Beyond growing and selling food, women farmers perform literacy work to establish and maintain legitimacy. As part of a larger interview-based dataset, this article analyzes the literacy practices that one woman farmer, Lauren, undertakes in relation to her legitimacy as a farmer. Informed by literacy studies research and feminist rhetoric scholarship, as well as interdisciplinary studies on women in agriculture, the analysis here illustrates how Lauren performs specific literacy practices. Audiences' gendered expectations necessitate such practices, which Lauren performs in order to be understood as a farmer in a masculine, patriarchal landscape shaped by her family, customers, and broader farming community. These literacy practices include crafting an image visually, interacting intentionally through verbal conversations, adapting to audience assumptions, and taking on community leadership roles.

Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, challenges scholars to see and write past the limits of their own methods and knowledges.She advocates for writing not only about what we know about rhetoric, but what we don't know.Restaino frames herself as a writer and researcher who is figuring out how to move forward after the loss of her friend Susan Lundy Maute to cancer, recognizing how experiences and people change us and deepen our understanding of ourselves and our ways of knowing and being.Restaino's writing values narrative in scholarly discourse, embracing the idea of emerging as a presence to readers; this idea manifests in her work because she writes as a witness to the declining health and death of her friend.Restaino draws on the works of Jim W. Corder often in her book, and her writing reminds me especially of his argument that emergence is a risk of going out alone in writing, an exposure of ourselves and our narratives to the other.He writes that this kind of writing "requires a readiness to testify to an identity that is always emerging, a willingness to dramatize one's narrative in progress before the other; it calls for an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other" (Corder 26).Restaino demonstrates Corder's idea of argument as emergence in her writing, but she also forwards a key concept attached to this process that comes from feminist theory, the notion of surrender.She explains that we have to let go of a facade of wholeness, to render our subjectivity and knowledge for what it always already is: fragmented.She further describes how, when we face illness and death, we reach the unknown, and we have to let go, or release, "not only of what we know how to do (practice) and what we think we know (epistemology) but also of our subjectivit(ies) as writers and researchers" (13).In her own release of these things, Restaino works to come upon a different way of knowing and being after loss that she communicates to us as readers in the themes of her book, which I outline in this review.

This article foregrounds stories told by Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune in order to distinguish “community listening” from “rhetorical listening” and decolonize community writing. Dorothy’s stories demonstrate “transrhetoricity” as rhetorical practices that move across time and space to activate relationships between peoples and places through collaborative meaning making. Story moves historic legacies into the present despite suppression enacted by settler colonialism, and story yields adaptive meanings and cultural renewal. When communities listen across difference, stories enact resistance by building a larger community of storytellers, defying divisive settler colonialist inscriptions, and reinscribing Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies across the landscapes they historically inhabit.