College Composition and Communication

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February 2026

  1. Crying Censorship Wolf: Prefiguring Contemporary Realities through Disciplinary History
    Abstract

    US higher education faces mounting political pressure and censorship, resulting in threats to our institutional missions and challenges to academic freedom. In this article, we trace two moments in disciplinary history that examine (mis)understandings of how censorship functions: efforts to roll back the Guidelines for Nonsexist Use of Language in NCTE Publications (now Statement on Gender and Language ) and Students’ Right to Their Own Language , both approved by NCTE in the mid-1970s. We draw from the feminist theories of Kate Manne and bell hooks to analyze materials from the NCTE and CCCC archives, documenting the rhetorical and logistical moves employed in these rollback efforts. In doing so, we identify how the exploitation of organizational apparatuses contributed to the subversion of a larger and necessary priority: establishing credible disciplinary boundaries to serve as a bulwark against political encroachment into literacy education. In sorting through these case studies, we offer examination of how misguided censorship accusations can threaten our discipline when actual censorship efforts are enacted by governmental entities.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2026773404

December 2025

  1. Black Women in the Control Room: Exploring the Sonic Literacies Development of a Hip Hop Audio Engineer
    Abstract

    This article focuses on the seldom-discussed literacies of the Hip Hop audio engineer through the experiences of Lyrix, a Black woman audio engineer from the Midwest. Grounded in the literature of literacy scholars invested in the sonic dimensions of Hip Hop culture, two research questions guide this article: How does one develop their expertise as an audio engineer, and what insights can be gathered about literacy learning by focusing on marginalized Hip Hop figures, such as women audio engineers? This article ultimately argues that Lyrix’s experience underscores a nonlinear approach to sonic literacy education, highlighting a transitory approach that ruptures and flows through barriers of access. The article concludes with suggested starting points for future research on Hip Hop literacy studies in particular and literacy studies more broadly.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025772317
  2. Contextualizing Reflective Writing for Creating Change: A Cross-Institutional Case Study of First-Year Students’ Reflections
    Abstract

    Writing studies scholarship lauds reflection’s capacity for building metacognitive understanding and facilitating transfer. Meanwhile, feminist and antiracist pedagogy scholarship highlights reflection’s ability to create spiritual and societal change. By contextualizing reflection within institutional and programmatic contexts, we argue that writing scholars can revise assignments to account for reflection’s contributions to civic and spiritual identity development. This cross-institutional case study analyzes patterns in first-year students’ reflective writing across three writing programs. Drawing on five codes for reflective identities—scholarly, writerly, professional, civic, and spiritual—we found that scholarly and writerly identities were emphasized regardless of context. However, students often had an “excess” in reflection, writing about civic and spiritual growth when prompts did not invite it. In conversation with university and program mission statements, we argue that instructors and WPAs can leverage reflection to expand beyond a single classroom context, ultimately tapping into its potential to create individual and social change.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025772289

February 2025

  1. “Because We’re Going to Mess Up”: Practices for Accountability—Not a Piecemeal Approach
    Abstract

    What are we in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies currently practicing? What practices do harm and, in contrast, which counter harm? How do we disrupt everyday, cumulative, and structural injustices and instead invest in accountability? In addition to asking these and other questions, this article engages four accountability practices that are necessary for countering the ongoing violence of the mythical norm (Lorde), of domination, and of harm within higher education: (1) resisting denial of ongoing harms; (2) recognizing normalized violence; (3) divesting from whiteness; and (4) investing in a consistent, relational approach to seeking justice. These practices help us tap into and amplify the work of BIPOC feminist and womanist educators-scholars-activists (including Ahmed, Gumbs, hooks, Mingus, and Royster) who have been countering epistemic injustice by building linguistic resources and expanding what we can name. These practices are part of a whole in which taking a piecemeal approach entrenches the current state of affairs: white supremacy status quo and normalized violence. Together, these add up to a call for striving toward justice in a sustained, momentum-gathering way.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025763396
  2. Research Brief: Transnational Feminist Rhetorics
    Abstract

    This Research Brief provides an overview of the current scholarship on transnational feminist rhetorics (TFR), drawing from interdisciplinary traditions. TFR inquiries should always begin with “a cogent analysis of power” (Dingo et al.), attending to how transnational power dynamics act on gendered bodies and how those bodies engage with and speak back to intersectional geopolitical forces. They rely primarily on the analysis of textual and visual artifacts in historical and contemporary contexts and use a variety of concepts and theories from rhetoric and elsewhere, grounded in the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The Research Brief ends with a discussion of future directions for this field, calling for more interdisciplinary inquiries, continued critical intersectional engagement with diverse transnational communities and subjectivities, reflexive and ethical research practices, and pedagogical applications.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025763452

September 2023

  1. Engaging Assessment Counterstories through a Cultural Rhetorics Framework
    Abstract

    Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202332674

September 2022

  1. Post-Arrival Mentorships That Are Not Mentorships: Cross-Gender and Cross-Generational Trajectories in Rhet/Comp’s Nexus of Practice
    Abstract

    Bilateral mentorships in rhetoric and composition can persist beyond formalized, institutional arrangements in ways that continue to (re)shape lives in the profession. Mediated discourse theory provides a lens through which to describe practices of enduring mentorships in terms of ways they might advance cross-gender and cross-generational understanding.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202232120
  2. Misogyny and the Norm of Recognition in Graduate English Programs
    Abstract

    Drawing on interviews with ten female-identifying graduate students, this article theorizes a norm of recognition and argues that recognition, conceptualized as a masculine-coded good, circulates away from female graduate students toward faculty and from faculty back to male graduate students. Female graduate students instead experience misogyny, understood as a punishment for straying from patriarchal gender roles in which they are required to be givers.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202232118

February 2022

  1. Hitting a Brick Wall and the Women Who Do the Work: Is This the Same Old Story?
    Abstract

    Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s work on “brick walls,” this article discusses a qualitative study of stories shared by twenty-five women writing center directors and the possible insights gleaned if we choose to “notice through feminism,” (Ahmed) and advocate for change across writing studies.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202231878

June 2021

  1. Fingerprinting Feminist Methodologies/Methods: An Analysis of Empirical Research Trends in Four Composition Journals between 2007 and 2016*
    Abstract

    This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202131442
  2. Sexual Violences Traveling to El Norte: An Example of Quilting as Method
    Abstract

    This quilt documents sexual violence migrant women experience and demonstrates Quilting as Method, a feminist, qualitative research method. The author argues that tactile approaches to research can deepen understandings of shallowly understood experiences.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202131439

February 2021

  1. A Feminist and Antiracist History of Composition and Rhetoric at Oberlin College (1846–1851)
    Abstract

    When first admitted to Oberlin College, women were expected to attend their rhetoric courses in silence. Not content with an education that did not prepare them for public speaking, some women students collaborated to educate themselves. Their history uncovers feminist and antiracist disruptions to composition and rhetoric that have much to teach present-day educators.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202131161

December 2020

  1. A Queer Praxis for Peer Review
    Abstract

    If, as I argue, student-to-student peer review is animated by “improvement imperatives” that make peer review a form of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” then rhetoric and composition will need to imagine theories and structures for peer review that do not repeat cruel attachments. I offer slow peer review as a strategy for queer rhetorical listening that maintains our commitments to peer review without the limitations created through the improvement imperative.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202031039
  2. With Heart in Hand: Whiteness, Homonormativity, and the Question of the Erasure of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Chicana Identity from the CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award
    Abstract

    The Queer Caucus created the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award to honor Anzaldúa’s impact on “studies of both rhetoric and queer theory” through forging “connections across difference and oppression in order to dismantle systems of privilege, whether that be heterosexism, heteronormativity, racism, sexism or ableism (as a non-exhaustive list).” However, the text of the Award, along with its impetus, belies these intentions. The Award erases Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad from her work and her person through the emphasis on culture-less sexual and gender minority experiences, the redefinition of Anzaldúa’s work as focused on generalized difference and oppression, and the omission of any substantive acknowledgment of her Chicanidad. This essay examines the erasure of Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad and the appropriation of Anzaldúa as a race-less and culture-less liberatory figure through the operation of homonormativity and whiteness. I analyze the text and impetus of the Award through an analytical framework rooted in the rhetorical concepts of Kenneth Burke and Gloria Anzaldúa’s own concerns about erasure and appropriation through homonormativity and whiteness. I argue that the meaningful change to the text and its authorship, as well as to meaningful inclusion of queers of color, is necessary for the Award to continue.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202031038

February 2020

  1. Re-Engaging Rhetorical Education through Procedural Feminism: Designing First-Year Writing Curricula That Listen
    Abstract

    This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202030504

December 2016

  1. 2016 CCCC Chair’s Address: Making, Disrupting, Innovating
    Abstract

    0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

    doi:10.58680/ccc201628886

September 2014

  1. Daughters of the Seminaries: Re-landscaping History through the Composition Courses at the Cherokee National Female Seminary
    Abstract

    Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201426110

December 2013

  1. Review Essay: Pieces of the Puzzle: Feminist Rhetorical Studies and the Material Conditions of Women’s Work
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Fitalicinism, and Public Policy Writing Rebecca Dingo Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 Jane Donawerth Fitalicinist Rhetorical Resilience Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, editors Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era— Lisa Mastrangelo— Fitalicinist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch

    doi:10.58680/ccc201324505

June 2013

  1. Meaningful Engagements: Feminist Historiography and the Digital Humanities
    Abstract

    This essay explores potential connections between feminist historiography in rhetoric and the digital humanities. We investigate how specific digital innovations might invigorate feminist historiographic study, and we pause to consider how a turn to the digital might run counter to feminist methodological imperatives.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201323662

September 2012

  1. Review Essay: Making Sense of Making Knowledge
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives, Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt, editors, The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide, 3rd edition, Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Winifred Bryan Horner, editors, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson, editors, The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process, Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, Becoming a Writing Researcher, Ann Blakeslee and Cathy Fleischer

    doi:10.58680/ccc201220867

June 2010

  1. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence
    Abstract

    In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw attention to interconnections among three critical terms of engagement: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation. Third, we propose an enhanced inquiry model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical work in rhetoric and writing studies.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201011333

December 2009

  1. ”Eve Did No Wrong”: Effective Literacy at a Public College for Women
    Abstract

    In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women’s colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women’s education in speaking and writing.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099484
  2. Brains v. Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in Literacy Narratives
    Abstract

    A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives—Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps, and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self—shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these writers experiences, manages, and ultimately resolves, to greater or lesser degrees, his conflicts over masculinity, at least textually speaking, and does so, moreover, in ways that are linked to his views on literacy and education.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099489

September 2009

  1. Review Essay: “Are You Going to Be a Problem?” Race as Performance
    Abstract

    Review of Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity by Vershawn Ashanti Young

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098331
  2. The Bust in’ and Bitchin’ Ethe of Third-Wave Zines
    Abstract

    Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the modes of argumentation practiced by this subculture of the current feminist movement, one which is firmly grounded in the larger public sphere.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098309
  3. The Writing Center Paradox: Talk about Legitimacy and the Problem of Institutional Change
    Abstract

    Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098316
  4. Theorizing Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoric as a Communicative Art for the Composition Practicum
    Abstract

    This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098323

September 2008

  1. Review Essay: Politics, Gender, Literacy: The Value and Limitations of Current Histories of Women’s Rhetorics
    Abstract

    Reviews of: “Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century” by Sarah Robbins; “Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Writers” by Lindal Buchanan; “Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930” by Wendy B. Sharer.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20086756

December 2006

  1. Uncovering Forgotten Habits: Anti-Catholic Rhetoric and Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Literacy
    Abstract

    This article examines the connection between religion and literacy efforts on behalf of girls and young women in the early nineteenth-century United States by looking at the rapid proliferation of Catholic convent academies and the anti-Catholic sentiment that spurred the growth of proprietary academies, such as those of Mary Lyon and Catharine Beecher. It also examines how religious rhetoric influenced the curriculum in both Catholic and proprietor schools.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20065893

September 2005

  1. Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body
    Abstract

    This essay attempts to demonstrate how transgender theories can inspire pedagogical methods that complement feminist compositionist pedagogical approaches to understanding the narration of gender as a social construct. By examining sample student writing generated by a prompt inspired by transgender theories, the author’s analysis suggests how trans theories might usefully expand and extend—for both instructors and students—our analysis of the stories we tell personally, socially, and politically about gender. Ultimately, the author argues that trans theories and pedagogical activities built on them can enhance our understanding of gender performance by prompting us to consider gender as a material and embodied reality.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20054012

September 2004

  1. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook
    doi:10.2307/4140686
  2. Reviews: Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Reviews: Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/56/1/collegecompositioncommunication3995-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc20043995

February 2004

  1. Facing (Up To) ‘The Stranger’ in Community Service Learning
    Abstract

    This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of “the stranger” haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these “strange(r) encounters,” we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates opportunities for progressive practices and effects.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20042761

December 2003

  1. Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility
    Abstract

    The project Andrea Greenbaum attempts in EmancipatoryMovements in Composition is both worthwhile and ambitious. The project is worthwhile because introducing newcomers, particularly graduate students, to the multiple disciplines that have been incorporated into critical pedagogy in the last decade can be daunting, and there is certainly room in the field for text that names and organizes them. The project is ambitious because it attempts to do this in mere one hundred pages, with additional pages devoted to an appended syllabus, notes, and citations. Greenbaum opens her book with personal narrative of the Passover story, drawing from it the lesson that human beings need to experience oppression-even if it is relived only mythically-in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals (xi), setting the polemical tone she maintains through the rest of the work. She organizes the book around what she identifies as four key approaches to critical pedagogy for the writing classroom: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, examining each for what they offer writing teachers seeking to enact critical pedagogy in their classrooms. Her first two chapters offer brief historical development of sophistic and cultural studies approaches. Greenbaum begins with the reclamation of sophistic rhetoric, drawing particularly on Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, and handful of others. She proposes that this neosophistic contributes to rhetoric of possibility by drawing attention to the indeterminacy of language, an empowering shift from logos privileged in Western philosophy to mythos that invites disruptive stoof the frontier is reconstrued as collabo ative zone of cultur l and linguistic contact, a historical moment of meeting, clashing, and cooperating ulticultura encounters (66).

    doi:10.2307/3594226

June 2003

  1. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910
    Abstract

    Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or parlor traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space - and the debate about who should occupy that space - Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman's proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years. While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women's words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge white middle-class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman's place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife. Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women's roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the quiet woman must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women's space in historical discourse.

    doi:10.2307/3594189
  2. Feminism beyond Modernism
    doi:10.2307/3594190

February 2003

  1. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies
    Abstract

    Reflecting the rich complexity of contemporary college composition pedagogy, this unique collection presents twelve original essays on several of the most important approaches to the teaching of writing. Each essay is written by an experienced teacher/scholar and describes one of the major pedagogies employed today: process, expressive, rhetorical, collaborative, feminist, critical, cultural studies, community service, and basic writing. Writing centers, writing across the curriculum, and technology and the teaching of writing are also discussed. The essays are composed of personal statements on pedagogical applications and bibliographical guides that aid students and new teachers in further study and research. Contributors include Christopher Burnham, William A. Covino, Ann George, Diana George, Eric H. Hobson, Rebecca Moore Howard, Susan C. Jarratt, Laura Julier, Susan McLeod, Charles Moran, Deborah Mutnick, Lad Tobin, and John Trimbur. An invaluable tool for graduate students and new teachers, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies provides an exceptional introduction to composition studies and the extensive range of pedagogical approaches used today.

    doi:10.2307/3594179
  2. Accepting Roles Created for Us: The Ethics of Reciprocity
    Abstract

    Grounded in theories of feminist research practices and in two empirical studies we conducted separately, our argument is that seeing reciprocity as a context–based process of definition and re–definition of the relationship between participants and researcher helps us understand how research projects can benefit participants in ways that they desire.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20031489

December 2002

  1. “And Now That I Know Them”: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course
    Abstract

    In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20021483
  2. "And Now That I Know Them": Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course
    Abstract

    In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

    doi:10.2307/1512148

September 2002

  1. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education: 1885-1937
    Abstract

    In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class. Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.

    doi:10.2307/1512108
  2. “Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action”: Women Online
    Abstract

    Radical feminist textuality of the 1960s and today provides a suggestive example of networked and collectively literate action, action dependent on the constant and visible contextualization of self and writing within the discourses that shape us. In this essay, I argue that an articulation of radical feminist textuality can benefit both scholarship and classroom, in that it situates writers as rhetorical agents who can write, resist, and, finally act within a network of discourses and identifications.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20021477
  3. "Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action": Women Online
    doi:10.2307/1512105

June 2002

  1. Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader
    Abstract

    The temperance movement was the largest single organizing force for women in American history, uniting and empowering women seeking to enact social change. By the end of the century, more than two hundred thousand women had become members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and numerous others belonged to smaller temperance organizations. Despite the impact of the movement, its literature has been largely neglected. In this collection of nineteen temperance tales, Carol Mattingly has recovered and revalued previously unavailable writing by women. Mattingly's introduction provides a context for these stories, locating the pieces within the temperance movement as well as within larger issues in women's studies. The temperance movement was essential to women's awareness of and efforts to change gender inequalities in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their fiction, temperance writers protested physical and emotional abuse at the hands of men, argued for women's rights, addressed legal concerns, such as divorce and child custody, and denounced gender-biased decisions affecting the care and rights of children. Temperance fiction by women broadens our understanding of the connections between women's rights and temperance, while shedding light on women's thinking and behavior in the nineteenth century. Temperance writers featured in this reader include Louisa May Alcott, Mary Dwinell Chellis, Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, Frances Dana Gage, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz, Marietta Holley, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward), Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Water Drops from Women Writers features biographical sketches of each writer as well as thirteen illustrations.

    doi:10.2307/1512128

February 2002

  1. A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880-1940
    doi:10.2307/1512139

September 2001

  1. John Wesley and the Liberty to Speak: The Rhetorical and Literacy Practices of Early Methodism
    Abstract

    In early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley’s “method” of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20011442
  2. John Wesley and the Liberty to Speak: The Rhetorical and Literacy Practices of Early Methodism
    Abstract

    early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to

    doi:10.2307/359063
  3. Off the Radar Screen: Gender, Adjuncting, and Teaching Institutions
    Abstract

    we read Michael Murphy's article, Faculty for a New University, we were surprised and troubled by the story about adjuncts that Murphy purports to tell. Murphy's argument, that a substructure in rhetoric and composition exists but remains invisible and that to recognize such a substructure would cost universities little, is based on a notion of universities that has not existed in most places for a very long time, if ever. Murphy's idea of a teaching track that supports full-time faculty research is based on a conception of a university at a handful of research institutions. Schools that train graduate students, produce the bulk of scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, and grant PhDs are about 7 percent of the total number of universities in this country (Phelan 76). To make an argument about adjunct work and adjunct labor without considering the other 93 percent of us seems to us to be thoughtless, at best, and unethical, at worst. The other aspect of adjuncting that Murphy leaves out is, of course, gender. As Theresa Enos writes, When a field has been feminized and when a disproportionate number of its workers are female, that field is devalued and is subject to both disciplinary and gender bias (43). As the latest report on Women in the Profession indicates, women are still more likely than white men ... to obtain jobs in lower-paying institutions .., and they tend to linger

    doi:10.2307/359067

February 2001

  1. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women
    Abstract

    Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

    doi:10.2307/358630

December 2000

  1. Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces
    Abstract

    Mapping the Terrain of Feminist Cyberscapes, Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi Map of Location I: The Body in Virtual Space Technological Fronts: Lesbian Lives On the Joanne Addison and Susan Hilligoss Postmodernist Looks at the Body Electric: Email, Female and Hijra, Sarah Sloane Re-Membering Mama: The Female Body Embodied and Disembodied Communication, Barbara Monroe Making the Map: Interview with Helen Schwartz Map of Location II: Constructions of Online Identities Our Studnets, Our Selves I, A Mestiza, Continually Walk Out of One Culture Into Another: Alba's Story, Sibylle Gruber Pedagogy, Emotion and The Protocol of Care, Shannon Wilson. Writing (Without) The Body: Gender and Power in Networked Discussion Groups, Donna LeCourt Making the Map: Interview with Gail Hawisher Map of Location III: Discourse Communities Online and in Classrooms A Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other, Christine Boese The Use of Electronic Communication in Facilitating Feminine Modes of Discourse: An Irigaraian Heuristic, Morgan Gresham and Cecilia Hartley Over the Line, Online, Gender Lines: Email and Women in the Classroom, Dene Grigar Maps of Location IV: Virtual Coalitions and Collaborations Designing Feminist Multimedia for The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Mary Hocks Voicing The Landscape: A Discourse of Their Own, Laura Julier, Paula Gillespie, And Kathleen Blake Yancey Thirteen Ways of Looking at an M-Word, Margaret Daisley and Susan Romano Making The Map: Interview With Mary Lay and Elizabeth Tebeaux Map of Location V: The Future: to be Mapped Later Feminist Research in Computers and Composition, Lisa Gerrard An Online Dialogue with the Contributors to Feminist Cyberscapes Mapping the Future: Interview with Cynthia Selfe

    doi:10.2307/358504