Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

Booher, Amanda K., & Jung, Julie. (Eds.) (2018). Feminist rhetori­cal science studies: Human bodies, posthumanist worlds. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 274. Paperback $45.00.Yergeau, Melanie. (2017). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neuro­logical queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 312. Cloth $104.95, Paperback $27.95.Koerber, Amy. (2018). From hysteria to hormones: A rhetorical history. University Park: Penn State University Press. pp. 264. Cloth $99.95, Paperback $34.95.

Despite significant work on literacy as a situated practice (Brandt; Street; Gee), in the African American community (Banks; Richardson; Young) and in the LGBT community (Alexander; Alexander and Rhodes), only recently have scholars looked at literacy at the intersection of Black and LGBT people. A notable example is Eric Pritchard’s discussion of “literacy normativity” and the multilayered ways in which Black queer literacies function(Darnell). In this multimedia article, the social space I focus on is Washington, DC, Black Gay Pride 2013, where I discussed shade and shade narratives with seven men and one transgender woman. A main finding of this research was that participants typically relied on narrative to illustrate how shade was thrown; in fact, narrative is a necessary component of catching shade. These narratives provide situated examples of throwing shade while foregrounding the subjectivities or backstories that give throwing shade traction. In this way, throwing shade as a part of a larger “fierce literacy” talks back to literacy normativity and speaks to Black queer people’s relationships with one another, with language, and with the larger culture.

Business communication instructors can improve their own instruction about networking online given further understanding of the gender gap among LinkedIn users. An analysis of the rhetoric of magazine advice articles finds gendered differences in the representation of LinkedIn to readers. Examining how publications talk about LinkedIn leads to guidance on how instructors can discuss LinkedIn and gender in the classroom. The article suggests instructors can modify or create assignments to address potential gender usage patterns.

“With such a small, affluent, and diverse group of readers, a tiny circulation, and an obvious absence on myriad bookstore and grocery store shelves, Bitch Magazine would likely be less effective in its goal of responding to popular culture using a radical feminist lens.”

“In the aftermath of Minassian’s attack, women once again raised their voices. They offer insight into their experiences. They remind the commentariat that we’ve already had this conversation before, that we’ve warned about the dangers of online communities that radicalize aggrieved men and champion acts of gender violence.”

“While sexism is a backdrop for diverse women’s professional narratives in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle’s collection Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition, Kirsti Cole and Holly Hassel’s edited collection, Surviving Sexism in Academia, brings sexism uncompromisingly into the foreground as contributors define, explore and strategize responses to sexism in higher education.”

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudéry's engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

This article situates reproductive applications as an emerging “do-it-yourself” health technology in need of feminist technical communication action. The authors focus on Glow, a fertility and period tracking application, and argue that though this application promises user’s self-empowerment over their reproductive health, individual agency is often reduced. The authors consider how technical communication scholars can intervene in fertility and period tracking applications through a redesign of how consent is obtained when collecting user’s personal health information.

The #MeToo movement unveiled a shifting testimonial landscape available to victims of sexual assault, one that was able to apprehend the attention of vast public audiences unlike other protests before it. Through an analysis of published #MeToo tweets and public discussion of them, this essay argues that what happened during #MeToo reveals a feminist deployment of megethos. Theorizing what I term feminist megethos through the lens of listing extends theories of magnitude beyond the idea of cultivating coherence or amounting excessive detail, toward a theory that captures how megethos can puncture pervasive yet normalized attitudes that constrain efforts for justice.

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

Over the course of my career, I have been privileged to review a number of single-volume surveys of the discipline of rhetoric, including Theresa Enos’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition in the 1990s and Thomas O. Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric in the 2000s. Now, at the close of the 2010s, I am pleased to consider Michael MacDonald’s Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, which – although not an encyclopedia – offers an encyclopedic perspective on the discipline a decade and a half after Sloane’s volume appeared. Like its predecessors, MacDonald’s volume ably documents the breadth and advance of rhetorical scholarship.Comprising the editor’s introduction and 60 individual essays, the Handbook spans myriad topics through millennia, from the early theorizing and speechmaking of the ancient Mediterranean to the digital media distinguishing the twenty-first century. MacDonald divides the volume into six periods of rhetorical study and practice: Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment, and Modern and Contemporary. As this distribution suggests, the collection privileges a chronological, historically centered approach to the discipline, which MacDonald refers to in his introduction as “the diachronic ‘journey’ ” (2). Nonetheless, he does not offer “a teleological narrative tracing the evolution – or devolution – of a fixed, unitary ‘classical’ rhetorical tradition over the arc of centuries,” nor does he posit rhetoric as a “monolithic cultural institution.” In his words, he wishes to portray “a protean, chameleonic art whose identity, purpose, and significance are contested in every period” (3).To highlight common concerns across historical periods, MacDonald commissioned multiple chapters on similar topics, forming what he refers to as “the synchronic ‘network.’ ” For example, chapters on rhetoric and politics appear in all six sections of the volume, while discussions of rhetoric and law are found in four. He describes the volume’s design as a “double structure”: “a chronological history with thematically interlocking chapters” that enables “the Handbook to be read serially, by historical period, as well as topically, by subject matter.” Touting the breadth of scholarship assembled in the volume, MacDonald notes that the scholarship assembled represents “30 academic disciplines and fields of social practice” (2).Ever the self-aware rhetorician, MacDonald explicitly identifies his intended audience: “readers approaching rhetoric for the first time” (2). More specifically, he describes four varieties of readers: “undergraduate and graduate students,” “university instructors,” “advanced scholars of rhetoric searching for historical context and new points of departure for research projects,” and “scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences looking for points of entry into the field of rhetoric.” He also calls attention to nine features intended “to make the Handbook useful and accessible” (3), including translations of foreign language passages, a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing of chapters. Furthermore, he thoughtfully reviews the history of definitions of his key term, rhetoric, before offering his own: “I shall define rhetoric (nebulously enough) as the art of effective composition and persuasion in speech, writing, and other media” (5).The 60 individual chapters comprising the Handbook are – with few exceptions – consistently well written, engaging, and easily accessible for the audiences MacDonald identifies without being simplistic, pedantic, or stale. This, in itself, is a praiseworthy editorial achievement. The high quality of writing that distinguishes this volume is not surprising, considering the impressive team of scholars MacDonald enlists, whom he describes as “leading rhetoric experts from 12 countries” (2).In addition to lauding the caliber of writing that distinguishes this volume, I call attention to the healthy variety of inventional approaches the Handbook’s contributors employ. Some provide strong, yet traditionally crafted surveys of the topic at hand – such as Heinrich Plett’s treatment of “Rhetoric and Humanism” – while others emphasize the scholarship concerning the topic, often reviewing the major controversies or points of difference within this body of work. Arthur Walzer’s “Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric” ably exemplifies the latter category. Several offer exhortations concerning the direction of future scholarship. For example, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford in “Rhetoric and Feminism” call enthusiastically for further feminist rhetorical practice and scholarship. “Such feminist interventions into traditional rhetorical principles,” they conclude, “provide opportunities for new ways of being rhetorical, of showing respect, making commitments, sharing power, and distinguishing ourselves as human” (595). Likewise, in his chapter on Renaissance pedagogy, Peter Mack pleads for “many more local studies, which should be more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed than this selective survey” (409). Some contributors reflect on the rhetorical implications of producing rhetorical scholarship, such as Angela Ray, whose “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States” considers the rhetoric of activism and the highly rhetorical nature of scholarship about it. At least one scholar, John O. Ward, uses his chapter, “The Development of Medieval Rhetoric,” to introduce an important but previously unstudied manual or summa that “enables us to peer into that dark arena and throw a little light upon the rhetoric of the period” (321).Predictably, the most memorable chapters provide reliable introductory material for the nonexpert reader while delivering sophisticated insights for those more knowledgeable of the topic. My favorites include Jeffrey Walker’s account of ancient Greek “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in which he lucidly details the two primary critical positions toward poetry that distinguish ancient Greek culture; Laurent Pernot’s essay covering “Rhetoric and the Greco-Roman Second Sophistic,” which succinctly demonstrates the value of the progymnasmata and elegantly complicates the “decline of rhetoric” narrative fed many of us in graduate seminars in years gone by; and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Rhetoric and Race in the United States,” which frames future scholarship in this area and issues a memorable call for innovative research. Less successful chapters feature either highly specific explorations of specialized topics or relatively partisan discussions of winners and losers amongst the scholarship they review.MacDonald’s cross-referencing, which he identifies as one of the special features of the volume, deserves recognition. Clearly, he worked meticulously to demonstrate the links among the many diverse essays he commissioned, and both the novice and the expert will find this feature enlightening. As I sampled the essays featured in the volume, MacDonald’s cross- referencing facilitated a lively conversation among the contributors, both those I know personally and by reputation and those previously unfamiliar to me. This multivocal symposium, which informs the entire volume, is one of its unexpected gifts.As mentioned at the outset, MacDonald favors a historical approach. In fact, 75 percent of the Handbook’s chapters focus on pre-twentieth-century topics. This strong emphasis on rhetoric’s past aligns with his own scholarly inclinations and those of the readership of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an ancient art, after all, which treasures its roots, and historically rhetorical scholars have viewed their study through the lens of time. Nonetheless, this historical focus can be seen as a limitation, particularly considering the breadth suggested by the volume’s title and the readers he posits. MacDonald himself reveals his inability to cover all topics, particularly recent scholarship, noting, “Gaps and lacunae abound in every period, especially in the modern and contemporary section, which lacks contributions on postcolonial rhetoric, disability rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, queer rhetoric, and countless other burgeoning other areas of inquiry.” I also note that although the volume’s title suggests a treatment of the subject that expands beyond the rhetoric of the West, the Handbook, in MacDonald’s words, “is limited to the study of rhetoric in Europe and North America” (4). To be fair, as he states, “no book or series of books could hope to provide a speculum, or panoptic survey, of the realm of rhetoric” (3), but nonetheless I might respectfully suggest a slightly different balance between the historical and the contemporary, the West and other world traditions.Ultimately, of course, it is prudent to focus upon what such a volume delivers, rather than what it omits. MacDonald’s Handbook provides five dozen essays of strikingly good quality that are useful to students and scholars alike. Furthermore, the care with which he has arrayed and contextualized these essays significantly enhances their utility. The value of the Handbook quickly became apparent to me, for even before I began the review, I was already employing its chapters in my teaching and research. This, to me, is the best indication of such a volume’s ultimate worth.I began by suggesting that MacDonald’s Handbook demonstrates the recent progress of rhetorical scholarship, and the primary goal of this review has been to build this case. Yet while sampling the Handbook’s chapters, I am reminded of the elusive nature of “the state of the art.” For example, when Malcom Heath states in the “further reading” section of his chapter on “Rhetoric and Pedagogy” that “There is no satisfactory account of Greek rhetorical education in the classical period” (82), Jeffrey Walker’s The Genuine Teachers of This Art immediately comes to mind. Capturing any field of study in a single volume is a worthy goal vexed by page restrictions and the passage of time. Given these inevitable limitations, MacDonald has performed admirably, and I am grateful for his impressive contribution to our field.

Background: This study adopted a corpus-linguistics approach to investigate the gender effects in students' technical and scientific writing. Specifically, we analyzed whether gender influenced how males and females used adverbs (e.g., very, really, and definitely) and passive voice (e.g., the article was published in the journal). The overuse of both adverbs and passive voice has been associated with poor writing clarity and concision. Literature review: Previous research works on gender effects in language have been mixed. Since these are all the essential elements of effective technical communication, teachers need to know what gender effects might exist. Research questions are as follows: 1. Does gender influence the student writers' use of adverbs? 2. Does gender influence the student writers' use of passive voice? Methodology: The sample included 87 writers (46 females and 41 males) who contributed to a 757,533-word corpus. Researchers analyzed 12,111 instances of adverbs and 4,732 instances of passive voice within a variety of technical texts. Results/discussion: Female writers used significantly more adverbs as well as more additive/restrictive, degree, and stance adverbs than expected. Male writers used more linking and manner adverbs than expected. Female writers also used significantly more passives, particularly passive verbs associated with reporting findings and interpretation. In contrast, male writers associated with passive verbs used to describe methods and analyses. Overall, the results suggested that females and males used the same style markers to fulfill different rhetorical functions.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudery’s engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudery enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudery’s Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudery’s feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

424 RHETORICA balances well her recovery of nineteenth-century women's cookbooks with a critique of "the pervasive social ordering system" of taste in the nine­ teenth century (p. 4). Offering the first book-length study of women's cookbooks as rhetorical texts, Walden makes a valuable contribution to scholarly conversations in interdisciplinary studies of food and food his­ tory, feminist histories of rhetoric, and the history of nineteenth-century American rhetorics. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, eds. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pp. ISBN 978904365100; David R. Carlson, ed. Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel. Cambridge, UK: Modem Humanities Research Association, 2018. 345 pp. ISBN 9781781886205 After a brief and unsuccessful career as a diplomat, Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) retreated to his estates and his library and to two life-long scholarly endeavors, the enrichment of the English language and the proper mode of national governance. The former is a task of some interest: it has its flowering a half century later in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney. But it is the latter task that is the subject of the two books now under review, one an edition per se, the other an edition and a monograph welded together. Both books publish three dialogues, Pasquill the Playne, Of That Knowlage Which Maketh a Wise Man, and The Defense of Good Women, and one treatise, The Doctrinal of Princes. Only Carson includes The Image of Governance, a book on the duty of kingship in the form of an idealized biography of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus. Between these two books, published virtually simultaneously, there is obviously a great deal of overlap, a circumstance that permits us to reflect on the state of academic publishing as well as on the optimal means of editing and con­ textualizing printed Tudors texts. Before turning to this task, however, we need to say something about the works themselves in the context of the humanist revival in England. A work in translation from the Greek, The Doctrinal of Prince permits Sullivan and Walzer to address the state of learning in Tudor England and to underline the remarkable fact that Elyot's translation may well have been the first directly from the Greek. That without the benefit of any schooling Elyot should undertake the task says a great deal both about him and about the flowering of English scholarship in the Tudor Age. Elyot's focus on the accuracy of his translation is salutary as well. In the first edition, he rendered the Greek "and that they may suppose howe to counsaile for their weal than themselves." In the second edition, this is revised to "that thei maie suppose that you canst counsaile them better tor their weale Reviews 425 than thei can them selfes," a more accurate rendering of the Greek, and a tribute to Elyot's meticulous concern. Despite a concern for translation, rhetorical style is less a focus of Sullivan and Walzer than genre. The Doctrinal of Princes is identified as an Isocratian parainesis, advice to a young prince on proper royal behavior. Its structure is simple, an introduction designed to lay down precepts for monarchs followed by the precepts themselves followed by a short epi­ logue, resembling a peroration. The advice is deliberately not specific. Here is a sample admonition: "Haue no lasse dominion or rule ouer they selfe, than ouer other" (Sullivan and Walzer, 104). This and its fellow admo­ nitions so smack of Polonius's sententiousness that one wonders why Elyot felt compelled to reach back to ancient Greece to retrieve it; one wonders, that is, until one realizes that Elyot was living in the reign of a monarch with a strong tendency to ignore good advice. The genres of two of Elyot's dialogues are a topic of debate. Is Pasquill the Playne modeled on Platonic dialogues, or on later ones by Lucian? Sullivan and Walzer opt for the latter on two grounds: Elyot recommended Lucian in the Governour and he characterized Pasquill as "mery." Although many of Lucian's dialogues can be characterized as...

Reviews Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 In the opening line of Tasteful Domesticity, Sarah Walden notes, "Taste is an elusive concept" (p. 1). It refers to both a physical sense and a theoret­ ical concept, an individual preference and a cultural standard. Taste was also central to the empiricist philosophies and belletristic rhetorics that informed nineteenth-century American rhetorical theory. Although such theoretical discussions of taste were the province of men, Walden argues that American women in the late eighteenth through early twentieth centu­ ries engaged publicly in discourses of taste in their cookbooks. Walden reveals an evolution of taste discourse through the long nine­ teenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era with which Walden's research begins, taste discourse contributed to the proj­ ect of nation building (p. 28). Engaging in this discourse, women cookbook authors in the early republic emphasized what they represented as distinctly American virtues such as independence and frugality. Moving into the mid­ nineteenth century, discourses of taste would continue to emphasize virtue while they were further linked to Christian morality and sentimental rhetoric (p. 53). Victorian-era domestic experts emphasized and performed the role of the "true woman" in teaching and maintaining the tastes and morals of the home—and, by extension, the nation. With the rise of Progressivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prescriptions of taste would be grounded in scientific standards, and progressive-era women participating in cooking school and home economics movements sought to professionalize women's domestic work by aligning it with science. This narrative of an evolving discourse of taste, however, is not the central focus of Walden's argument. Although Tasteful Domesticity certainly offers a macrohistory of over a century of women's domestic writing, Walden's analysis reveals domestic writing as a complex and multivalent rhetorical practice that resists easy narratives. For example, readers may be surprised by Walden's inclusion of the southern antebellum cookbook The Virginia Housewife in Chapter 1: "Taste and Virtue: Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic." Unlike the other cookbook authors discussed in this chapter, Virginia Housewife author Mary Randolph refers to taste only as a sensory perception and not as a cultural standard. Walden argues that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 4, pp. 422-437. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.374.422 Reviews 423 this was common in southern antebellum cookbooks (pp. 48-49). Thus, the Virginia Housewife may seem to fit better in Chapter 3: "Taste and Region: The Constitutive Function of Southern Cookbooks," where Walden examines other antebellum southern cookbooks. However, by including Randolph's text in Chapter 1, Walden complicates her argument about early nine­ teenth-century female cookbook writers' engagement in taste discourse as a nation-building rhetorical activity. In antebellum southern cookbooks (and like the republican mother associated with northern states), the southern woman played a role in the civic progress of the region through her manage­ ment of the home (p. 49). However, in the antebellum south, management of the home also included management of slave labor. Thus, Walden concludes that Randolph's Virginia Housewife "requires one to face the difficult truth that while discourses of taste serve republican virtue, they also govern those disenfranchised by its practice" (p. 52). The inclusion of Randolph's text in Chapter 1 reveals the complicated issues of identity and power lurking within discourses of taste. Throughout her analysis, Walden examines the ways women's cookbooks contributed to ideologies of nationality, class, race, region, and gender. For example, dur­ ing the Victorian era, women's participation in taste discourse reified a gen­ der ideology that implicitly defined "true woman" as white and middle class, and these demarcations of gender, race, and class would persist throughout the nineteenth century. During the...

Previous studies have noted the difficulties students have in understanding and adapting to professional workforce policies, especially mobile device usage and e-etiquette. This study focuses on determining how closely students and working professionals align in their perceptions of appropriate mobile phone usage during business meetings. After comparing the 476 student responses from our survey with a previous study, we found that student and professional perceptions aligned frequently; however, gender, age, and year in school influence student perceptions. The article concludes with suggestions for teaching and future research.

For decades, sexual violence prevention and sexual consent have been a recurrent topic on college campuses and in popular media, most recently because of the success of the #MeToo movement. As a result, institutions are deeply invested in communicating consent information. This article problematizes those institutional attempts to teach consent by comparing them to an alternative grounded in queer politics. This alternative information may provide a useful path to redesigning consent information by destabilizing categories of gender, sexuality, and even consent itself.

Equal rights remain a fantasy in the United States. In 2017, President Trump rolled back the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order made by President Obama, an order that ensured busines...

Given the barriers for transgender people to access affordable gender-transition care, online environments have witnessed a rise in user-generated instruction sets providing direction on the self-administration of hormone therapy. These ethical forms of tactical technical communication demonstrate the need to consider a new materialist approach to queer theory, which refuses to align queer agency with stable identities. Drawing directly from these user-generated instructions, this article articulates a theoretical framework for queer, tactical technical communication.

Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor united most workers regardless of craft or trade. They also organized African American workers and women. This essay uncovers how the Knights maintained unity by analyzing speeches given at their annual conventions from 1885-1890. Leaders defined male Knights as chivalric, self-sacrificing, and battle-tested. After identifying the elements of the rhetoric of knighthood, I then explain how the rhetoric offered only ironic inclusion to white women and excluded Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. This argument builds rhetorical scholarship on inclusion and exclusion in social movements by theorizing its partial and ironic modes.

Contrary to current scholarship in technical communication, which places the first women technical writers in the period of 1641–1700 AD, the first technical documents were written by women in 2400 BCE—eight centuries earlier. Enheduanna—the first woman writer and the first nonanonymous author ever identified—wrote many of the period’s great poems, including A Hymn to Inanna. Her work calls into question our discipline’s belief that persuasive writing began with Homer and was conceptualized largely by men. This fact has the potential to completely revise the history of both technical and persuasive writing, and women’s role in that history.

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AbstractWhile scholars rightly question exaggerated claims for the democratizing potential of digital archives, this essay argues they facilitate civic participation that rhetoricians should encourage further via our pedagogies of public memory. I advance this argument through analysis of four LGBTQ sites: the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, ACT UP New York Records, Arizona Queer Archives, and Digital Transgender Archive. Engagement with these sites is fruitful for exploring archival participation with respect to preserving the past and advancing claims about LGBTQ lives in the present and future.

In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke wrote that rhetorical style is nothing more than ingratiation—an attempt to gain approval by saying the right thing in the right context. Marie Lund’s commendable goal in An Argument on Rhetorical Style is to argue beyond this understanding and achieve a greater conceptual consensus on style for rhetorical scholars and critics. Lund does this by developing her own concept of “constitutive style,” making style valuable as an aesthetic aspect of rhetoric, a deliberate rhetorical strategy, and an analytical category comprising communicative actions, identity constructions, and social influence. She achieves this lofty goal by re-theorizing rhetorical style, exhibiting skillful stylistic analyses in selected popular and social contexts, examining the concept of style from historical eras including the postmodern, and analyzing style from several critical perspectives. This rich and important work provides a fresh, appropriate and comprehensive framework for scholars to analyze rhetorical style from textual, interactional, social and theoretical angles. Lund invokes and engages historically with accounts of style from the classical Greek and Roman periods to the present, and does not disappoint in synthesizing these traditions before creating her transcendent “constitutive style” contribution.Lund’s book is separated into two parts—“Rhetorical Style as a Critical Concept” and “Critical Perspectives.” Three chapters are dedicated to each part. The goal of these chapters is to make style “both powerful and useful in line with other concepts in the practical and critical disciplines of rhetoric” (11). Lund argues that style needs to be re-theorized in order to accomplish this goal and introduces an expansive dialogue between research traditions in order to do so. By separating the book into these sections, Lund illuminates previously fragmented analyses of rhetorical style and is able to bring a synthesized framework to focus for the critic. She begins by covering the range of definitions of style since antiquity and explores the Sophistic treatment of style as constitutively inventive, transformational, and performative. She then guides the reader through some of the earliest etymologies of style (stylus), as well as the modern conceptions of “Style as Dress” and “Style as Man.” She describes these historical and modern definitions of style in precise detail and explains how some of them have retained analytical utility while others fall short. For example, although she sees all three conceptions of style (“Style as Dress,” “Style as Man,” and her “Constitutive Style”) as viable formations in shaping our current perceptions of style, she doesn’t view them as equally effective. She draws on Gerard A. Hauser’s view that rhetoric is not only a strategic process but also a “social practice which constructs a reality” (49). Moreover, she argues that style constitutes our social relations, moral actions, identity constructions, and worldviews. She rejects the simplicity of the topos “Style as Dress,” which characterizes style as a rhetorical ornament that dresses thought. Although Lund recognizes the aestheticizing aspect of style as worthwhile and viable for criticism, she opposes the fundamental separation of style from thought inherent in rhetoric’s five classical canons: invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. A “Style as Dress” reduction ignores the inventive nature of style and the notion that all five canons can operate constitutively. Moreover, she rejects the presently loose versions of “Style as Man,” which convey the identity of the speaker as purely constituted through language.Instead, Lund proposes a re-theorization of style as “rhetorical language that constructs a social practice and may be turned into particular rhetorical strategies,” depending upon “the particulars of the rhetorical situation, and also, to some extent, the frame and focus of the critic” (50). It is here where Lund argues for an official third topos—“Style as Constitutive”—exploring the inventive side of constitutive rhetoric and how invented styles are ultimately performed. She supports her overall argument by weaving relevant and robust rhetorical analyses throughout her theoretical elaborations across chapters. For example, after taking stock of the contemporary research of rhetorical figures in chapter two, she analyzes how rhetorical figures function in Danish hip-hop style. She does so to “present rhetorical figures and style as significant analytical concepts that are part of a comprehensive theoretical complex” (86). This analysis is a rich, detailed and cohesive foundation for her analysis of constitutive style as argument. She includes rhetorical devices such as figures of speech and metaphor and re-conceptualizes them beyond mere ornament, substitution or value-addition. These views range from the classical to the postmodern, and Lund is able to admirably rise above them and bring clarity to the conceptual ambiguity concerning style and rhetorical devices. By drawing upon the constitutive function of rhetorical figures, Lund shows that strategic devices can be examined, not only as effective means for persuasion, but also as contributing to the very idea, topic, or style created. This is conveyed in her analysis of the Danish hip-hop style, where rhetorical figures are used strategically as textual and argumentative devices within a systematized cultural style.Lund wraps up Part I by examining the development of style in recent rhetorical criticism, noting equivalence between her constitutive style and the constructions of style brought forth by Barry Brummett and Bradford Vivian. However, Lund invokes an analysis of Danish political style to separate and bolster her own constitutive conception. She examines Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Opening Address on the First Assembly of the Danish Parliament in 2011 to illuminate the amalgamation of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical style. She concludes that Thorning-Schmidt’s style is constitutive of collaboration, creating “the qualities, ethics, and aesthetics of cooperation rhetorically, in its practice” (121). In this way, style is developed as constitutive of rhetorical strategies, essential qualities, and as orientations toward rhetorical situations.Part II of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is dedicated to an elaboration of three critical perspectives that may be adopted when analyzing rhetorical styles: feminine, provocative, and speechwriting. The chapters include critical analyses from the three perspectives. Lund argues for the significance of constitutive style as a theoretical and critical construct, designating provocative style as a critical concept comprising argumentative stylistic devices in an interpretive frame, feminine style as a flawed rhetorical strategy, and speechwriting as dependent on her constitutive framework in order to be analyzed as stylistically constructing meaning, identity and performance at the textual level. Ultimately, Lund is dedicated to enabling the critic with a constitutive topos that recognizes the “rhetorical effects of using style to argumentative and strategic ends” (203). Style is thus constitutive of “so-called substantial qualities such as meaning, ideas, argumentation, political action, cultural values, identity, and gender” (208).Marie Lund has synthesized the work on style in rhetoric and related fields and has added to the tradition her own construct, “constitutive style.” An Argument on Rhetorical Style covers the full range of what is known about rhetorical style and advances the scholarship in admirable, pragmatic and analytical fashion. Future scholars can now adopt this new framework to further engage rhetorical style beyond the feminine, provocative, and speechwriting—something Lund was unable to fully accomplish in this comprehensive work. The limited number of critical perspectives expounded upon in Part II warrants closer attention and further contribution. Overall, the theory and critical application of constitutive style provides scholars from different critical approaches with an important, comprehensive take on rhetorical style.

Patient-OBGYN (obstetrics and gynecology) communication about contraception and reproduction can be fraught with ideological pressures, cultural assumptions, and emotion-based claims and concerns. Specifically, the topic of elective sterilization for women often invokes preconceived notions of femininity and mothering. Based on medical pamphlets and online discussion forums, our analysis reveals how gendered discrepancies exist in medical information about elective sterilization. This persuasion brief aims to invite OBGYNs to understand how cultural and traditional views of gender inform medical decisions and oppress women’s reproductive autonomy. It offers suggestions for OBGYNs, women seeking sterilization, and scholars in the rhetoric of health and medicine.

Ada Metcalf’s 1876 memoir, Lunatic Asylums and How I Became an Inmate of One, is an early feminist articulation of embodied experience and agency. In this article, I develop a socially situated understanding of this memoir’s historical significance through the layering of four types of data onto the archival material: bureaucratic records, genealogical tracing, intertextual tracing, and field observations. I describe each of these forms of data and their contributions to understanding the significance of Ada’s taking back agency over her body through her public argument for women’s control over their own bodies.

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/.