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June 2018

  1. “A New Genus”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminization of Elocution
    Abstract

    Mary Wollstonecraft is significant figure in the development of women’s literature yet her importance in the evolution of rhetoric has yet to be fully recognized. Relatively little recognition has been accorded her work The Female Reader. Yet that text is the first elocutionary text written by a women, specifically for women, and which includes numerous selections from writing by woman authors. As such, Wollstonecraft’s work initiated a place for women in the influential and enduring elocutionary movement. The Female Reader also inspired other authors, female and male, to continue the production of elocutionary manuals intended for women throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus Wollstonecraft and her Female Reader were significant in establishing a tradition of women’s participation in rhetorical theory and pedagogy.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2018.0010
  2. The Influence of Textual Cues on First Impressions of an Email Sender
    Abstract

    The present study experimentally manipulated the gender of an email sender, closing salutation, and sending mode (i.e., email sent via desktop computer/laptop as compared with email sent via a mobile device) to determine if these specific cues influence first impressions of the sender’s competence, professionalism, positive affect, and negative affect. Although no effect of sending mode was found, closing salutation influenced perceptions; females were viewed as less professional when using “Thanks!” as opposed to using “Best,” “Thank you,” or no salutation. However, in general, females were viewed as more professional than males, and “Thanks!” elicited perceptions of positive affect.

    doi:10.1177/2329490617723115

May 2018

  1. From Hysteria to Hormones and Back Again: Centuries of Outrageous Remarks About Female Biology
    Abstract

    In this persuasion brief I suggest how rhetorical-historical insights into the scientific and medical discourses of female hormones are relevant to current organizational and institutional diversity initiatives, especially those that aim to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Many of the examples I cite in the essay make specific reference to hormones, and as I argue, hormones often serve an enthymematic function in these expert arguments, both past and present. More specifically, I argue, discourses about hormones allow people who do not possess any scientific expertise to make authoritative-sounding claims that resonate with popular beliefs about women’s bodies and brains. Uncovering these historical tendencies in scientific and medical discourse offers new perspectives on the obstacles that women face in today’s workplaces. In this persuasion brief I aim to discuss these perspectives in ways that make the findings of rhetorical-historical research relevant to the many different stakeholders, leaders, and policymakers who are currently working to help women rise to leadership positions in many different fields.

    doi:10.5744/rhm.2018.1004
  2. The Indecorous Objects of Social Transformation
    Abstract

    “When we consider the range of transgender restroom placards, that there is no standard design evidences a kind of unstable assemblage that itself represents the social change currently underway concerning LGBTQ rights. For sure, there is still no consensus on these changes”

  3. Rev. of Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric edited by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Meyers, and Rebecca Jones
  4. Rev. of Cámara Retórica: Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition by Alexandra Hidalgo
  5. Remonstrative Agitation as Feminist Counterpublic Rhetoric
  6. Changing the Landscape: Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, Five Years Later
  7. Louise Clappe and The Shirley Letters: Indirect Feminist Rhetoric and the Contradictions of Domestic Space
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Louise Clappe and The Shirley Letters: Indirect Feminist Rhetoric and the Contradictions of Domestic Space, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/80/5/collegeenglish29641-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce201829641

April 2018

  1. “Delightfully Feminine, Yet Practical”: Circumlocution in Vietnam-Era Recruitment Brochures
    Abstract

    During the Vietnam era, the military recruited women by appropriating feminist language and simultaneously employing depictions of traditionally conservative feminine ideals. Using a rhetoric of circumlocution to yoke together these two contradictory images, military recruitment rhetoric ultimately reinstated women’s subordinate status.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1424477
  2. Reaching Backyards and Board Rooms: Strategies for Circulation that ‘Change the Conversation’
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.59236/rjv18i1pp102-131
  3. Research as Care: A Shared Ownership Approach to Rhetorical Research in Trauma Communities
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.59236/rjv18i1pp71-101

March 2018

  1. A Tightrope of Perfection: The Rhetoric and Risk of Black Women’s Intellectualism on Display in Television and Social Media
    Abstract

    Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1392037
  2. Discorsi eloquenti da Ulisse a Obama e oltre di A. Pennacini
    Abstract

    Reviews 213 concerned primarily with prescriptive correctness. He traces pedagogies that have used these ideas at various times in western schools, but his biggest con­ tribution is examining theories that challenge this paradigm. For example, feminist stylistics, he contends, challenges the rules of convention. Pointing to the works of Cixous and Kristeva, Ray shows that textual structure and organization should be challenged as points of gendering stylistic choice. The last two chapters are on researching style and teaching style. Ray's chapter on researching style shows that there are still major gaps in the research; for instance, he notes that there have been no ethnographic studies on writing styles to date. Additionally, he describes the use of quantitative methods used to describe style, and data mining to describe stylistic featu­ res of writing. Beyond this, there are opportunities for research in rhetorical analysis, stylistics, and discourse analysis. The concluding chapter argues for better teaching strategies in the classroom. The fear is that teaching style will not liberate a curriculum but rather enslave it to prescriptive grammar study. Ray assuages these fears with suggestions for incorporating style in the classroom to develop writing, including ways in which classical rhetoric informs writing instruction in current theory. He invites interdisciplinary work in the classroom to discuss style from the perspective of various dis­ course communities enabling students to see diverse approaches to compo­ sition. Ray ends the chapter on a hopeful note: "For those teachers who adopt them, these guiding principles bring style out of the shadows of col­ lege writing classes, helping to improve students' writing while also per­ haps increasing their satisfaction in producing academic texts required for their success" (p. 219). A significant issue with Ray's book is that it does not quite live up to its lofty claim that "an in-depth, historical, and theoretical understanding of style helps teachers make writing more satisfying and relevant to stu­ dents" (p. 5). This may be true, but the topic is immense, and this is a rather slim volume. At best, Style is, as the title suggests, an introduction. The chapters do establish a framework for style, but they are not genuinely indepth discussions. However, Brian Ray's Style is an invitation for scholars to fill in those gaps, and I believe this book paves the way helpfully for future research. Robert L. Lively Arizona State University A. Pennacini, Discorsi eloquenti da Ulisse a Obama e oltre, Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta, Alessandria: Edizioni dell Orso, 2017 (I ed., 2015), 592 pp. ISBN 9788862746090. Adriano Pennacini é stato uno dei precursori, nell'universitá italiana, del tentativo di intrecciare lo studio delTantica técnica retorica con gli studi classici e con le nuove discipline della comumcazione. Presidente della 214 RHETORICA International Society for the History of Rhetoric dal 1991 al 1993, ha affidato a un corposo volume un 'eloquente' saggio del suo método di analisi della comunicazione persuasiva, che spazia dalla prima 'retorica' omerica fino a quella del (penúltimo) Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e comprende nell'oltre del titolo un esempio della origínale eloquenza di Jorge Bergoglio, papa Francesco. Raccolte di discorsi non mancano nelle biblioteche degli studiosi di retorica. Attingendo alia rinfusa in quella personale (assolutamente parziale e selettiva), posso ricordare: F. Sallustio, Belle parole. I grandi discorsi della storia dalla Bibbia a Paperino, Milano: Bompiani 2004 (anche in questo caso, una diacronicitá quasi esaustiva); G. Pedullá (cur.), Parole al potere. Discorsi politici italiani, Milano: Rizzoli, 2011; C. Ellis, S. Drury Smith (eds.), Say it Plain. A Century of Great African American Speeches, New York-London: The New Press, 2005; C.M. Copeland, Farewell Goodspeed. The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time, New York: Harmony Books, 2003; C. Knorowski (ed.), Gettysburg Replies. The World Respond to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Guilford, Connecticut: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Raccolte importanti (e ne ho elencate davvero pochissime fra le tante circolanti nelle varié parti del mondo), che offrono testi accompagnati spesso da riflessioni e inquadramenti generali, ma che difficilmente si prefiggono e realizzano lo scopo che ha avuto in mente Pennacini nel raccogliere discorsi anti­ chi e moderni accompagnati ciascuno da prove di analisi: quello, cioé, di«mostrare la durata...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2018.0022
  3. Book Review: Hidalgo’s Cámara Retórica
    Abstract

    “Hidalgo’s unique video book addresses feminist filmmaking professionals and students of rhetoric and composition as she argues that moving images made by rhetoricians are teachable, publishable, and tenure-worthy projects.”

  4. Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies
    Abstract

    Book Review| March 01 2018 Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies. By Rebecca S. Richards. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015; pp. vii + 231. $90.00 cloth. Tiara R. Na’puti Tiara R. Na’puti University of Colorado Boulder Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 196–199. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0196 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tiara R. Na’puti; Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 196–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0196 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0196
  5. Spectators, Sponsors, or World Travelers? Engaging with Personal Narratives of Others through the Afghan Women’s Writing Project
    Abstract

    This article studies the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and proposes three conceptual tools for examining the ways readers and editors of digital storytelling projects interact with writers and texts. The author advances discussions of personal narrative and the role this form of writing plays in transnational feminism and forms of humanitarian activism that increasingly take place online. Digital storytelling projects effectively circulate these personal accounts, but they benefit from scholarship that advises self-critical approaches to representing their subjects.

    doi:10.58680/ce201829540

February 2018

  1. Community Resistance, Justice, and Sustainability in the Face of Political Adversity
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.59236/rjv17i3pp1-6
  2. Understanding Intersectional Resistance Practices in Online Spaces: A Pedagogical Framework
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.59236/rjv17i3pp37-56
  3. Strong, Black, and Woman: Examining Self-Definition and Self-Valuation as Black Women’s Everyday Rhetorical Practices
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.59236/rjv17i3pp7-36

January 2018

  1. Toward a Feminist Food Rhetoric
    Abstract

    In 2012 The New York Times’s “Ethicist” column hosted a public writing contest, asking participants to defend eating meat. The contest sparked controversy due to its panel of judges—all white men. Analyzing this case study and the debate it catalyzed—a dynamic conversation about the problem of yoking animal ethics expertise to white masculine authority—issues calls for a feminist food rhetoric. Applying such an analytical lens illustrates both who may address food with authority and how such power is cultivated from gender stereotypes.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1395270
  2. Embodying Turing’s Machine: Queer, Embodied Rhetorics in the History of Digital Computation
    Abstract

    Although Alan Turing has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rhetoric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1395268
  3. Intentionally Public, Intentionally Private: Gender Non-Binary Youth on Tumblr and the Queering of Community Literacy Research
    Abstract

    In this essay, I uncover the ways in which the non-binary gender community challenges what we know about privacy and reciprocity within community engaged work. Using my experience as a program coordinator for an LGBTQ youth center, I illustrate the myriad of privacy needs of non-binary gender teens and young adults who expect to be simultaneously both public and private in their online writing on Tumblr. I argue that for the nonbinary gender community on Tumblr, direct contact from the researcher not only may invade their intimate space but also cause physical or emotional harm as many non-binary Tumblr users are underage and participating on Tumblr in secret. Instead, I demonstrate how the study of non-binary gender literacy practices can be done without engaging with or quoting directly from publicly published content, instead favoring an emergent thematic methodology. Additionally, I make a case for a queer methodology which instead seeks to recruit participants in the real world and be invited into their digital community once trust and reciprocity is established should interviews be important for further study.

    doi:10.25148/clj.12.2.009101
  4. Front Matter
    Abstract

    T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

    doi:10.25148/clj.12.2.009097
  5. Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom
    Abstract

    When community literacy partners work to gether with academic organizers, both groups recognize the uncertainties of risk, the importance of trust, and the necessity of clear communication in accomplishing their goals.Likewise, professors who use service learning must help their students negotiate experiences that are often unpredictable or uncomfortable.In both scenarios, conversations that spark reflection, untangle problems, and guide action are vital.These objectives, and their reliance on open, guided conversation, are central to a new offering by mother-daughter team Nel Noddings and Laurie Brooks: Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom.In this book, Noddings, an emerita Professor of Education at Stanford and prominent contributor to feminist care theory, and Brooks, a member of the board of Provident Financial Services and advisory boards for North Carolina State and Rutgers universities, point out that teachers today must help students cultivate critical awareness while navigating a minefield of highly controversial issues such as authority and obedience, religion, race, gender, and socioeconomic class.While Noddings and Brooks intend to target K-12 teachers, administrators, and parents, many community literacy scholars and practitioners will appreciate the ideas the authors suggest that enable their readers to more thoughtfully create room for co-inquiry, conversation, and examining resources across different disciplines and perspectives.Noddings and Brooks' core purpose with this text lies in their dedication to helping students "prepare for active life in a participatory democracy" (2).To achieve this, they insist that adults not shy away from joining forces with students to examine complex and challenging questions.The authors advocate for critical thinking bolstered and emboldened by moral commitment, which, in their words, is "to bring people together-to help them understand each other in the fullness of their humanity" (159).Noddings and Brooks approach this task from an interdisciplinary lens, one that enables them to reach across and through traditional divisions among disciplines, genres, and media.This text provides specific suggestions for educators

    doi:10.25148/fclj.12.2.009111
  6. #StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
    Abstract

    This paper examines the language, literacies, communicative, and rhetorical practices of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The work pays attention to the communication practices of the BLM and Hip Hop generation in its extension of Black and African American language traditions and prior liberation movements in their unapologetic performance of Black chants, Black grammar, phonology, vocabulary, Black fashion and music, to die-ins, hands-up, and the technologization of the movement through social media, Black Twitter, hashtags, and memes. The language and literacies of the Black Lives Matter movement represent diverse identities within Black community, vernacular associated with various economic and educational classes, diaspora, culturally rooted, Hip Hop generations, cis-gendered women, men, as well as LGBTQ and gender non-conforming. In this way, the language and literacies of BLM promote the value of ALL Black lives.

    doi:10.25148/clj.12.2.009099
  7. Mythic Historiography: Refiguring Kenneth Burke’s Deceitful Woman Trope
    Abstract

    Readers of A Rhetoric of Motives often acknowledge Burke’s anti-feminist blind spots, but argue that these blind spots need not negate his larger contributions to rhetorical theory. While true, this claim is also dangerous because it assumes that identifying an argumentative blind spot is tantamount to having worked through all its complexities. This article attempts to work through these complexities via a method of mythic historiography grounded in Burke’s concept of the almost universal. This article demonstrates that Burke organizes his philosophy of modern rhetoric and his concept of identification around a deceitful Woman trope in ways that claim a universality that is actually gendered male. By reimagining the relation of identification and myth in A Rhetoric of Motives this article refigures the deceitful Woman trope in terms of its unassimilability within Burke’s modern philosophy of rhetoric and discusses implications for rhetorical studies.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1278780
  8. Remembering Silence: Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins
    Abstract

    The consensus memory of the 1960 Greensboro student sit-ins suggests that four men were solely responsible for the demonstration. Contrary to that memory is the story of women at Bennett College who began planning the sit-ins in the fall of 1959. This essay uses rhetorics of silence to explore questions about feminist historiography and public memory studies raised by this controversy. In 1960, rather than speaking publicly about their role, Bennett women protected the credibility of the demonstration by taking a position of silence. As time passed, public memories of the event were defined by the four men, and the women’s stories were further suppressed through the processes of commemoration. Studying silence in this context reveals how rhetorical values associated with silence can change over time. Although the Bennett women’s silence began as a temporary tactical choice, their voices were nearly permanently silenced through the processes of commemoration.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1273379

2018

  1. The Rhetorical Stakes of Cure
    Abstract

    This review of Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017) and Eunjung Kim’s Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (2017) shows how both Clare and Kim critique the politics of cure in the U.S. and Korea. Specifically, these texts reveal the (at times) violent ways that cure has been forced on disabled bodies, and unpack longstanding debates within the political, cultural, and medical sectors about eliminating disability at all costs, and refusing cure. Although both works are oriented towards the field of disability studies, this review highlights the intersectional aspects of both texts and the concrete, practical ways that rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers can benefit from this discourse.

  2. Storying Autism
    Abstract

    In this essay, I review three recent monographs: Jordynn Jack’s Autism and Gender , Anne McGuire’s War on Autism , and Melanie Yergeau’s Authoring Autism . Each of these texts centers disability—autism in particular—and in doing so, they highlight the insidious ways in which our cultural, institutional, and personal autism narratives support extant social hierarchies that sideline autistic lives in scholarship and beyond. Central to these three books are issues of rhetorical play, textual narrative, and storying in contemporary autism discourse, so in this essay I aim to tie together these fundamental themes, placing them in conversation with one another. I begin the discussion with a brief overview of the history of autism before drawing from Yergeau, Jack, and McGuire’s texts to explore the lay of the discursive field of autism and forms of rhetorical (and physical) violence that are normalized in autism discourse. Finally, before concluding, I explore what the authors of these texts explicate about the rhetors who take part in a shifting discursive field.

November 2017

  1. Feminist Critique and the Realistic Spirit
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTContemporary debates over the future of critique, feminist or otherwise, tend to neglect if not perpetuate a reliance on the philosophical tradition, with its disdain for the contingent and indifference to local audiences. If critique is to be realistic, as distinguished from realist or antirealist as the philosophical tradition has defined those terms, it must begin by clarifying the nature and extent of this reliance and begin to develop alternatives. Such an idea of critique would begin by questioning received notions of the relationship between theory and practice, which I argue are unduly inflected by philosophical prejudices. Theory should not be understood as a primarily epistemological or methodological enterprise whose task is to justify the basis of critique. Instead, theory should be conceived, with the rhetorical tradition, as a world-creating, first-order practice that gives meaning and significance to the human commons.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.50.4.0589
  2. And Gladly Teach: The Archival Turn’s Pedagogical Turn
    Abstract

    This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729373

October 2017

  1. “A Strong Leadership that Does Not Show”: Ladies Auxiliaries as Women’s First Entrance Points into the Fire Department
    Abstract

    Women first entered East Coast fire departments through forming ladies auxiliary groups, where women provided critical support services—offering assistance at the fire, holding fundraising events for the department, and building community relationships—while maintaining conventional gender roles. Exploring auxiliary work through the lens of collaboration reveals feminist strategies for creating ethos in a highly gendered workplace; this approach for studying the complexities of women’s movement between background and foreground roles opens new avenues for considering women’s navigation of rhetorical barriers in professional spaces.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1355195
  2. “Not the Stereotypical View of the South”
    Abstract

    This article discusses the convergence of the perspectives of literary, gender, and regional studies in the implementation of an oral history project as a service-learning requirement in an upper-level southern women's literature course, providing information about the model and examining learning outcomes as presented through the final projects and student reflections.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-3975463

September 2017

  1. Selections From the ABC 2016 Annual Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico: Teaching Innovations Soaring Like a Flight of Balloons Over Albuquerque
    Abstract

    This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 12 assignments designed to help students increase their online communication skills, conduct professional conferences, use advanced presentation software, develop problem-solving and critical thinking, gain greater awareness of gender effects in communication, and perform community service. These teaching innovations debuted at the 2016 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://salesleadershipcenter.com/research .

    doi:10.1177/2329490617693351
  2. Songs of Our Fathers: Gender and Nationhood at the Liberation of France
    Abstract

    Abstract The experiences of defeat and occupation by Germany and liberation by the Allies wrought considerable gender damage upon France during the Second World War. In this essay, I examine appropriations of “Quand Madelon,” a popular World War I song that reemerged during the early weeks of France’s liberation, arguing that these appropriations offered one discursive resource by which patriots reasserted the manly strength of their nation. By reviving old archetypal notions of eroticized, subservient femininity and tough, virile masculinity, the tunes exerted discipline over “wayward” French women and eased gendered anxieties about the nation’s ability to reclaim its status as a sovereign nation. Courting widespread favor, even among French women, the songs made this gender discipline more palatable by pairing it with visions of a sexualized, civically engaged womanhood.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0385
  3. Brave/r Spaces Versus Safer Spaces for LGBTQ+ in the Writing Center: Theory and Practice at University of Kansas

August 2017

  1. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric, edited by Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones: Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2016. xii + 304 pp. $45.00 (paper).
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1272326
  2. Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Tiffany Kinney Tiffany Kinney University of Utah, Salt Lake City Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (3): 368–370. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tiffany Kinney; Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban. Rhetorica 1 August 2017; 35 (3): 368–370. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368
  3. Writing the Self: Black Queer Youth Challenge Heteronormative Ways of Being in an After-School Writing Club
    Abstract

    Although contexts for writing have shifted in recent decades, traditional views tend to focus on and perpetuate standards-driven practices for “effective” writing. Literacy scholars have demonstrated the rich possibilities of the English language arts, and of queer-inclusive practices, but few have discussed how the writing of queer youth might disrupt heteronormativity and affirm gender and sexual diversity. Merging an expanded view of authentic writing and Yagelski’s (2011) writing as a way of being, this study explores the writing of Ava, Sanavia, and Anika, three Black queer youth who participated in an after-school writing club. This study examines how normalized literacy participation and ways of being are interrupted when queer youth write the self. In other words, participants constructed identities through the experience of writing and not the extent to which the content or form of their writing conformed to convention or what was “acceptable” in school spaces. Findings suggest that the act of writing enabled the participants to navigate and disrupt heteronormativity and traditional writing practices while being who/how they were. These findings contribute to research that seeks to interrupt literacy normativity and calls for restorative literacies aimed at enabling Black queer youth to (re)claim who they are through their writing.

    doi:10.58680/rte201729198

July 2017

  1. Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric: Searching the Negative Spaces in Histories of Rhetoric, Lydia M. McDermott: Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. 182 pages. $80.00 hardcover.
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1318351
  2. Feminist HistoriographyAs If: Performativity and Representation in Feminist Histories of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    The recently diagnosed “broadening imperative” in revisionary historiography is of special concern to feminist historians, for whom critique of traditional methodological presuppositions has been central to the feminist revisionary project. By examining the performative and figurative elements of feminist historiographical discourse, feminist historians and historiographers can both identify sites of feminist rhetorical resistance to traditional presuppositions, and gain an understanding of how feminist revisionary methodologies have been re-assimilated into traditional methodological and rhetorical paradigms.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1317571
  3. Changing Ideographs of Motherhood: Defining and Conscribing Women’s Rhetorical Practices During World War I
    Abstract

    This essay uses Michael McGee’s concept of the ideograph to discuss the ways that <motherhood>was used both by and against women in World War I. Regardless of whether women sided with the peace or the preparedness movements, their participation was defined by their status as mothers (either actual or metaphorical). Their participation was also conscribed by societal and governmental ideals of motherhood, conveyed through a shifting ideographic definition. Women’s rhetorical practices during the war were, therefore, both constrained and defined by notions of motherhood.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1318253
  4. Courting the Abject: A Taxonomy of Black Queer Rhetoric
    Abstract

    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

    doi:10.58680/ce201729160

June 2017

  1. Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories by Tarez Samra Graban
    Abstract

    368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0012
  2. Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise by Laurent Pernot
    Abstract

    370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0013
  3. Haul, Parody, Remix: Mobilizing Feminist Rhetorical Criticism With Video
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2017.03.002
  4. Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science
    Abstract

    Book Review| June 01 2017 Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science. By Risa Applegarth. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014; pp. x + 267. $27.95 paper. Ann George Ann George Texas Christian University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 376–384. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0376 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ann George; Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 376–384. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0376 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0376
  5. Fixating on the Stasis of Fact: Debating “Having It All” in U.S. Media
    Abstract

    Abstract Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer’s coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the “having it all” debate—and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0253

May 2017

  1. The Transcoding of “Women Empowerment” as “Empoderamiento de la Mujer”: a Post-colonial Translation Theory for Transnational Feminist Rhetorics
    Abstract

    In the work of transnational feminist scholars, there is a share interest in investigating the colonial practices that affect women’s lives around the globe. In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1986) Mohanty claims that scholars in the field should “detect (…) colonialist move(s) in the case of a hegemonic first-third world connection in scholarship” (349) in order to recognize the peculiarities of the cultures whose discourses are being created and thus, avoid the universalization and “homogenization of class, race, religious, cultural and historical specificities of the lives of women” (348). In this regard, Dingo touches upon the vital role of translations in the transcoding of arguments: “the way policy makers and development experts <strong>translate</strong> the term gender mainstreaming into policy documents should be <strong>a crucial concern for feminist rhetoritians</strong> because this act of translation demonstrates how arguments shift and change due to economic and geopolitical contexts and thus <strong>shows how power informs rhetorics</strong>” (2012: 31). Dingo´s conceptualization of the term “translation” is ambiguous, sometimes used to refer to “transcoding” (resituate a taken-for-granted term within the same language in order to fit certain ideologies, 31) and other times as the transfer of words from the source language to the target language (104). In this article, I aim to investigate the “transcoding” of the concept "women empowerment" as it is translated from English to Spanish and vice versa with the attempt to “make visible the ways in which all of our knowledge is mediated” (Queen 2008: 486) from the perspective of a post-colonial theory of translation.

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1227