This article explores the intersections of queer subjectivity, community storytelling, and recovery literacy through the digital storytelling project, Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB). Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, including queerstory of recovery (Bacibianco) and the concept of rhetorical velocity (DeVoss and Ridolfo), this research highlights how VFRB creates an inclusive multimodal platform for recovering alcoholics and addicts to share their stories beyond the privatized, hegemonic spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This article argues that VFRB’s feminist construct creates a civic space where queer recovering alcoholics and addicts can resist institutionalized constraints, perform their stories, and engage in collective knowledge-making. Ultimately, this study advocates for a broader understanding of recovery storytelling as a communal act of dissent that empowers queer individuals to challenge hegemonic frameworks and offer new ways of knowing, being, and narrating recovery experiences in the public sphere, through what the author terms as “queerstory of recovery.” Keywords: Voices from Rock Bottom, queerstory of recovery, recovery literacy, queer subjectivity, queerstory, queer rhetoric, recovery rhetoric

This article interrogates the complexities of immigration encountered by international scholars working in higher education. Drawing on life history and lived experience, the article examines issues of marginalization, inequality, and discrimination. It draws from Black Feminist Care ethics to channel ideas for how to build resilience in the face of unrelenting restrictive policies that shape the daily lives of international scholars in the academy and jeopardizes their ability to succeed.

In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice for instructors and students, we used a lesson study methodology in which a team of teacher-researchers collaboratively designed, observed, analyzed, and revised a sequence of lessons. We provide the larger context for our lesson study project, the lesson study structure including preparatory material for students, trauma-informed teaching strategies, and reflections on the lesson. To effect meaningful change and learning, we needed to have difficult conversations with students; this required us to acknowledge the presence of trauma in the classroom and then work to support the students who have experienced trauma. Finally, we offer a reflective critique of our experience as a heuristic for instructors to use as they implement and reflect on trauma-informed pedagogy in their own classes. Content Notice: The content of this article references rape and refers to violence against women in a way that relates to, but does not directly reference, transgender and non-binary individuals. We acknowledge, respect, and honor the many varied ways in which individuals respond to traumatic content. If you would like to speak with someone for support, please consider using the RAINN National Sexual Assault Crisis Hotline by calling their anonymous toll-free hotline (1-800-656-HOPE (4673)) or using the confidential online chat: https://hotline.rainn.org/online

In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy skills of women and young girls. By reflecting on our partnership, we argue that international engagements, premised on equity as a goal and conducted digitally, will help in creating opportunities for the students as well as the communities in tackling the digital divide via writing and designing conducted in the pursuit of enhancing the digital literacy of the rural communities in need.

Since 2016, we have borne witness to an authoritarian leader who has wielded words to shape our national consciousness about people of color, women, immigrants, and disabled people in ways that have ignited the extreme right, resulting in a rise in hate crimes, the loss of protections for LGBTQ+ people, and, harrowingly, the indefinite detention and separation of immigrant children from their families. On January 6, just two weeks before the inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris, the vitriol of the past four years catalyzed an insurrection by Trump supporters, encouraged by Donald Trump himself, in which U.S. Capitol police were violently attacked and killed and lawmakers were chased and called to be hanged. Emboldened by their indignation and their immutable belief that Joe Biden’s win was the result of widespread voter fraud, the insurrectionists, mostly white people, many with ties to white supremacist groups, armed themselves with Trump’s combative rhetoric to launch a physical attack on our democracy.

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Inforgraphic about the human right to maintain personal control over our bodies, life decisions, sexuality, gender identity, and the choice to reproduce.

In a sociopolitical context that continues to constrain reproductive agency, many organizations, media, and people construct pregnant or mothering teenagers as “things that are other than it should be” and many young mothers report being talked to as if they were a defect that must be addressed. People who experience dominant discourses of “teenage pregnancy prevention” are prompted to immediately respond to the rhetorical exigence of pregnant and parenting teen bodies. When visibly young pregnant or parenting people venture into public, they face an unpredictable and potentially hostile rhetorical arena. In this article, I reflect on a community-based workshop I facilitated in Boston from 2015-2019 at an annual one-day event for young parents called the Summit for Teen Empowerment and Parenting Success. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theories of interruption tactics, this workshop prepares young pregnant and parenting people with researched information and scripted responses they can use to interrupt and transform everyday moments in public places when strangers read their bodies as problems to criticize or loudly bemoan. However, findings from the surveys circulated at the 2019 workshop indicate that what participants value most about this experience is the opportunity to share and relate to one another’s experiences of reproductive injustice. This article offers feminist rhetoricians, community literacy scholars, and other scholar-activists an approach to sharing research findings and facilitating discussion in a useful way with those who embody exigences of reproductive justice.

In this article, we share the example of our recent community-based performance project on reproductive justice, We are BRAVE, to serve as a model of how community-based performance can be an embodied strategy for social change. We draw from the work of scholars of feminist rhetoric, community- based performance, and reproductive justice. This case study examines elements of the community-created script to demonstrate how we knit together intersectional narratives of reproductive (in)justice that challenge and expand a mainstream discourse of reproductive rights and move towards a broader vision of reproductive freedom. The We are BRAVE project was a form of cultural work that went alongside other grassroots organizing e orts to persuade both legislators and constituents to think about the significance of abortion and to engage with more complexity around intersecting identities and issues that impact our reproductive lives. This strategy was used to frame groundbreaking legislative work. In sharing the example of We are BRAVE, we show how using community-centered, performative storytelling as embodied rhetoric can be an effective mode of public and political persuasion.

In this article, we share the example of our recent community-based performance project on reproductive justice, We are BRAVE, to serve as a model of how community-based performance can be an embodied strategy for social change. We draw from the work of scholars of feminist rhetoric, community-based performance, and reproductive justice. In sharing the example of We are BRAVE, we show how using community-centered, performative storytelling as embodied rhetoric can be an effective mode of public and political persuasion.

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical approach are identified, as well as the opportunities they offer to understand the risks and complexities of writing in prison. These differentiations in literacy practice highlight the necessity of building relationships among and between incarcerated LGBTQ+ people in prison literacy initiatives, and situate the conclusion that prison abolition’s demonstrated commitment to transformative social relations has a direct application to understanding and shaping prison literacy programming and practice.

Community writing partnerships between university and incarcerated students typically focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through shared assignments, peer review exchanges, and group discussion. This article examines a prison-university writing partnership between two semester-long yoga classes, one at a maximum-security women’s prison and one at a competitive university, that privileges building community over building academic skills. The yoga students shared reflective writing on yoga-related topics—from philosophy, to tips and modifications for poses, to personal experience—in a monthly newsletter called “The Om Exchange.” The sound of “om” in yoga symbolizes the universal “oneness” of all living beings. The purpose of the newsletter was two-fold: to support reflective writing for deeper engagement with class material and to connect with the larger yoga community beyond classroom walls. While the yoga students only met in person once, the newsletter enabled them to build a sangha, or a local community with shared values that offers members motivation, guidance, support, and accountability in practicing those values. I suggest that the intersections between contemplative practice and feminist rhetorical listening facilitated these students, who may appear distinct, in finding “oneness” with each other; with its focus on building community, this writing project affords visibility to the power of forming partnerships around explicit shared values through the lens of sangha, and offers transferable methods for more conventional community literacy projects. A contemplative approach fosters social and emotional learning, including civic and democratic values, that bridges institutions, cultures, and differences for a more equitable society. As one incarcerated yoga student reflected: “If what we do for the good inside these walls doesn’t reach beyond these walls, then what’s the point—[this partnership] is the point and a start.” Read more at https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/19Sp_KINE_1410-1_Yoga/.

Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down to the many nontenure-track faculty and graduate students teaching first-year writing. The authors introduce two methods of moving beyond writing program management to include greater attention to community engagement and leadership post-Trump: through revising curricula and course materials and by diversifying professional development opportunities. WPAs may find themselves in a rare moment where the pedagogical approaches for which we have long advocated—attention to marginalized voices, representation of complex arguments grounded in material realities, validation of the rhetorical import of nonacademic texts—are immediately practicable as a condition of civic engagement. Curricula and course materials may convey these commitments beyond the classroom. Further, the authors address the need for greater attention to professional development for faculty, particularly focusing on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They discuss two professional development resources beyond individual campus resources: the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR). By grounding this renovated image of the writing program administrator as a writing program leader, situated theoretically in leadership studies, the authors extend the work of scholars who see the WPA as a site of radical advocacy.

Through a case study of a community organization, The Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, I present a new framework for circulation strategies. The organization composed and distributed research reports on the gendered inequalities in their local economy, which they aimed to circulate locally. However, they encountered local publics that often resisted discourse on gender and gender-related issues. So, the organization developed a strategy focused not on circulating their work, but on challenging the discursive norms of their local publics that structured circulation and engendered the resistance. My case study reveals new ways to research and strategize circulation—aiming not to circulate texts or disrupt ongoing circulation but to challenge and/or make anew the norms that structure circulation.

In this article, we tell stories from our own research experiences to demonstrate the need for a set of methodological tools within Rhet/Comp that is more fully responsive to the ethical challenges of working with traumatized communities. Drawing on feminist and indigenous approaches, we propose a methodological toolkit for trauma-related research to reduce participant risk. In so doing, we situate shared ownership within a research as care framework and suggest five pillars for conducting trauma-related rhetorical research: (1) mediating academic use, (2) responsivity to re-living trauma, (3) recognizing participant motivations, (4) collaborative meaning-making, and (5) accounting for identity evolution. In sharing our stories about our research and the complications involved in negotiating researcher-participant dynamics in traumatized communities, we hope to help other researchers more effectively navigate similar territory in their own work.

For many, the results of the 2016 election brought a shock and much-needed wake-up call, as residents of the U.S.(and other nations across the world) faced a reality that can be easy to forget and ignore: White supremacy still reigns, both in the U.S. and abroad. While the results of the election appeared to surprise residents and poll analysts alike, for many marginalized communities, the election of a President with a history of racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia was merely another reminder of the discrimination embedded in our daily realities; a reminder that as marginalized people living in the United States, our fight for survival and agency is far from over.

This paper presents some of the difficulties and challenges that a writing instructor faced when integrating themes of race, gender, and sexuality into her pedagogy, as well as strategies that she developed to address those challenges. The author discusses the merits of building a pedagogy from what Alcoff (2000) refers to as “social location,” despite evidence that women in academia are already subject to gender bias in the classroom. Finally, the author presents a feminist writing pedagogy developed from her research on YouTube’s beauty community, a diverse community that includes many women of color entrepreneurs, in which she asks students to use their experiences, rhetorical knowledges, and feminist theories to question the nexus of professionalism and identity. A sample assignment is included.

Drawing from a larger qualitative research project focused on Black women’s naming practices, I consider how Black women employ Black feminist consciousness practices of self-definition and self-valuation to name, define, and describe their identities. Given the complex history and popularity of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) image within public and private discourses, I focus on how five self-identified Black women claim, utilize, and theorize strong in relation to their identities and as part of their everyday lives. This research calls for more critical engagement of the individual and collective meanings behind words commonly associated with Black womanhood, but doing so by prioritizing the voices and lived experiences of Black women.

The proportion of young women in the juvenile justice system has increased substantially since the nineties, yet the rhetoric surrounding them remains under-studied and under-critiqued. The oppressive nature of this rhetoric thwarts the achievement of gender equity in juvenile justice, undermining the reforms that have been recommended over years of research. The following analysis examines this rhetoric for the ways in which it silences women and furthers gendered oppression in system; it also offers critical cautions regarding existing approaches to gender-responsive programming. By acknowledging the subalternity of young justice-involved women, further studies and community collaborations can be taken up to close the distance between the actual experiences and knowledges of young women and the rhetorical constructions of them that have long informed policy, programming, and daily interaction.

“Walk out, dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence,” serves as a prompt for One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler’s Global V-Day: Stop Violence Against Women Movement. One Billion Rising asks women and those who love them to gather in dance, protest, and voice in a globally staged effort to demand an end to gender-based violence. This essay analyzes a One Billion Rising installation with particular focus on ways a campus community engages with and understands personal trauma as impacted by publicly staged trauma movements. Cvetkovich’s (2012) “public feelings” project and Berlant’s (2011) “cruel optimism” provide a theoretical framework to consider ways One Billion Rising constructs private bodies as representations of public opposition to violence and its aftermath. Closing thoughts consider how reproducers of civic engagement and resistance, and those most intimate with sexual violence and its trauma, interact with the One Billion Rising charge.

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author suggests that, although they redefined their figured identities in the program, the two women’s ability to take action in their lives—their selves-in-practice—was contingent on other factors beyond the influence of the Program, such as familial and significant others’ influences, which were definitive and integral to who the participants were. Thus, how the participants figured or positioned themselves inside and outside of the program was fluid and sometimes contradictory and greatly influenced by the symmetry between competing figured worlds, in which they participated and the strategic and practical gender needs that informed their positional identities in their day-to-day lives.

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities.

While service learning can be compatible with feminist objectives, if the service does not contribute to structural change or help students understand their role in facilitating change, it can replicate patriarchal goals and run counter to feminism (Ludlow). In this article, we show the way we utilized a feminist lens when designing and implementing a service learning project designed to tackle the problem of dating violence on our campus community. We argue that the feminist lens enhanced student learning and ensured the students make a more lasting and meaningful contribution to a community.

Review of Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. HarperCollins, 2014.

Review of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González and Angela P. Harris. Utah State UP, 2012.

Francisco and Miguel’s research agenda is centered in educational leadership and community development. Their work is interdisciplinary and is situated within the intersectionalities of identity formation, race, class, gender, plática and story. In operationalizing this work, Guajardo and Guajardo employ an epistemological construct congruent with their research partners that challenges higher education to engage in research that privileges the lives of youth, elders, and the organic leaders from the community.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Her activism and scholarship engages with Feminism, Marxism, and African American studies. Benjamin D. Kuebrich met with Professor Davis at Syracuse University to ask her about issues of pedagogy, rhetoric, and community literacy.

At the start of my junior year this semester, Professor McCracken asked our class whether or not we identified as feminists. I hesitated before raising my hand. I knew that I wanted to be a feminist but I was afraid that if I was questioned further about what it means to be a feminist, I would not have a worthy answer. Having minimal background in the history and contemporary struggle for women's rights, I quickly glanced around the classroom to gather a reason why my hand should remain raised. I noticed some hands raised confidently and others at half-mast. Then I noticed the white board displaying the title of our class: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Marginalized Communities. I really care about these issues, I asserted in my mind, and my classmates must too, if they chose to take this course.

What is the origin of oppression? Why do we hear so much about it from some circles, and yet can rarely identify it when it confronts us in our everyday lives? Charlie Manter and I, April Maltz, set out to answer this question within the context of our Honors Seminar, Gender, Sex, Race, and Marginalized Communities. We focused on rhetorically analyzing oppression as it occurs in American society using Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, which states that our reality is represented through the use of symbols and that it is created by the terministic screens through which we view these symbols and by drawing on Tracy Ore and Marilyn Frye's theories of oppression. Tracy Ore claims that oppression is institutionalized, and that there are five types of institutional oppression: family, media, education, state and public policy, and economy.

Since its founding, the Hetrick-Martin Institute has grown from a small, volunteer-led grass-roots advocacy organization into a leading professional provider of social support and programming for at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning (LGBTQ) youth. Hetrick-Martin youth members, ranging in age from 12 to 21, come from 174 zip codes throughout all of New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area. They are of all colors and sizes, come from all kinds of backgrounds, and their enthusiasm and creativity is boundless.

In Queer Rhetorics, an upper-division service-learning writing course taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, students used queer theory to frame their engagement with local LGBTQ non-profit organizations in Boulder. In their journals, students moved from responding personally to the course material and their volunteer work to generating their own critical inquiries into queer discourse, as well as community-based service projects. This essay argues that self-reflecting on their own sexual citizenship in the context of community engagement fosters students' critical understanding of the public rhetoric of sexuality and gender and the social norms that delimit our sexual worlds.

This article presents an interdisciplinary advanced honors course: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Marginalized Communities. Through this ' course and its service-learning applications, students discovered that discourses of gender, sexuality, and race are not simply theoretical—ultimately, they impact people's lives. I include an explanation of the curriculum and the service-learning applications in my design and facilitation of the course, as well as samples of student work and a partial "showcase" of the student's final community event. In addition to describing one course in particular, this article aims to explore service-learning in activist, educative, and research formats and the implications for our students, our own research and knowledge, and our communities.

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic literacy. Based on this analysis, it argues that (1) only a collaborative, negotiated approach can promote effective social change, (2) that such efforts must include reflexive work by researchers to produce viable negotiations, and (3) that this approach highlights the intersection between pragmatic and ethical concerns that underlies effective social change.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

Review of Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies: Activism in the GirlZone by Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2008.

This essay examines the origins and initial objectives of the Comedy Club—an after school comic theatre program that develops an original sketch comedy show annually at Colonel E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton, Maryland—along with the value of university-middle school collaborations. Throughout, I document administrative issues, some associated with university collaborations and others endemic to the public school system and the impact this collaboration had on my own research and teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park. Employing a feminist ethnography as my method, this discussion draws from interviews, participant-observation methods, and first-hand involvement to examine how this program is efficacious for students, the school district, the university and community at large.

This article uses James Paul Gee's distinction between acquisition and learning to consider the context of GED tutoring in a correctional facility. It draws on the notion of performance, as defined in Judith Butler's work and in queer theory, to consider the ways that literacy and Identity are performed in the space of the prison. Arguing that Butler's broader definition of performance, while helpful, reads identity out of literacy, the article proposes a notion of transgender literacy that shows how the confluence of "distance and "similarity" can offer a useful way of rereading literacy in institutional spaces.

Review of Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison by Paula C. Johnson. New York: NYU Press, 2004. Paperback $19.00.

Review of Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings 200 to the Present, Second edition, ed. by Judith A. Scheffler, foreward by Tracy Huling. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002. 329 pp., $18.95

This article discusses a service-learning project for an English Composition class, focusing on the theme of incarcerated women. Through class projects, which included a book drive and research for the group Prison Watch, the students and teacher learned to negotiate the tricky demands of audience and worked to develop a new model of successful service learning.