailors, were apt practitioners of needlework, using needle and thread both to fix and decorate cloth and sails aboard their ships. Over the years, however, samplers slowly became associated with domesticity and served to teach “the basics” (not to invent), were signed and dated (no longer anonymous and collaborative), and served other functions, such as, teaching the alphabet, the multiplication table, the solar system, and, perhaps most powerful, moral values through the process of stitching religious verse and psalms on cloth.4 Later on, samplers were framed, collected, and displayed, thereby eliminating any possibility of maintaining their earlier heuristic function. The result, Goggin suggests, is that samplers “served as important resources up until about the eighteenth century when this practice was displaced, sampler-making [was] . . . transformed, and its invention function ultimately erased” (317). The important point to be noted about Goggin’s work is that it calls attention to material practices with rhetorical functions that are not text based yet reveal important aspects of rhetorical, cultural, and gender formations. Goggin notes that the material/rhetorical practice was completely transformed; that is, needlework sampler making was domesticated, turned into a teaching tool and “site of credentialing” (324), thus supporting a gendered division of labor and reinforcing an ideology of modernity. In fact, Goggin claims that the changes over time in needlework sampler making so radically transformed the original practice that it was no longer recognizable as part of its original context; hence, Goggin calls it the erasure of a practice. What is noteworthy regarding Goggin’s approach is that she seriously pushes the boundaries of what we might consider to be a part of rhetorical 61

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studies; she challenges us to see, identify, and research new dimensions of different kinds of material practices. She suggests that this kind of work “break[s] new ground by tracing the history of needlework sampler making: first, to bring into relief the rhetorical force of diverse practices that create texts, whether verbal or otherwise crafted, and second, to push at the boundaries of what counts as rhetorical practice and who counts in its production” (310). In other words, Goggin deliberately challenges scholars to examine what is in and what is excluded not just in feminist rhetorical inquiry but also in the larger field of rhetorical studies. Goggin also asks us to notice gaps and omissions, pieces of history that we cannot know. For instance, she suggests that only a limited set of samplers was preserved, most likely those considered to be decorative, rich, and distinguished but less likely those that had primarily a heuristic function, that were shared as a tool of invention and passed on from one generation to the next, that were meant to be used, not displayed. Goggin observes, “[T] his problem raises an interesting challenge for historical scholars of material culture: Our ability to reconstruct the past is limited to what prior groups deemed valuable and thus saved, and what was deemed less valuable and thus tossed” (330). Questions of gaps and omissions are equally relevant to the study of writing, particularly when it focuses on “ordinary” writing. More feminist scholars are now paying attention to writing of the everyday, to rhetorical and literate activities that might be considered mundane, routine, and most certainly ordinary. These scholars, like Goggin, face a challenge: how to know what has been saved and what has been tossed. Take, for instance, the groundbreaking work of Jennifer Sinor, who urges us to be on the lookout for our blind spots, for the writing that gets done in the shadows of everyday life. She argues that ordinary writing, by definition, is the daily, the routine, the unnoticed—and little studied—kind of writing. When, by chance, we come upon ordinary writing, as she did with the diary of her Great-great-great Aunt Annie Ray—we are challenged to read and interpret it in rich and meaningful ways. Sinor’s Aunt Annie Ray used writing as a means of recording and observing daily activities, work, and weather conditions but not as a place of reflection and introspection, of chronicling her hopes, dreams, and desires, a function of diaries that became more prevalent with the onset of modernity. In other words, when Sinor came upon this diary, or perhaps better described as a “log of daily activities,” she immediately noticed that it did not easily fit into the tradition of diaries. Sinor had to confront her own assumptions and ways of reading Annie Ray’s diary if she was to value and include it in rhetorical studies. As Liz Rohan comments, “Sinor devel62

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oped a method of reading Annie’s texts that honors the efficacy of ordinary writing. In advocating for Annie, Sinor advocates for all ordinary writing” (“Re-seeing”). Like Goggin, Sinor decided to reframe rhetorical inquiry by including a textual, material practice that can be easily dismissed as trivial, mundane, and void of cultural meaning. Developing tools to read ordinary writing allows us to see that ordinary writing, while measured and open and fragmented and boring, presents just as complicated an intersection of writer, text, and context as any form of writing. What we first might take as simple, unsophisticated, and plain becomes one of the few opportunities to access the ways in which subject and text are made every day by ordinary people. (187)

Sinor argues that everyday, fragmentary, mundane, interrupted, incomplete, and scribbled writing can offer us glimpses of an evolving, changing life—if we can learn how to pay attention. If we are unable to do so, that is, notice ordinary writing, we are likely to disregard—and discard—it. Ironically, however, if we do find meaning in ordinary writing, study it carefully, and save it, we elevate it to something other than ordinary—that is, the very act of attending to ordinary writing makes it extraordinary. The point to be noted is that Sinor, like Goggin, pushes the boundaries of rhetorical studies: What is worthy of inclusion? What is left at the margins? How do we read texts when they don’t meet our expectations? How do we step back and examine our readerly habits and expectations? How do we read material artifacts as rhetorical activities, even if the writing was done by needle, not pen? Feminist scholars like Sinor and Goggin challenge us to attend to our blind spots, to the underbelly, to the remnants of rhetorical activities. They asks us to expand our vistas to include traces of rhetorical activities that often linger only in the shadows of literate lives, to notice viewpoints that might be easily dismissed, discarded, tossed. Katrina M. Powell’s research, in “Virginia Mountain Women Writing to Government Officials,” provides another example of honing in on ordinary writing. In this case, the letters penned by Virginia mountain women were preserved only because they were sent to government officials. What is compelling about Powell’s study is that she offers a rich portrait of rhetorical activities of a group of women often considered illiterate, uneducated, poor, dependent, and possessing few or no moral values. By closely examining the letters written by these women to government officials and by treating these letters seriously—as rhetorical documents that engage government officials and demand a response—Powell expands sites of rhetorical inquiry to a population often considered at the margin of society. 63

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The letters written by the women of the Blue Ridge mountains during the 1930s tell an untold story: they are a written record of the kinds of issues faced by working and poor women as social and educational reform shaped their destinies and relocated their homes. As acts of literacy, they provide insight into poor and working class women’s education. (“Virginia Mountain Women” 76)

What is remarkable about these letters is that despite containing obvious misspellings and grammatical errors, they engaged and challenged park officials and other representatives of government. When their land and homes were threatened by the establishment of the Shenandoah National Park in the early 1930s, these women appealed to government officials’ sense of justice, fairness, responsibility, community, and public good. Moreover, these women represent themselves as strong, law-abiding families in need of resources; they command a good amount of attention and respect due to their repeated requests—and demands—expressed in their letters. Powell explains, “While [these women] were not necessarily consciously resisting inscribed identities, their self-constructions reflect identities counter to those provided for them, identities that include education, literacy, rhetorical awareness, strength, hard work, caring for others, and a sense of justice” (75). Not only does Powell open up new territory by providing examples of the rhetorical strategies of a group of women at the margins of society but she also insists that we rethink how we define success when we examine rhetorical activities. Since their requests were mostly not granted, it may seem on the surface that their literacy failed. Rather than view literacy and its power as achievement or success-based, the women’s letters reflect that literacy’s power lies in its interactive nature. The act of engaging those in positions of power is more salient than whether or not their requests were granted. Their letters reveal their abilities to use complex language, when those in power believed they had none. Their literacy poignantly records their values, ethics, and critical awareness, all aspects not recognized by those who had the power to determine their fates and displace them from their homes. (87)

By tracing the letters and conversations that took place between displaced residents and park officials, Powell challenges our standard measures of success: that literacy is only effective when it succeeds with requests for action. Instead, Powell offers us a new definition of success. The point here is that by expanding the range of genres included in rhetorical studies, we are broadening our vision, reexamining our values, and, perhaps most powerful, inventing new methods for studying rhetorical 64

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activities. These examples suggest that scholars are much more willing to examine rhetorical activities in new contexts, attend to material practices with rhetorical functions, identify material practices that may not include written words (though perhaps stitched words), and expand the genres we consider worthy of study. Modes of Expression As scholars are expanding the range of genres they study, they are also paying close attention to technology and the different forms of expression that technology creates and invites. For instance, Kim Hensley Owens, in “Confronting Rhetorical Disability,” examines how women use the Internet, particularly blogs, to share information about pregnancy, birth experiences, and motherhood. She examines a fairly new genre, “birth plans,” which women write to instruct their doctors, midwives, and partners of desired medical interventions (or lack thereof) during the birthing process, a time when some women might not be able to articulate their wishes (Owens calls this “rhetorical disability”). Owens argues that “technologies can both silence and give voice,” and she “examines women’s use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth”(247). What is significant here is the intersection of genre, technology, and rhetorical agency. The Internet allows women from many locations and backgrounds to share information and lived experiences much more widely than local networks of friends, family, participants in birthing classes, and medical settings have traditionally allowed. Owens notes that “because mothers of varied backgrounds are now embracing the Internet as a space to share birth stories [and birth plans], scholars and the public alike now have access to these self-representations” (“Revelations and Representations” 352). She suggests that this rich new site of rhetorical agency and intervention—the Internet—combined with new genres of sharing information—blogs focused on birthing and mothering experiences and birth plans themselves—has allowed for the creation of new communities of diverse women who may not otherwise have been able to share their knowledge, experiences, and interventions in the medical process. Owens challenges us to examine the intersections of genre, technology, gender, and rhetorical activism: she points out how broader public accessibility through blogs allows women to reach new audiences and participate as writers, thereby enabling new representations of women’s experiences, creating genres that can be used to assert rhetorical agency in the medical community, and broadening the social circulation of writing about women’s expectations and experiences of pregnancy, giving birth, and motherhood. 65

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The point is that as technology changes rapidly, so do different sites of rhetorical agency. Scholars have only begun to study small fragments of the vast array of new rhetorical activities unfolding via the Internet and an increasing number of other interpersonal communication devices. Another short example offers additional evidence of the expanding opportunities of technology to shift the terrain. Consider Cynthia L. Selfe’s recent article, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” Selfe argues that our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity has been limited by our dedication to alphabetic-only compositions, instead of compositions that take advantage of other modalities as well, including aural and visual ones (e.g., speech, music, sound, moving and still images, and so on). She proclaims that digital technologies open up these opportunities exponentially and that teachers and scholars in RCL should reconsider how other modalities might play more productive roles in contemporary communication tasks. In this article, Selfe includes, beyond her own insights and experiences, the work and participation of an impressive number of women professionals who are engaged actively in the groundbreaking effort to expand and enhance our understanding of expressive modalities and to bring visibility to the nature and scope of expressiveness in a technologically sophisticated world. One of the interesting connections to be made via these types of analyses of genres and modes is the extent to which we seem now to be witnessing a steady stream of hybrid genres, forms that are being expressed in new media that are indeed multimodal, cross genre, and different, with the patterns and possibilities of these forms yet to be fully appreciated. Still, we cite two examples of publications in which colleagues are already paying attention. One publication is James P. Purdy’s essay “When the Tenets of Composition Go Public: A Study of Writing in Wikipedia,” in which he invites us to rethink not only the concepts of revision, collaboration, and authority on the web but also pushes us to reexamine the whole nature of what constitutes research materials and who has the right/authority to participate in knowledge-making processes. A second publication is “Thinking about Multimodality” by Pamela Takayoshi and Selfe. On the horizon, however, is work focused on digital environments, for example, social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter; websites such as YouTube and blogs, which offer amazing opportunities for public voice and publication; and programs such as Second Life, which offers a different instantiation of the concept of conversation and social interaction and questions as well the nature of authorship as it functions through avatars and the nature of classrooms as they are constructed in virtual space. All of these new media 66

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and new environments for rhetorical actions are dramatically recasting the notion of authorship, genre, audience, and community. All seem to invite democracy quite boldly into the public sphere, including the active participation of women and girls, and all are clearly pushing us in a twofold way: to be conscientious about the critiquing of these tools and resources; and to be more innovative in shaping pedagogical theories and developing classroom activities capable of engaging contemporary students thoughtfully and responsibly. Implications Presenting this list of contemporary rhetorical analytics in juxtaposition to traditional frameworks in Western rhetorical studies (white, male, elite performances in public domains—from the perspective of Western cultural traditions) permits us to see the ways in which values in the field have been shifting quite dramatically and re-forming elements of the rhetorical enterprise to include a broader, more diverse range of participants, sites, conditions, types of performance, as well as sociocultural logics. This assaying process permits us to notice the persistence over the last thirty years with which researchers, scholars, and teachers in feminist rhetorical studies, as it connects vibrantly with similar imperatives in other areas, have been and are now going well beyond the traditional rendering of rhetorical elements to create new vistas of things rhetorical. At this point, our intention is to look more closely at these elements and their properties with the intention of assessing how such strategies are serving as multivalent, enabling touchstones for doing high-quality work. The next step, therefore, is to move the discussion further along the path by articulating four terms of critical engagement that seem to be functioning in generative ways—given the work that researchers and scholars are now doing in feminist rhetorical studies—as we gain a renewed sense of qualities of excellence in both rhetorical performance generally and feminist rhetorical practices in particular. In identifying the edges created by tectonic shifts with regard to the elements and properties of rhetorical enterprises, we are asserting that these shifts have emerged from robust research strategies that are currently in motion in the field. We are suggesting, as well, that the strategies are marked by an increasingly coherent set of analytics. From our observations, recurring features in processes at an operational level include one or more of the following: dialogic, dialectical, reflective, reflexive, embodied, and anchored in an ethos of care, respect, and humility. We have extrapolated these features, therefore, as critical for understanding the actual dynamics of feminist rhetorical inquiry in its capacity to function as a lever for 67

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achieving substantive insights and thereby for disciplinary re-formation. The next part of this volume, therefore, seeks to cluster not so much the recurring features but the terministic screens that help us understand new centers of impact and consequence. This chapter begins with a quotation from Anna Julia Cooper, who was one of the first African American women to receive a PhD, one of the first to serve as president of a college, and among the group of women community activists at the turn of the twentieth century who powered the black clubwomen’s movement. As indicated by the quotation, she believed that the nation should see, nurture, and honor all of its human potential, including the potential of women, because she believed that this equity brought balance and clarity to the world and to our capacity to make it a better place. By analogy, in focusing on the edges that are being created by feminist rhetorical studies and the changes to our disciplinary terrain that are arising, this chapter makes a similar claim for insight, interpretive power, and greater clarity in rhetorical studies. We are suggesting with this argument that the work in feminist rhetorical studies in history, theory, criticism, and pedagogy is helping the field to assume a steadier, more well-balanced gait and to build a more comprehensive knowledge and understanding of rhetoric as a global enterprise.

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P art T hree Recasting Paradigms for Inquiry, Analysis, and Interpretation

5

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The best histories strive not to glimpse universality but to locate theories and events in specific historical and material circumstances. . . . The best histories do not tell a single story, leaving out information that does not fit, but stress multiplicity and diversity. —Jane Donawerth, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900

As Royster points out in Traces of a Stream, the use of critical imagination functions as one of several inquiry tools available for developing a critical stance in order to engage more intentionally and intensely in various intellectual processes. The idea is to account for what we “know” by gathering whatever evidence can be gathered and ordering it in a configuration that is reasonable and justifiable in accord with basic scholarly methodologies. The next step is to think between, above, around, and beyond this evidence to speculate methodically about probabilities, that is, what might likely be true based on what we have in hand. For example, in historical work (which we emphasize, again, is our own scholarly focus but not the only area for which such inquiry strategies are relevant), this process involves interrogating the contexts, conditions, lives, and practices of women who are no longer alive to speak directly on their own behalf. We use critical imagination as a tool to engage, as it were, in hypothesizing, in what might be called “educated guessing,” as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand. 71

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Without the option in these types of inquiries, typically, for more-traditional scientific experimentation and documentation, the goal is to look beyond typically anointed assumptions in the field in anticipation of the possibility of seeing something not previously noticed or considered. We look at people at whom we have not looked before (e.g., women, people from underrepresented minority groups), in places at which we have not looked seriously or methodically before (e.g., women’s organizations), at practices and conditions at which we have not looked closely enough (e.g., in literary clubs, garden clubs, or church auxiliaries), and at genres that we have not considered carefully enough (e.g., women’s organizational records, artifacts from digital culture, and artifacts from visual culture), and we think again about what women’s patterns of action seem to suggest about rhetoric, writing, leadership, activism, and rhetorical expertise. We connect this effort to Geertz’s notion of tacking in and tacking out (Interpretation). Metaphorically, we link “tacking in” to the use of longstanding analytical tools (such as various strategies used for close textual analysis) in order to focus closely on existing resources, fragmentary and otherwise, and existing scholarship to assess what we now understand and to speculate about what seems to be missing. We associate “tacking out” analogically with the technologically enhanced ability to view the Earth from satellites in outer space in order to gain the capacity to see, for example, that rivers, long since dry or shifted, once flowed—a “traces of a stream” metaphor in the extreme. To tack out, then, we stand in conscious awareness of what we have come to know by more-traditional means and from that base use critical imagination to look back from a distance (from the present into the past, from one cultural context toward another, from one sociopolitical location to another, and so on) in order to broaden our own viewpoints in anticipation of what might become more visible from a longer or broader view, where the scene may not be in fine detail but in broader strokes and deep impressions. Examples Tacking In The shift in practice here is a shift in the commitment to engage dialectically and dialogically, to actually use tension, conflicts, balances, and counterbalances more overtly as critical opportunities for inquiry in order to enable a conversation, even if only imaginatively, and simulate an interactive encounter with women who are not us, that is, the women whom we study. We go back and forth between past and present, their worlds and ours, their priorities and our own, local analyses and more-global ones, doing all 72

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with the cautionary tale that a core value is an ethos of humility, respect, and care.1 One of the most-ambitious goals in enacting this ethos of care within this context, however, is connected neither to the past nor the present. Instead, it connects both us as scholars and the women as rhetorical subjects to the future. The enterprise shifts in the sense that the ultimate goal becomes enhancing our capacity to articulate a vision for the future, a vision of hope. As Paula Mathieu suggests, to have hope, to envision a future requires not only imagination but action: “To hope, then, is to look critically at one’s present condition, assess what is missing, and then long for and work for a not-yet reality, a future anticipated” (19). We emphasize, then, that feminist rhetorical practices have helped us to embody the idea that rhetoric is action—past, present, future. Such sentiments regarding hope and action constitute a dominant theme throughout the rhetorical practices and social activism of African American women who have seen themselves as needing to face persistently insurmountable challenges. Consider, for example, Mary Church Terrell, an African American social activist who served as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896. In an essay entitled “The Duty of the National Association of Colored Women to the Race,” published in January 1900, by the AME Church Review, she states: As individuals, colored women have always been ambitious for their race. From the day when shackles first fell from their fettered limbs till now, they have often, single-handed and alone, struggled against the most desperate and discouraging odds, in order to secure for their loved ones and themselves that culture of the head and heart for which they hungered and thirsted so long in vain . . . As a result of a general legalization of this fact, the National Association of Colored Women was born. (139–40)

In this statement, Terrell captures a sense of yearning, desire, ambition, and aspiration. She went further, however, to bring texture to this view through the use of a narrative that contrasts the world of possibility for African American children and white children: As parents, teachers and guardians, we teach our children to be honest and industrious, to cultivate their minds, to become skilled workmen, to be energetic and then to be hopeful. It is easy enough to impress upon them the necessity of cultivating their minds, and of becoming skilled workmen, of being energetic, honest and industrious, but how difficult it is for colored women to inspire their children with hope, or offer them an incentive for their best endeavor under the existing condition of things in this country . . . how bitter is the contrast between the feelings of joy and hope which thrill 73

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the heart of the white mother and those which stir the soul of her colored sister. (146)

Terrell asserts what should be for children but recognizes the extent to which such ideals were particularly difficult to provide for African American children. Instead of succumbing to the prescription for failure, however, she urges her direct audience (as well as contemporary feminist rhetorical scholars who might be categorized now as her overhearers) to understand the importance of the commitment of African American women and others to the important work of reform. Terrell’s statement offers a vision of a world that does not exist, but she helps us to see not only that it could exist but, more important, that it should. The narrative that she spins exposes the space between the world that isn’t and the world that should be, such that the clear message to her audience(s) is “Make it so,” or in the very least, “Try to,” which indeed was what Terrell tried to do through her social activism until her death at the age of ninety-one, as documented in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. Historically, African American women rhetors have been acclaimed for their uses of rhetorics of power, resistance, and revolution. They are recognized especially for their powerful and empowering visions and voices in support of activism and advocacy on many fronts. There is, in fact, a considerable body of scholarship available documenting their practices over time, including some of the studies already cited in this volume (e.g., Barbara Christian, Shirley Wilson Logan, Deborah McDowell, Gwendolyn Pough, Elaine Richardson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Barbara Smith) with these scholars indicating that there is still much work yet to be done. Our intention in using this excerpt from Terrell is to highlight the point that while African American women’s rhetorics persistently evidence their activism and advocacy of various interests, they just as persistently evidence views of hope and caring in their being, not just warriors for justice and equality but also champions of peace and prosperity as well. The discussion of either view of their performances does not negate the other. Far from it. The existence of both views (and more) suggests instead that one view or dimension of their practices neither defines nor contains the full potential of their ways with words—any more than the other examples of rhetors cited in this volume or elsewhere would suggest the limits of potential for those rhetors. What we find striking about the Terrell example is twofold. First, she offers a powerful articulation of how one sees, cares, and has the capacity to act amid the challenging circumstances that might surround a specific situation—thus modeling in a compelling way a rather broadly construed rhetoric of hope, caring, expectation, and action even when the material 74

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conditions of that time might suggest otherwise. Second, rather than positioning this example as only an enactment of a racialized rhetoric of power and activism, we deem it important (given our effort to establish inquiry frameworks for women’s uses of rhetoric that have more interpretive power) to acknowledge that Terrell’s rhetoric as an African American social activist is not a calcified unidimensional display. Multiple layers and dimensions deserve our attention, some of which can be articulated both as part of rhetorics associated with sociopolitical activism as well as part of their active participation in a broader rhetorical agenda and history. The point to emphasize here is that by tacking in and out, through the use of critical imagination as a dialectical and dialogical analytical tool, we enhance our capacity to account more substantially and respectfully for the performances of women. In effect, in this volume, we are using feminist-informed scholarly practices to interrogate mainly, though not exclusively, women’s rhetorical performances as cases in point. Using this analytical lens, what becomes clearer is that our historic concentration in feminist rhetorical studies on the three Rs has been evolutionary in that we now recognize, as a matter of course, the existence of women in rhetorical history. The body of scholarship that we have produced has functioned to shift expectations for historical inclusion. The goals of feminist rhetorical scholarship, however, go beyond establishing existence and inclusion. Quite wisely, given the glimmers of possibility that feminist rhetorical work has generated, we see the importance of not resting on this laurel. In fact, if we were to stop with rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription, in effect, we would be placing historical women’s lives mainly in service to our lives and work, our curiosities, imperatives, and agenda, rather than placing them in symbiotic partnership with women over time and across our variable standpoints and perspectives in re-creating and honoring a more fully textured view of involvement, participation, rhetorical prowess, and indeed leadership. Tacking In and Out Carol Mattingly’s work on the temperance movement (Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric) provides another example of critical imagination at work, of tacking in and tacking out in order to see larger vistas in the newly emerging landscapes of rhetorical inquiry. In tacking in, her studies of the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century women who were involved in temperance activism have recovered “a broad range of primary sources” (“Telling Evidence” 102) and made visible that far more women were active rhetorically in the nineteenth century than 75

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our rhetorical histories have indicated. She documents the fact that women addressed public meetings held for promoting issues of concern to women, as well as the fact that temperance constituted an occasion for articulating “a plethora of other matters of importance to women: dress reform, moral purity, suffrage, domestic abuse, married women’s property rights, custody of children—the list goes on” (“Telling Evidence” 103). In tacking out to consider what these truths make more evident, Mattingly reflects on the fact that feminist scholars had to “defend the women [they] resurrected” (“Telling Evidence”102) in order for them to be included in the rhetorical canon and that it was much easier to mount such defenses when the women promoted liberal causes, causes that are in keeping with contemporary concerns rather than more historical ones. Hence, a review of the scholarship on women demonstrates that women in the suffrage movement received much more attention and detailed treatment than women who promoted what represents for us more conservative values—temperance and moral purity, for instance. Mattingly observes, “We had learned to think of women outside the suffrage movement as ‘conservative’ although many took radical actions, such as marching publicly and protesting inside or outside saloons or brothels, even at the risk of being jailed.” (“Telling Evidence” 103). Tacking both in and out, Mattingly’s work encourages us to recast our conceptual frameworks so that we might better understand historical women within their own cultural contexts, rather than ours, and to render their lives more fairly and respectfully. As her work suggests, we need to do more than claim that we are “restoring their voices to the public record,” when that move was perhaps not their goal, not their way of being in the world, not a part of their identity. Taking the time to tack out, we learn to look more systematically beyond our own contemporary values and assumptions to envision the possibilities of women’s practices in broader scope and to bring intellectual rigor to the analytical task. This task is neither easy nor common—to study those with whom we disagree, whose values we don’t share, whose worldviews might be foreign to us. What feminist rhetoricians have taught us is to attend to our own levels of comfort and discomfort, to withhold quick judgment, to read and reread texts and interpret artifacts within the contexts of the women’s chronologies, to interrogate the extent to which our own presence, values, and attitudes shape our interpretations of historical figures and periods. They have also taught us to attend the twofold challenge of being aware, not only of what enters our field of vision—what we see and recognize—but attuned also to our blind spots in order to consider with critical intensity what may be more in shadow, muted, and not immediately obvious. These reflective 76

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and reflexive practices have predisposed us to understand the inevitability that, more than likely, there will be factors and dimensions of scenes and situations that we may not notice and especially so if we fail to exercise a direct and specific commitment to look and look again, listen and listen again, think and think again recursively. Only recently have scholars grappled earnestly with the complex challenges of engaging with historical figures whom they do not necessarily admire or admire fully. Consider, for instance, the case of Daphne Desser, who writes about nineteenth-century, American missionary women in Hawaii and reflects on her own struggle to represent the multiple parts of their life stories—the sacrifices these women made when leaving home and working as teachers and missionaries, as well as the racist attitudes they inherited and perpetuated. Desser not only reflects on the complex identities and values of the women she studies but also puts herself into the story as someone who now lives and teaches in Hawaii but who does not have ancestral roots there. It’s a complex story, and she tacks in and out of the past and present, illustrating the tensions she herself experiences as well as those whose life stories she studies in an historical context. Desser identifies the tensions the missionary women expressed in their desire to connect with the students they taught and the larger community into which they moved (made evident by their efforts to learn the Hawaiian language, for example) at the same time that they continued to believe in the superiority of the English language and of Christian values, beliefs, and moral codes. Here, Desser does not shy away from showing the blatant racist assumptions under which missionary women operated (as expressed, for example, in letters written home), at the same time that they took pride in connecting with their students, learning the Hawaiian language, and becoming active members in their new community. Desser connects the past and the present by reflecting on the legacy of American missionary women in terms of current struggles by indigenous people for language rights. She notes that “the legacy of the missionary wives’ fear of contamination (simultaneously linguistic and moral) lives on in the struggles for recognition of the Pidgin and Hawaiian languages” (465). She also envisions a more hopeful future: the elimination of a language policy and politics based on nineteenth-century prejudices. She describes her activist agenda in hopes of contributing to a more inclusive future: In an effort, then, to be unlike the missionary women of nineteenth-century Hawaii, I not only highlight a set of historical rhetorical tensions and describe the literate practices that produced and resulted from them; I also hope to provide insight into how power was exercised from positions of privilege, 77

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reproduced through language practices, and embedded in emergent forms of educational institutionalization. . . . At the same time, I hope such scholarship will contribute to the ongoing struggles of indigenous peoples for recognition, reparation, sovereignty, and/or self-determination. (446)

Throughout her research, Desser self-consciously situates herself as an activist researcher, articulates her goals, and tries to work toward a more generous language policy. Desser’s work casts light on a persistently ragged edge for research, teaching, and scholarship in her modeling of one kind of feminist research that attempts to connect the past, present, and future. Desser invites readers to hear the voices of the women whose letters she studies, and she attempts to balance a respectful portrait of what these women set out to do, the risks they took, and the challenges they faced (leaving home, starting a new life, learning a new language and culture, often with little support from others). Simultaneously, she works to offer an accurate portrait of the racist discourse and supremacist assumptions underlying this missionary work. She examines the tensions toward connection and separation these women negotiated within their social circles, and she reveals her own tensions and places herself inside these social circles as she negotiates her role as a newcomer to and outsider in Hawaii, as a faculty member, and as a literacy teacher. The consequences of these types of connectivity are multiple, beginning with a cautionary tale. Paramount in our professional obligations in research, teaching, and scholarship is recognizing the need to construct consciously a role and place for ourselves in the work and to understand our specific professional and personal relationships to it. Given the ethical values espoused by feminist rhetorical studies as indicated in preceding chapters, the challenges are at least twofold. On one hand is the need to counterbalance the primacy (and habitual imperialism) of Western ways in the construction of both professional identities and operational strategies. On another is the need to resist overidentification and romanticism by sustaining reflective, reflexive, dialectical, and dialogical habits of inquiry that function to keep our critical perspectives always in gear. In effect, we are called upon to reconfigure the nature and scope of rhetorical enterprises, to decenter our biases, and to broaden our sense of accountability by connecting local and global analyses. These tasks constitute a fine balancing act, but in addressing them more overtly, feminist rhetorical studies is adding not just to our value system as professionals operating ethically in the field but also substantially to our knowledge base. 78

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Pedagogical Connections By moving forward with an ambitious agenda-setting effort, finding new pathways, raising new and different questions, and holding our work accountable reflectively and reflexively, we proclaim that feminist rhetorical work has an ongoing intellectual vibrancy and contend that the use of critical imagination as an analytical tool, along with strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization (discussed below), functions in feminist rhetorical studies to form and sustain both an enabling critique and an ethos of humility, respect, and care. Moreover, we also proclaim that the patterns of action that we have identified using these terministic screens are creating shifts not only in research practices but in pedagogical practices as well. Gesa’s Reflection I have found the concept of critical imagination to be an important research strategy to share in working with graduate students. In a recent graduate seminar I taught, students referred to this research strategy by the shorthand CI whenever they wanted to expand the boundaries of their research projects.2 What makes this strategy particularly appealing, I noticed, is that it not only justifies going beyond anointed research methods, sources, and published scholarship but actually mandates that researchers engage their topics in multiple ways, using dialectic and dialogic approaches and imagining ways in which historical subjects might have left traces of a stream in places where we may not have looked, looked closely enough, or may have overlooked. I find that invoking critical imagination is a great way to encourage students to go out into the world, explore unlikely sources, be open to chance discoveries, and consider the relevance of seemingly irrelevant documents, artifacts, and encounters. As an example, I like to tell the story of how I became interested in the work of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter via a circuitous route. One sunny day, while hiking in Torrey Pines State Park, along cliffs high above the Pacific Ocean, just north of San Diego, I stopped by the visitor’s center, an old, adobe-style building with a grand view of the Del Mar to the north and valley floor below. There I read about the history of the park and saw a picture of Ellen Browning Scripps on the wall, a familiar picture and name. If you have ever visited or lived in San Diego, you’ll notice that the Scripps family name is intimately connected with the history of the city: the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Scripps Clinic, Scripps Memorial Hospital, Scripps Ranch neighborhood, San Diego Zoo, La Jolla Playground, Children’s Pool, and La Jolla Park—all financed with donations by the Scripps family, most prominently E. W. Scripps and Ellen Browning Scripps (1836–1932).

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  The question I pondered that day was rather simple: How did Ms. Scripps get the money to do all the good works she did? Given that she was born in 1836, I guessed that she either inherited the wealth from her father or from her husband. In order to find an answer that day, I walked into a local bookstore and asked to buy a biography of Ms. Scripps; it seemed like interesting summer reading. To my surprise, the book store clerk came up empty-handed. She checked the regional section, the California section, the history section, the computer, and with her colleagues. Nothing. That was the first surprising discovery—no biography of one of the founding figures of one of the largest U.S. cities. Then again, if you’re a student of women’s studies, perhaps it’s not so surprising—there are many gaps yet to be filled.   The helpful clerk suggested I visit the archives of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; after all, they were named after the Scripps family, and the archivist there might have more information. She did. She handed me a master’s thesis written in the 1950s by a third cousin of Ellen Browning Scripps, and that is where I found my answer: Ms. Scripps neither inherited money from her father nor from a husband; she earned it. It turns out, she never married and worked all her life in the family business; her father had founded the Scripps Newspaper Service, a predominantly Midwestern company that did very well. She invested her money in stocks, lived frugally, and at the end of her life, decided to put her money to good use. To this day, San Diegans continue to enjoy the many parks and public venues created by one thoughtful, generous woman: Ellen Browning Scripps.   When I was ready to leave the Scripps Archives, the archivist said to me, “If you’re interested in women’s history, you should read the autobiography of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter. She was quite an interesting character, a physician who got her MD in 1886, ran her own practice for more than twenty years, supported women’s rights, and became an active civic leader.” That summer I read Dr. Ritter’s autobiography, More Than Gold in California. After finishing the book, I was intrigued: What motivated this unusual woman? How was she able to move into the male-dominated world of medicine, being one of only two female students in her medical class? What sparked her activism on behalf of women? How did she use persuasive and other rhetorical strategies to bring about the changes she advocated so relentlessly? Thus began my research interest to better understand her life, work, and rhetorical agency.

By this example, we are also suggesting that this type of inquiry lays a good foundation from which researchers might gain a more robust capacity to reach insights, chart productive pathways for sense making and knowledge making, and identify patterns of action for enhancing, extending, and even reinvigorating knowledge and understanding. 80

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Jackie’s Reflection Like Gesa, coming to understand the self-authorization of curiosity and imagination as a practical tool and a critical driver in fashioning research agenda was a turning point for me in learning to set my own research agenda. I developed the habit of listening to the simple questions that came to my mind about the lives, conditions, work, and contributions of African American women, rather than assuming that the goal of my scholarship, in a sense, should be to wait in taking myself and my own questions seriously until I might be able to structure well-formed, well-focused projects that fit well within the lines of scholarly expectations in rhetorical studies. Gesa’s questions about Ellen Browning Scripps and Mary Bennett Ritter resonate with the shift that I experienced. Her questions strike me as organic, given what she was noticing, emerging from her sense of wonder: Where did Scripps’s money come from? What was her daily life like? What seemed to motivate her life decisions? What resources did Ritter put together to support her desires for agency and action as a socially conscious physician? How did she use rhetorical strategies in accomplishing her goals? And so on. I believe that my questions about African American women were similarly organic: Where did these women come from? Who were their folks? Where did they go to school? What did they do with what they learned? How did they manage to do all of the extraordinary things that they managed to do? How did they negotiate anything amid the disempowering conditions that surrounded them? Who helped them? What did they say? Why were they so passionate about their work? Where did that passion come from? How was it nourished? What did they write? Who published them? Who listened to them? Who cared? What difference did it make that they spoke or not? My list was virtually endless. I had a need to know. I had a research agenda. Such basic questioning offers a place to start thinking critically, creatively, invoking critical imagination. This turning point for me was my own tectonic shift. My curiosity and imagination and the search to satisfy these desires were bringing me to a more visceral sense of what it means to hold a rightful place for critical imagination in shaping the work that would become for me a lifelong commitment, instead of trying to align my thinking mainly to reflect others, in keeping with W. E. B. DuBois’s image of measuring myself by the tape of others. With that turning point, my identity as a researcher with a primary interest in the rhetorical practices of women of African descent began to coalesce. Even so, in the beginning, what I didn’t pay as much attention to was how these inquiry habits would also impact my pedagogical decisions. Using critical imagination as a persistent research practice shifted the whole 81

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paradigm within which I was working, not only as a researcher and scholar but also as a teacher. My favorite example of my use of critical imagination in the writing classroom is presented in the reader Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community, a textbook that I designed for a 300-level writing course focused on exploring the nature of the U.S. experience with emphasis on race, class, gender, and nation. As a showcase example in a section entitled “Claiming Identity,” I chose a Studs Terkel interview from American Dreams, Lost and Found entitled “C. P. Ellis.” Ellis was a factory manager who had once been president (exalted cyclops) of the Durham, North Carolina, chapter of the Ku Klux Klan but through his work as a labor activist had learned to cross racial and gender lines in support of common causes. My desire was to use storytelling techniques to have students get inside the experiences of Ellis and his other associates in the narrative, including the African American woman Ann Atwater, whom he first perceived as a quintessential enemy but whom he eventually came to respect as a fellow activist. I wanted my students to use their imaginations to think about who these people were, how they came to see the world and to behave as they did, as well as to think specifically about how race, class, and gender functioned in the making of their life stories. I also wanted to encourage them to set aside default presumptions, to delay coming to judgment about these human beings too soon, and to engage in their inquiries fully but courteously and respectfully—even when they disagreed with or became uncomfortable with something that they were seeing or hearing. My first pedagogical move was to have them “map” the text by asking them several questions, such as: Who is C. P. Ellis? Given the details that Terkel presents, describe the impression that you receive of Ellis as a person, a worker, a member of his community, a citizen. How does he conform or not conform to the norms, the conventions of behavior, beliefs, and values in his community? Go through the narrative and circle the personal pronouns (I, you, our, we, them, their). Describe Ellis’s personal, social, and public boundaries as suggested by these pronouns (I/we, you/they). (Royster, Critical Inquiries 56–57)

My desire was to help the students to create a narrative and descriptive database from which they might think more viscerally about Ellis and his associates. Then, I fashioned writing activities designed to help them to push their imaginations, to contemplate various details of the experience, to speculate about possibilities. One assignment, for example, was the following: 82

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C. P. Ellis found ways to struggle through his problems. What were his solutions? In what ways do you feel his actions were effective or ineffective? If you faced a similar situation—one in which you needed to forge an alliance with a former enemy, for example, in order to succeed—what do you think that you would do, and how do you think you might do it? Would you take advice from Ellis’s narrative? If so, what advice would you take? If you wouldn’t take his advice, why wouldn’t you? What would you do instead? (Royster, Critical Inquiries 57).

I am pleased to say that my uses of critical imagination strategies with my writing classes resulted in engaged discussions and good, often really good, papers. As I reflect on the interconnections between my practices as a scholar and my practices as a teacher, I now see more clearly than I did at the time that there was a seepage, a merging of habits that speaks, in my view, quite boldly about the utility of critical imagination as an analytical tool. The message that I take away, however, is not simply the fact that critical imagination is a useful analytical tool. My sense of the real message in sharing this reflection is that I now recognize that I was participating in the paradigmatic shifts that were forming the infrastructure for what we more confidently speak of today as feminist rhetorical practices.

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Strategic Contemplation

[U]nderstanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent—with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well. . . . [R]hetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular—and very fluid—standpoints. Standing under discourses means letting discourses wash over, through, and around us and then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics. —Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness

As we state in chapter 2, we consider our four terms of engagement as terministic screens that interact dynamically with each other to create new knowledge and understanding. Ultimately, with the term strategic contemplation, we want to reclaim a genre of research and scholarship traditionally associated with processes of meditation, introspection, and reflection. We suggest that using a meditative/contemplative approach allows researchers to access another, often underutilized dimension of the research process. Building on critical imagination, this strategy suggests that researchers might linger deliberately inside of their research tasks as they investigate their topics and sources—imagining the contexts for practices; speculating about conversations with the people whom they are studying, including historical figures long passed on; paying close attention to the 84

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spaces and places both they and the rhetorical subjects occupy in the scholarly dynamic; and taking into account the impacts and consequences of these embodiments in any interrogation of the rhetorical event. This process of paying attention, of being mindful, of attending to the subtle, intuitive, not-so-obvious parts of research has the capacity to yield rich rewards. It allows scholars to observe and notice, to listen to and hear voices often neglected or silenced, and to notice more overtly their own responses to what they are seeing, reading, reflecting on, and encountering during their research processes. Strategic contemplation asks us to take as much into account as possible but to withhold judgment for a time and resist coming to closure too soon in order to make the time to invite creativity, wonder, and inspiration into the research process. In effect, as a method of scholarly inquiry, strategic contemplation allows us to pay attention to two different parts of the research process, to two different journeys. One is an outward journey in real time and space, more in keeping with traditional notions of fieldwork, as researchers go to the archives, the historical sites, the city or country where a historical subject worked or lived. This outward journey slows down the research process so that researchers can collect data—in looking up, down, under, and around the rhetorical situation in order to take in the sights (e.g., walking the streets, seeing the buildings, examining the scale of things), carefully collecting details, information, experiences, all of which can help researchers better understand a historical period, a place in time and context, a particular rhetorical figure, or a specific practice as it exhibits rhetorical effects. The second journey can be described as an inward journey, focused on researchers noticing how they process, imagine, and work with materials; how creativity and imagination come into play; how a vicarious experience that results from critical imagination, meditation, introspection, and/or reflection gets mapped, perhaps simultaneously, as both an analytical one and a visceral one. With archival work as a prime example, we come to understand the extent to which historical figures join the living when they become a part of us, when we get to know them like friends or relatives, or when they serve on our internal landscapes as guides or mentors to our lives. In drawing attention to the benefits of this type of approach, we hasten to emphasize that the process is not solely about the extent to which contemplation processes focus on “spiritual” dimensions of scholarship. While there may frequently be evidence of such a dimension, in our review of contemplative processes, we found such accounts not to be quite as spiritual or mystical or mysterious as they might at first sound, nor did we find them to be uncommon. Contemplation as a strategic tool seemed 85

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most clearly defined by researchers willing to stop for a time and think multidirectionally, from the outside in and the inside out, not just about the subject of study but also about themselves as the agents in the process, as well as about the process itself, that is, what is going on in the studying. Contemplative moments seem to be a driving force for many scholars who have reported not only on how they have found passion in their work (a spiritual dimension) but also on how they have made chance discoveries and traveled down unexpected paths (in support of scholarly benefits)—all when they allowed themselves to pause, to wonder, to reflect, to see what else they might not have considered, and to articulate these moments in language. In effect, we are suggesting that these authors have engaged in a process of strategic contemplation. In more recent years, however, any considerations of deliberately taking time away from the relentless march of making progress in the completion of a scholarly project—short of dramatic and often traumatic life experiences—have not been viewed as strength moves for serious scholars. The whole notion of making the time and space to sit and think or to talk about doing so as a normal part of scholarly methodologies has seemed unintelligible. Although scholars have still taken the time to contemplate the substance, ways, and means of their work (in the journals that some may keep, for example, or in their more private meditative moments), their doing so has until quite recently been cast in shadow, perhaps even guiltily so, as a rather self-indulgent luxury. We suggest instead that these practices should be brought out of the shadows and highlighted as important and empowering aspects of the research process—as more and more scholars are beginning to do. Our view is that contemplative practices need to be seriously engaged and strategically incorporated over the course of the work in order for researchers to function optimally as critical and creative thinkers. A key factor in embracing strategic contemplation as an inquiry strategy becomes a recognition of it as a recursive practice of thinking, writing, thinking, writing, thinking as the research spirals toward ever more fully rendered understandings and intellectual insights. In taking note of the back and forth nature of this sort of approach, we identify using dialogical viewpoints and dialectical thinking as active rhetorical practices for calling forth multidimensional perspectives of the scene and situation and thus for enhancing a researcher’s capacity to ground the analysis more specifically within the communities from which it emanates. With these uses, the objective is to actually enact the belief that rhetorical performances are deeply rooted in sociohistorical contexts and cultural traditions. Dialogical viewing and dialectical thinking bring to visibility the presumption, in 86

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keeping with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theories of the “dialogic imagination,”1 that there are multiple voices, viewpoints, experiences, and interpretive possibilities, all embedded within a fully textured sociohistorical context, and that rhetorical performances are thus accompanied by the variable impacts and consequences that emerge from that multiplicity. Positioning rhetorical knowledge in this way situates rhetoric itself more clearly as an embodied social practice. By this approach, critical imagination centers on enabling and enhancing the quality of thinking processes, and strategic contemplation centers on being willing to go a step farther to use a fuller spectrum of these critical resources in the scholarly production process. The extra effort is to articulate not only a critical discovery as related to the task at hand—the outward journey—but also to take into account the internal journey toward discovery—acknowledging the bodily effects, the visceral changes in mind, heart, backbone, and stomach that the discovery process occasions, thus encouraging a reclaiming of meditation as a generic experience that is endemic to the act of knowledge creation. Whether the researcher publishes the account, keeps a research process journal, makes notes at strategic times, shares such moments through a writing group or with writing partners, or any number of multimodal choices that might be available, meditative/ contemplative moments, and naming them as such, enhance the possibility of recognizing the dynamic intersections between the fact of intellectual discovery and the experience of it as a credible strategy in the rhetorical act of knowledge creation. Examples Tacking In Consider the experiences described by contributors to Beyond the Archives (Kirsch and Rohan), who describe how research became a lived process, that is, how they moved back and forth between past and present, between visiting historical sites and bringing them into the present, between searching archives and walking the land. The experiences described by authors range from feeling a closer connection to the subject matter, to gaining a better understanding of the events that took place long ago, to experiencing physical effects during archival visits, to entering imaginatively and creatively the world of those they study. What is noteworthy about this collection is that contributors call attention to processes that are intuitive and reflective and they describe how they move back and forth between interior and exterior worlds, that is, between paying attention to insight, intuition, and sensory 87

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experiences and engaging more directly in cognitive tasks associated with examining evidence and material artifacts. For instance, when Malea Powell visited archives at the Newberry Library in Chicago to study the letters of Charles Eastman, a Native American scholar, she found herself and her heritage the object of imperialist, colonial discourse. The first point to be underscored is that the subject of her work is not female, which indicates that while her research strategies may be very much informed by the intersections of feminist studies and rhetorical studies, we suggest that rather than functioning only with regard to the study of women, they exemplify instead a conceptual view and a set of values, and they embody evolving qualities of excellence in rhetorical inquiry more generally. Another point is tied to Powell’s discussion of her research experience. She describes her trips to various archives that hold Native American collections as an embodied experience: She often felt chilled in the cold basement of the buildings. Her bones ached because the words she read inflicted violence upon her and her ancestors: “I went back to my hotel room each night, my stomach clenched against the sharp space that had been carved out of me” (118). Powell experienced the physical space of the archives as an alienating place; she found herself violated—dehumanized—through the language of empire and conquest. Only slowly did she learn to speak and write back to the archives as she illustrates in her contribution to Beyond the Archives. History isn’t a dead and remembered object; it is alive and it speaks to us. We are obligated not just to our ancestors out of whose lives we “make” that history but also to the places and spaces, and the living things therein, who remember them and—through them—remember us. My obligation to the land, my obligation to Eastman, they are both a part of the same tradition that requests only that I carry the past into the lived present in a respectful and honorable way. (121–22)

Powell’s sense of embodiment, painful as it is, enables her to find a way to speak back, to connect the past with the present, and to reclaim her heritage, her dignity, and her humanity in the face of imperialist archives. Here, Powell’s reflections on her experiences, her pauses and silences, her aching bones and body enable her to gain new insights and move forward with her research. She understands more deeply the importance of her archival recovery work, of speaking back to those who imposed their views and values on Native American history, and of listening to and bringing to voice those who have been pushed to the margins of history. Another experience described by Powell is reading—and importantly touching—the letters of Eastman; her tactile sense enables her to reconnect 88

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to her ancestry: “I’ve already made my request for copies, so I take my task as one in which I simply sit and think and feel in relation to the materials at hand” (120). Here, we see a scholar engaging in what we would describe as one example of strategic contemplation. When Powell examines a photograph of Eastman, she sees him “unfolding from the flat plane of that photograph as I felt myself unfold and emerge from the singularity of that imperial narrative” (121). Powell and Eastman both become multidimen­sional in this narrative, reclaiming their subjectivity and their culture through an act of resistance. Powell’s attention to her lived experience—touching historic letters, reflecting on their meaning, and feeling the cold chill of the archives—we suggest, enriches her scholarly work by allowing her to notice other dimensions of her project—ethical, political, and cultural. In bringing forth Powell’s essay as an example, we argue that such examples underscore the need to claim a space for strategic contemplation, including the use of scholarly meditation as an enabling genre. In making this argument, we recognize the capacity of strategic contemplation to go beyond a critical examination of how archives can—and often do—reinscribe imperialist, patriarchal, Western rhetorical traditions and beyond the fact that the personal location of an individual researcher may be complicated by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, or any number of specific personal identities. We believe that strategic contemplation has the capacity to keep these factors deliberately within scope as a specific researcher engages the materiality of archival work—visiting places, handling artifacts, following unexpected leads, standing in silence, and allowing for chance discoveries and serendipity. Strategic contemplation makes room for the researcher to acknowledge her or his own embodied experiences while engaging in inquiries that permit the researcher to gain perspective from both close and distant views of a particular rhetorical situation or event. In more fully texturizing the analytical perspective by such means, we leave open the possibility of noticing patterns unseen or perhaps seen in a different way—the traces of a stream—that may not be visible without standing back, reflecting, observing, and reconnecting. The recognition of rhetoric as a social practice makes even clearer the critical advantage of using dialogical viewing and dialectical thinking in analyses. As qualitative methodologies, these mechanisms are designed as flexible exploratory tools capable of shaking out features, factors, and details multidimensionally (e.g., in keeping with Geertz’s notion of tacking in and tacking out) in order to clarify the materiality of ideas, arguments, sites, and situations; to see more substantively what features and components are visible, what is cast in shadow, and what may be missing. The 89

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imperative becomes the generating of thick descriptions, often in order to complicate our sense of reality and relationships, making the nature of the multiplicities clearer and more manageable, rather than trying to simplify or oversimplify them. These sorts of analyses are geared toward understanding a scene and situation rather than toward proving a hypothesis. They encourage us to look for alternatives to first looks, first thoughts, and first impressions, or even second and third ones, in order to engage possibility as a generative, dynamic concept, rather than a static one. Quite fundamentally, they encourage us to leave both knowing and ways of knowing open to negotiation and interrogation. Again, coming full circle, the impact of our embracing these methodologies in feminist rhetorical studies is that we deliberately recognize rhetoric as a social practice that is multivariant and polylogical. In turn, the polylogicality of rhetoric pushes us to take the time to think reflectively and reflexively, to engage in strategic contemplation as a critical, meditative process in order to assure that levels of understanding function polyphonically and in high definition. Such positioning helps us to remember how complex rhetorical processes are, to resist coming to firmly set conclusions too quickly, and to move the scholarly process forward in well-grounded ways that are tempered by the crucial importance of addressing interstitial needs as we draw relationships among the known, the unknown, and what we may never know of women’s lives or the lives of others within the larger context of rhetorical history. We suggest, then, that strategic contemplation opens up spaces for observation and reflection, for new things to emerge, or rather, for us to notice things that may have been there all along but unnoticed. Tacking Out Accounts of researchers who contributed to Beyond the Archives offer considerable testimony of how discoveries might take shape as researchers both prepare themselves well for engagement with archival materials and simultaneously keep opportunities for serendipity more deliberately open. In other words, while critical imagination encourages an open and inquiring point of view, strategic contemplation complements this process by enabling the capacity to see both patterns and possibilities that may exist in support of knowledge creation and understanding—including the traces of a stream that may become visible when we stand back, observe, reflect, and meditate about the contours of various practices and the choices that rhetors make or might make in support of specific mandates and purposes amid the conditions and circumstances that shape and direct those choices. 90

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Consider, for example, the description Christine Mason Sutherland offers on her uses of strategic contemplation. Sutherland describes how she encountered physical places and living traditions that connect her to four women she is researching, women who lived several hundred years ago— Lady Anne Clifford, Margaret Fell Fox, Mary Astell, and Dame Julian of Norwich. She suggests that in addition to studying the history of the period in some detail and reading as many works of that time as we possibly can, [there is an] alternative strategy, that of entering as far as possible into the physical world of our subject. This kind of holistic approach is consistent with the rhetorical method, which traditionally has looked beyond the rational to the emotional and the spiritual as means of persuasion. These elements are important not only in constructing discourse but also in understanding and evaluating it, and they are fundamentally bound up with the experience of the material and social world familiar to the writers we study. In thus attempting to experience the world of the past, we are in fact working with a different kind of meaning . . . [that] . . . is derived from experience, in this case that shared experience that can bring us closer to the person whose writings we study, informing and illuminating our research. Closeness of this kind is especially associated with feminist practices, in which there is “a link between researcher and researched” (Bowles and Klein 17). (28)

By attending to her lived experience, to chance encounters, and to her critical imagination, Sutherland found ways to share many experiences with her research subjects and to be instructed by their worlds. In doing so, she narrates a fascinating tale of curiosity and adventure in her willingness to speculate about what it means to enter historical spaces. Or consider the case of Kathleen Wider, a philosopher who used a sense of place to get to know her subject more deeply. The topic of Wider’s research is selfhood and identity; in her book, she examines her grandmother’s life as a case study. Specifically, she focuses on her grandmother’s unusual role as a speaker on the national lecture circuit on such topics as art, beauty, and the development of individuals and citizens. Wider decided to visit the farm where her grandmother Augusta Maguire had lived. I wanted more than just knowledge of the facts of the history that surrounded my grandmother’s family as they came to cultivate the Dakota land. So I set out for South Dakota to experience firsthand the land and its people. . . . Walking on what had once been the Maguire home farm, I felt at peace, as if I had come home. I was moving closer to the Maguires. In writing this book, at times I felt as though people long gone surrounded me, as alive as those 91

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with whom I lived and worked. Not only would I search for the details of Augusta’s life and its historical context, I would also need to use my imagination, fueled by sense experience, to dwell within that life. Only then would I be able to offer even partial answers to my philosophical questions. . . . This project cut closer to the bone than any other ever had. I had to go far beyond an abstract and logical analysis of the questions and their possible answers. I had to go out into the world and deep into myself. (69)

Here we see a traditionally trained researcher using nontraditional research methods—going to the place where her historical subject lived and experiencing it physically as well as imaginatively. Wider’s visits to specific places became a transforming experience for her, energizing her interest, imagination, and passion for her scholarly subject. Wider’s comment on having “to go out into the world and deep into [herself]” captures the two-part journey of strategic contemplation that we have been describing as a moment of meditation that can interact dynamically with critical imagination. A sense of place—the physical, embodied experience of visiting places— can become a powerful research tool and an important dimension of strategic contemplation, something we want to emphasize in the age of virtual reality. Although it may be easy to retrieve important information online and visit archives virtually, eventually, being on location, walking the streets of a town, or getting a feel for the land, the geography, the history all can enrich the creative and critical imaginations of scholars. Deborah Mutnick, in her article “Inscribing the World: An Oral History Project in Brooklyn,” reflects on the importance of place as a source of knowledge and insight. Places are sensuous, laden with the repetition of daily life. As we pass through or dwell someplace, we recreate it. We sense the presence of those who have been there before us. These qualities draw us to places like Stonehenge, Mayan ruins, or back to the mystery of our childhood homes. In our absence, places still exist for others as well as within us, our memories, our very being, disseminating their essences elsewhere. (626)

Mutnick’s observations capture the richness that places can represent, a fact particularly apt for historical researchers. Places connect past and present and hold the promise of a future yet to unfold. They can provide a rich backdrop for scholars’ work, particularly when they encounter those places through the process of strategic contemplation. In addition, they constitute a type of “field” experience, a tacking out from the text that adds to the fabric of understanding from which rhetorical scholars can draw. 92

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Only recently have scholars paid close attention to how lived experiences–such as, inhabiting specific places and particular bodies—can shape research and teaching. For instance, in Laird Christensen and Hal Crimmel’s Teaching about Place: Learning from the Land, scholars reflect on how the geographical places where they live affect their teaching and scholarship. Examples include essays by Paul Lindholdt, who reflects on how “teaching environmental studies to rural Westerners differs from teaching it in cities on the coast” (186); by Cheryll Glotfelty, who writes about “women and place” and explores the tensions between the care-giving, self-sacrificing, and community-building work often performed by women and the contrasting desire of “cutting ties and casting off obligations in the name of self-determination” (67); and by Rochelle Johnson, who describes her journey in “Rediscovering Indian Creek,” a research, environmental, and civic project that led her and many of her students to move from initial alienation to gradual acceptance and finally to fierce commitment to the redevelopment of their college town. What distinguishes these scholars’ work is their reflection on how place is a fundamental feature in our daily lives that can shape our imaginations, our sense of self and others, and our relations to built and natural environments. To take another example, consider The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Academy, a collection edited by Diane P. Freedman and Martha Stoddard Holmes. Here contributors illustrate how the body, in all its many forms—disabled, pregnant, gendered, raced, and otherwise marked—affects teaching, learning, and classroom encounters. Scholars draw on their own experiences and describe how a changing body (for example, an aging, ill, or pregnant body) affects their scholarship, their teaching, their sense of authority, and their sense of self in place. These scholars showcase how classroom dynamics can change as the teacher’s body changes, how she or he negotiates daily life in the classroom, on campus, and in the community—lived experiences that powerfully inform scholarly work and teaching practices. The examples of scholarship we have showcased above serve to illustrate the many different forms that outward and inward journeys can take, the many ways in which scholars engage the process of strategic contemplation. What we find particularly noteworthy are the accounts in which writers and scholars reflect in depth on how their work is shaped by the context of their daily lives, the places in which they live, and the bodies they inhabit. As contributors to Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins’s edited volume Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture make abundantly clear, we have not deeply theorized how our work 93

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constructs—and is constructed by—various forms of identity. Although much has been written about identity politics, how we read and are read by others—through various markers of language, class, gender, race, and culture—reflections on how our embodied, lived experience bears on our scholarship and teaching are much less readily available. We suggest that strategic contemplation can serve as a tool for addressing this gap. This analytical tool offers a mechanism for deliberately attending to our embodied experiences, to our sense of place, to our connections to the past and present, to our sense of cultural similarity and difference, to our intuitive side. Pedagogical Connections The examples of scholarship we have showcased above serve to illustrate the point that life is material, not abstract, such that we have come to see the importance of fleshing out our use of the phrase lived/embodied experience as an extremely powerful concept. First of all, we assert the obvious, that experiences are by nature lived by human beings who have and hold them, but we also assert that in highlighting the lived nature of experiences, we are bringing attention to the fact that experiences are grounded in the sociohistorical context and cultural traditions of the communities in which they are lived. Incidents, actions, circumstances, conditions, and experiences endow our sense of being, inform the ways in which we see and interpret events and scenes and shape our ways of doing things. By this definition, we are paying attention, then, to the intersections of exterior conditions and interior effects as they in turn inform action, whether the responses are proactive or reactive or some convergence of both. From this perspective, we recognize the senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, intuition) as sources of information in rhetorical performance and in the analysis of performance. This recognition creates an imperative if we expect to develop rhetorical expertise and high-quality analyses. We have the opportunity to develop and use these abilities with the expectation that they are critical enablers as we observe—read/make intelligible, not just words but actions and situations; sort through and sort out details, problems, concerns; touch the world, inhabiting places with a sense of the ecologies of those places; and listen actively to and for the presence and voices of others. With sharpened senses, we learn to produce, consume, and take into account texts, variously defined, the material conditions and circumstances that surround those texts—cognitively and affectively—and the impact and consequence of them in the world. In essence, then, by deliberately noticing—rather than ignoring—ecological conditions, or the ethical, political, cultural dimensions of rhetorical enterprises, or the materiality of 94

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ideas, arguments, sites, and situations, we come to rhetoric as an embodied, polylogical social practice that needs to be understood symphonically and in high definition. Recognizing rhetoric as an embodied experience (i.e., as a polylogical social practice) functions to shape research, in the sense that we are compelled to notice the nature of the particular lived experience, what is embodied, and what the material consequences are, whether those consequences are rooted in the past or present (e.g., being denied a rhetorical education because of one’s identity, gender, race—as referenced in Royster and Simpkins). We are suggesting something more, however, than another version of identity politics, which, we have found, can become unproductive when focused on a speaker’s, listener’s, reader’s, or writer’s identity to the exclusion of the subject of study or when it leads to self-centered analysis rather than a pushing ahead of an intellectual project. As Kirsch and Joy Ritchie argue elsewhere, we need to go “beyond the personal” in order to theorize a politics of location. That is, we need to reflect on what parts of our identity are relevant to the research at hand and work through that relationship at every step of a project. It is not enough to proclaim up front one’s ethnic, racial, class, gender, and religious origins and leave it at that. Rather, the key questions are how do these features of the researcher’s sense of self inform the topic the researcher studies, the research questions she asks (and does not ask), the data she collects (and does not collect), the interpretations she offers (and does not consider), and so on. In other words, we are suggesting that identity plays a much-larger role in research than we have considered at this point. Gesa’s Reflection Strategic contemplation invites us to be attuned to our lived, embodied experience, observing and paying attention to the world around us (the “fieldwork” aspect of our work) and reflecting on those experiences, letting them rise and settle, observing our responses to the world (the contemplative part of our work). In many courses I teach, I ask students to be mindful, to pause, to reflect, to pay attention to the world around them without rushing to judgment, to be open to chance discoveries, to new ways of seeing the world. Graduate students and undergraduate students alike enjoy the process of slowing down, noticing, and observing before being asked to analyze, dissect, and argue (much more familiar academic activities). I make a point of articulating clearly the goals of my pedagogy: to contrast contemplative, reflective activities with the more-standard analytical moves taught so thoroughly in college and graduate school. I also contrast my approach to the very fast-moving world of instant communication; I ask students to 95

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notice what happens when they slow down, stand still, pause, observe, and reflect. As I have suggested elsewhere: The importance of silence, of pausing, of standing still, of attending to the moment, of being fully present, of listening deeply cannot be overstated . . . and especially for a generation of students who are always wired, always multi-tasking. This kind of generative silence is in line with what a number of composition scholars suggest about the power of silence as a rhetorical tool: Elbow in “Silence: A Collage;” Pat Belanoff in “Silence: Reflection, Literacy, Learning, and Teaching;” and Cheryl Glenn in Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. I try to create a number of such pauses—moments of silence—in the classroom: after we read an essay, after we complete a free-write, after we workshop an essay. I often invite a minute of silence so we can reread what we have read, reflect on what we have heard, jot down an image, thought, or idea that has been evoked for us. (“Creating Spaces” 63)

In the context of working with undergraduate students, I explain that my goal is to “create a space where they can take contemplation and reflection seriously, a process that can enable powerful writing” (“From Introspection to Action” W9). Furthermore, I point out that “these skills are first and foremost important for writing vivid pieces [of prose], but at the same time, they can be very valuable in the world of personal and professional relationships, (a fact that business-minded students appreciate)” (“From Introspection to Action” W5). In terms of my work with graduate students, I invite students to go on “archival adventures” (broadly defined) in order to encourage exploration, visits to new places, attention to historical and cultural artifacts, and reflections on the research process; that is, I try to invite students to come to a place where reflection, contemplation, and observation meet. I continue to be inspired by the depth, range, and commitment the process of strategic contemplation invokes in students; the invitation to attend to inward and outward journeys as well as lived experiences often leads students to passionate, thoughtful, and powerful research and writing. Jackie’s Reflection When I teach writing, I do so using a rhetorical approach. Early in my teaching experience, I learned that students don’t always take easily to the traditional jargon of the field. For example, I observed my classes grappling mightily with the notion of argumentative appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos. I watched and listened to too many conversations that didn’t seem to be conversations in which the students were actively and authentically engaged. I concluded that although the students understood the words and 96

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were basically satisfying the assignment, they didn’t have a visceral enough sense of what the words really meant as useful concepts in crafting a powerful and persuasive text. I thought about my own rhetorical decision-making process and the ways that I might connect the concepts to lived experience. I began asking my students to think of rhetoric as a “whole-body experience” instead of a set of disembodied practices for composing or analyzing a text as an academic exercise. I asked them to think about their bodily responses to what they were reading and writing, the part of the body to which they thought a text was connecting or trying to connect: the head (logos), the heart (pathos), the backbone (ethos—as related to beliefs), or the stomach (ethos—as related to aesthetic pleasure or revulsion). Their body parts became symbolically sites of persuasion, leaving open the opportunity to interrogate the sources of such responses and the extent to which these visceral reactions are shaped and defined by culture, experience, habits of engagement, and so on. In other words, through these types of classroom activities, I invited them to engage in a process of strategic contemplation, using their critical imaginations to get inside of a moment of critique and productivity; to look around, think about what they are seeing and thinking, and come to a new level of understanding; to use this base of information for reflection, speculation, talking about writing, writing, and critique. What I found is that an enriched awareness of rhetoric as a “wholebody experience” permitted a better-grounded class discussion of the arts and crafts of persuasion. Through our interactions in class, the groups have generated more regularly a clearer understanding of the nature of eloquence, as moments when they recognized and had a vocabulary, not just for the assertion that they were persuaded by a text but for their understanding of the sorts of appeals that seemed to be operating in the process of persuasion and even sometimes how such textual constructions connect with community and culture, habits and expectations, worldviews, ways of knowing and believing, and the like. I learned, and I believe that they learned. These sorts of classroom activities helped me to see the value of critical imagination and strategic contemplation as useful inquiry strategies capable of helping students to develop a rhetorical vocabulary, to think critically and creatively, to write with purpose and consequence, to talk about their own writing and the writing of others, and to critique their experiences as rhetorical decision makers, a core pedagogical value for me in the teaching of writing. As I saw the usefulness of this approach in composition courses, ultimately I developed a habit of using these types of questioning strategies in other courses that I taught—undergraduate and graduate—in rhetorical studies and literacy studies as well. 97

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Social Circulation

[S]uccessful circulation of public writing is not achieved by going it alone, but through networks of relationships, in alliances between those in power and those without, through moments of serendipity. Any changes made or attempted can’t be located solely on the page, or in the act of composition, but also are found in the writing’s circulation, in how it works in the world, fostering conversation, creating pressure, and even creating unexpected allies. —Paula Mathieu and Diana George, “Not Going It Alone”

As we describe in chapter 2, we chose the term social circulation as leverage for understanding complex rhetorical interactions across space and time. The desired analytical outcome is to enhance the capacity to reimagine the dynamic functioning of women’s work in domains of discourse, re-envision cultural flow in specific localities, and link analyses of these phenomena in an informative and compelling way in support of amplifying and magnifying the impacts and consequences of women’s rhetoric as we forward an enlarged view of rhetoric as a human enterprise. Finding a window for understanding the concept of social circulation might well begin with a disruption of the dichotomies associated with rhetoric being defined within what has been considered historically to be the public domains of men (politics, law, religion, philosophy, science, medicine, and the like), rather than within the private domains of women (the home and family). Such binaries have been powerful in limiting the frameworks 98

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within which women’s practices have been expected to occur historically and even more powerful in creating the hierarchies of sociopolitical favor that have functioned to devalue women’s accomplishments, whether women were actually participating in public domains or private ones. Dismantling the public-private divide, therefore, was the focus of intense scholarship in women’s studies for many years and also in rhetorical studies. In rhetorical studies, this scholarship is represented well by the work of Karen A. Foss and Sonja K. Foss. In Women Speak: The Eloquence of Women’s Lives, for example, they explicitly bring to our attention the importance of the fact that the study of communication and rhetoric had been confined to formal public arenas, the very places where historically the practices and the eloquence of women have been ignored. They draw attention then to the impact of such a choice in determining the nature, and even the possibility, of eloquence for women. The focus in the study of public address, as its name suggests, has been on communication in the public arena. Communicators may address others in various formats and contexts, but those messages that occur in public, formal contexts are those that have received attention in studies of public address. . . . By definition, we recognize, scholarship in the area of public address is supposed to deal with public rather than private discourse. The realm of the private belongs to the scholar interested in interpersonal communication, the conversational analyst dealing with patterns in everyday talk, or the ethnographer studying various cultural expressions. We suggest, however, that the delineation of a realm of study confined to public discourse unnecessarily limits the kinds of knowledge that can be generated about communication. (13)

In other words, Foss and Foss sought to broaden the scope of worthiness in communication studies and rhetorical studies, making room for seeing and understanding women’s eloquence from a different standpoint, that is, the standpoint of their eloquent lives. These types of critiques served to open interrogations of practices (e.g., women’s practices, non-elite practices, practices of the socially disfranchised by various definitions) that before this era of scholarship were persistently cast in shadow. On one hand, criticism about the scope and nature of rhetoric gave rise to work in search of “public” women, such as, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, volumes 1 and 2; Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970; and Shirley Wilson Logan, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Such projects 99

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brought women’s performances and accomplishments to visibility, bringing complexity to who constitutes the category rhetor and recovering over the years, as others joined in the work, a sparkling array of women’s voices. On the other hand, there were also projects that pushed these boundaries even more by moving beyond the effort to paint women more fully into the historical narrative toward proposing quite different frameworks designed to recast that narrative and to engender analyses that focused more robustly on the use of language within social relationships and the understanding of rhetorical practices as sociopolitical and cultural performances. For example, in her 1990 volume Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880, Mary P. Ryan states: To search for women in public is to subvert a longstanding tenet of the modern Western gender system, the presumption that social space is divided between the public and the private and that men claim the former while women are confined to the latter. This investigation is not premised on a perverse inclination to defy conventional wisdom but rather is an obvious step in the progression of feminist scholarship and women’s history. The feminist theory and the women’s studies scholarship produced in the last twenty years provide a direct incentive to defy the rigid classifications of male/public and female/private. These paired dualisms, highly useful guideposts to feminist scholars early in the 1970s, had become objects of suspicion by the end of the decade and are now prime candidates for extinction at the hands of deconstructionists. . . . The object of my search is simultaneously women as subjects and gender as both a linguistic construction and a set of social relationships. (4)

As Ryan suggests, as recovery projects in RCL brought together rhetorical studies and feminist studies, they soon began to shift away from mainly a disruption of the public-private divide and an expansion of who constitutes an appropriate rhetorical subject to a more intense interrogation of the whole concept of social space, rather than private space or public space. In recognizing rhetoric, thereby, as a social phenomenon, rather than more simply a public phenomenon, insights about women’s practices began to emerge more boldly. Recognizing also that since women were not mute, there was more room in these revised paradigms for questions such as: Where were the spaces in which women chose/were permitted to speak? What were their fora, their platforms, the contexts of their rhetorical performances? Who were their audiences? What were their concerns? What tools for interaction did they use? How did they construct their arguments? What were the impacts and consequences of their rhetorical performances? 100

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How were they trained? How did they convey legacies of action? Inquiries blossomed exponentially. In interrogations of feminist rhetorical practices in these sorts of ways, the concept of social circulation functions as a metaphor to indicate the social networks in which women connect and interact with others and use language with intention. These ever-vibrant, interlinking social circles connect women not just across sociopolitical and cultural contexts, settings, and communities—locally and globally—but also across generations, across time, and across space. The idea of ever-shifting social circles pushes us to move beyond the public-private dichotomy and beyond just calling attention to social networks. Instead, we shift attention more dramatically toward circulations that may have escaped our attention, that we may not have valued (and therefore neglected to study), or that because they are based in women’s activities, we may not have immediately envisioned as rhetorical activities—such as involvement in local garden clubs and community organizations (e.g., Hogg, discussed below), in parenting groups, or in social circles of quilters and needle workers (e.g., Goggin, discussed in chapter 4). Yet, these kinds of social networks are often civic in nature, rhetorical in function, and both activist and community building in outcome, such that the circles of ideas created within such discourses have the capacity to compound effects across time and across space. Essentially, we propose social circulation as a critical term of engagement to suggest that this sense of the fluidity of language use—as well as the fluidity of the power those uses generate—can help us see how traditions are carried on, changed, reinvented, and reused when they pass from one generation to the next. Furthermore, we suggest that social circulation enables us to see metaphorically how ideas circulate not just across generations but also across places and regions in local, global, and transnational contexts. It helps us to see how ideas resonate, divide, and are expressed via new genres and new media. Noticing such ebbs and flows within ever-changing, often ever-broadening circles of interaction enables us to see how the past can reach into the present and how the close at hand might reach toward the distant and further away, thus helping all of us to imagine a future worth working toward as a more inclusive enterprise. By such frameworks, the whole idea of continuity and change takes on ever-new possibilities. To explain further, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, editor Stuart Hall discusses the concept of “the circuit of culture,” indicating multidirectional and dynamic relationships among various points of reference, including the symbol or representation that anchors the process (in this case speaking, writing, and other visual representations), 101

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forming an identity with the cultural framework (as speakers, writers, listeners, and readers), the production of meanings within that framework (various multimedia rhetorical acts), the process of consumption for those productions (listening, viewing, reading), the ways in which such meanings might be regulated within the culture (in terms of processes of authorization, accreditation, and valorization or not), and then recursively and dialogically acknowledging the back and forth movements among all of these reference points in the process of cultural engagement (1–11). Hall underscores how language functions as a representational system in using signs and symbols “whether they are sounds, written words, electronically produced images, musical notes, even objects—to stand for or represent to other people our concepts, ideas and feelings” (1). In other words, he positions language use as a symbolic materiality for building circles of meanings that are shareable and useable in social interactions. Hall emphasizes how language, broadly defined, is the privileged medium that enables the dialogues that permit us to build the shared meanings and practices that constitute cultural knowledge and understanding and permit us, in turn, to interpret the world in resonance with those others with whom we are engaging. He recognizes that meanings are multiple, that they are not straightforward or transparent, and that they tend to shift over time, space, and circumstances. Language, then—broadly including words, sounds, and images as symbolic representations—is the medium for negotiating these various processes of expression, communication, and persuasion and for enabling culturally informed action. Examples Tacking In As suggested above, rhetorical processes, in effect, have the capacity to envelop broadly defined uses of language as a symbolic system, with rhetoric being constituted in this schema as culturally informed social actions that participate recursively in the circuit of culture, especially as we take into account how identities and ideas form and become rhetorical (i.e., associated with deliberate action), as well as how language and ideas travel, create multiple circles of meaning, and engage multiple mechanisms for creating impact and consequence. As part of the intellectual work related to the making and transmission of meaning, some scholars in feminist rhetorical studies are actively involved in tracking specifically the ways in which feminist-informed analyses of texts and contexts are negotiating these circuits. A prime example is “Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse,” Jessica Enoch’s 102

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analysis of Chicana rhetorics of sterilization abuse. In this analysis, Enoch examines Madrigal v. Quilligan, a case in which Dolores Madrigal, whose first language is Spanish, was coerced during the birth of a child to sign a “consent to sterilize” form written in English and received a tubal ligation. Madrigal, who was joined by several other Chicano women who claimed to have experienced the same treatment, filed a class-action suit against the medical center for sterilizations that were conducted without informed consent. The case was dismissed as essentially an unfortunate “misunderstanding” triggered by the victims who lacked fluency in English and who were atypical patients as members of a “subcultural” group. Enoch positions the testimonies of the Chicana women as rhetorics of survival, explaining how the women fought forcefully in court for “their right to personal, familial, and cultural survival” (6). In her analysis of their arguments, she applies three feminist historiographic approaches from a list of five that she identifies as typical of feminist rhetorical scholarly work. The approaches that she identifies include: • recovering the voices of women from ignored and overlooked spaces • identifying recurrences of their actions inside of women’s rhetorical history • contextualizing their performances within their original sociohistorical context in order to understand both how the women came to voice and how their audiences responded to their voices • analyzing the ways the basic tenets of traditional rhetorical criticism often refuse the possibility of female or feminized rhetors • creating rhetorical theories from the findings of the analysis that open spaces for the rescue, recovery, and more equitable (re)inscription of women’s participation Enoch states that in her analysis, she focuses on the first three approaches but adds one that is not usually included. Between the task of contextualizing the rhetorical performance within its immediate context and the task of theorizing in order to open new spaces for analysis, she disrupts the flow of analysis and identifies as a particular challenge the way in which normalizing processes function to silence the voices of nontraditional participants (as in the case of the Chicana women in court deliberations), rendering them not-hearable and invisible within the norm of possibility and expectation (in the case of the Chicana women in terms of what counts as evidence of harm). By this reckoning, rhetors who do not conform to normalizing processes are ultimately forced to occupy and function in whatever spaces are left.1 Enoch asserts that we should pay more attention to the spaces left 103

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as another strategy for critical inquiry that is designed to push beyond the boundaries of the immediate moment of interaction toward the other circuits of engagement. She encourages us to ask, “What else happened with the rhetorical endeavors?” in order to determine who else might have been listening beyond the originally designated listeners, how the rhetorics that emerged might have been used in different contexts for different purposes, and what other responses might have occurred with impact and consequence (6–7). We contend that Enoch’s approach shifts the landscape for rhetorical analysis and engenders insights about rhetorical performances and situations that would otherwise go unnoticed. Enoch says: [F]eminist historiographic practice does not have to end here [i.e., with the contextualizing of the performance within its immediate interaction]. Scholars can continue their historical pursuit by asking, what else happened to women’s rhetorics? By asking this question, feminist scholars can begin to understand how women’s words were remembered and retold in different rhetorical situations and how they achieved different rhetorical effects. This particular historiographic practice grounds itself in the idea that just because a rhetoric has been silenced in one venue does not mean it is gone forever. (17)

In this way, Enoch looks beyond the immediate moment to suggest the importance of taking a longer view of tales twice (or even more) told—and remembered. She pushes us to see that the point of such an interrogation is not merely to track the migration of an idea or experience from one context to another but also to assess the transits of purposes and audiences in order to track how ideas and imperatives might actively survive and live on, rather than just moving from place to place in a more passive existence. As Enoch suggests, questions might include: Who else was listening? Where else were these stories told? For what additional purposes were these arguments deployed? The imperative is to assess how feminist rhetorics recover (even after devastating first effects) and survive, to identify their reoccurrences and track the wake of reuse and reinterpretation—again, as an active process, rather than a more passive one, with words, concepts, stories, and beliefs put to new and renewable uses. Tacking Out From the dialogical, dialectical, reflective, reflexive, embodied, and ethically anchored processes of engagement in feminist rhetorical studies, we are drawn to consider more closely the patterns of social circulation that surround rhetorical performances, with particular regard to the commu104

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nities in which a given performance takes place and to the environmental conditions that affect the performance. Take, for instance, the important contribution Gail Okawa makes in “Unbundling: Archival Research and Japanese American Communal Memory of U.S. Justice Department Internment, 1941–45.” Okawa illustrates how archival work can begin with the discovery of family artifacts (in this case, letters left behind by her grandfather, the Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe) and then take on much-larger cultural, social, and historical dimensions. In order to understand her grandfather’s life experiences and the political context of the times, Okawa began her research by synthesizing information from FBI files, government documents, oral histories, interviews with descendants of internment survivors, and family archives. The result is a larger coming together of other individuals who shared experiences similar to her grandfather’s, a community of sorts, though an involuntary one. Okawa’s work not only recovers the life and legacy of her grandfather but also contributes to a multigenerational, multivocal, collective biography of the Japanese Hawaiian internment experience. Here, we see how social circulation as a term of engagement can be useful in looking at where our research originates, where it travels, and how it connects communities, generations, and different locations. What is particularly significant about Okawa’s work is that it responds to the community from which it arises—the Japanese Hawaiian community. Okawa not only writes for an academic audience but also has contributed to a public museum exhibit honoring a generation of Japanese American fathers and grandfathers who were falsely imprisoned, collected oral histories and interviews that she has shared with other families and made available to the public, worked on a digital history project, and given public lectures—all of which have contributed to connecting social circles in the Japanese Hawaiian community. These important contributions have enabled descendants of the generation of imprisoned men to learn more about their ancestors and to come to terms with a topic that was once considered too shameful to discuss. Okawa’s research exemplifies the work of a scholar-activist, someone who reflects on the social and cultural contexts of the research and the impact it can have on connecting community members, on creating a bridge between past and present. Okawa’s research makes a major contribution to recovering the lives and times of a lost generation, moves them into the present, and works toward a future that honors rhetorical practices and the community of Japanese Americans who turned into “alien enemies” overnight. In light of events that unfolded in the aftermath of 9/11, this kind of rhetorical study is particularly pertinent because it helps us to imagine—and work toward—a more just future. 105

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These sorts of circuits of culture can be linked not only to the ways and means of rhetorical actions as dynamic sociocultural performances and to the strategies that we employ for scholarly research but also to our reading and interpretive processes as well. To illustrate, consider Kirsch’s use in a graduate seminar of From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community by Charlotte Hogg.2 In this volume, Hogg explores the literacy practices of white, rural women in Nebraska, including her grandmother and other women whom she knew as a child. This multigenre text blends memoir, interviews, research, reflection, and auto-ethnography; Hogg portrays in detail how rhetorical activities function in the small town of Paxton to build, sustain, and foster a sense of community. Hogg demonstrates how rural women, despite living and subscribing to an “agrarian ideology that values the work and lives of men” (19–20), use literacy for their own purposes. They establish rhetorical agency through such activities as collecting, editing, and publishing books about the history of their town, their families, and the Sand Hills of Nebraska; running the public library; and organizing community events. Hogg further suggests that the literate lives of rural women are to be valued and appreciated, and she challenges the message that she remembers receiving as a child—that to succeed in life meant leaving Paxton. Instead, Hogg suggests that value, dignity, and meaning are to be found in the rhetorical and community-building practices of rural women. Hogg expands our vista on rhetorical inquiry on many fronts. She studied women’s rhetorical practices in a setting not often considered important: an agricultural, small town; she looked beyond schooling and the local library to see how rhetorical practices are embodied in the everyday activities of rural women (as they participate in various clubs, community organizations, and civic projects); she reclaimed her personal and cultural memory as a source of strength, to reconnect with the community that she had left behind; and she honored the women whose community she studied by focusing on what they had taught her, how they envision the future of their small town, and how she fits into this picture as researcher and writer of this study. Pedagogical Connections In presenting these examples, we are suggesting that within the overlapping circles of rhetorical engagement resides the opportunity to foreground the varying social circuitry of ways of thinking about texts and performances, the use of differing perceptions as innovative springboards not only for teaching and learning but also for reading and writing, and a conscious recognition of evolving methods in research and scholarship. We underscore the notion that there is an amply renderable matrix of practices, protocols, 106

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and processes that researchers, writers, and readers are utilizing, and we mark the importance of considering the difference that the differences along this matrix make with regard to analysis and interpretation. Ultimately, we identify this work as constituting specifically, though not exclusively, emerging patterns in feminist rhetorical studies. With the shift in research we are describing (the new landscape we are seeing), we see a need to move beyond analyses of our habits as academic readers. In particular, we are challenged to imagine new ways of locating the reader in relation to new forms of texts, in relation to the articulation and development of aesthetic sensibilities (i.e., evaluative systems), and quite importantly in relation to the development of interpretive/sense-making frameworks. But these changes in readers’ habits and expectations are only a beginning. Readers are now being challenged to reexamine their assumptions and expectations as the scope and nature of rhetorical work is shifting its Western, Eurocentric framework. As scholars include a much-greater variety of rhetorical sites, subjects, contexts, and practices than ever before, as they include material practices other than reading and writing in their scholarly projects, and as they look at rhetorical practices in global and transnational contexts, the methodological and analytical frameworks for preparing graduate students to engage in this work going forward must, by necessity, shift, and so must paradigms that operate at even more-basic levels. For example, in our undergraduate classrooms, we are increasingly called upon to help students to shift the paradigms by which they form their expectations as readers and composers of multimedia texts, and, of course, we, too, as teachers are hard pressed to be more open to possibility and diversity in the ways by which we engage with students and make and use our pedagogical choices. Gesa’s Reflection When I read Hogg’s book, I admired it for its respectful portrait of rural women, caring tone, focus on a local setting, new definitions of rhetorical practice, and the hybrid genre with which the author experiments. I chose the book for a graduate seminar I was teaching at the time to showcase the shifting landscape of feminist rhetorical inquiry. When students read the volume, their responses varied greatly, which suggests that their ways of reading and interpretation were different from mine: Some admired the book for its experimental approach to research and writing; others criticized the book for its affectionate, perhaps sentimental tone, for the central, perhaps self-centered role the author plays in the narrative, and for the familial/autobiographical narrative stance/tone. In making this statement, 107

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I do not mean to suggest hierarchies of reading practices. Instead, I want to underscore variations in reading practices that deserve more scholarly attention in our field. Jackie’s Reflection When I think of reading practices, I am typically drawn to how we recognize reading, not just as a marker of social status but as a critical tool for engaging with one’s world, as a means of developing a critical stance, as an instrument of social activism, as a community-building tool, as a critical piece of our abilities to function most powerfully as rhetorical decision makers, and more. With this type of viewpoint, I cast my eyes almost immediately toward the scholarship of feminist rhetorical scholars with Logan as a prime example. Consider her volume Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America and particularly this scene: Leagues [the Union or Loyal League Movement sponsored by the Republican Party after World War I] frequently met at night and formed a system of night schools. At these meetings, the leagues served a variety of educational functions, and information was disseminated through long speeches, lectures, and discussion on current topics. . . . A good deal of time was spent reading newspapers and pamphlets aloud to members, who would listen at length, an activity particularly beneficial to members just learning to read. Many often committed the material to memory, in a process similar to the one followed by the slave mission preachers. . . . Of course, as historian John Hope Franklin notes, the leagues, surrounded in secrecy, ritual, and a rhetoric of freedom and equal rights, attracted large numbers of African Americans, many of whom looked to league leaders for voting advice, but long after league popularity declined, leaguers who had been indoctrinated into politics through it carried their acquired skills into other political and economic arenas. (25; emphasis added)

The leagues “taught” the people who attended these meetings through the social acts of talking, listening, reading, writing, and turning the results of their understanding into action (in this case, often action in the voting booth). However, after the leagues were no longer functioning, the practices continued “into other political and economic arenas.” In effect, the ideas and the rhetorical practices were set in motion by the organizers of the leagues for their own purposes, but they enabled the participants and/or liberated them to engage in other enterprises, using these ideas and practices in their own ways in support of other social networks and other purposes. 108

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As teachers, we place literacy development and rhetorical education (reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, expressiveness; acts of communication, persuasion, and performance) in social circulation in our classrooms. We are hopeful that we ground these processes via our enhanced awareness of the ways and means of rhetorical enterprises, including the reality of their existence in multiple sites of engagement, in keeping, for example, with the remarkable set of sites that Logan discusses in her volume. What this means to me is that as teachers, we have a clearer capacity to think well about what it means to develop rhetorical expertise for a broad range of students whose identities and passions are shaped by a broad range of experiences, values, beliefs, and imperatives. One additional point is that in our classroom and extraclassroom encounters once we set literacy in motion as a liberating force, there is no telling and, more likely, no controlling where the impact and consequences of such educational moments, as transformative moments, might lead. I am sobered, therefore, by Logan’s analysis in terms of our social and ethical responsibilities as people who participate actively in acknowledging literate possibilities but simultaneously in shifting or disrupting or redirecting the ebb and flow of them. Whether we consider ourselves to be in rhetoric, composition, communication, literacy, or some other category, we have the privilege and power of helping our students to liberate themselves as thinkers and self-defined users of language in full understanding that a liberation process does indeed mean, in effect, that we set in motion a process of casting “bread on the water” and creating circles of response—social circulations—the outcomes of which we might never be able to imagine—nor should be able to.

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8

Globalizing the Point of View

[T]he global pivot calls for new questions about and new perspectives on the relation between past and present prototypes of globalization, consideration of how symbols and symbolic practices are appropriated, translated, and rehistoricized, and reconsideration of earlier transnational thinkers and international rhetorical figures. —Wendy S. Hesford, “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies”

In our postimperial world, we are pressed to acknowledge the presence of others globally and to find ways to treat globality as a core analytic by which we interrogate rhetorical performance and accomplishment. The basic argument of this chapter, as suggested in the epigraph by Wendy S. Hesford, is that our understanding of global feminist rhetorical studies is interwoven with a need to critique our understanding of globalization and global feminist studies over time. A signpost for global feminist studies is Women’s Studies: A Retrospective, the 1995 Ford Foundation–commissioned retrospective on women’s studies as a young field, a report in which Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Susan Heath recognized the need for the field to connect feminist work in the United States to activist and academic work around the globe. As documented in chapter 3, in similar fashion to women’s studies, attention to feminist rhetorics as a local priority emerged in the United States in the 1980s with its emphasis on the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription of women’s practices. Over the years since then, these 110

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three Rs have functioned as major leverage for achieving tectonic shifts in what constitutes a more inclusive view of rhetorical studies as an enterprise. The dynamic effects of changes across nationally defined sectors of performance have created reverberations that have pushed scholarly attention more persistently in RCL beyond our national borders, as these shifts have given rise to curiosities about the connections and interconnections of patterns of rhetorical action worldwide. Currently, interests in rhetorical studies, feminist studies, and global studies are indeed converging persistently in RCL and showing evidence of a growing commitment to shift rhetorical studies away from traditional, imperialist perspectives of rhetorical performance and knowledge to a more democratic and more inclusive one that recognizes transnational constructions of rhetorical enterprises, not just Western ones. This resetting of scholarly vision and priorities is keyed by a dynamic expansion of local knowledge (Western rhetoric/rhetoric in the United States) amid global knowledge (rhetoric within and across multiple cultures and national boundaries), which with the convergence of rhetorical studies, feminist studies, and global studies, has in turn generated a clearer potential to magnify and amplify our understanding of women’s participation within an integrative view of rhetorical processes. Global Rhetorics Then and Now As indicated in chapter 3, the elite, white, male traditions of Western rhetorical studies are highly entrenched and have extended with an uninterrupted trajectory from fifth-century bce Greece to the present—over twenty-fivehundred years. Within this long history, the provenance for a “globalized” agenda for rhetorical enterprises has been necessarily defined by the cultural contexts within which this record has been generated, that is, within cultures that have been significantly shaped by a long and deep patriarchal and imperialist past. In other words, like Western empires themselves, Western rhetorics did indeed go global, migrating around the globe as part and parcel of the social, political, and cultural conquest of others and exhibiting and naturalizing the privileges of Western preferences and values to set the terms of engagement and the terms by which worth and positive regard have been historically determined. A major development in this historical positioning, especially during the last half of the twentieth century, has occurred via various types of social, political, and cultural movements nationally and globally. Over the last sixty years, swept by recursive waves of resistance, the world has shed some of its imperialist markings and moved to a postcolonial, postmodern era. The consequence for rhetorical studies is that just as this discipline has been 111

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embedded historically in the social, political, and ideological framework of its imperialist past, so is it now enmeshed in the web of postcolonial, postmodern change. We are witnessing now a continuous process of worldwide decolonization and a remaking of paradigms and frameworks in support of all manner of sociocultural imperatives, including knowledge creation. A critical imperative in the field has been to draw more vibrantly into the scope of rhetorical enterprises a global vision. For a field that has been so thoroughly endowed by its Western traditions, a challenge has been and continues to be to seek out and consistently enact an agenda that expects and acknowledges a multidimensional sense of diversity as a core value and that does so with both local and global curiosity and respect. Considering such moves as both a proactive and reactive response to change suggests that we are seeing in RCL tectonic shifts in motion in terms of upheavals in the very ground and grounding of our work. Essentially, instead of maintaining in an uncritical way a global agenda that has been defined by imperialist patriarchal values and by the imposition of Western paradigms and traditions as default measures of performance and excellence, the postcolonial, postmodern imperative has been to invoke a different sense of globalization that addresses two basic issues. On one hand, despite the fact that in the United States we are significantly constrained by the need to focus across genres on texts and resources that are conveyed in English, rather than in other languages, there is, nevertheless, a call to extend not the linguistic boundaries as such but the boundaries of locally defined assumptions, values, and expectations regarding how rhetorical performance is constituted and valued. The intention in doing so is basic—to shift rather dramatically the scope of conceptual and operational possibilities beyond elite, white, male, European-based habits and measures. Addressing this paradigmatic issue functions to reconstitute what counts as rhetorical performance and is worthy of interrogation and valuation and thus makes room both within and beyond historical frameworks for feminist rhetorics to come more vibrantly into view in both local and global scope. In keeping with the organizational pattern that we are using for this volume in tacking in and out to offer examples of innovation, the imperative is to shift our culturally specific sense of what is rhetorically salient so that we can acknowledge a more diverse and more inclusive cultural and intellectual framework that is, on one hand, internal for the nation. In addition, however, with an expanded, internal view, is also a call to tack out as well, by contextualizing such shifted paradigms within a broader geopolitical scope, one that more fully endows the range of human potential and that is more capable of defying the binaries and hierarchies that have been set in 112

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motion by the historical dominance of Western ways as a default measure. In other words, tacking in and out within global context permits us to see ourselves more fully as ourselves and simultaneously to pay more attention to our global intelligibility through the eyes, experiences, and practices of others. By these means, we defy the narrowness of our own limitations and shift the ground on which we stand, increase our capacity to see and appreciate a different vista, and make more room for human variety, including global feminist rhetorics, as a substantial and powerful concept. Linkages with Global Women’s Studies A preliminary step in looking more critically at global feminist rhetorics includes taking into account what has come to be recognized as global feminism and looking more specifically at how globalization has emerged in women’s studies as an intellectual enterprise that shares with RCL fundamental goals and concerns related to the interrogation and documentation of the lives, conditions, and contributions of women. Consider Guy-Sheftall and Heath’s Women Studies, which discusses the importance of the internationalization and global reach of women’s studies as a major priority going forward for this academic field. The authors conclude that they cannot adequately address local feminist concerns without seeing the broader connections and implications worldwide. They offer examples outside of the United States and Europe, namely, in Africa, the Middle East, India, the Caribbean, and several other sites, of how infrastructure was being built for women’s studies in international venues, and of how workshops and other programs were being offered and institutionalized (19–24). They highlight research fellowships that were supporting and encouraging the interrogation of gender and feminism in Third World contexts, and they also identify a range of women’s issues that were receiving greater attention from a global perspective, including the debt crisis, domestic violence, reproductive rights, militarism, migration, reproductive technologies, female genital mutilation, apartheid, racism, refugees, work, and the family. Now, almost two decades later, no doubt they would add to this list health, the environment, food production, war and terrorism, national leadership, education, the equitable application of law and justice, microeconomic lending, and so on. This framing, in like manner, constitutes the exigencies for much of women’s rhetorical action. In keeping with a global feminist-studies agenda, Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim’s edited collection Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives is an excellent example of how scholars in women’s studies have moved forward to account for the globalization of the field from a theoretical and pedagogical perspective. Their anthology grew out of their 113

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participation in the Ford Foundation’s Summer Institute on “Women and Gender in an Era of Global Change” and their subsequent experimentation with various texts in their own classrooms. Starting with definitions of key terms (e.g., feminism, local, global, and civil society) and key concepts (e.g., gender, women’s experiences, the personal is political, and difference), the collection focuses on: (1) critical debates about differences among women across time, space, and condition (including social movements related to race, class, sexuality, and nation), and (2) the theories that have informed these debates (including the politics and implications of agency, standpoint, location, coalition). McCann and Kim take particular note of the following: Feminist theories, like other political philosophies, provide intellectual tools by which historical agents can examine the injustices they confront, and can build arguments to support their particular demands for change. Feminist theorists apply their tools to building knowledge of women’s oppression and, based on that knowledge, to developing strategies for resisting subordination and improving women’s lives. Feminist theories respond to questions such as: How are women subordinated as women? How can we understand the ways in which specific events might be part of social oppression based on sex, rather than unique individual misfortunes? How can we be sure that we have clear understandings of oppressive situations? How can women resist subordination? How should we work for changes that will improve women’s lives? In what arenas of life should we focus efforts for change? What kinds of changes are needed? How is women’s subordination as women connected to related oppressions based on race, ethnicity, nationality, class and sexuality? (1–2)

In making such a statement, these editors underscore the notion that when we look at feminist research through the lens of global women’s studies, what comes to bolder relief is the view that the connections between women’s activism and research related to gender and women’s issues are intricately entwined. Also notable is that a dynamic part of this intricacy, in keeping with the typically multilensed, multidisciplinary, intersectional approach to analyses, is keyed by an analysis of symbolic representations, language use, public discourses, and other meaning-making processes, points of focus that are of particular concern in RCL. The questions raised by McCann and Kim suggest richly rendered possibilities for reconsidering how those of us in rhetorical studies might obtain a clearer understanding of women’s lives broadly defined (even though the historical standpoint, as explained in chapter 4 and below, is different). In complementary relationship to their questions, the inquiry framework raised in this volume seeks to bring more attention to the rhetorical 114

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dimensions of feminist analysis—not simply the use of rhetoric in feminist studies but the use of feminist analyses in rhetorical studies. Essentially, the idea is to address forthrightly and critically the effects of shifting the kaleidoscopic perspective of feminist analysis, especially in global scope, to inquiry frameworks in which language and rhetoric constitute a pivotal lens, where this viewpoint becomes the place from which to begin, that is, the point of focus or the analytical lever. Looking at the work being conducted in RCL, then, where is the evidence that issues related to language, rhetoric, public discourses, and the like are being interestingly and innovatively incorporated into feminist analysis and vice versa and addressed within the context of larger, more-worldwide views of women’s concerns? How does the convergence of rhetorical studies and feminist studies in global contexts work? What are the challenges and implications of this type of research and scholarship for the history of rhetoric as a specific point of focus? To be sure, the differences in the historical developments for the two fields (women’s studies and rhetorical studies) matter, regardless of there being core commonalities for them. Although both areas have gained considerable traction in knowledge making and pedagogical practices from frameworks that have been substantially defined by Western enterprises, and both have recognized the need to face the challenge of extending and traversing such boundaries and limitations, one critical factor is the historical context from which each has emerged and been defined—rhetoric from the perspective of imperialist dominance; women’s studies from the perspective of activism and resistance to oppression. As indicated in the Ford Foundation report, women’s studies, as a young academic field in the United States, came into being during the 1960s when differences by race, gender, class, sexuality, culture, nation, ideology, and others were operating with dynamic force and energy around the globe in the wake of a full range of social, political, and cultural movements. Leaders in this field, who were emerging from various political and personal standpoints within this volatile context, recognized fairly immediately the mandate to globalize their scope in setting the values, expectations, and practices of the field. In keeping with habits in women’s studies, they have taken an activist approach in identifying pathways and processes for doing so, again as documented by the Ford Foundation report as a retrospective for these historical developments. In contrast, as chronicled here, rhetorical studies emerged in the fifth century bce, an era in which imperialism reigned supreme. Over the centuries since then, habits and expectations have been set in binary and hierarchical ways that have privileged Western traditions and established the primacy of imperial traditions in setting definitions, values, and practices, with rhetorical 115

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studies serving as an instrument of the imperial social order, tools of the master, as it were.1 Consequently, although many goals and concerns are now shared between women’s studies and rhetorical studies, given the various social and political changes of our postimperial, postcolonial, postmodern (and some might say postracial and postgendered era), the historical pathways of these two academic fields have been different. Measures of Engagement The basic focus of inquiry for this chapter is, What happens in global feminist research when we shift the analysis so that rhetorical studies becomes a primary vector in the framing of scholarly interrogation? To begin addressing such a question, first of all, we need a sense of the current evidence in RCL of vitality and vibrancy regarding a convergence of rhetorical, feminist, and global studies. One preliminary measure is a review of recent book and journal publication. A preliminary search of three search engines was instructive: google.com, amazon.com, and the online catalog of a major research university’s libraries. Acknowledging the constantly changing state of electronic searches, in late 2009, we typed the key words “international feminist rhetoric” into google.com. The yield was 112,000 results, a sobering number in that this frequency of hits suggests a considerable presence for these terms in popular digital culture. Moving to amazon.com and focusing on book publications, we found the following results via the key word searches below: Key word search International women’s rhetoric Global women’s rhetoric International feminist rhetoric Global feminist rhetoric

Result 534 175 145 74

These results confirm that there is a relatively small body of published work that is readily available. Added to this preliminary survey, we also included “comparative rhetoric” as a traditional category through which international connections might be made. In google.com, the yield was 9,730,000 results. In amazon.com, the results were 1,309, both illustrating the same point—presence. A major cautionary point related to available works with these last key words, however, is that, as a category, comparative rhetoric does not always focus on transnational comparisons. There are many other types of comparative points as well that, by the terms of this current discussion, would be considered 116

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local (e.g., comparisons by gender, race, class, sexuality, and/or ethnicity within a particular culture). To be noted, then, is that while “comparative” as a category may not always constitute a direct line of inquiry for either global or feminist comparisons, it does suggest a methodological pattern for shifting viewpoints, a practice that is deemed critical in both women’s studies and RCL to seeing the contours of a global landscape. Another point to be noted in this type of surveying is that, obviously, not only are there overlaps in the titles represented by these numbers but also publications are a constantly moving target, with new publications emerging regularly. Just as obvious, however, these preliminary searches offer evidence of a growing body of publications in global feminist rhetorics that suggests a level of intellectual vitality that is noticeable. Further, this point gets magnified, based on even an anecdotal sense of the dramatic increase in productivity over the last thirty years, as gaps in the knowledge base are being revealed via this work. Refocusing the analysis in a more academically specific way, we used the same terms listed above (with the exception of comparative rhetoric) to search the local collection of the Ohio State University Libraries (i.e., not including the links to the larger network of libraries that have a collaborative relationships with the university). While the numbers of items that resulted from the search are not as substantial as the more general scope of google.com and amazon.com, the numbers at this convergence are meaningful nonetheless. Key word search Women’s rhetoric International women’s rhetoric Global women’s rhetoric Feminist rhetoric International feminist rhetoric Global feminist rhetoric

Result 295 14 19 288 19 10

Note the alignment of women’s rhetoric with international and global women’s rhetoric. Of the 295 results for women’s rhetoric, 4 percent and 6 percent of them can be categorized respectively as international or global women’s rhetoric. Likewise, with the 288 results for feminist rhetoric, 6 percent and 3 percent can be categorized, respectively, as international or global. Although in each of the search cases the results are likely to say as much, if not more, about classification systems as they do about the resources that may actually be available, they offer, nevertheless, at least a preliminary sense of the level of vitality and productivity of feminist rhetorics as a global enterprise. 117

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One additional view helps to make the point about the emergence of globalization. Consider the very simple table below showing a timeline based on the library search results. If we look across the publication dates of these volumes in five-year increments for the categories above (global feminist rhetorics, international feminist rhetorics, global women’s rhetoric, international women’s rhetoric), we see the following.

Time Line for Publications

Global feminist rhetoric (10) —.047% of 295 results

1994

1995–99

2000–4

2005–9

1

1

4

4

9

5

5

4

11

3

9

3

2

International feminist rhetoric (19) —.064% of 295 results Global women’s rhetoric (19) —.034% of 288 results International women’s rhetoric (14) —065% of 288 results

1

note: The table is based on the number of volumes the Ohio State University Libraries classified in 2009 as “global/international feminist rhetoric” and “global/ international women’s rhetoric.” With each classification is the percentage that the number of volumes represents within the larger, more general classifications “feminist rhetoric” and “women’s rhetoric.”

Though the numerical results represented in this simple table are quite small, the timeline shows a pattern of general increase between 1994 and 2009. In 1994 there were 2 publications. By 2009, after fifteen years, there were significantly more. Another sign of a feminist/rhetorical studies convergence in global context is conference programs. Professional organizations in RCL have long shown evidence of interests in rhetorical studies as a global enterprise, as evidenced, for example, by the existence of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, which held its seventeenth biennial conference in Montreal, Canada, in 2009. This conference program shows strong participation by those whose research centers on rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome, Europe, and the United States but also other sites as well, for example, Africa, China, and Mexico. Of the eighty-four sessions, seven panels dealt explicitly with women’s rhetoric, and seven panels specifically 118

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identified women’s rhetoric, representing about 17 percent of the program, not to ignore a significant number of women presenters whose interests were not specifically identified as connected with women’s studies. A point to notice among these presentations is that the global connections, as suggested by the nations indicated above, have been defined significantly by geographical location and keyed by Western traditions—for example, traditional literary genres or individual rhetorical figures, as compared with presentations or panels that centralize more directly the material conditions of women’s lives or that focus on community practices rather than individual ones. In other words, these presentations indicate that attention in the history of rhetoric is drawn more persistently to the presence of women within traditional Western rhetorical frameworks than to how a broadening of assumptions, values, and frameworks might defy boundaries of geography, culture, conditions, and contexts and reveal a different knowledge and understanding of rhetorical behavior. Consider, for example, a small number of randomly selected titles: “English Renaissance Letter-Writing Manuals for Literate Women”; “‘A Proper Book’: Elocutionary Manuals and Women’s Education”; “Feminine Ethos and the Ethics of Affect in Julian of Norwich”; “Speaking in Their Own Voices: Women in the Southern Dynasties [Early China]”; “Encountering Rhetorics of the Juarez Femicides: The Justicia para Nuestra Hijas Campaign”; “Rhetorical Education for Women in American Elocution Colleges, 1880–1925.” In the United States, one organization through which we get a sense of a feminist-rhetorical-global convergence is the Rhetoric Society of America. The conference program for this organization in 2008 illustrates three relevant points: the RSA’s acceptance of a Western heritage is seen in the ways in which much of the work shared is linked to traditional Western scholarship; a significant number of women are participants on the program regardless of topic, which might suggest a possibility of the use of feminist methodologies whether the analytical focus is on women’s practices or not; and a significant slate of work is directly related to women’s rhetoric, some defined by Western traditions, others connected either to Western traditions in context or to an interrogation of practices that cross national boundaries. Of a total of 221 sessions, about 20 percent included full panels or topics specifically focused on women’s rhetorical concerns. Attention was given to issues (e.g., justice and equity, sexuality, feminist thought, women’s health, women’s suffrage, domestic issues, beauty, and so on); a broad range of rhetorical sites (e.g., book clubs, professional arenas, women’s colleges, penal institutions, and so on); issues of identity, agency, authenticity, and authority; women’s participation in various discourses (e.g., medical, legal, educational, 119

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ecological, environmental, religious, political, and so on); women’s participation in various genres (e.g., autobiography, television, music production, film production, journalism, and so on). In these venues, what constitutes a global perspective is not always simple and straightforward. Globalization might be indicated by scope, rhetorical subject, site, context or condition, issue, or methodology, and the like. A list of session titles and paper titles just in the first few program pages illustrates this rich diversity of approaches: “Breaking through the Glass Ceiling: A Colloquy on Gender Equity and the Rhetoric Society of America”; “Oklahoma, Ohio, and Oprah: Exploring the (Dis)Connections between Book Clubs and Civic Action”; “Episteme and Political Work of ‘Marriage Plots’ in the Same-Sex Marriage Controversy”; “Mutual Responsibility: The Woman’s Medical Journal”; “The [Female] Citizen: Selling a Story of [Islamic] Democracy in the West”; “La Rhetorica Cósmica: José Vasconcelos’ Global Vision of ‘La Raza’ and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Racial (Dis)Unity in Mestizaje,” among others. While such titles are a provocative display of the intersections of gender and rhetorical studies, they do not suggest so clearly linkages with global perspectives in rhetorical performances and interests, just as other titles in the program show rhetorical studies from a more global perspective but not so clearly feminist or gender issues, as illustrated, again, by a few examples: “Constituting the Venezuelan Pueblo: The Rhetoric of Hugo R. Chávez”; “Nonprofit Rhetoric and the Alberta Lobbyists Act Debate of 2007”; “Progymnasmata Textbooks and Religious and Political Strife in Seventeenth-Century Europe”; “Rereading Confucian Rhetoric”; “Practicing Safe Patriotism: An Historical Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus”; “The Rhetoric of Totality: Non-Muslims and the Dialectic of Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s Constitution for the Caliphate State”; “The Rise and Fall of Totalitarian Rhetoric in Poland”; and “Rhetoric and Transnationalism.” Given this complexity, it seems fair to say that the global dimensions of feminist/women’s rhetoric as listed in the program remain, to some degree, muted. Another U.S.-based organization that offers evidence of feminist rhetoric in global context is the Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, sponsored by the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. The 2009 program was the seventh biennial conference, and, being true to its name, it was a display of 155 sessions and events that all showcased various intersections of the theme feminism(s) and rhetoric(s), with presentations that added dynamically to our knowledge of women’s participation and leadership in a full range of rhetorical arenas, including academe; enhanced our understanding of the conditions, contexts, sites,

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and genres of rhetorical performance; interrogated issues related to voice and agency, identity and representation, power and authority, and the like; and addressed the need for more-inclusive and more-generative theories to account for the versatile ways in which languages are used, including in technological environments. As with the previous two examples, however, the Feminism(s) and Rhet­­– oric(s) Conference program, as an essentially regionally defined organization (i.e., focused primarily on feminisms and rhetorics in the United States) is less clear in the program about the connections and possible connections between local U.S. enterprises and such concerns within a larger, more global context. These concerns were not absent, however. About 10 percent of the program was more explicit about rhetorics in global context. For example, a featured session was entitled “Racial and Scientific Rhetoric in Eco-Political Matters: Third World Women Workers in Helena Mara Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood.” Eleven panels focused on points of interest and/or sites beyond the United States, for example: “From Situation(s) to Network(s): Feminists Transnationalizing the Rhetorical,” “Le Cinema, La Biblioteca: Transnational Perspectives on Gender and Media,” “Complexities of Writing Realities—Embodied Rhetoric of Chinese Women,” “Asian Rhetorics: National Heroes and the Queen,” “Transnational/Transformative: Women Change the World,” “Reclaiming Women Rhetoricians from the Classical Era,” “The Structure of the Frontier: Rewriting Colonialist Discourse.” And, four presentations were also quite explicit by either geographical site, rhetorical subject, or transnational issue, including “Transnationalizing Feminist Rhetorical Pedagogy,” “Royal Sewing for the Queen: Rhetorical Embroidery in Sixteenth-Century England,” “Mestiza Voices: Mexican Woman Journalists in the Formation of Discursive Spaces,” and “Wollstonecraft the Critic: Critiquing Woman as Commodity in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk.” The point to hold in mind here is that the percentages for global feminist rhetorical studies at these three conference programs do not show intellectual dominance in the field. What they can reasonably proclaim, however, is presence. Over the last thirty years, interest has been rising, with the scholarly activity in these three venues indicating that these interests are not a passing fancy. By such measures, we can easily conclude that there is evidence of an increasing interest in contextualizing rhetorical concerns within a larger geopolitical context and interrogating the whole concept of rhetorical action as a multidimensional enterprise that becomes variously enacted across cultural spaces in particular sites and situations.

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Examples Tacking In A few examples serve to illustrate the range of the work related to global feminist rhetorics that has been occurring in RCL. In 2002, Elizabeth A. Flynn published Feminism beyond Modernism. In this volume, she uses three terms—modernism, antimodernism, and postmodernism—as complexly interrelated concepts to discuss feminist intellectual, social, and political traditions within a global context and to link these concepts to the study of rhetoric, composition, and literature: I posit that whereas modern feminists focus primarily on equality and antimodern feminists focus on creating a women’s culture that opposes male culture, postmodern feminists move beyond both by questioning representations of women and men as binary opposites and by making evident that both women and men are capable of being victims and executioners. I also suggest that whereas modern feminists emphasize commonalities between women and men and antimodern feminists focus on differences between them, postmodern feminists problematize binary conceptions of difference. If modern feminists see women as the equal of men rather than their opposite, postmodern feminists emphasize the limitations of dichotomous representations of relationships between women and men or women’s culture and men’s culture. They also see that gender is only one variable in a complex matrix . . . and doing so makes evident the limitations of explanations and representations that focus exclusively on gender. (14)

Flynn grounds her discussion in a critique of the Enlightenment movement and its association with the scientific revolution and rationalism and its emphasis on reason, empiricism, individual rights, and human progress, and she suggests that “postmodern feminism moves beyond modernism by challenging and problematizing it rather than replacing, opposing, or nullifying it” (44). Of particular relevance for this analysis, in chapter 2, “Reading Global Feminisms,” Flynn uses examples from Morocco, Japan, and India to illustrate the value added by postmodern analyses in situating problems from these regions historically, geographically, and culturally, thus making it easier for Western readers to see our own analytical limitations through the eyes of others. She emphasizes the need to reconfigure and reconcile the impact, not just in terms of gendered analyses but also in terms of a broader range of factors, such as, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as in terms of the impact of other types of issues, such as patriarchy, secularism, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. By such rerenderings, she suggests, we have the capacity to see complex problems more 122

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complexly and, given our own primary foci on Western feminist rhetorics, to contextualize Western practices within a more richly rendered scope of feminist knowledge as a multilensed, interdisciplinary, global enterprise. What Flynn’s analysis indicates for the work in global feminist rhetorical practices, as a generally underresearched area in RCL, is the need to recognize more overtly where we are in terms of assuming a more expansive stance. Certainly, we recognize that our local efforts to rescue, recover, and (re)inscribe Western women’s practices over time are indeed moving knowledge and understanding forward in keeping with postmodern frameworks. As suggested by the preceding chapters, by all accounts, we have brought a broader range of women rhetors to visibility and audibility, and we have fleshed out a clearer sense of women’s culture as a distinctive focus for interrogation. In addition, we have also been challenging and problematizing neatly rendered binary and hierarchical views of men and women rhetors, men’s and women’s cultural traditions, and men’s and women’s rhetorical accomplishments. What Flynn’s discussion underscores, then, is that in large part, we are actually just beginning to read and render this knowledge within a global context or to connect our local analyses to the impact of history as a global concept, to an imperialist past or reconfigured present, or to a complexly refigured landscape of geographical and cultural complexity. In 2002, one effect of Flynn’s discussion was to serve as a call to scholars and researchers in RCL to strike a more conscious global stance and to commit to a more coherent engagement of Western practices as part of, rather than separated from or oblivious of, a global rhetorical history. Tacking Out In 2007, five years after Flynn’s volume, Beth Daniell and Peter Mortensen rose well to the occasion, not so much with a focus on rhetorical practices as with a focus on literacy. Their edited collection, Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century, as the title suggests, draws together twenty-one authors and coauthors, not counting themselves, to discuss issues related to women and literacy as both a local and global inquiry, with a primary goal with regard to the global context of demonstrating how interdependent we are across national boundaries. The essays discuss the globalization of women’s education (Shevaun Watson and Morris Young), literacy as a postcolonial phenomenon (Keith Walters), the digital ecologies of literacy (Gail E. Hawisher, Cynthia L. Selfe, Kate Coffield, and Safia El-Wakil), the negotiation processes of Vietnamese women functioning within a modern marketing economy (Ilene Whitney Crawford), literacy as a postapartheid practice (Mary K. DeShazer), and stories of the exploitation 123

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of Korean women during times of war (Gwendolyn Gong). All use a scope of interrogation beyond a U.S./Western agenda to interrogate women’s experiences, and all suggest, by the issues that they raise, the enhanced understanding that is possible when we view literacy in more-globalized terms. The volume suggests, however, that all is not neat or simple. The editors end with two essays that raise important issues. In “The Outlook for Global Women’s Literacy,” Catherine L. Hobbs interrogates the intersections between the uneven playing field for educational opportunity for women worldwide and the links between these opportunities (or the lack thereof) and qualities of life, and she raises to view the critical role that literacy must play in increasing women’s ability “to participate freely in creating the conditions that make all our lives, both locally and globally, more than a struggle to survive” (287). Likewise, in “Afterword: Reading Literacy Research against the Grain of Fast Capitalism,” Min-Zhan Lu raises issues related to the broad array of inequities around the globe that affect the qualities of life and relationships not only for those directly affected but for us all, with implications for the restructuring of global economies, as well as for how those of us in RCL in the United States need to reconsider pedagogical and scholarly frameworks in order to account for “not only one’s own sense of self and life, one’s relations with other users of English the world over, but also the lives of other users and the world we share” (297). This collection offers, therefore, an example of the geographical range of researchers and scholars in the field and of how these interests are being enacted through their insightful interrogations of women and literacy. Two additional examples offer insights from a different perspective. Consider Hesford’s 2005 article, “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” and Kirsty Best’s article “Rethinking the Globalization Movement: Toward a Cultural Theory of Contemporary Democracy and Communication.” Both raise issues related to globalization in a more cautionary way, directing us to assume a more critical stance as we consider what is actually happening in our area under the label and guise of globalization and internationalization. Mapping Transnational Territories Ahead From the measures discussed above, an obvious conclusion is that many researchers and scholars in RCL are interested in the convergence of feminist studies, rhetorical studies, and globalization. Moreover, as an area of growing vitality, these types of interests are adding intensity to the tectonic shifts that are occurring generally in the knowledge base in rhetorical studies. Indicators of tectonic movement or volatile change can be found in feminist 124

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rhetorical anthologies. Consider, for example, the 2002 volume edited by Jane Donawerth, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900. This collection could easily have been focused only on Western women, but Donawerth shifted expectations just a bit and included Pan Chao’s “Lessons for Women” (China, first and second centuries ce), and Sei Shonagon, from The Pillow Book (Japan, tenth century ce). This type of shifting is also the case for the editors of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing, who are keeping a variety of factors in view (including theory and practice; culture and geography; race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality; and the like) as they build a collection of rhetoric and writing across time and cultures. Essentially, this group of six—Robert Harriman, Susan Jarratt, Andrea A. Lunsford, LuMing Mao, Thomas Miller, and Jacqueline Jones Royster—seeks, as Lunsford states, to “complicate our understanding of Western rhetorical traditions . . . and to include powerful performances of rhetoric, again across time and cultures” (SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies xxvi). Given this general survey of resources, we have in hand evidence of a growing interest in RCL in incorporating feminist studies and global studies into rhetorical studies and a growing sense of the means by which such work is being done. We also have some touchstones by which we can assess the interplay between these volumes and broader conversations about excellence in the field at large (e.g., in determining whether the women rescued, recovered, and (re)inscribed are being cited in other places; how women’s contributions are migrating into other arenas that may not be centrally defined by gender; how specific rhetorical subjects and concerns are informing and reconstituting discourses and becoming part of our commonplaces). In other words, we can easily conclude that researchers and scholars in the history of rhetoric are making connections geographically on every continent, and many of them are documenting and critiquing women’s practices in ways that traverse various boundaries. They are using a framework in which feminist studies, rhetorical studies, and global studies converge. Analyses within this framework demonstrate both a tacking in and tacking out by accounting within Western culture for factors such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ideology, and other social hierarchies and by accounting within a more global context for the impact of patriarchy, secularism, colonialism, capitalism/global economic structures and systems, and the like. Such analyses draw us to the conclusion that transnational work in rhetorical studies has been very important in amplifying dynamic shifts in both sense making and the development of methodological tools and strategies. Within our more locally defined work, quite literally, the very doing of feminist rhetorical scholarship, as anchored by the three Rs, has 125

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forced us to stand outside white, elite, male and European-based frameworks—which continue to serve, sometimes unwittingly, as the given, the implied, the presumed measure of excellence in the field. Over the decades, work in feminist rhetorical studies has not been ordained or privileged as acceptable. At this point, however, it has come to greatly inflect traditional knowledge, offering glimpses of the rhetorical activities of women and others from historically unauthorized groups. Such glimpses have provoked our curiosities, pushing us to expand our sense of wonder. Pedagogical Connections When we contextualize Western rhetorics within a global framework, we recognize immediately our increasing interests as professionals in feminist rhetorical studies in practices that reach beyond our national boundaries. To date, however, most of the work of our three Rs, as the foundational core at present of feminist rhetorical studies, has taken place within the Western rhetorical tradition. We have been contending most directly with the implications of our Western past. This work has led us to a different understanding of the history of rhetoric, to reassess the nature of rhetorical performance, the scope of its concerns, and the sites and contexts of its enactments. Contexts have mattered in our reconsiderations, and they continue to matter, perhaps exponentially so, as we enlarge our vision to include more global circles of engagement. To be sure, our tendencies in feminist rhetorical studies have been to build a different sense of rhetorical experience and expertise from the ground up, looking, as discussed in chapters 5 through 7 at sites and situations in the main that are local to the U.S. experience that we have not interrogated in the past. In extending that work to a more global context, it becomes quite evident that while we have come to many incredible insights, there is far more to be considered than we have currently addressed within our own national milieu or within a narrow rendering of our own Western heritage. Raising questions about women’s participation in rhetorical enterprises from a global perspective inevitably pushes us to see the critical need for new rounds of inquiry, to acknowledge new needs to know. For example, what are the implications of an imperialist past for Western cultures as we focus on recasting and re-forming where and how we are with rhetorical knowledge? In light of the internal impact of this past, what ultimately do we mean when we think of its external implications and work toward globalizing either rhetorical studies or feminist rhetorical studies? Consider again the much-expanded array of sites for learning and rhetorical performance presented in Women and Literacy: micro-economic 126

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trades among Vietnamese women (Ilene Crawford); women’s schooling in Tunisia (Keith Walters); women’s poetry as orality, franchise, and reconciliation in postapartheid South Africa (Mary K. DeShazer); and the political dimensions of women’s literate activities in many other contexts. These essays participate in a vanguard movement to enlarge our vision, and they underscore that there is much yet to be done before we are well positioned to move beyond an acknowledgment of the existence of women in rhetorical arenas globally to a more thorough incorporation of global rhetorical experiences and accomplishments into our core ways of being and doing as researchers, scholars, and teachers. To summarize, while many of the new areas of inquiry in feminist rhetorical studies—contributions to community, civic life, public discourse, rhetorical performance and prowess—have been reaching beyond our national borders and our Western heritage, they have still been measured, compared, and held to the standards of evaluation for Western traditions. Hence, the challenges of global feminist rhetorical inquiry are not just the challenges of acquiring knowledge but also the challenges of how that knowledge is measured and valued. Shifting knowledge is just one piece of the puzzle in re-forming the landscape. Shifting the measures of evaluation is another. Shifting measures of evaluation is tectonic indeed in that it shakes up RCL at its very core in its long-standing alliances within Western cultural frameworks, starting with the reality that we are confined more often than not, given our educational habits in the United States, by our linguistic limitations to performances in English. How then do we explore the experiences of others without the encumbrances of our own cultural and linguistic prisms? How do we recast what we know in the face of the expanded scope of the unknown terrains before us? How do we create linkages between local and global points of view, knowledge, experience, achievement? Do the shifting paradigms of feminist rhetorical studies offer more-generative springboards as we search for new questions, gather data that may look different and actually be different, search for other ways to consider these data, and pursue an enhanced sense, we are anticipating, of rhetorical value? Before leaping to scholarly judgments, one strategy might be to use our classrooms as innovative experimental sites in recognizing that while we are tacking out into the world, the imperative may be simultaneously to tack in as we consider the presence of the world at home. We look toward the world, but simultaneously we have the opportunity to look at the world in us—within our nation, in our communities, in our classrooms. Responding to such issues of linguistic and cultural diversity at home and abroad as we engage in classrooms is Cross-Language Relations in 127

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Composition, edited by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Although this volume cannot be categorized as centered in feminist rhetorical studies, its focus on moving our conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical scope beyond the confines of English, and certainly the persistence of the English-only movement, and beyond the borders of the United States of America is extremely relevant. The contributors to this volume recognize changing perceptions about the nature and possibilities of language as a cultural phenomenon and about literacy development as a multilingual, rather than a monolingual, process. The collection draws attention to the need to broaden our pedagogical sensibilities as we permit more language resources to come legitimately into play in composition classrooms, to credit these resources, to take advantage of the variety and variability that they bring, and to come to new measures of productivity and linguistic success. As Horner states in the introduction, using Raymond Williams (Marxism and Literature) as a springboard, “pursuing cross-language relations in composition can help to reclaim all language as ‘a persistent kind of creation and re-creation: a dynamic presence and a constant regenerative process’ (Williams 31). This does not simply allow more voices to be heard. It helps writers and readers put all their language resources to work to produce meanings in the interests of all” (13). At present, feminist rhetorical studies shares with this collection the notion of reframing the challenges, opportunities, and obligations of RCL. All of us are still figuring out how we might better engage with others who may be different from ourselves and have different cultural histories and legacies. Despite such important variety, how might we expand our linguistic and rhetorical abilities to facilitate new understandings of language, rhetoric, and culture—in considering both the past and the preparation of students for the future? As suggested by our choosing Cross-Language Relations in Composition as an exemplar, it strikes us that tacking in pedagogically may offer a way to begin. We might tack in to move more consciously into our classrooms, recognizing more explicitly the globality within them. We might take greater advantage of these instantiations of globality internally, seeking more deliberately to gain experience in connecting internal globality (the world in us) to external globality (us in the world), as we tack out to other geopolitical locations. The pedagogical opportunity fits well with our scholarly and pedagogical habits. We have a chance to build from the ground up, to use critically, creatively, strategically what we know, while being primed to be open to and to expect discoveries as we look critically at ourselves in the context of others around the globe.

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9

Charting a New Course for Research and Practice

I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written. —W. E. B. DuBois, “The Forethought”

In this volume, we have sought to raise the veil of feminist rhetorical studies to reveal its practices and potential and bring to bolder relief ways that these practices impact rhetorical studies itself as an ongoing academic enterprise. One basic goal of the analysis has been to document the extent to which feminist rhetorical studies is demonstrating a capacity to enhance our understanding of rhetoric as an embodied social experience in ways that facilitate rhetorical work more generally. To accomplish this ambitious task, we focused on assaying examples of work that tend to cluster at the convergence of feminism(s) and rhetoric(s) as ideological constructs, drawing forth matrices that confirm two general claims. The first is that given the volume of work designed to rescue, recover, and (re)inscribe women in the history of rhetoric, we have now established the existence of women in rhetorical history in an evidence-based way. The second is related to the first. With clearer and substantial documentation of the existence of women in the history of rhetoric, we take note that women are indeed being more systematically included as a normal part of the rhetorical-studies landscape (history, theory, criticism, and pedagogy) in at least 131

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two ways: textually, in terms of the range of texts produced by women that are consistently deemed worthy of recognition, study, and use; and contextually, in terms of the ways in which women’s participation in various discourses and within the social circles in which they operate are helping to redefine what constitutes rhetoric and recast the ways in which we think about and interrogate the nature and consequence of rhetorical enterprises. Beyond these core claims as very much gendered assertions, however, we also proclaim that as a field, rhetorical studies is indeed experiencing tectonic reverberations from these shifts in regard and by such re-formations are continually expanding and recasting our ways of seeing and being, that is, changing the paradigms by which we function as professionals in the field. The import of such shifting is that at this point in rhetorical history, we are not just celebrating the recognition of women’s rhetorical lives and contributions but understanding rhetorical agency itself in new, more-dynamic terms with regard to the scope and nature of rhetoric as an embodied social praxis that enacts itself variously across cultures and around the globe. In keeping with Peggy McIntosh’s schema for disciplinary re-formation, we assert here that it is not enough to focus mainly on the fact of women’s existence in rhetorical history. We emphasize that indeed feminist rhetorical studies is moving beyond the fashioning of presence in the master narratives of rhetorical history toward the renegotiation of the paradigms by which we account for rhetoric as a dynamic phenomenon. We affirm that the three Rs (rescue, recovery, (re)inscription) constitute only one dimension of what potentially is a more substantial, ambitious, and ultimately far more compelling enterprise. In fuller scope, feminist rhetorical studies promises to be a dynamic framework, a model of action for enhancing our capacity as researchers, scholars, and teachers in rhetorical studies to deepen, broaden, and build rhetorical knowledge and to offer multiple mechanisms for enhancing our interpretive capacity with regard to the symphonic and polylogical ways in which rhetoric functions as a human asset. During the 1980s, McIntosh considered the phases for disciplinary growth and development to be a sequence for thinking innovatively and critically about disciplines (cited in chapter 3). She illustrated this re-formation process by taking her own discipline (history) through the process. In history, she focused on: phase 1, womanless history; phase 2, women in history; phase 3, women as a problem, anomaly, or absence in history; phase 4, women as history; and phase 5, history reconstructed, redefined, and transformed to include all (26). In this volume, although we see work in feminist rhetorical studies to have been functioning quite resonantly in engaging rather organically the same concerns, we consider the focal points that we have 132

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been discussing (critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization) to be more of a matrix through which evidence of disciplinary transformation might be recognized and articulated. In rhetorical studies, the pattern of disciplinary transformation or paradigmatic shifting has included the following: • We have been rescuing historical women, demonstrating that they were there, thus establishing, as McIntosh’s model suggests, the existence of women as participants in the history of rhetoric. • We have been identifying and recovering their practices and have worked to include them as normalized participants who engage in various rhetorical actions. • We have been (re)inscribing women as normal participants in rhetorical arenas, a dimension of the process that has inevitably functioned to shift the nature and scope of rhetorical subjects, sites, and scenes away from traditional Western paradigms, that is, away from Western, elite, white males who perform in traditional public and highly institutionalized arenas—politics, religion, law, business, academe, and so on—toward others who are neither Western, elite, white, nor male and who function in social spaces, rather than just public and institutional ones. Further, the (re)inscription process has also pushed the boundaries of our understanding, as in the case of Enoch’s analysis of Chicana survival stories (cited in chapter 3), of the primacy and interpretive power of existing “norms” in this area as exclusionary and ultimately discriminatory anchors. • In broadening the nature and scope of rhetorical subjects, sites, and scenes, we have set in motion the need to renegotiate the terms by which visibility, credibility, value, and excellence are determined. • With the effort to renegotiate terms being in lively play, in effect, we are re-forming the discipline and reendowing the vision of our rhetorical landscape as a globalized, multidimensional human asset and not just the exclusive possession of Western, elite, white males. Thus, the effort has been to shift conceptual and operational paradigms and, thereby, recast the history of rhetoric as a more broadly based multivariant arena of action in which rhetors, variously defined, engage in a wide range of rhetorical behaviors and demonstrate variously rhetorical expertise and prowess. To be noted, then, is that while we have not overtly adopted McIntosh’s schema as a specific collective project, we are, nevertheless, enacting an 133

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interactive re-formation process that mirrors fairly closely McIntosh’s five basic critical points of engagement. In both her model for women’s studies and our efforts in feminist rhetorical studies, the goal is to enhance our capacity to build a more richly endowed knowledge base, carry out a more inclusive research agenda, and generate greater, more inclusive interpretive power—a threefold challenge that remains for our field quite an ambitious undertaking. Identifying Patterns amid Abundant Examples In our effort to bring visibility and audibility to women’s rhetorical participation and achievements and to identify the patterns of disciplinary transformation, we have drawn forth four themes as clusters of concerns that are functioning in feminist rhetorical studies with substantial integrity. First and foremost, feminist teachers and scholars are using robust inquiry strategies that include using: critical inquiry, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization to gather symphonic and polylogical data that function dialectically (referring to the gathering of multiple viewpoints); dialogically (referring to the commitment to balance multiple interpretations); reflectively (considering the intersections of internal and external effects); and reflexively (deliberately unsettling observations and conclusions in order to resist coming to conclusions too quickly). In this volume, therefore, we have used the pattern of these strategies as terministic screens in order to create a coherent matrix by which to see and understand this growing body of work. Further, feminist scholars and teachers are also grounding analysis and interpretation both textually and contextually. In order to examine the scope and contours of this grounding, we assayed various elements and combinations of elements that impact rhetorical engagement, juxtaposing historical parameters for rhetorical studies—that is, the centrality of its Western, white, elite maleness within public domains—with the contemporary analytics that serve to define such parameters—gender, race and ethnicity, status, and geographical sites. We paid attention to rhetorical domains—not just public ones but those that might be considered private or social—and we linked these contexts to rhetorical decision making and to the ways in which rhetors use various genres and modes of expression. We centered this assaying process on examinations of rhetoric as a sociopolitical process, as well as on rhetorical engagement being exercised through sociopersonal choices (i.e., the choices that rhetors make or are called upon to make within specific sociopolitical contexts) regarding occasions and domains of performance and genres and modes of expression. 134

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One effect of documenting the ways in which feminist rhetorical practices are being grounded has underscored the important roles that feminist rhetorical studies has played in bringing visibility and audibility to rhetorical engagement as an embodied social practice. For example, with an evidence-rich approach, we enhance the capacity to track the uses, reuses, and retellings of rhetorical performances as generative devices for seeing beyond normalized rhetorical arenas to the alternate spaces within which many rhetorical interactions among women have occurred and continue to do so. Thus, we make rhetoric, rather than just women’s rhetorics, visible as a multisensible, multidimensional action affected by sociopersonal decision making within sociopolitical contexts. Understanding rhetoric more overtly as social praxis encourages us to look again and again and again at rhetorical situations and events with the deliberate intention of positioning and repositioning ourselves to notice what we may not have noticed on first, second, third, or next view. With more complexly rendered views, we enhance the capacity of our analyses to bring into analytical scope the material elements, properties, processes, and conditions that may be operating, whether hidden or in plain sight, in order to consider more carefully how they are functioning, interacting, and achieving dynamic rhetorical effects. Grounding analysis and interpretation in these types of multidimensional ways facilitates a clearer articulation of patterns of reading, analyzing, and interpreting that are dialogical, dialectical, reflective, and reflexive, with the general effect of bending the mind in order to push our intellectual capacities and developing a greater flexibility to see more of how and why reality might unfold on the page. The identification of robust inquiry strategies and grounded analyses and interpretations as thematically clustered concerns in feminist rhetorical studies combines to draw attention to a third and a fourth theme. The third cluster centers on connecting local rhetorical analyses to rhetoric as a global enterprise. These concerns gain coherence in recognizing the importance of actually documenting the ways and means of human behavior around the globe rather than presuming the performances and behaviors of one group to be of superior worthiness or value. These types of projects raise questions more open-endedly about rhetors and rhetorical participation and elements, processes, and conditions as well as about impacts, consequences, and qualities of excellence in context. The fourth theme links an ethics of hope and care to responsible rhetorical action. This cluster focuses, for example, on scholars and teachers operating in conscious awareness of the social and ethical implications of their viewpoints, actions, and interpretations. We notice more directly and deliberately how identities form and 135

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deploy for all, whether we are speakers, listeners, writers, text developers, readers, teachers, or researchers; the ways and means of production and reception processes; and impacts and consequences of rhetorical choices and conditions. An Enhanced Inquiry Model These four interlocking themes—robust inquiry practices, grounded analyses and interpretations, connecting local and global enterprises, and linking an ethics of hope and care to responsible rhetorical action—create a coherent matrix of operational relationships that permit colleagues in feminist rhetorical studies and beyond to gain metacognitive traction in developing more-multidimensional perceptions of rhetorical performances and processes. With the identification of the themes, we have the wherewithal to think again, reorganize the analysis, and reflect on the implications for re-presenting the findings as an enhanced inquiry model. Our original effort was to interrogate feminist practices (using terministic screens that enable robust inquiry), to move from that base to identify focal points that leverage critical engagement (the sociopolitical factors that impact sociopersonal decision making related to both content and context), and then to use this combination of data to create a metacognitive framework capable of informing dialectically, dialogically, reflectively, and reflexively not just the practices but also what the practices are designed to enable, that is, rhetorical knowledge creation, rhetorical eloquence, and expertise. Consider the reorganization below and the use of the four themes as a framing mechanism for holding inquiry strategies in dynamic relationship to the use of specific tools for engaging in multiple interrogations and recognizing certain analytics as powerful leverage for data gathering, analysis, and interpretation. Symphonic and Polylogical Patterns of Inquiry The exemplars and scholars that we have showcased in this analysis have identified a broader range of participants than typically the case in rhetorical studies, vigorously interrogated their practices, contexts, conditions, and accomplishments, and found innovative ways to incorporate their findings within an expanded scope of what constitutes rhetoric. Moreover, they have made sense of a broader range of rhetorical sites and scenes of action by the use of various systems of inquiry, whether those systems are based on gender, race and ethnicity, status, geographical sites, rhetorical domains, genres, modes of expression, and so forth or, more likely, some complex intersection of several factors and components. 136

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Chapter 2 and, in greater detail, chapters 5 through 8 survey the breadth, depth, and texture of the work that is being produced; we used four sets of inquiry strategies as tools for engaging interrogations from multiple perspectives (critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization). In this final chapter, we now re-present these tools in order to summarize the values that they add to inquiry, analytical, and interpretive processes with the intention of asserting that the breadth and variety of the strategies showcased function symphonically and polylogically to produce analyses and interpretations of rhetorical enterprises that are thickly rendered (as explained by Geertz’s theories) and thereby embodied with performative characteristics that are fully textured by the lives and experiences of human beings, including women, in all of their diversity. Critical imagination. Using this inquiry tool, we underscore the ways in which colleagues are using reflective, reflexive, dialectical, and dialogical strategies to determine what factors and features of the rhetorical situation are visible or cast in shadow, present and not present, considering more explicitly what we know in a more broadly based view of rhetoric, do not know and might come to know instead. Through this mechanism, we see a focused opportunity to create—for lack of a better term—qualitatively imbued hypotheses about what constitutes rhetors, rhetorical events, sites, and practices; how we determine rhetorical credibility; and how we are perceiving rhetorical prowess. The effort is to stretch the boundaries of our thinking and our capacity to see more, to see differently, and to be better positioned to interpret more adequately the whos, whats, hows, and whys of the rhetorical landscape before us. Strategic contemplation. With this tool, we highlight the critical and creative ways that researchers, scholars, and teachers are using narrative, essayistic, critical reflection to focus intellectual energy during the process of generating complex analyses in order to intensify even more the capacity to bring intellectual abilities to bear. The idea is to use more deliberately what we have labeled contemplative moments in research and scholarship in an effort to recover from our rhetorical past concepts such as contemplation, reflection, and speculation and to reclaim, thereby, scholarly meditation as a methodologically enabling genre. Paying more attention to strategic contemplation, then, is an effort to account for how moments deliberately designed to slow down analyses function to take both cognitive and affective soundings for how the work is going and being experienced. The idea is to take the time, not just to work in theoretically well-grounded ways but also more explicitly to think consciously about our work in its wholeness with the expectation that these moments for being deliberately conscious 137

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of our goals, desires, insights, feelings, instincts, and social and ethical responsibilities will enhance the capacity to build clarity about our work and the insights that we are deriving from it. Social circulation. With this term, we recognize the obvious: Sense making at its best is dynamic, with knowledge and expertise drawing from many sources that cannot always be neatly contained within traditional disciplinary boundaries. Thus, using social circulation as an analytical springboard helps to make clearer that knowledge is fluid, particularly as we notice the use and reuse of ideas in various contexts and under varying conditions. The analytical effort is to pay attention to the ways that ideas travel in order for us to become more consciously aware of patterns of intellectual and social engagement. Our view is that awareness of these types of patterns helps to enable a better functioning of our symphonic sensibilities (with regard to the need to see, hear, listen, speak, and compose texts) and to enhance our capacities to develop polylogical viewpoints (with regard to the need to engage in livelier ways both cognitive and affective domains in reasoning through challenges and concerns and posing and solving problems). Globalization. We found this term to be very powerful for operationalizing and normalizing the notion that rhetoric is a global phenomenon, not just a Western one. Using this springboard, we draw forth the need to respect local viewpoints (such as U.S.-based or other nation-based rhetorical practices) while understanding that local sites of rhetorical action inevitably connect in multileveled ways across national boundaries since rhetorical enterprises are indeed definable by their humanness (i.e., the deliberate use of language by human beings, including women, to fulfill various agenda), rather than only by their geopolitical locations. Treating rhetoric as a process that occurs around the world permits us to take seriously both continuities and discontinuities in the complex patterning of rhetorical action around the world. It helps us to note, for example, the ways in which the interests and concerns of U.S.-based women are embodied by the material conditions of lives as lived in the United States; to recognize the likelihood that shifts in material circumstances around the globe might foretell of both connections to and divergences from more-local U.S. analyses; to appreciate and value both the connections and divergences and the range of realities in between the two as credible and worthy. The goal in creating such richly endowed documentation matrices, of course, is to broaden and deepen our sense of what constitutes the nature, scope, and mechanisms of rhetorical performance and to add texture and vibrancy to the methodologies that we are using in the field generally for analysis, interpretation, criticism, and classroom applications. 138

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Grounding Analysis and Interpretation In addition to enhancing patterns of inquiry, we note that feminist rhetorical studies also enhance interpretive value by grounding analyses and interpretations both textually and contextually. As we have suggested throughout this volume, the tectonic/paradigmatic shifts we have been describing point to a new era in rhetorical studies, one that is much more fluid, shifting, and expansive than before. This re-formed view encourages the use of patterns of observing, reading, analyzing, and interpreting that are dialogical, dialectical, reflective, and reflexive and that generate thereby multiple sources of information that have to be balanced in knowledge creation and knowledge use. As professionals in the field, then, we face the challenge of gathering data with a consideration of multiple viewpoints, balancing the viewpoints that emerge, and then coming to interpretations of this enriched landscape that are substantive, fair, and respectful. Facing this challenge requires more than just excellence in scholarly work. It also requires patience, attention with caring, a willingness to consider more than one set of possibilities and to forestall coming to closure too quickly. For instance, as we discussed in chapter 4, Katrina M. Powell cared about the writing of Virginia mountain women, and in order to make sense of their rhetorical activities—their repeated requests to government officials—she needed to look at the contexts of their lives, not just their letters, at their “anguish of displacement” (the title of Powell’s book-length study), and at their rhetorical prowess in light of daunting odds—a federal government that would eventually seize their homesteads to establish a national park. Powell takes the time to renegotiate traditional notions of “success” (in view of the fact that by the assessment of direct outcomes their actions obviously failed) in order to appreciate these women’s efforts—that is, their success in taking the authority to assert their rights to keep their property and to harvest the crops they had planted. These women did not, indeed, could not, change the eventual outcome of the federal government’s use of eminent domain laws, but they could—and did—represent themselves to government and park officials, arguing for their property rights, demanding responses, and using rhetorical strategies to establish their dignity, moral values, and rights as citizens. Moreover, their relentless letter-writing campaign and other rhetorical activities challenged public representations of Appalachian families as depicted in newspapers and government reports. These rhetorical moves, Powell asserts—and we concur—represent rhetorical agency and voice and success. In examining the ways in which colleagues are grounding their analysis both textually and contextually, we highlight the necessity of pausing in our work to question definitions of basic terms, definitions that we may have 139

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taken for granted but that have defined—perhaps limited—the boundaries of rhetorical inquiry. We draw forth also the need to examine the habitual methodologies that we have become accustomed to using and the criteria that we have relied on in making decisions about what should be included and excluded in rhetorical studies. To return briefly to Jennifer Sinor’s research on ordinary writing, the correlating and aligning of textual and contextual analyses permits us to recognize, as Sinor does, the need for a different kind of interpretive lens for writing that occurs outside of traditionally accredited literary and rhetorical genres—that is, for writing that does not easily fit our traditional frameworks for worthy products of study. Sinor argues for the importance of studying ordinary, daily kinds of writing, the uses of writing that do not set out to tell a story but serve as record keeping, a daily log, a charting of activities. Sinor asks us to bring a different interpretive lens to such writing as a distinctive rhetorical enterprise, one that allows us to witness the unfolding of a life. Rather than imposing a dramatic lens, for instance, or one focused on literary or aesthetic qualities when we encounter such texts, Sinor provides an example of how we can look carefully at detailed, minute records so that we can see, understand, and value such small, on-the-ground details—the daily routine elements that make up a life but that are so small as to escape our attention. In other words, Sinor invents a new, enhanced way of reading, a new interpretive method, in order to broaden our perspectives of what constitutes rhetorical action and to make it possible to claim a space for taking such ordinary practices seriously. What our argument here suggests is that when we draw forth both textual and contextual analyses in these innovative ways, we underscore the fact that researchers are shifting habits and expectations in reading and writing. One shift is that we no longer provide a singular, isolated interpretation without considering other possibilities. Moreover, we habitually include the voices and perspectives of those whom we study, describe the contexts in which the work that we are interrogating has been produced, reflect on our ethical obligations to others, and reveal the goals, values, and assumptions of our work. Along similar lines, a shift for reading is, first of all, that we are examining a broader range of texts than we have ever examined before, and in our examinations of these texts, we are acknowledging the existence of multiple, at times contradictory viewpoints, as we seek to render observations and conclusions that are more fully considered, again, in terms of both textual and contextual analyses. A third shift is that we are presenting more explicitly not only the interests and concerns of the researcher but referencing also the individual interests and concerns of others who may be 140

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participants and the collective interests and concerns that may exist in the communities of these participants as well. The shift in expectation, then, is the need to recognize that the stakes of research, typically, can be both high and also multiple, which serves to enhance the need for researchers to commit to being balanced, fair, and respectful of whatever points of view are imbedded in the rhetorical situations that constitute our work. The expectation that authors are required to bring conscious attention to their “passionate attachments,” “social commitments,” and “ethical obligations” (Royster, Traces of a Stream 279–81)—even though they may not ultimately write directly about these dimensions of their work in each and every publication—adds texture to the processes of intellectual engagement, which strikes us as instrumental in reconstituting what counts as good practice. As suggested below, by drawing out these dimensions of intellectual engagement as part of a need in scholarly practices for an ethics of hope and care, we underscore that feminist researchers are finding increasingly with their work that they wish/need to study the situation critically at the same time that they wish/need to remember, honor, memorialize, celebrate a community, and perhaps their own membership in that community. At the root of this desire/need seems to be the reality that the two impulses fundamentally oppose each other, given traditional Western perspectives of objectivity in scholarly work, but we assert that it is exactly this tension point, this balancing act that reveals the potential and the challenge that we see via the enhancements to rhetorical inquiry that are emerging from feminist rhetorical studies. In other words, at the very core of our scholarly desires/obligations in studying rhetoric as a very much embodied social practice, we are challenged from the inside out and the outside in to be ever vigilant about functioning reflectively, reflexively, dialectically, and dialogically as we take the time and care to resist coming to judgment too quickly. Connecting Local Analyses to Global Enterprises As indicated in chapter 8, substantial evidence suggests a growing priority among colleagues in feminist rhetorical studies (and by extension in rhetorical studies generally) to bring multilayered, multidimensional critical attention to the rationalities and advantages of engaging in our work in history, theory, criticism, and pedagogy with more-direct and more-active linkages between local analyses and rhetoric as a global enterprise. This particular shift in our perspectives of what should shape and endow our arenas of interests and concerns arises quite inexorably within the context of changes in viewpoints and attitudes across the geopolitical landscape of our Western/Westernized societies, shifting away from the presumption 141

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that Western practices are superior, more civilized, innately more worthy than all else and moving toward a more fully rendered recognition of the presence, participation, and possibilities of others. As might be expected with an intersection of feminism(s) and rhetoric(s) to gather data, what stands out dramatically is the opportunity to use gender, race, ethnicity, status, geographical sites, rhetorical domains, genres, and modes of expression as critical leverage points for adding yet another dimension to critical interrogations. Over the last century, converging scholarship across several disciplines has established that while these vantage points function quite obviously as markers of identity, culture, and condition, they are also social constructions that function compellingly as analytics or focal points for interrogation and negotiation. Such has been the work, for example, of women’s studies, race/ethnic studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and so on. Ever-insightful critiques have pushed us to see the double-edged challenges and opportunities of considering more fully the ways in which identities, contexts, and conditions function not only as intersecting instruments of oppression but simultaneously as levers for probing the nature, scope, and contours of actions, relationships, material realities, impacts, and consequences. In rhetorical studies, critical questions have emerged from such critiques centered on the notion of standpoint: Where do we stand as teachers and scholars in viewing and questioning rhetorical events and situations? When we articulate a point of view, what does this positioning reveal? What does it cast in shadow? What are the advantages of acknowledging and using more broadly conceived measures of the texts and contexts of performance? How does an expanded view of rhetorical eloquence and expertise function to remake master narratives of performance, critique, and aesthetic regard? In structuring this project with these sorts of questions in scope, we recognized the historical ways in which this array of sociopersonal/political elements has cast many things rhetorical in shadow, including the ways and means of participation, eloquence, and expertise. However, we recognized as well that these very elements serve reflexively as the places to begin to disentangle complex interactions in order to dispel the darkness, shed light, and increase our capacity to draw different insights. We also centralized the idea of converging vectors, seeing the multiplicity of this convergence as an opportunity to open up, reinvigorate, enhance, and become far more conscious metacognitively of our methodological practices and processes and of the new horizons that might be emerging as a result. Attention to contextual analyses brings us recursively to the impact of technologies, as a vibrant contemporary context, on rhetorical performances. 142

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We take note particularly of one impact of these technologies. Over time, we have gained an ever-increasing convenience and speed in mobility, with human beings, regardless of where they might originally reside, able to stay in place, or move or be moved around the globe, or go back and forth between various places and yet remain connected. With such mobility and interconnectedness, we have come to see more clearly our capacity to hold places of origin in our heads and hearts while being called upon to immerse ourselves within the material contexts of other places. As teachers, researchers, and scholars, we are more primed than ever before to notice that people engage in various actions, including rhetorical actions, in their various contexts with a robust sense of self, society, and community; that given our technological resources, they demonstrate a capacity and commitment to forging and sustaining human relationships via communicative links both near and far; and that there arises within these situations opportunities for building both knowledge and respect in ever more refined and complex ways. At the same time, we remain cautious and aware of the fact that there are vast differences in access to technological resources around the globe. Indeed, if we have learned one thing, it is to remain humble in the face of the many challenges women encounter globally, the dramatic differences in material, economic, political, cultural, and religious conditions, and the way these conditions shape women’s lives and rhetorical agency. Once again, however, we want especially to caution against an us-and-them perspective and argue that the richness of our work lies in attending to the intersections of local and global rhetorical sites. Such work can enable, for instance, “feminist rhetorical analysis of transnational networks” (502) as Rebecca Dingo illustrates when she focuses her gaze on how women are represented by “incongruous logics” (495) set forth by different governing bodies: the U.S. welfare system and World Bank policies (i.e., with one urging women to marry and focus on family life and the other urging them to seek employment and assume responsibility for their families’ economic well-being). Returning, however, to technologies as a specific context for rhetorical engagement, we are also drawn to how using feminist rhetorical analyses to interrogate digital cultures brings to light both the promise and challenge of functioning within these complicated technological environments. Consider for example the work that has emerged since the mid-1990s related to cyberfeminism. For example, in “Cyberfeminism Intersects Writing Research,” Mary Hocks establishes cyberfeminism as a fast-growing area in feminist studies, recognizing Australian feminist Sadie Plant as the scholar who coined the term cyberfeminism and Kira Hall for clarifying the concept. Hocks suggests that cyberfeminists are called upon to work deliberately to 143

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address two basic challenges. One challenge is the necessity of critiquing and countering the possibility of replicating sociopolitical issues and biases in yet another environment. The second is the need to bring our critical resources to bear in interrogating what it means to communicate and produce texts in digital spaces. Referencing the sociology of science, Hocks asks of these environments questions such as these: Who has power? How can we get it? What/who is invisible? What is/is not transparent? Where do readers and authors find the pleasures of writing/reading/performing? What institutional infrastructures work for and against these pleasures, pushing against bodies that must live in time and space? (250)

Perhaps more instructively, she states, “Cyberfeminism reminds us just how much digital rhetoric needs grounded cultural critique. . . . Historical, sociocultural, and political analyses can situate digital rhetorical studies as local knowledge that is partial, but committed to helping find the truth in that specificity within a network of meaning” (251). Further, these types of ecological shifts in operational environments have also been affected by our growing understanding of the complicated links and balances that constitute global economies and financial relationships, in considering especially the ways in which we bring our human resources to bear in figuring out how we will live, breathe, provide ourselves with food, clothing, and shelter, and prosper. Such processes have been dramatically informed by the various social movements of the last two centuries, such as the abolitionist, women’s, anti-imperialist, postcolonial, labor, civil rights, environmental, and peace movements (including most certainly the enactments of those movements within our own disciplinary arenas, resulting, e.g., in the disciplinary/interdisciplinary formations of women’s studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, labor studies, environmental studies, peace studies, and the like). These types of agitations have helped to place our Western biases more in check with the realities of our contextual surroundings, such that over the last three decades particularly, we have come to see much more clearly than ever before that the world is not simply a blank slate on which Westerners enjoy the authority, privilege, and entitlement to write. In feminist rhetorical studies, our sense of researchers and scholars not having the authority, privilege, and entitlement to write or write over the presence of others is pushing us rather persistently to operationalize this view in our actual ways of thinking, being, and doing as professionals in the 144

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field. Whether we are working in history, theory, criticism, or pedagogy, the imperative—again—is to think dialectically and dialogically, to be reflective and reflexive not just generally but specifically as we look and look again, think and think again. Moreover, it is also to enact a desire and commitment to use a geopolitical lens as we seek to understand more fully what is accounted for in our inquiry paradigms and what we may find to be missing; what is there now and what could be there instead—not just generally but specifically because of our taking into account place, space, and geopolitical location. Interestingly, we underscore that such commitments highlight, as asserted by Wendy S. Hesford in “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” the importance of historical study and archival work as part of the bedrock of knowledge creation and knowledge using. The point to be emphasized is that none of these springboards for enhancing our inquiry paradigms suggest a linear process. Instead, we highlight the need to see the dynamic effects of a more kaleidoscopic view in which analyses converge. Connecting local analyses to global enterprises comes together via the use of symphonic and polylogical patterns of inquiry, textually and contextually grounded analyses, and linkages between an ethics of hope and care and rhetorical action (as explained in more detail below). The call is to be deliberate about developing and sustaining throughout the analytical process a more conscious and explicit habit of thinking about our work as part of, rather than disconnected from, other rhetorical enterprises around the world. Linking Ethics to Responsible Rhetorical Action As described above, our review of feminist rhetorical studies suggests the need to draw forth the importance of an ethics of hope and care. Hope, as we explained in drawing on Mathieu’s work, is more than engaging in wishful thinking. This view of hope calls instead for sharp analytical skills. With a positive outlook as a driving force, the effort is to assess current situations, contexts, and institutional forces; to recognize the strengths, limits, and challenges of present arrangements; to inhabit a sense of caring about the people and the processes involved in the use of language by immersing ourselves in the work, spending time thinking broadly and deeply about what is there, not there, and could be there instead. The effort is to think beyond the concrete in envisioning alternative possibilities in order that we might actually work, often collaboratively, toward enacting a better future. An ethics of hope and care requires a commitment to be open, flexible, welcoming, patient, introspective, and reflective. It requires looking and looking again, reading and returning to texts, learning about the contexts 145

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of those who use rhetorical strategies under conditions that may be very different from our own. It is learning to withhold judgment, to linger, observe, and notice what is there and what is missing. It is an attitude, a stance, an inclination to discover new well-embodied truths and to revise old truths. We believe that an attitude that is deliberately tied to hope and caring is actually a different way of being in the academic world than is our traditional habit, starting with the fact that it does not presume superior knowledge or superior intentions. An ethics of hope and caring is the very reason that we have argued throughout this volume for the importance of strategic contemplation. An ethics of hope and care encourages us to assume a more patient, receptive, quiet stance, to “sit with” the text, to think about it—slowly, rather than to take a more aggressive stance in order to “do something to” it as a mechanism for arriving at and accrediting its meaning. Krista Ratcliffe describes this process as rhetorical listening—“listening with the intent to understand, not master discourses” (33). With patience and quiet as salient features, the goal with an ethics of hope and caring is to learn to listen and speak, not just with our heads but with our hearts, backbones, and stomachs, thus making feminist rhetorical action a fully embodied experience for both the subjects of research and the researcher. Further, an ethics of hope and care also requires us sometimes to put our latest theoretical toolkits on hold when we perceive that they are pushing us all too easily and prematurely to filter what is see-able or when they are moving us to create categories for what we are examining when those categories may be inadequate to account for either the site, situation, or performance that we are examining. For instance, in discussions at the Virginia Tech symposium, Royster reminded us that it makes little sense to ask of women in the past, “Were they feminist?” when this concept is of our making and not theirs. This terminology had little or no relevance or meaning in the actual contexts of many historical women’s lives—or even some contemporary ones for that matter. Instead, Royster suggested that we might ask, “In what ways did these women articulate their own goals and take actions that we might recognize and describe as complementary to our goals and actions—ones that we have chosen to call ‘feminist’ even though the women that we may be studying may not have made this terminological choice?” Learning to ask fairer, more-respectful questions is not enough, however, to exercise an ethics of hope and caring. We also have to learn to look for what is not like us and our practices, to immerse ourselves in the times and lives of the women or others we study. The commitment is to engage as directly as we can manage with the issues that they faced; to pay attention to 146

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how they faced them; to build an understanding of the ways that language and rhetorical practices functioned for them within their own spheres of operation; and to take into account both the conditions and forces that informed their decision making as well as the reception of the resulting rhetorical performances. The commitment is to learn to listen deeply to texts and images and for voices and sounds in order to better understand both what is happening and what is going on; to listen to their views and ideas instead of just our own, to their stories, rather than ours. In other words—even if and when we find ourselves disagreeing in the end with their values, ideologies, or beliefs, we still look and listen carefully and caringly, contemplate our perceptions, and speculate about the promise, potential, and realities of these rhetors’ lives and work (as we illustrate in chapter 5 when we discuss the work of Carol Mattingly and of Daphne Desser). Linking an ethics of hope and care to responsible rhetorical action requires a commitment to both our academic communities and the communities that we study. That is, if we wish to honor and do justice to those whose lives and works we study and bring their visions, voices, and accomplishments into academic or knowledge-making circles, we need to be cognizant of how rhetorical practices that have not been privileged to interrogation and documentation as academic subjects are passed on, modified, and revised from one generation to the next, from one social setting to another. In reaching deeply into these communities with the desire to do so respectfully and caringly, our obligations are not only to “create new knowledge and make an original contribution” in an academically selfcentered way but instead to create relationships with those communities as they invite us into their worlds, their lives, their issues and concerns. Our obligation is to partner with them as we join our world to theirs and work with them to set in motion a different, more fully rendered sense of rhetoric as an enterprise with a future. An ethics of care and hope demonstrates a willingness to engage those whose conditions for engagement are different (e.g., Kynard and Eddy), whose values for engaging are different (e.g., Desser; Mattingly), who may have been considered illiterate or rhetorically ineffective (e.g., K. Powell); a willingness to broaden the geopolitical scope of what gets considered (e.g., Ramírez; Monberg; Wu), to broaden the nature and form of texts considered (e.g., W. Johnson; Goggin; Pough; Richardson; Takayoshi and Selfe); a willingness to consider rhetorical practices that are ordinary, routine, perhaps even mundane (e.g., Sinor), to consider rhetors and audiences that stretch the boundaries of identity (e.g., Rawson), the cultural implications of identity (e.g., Brodkey; M. Powell; Middleton), the implications of language and 147

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teaching (e.g., Scott, Straker, and Katz; Smitherman); a willingness to write about subjects that are close to the heart (e.g., Hogg; Okawa) but also those that seem distant, foreign, and/or create discomfort (e.g., Rohan; Desser). The list of possibilities can actually be anchored in so many different ways that it seems virtually endless. To conclude, we offer figure 9.1 as a graphic summary of this explanation. The intention is to suggest that the frameworks for feminist rhetorical inquiry have emerged in thematic ways, clustering in the patterns indicated by the column on the left side of the graphic. The middle column is intended to capture the point that colleagues in feminist rhetorical studies have developed and modified many data-gathering tools that now permit interrogations to be robust and that enable analyses to be richly informed by data and insights gathered from multiple perspectives. The intention of the third column on the right side of the table is to go more deeply into the data-gathering process to identify elements of the human experience and components of rhetorical decision making that combine and recombine to provide leverage for gaining both textual and contextual insights. The bottom line is that with this rather simplistic graphic representation, we are suggesting that the convergence of the three columns as a merged horizon offers a multidimensional mechanism for engaging with metacognitive awareness in inquiry processes, in terms of inquiry frameworks, tools, and leverage points that combine dynamically to enhance sight, insight, and interpretive power. Fig. 9.1. An Enhanced Inquiry Model Thematic frameworks for feminist rhetorical inquiry

Strategies for enabling robust inquiry

Leverage points for data gathering, analysis, and interpretation

Symphonic and polylogical patterns of inquiry Textually and contextually grounded analyses Local analyses connected to global enterprises An ethics of hope and care linked to responsible rhetorical action

Critical inquiry Strategic contemplation Social circulation Globalization

Sociopolitical impacts on content and context • Gender • Race • Ethnicity • Status • Geographical sites Sociopersonal impacts on rhetorical decision making • Rhetorical domains • Genres • Modes of expression

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To be underscored in this explanation is an important proposition. With an interrogation of the ethical dimensions of our work, we are suggesting that our identities, histories, and lived experiences shape who we are, how we think, and what we choose to do. Hence, we see the need to acknowledge these dynamic effects in paying attention to how writers and readers, speakers and listeners, texts and contexts, internal and external states interact; how processes of reading and writing are embodied; how our sense of self (both personal and professional) comes into play as we go deeper, reread and reconsider texts, reflect on the patterns we are seeing, whether (in Geertz’s terms) we are “tacking in or tacking out.” Rather than distancing ourselves from the complexities of this embodied-ness, we suggest instead that we attend to it, reflect on it, observe it, and critique it and that we cultivate a stance amid the chaos of it all that enables robust inquiry while enacting an ethics of hope and care. New Horizons Throughout this volume, we claim that feminist-informed practices are shifting the scope and parameters of research and scholarship in terms of how both rhetors and rhetorical performances are perceived and acknowledged, especially in terms of the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription of women (and others) in the history of rhetoric. We claim also that when we take a more critical view of this work in the larger context of the field itself, it becomes more evident that as worthy and wonderful as efforts in the three Rs have proven themselves to be in terms of the development of feminist rhetorical studies as a scholarly area, it is past time to reach for more-ambitious goals, as, indeed, colleagues across rhetorical studies are now doing. In our assaying in this volume a compelling array of contemporary practices, we see new horizons emerging. Distinctive among these new scholarly terrains are four vistas that are continuing to draw interests and concerns as we look ahead: One is linked to ways of being and doing in rhetorical studies. Based on work that has emerged from the lively intersections of feminism(s) and rhetoric(s), we now have a richly endowed set of practices that form a coherent matrix, an enhanced inquiry model, for engaging in work that can be labeled quite substantively as feminist rhetorical practices. We are pointing specifically to the new dimensions that feminist rhetorical scholars have brought to our field, dimensions that are profoundly transforming rhetorical studies more broadly. Chief among these new dimensions is the study of new rhetorical scenes, neglected sites, rarely studied groups of people, extracurricular locations, and unusual genres. The four thematic 149

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frameworks for feminist rhetorical inquiry that we highlight in the first column of figure 9.1 illustrate ways to enrich these dimensions of study. A second vista is linked to textual concerns, broadly defined, in terms of a need for critical and creative attention to be directed toward the interrogation of our listening and reading practices as rhetorical actions. As scholars like Ratcliffe and Cheryl Glenn have made abundantly clear, we are beginning only now to understand how silence as well as listening can have different rhetorical purposes and outcomes, including expressions of resistance and challenges to authority. As academic readers, we are habituated to expect research, interpretation, and arguments to unfold clearly and logically, yet as feminist scholars teach us time and again, listening and reading against the grain can enrich not only what we hear and comprehend but allows us also to discover new genres, voices, and ways of reasoning that have been cast in shadow for many decades if not centuries. Here we find particularly useful the strategies for robust inquiry in the middle column of figure 9.1. With the rapid developments of new technologies, listening and reading have become even more fluid, multimodal, interactive, visual, and transnational—all features we are just beginning to notice and study. A third vista is linked to both textual and contextual concerns in keeping with the multimedia/multimodal texts that are now being increasingly produced within ever-changing technological environments and the need to critique not only these contexts, products, and processes but also the impacts and consequences of technologies on the scope, nature, and contours of rhetorical enterprises. As collaborative studies like the one by Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Patrick Berry, Shafinaz Ahmed, Vanessa Rouillon, Gorjana Kisa, and Mirza Nurdic illustrate, transnational students, especially those who left their countries because of war or the threat of violence or those who migrated to improve their economic and educational futures, often maintain a vast network of global cross-cultural relations. They also use a plethora of technological devices to maintain cross-cultural, multilingual, and geographically dispersed social networks of friends and family, all of which we are only beginning to describe and comprehend, as suggested by the collection of articles in the 2009 special volume of JAC focused on “Working English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global-Local Contexts, Commitments, Consequences.” A fourth connects with contextual concerns in terms of the need to direct attention not just to public-private divides but also to a more fully textured examination, especially given emerging technologies, of what constitutes private, social, and institutional spaces. Here, we see archival and historical work as well as global and technological work pushing our boundaries of 150

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understanding of how knowledge travels, translates, mitigates, and shapes rhetorical actions and how resistance, challenge to authority, and social changes move along axes of sociopolitical contents and contexts. We outline these leverage points for data gathering, analysis, and interpretation in the right-hand column of figure 9.1. In thinking about these four new horizons, it becomes more obvious that we need to direct more-explicit attention, not just to writing practices as rhetorical acts, as we have habitually done in RCL, but also to reading, speaking, and listening practices as rhetorical acts as well, and not just to what’s happening in the Western world but to what is happening around the globe. The cautionary tale, as always, is that although we see that patterns have indeed emerged from feminist rhetorical studies that are proving themselves to be transformative in the area and for RCL in general, there is still much work to be done. The ultimate goal, of course, is to operationalize the view of rhetoric as a vibrant and interestingly diverse global enterprise. The inevitable conclusion is that the work continues.

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NOTES WORKED CITED INDEX

NOTES 1. Our Own Stories of Professional Identity 1. A great number of feminist works shaped my thinking profoundly, including many of the books listed in Jackie’s story in note 3 below. Books outside of RCL that had a great impact on me include Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness (a book that documents the abuse of electric-shock treatment during the 1950s by psychiatrists who tried to “cure” middle-class, white women who lacked interest in the domestic sphere) and Ann Oakley’s often cited interview study with pregnant, working-class women (which lead Oakley to challenge and change standard interview procedures, which had attempted to “deflect or redirect” interviewees’ questions when these women requested help with access to prenatal care). 2. Jackie and I were fortunate to participate in a symposium for feminist rhetoricians at Virginia Technological University during the spring of 2007. We thank Katrina M. Powell for organizing and inviting us to attend this symposium. 3. Providing an instructive context for my growing understanding of disciplinary challenges were other volumes as well, including: The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara; Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith; and Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, edited by Asian Women United of California. To be noted also is that in 1997, Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California published an update of this volume, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women. 4. In 2009, Frances Smith Foster, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Stanlie James updated this resource with the editing of Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, a collection that accounts for ongoing developments in this area. 2. Documenting a Need for Change in Rhetorical Studies 1. This section builds on an earlier report of this project that was shared in Kirsch and Royster, “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence.” 2. Note here that the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription effort mirrors in many ways the first four phases of Peggy McIntosh’s schematic for curricular transformation in history. In RCL, we have clearly spent much energy rescuing, recovering, and (re) inscribing women speakers and writers and their contributions to rhetoric, composition, and literacy. In contrast, in this volume, we are advocating that at this point in

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our development as an academic area, we need to spend time as well assessing our maturity (the extent to which feminist rhetoric has come into its own) and seeing the extent to which the practices that we have honed have been transforming the field and creating a leading edge for it. 3. The term ecology is used here to indicate the complex, dynamic, interactive, and changing nature of rhetorical activities. We refer interested readers to work by Marilyn M. Cooper and by Margaret A. Syverson. 4. Liz Rohan, who studies the work and life of Janette Miller, a nineteenth-century missionary, comments that she has become “a witness” to Miller’s life, translating “Miller’s ideas and life for new audiences.” Although some of Miller’s ideas may get lost in translation, Rohan continues to be a witness to Miller’s life, keeping her ideas and presence alive. See also Lynn Bloom’s rich discussion in her article “Witnessing.” 5. In “Composition and the Circulation of Writing,” John Trimbur articulates how the notion of circulation, which he takes from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, can help us—and our students—understand how writing circulates in social and political contexts and takes on different “exchange and use values” (188) in different contexts. More recently, Paula Mathieu and Diana George have taken up the concept of circulation in their discussion of public rhetoric and the teaching of writing. We use the concept of social circulation as a metaphor that helps us imagine the ways in which women’s rhetorical activities take on different meanings in different contexts across time and space. 3. Tectonic Shifts in Rhetorical Practices 1. See Kirsch and Sullivan, Methods and Methodology in Composition Research, for a fuller discussion of methods and methodology; Kirsch, Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research, for a discussion of ethical dilemmas in feminist research; and Mortensen and Kirsch, Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, for a discussion of ethics and representation in qualitative research. 4. Feminist Rhetorical Studies as a Robust Interdisciplinary Framework 1. Jacqueline Jones Royster uses the metaphor of “landscaping” in her 2003 essay “Disciplinary Landscaping or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric” as a basic frame by which we can embrace the advantages of incorporating into our theoretical and methodological approaches mechanisms deliberately designed to move us beyond the constraints of our habitual paradigms so that we might be better able to notice conceptual and ecological features that might otherwise go unnoticed. 2. The ways and means of scholarly collaboration have gained an increasing presence in RCL, as championed, for example, by Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede in Singular Text/Plural Authors. 3. As Monberg cites in her essay, the term Pinay has a complicated history but is often used to refer to Filipina women who are living in the United States as compared with being visitors or temporary workers. 4. In an aside, Goggin remarks that this transformation might be considered the first manifestation of writing across the curriculum: “Not only were letters and verses learned via sampler-making, but one might say that samplers served as an early instrument of writing across the curriculum, for students learned other subjects in the process of stitching samplers” (323).

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5. Critical Imagination 1. Our phrase ethos of humility, respect, and care does echo, to some degree, Nel Noddings’s concept of an ethics of care. Noddings’s work has led to rich discussions of ethical principles and feminist theory in fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology, education, women’s studies, psychology, literature, cultural studies, and composition studies. For an overview, see Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics.” For a discussion of feminist ethics in writing studies, see Kirsch, Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research. For a discussion of ethics and representation in qualitative studies of literacy, see Mortensen and Kirsch, Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy. For a discussion of the limits of an ethics of care as it applies to research methodology, particularly the process of recruiting research subjects for medical research, see Ellen Barton, “Further Contributions from the Ethical Turn in Composing/Rhetoric: Analyzing Ethics in Interaction.” 2. Gesa thanks her graduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, during spring 2010 for their lively discussion of and enthusiasm for this research strategy. 6. Strategic Contemplation 1. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, translated by Emerson and Holquist and edited by Holquist, for Bakhtin’s discussion of his polyphonic theories of language and meaning. 7. Social Circulation 1. For a similar argument about the silences and invisibilities of African Americans as scholars and as students in the historical narratives of composition studies, see Royster and Williams, “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.” 2. Gesa Kirsch thanks the graduate students at the University of New Hampshire for their engaging, lively discussion of this book. 8. Globalizing the Point of View 1. We draw the image of the “master’s tools” from an essay by Audre Lorde entitled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

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169

INDEX academics/researchers: activist, 8, 77–78, 105; definition, 49; embodiment of experiences, 88–89; engagement with subjects, 14–15, 49–50, 57, 91, 140–41; full-professor rank, 5; lived experiences, 7, 22; self-awareness, 81; social and ethical responsibilities, 78, 79, 109; writing and research experiences, 4–6 accountability, 78, 79 action, responsible rhetorical, 145–49 activist work: geographical place and, 93; globalized point of view and, 115; research and, 8, 77–78, 105; social networks and, 101 administrative work, 6, 8–9 African Americans, leagues and, 108 African American women, 57, 73–75; rhetorical history of, 9–10; as rhetors, 74–75 “Afterword: Reading Literacy Research against the Grain of Fast Capitalism” (Lu), 124 agency: Internet and, 65; racialized notions of, 51; rhetorical, 65; rhetorical space for, 48–49 Aisenberg, Nadya, 5 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Hull, BellScott, and Smith, eds.), 10, 57 American Dreams, Lost and Found (Terkel), 82 analytical matrices, 12, 16, 42–44, 49–50, 106–7, 131, 133, 149

analytical processes, 15–17, 67–68 anti-color-blinded composition, 51 antimodern feminism, 122 archives, 35–36; physical space of, 88; strategic contemplation and, 85, 88–89; writing classes and, 96 assaying metaphor. See rhetorical assaying process Astell, Mary, 91 authorship, 49, 60, 66 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 87 Bazerman, Charles, 38 Bell-Scott, Patricia, 10, 57 Best, Kirsty, 124 Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (Kirsch and Rohan), 36, 87–89 binary concepts, 30, 44; gender, 46–47, 100, 123; public-private sphere, 98–99 birth plans, as genre, 65 black women’s studies, 9 borderland, 37 Braddock Awards, 43–44 Brandt, Deborah, 52–54 Braxton, Joanne M., 10 Brereton, John, 35 Brock, Rochelle, 51 Burke, Kenneth, 15 Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (Royster and Simpkins), 11, 93–94 canon, feminist rhetorical, 46–47

171

Index

Carter, Kathryn, 3, 4 case studies, 5, 59–60, 91–92 Chesler, Phyllis, 155n1 China, 56–57 Christensen, Laird, 93 circuit of culture, 23, 101–2, 106 circulation of ideas, 59–60 civic social networks, 101 Clifford, Anne, 91 Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CWSHRC), 32, 41, 120–21 coauthored work, 43–44 collaboration, 43–44, 150 College Composition and Communication, 43–44 College English issue on transnational feminist rhetorics, 37 Collins, Patricia Hill, 10 color-conscious critical framework, 50–51 Colored Woman in a White World, A (Terrell), 74 communication studies, 44–45, 98–99 communities, 23, 32–33, 49, 105, 147 community building, 93, 101, 106, 107 comparative rhetoric, 38, 116–17 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) feminist workshop, 41 “Confronting Rhetorical Disability” (Owens), 65 contextual analysis, 52–53 Cooper, Anna Julia, 40, 41, 68 Cordova, Dorothy Laigo, 48–50 counterpublic arenas, 30, 58 creativity, 39, 85 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 10 Crimmel, Hal, 93 critical imagination, x, 19–21, 148; as analytical tool, 82–83; in enhanced inquiry model, 137, 148; going beyond inclusion, 71–75; pedagogical connections, 79–83; self-authorization of, 81; strategic contemplation, intersection with, 91–92; tacking in, 72–75; tack-

172

ing in and out, 75–78; tacking out, 72, 76; in writing classroom, 79–83 Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community (Royster), 82–83 cross-boundary practices, 58 Cross-Language Relations in Composition (Horner, Lu, and Matsuda, eds.), 127–28 cultural contexts: of globalized point of view, 111–13; of historical women, 76 cyberfeminism, 143–44 “Cyberfeminism Intersects Writing Research” (Hocks), 143–44 Daniell, Beth, 123 data collection, 34, 42–43, 85, 95, 127, 139 defense of historical women, 76 delivery, 59–60 Desser, Daphne, 77–78 dialectic and dialogic thinking, x, 14, 21, 86–87, 134 diaries, 62 digital rhetoric studies, 143–44 digital technologies, 66 Dingo, Rebecca, 143 “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric” (Royster), 7, 11–12, 156n1 disciplinary reform, 10–11, 132–34, 155–56n2 discourse community, 41 Donawerth, Jane, 125 DuBois, W. E. B., 8, 81, 131 “The Duty of the National Association of Colored Women to the Race” (Terrell), 73 Eastman, Charles, xii, 88–89 Eberly, Rosa A., 45 Eddy, Robert, 50, 51 Ede, Lisa, 41 edges, 6, 43, 56, 67, 78 education, women’s, 124 educational oppression, 8 Elbow, Peter, 96

Index

eliteness, 51–54 engagement, terms of, 18–19 Enoch, Jessica, 58–59, 102–4, 133 erasure, legacies of, 48 erasure of practice, 61 “Essampliare Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler-Making, An: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Practice” (Goggin), 61–62, 156n4 Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication (Kirsch), 6 ethical self, 18 ethics, 6–7, 14, 36 Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (Mortensen and Kirsch), 6 ethos, 14; as whole-body experience, 96–97 ethos of humility, respect, and care, 21–22, 67, 72–73, 79, 134–35, 139, 141, 157n1; African American women activists and, 73–74; linking to responsible rhetorical action, 145–49, 148 evaluation, 16, 127 evidence, historical, 20–21 evolutionary relationships, 23 excellence, 13, 19, 42, 52, 131–32; globalized point of view and, 112, 125 extracurricular learning process, 8 Farr, Marcia, 8 Feminism and Modernism (Flynn), 122–23 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference, 32, 38, 41, 120–21 feminist boundary work, 45 feminist research methods, 34–35. See also research methods/methodologies feminist rhetorical studies, 3–4, 12–18; building on previous work, 22–23; elements and properties, 44–67; globalized point of view and, 24–25, 39, 114–15, 125–26; implications for, 67–68; new horizons, 149–51; over-

view, 31–34; professional organizations and alliances, 41–42; rhetorical assaying process, 42–44, 67; transformation of RCL, 15, 33–34, 111. See also ethos of humility, respect, and care; research methods / methodologies; publications; rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription; individual works feminist studies, 17, 38, 88, 100; cyberfeminism, 143–44; globalized point of view and, 110–11, 114, 125 Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (McCann and Kim, eds.), 113–14 field experiences, 85, 92, 95 Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), 48–50 Filipino women, 48–50, 156n3 Flynn, Elizabeth A., 122–23 Ford Foundation, 110, 114, 115 “Forethought, The” (DuBois), 131 “Forging a Mestiza Rhetoric: Mexican Women Journalists’ Role in the Construction of a National Identity” (Ramírez), 55–56 Foss, Karen A., 99 Foss, Sonja K., 99 Fox, Margaret Fell, 91 Franklin, John Hope, 108 Freedman, Diane P., 93 From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community (Hogg), 106, 107 Geertz, Clifford, x, 19, 72, 89, 137 gender, x, 44–45, 134, 148; as analytic, 46–47, 53–54 generational shifts, 23, 101, 147 genres, x, 60–65, 134, 140, 148; hybrid, 106, 107 geographical sites, x, 54–58, 134, 148; archives, 88–89; place, sense of, 91–92; research and teaching, effect on, 93 geological metaphors, 15–16, 43 George, Diana, 59–60, 98 Gere, Anne Ruggles, 6

173

Index

Glenn, Cheryl, 21, 41, 96, 150 globalized point of view, xi, 19, 24–25, 37–39, 110–28; English-language limitations, 112, 124, 127–28; in enhanced inquiry model, 138, 148; future directions, 124–26; historical context, 111–13, 115, 126; linkages with global women’s studies, 113–16; literacy and, 123–24, 128; measures of engagement, 116–21; pedagogical connections, 126–28; professional organizations, 118–19; tacking in, 112–13, 122–23, 125, 127, 128; tacking out, 112–13, 123–24, 125, 127, 128 global studies, 38, 111, 116, 125 “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies” (Hesford), 110, 124, 145 Glotfelty, Cheryll, 93 Goggin, Maureen Daly, 61–62, 156n4 Greco-Roman tradition, 30, 55, 111 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 110, 113 Hall, Kira, 143 Hall, Stuart, 23, 101–2 Harrington, Mona, 5 Hawaii, missionary women in, 77–78 Heath, Susan, 110, 113 hegemonic limits, 49–50 heritage groups, 54, 55 Hesford, Wendy S., 37–38, 110, 124, 145 heuristics, needlework samplers as, 61–62 Hilliard, Asa, 50 Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs), 50 historical context, globalized point of view and, 111–13, 115, 126 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), 50, 52 historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs), 50 “Historical Studies of Rhetorical Women Here and There: Methodological Challenges to Dominant Interpretive Frameworks” (Wu), 56–58

174

historical women, 75–76, 133; critical imagination and, 20–21; as guides/ mentors, 85; lived present and, 88; as museum pieces, 9, 11; responsible rhetorical action toward, 146–47; speculative conversations with, 84 historiographic approaches, 102–4 history of rhetoric, 46; critical tasks, 13–14; geographical sites, 54; globalized point of view and, 126; traditional paradigm, 30–31 Hobbs, Catherine L., 124 Hocks, Mary, 143–44 Hogg, Charlotte, 51, 106 Holmes, Martha Stoddard, 93 hope, rhetoric of, 73–75, 77–78, 145 Horner, Bruce, 127–28 hostage negotiation work, 51 Hull, Gloria T., 10, 57 hybrid genres, 66, 106, 107 identity: gender and, 45–46; multiple subjectivities, 55; professional, 81–82; research and teaching, effect on, 93–94 identity politics, 94, 95 imagination, as term, 19 imperialism, 88–89, 111–12, 115–16 inclusion, 53, 63, 75; going beyond, 13–14 incongruous logics, 143 indigenous peoples, language rights, 77–78 inquiry strategies, 42, 43; collaboration, 43–44; enhanced model, 136–49, 148. See also critical imagination; globalized point of view; social circulation; strategic contemplation “Inscribing the World: An Oral History Project in Brooklyn” (Mutnick), 92 “Interactive Phases of Curricular Revision” (McIntosh), 29 interdisciplinary approaches, 8–9, 40–42 International Society for the History of Rhetoric, 118–19 Internet, 65–66

Index

Interpretation (Geertz), 72 interpretive frameworks, 5, 19, 20–21, 56, 134 interrogations/questions: critical imagination, 80, 81–83; globalized point of view, 114–15, 126, 127; social circulation, 100–101; standpoint, 142; strategic contemplation, 81, 97 intersectional perspective, 47–50 interstices/spaces, 103–4 Japanese Hawaiian internment, 105 Jarratt, Susan, 46 Johnson, Rochelle, 93 Julian of Norwich, 91 Kim, Seung-Kyung, 113–14 Kirsch, Gesa E., x, 4–7, 41, 87–88; on critical imagination, 79–80; on social circulation, 107–8; on strategic contemplation, 95–96 knowledge creation, 19–20, 42, 102, 138; globalized point of view and, 127; postcolonial era, 112; strategic contemplation and, 87 Kynard, Carmen, 50, 51 landscaping metaphor, 11–12, 156n1 language: actual functioning of, 16–17; barriers, 57–58, 112, 127–28; cross-language relations, 127–28; fluidity of use, 101; rights of indigenous peoples, 77–78 leagues, African American, 108 L’Eplattenier, Barbara, 35 leverage, analytical, 23, 44, 48, 67–68, 115, 136, 142, 148, 151 Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America (Logan), 108–9 liberation process, 109 Lindholt, Paul, 93 listening, 14, 76–77, 81; critical imagination and, 20–21; designated listeners, 104; intersectional strategies, 48–50; rhetorical, 84, 146–47; visual strategies, 48

“Listening for Legacies, or How I Began to Hear Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the Pinay behind the Podium Known as FANHS” (Monberg), 48–50 literacy, 32; globalized point of view and, 123–24, 128; as liberating force, 109; lyrical, 8; material systems and, 52–53; power and, 64 Literacy in American Lives (Brandt), 52–54 literacy-learning experiences, 52 lived/embodied experiences, 7, 22, 29, 56–57; body of teacher, 93; entering into past, 91–92; research as, 88–94; rhetoric as, 87, 131–32, 135, 141; senses as sources of information, 94–95; shaping of research and teaching, 36, 93–94; sociohistorical context of, 94 local analyses, global enterprises and, 141–45 local discursive practices, xi, 51, 106, 107, 111, 138 Logan, Shirley Wilson, 108–9 logos, 96–97 Lorde, Audre, 10 “Lost in Translation: The Modern Chinese Conceptualization of Rhetoric” (Wu), 56 Lu, Min-Zhan, 124, 127=128 Lunsford, Andrea A., 34, 45 lyrical literacy learning, 8 Madrigal, Dolores, 103 Madrigal v. Quilligan, 103 Maguire, Augusta, 91–92 male rhetors, 30 marginalization, double, 6 Mastrangelo, Lisa S., 35 material practices: everyday writing, 62–63; Internet, 65–66; letters to government officials, 63–64; needlework samplers, 61–62 material systems, literacy and, 52–53 Mathieu, Paula, 59–60, 73, 98, 145 Matsuda, Paul Kei, 127–28

175

Index

Mattingly, Carol, 75–76, 147 McCann, Carole R., 113–14 McIntosh, Peggy, 29, 132–34, 155n2 McLaughlin, Andrée Nicola, 10 meditation, 21–22, 36, 84–85, 87, 89, 92, 137. See also strategic contemplation mentors, historical figures as, 85 mestiza rhetorics, 55–56 metacognitive awareness, 31 metaphors, limits of, 23 Mis-education of the Negro, The (Woodson), 8 Mismeasure of Woman (Tavris), 5 missionary women, 77–78 modern feminism, 122 modernity, ideology of, 61 modes of expression, x, 42, 65–67, 134, 148 Monberg, Terese Guinsatao, 48–50, 156n3 More Than Gold in California (Ritter), 80 Mortensen, Peter, 123 motherhood, 73–74 movements, social, political, and cultural, 112, 115, 144 “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” (Selfe), 66 multidimensionality, 42 museum pieces, 9, 11 Mutnick, Deborah, 92 National Association of Colored Women, 73 National Council of Teachers of English, 6 Native American history, 88–89 navigational tools and strategies, 14–15 needlework samplers, 61–62 Nickoson, Lee, 44 Noddings, Nel, 157n1 nontraditional rhetors, silencing of, 103–4 normalizing processes, 31, 103–4, 133, 138 Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing (Harriman, Jarratt, Lunsford, Mao, Miller, Royster), 125

176

“Not Going It Alone: Public Writing, Independent Media, and the Circulation of Homeless Advocacy” (Mathieu and George), 59–60, 98 Oakley, Ann, 155n1 Okawa, Gail, 105 oppression, educational, 8 oral history, 48–49, 105 ordinary writing, 36, 62–63, 140 organizational framework, feministinformed, 15–18 Owens, Kim Hensley, 65 pathos, 96–97 pedagogical connections: critical imagination, 79–83; globalized point of view, 126–28; social circulation, 106–9; strategic contemplation, 94–97 pedagogy, as rhetorical practice, 58–59 performance, rhetorical: contexts, 86–87; of gender, 44, 45; lived experiences and, 94; writing as, 59–60 Perry, Teresa, 50 Plant, Sadie, 143 polylogical analytical model, 14, 90, 95, 136–37, 138, 145, 148 postcolonial era, xi, 111–12 postmodern point of view, 45, 56–57, 122 Powell, Katrina M., 63–64, 139 Powell, Malea, xii, 30–31, 51, 88–89 power, redefinitions, 64 presentation, gender and, 45 professional identity, 81–82; interdisciplinary, 10–11; stories of, 3–12 professional obligations, 78 professional organizations and alliances, 41–42, 118 public, concept of, 59 public address, study of, 99–100 publications, 32–34; on archival research methods, 35–36; on authorship, 32; electronic searches, 116–18; on feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition, 33–34; globalized point

Index

of view, 37–38, 119–21; on individual women rhetors, 33; literacy, reading and writing practices, 32; on public women and public address, 99–100; race and ethnicity, 47; reframing Western traditions, 32; on rhetorical and literate practices, 32–33; on technological environments, 33; on writing studies, 36 public domains, 30, 44, 48–49, 52, 58–59 67, 98–99, 134 public-private divide, 23, 98–100, 133 public writing, 59–60, 98; historical women’s intentions, 75–76 Purdy, James P., 66 “Queering Feminist Rhetorical Canonization” (Rawson), 46–47 Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality (Ringer, ed.), 44–45, 46 race and ethnicity, x, 47–51, 134, 148 racism, 77–78 Ramírez, Christina D., 55–56 Ramsey, Alexis, 35 Ratcliffe, Krista, 84, 146, 150 Rawson, K. J., 34–35, 46–47 reading processes, 32, 106–8, 140 Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Lunsford, ed.), 34, 35 “Rediscovering Indian Creek” (Johnson), 93 Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911 (Enoch), 58–59 reflective and reflexive practices, x, 14, 20–21, 31, 76–77, 134 representation, 6–7, 101–2; gender and, 45; race and ethnicity and, 47–48; of women’s voices, 4–5 Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Hall, ed.), 101–2

rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription, 14, 18, 20, 42, 58, 75, 132, 149, 155–56n2; globalized point of view and, 110–11, 123, 125–26; social circulation and, 100 research: activism and, 8, 77–78, 105; body of researcher, 93; culturally informed agenda, 49; disagreement with subject, 22, 36, 76–77; lived/ embodied experiences and, 88–94; as lived process, 87; on living women, 58 research methods/methodologies, x–xii, 34–37; archival, 34–35. See also feminist rhetorical studies research subjects, x; researcher engagement with, 14–15, 49–50, 57, 91, 140–41; tacking in, 72–73 “Rethinking the Globalization Movement: Toward a Cultural Theory of Contemporary Democracy and Communication” (Best), 124 rhetoric: as culturally informed social actions, 49, 102; as embodied social practice, 87, 89, 131–32, 135, 141; as human enterprise, 14, 23, 39, 42, 45, 47, 98; as whole-body experience, 97 rhetoric, composition, and literacy (RCL), 3, 11–12; collegial engagement, 43–44; feminist rhetorical scholarship and, 15, 33–34, 111; rhetorical assaying process, 15–17; tectonic shifts in, 33–34, 111. See also feminist rhetorical studies; rhetorical studies Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (Schell and Rawson), 13, 34–35 rhetorical action, 54, 145–49, 148 rhetorical analysis, appropriate sites for, 58–60 rhetorical assaying process, 15–17, 42–44, 67, 131, 149 rhetorical decision making, 97, 134, 148 rhetorical domains, x, 58–60, 134, 148 rhetorical functions, non-text based, 61–62

177

Index

rhetorical history, revision of pedagogical practices, 58–59 Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Ratcliffe), 84 rhetorical studies: broadening, 62–64, 68; globalized point of view and, 38–39, 111, 116, 125; public-private divide, 99–100; shifts in, 4, 7, 9–11, 13–14, 17–19, 29–31, 42–44, 100. See also rhetoric, composition, and literacy (RCL) Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 (Donawerth, ed.), 125 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), 119 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute (2007), 38 “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing” (Powel), 30–31 rhetors: male, 30; nontraditional, silencing of, 103–4; women as, 99–100 Ringer, R. Jeffrey, 44–45 Ritchie, Joy, 95 Ritter, Mary Bennett, 7, 79–80, 81 Rohan, Liz, 62–63, 87–88 Royster, Jacqueline Jones (Jackie), x, 7–12, 19–20, 95, 141, 146; on critical imagination, 81–83; on social circulation, 108–9; on strategic contemplation, 96–97 rural women, 63–64, 106, 107, 139 Ryan, Mary P., 100 SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, 8, 9 SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, The (Lunsford, Wilson, and Eberly), 45 Schell, Eileen E., 13, 34–35, 37–38 Scripps, Ellen Browning, 79–80, 81 Second Life, 66 Selfe, Cynthia L., 66 senses, as sources of information, 94–95 Sharer, Wendy B., 35 Shenandoah National Park, 64 Sheridan, Mary P., 44

178

silence, 21, 96, 150 “Silence: A Collage” (Elbow), 96 silencing, of nontraditional rhetors, 103–4 Simpkins, Ann Marie Mann, 93–94, 95 Sinor, Jennifer, 62–63, 140 Smith, Barbara, 10, 57 social circles, 23, 60, 78, 101 social circulation, xi, 19, 23–24, 36–37, 98–109, 148, 156n5; in enhanced inquiry model, 138, 148; as metaphor to indicate social networks, 101; pedagogical connections, 106–9; publicprivate divide and, 23, 98–99; tacking in, 102–4; tacking out, 104–6 social-networking sites, 66 social networks, 101 social space, 23, 100, 133, 134 Souls of Black Folk, The (DuBois), 8 spiritual dimension of scholarship, 85–86, 92 Spitzack, Carole, 3, 4status, x, 51–54, 134, 148 Steele, Claude, 50 sterilization abuse, 102–4 strategic contemplation, x–xi, 19, 21–23, 36, 84–97; archives and, 85, 88–89; in enhanced inquiry model, 137–38, 146, 148; judgment, withholding, 85; of lived experiences, 91–94; as multidirectional, 86–87; “not strength move,” 86; outward and inward journeys, 85, 93; pedagogical connections, 94–97; place, sense of, 91–92; as recursive practice, 86; tacking in, 87–90; tacking out, 90–94 Stryker, Susan, 45 success, redefinition, 64, 139 suffrage movement, 76 Sullivan, Patricia, 41 survival, rhetorics of, 30–31, 51, 102–4, 133 “Survival Stories: Feminist Historiographic Approaches to Chicana Rhetorics of Sterilization Abuse” (Enoch), 102–4, 133

Index

Sutherland, Christine Mason, 91 symphonic sensibilities, 136, 138, 145 tacking in, x, 72–75, 87–90; globalized point of view and, 112–13, 122–23, 125, 127, 128; social circulation, 102–4 tacking in and out, 75–78, 148 tacking out, x, 72, 76, 90–94; globalized point of view and, 112–13, 123–24, 125, 127, 128; social circulation, 104–6 Takayoshi, Pamela, 66 Tavris, Carol, 5 Teacher’s Body, The: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Academy (Freedman and Holmes, eds.), 93 Teaching about Place: Learning from the Land (Christensen and Crimmel), 93 technological environments, 33, 143, 150 tectonic shifts, 13, 17–18, 19, 29–39, 37, 38, 67; disciplinary reform, 10–11, 132–34; evaluation, 16, 127; in globalized point of view, 110–11, 112, 124–25; lines of development, 40–41; in operational paradigms, 31; publications, 32–34; in researcher’s identity, 81–82; worthiness, 16, 31, 63–64, 112, 127 temperance movement, 75–76 Terkel, Studs, 82 terministic screens, 42, 54, 84, 134; assaying, 15–17; geological metaphors, 15–16. See also tectonic shifts terrain of work, 17, 19, 29 Terrell, Mary Church, 73–75 thick descriptions, 90, 137 “Thinking about Multimodality” (Takayoshi and Selfe), 66 thinking/writing/research across the curriculum, 8–9 Third World sites, 55–56, 113 topology for feminist rhetorical practices, 13–14, 17 “Toward a New Critical Framework: Color-Conscious Political Morality and Pedagogy at Historically Black

and Historically White Colleges and Universities” (Kynard and Eddy), 50 Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Royster), 7, 11, 19–20, 71 traces of a stream metaphor, x, 79, 89, 90 Transgender Studies Reader, The (Stryker and Whittle, eds.), 45, 46 translation, 57–58 transnational feminist rhetorics, 37–38. See also globalized point of view tribal institutions, 50, 52 Truth, Sojourner, 11 “Unbundling: Archival Research and Japanese American Communal Memory of U.S. Justice Department Internment, 1941--45” (Okawa), 105 undecidable meanings, 56–57 United States, residence and heritage groups, 54–55 U.S.-centric narratives, 37–38 “Virginia Mountain Women Writing to Government Officials” (Powell), 63–64 Virginia Tech symposium, 2007, ix, 7–8, 12, 146 visual representations, 101–2 war brides, 49 Well-Tempered Women: NineteenthCentury Temperance Rhetoric (Mattingly), 75–76 Western traditions, 32, 44; counterbalancing, 78; globalized point of view and, 37–38, 111–1, 119, 126; paradigm for history of rhetoric, 30–31, 115–16; transnational context, 54–55 “When the Tenets of Composition Go Public: A Study of Writing in Wikipedia” (Purdy), 66 Whittle, Stephen, 45 Wider, Kathleen, 91–92 Wikipedia, 66

179

Index

Wild Women in the Whirlwind (Braxton and McLaughlin), 10 Williams, Patricia, 10 Williams, Raymond, 128 witnesses, 156n4.23 women: in professional organizations, 119–20; as rhetors, 99–100. See also historical women “Women and Gender in an Era of Global Change” (Ford Foundation Summer Institute), 113–14 Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (Daniell and Mortensen), 123–24, 126–27 “Women in Communication Studies” (Spitzack and Carter), 3, 4 Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Ryan), 100 Women of Academe (Aisenberg and Harrington), 5 women rhetors, 33 Women Speak: The Eloquence of Women’s Lives (Foss and Foss), 99 women’s studies, 10–11, 110; global, 113–16; political struggle and, xi Women’s Studies: A Retrospective (GuySheftall and Heath), 110, 113 Women Writing the Academy (Kirsch), 4–6

180

wonder, 85 Woodson, Carter G., 8 working-class students, 51, 52 “Working English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global-Local Contexts, Commitments, Consequences” (JAC), 150 Working in the Archives: Practical Methods for Rhetoric and Composition (Ramsey, Sharer, L’Eplattenier, and Mastrangelo), 35–36 worthiness, 16, 31, 63–64, 99; globalized point of view and, 54, 112, 127, 142 writing across the curriculum, 156n4 writing classroom: activities, 82–83; classroom narratives, 50–51; critical imagination in, 79–83; public writing, 59–60; strategic contemplation in, 95–97; undergraduate, 107 writing ethos, 51 writing programs, 8–9 Writing Research Across Borders Conference, 38–39 Wu, Hui, 56–58 Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American Students (Perry, Steele, and Hilliard), 50

Jacqueline Jones Royster is a professor of Literature, Communication, and Culture and the dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her books include Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett; Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women; Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803–2003; two coedited collections, Double-Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters and Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture; a college-level reader, Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community; and consulting editorship for two school textbook series, Writer’s Choice: Grammar and Composition, grades 6–8, and Glencoe Literature: Reader’s Choice. Currently, she is serving as a coeditor of the Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing. Gesa E. Kirsch is a professor of English and a cofounder of the Women’s Leadership Institute (now the Center for Women and Business) at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her publications include Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication; Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation; and several coedited collections: A Sense of Audience in Written Communication; Methods and Methodology in Composition Research; Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy; Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook; and most recently, Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process.

Studies In R hetorics A nd Feminisms Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms seeks to address the interdisciplinarity that rhetorics and feminisms represent. Rhetorical and feminist scholars want to connect rhetorical inquiry with contemporary academic and social concerns, exploring rhetoric’s relevance to current issues of opportunity and diversity. This interdisciplinarity has already begun to transform the rhetorical tradition as we have known it (upper-class, agonistic, public, and male) into regendered, inclusionary rhetorics (democratic, dialogic, collaborative, cultural, and private). Our intellectual advancements depend on such ongoing transformation. Rhetoric, whether ancient, contemporary, or futuristic, always inscribes the relation of language and power at a particular moment, indicating who may speak, who may listen, and what can be said. The only way we can displace the traditional rhetoric of masculine-only, public performance is to replace it with rhetorics that are recognized as being better suited to our present needs. We must understand more fully the rhetorics of the non-Western tradition, of women, of a variety of cultural and ethnic groups. Therefore, Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms espouses a theoretical position of openness and expansion, a place for rhetorics to grow and thrive in a symbiotic relationship with all that feminisms have to offer, particularly when these two fields intersect with philosophical, sociological, religious, psychological, pedagogical, and literary issues. The series seeks scholarly works that both examine and extend rhetoric, works that span the sexes, disciplines, cultures, ethnicities, and sociocultural practices as they intersect with the rhetorical tradition. After all, the recent resurgence of rhetorical studies has been not so much a discovery of new rhetorics as a recognition of existing rhetorical activities and practices, of our newfound ability and willingness to listen to previously untold stories. The series editors seek both high-quality traditional and cutting-edge scholarly work that extends the significant relationship between rhetoric and feminism within various genres, cultural contexts, historical periods, methodologies, theoretical positions, and methods of delivery (e.g., film and hypertext to elocution and preaching). Queries and submissions: Professor Cheryl Glenn, Editor E-mail: [email protected] Professor Shirley Wilson Logan, Editor E-mail: [email protected]

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Department of English 142 South Burrowes Bldg. Penn State University University Park, PA 16802-6200

Other Books in the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series A Feminist Legacy The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck Suzanne Bordelon Regendering Delivery The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors Lindal Buchanan Conversational Rhetoric The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 Jane Donawerth Feminism beyond Modernism Elizabeth A. Flynn Liberating Voices Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers Karyn L. Hollis Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 Nan Johnson Appropriate[ing] Dress Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America Carol Mattingly The Gendered Pulpit Preaching in American Protestant Spaces Roxanne Mountford Rhetorical Listening Identification, Gender, Whiteness Krista Ratcliffe Vote and Voice Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930 Wendy B. Sharer

Royster and Kirsch

rhetoric   “Feminisms and rhetorics has been waiting for this kind of work. Royster and Kirsch show how feminist rhetoric has changed the foundation of methodology, ethics, and research in the whole field. They take us beyond the rescue, recovery, reinscription that almost every author in women’s rhetorics claims to desire but few achieve. Their scholarship and writing are meticulous, beautifully organized, and exciting to read.” —Kate Ronald, Roger and Joyce L. Howe Professor; director, Howe Writing Initiative, Richard T. Farmer School of Business at Miami University

FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES

T

he field of rhetorical studies is shifting. Feminist Rhetorical Practices reviews major developments in feminist rhetorical studies in recent decades and explores the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impact of this work on rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. Royster and Kirsch argue that there has been a dramatic shift in what rhetorical subjects are addressed, how these subjects are studied, and how work in the field is evaluated. To help contextualize these shifts, the authors use four critical terms of engagement—critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization—and offer an enhanced analytical model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating not only feminist rhetorical inquiry but also rhetoric studies in a broader sense.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is a professor of English and the dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her previous books include Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women.   Gesa E. Kirsch is a professor of English and a cofounder of the Women’s Leadership Institute at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her previous publications include Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication and Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation.

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RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND LITERACY STUDIES

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JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER and GESA E. KIRSCH

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Southern Illinois University Press

Cover illustration: Kitty Tatch, a maid and waitress at the Sentinel Hotel in the late 1890s and early 1900s, and her friend Katherine Hazelston dressed in long, wide skirts and danced and did high kicks at Overhanging Rock, three thousand feet above the Yosemite Valley, on Glacier Point as George Fiske photographed them. Department of Interior, National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.

Printed in the United States of America



$35.00 usd isbn 0-8093-3069-5 isbn 978-0-8093-3069-0

NEW HORIZONS FOR

Foreword by Patricia Bizzell

studies in rhetorics and feminisms southern illinois university press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siupress.com

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FEMINIST RHETORICAL PRACTICES

12/12/11 12:39 PM