At many levels of the educational system, teachers use Sojourner Truth's speech “Ain't I a Woman” as a powerful example of women's rhetoric. This article examines the politics of privileging one version of the speech. The author makes a call to teachers to teach multiple versions and talk about the politics of transcription, gender, and race.

Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008. 364pp. Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice is a collection of theoretical works and case studies that analyze the “‘alliance’ or ‘connection’ between women and techno...

This article examines the social influences that affect how women perform in a composition course focused on first-year students. We know that society encourages young women to be good girls, but does being a good girl lead to being a good student? Can first-year composition assignments illuminate gender gaps at play in higher education?

Abstract Abraham Lincoln’s 1842 Temperance Address can be understood as an act of cultural criticism delivered in epideictic form in which the young politician demonstrated his leadership ability by presenting his political philosophy. Lincoln exploited the capacious indeterminacy of meaning afforded by the discourse of the flourishing temperance movement to address indirectly problems plaguing the American republic, namely incivility and slavery. Offering only hushed praise for Washington, Lincoln silenced the slaveholding founders so that the sensibilities of a new generation of men could be heard. Lincoln constructed a Whig manhood grounded in ideals of entrepreneurialism and restraint that demonstrated his fitness to lead his party and the Second American Revolution.

Accusations of sexual impropriety have been used against women public speakers at least since the Renaissance, and nineteenth-century America was no exception. In constructing public personae that worked with prevailing gender ideologies, women tried to preserve the appearance of sexual purity. This concern for chastity carried over into fictional representations of women public speakers. While some authors depicted such figures negatively, the three examined here—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances E. W. Harper—all defended the woman public speaker by providing warrants within the narrative structure for her chastity and by giving her a public mission that was appropriately feminine according to nineteenth-century gender ideology. These women authors also provided a utopian moment in their narratives in which the social benefits of allowing their protagonists to speak in public are dramatized. Studying the literary representations of women speakers, in any era, can help to illuminate the cultural milieu in which such women made their way.

This article examines how Black girlhood is constructed through fiction. The following research question guided this study: How do writers represent the heterogeneity of urban teenage girls in school-sanctioned African American young adult literature? Five popular narratives that exemplify the contemporary lives of urban African American female pre/teenage protagonists represent the data. Utilizing a Black feminist epistemological framework coupled with a complementary theory of adolescent identity development, we analyze the symbolic textual representations along with the protagonists’ decision making and situational depictions. We argue that the protagonists’ textual heterogeneity manifests across the texts through four enactments of identity: intellectual, physical, kinship, and sexual. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications for educators and researchers alike.

“Through informal conversations about cooking, women have participated in a practice that has allowed them throughout history to connect with other women and validate their own existence in the domestic sphere.”

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

This study investigates English language learners’ writing strategies with reference to their gender and year of study at a university in Iran. To this end, a writing strategies questionnaire was employed to tap into the memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, social, and affective strategies of 230 participants. Semi-structured interviews with participants were also conducted in addition to the questionnaire. Participants’ perceptions demonstrated no significant differences in writing strategy use for either gender or year of study. Metacognitive and cognitive strategies were found to be the most frequently used strategies by all writers, and both the low- and high-level male and female learner-writers used writing strategies with approximately the same frequency. Interviews identified sociocultural and contextual differences in students of both genders and years of study which reflect the challenges foreign language learner-writers of English face in an academic context. Further research on writing strategies taking more specific variables, task settings, and contexts into consideration is necessary to shed more light on EFL writing strategy use.

In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw attention to interconnections among three critical terms of engagement: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation. Third, we propose an enhanced inquiry model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical work in rhetoric and writing studies.

Book Review| May 01 2010 Review: The Eloquence of Mary Astell, by Christine Mason Sutherland, Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, by Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric, by Jennifer Richards Christine Mason SutherlandThe Eloquence of Mary Astell, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. xxi + 202pp. ISBN 1552381536.Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds. Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 2007. x + 254pp. ISBN 978-0-415-38527-5.Jennifer RichardsRhetoric (The New Critical Idiom), London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 198pp. ISBN 978-0-415-31436-7. Rhetorica (2010) 28 (2): 232–235. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2010.28.2.232 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: The Eloquence of Mary Astell, by Christine Mason Sutherland, Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, by Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric, by Jennifer Richards. Rhetorica 1 May 2010; 28 (2): 232–235. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2010.28.2.232 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. © 2010 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing can be a tool for communicating and learning in content area subjects. This pretest-posttest quasi-experiment examined the effects of instruction in a content area writing framework on students' text quality and ability to use writing to learn. It also examined the effects of possible moderator variables (gender, previous writing achievement) and mediator variables (genre knowledge, approach to writing). A multilevel analysis was conducted with students nested within classes. Instruction significantly increased argument genre knowledge and explanation text quality, but not argument text quality, explanation genre knowledge, or learning during writing. Gender predicted previous writing achievement and posttest argument text quality, but did not interact significantly with instruction. Previous writing achievement strongly affected several posttest measures, but did not interact significantly with instruction. A path analysis supported the theory that instruction affects genre knowledge, which affects text quality, which predicts learning during writing.

232 RHETORICA Christine Mason Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. xxi + 202pp. ISBN 1552381536; Jen­ nifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds., Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 2007. x + 254pp. ISBN 978-0-415-38527-5; Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric (The New Critical Idiom), London and New York: Routledge, 2008.198pp. ISBN 978-0-415-31436-7 If early modern men were educated to speak, then early modern women were educated (if at all) to be silent, and the three books under review add to the still growing pile in which modern feminist historians—educated, of course, to be highly articulate—try to negotiate this difficult and troubling fact. They do so in various ways. Christine Sutherland, for example, presents the learned and prolific Mary Astell (1666-1731) as a remarkable exception to the rule. As she is the first to admit, even those enlightened humanist figures who had argued for female education in the sixteenth century did not go so far as to allow women to speak in public or to argue in print. Rather, they endorsed a silence that was, in Sutherland's words, "the feminine equivalent of the masculine virtue of eloquence" (p. 18). In spite of this cultural discour­ agement, however, and a class position that offered her no privileges to speak of, Mary Astell devoted her life to writing—and publishing—a series of re­ ligious, philosophical, and political works. Sutherland's main justification in presenting her subject as above all else a "practising rhetorician" (p. 53) is her claim that, in the course of her writing career, Astell moved from the relatively private genre of sermo to the more public genre of contentio, these two literary modes being gendered as "feminine" and "masculine" respec­ tively. In terms of Astell's publications—which range from works published in the letter format (such as her—originally private—correspondence with John Norris, published anonymously as Letters Concerning the Love ofGod, or her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, addressed to high-ranking women) to what were effectively treatises addressed to a wider reading public (such as Some Reflections upon Marriage, The Christian Religion, or her political pamphlets), this is not particularly contentious. There are times, however, when I think Sutherland overstates her case. The fact, for example, that Astell adapts her style and tone according to her destined audience—developing a "tender" and "maternal" voice when addressing a specifically female readership, and a more strident, argumentative one for everyone else—certainly demon­ strates a sensitivity to and understanding of decorum on her part, but is not in itself the major contribution to rhetorical theory that is claimed for it. This book also shows a (sometimes explicit) tendency toward self-reflection: that is to say, what makes Astell so remarkable a figure—and the natural choice of subject for a book of this kind—seems to be precisely the wav in which she comes to exemplify the feminist writer (otherwise so absent from the early modern scene) and to mirror the feminist academic who is writing or reading about her. Thus Astell's correspondence with Norris, for Reviews 233 example, is said to be an experience of further education that we might compare with the modern graduate school" (p. 42), and to have the same qualities as most good tutorial relationships" (p. 48); the letter-writing that she cultivated was the early modern equivalent of publishing in "learned journals (p. xx, citing with approval an article by Judith Rice Henderson). In her political pamphlets Astell emerges as the model scholar who "had read all the relevant books and documents, had studied all the arguments, and above all was thoroughly familiar with the historical background" (p. 117). By the end of the book, Astell is presented as being of "benefit" to "modern feminist scholars" precisely because she is "one of the earliest of their kind" (p. 153). This is not in any way to diminish Astell's achievement, of course, but only to raise the concern that, in situations where the reader is invited to identify with the subject in hand, a degree of critical distance might be...

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

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

The article examines the significance of lore in creative writing pedagogy discourse, the problem posed by the historical distinction between teaching craft and drawing out talent in workshops, and the role of social identity as it is rejected, theorized, or ignored in discussions on teaching creative writing. Taking into account students' subjectivity as also constituted by the dynamics of collective identities such as those suggested by the terms gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, the essay offers examples of workshop strategies that encourage dialogic voicing.

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies—inflected by feminist research, new literacy studies, critical theory, and digital media studies—provide teacher-scholars a promising set of strategies for conducting research and for representing students' work and our own scholarship in digital contexts.

This article characterizes the first ten volume years of From the Classroom (FTC), one of three featured columns in Pedagogy. FTC articles, like other Pedagogy articles, showcase the work of scholars representing different ranks, subdisciplines, and institutional levels; unlike regular articles, FTC articles tend to be just 500 to 3,000 words. FTC authors, then, are challenged to raise a specific question or phenomenon by placing it momentarily within a larger theoretical, historical, and conceptual framework. Brockman groups most FTC articles into nine categories: Minding the Margins; Honoring Creative Nonfiction; Understanding Class, Culture, Gender, and Race; Mentoring Preservice Teachers; Incorporating Technology; Constructing Academic Arguments; Teaching Non-English Majors; Highlighting Effective Methods; and Showcasing Subdisciplines.

This article looks closely at some of the lingering stereotypes that Composition Studies holds toward Web surfing and queries the resulting literacy hierarchy against our students’ reading and writing practices that take place online. This article claims that while good progress has been made in the way of revising twenty-first century definitions of (digital) composing, the academy has yet to fully revisit its boundaries of legitimacy surrounding (digital) reading. Additionally, this article contests the academy’s use of technology vis-à-vis email, Blackboard, or blogging as a placating attempt to integrate technology into the classroom without genuinely validating our students’ dominant literacies or their digital lives. This article leans on the theories of feminist composition pedagogy as it calls for the field to decenter its authority and revise curricula to incorporate critical digital literacies.

Abstract Co-owning and writing for one of the world's largest private publishing houses in the 1920s and 1930s, Marcet Haldeman-Julius's (1887–1941) position should have guaranteed her a place in American women's literary history. Haldeman-Julius's socialist and feminist exigency, though, was elided by a complex and emotionally abusive marriage to her editor and publisher, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, whose final approval represented her chance to effectively enter the public sphere. This study recovers Haldeman-Julius's work and traces her significant attempts to negotiate the paradox of writing as a feminist in ways rhetorically coded to escape certain audiences and to activate others. Notes 1I want to thank Catherine Hobbs for her meticulous reading of my manuscript and her insightful and charitable guidance in bringing this piece through the review stages. I would also like to thank Breon Mitchell at Indiana University's Lilly Library, as a portion of my research was made possible by a Helm Visiting Fellowship. Thanks also to Randy Roberts and Janette Mauk at the Leonard Axe Library at Pittsburg State University for their generous assistance during the research process as well as Teresa Coble at the Kansas State Historical Society. I would also like to publicly express my gratitude to Frank Farmer, Maryemma Graham, Brian Donovan, Amy Devitt, Susan Gubar, Bill Tuttle, Ann Schofield, and James Gunn for their guidance, time, and encouragement, at various stages of this process. In the end, though, I owe the most to Rebecca, Gus, Mae Hazel, Reba, and Steve for their patience, energy, and optimism.

Kip Strasma Responds to “Gender and Peer Response” by Elizabeth Tomlinson, and Tomlinson responds to Strasma’s “Spotlighting.”

This case study examines written peer response materials generated by small groups with varying gender compositions. Based on those observations, I offer several pedagogical implications.

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women’s colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women’s education in speaking and writing.

A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives—Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps, and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self—shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these writers experiences, manages, and ultimately resolves, to greater or lesser degrees, his conflicts over masculinity, at least textually speaking, and does so, moreover, in ways that are linked to his views on literacy and education.

Analysis of a collection of contemporary recommendation letters for admission to a PhD program in English studies revealed differences in length, level of specificity, and rhetorical appeals that applied much more strongly to candidates' acceptance status than to gender. Across both status and gender groupings, however, candidates were frequently appraised through economic metaphors, indicating a disciplinary culture that dually approaches graduate students as immediate sources of labor and as the future of the profession. Findings from these letters should promote continued conversation about disciplinary culture and clearer guidelines for those writing and requesting recommendation letters.

Review of Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity by Vershawn Ashanti Young

Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the modes of argumentation practiced by this subculture of the current feminist movement, one which is firmly grounded in the larger public sphere.

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

Manhood, Lorain Style is a narrative essay in which the author discusses issues of masculinity and gender identity in the working-class environment of his hometown Lorain, Ohio. Written mostly as a story, the essay recounts a fistfight that the author provoked and participated in when he was sixteen years old in order to prove he wasn’t “gay” based on the standards of what he considers Rust Belt masculinity.

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

While feminist scholars consider bodies, dress, and space central to inquiry into gendered rhetorics, we lack methodologies that situate these factors—and the additional factor of time—in an integrated system. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “acts of institution” can help feminist rhetoricians to construct richer accounts of the gendering of the female body. The example of rhetorics surrounding women factory workers in World War II America demonstrates how rhetorical practices produce gender differences through embodied, spatiotemporal rhetorics. In this case wartime adjustments did not bring about long-term changes because they relied on a fundamental antithesis between men and women.

Abstract Lu Yin (1899–1935), a modern Chinese writer, employed a variety of vernacular genres to explore women's living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. With her vision of nüquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing, Lu Yin modeled herself as a feminist rhetorician and employed redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist assumptions in the prevailing patriarchal discourses and to empower Chinese women. This study further calls for a more flexible and sensitive approach to studying women's rhetorics from different cultures. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Mary Garrett and Xing (Lucy) Lu for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to CSU–Fresno for its support of this project with a Grant for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities. 2On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing demonstrated against the Chinese government's humiliating policy toward Japan. There resulted a series of strikes and associated events amounting to a social and intellectual revolution. These events were soon dubbed by the students the May Fourth Movement, which acquired a broader meaning in later years. 3See Chinese Department at Jinan University, Zhongguo lidai shige mingpian shangxi. 180–83. 4Unless noted otherwise the passages quoted from the original texts are my translation. 5Lu Yin was well versed in classical Chinese; her view of writing was inevitably influenced by the ancient Chinese philosophers in terms of cosmology and epistemology. This sense of a unity with the whole of society and of the world comes from the Neo-Confucian tradition—the great learning paradigm grounded in the cosmological assumption of a unity of heaven and man—which claims that the outer world may be ordered by first cultivating the inherent goodness within the individual mind. 6Since the late Qing period, Chinese intellectuals and writers had engaged in the Baihua (Vernacular) Movement in which they translated various kinds of Western philosophical and literary works, experimented with new words, sentence structures, vernacular genres, and other baihua rhetorical devices to create a new culture. See Edward Gunn's Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. 7Lu Xun's short fiction "Diary of a Mad Man" was published in New Youth in May 1918. Ding Ling published "Diary of Miss Sophia" in Fiction Monthly in 1928.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Information security and privacy on the internet are critical issues in our society. In this research, we examine factors that influence internet users' private-information-sharing behavior. Based on a survey of 285 preteens and early teens, who are among the most vulnerable groups on the web, this study provides a research framework that explains an internet user's information privacy protection behavior. According to our study results, internet users' information privacy behaviors are affected by two significant factors: (1) users' perceived importance of information privacy and (2) information privacy self-efficacy. The study also found that users believe in the value of online information privacy and that information privacy protection behavior varies by gender. Our findings indicate that educational opportunities regarding internet privacy and computer security as well as concerns from other reference groups (e.g., peer, teacher, and parents) play an important role in positively affecting the internet users' protective behavior regarding online privacy. </para>

Reviews 233 allows for a comparison so general, one might doubt its usefulness. “Painting is really like poetry/' van Eck writes, “because both arts are inventions that make appear things that do not exist" (p. 68). Yet the point of van Eek's book is not to show how painting and architecture are the same as rhetoric, but how a culture saturated with the lessons of classical rhetoric influenced the creation and reception of visual art. In fact, rather than primarily focusing on works of visual art and architecture, the book is actually more concerned with the way early modern artists, architects, and spectators spoke and wrote about the visual arts. This is the book's strength, as example after example reveals that classical rhetorical theory provided a rich mine for both artists seeking to describe their method and spectators accounting for their reaction to the artwork. The discussion (in chapter fixe) of poetic responses to the discovery of the Lnocoon statue in 1506 is particularly interesting in this regard. The responses laud the power of the statue to move the viewer while drawing on the language of classical rhetorical theorv. As a whole van Eek's studv is a compelling and welcome contribution to the growing body of work on earlv modern visual culture, broadly defined. Through careful readings of a v ariety of early modern texts about art and architecture from England and Italy, she is able to show how rhetoric influ­ enced the theory, practice and reception of the visual arts. The book serves as a correctiv e to art historical approaches based on theories of aesthetics and style after Kant that downplay the instrumental character of much early modern art. To accomplish this, though, the variety of rhetorical theory is necessarily placed in the background to allow for the common threads that tie rhetoric to the v isual arts in van Eek's account to come into relief. For those interested in early modern European visual culture this will seem a small price to pay. James A. Knapp Eastern Michigan University Susan Miller, Trust in Texts: A Different History ofRhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. xiv + 224 pp. This is an astute, ingenious, and inclusive survey of the contemporary Anglophone discussion that centers on what Miller considers the rhetorical core: that is, pedagogy, training for discursive performance—either in civil affairs or in "self-fashioning," techniques of representation of the practi­ tioner for both public and private motives. That is, both teaching-practice and practice-practice. Tier vital distinction is the prefix meta . rhetoric engages "multiple metadiscourses derived from ritual, imaginative, affil iative practices" (p. 1). Rhetoric as pedagogy is obviously meta-discourse, discourse about discourse; it can, or should, invest in meta-discursive 234 RHETORICA controlling, important—discourses that form and are formed by vital, specific life-interests. On the one hand, the multiple metadiscourses are practices 1) "that we trust for their well-supported and reasoned statements", or 2) "for their participation in infrastructures of trustworthiness," products of "special plane[s] of understanding, and [their] consequences" (p. 2). But, on the other hand, pedagogy, as schooling in the conditions of trust, deals also with trust, not in reason and the shared infrastructure, but with uncertainty, bad faith; it functions "symbolically and charismatically" (p. 3), it can be a "retreat to the orphic" (p. 147). Still, it is always creating "contexts for choice" in an "emergent present" (p. 3) responding—she cites John O. Ward—to "distinct market niches" (p. 4), or, preferably to universal/human, national, global niches. Thus, rhetoric is hegemonous: powerful in its contribution to "productivity and stature of the present [whatever] age," or to "the circulation of contemporary values" (p. 37). As hegemonous, omnicompetent: the study considers political ideolo­ gies, literary aspirations, social ambitions, power contests, gender definings, genre strategies. Rhetoric can be reformulated as concerned with "ad hoc, class-based, experiential, and especially educational bonds that enable per­ suasion" (p. 53). Anything, in short, "crucial to monitoring, reprocessing, and delivering the limits of trust" (p. 5). There is, as well, a very strong emphasis on the pertinent contributions of emotional as well as cognitive capacities. Indeed, a large...

It is often claimed that Italian humanists disapproved of the study of rhetoric for women, seeing it as transgressing the social- ethical norms that reserved the public virtue of eloquence for men. A key piece of evidence adduced for this view is a passage in Leonardo Bruni’s De studiis et litteris, which appears to exclude the study of rhetoric for women on precisely these grounds. This paper challenges the conventional interpretation of this passage, arguing instead for a satirical reading. Far from proscribing rhetorical study for women in De studiis, it is suggested here, Bruni advocates an innovative humanistic model of rhetorical education, using the choice of a female addressee to underline the novelty of this ideal.

AbstractIn Blessed by Thunder: Memoir of a Cuban Girlhood, Flor Fernandez Barrios examines the consequences of Castro's Revolution and its silencing, censoring, and prohibitions on the writing, speaking, thinking, and performance of public rituals of communities and families. Barrios is able to use the history of storytelling and orality to integrate her roles as a daughter, granddaughter, and healer into a larger history of Cuban women who have preserved knowledge practices that exist outside of the state's masculine identity and its sanctioned social and medical institutions. As Barrios rewrites the Cuban Revolution through the collective memories of three generations of women in her family, she articulates her own Cuban-ness as well as her relationship to Afro-Cuban culture, an often-overlooked connection that tells us as much about upper-class culture on the island during this period in the early 1960s as it does about Afro-Cuban life practices such as Santería.

As advice books on caring for the home become more popular, they become more specialized. This essay analyzes one target niche of domestic advice: cleaning books for men. The authors of books like Clean Like a Man adopt as their primary persuasive strategy an ethos that establishes their own masculinity and, by extension, affirms the masculinity of readers. Though they explicitly argue for more equitable sharing of domestic tasks, the ethos adopted by the authors reveals general ambivalence about the changing notions of masculinity associated with such behaviors.

Abstract The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In response, the author exhumes an embodied history of rhetoric, reexamining the myths of the Greek goddess Metis as a means of enlivening rhetorical theory and history. The author then connects these myths to other rhetorical traditions invoked by Hélène Cixous and Gloria Anzaldúa, connecting Metis to Medusa and to mestiza consciousness. The author affirms the rhetorical power of the body, specifically of those bodies that challenge rhetorical norms. Notes 1I thank generous RR reviewers Richard Enos and Michelle Ballif for their advice and assistance with this essay. 2In Grosz's words, "[T]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory" (Volatile 3). The body then becomes "what is not mind … implicitly defined as unruly, disruptive, in need of direction or judgment, merely incidental … a brute givenness which requires overcoming" (Volatile 3–4). 3Thanks to Richard Enos for his thoughtful comments in reviewing an earlier draft of this manuscript. 4Disability studies scholars use the term normate to designate the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual. The word normative also converts the idea of normalcy into an active process—norms "are" but they also "act"—we live in a culture in which norms are enforced, a normative society. It can—and has—been argued that in antiquity there was not a concept of normalcy per se. But as Lennard Davis writes, although the word normal appeared in English only in the mid-nineteenth century, "before the rise of the concept of normalcy … there appears not to have been a concept of the normal, but instead the regnant paradigm was one revolving around the word ideal. … [I]n the culture of the ideal, physical imperfections are not seen as absolute but as part of a descending continuum from top to bottom. No one, for example, can have an ideal body, and therefore no one has to have an ideal body" (Enforcing 105). Yet Aristotle had more than one concept of ideality—he expounded on the idea of the mean, for instance. He outlined the idea of both an absolute mean, a method for measuring humans against one another, and a relative mean, a system for disciplining oneself (Nicomachean Ethics II 6–7). I would argue that the commingling of these imperatives results in a normative culture or society—both the upheld fiction of perfection and the systematic self- and Other-surveillance and bodily discipline of normative processes. 5This is true for women particularly, but the stigma of femininity is also applied to men. For instance, Demosthenes was said to have been soft and lame because he spoke with a stutter and had an overly feminine demeanor. Physical disability is mingled with femininity to discredit him—see his exchanges with Meidias in particular and Cicero's investigation of Demosthenes' self-education in De Oratore. The story of Demosthenes that has been popularized holds that through rhetorical practice Demosthenes overcame these "impediments" to become a great orator (see Hawhee; Fredal). The possibility that Demosthenes' difference could have queered his bodily/rhetorical performance in a generative sense is not addressed—indeed, any such transgressive possibility is ignored, despite that fact that other historians convincingly challenge the narratives of overcoming and passing that have been ascribed to Demosthenes (see Martha Rose). 6In contrast, an abstract, flawless (male) body becomes a tool for norming. As (Plato wrote and) Socrates said in the Phaedrus, "[A]ny discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work" (128). 7In the Phaedrus, Plato could be seen to change positions slightly, suggesting that certain forms of more "scientific" and therefore "noble" rhetoric might be acceptable (see White; Ramsay; McAdon; Solmsen for a range of readings). 8I gesture here to the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, foundational in disability studies. Garland-Thomson was one of the first scholars to show that "seeing disability as a representational system engages several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications" ("The New Disability Studies" 19). These premises are also the premises of this essay. 9Hawhee's linkages between mêtis and wrestling, and then between wrestling and rhetoric, provide an interesting image for this form of intelligence: "the corporeality of mêtis" as "struggle" or "the swarming mass of cunning craftiness and flailing limbs" (46, 45). 10In Randy Lee Eickhoff's recent translation of the Odyssey, he points out that Odysseus, considered to be another exemplar of mêtis, uses the name me tis or "no man" as a pun (n4; 404). 11 Mêtis has the practical advantage (and perhaps theoretical disadvantage) of "disappearing into its own action [so that] it has no image of itself" (de Certeau 82). Mêtis cannot be contextualized or schematized because each time it occurs in a context, it shifts that context, and each sequence it is inserted into is distorted (de Certeau 83–84). 12In the classical context, Homer, the mythical seer Tiresias, Oedipus, the great orator Demosthenes, Paris's killer Philoctetes, Croesus's deaf son, and others form our view of disability. In these stories, typically, disability impels narrative through the themes of overcoming, compensation, divine punishment, and charity. 13As I have previously argued, we can also view mythical discourse as, in the words of Susan Jarratt, "capable of containing the beginnings of … public argument and internal debate" (35). Despite the idea, advanced by Eric Havelock in particular, that myth was rote and didactic, we might see myth as being connected to the body, as being highly rhetorical, as being an arena for mêtis—thus my retellings hopefully honor this spirit (see also Slatkin). 14The myth of Metis can be traced as far back as Hesiod (Theogony lines 886–900). 15It is worth noting that these ableist accents on the denunciation of mêtis are also accompanied by a distinct ethnocentrism and even xenophobia. The word metic meant immigrant in ancient Athens. The word is a compound of the words change (meta) and house (oikos), and literally meant someone who changed houses. Many of Plato's attacks on the flexibility, malleability, and the bodily materiality of rhetoric are aimed at the Sophists, metic non-Athenians, and are part and parcel with a larger ideological agenda. 16 Techne was similarly made practical. As Janet Atwill explains in Rhetoric Re-Claimed, techne, when it is allied with mêtis (as it is by the Sophists), "deforms limits into new paths in order to reach—or, better yet, to produce—an alternative destination" (69). Yet we now refer to technai, handbooks full of sets of rules and examples, when we think of techne. William Covino argues that "reactions against the Sophists contributed to the establishment of rhetoric as techne without magic" (20). This distortion is similar to the attempt to ally mêtis only with the forms of knowledge Plato and Aristotle most highly value—to make it precise, a science, as Aristotle does. 17When defining phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle never truly rules out the idea that one would need some form of cunning intelligence to have "prudence," and the version of phronesis he outlines is certainly an abstract form of knowledge. He suggests that to have prudence one must understand particulars as well as universals. Yet the version of phronesis that was later adopted—for instance as one of the Medieval four cardinal virtues—sheds much of this uncertainty and avoids reference to cunning intelligence. 18There also may have been a familial connection between Hephaestus and Medusa—in some myths the two are sexual partners. Their child, Cacus, was said to be a fire-breathing giant. Cacus was said to eat human flesh and nail human heads to his door. Killing him was one of Heracles's twelve labors (Graves, The Greek Myths 158). This link is not made by all scholars, though the story shows up in Ovid and in Virgil's Aeneid. 19Often, Medusa wasseen to symbolize "artful eloquence." For instance, Coluccio Salutati in the fourteenth century and Nancy Vickers in the twenty-first both argue for this reading. As Salutati suggests, the snakes on her head might be seen as "rhetorical ornaments … instruments of wisdom" because snakes are "reported to be the most cunning" (55). In this interpretation Medusa turns an audience to stone not because of her looks but because of her rhetorical power—her audience "so convinced of what they have been persuaded that they may be said to have acquired a stony quality" (56). Vickers goes further, sourcing this connection back to Plato (254). She also argues that Medusa's "stoning" be seen as a rhetorical power, an ability to change the audience's state of mind, accompanied by a somatic effect. Finally, she suggests that Medusa's rhetorical power might represent the freezing of us all before the specter of the feminine—and she asks what we might do to reverse a legacy of neutralization and appropriation of the Other. 20As an example of the ways that myths crucially disagree with one another, we can see that in Homer's version of the story, Medusa comes into the world with her head of snakes. I think such differences reveal quite marked transitions in and contestations of signification. 21Of course it matters very much whether Medusa was raped or not. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin has argued, this rape has often been elided, and responsibility for it shifted away from Poseiden to Athena. She suggests that this shifting of responsibility essentially excuses men's violence toward women and thus silences women further. 22Detienne and Vernant write that mêtis was often symbolized by the octopus. Thus this connection to the octopus of mêtis may not have been coincidental. Certainly the original Medusa myth relied upon a reference to the dangerous, trapping "knot made up of a thousand arms" that the octopus represented and that conveyed a sense of the powerful double-ness and unpredictability of mêtis (38). 23Graves writes that vials of Medusa's blood were widely distributed: The blood had the power both to kill and to cure (Greek Myths 175). There are many contradictory stories about who received the blood, who distributed it, and who used it for good, who for bad (Greek Myths 175). 24The myth may also express a male fear of Medusa's creative power—she is so "procreative" that her children Chrysaor and Pegasus spring from her dead body (Graves, Greek Myths 127). 25I would argue that as teachers, we need to avoid the temptation to "eat" mêtis and wrest control over knowledge away from students. Students' cunning strategies and divergent expressions may threaten us or challenge us, but we cannot believe that mêtis is something we use on students, that we can be the sole tricksters, holding student bodies captive. Nor can we use the brute force of Zeus or Perseus to coopt their power when it threatens us, to subordinate their thinking bodies. 26The French word métis is related to the Spanish word mestizo, both coming from the Latin word mixtus, the past participle of the verb to mix and connoting mixed blood. 27In critical theory the concept of metissage also locates and interrogates the ways that certain forms of knowledge have been relegated to the margins, and thus this concept links usefully to the stories I have been reanimating. Metissage, obviously etymologically linked to mêtis and meaning mixture or miscegenation, has been used as a critical lens through which one might observe issues of identity, resistance, exclusion, and intersectionality. Relying upon metaphors of mixture that are biological and cultural, this concept of metissage both is like and is what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to when she writes about mestiza consciousness. (See Steinberg and Kincheloe; Hardt and Negri; Gruzinski; Glissant.) 28Coatlalopeuh later becomes conflated with the Virgin of Guadalupe after the Spanish Roman Catholic conquest of Mexico. 29Carrie McMaster also suggests that we might learn from Anzaldúa's writing about her own bodily difference—having experienced congenital disease, chronic illness, disability—to "draw non-homogenizing parallels between various embodied identities" ("Negotiating" 103). In Anzaldúa's own words, "[T]hose experiences [with disability] kept me from being a 'normal' person. The way I identify myself subjectively as well as the way I act out there in the world was shaped by my responses to physical and emotional pain" ("Last Words?" 289). From this we can make some suggestions about the epistemological entailments of mestiza knowledge—it comes from unique, never "normal," bodied experiences. The "leap" that should be encouraged, then, is to see such situated knowledge as vital and perhaps even central to human experience. The "abnormal" body is not something given to women symbolically as a form of derogation; it is an engine for understanding and thus has serious rhetorical power.

This study analyzes gender variation in nonstandard typography—specifically, abbreviations and insertions—in mobile phone text messages (SMS) posted to a public Italian interactive television (iTV) program. All broadcast SMS were collected for a period of 2 days from the Web archive for the iTV program, and the frequency and distribution of abbreviations and insertions, as well as overall message lengths, were analyzed according to sender gender. The results reveal that females posted more and longer SMS and followed more, and more varied, nonstandard typographic practices, contrary to previous gender-related findings in the sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication literatures. A theoretically grounded explanation for these findings is developed in terms of the localized norms of a heterosexual market—and an implicit dating market—in Italian iTV SMS.

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

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