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This essay explores how Black LGBTQ students use writing to translate and transmit African American vernacular language codes in their everyday lives. Through documenting how students experience and interpret homophobia through the prism of African American vernacular English (AAVE), I demonstrate how some use language and literacy practices to critique and perform dominant gender behaviors reflected in their community. I theorize a Black queer rhetoric as a framework for understanding and nuancing the discursive limits of African American vernacular English

This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

Identifying the specific complexities and historical context of post-Mao Chinese literary women’s rhetoric, along with ways they have been misread, the author argues in general that Western feminist critics need to be cautious about applying their concepts to non-Western women’s literature.

Examining two particular texts and applying modifications of Western feminist concepts, the author argues that early twentieth-century Chinese women’s writing contains feminist thoughts and textual strategies far more complex and nuanced than conventional wisdom has led us to expect.

This special issue on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism challenges the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship. Such defining has tended to focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe. The result is, potentially, the reproduction of institutional hierarchies. 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 field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift our objects and areas of study.

Despite the important work emerging from both the global and digital turns in rhetoric and composition studies, one key area has yet to be examined: the central role that the circulation of digital texts plays in the transformation and appropriation of feminist discourse. This article proposes a new methodology for analyzing the processes through which the modes of global circulation of digital representations become rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend its analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority.

Links among the World Bank’s gender-mainstreaming policies and recent U.S. welfare policies demonstrate how transnationalism enables international gendered logics to become national (and international) norms. The metaphor of the network helps feminist rhetoricians expose how transnational linkages shape domestic and international policies by articulating the complex relationships among gendered logics, power, and occasion.

Rereading the work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon in light of Hugh Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the author suggests that current disciplinary definitions of the sublime that separate its aesthetic heritage from its rhetorical foundations suppress those of its aspects that were the particular province of women writers in the nineteenth century, and limit our current understanding.

Focusing on the rhetorical work of definition in the writings of Maria Rentería, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Astrea, contributors in the early years of the twentieth century to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica, this essay argues that these writers redefined who the Mexican woman was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. Its exploration of their definitional claims historicizes Chicana feminist rhetoric, and examines how their work infuses rhetorics of/from color with concerns of gender and class.

n 1910 and 1911, Maria Renteria, Sara Estela Ramirez, and Astrea3 redefined who the woman4 was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. As contributors to La Crdnica, a Spanish-language newspaper based in Laredo, Texas, these three women called their female readers to refuse essentialist definitions that described women as second-class, subservient, and apolitical.5 The writings of Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea stood in contrast to such constructions as they inscribed women as intelligent and honorable-as women who could, and indeed should, engage in and change the world around them. Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea wrote to shift old and shape new definitions, but even as they shared this goal, each writer composed a different Mexican woman for her readers. Astrea persuaded her readers to reassess their education and their place outside the home in her two articles To the Woman Who

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Suggests that moves to dispersed authorship signal not a challenge to the old ideology of authorship, but rather its appropriation for commercial ends. Identifies alternatives to this appropriation and explains why embracing these alternatives is important. Concludes that scholars of rhetoric and composition need to identify, theorize, practice, and teach alternative forms of subjectivity and alternative modes of ownership.

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As feminism has sought to contest patriarchy in ever more diverse sites of culture and increasingly to interrogate power/knowledge relations in a variety of disciplines, its languages have become more complex and difficult. This creates the paradox of a feminism much more capable of reunderstanding reality-and thus changing it-in profoundly different ways and yet much less accessible and understandable to those whose lives it seeks to affect. In other words, a widening gap is developing between the advanced languages and discourses of feminism-especially feminist theory-and its main constituency: those women (and men) who rely on its insights and the movement it articulates to orient their lives in more egalitarian and non-exploitative ways-in sexual relations, in raising children, in the politics of the work place and domestic arrangements. In fact, the difficulty of recent (postmodern) feminist theory has led many to reject it altogether as too remote and politically ineffective. But I believe that feminist theory is necessary for social change and that, rather than abandon it as too abstract, we need to reunderstand it in more social and political terms. I have thus attempted in this essay to rearticulate some of the main theoretical concepts of contemporary feminism in a more available language and, more important, to offer a political rewriting of these concepts. My text, therefore, is a series of explanatory speculations on feminist theory, its main concepts and the way these concepts enable a feminist rewriting of patriarchy. In doing so, it points to the emergence of what I call materialist feminist theory. In feminism, as elsewhere, postmodern has become a loaded and politically volatile word. Many feminists are opposed to it, worried that such a term may trivialize the serious import of feminism, which is intervention and social change. Underlying such mistrust is the common misunderstanding of postmodernism as a fad based on passing desires and trivial pursuits. This may be true of some aspects of postmodernism, but it is not at all characteristic of postmodernism in general; it is a significant political, cultural, and historical development. Teresa L. Ebert teaches critical theory and feminism at the State University of New York at Albany. She has completed a book on materialist feminism called Patriarchal Narratives and is at work on another on feminist theory and politics. In 1990 she organized and directed the conference on Rewriting the (Post)modern: (Post)colonialism/Feminism/Late Capitalism at the University of Utah where she was a Fellow in the Humanities Center.

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