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February 2003

  1. Accepting Roles Created for Us: The Ethics of Reciprocity
    Abstract

    Grounded in theories of feminist research practices and in two empirical studies we conducted separately, our argument is that seeing reciprocity as a context–based process of definition and re–definition of the relationship between participants and researcher helps us understand how research projects can benefit participants in ways that they desire.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20031489

January 2003

  1. Rhetorical Chemistry: Negotiating Gendered Audiences in Nineteenth-Century Nutrition Studies
    Abstract

    This article employs neoclassic and feminist rhetorical perspectives to investigate the persuasive strategies in two scientific articles written in the late nineteenth century by Ellen Swallow Richards. One of the first credentialed female scientists in the United States, Richards wrote about nutrition research she conducted in her experimental food laboratory, the New England Kitchen, to persuade two separate audiences—one predominantly male and the other predominantly female—of the scientific value of nutrition studies. The article adds complexity to our historical underpinnings by querying how gender—of the writer, of the audiences, and in the nature of the topic—contributed to the writer’s rhetorical burdens and provides evidence that women historically have been active knowers and users of science and technology.

    doi:10.1177/1050651902238544
  2. Reviews
    Abstract

    Spoken and Written Discourse: A Multi‐disciplinary Perspective by Khosrow Jahandarie. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Publishing Company, 1999. 446 pp. Mattingly's “Telling Evidence”;: Re‐Seeing Nineteenth‐Century Women's Rhetorics Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader edited by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 292 + xii. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth‐Century America by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uniersity Press, 2002. 175 + xv. Seeking the Words of Women: Two Recent Anthologies Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology edited by Jane Donawerth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 337 + xlii pp. Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 521 + xxxi pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773940309391249
  3. A sphere of noble action: Gender, rhetoric, and influence at a nineteenth‐century Massachusetts State Normal School
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay explores the rhetorical education of nineteenth‐century women attending the Westfield State Normal School, the second public and first co‐educational normal school in the United States. Archival research reveals that Westfield developed a program of rhetorical study that aimed to prepare both men and women to use oral and written persuasive discourse in their work as teachers. Westfield justified its progressive curriculum by arguing that advanced study in rhetoric would help future teachers to foster learning, win respect, and achieve meaningful moral influence among their pupils. While traditional gender ideologies at times complicated the efforts of female students to master oral and written persuasive discourse, Westfield's faculty and students remained committed throughout the century to the idea that study in rhetoric would aid the future teacher in cultivating a powerful public voice.

    doi:10.1080/02773940309391245

2003

  1. Establishing Rhetorical Feminism by Challenging Normative Identities
  2. Considering Rhetoric as a Global Human Enterprise: A Review of Feminist Rhetorical Practices

December 2002

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Reviews four books: Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies, ed. Sibylle Gruber; Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher; Readings Online: A Virtual Common Place, ed. Paul Amore; Reading and Writing in an Online World, by Dawn Rodrigues.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc20022056
  2. “And Now That I Know Them”: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course
    Abstract

    In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20021483
  3. "And Now That I Know Them": Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course
    Abstract

    In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

    doi:10.2307/1512148

November 2002

  1. Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists' Three Rs
    Abstract

    or rhetoric and composition, the last decade of the twentieth century might be deemed Return of the Ancients. In many ways, contemporary scholars have taken up an earlier resurgence of the ancients, one that began decades earlier with what have since become standard historical treatments of the ancients (Kennedy, Kerferd, and Guthrie), and, perhaps most notably, in 1972, when Rosamond Kent Sprague's volume The Older Sophists made available the sophistic fragments in translation for the first time. But recent work aims to be more connective: rather than writing history for the sake of history, scholars such as Janet Atwill, Richard Enos, Susan Jarratt, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, Kathleen Welch, Victor Vitanza, and most recently Jeffrey Walker (Rhetoric) have reclaimed, refigured, and reread Aristotle, Isocrates, and the sophists, delineating ways in which these ancient figures might help us reframe or reconsider contemporary debates about pedagogy. The connections to feminism (arratt), cultural studies (T. Poulakos and Welch), postmodernism (Vitanza and Atwill) and the liberal arts (Atwill and Walker) have been convincing enough to spark renewed and broadened interest in how the ancients conceptualized rhetoric, how they taught, what they did. In many ways what follows is also a return to the ancients, but rather than attempt to connect the ancients to discourse already in circulation-an important task, to be sure-I want to instead explore a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection that isn't as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but as I will suggest just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. It is important to note at the outset, as many writers have pointed out (for

    doi:10.2307/3250760

October 2002

  1. Feminist Theory in Technical Communication: Making Knowledge Claims Visible
    Abstract

    This study extends the corpus of an earlier qualitative content analysis about women and feminism and identifies the knowledge claims and themes in the 20 articles that discuss gender differences. Knowledge claims are reflected in expressions such as androgyny; natural collaborators; hierarchical, dialogic, and asymmetrical modes; web; connected knowers; different voice; ethic of care; ethic of objectivity; continuous with others; connected to the world; the cultural divide; visual metaphor; andgender-free science. Built from knowledge claims, the themes in the 20 articles include gender differences in language use, learning, and knowledge construction; gender differences in collaboration; and reviews of research about gender differences and political calls for action. Although the 20 articles provide little support for the existence of gender differences, by introducing, discussing, testing, and revising new ideas about women and feminism, they serve as an example of the process of knowledge accumulation and remodeling in technical communication.

    doi:10.1177/105065102236526

September 2002

  1. Regendering delivery: The fifth canon and the maternal rhetor
    Abstract

    Abstract This article contributes to ongoing feminist efforts to regender the rhetorical canons, in particular, by exploring how the fifth canon of delivery changes once the assumed male at the center of the rhetorical tradition is replaced by a woman who is both a mother and a speaker. Delivery—which conventionally focuses upon the speaker's use of voice, expression, and gesture—is usually considered the most material of the canons. However, once viewed from the perspective of nineteenth‐century maternal rhetors, distinctive corporeal, ideological, and performance issues become apparent, all indicative of significant gender differences in men's and women's delivery. More broadly, this study illustrates how recasting the canons by recognizing and incorporating the experiences of previously marginalized groups promises to produce a more comprehensive, complex, and compelling understanding of the history and practice of rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391240
  2. Dis/Integrating the Gay/Queer Binary: "Reconstructed Identity Politics" for a Performative Pedagogy
    Abstract

    ver ten years have now passed since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began making trouble with its challenges to the systems of gender and sexuality. The book has been translated into nine languages; anniversary editions have been released, and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in subsequent articles, interviews, and book-length works. In short, Gender Trouble, and, most particularly, the theory of performativity delineated within this book, has remained on postmodern theory's center stage since its 1990 appearance. Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her original and more modest intentions for it, and she credits the continually changing context of its reception for Gender Trouble's endurance (Preface vii). While Butler's humility and attribution to audiences here are refreshing, Gender Trouble's central claims did constitute theoretical interventions of the first order, disrupting feminism as many of us knew it, and helping to found queer theory in the process. Subverting common-sense beliefs that gender and sexuality are fundamental truths of the self, Gender Trouble (in what are now statements of their own commonplace familiarity) tells us instead that both are always acts, expressions, behaviors, which, like performative speech acts, bring into existence that which they name, and, through their repetition, come to constitute the identities they are purported to be. In other

    doi:10.2307/3250728
  3. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education: 1885-1937
    Abstract

    In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class. Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.

    doi:10.2307/1512108
  4. “Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action”: Women Online
    Abstract

    Radical feminist textuality of the 1960s and today provides a suggestive example of networked and collectively literate action, action dependent on the constant and visible contextualization of self and writing within the discourses that shape us. In this essay, I argue that an articulation of radical feminist textuality can benefit both scholarship and classroom, in that it situates writers as rhetorical agents who can write, resist, and, finally act within a network of discourses and identifications.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20021477
  5. "Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action": Women Online
    doi:10.2307/1512105

July 2002

  1. "a little afraid of the women of today": The Victorian New Woman and the Rhetoric of British Modernism
    Abstract

    This essay argues that modernist British writers revived the ideologies of the Victorian New Women in their fiction and essays in order to influence the reception of radical feminism. The New Women novelists, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, developed a rhetoric of domestic feminism, a method of protofeminist subversion usually confined to the domestic space. Modernists outwardly disdained Victorian women's writing; yet they revived "the woman of the past" in their art. This seeming inconsistency within modernist sentiment actually signifies a coherent rhetorical movement that directed twentieth-century reactions to feminism and women's participation in British literary history.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2103_2
  2. Visible Disability in the College Classroom
    Abstract

    Investigates how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. Argues that the implementation of an autobiographical pedagogy must extend beyond the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality and must include disabled persons in these discussions as well.

    doi:10.58680/ce20021267

June 2002

  1. Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader
    Abstract

    The temperance movement was the largest single organizing force for women in American history, uniting and empowering women seeking to enact social change. By the end of the century, more than two hundred thousand women had become members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and numerous others belonged to smaller temperance organizations. Despite the impact of the movement, its literature has been largely neglected. In this collection of nineteen temperance tales, Carol Mattingly has recovered and revalued previously unavailable writing by women. Mattingly's introduction provides a context for these stories, locating the pieces within the temperance movement as well as within larger issues in women's studies. The temperance movement was essential to women's awareness of and efforts to change gender inequalities in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their fiction, temperance writers protested physical and emotional abuse at the hands of men, argued for women's rights, addressed legal concerns, such as divorce and child custody, and denounced gender-biased decisions affecting the care and rights of children. Temperance fiction by women broadens our understanding of the connections between women's rights and temperance, while shedding light on women's thinking and behavior in the nineteenth century. Temperance writers featured in this reader include Louisa May Alcott, Mary Dwinell Chellis, Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, Frances Dana Gage, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz, Marietta Holley, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward), Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Water Drops from Women Writers features biographical sketches of each writer as well as thirteen illustrations.

    doi:10.2307/1512128

May 2002

  1. Feminist Technologies and the Women's Studies Classroom

April 2002

  1. How, Why, and What: Teaching Students the Literatures of Early America
    Abstract

    One of the many significant points made in Teaching the Literatures of Early America is that students often resist the nuances of early American texts, and for similar psychological or ideological reasons they are reluctant to link the themes to our own time. I met this resistance early in an American survey, at a Florida university, when attempting to direct the class’s examination of sixteenthand seventeenth-century colonialism to the World Conference on Racism, then unraveling in Durban, South Africa. I had photocopied and distributed to the class a newspaper article about the United States and Israel’s abandonment of the U.N. meeting. The article explained why Israel had rejected the label of a “colonialist” state, and it suggested through the Palestinian ambassador, Salman el Herfi, that the American delegation had left because it wanted to avoid discussing slavery and the injustices done to native peoples. The thematic interests and chronological structure of the course invited this brief digression. We were moving forward through time and addressing the same questions: What is a colonialist state, and what are the traits of colonial culture? What are the aesthetics of denial, when power is asserted and contested on an international stage? My strategy to this point had been to complicate the “colonialist” label by offering different versions of the encounter it implies. A comparison of Spanish, French, English, and indigenous texts was to foreground how “new worlds” were imagined and understood. The newspaper article, I thought, would cap off the week’s reading and use current events to suggest how the legacies of empire were with us still. For the Tuesday meeting I had assigned selections from the Puritan captive Mary Rowlandson, a staple of American survey courses. The students divided into small groups and, with little supervision, identified where a woman’s experiences on the frontier potentially challenged ecclesiastical authority. The reading assigned for the following Thursday was an English translation of the Nican mopohua, a Nahuatl account of the Virgin of Guadalupe written about the time of the Puritan narrative. To my mind, the two works yielded a striking contrast. Both defined religious experience through gender and the meeting of cultures, but where

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2-2-281

March 2002

  1. The influence of gender on collaborative projects in an engineering classroom
    Abstract

    Using a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, the article discusses some of the findings from a larger study on collaboration and the role of gender. We profile three student engineering teams as they participate in processes leading to the submission of a report for a team-based technical communication course. While some theorists suggest that gender can play a significant role in achieving a successful team dynamic, our study only partially supports that claim. A synopsis of two women from two predominantly male teams reveals glimpses of what the literature describes as traditional gender-linked behaviors by both men and women, but the all-female team does not conform to stereotypical patterns and their behaviors call into question the existence of these interactional styles. We suggest that factors other than gender and independent of a team's gender composition exert a greater impact on collaboration. Nevertheless, the study does caution against assigning women to predominantly male teams, since when a team's social structure is mostly male, traditional gender-linked interactional behaviors as well as manifestations of the culture of engineering are more likely to emerge. Overall, the study underlines the importance of examining specific face-to-face interactions to see how behavior is situationally produced in order to more fully understand the interactional strategies open to individuals.

    doi:10.1109/47.988359
  2. Logic, rhetoric, and discourse in the literary texts of nineteenth‐century women
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay traces the reception of a new grammatical‐rhetorical theory of personification in the canon of textbooks widely used to teach vernacular literacy in the nineteenth century. Invented, in 1751, by James Harris’ Hermes, a work in universal grammar, this new doctrine contributed to the increased masculinity of standard literate performance. Hermes increased the representivity of gendered pronouns and required a contradictory use of gendered personification as if it were both literal and figurative. As a result, two distinctive relations to language were made possible. For men, grammar and rhetoric appear in strict opposition and are always representative of their experience of language. Women literates, who were not taken into account by the masculinist sensibility of Hermes, were assigned, de facto, an anomalous position and a potentially more critical relation to language. The texts of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Sarah Willis ("Fanny Fern “) provide examples which demonstrate that women recognized and profited from their anomalous difference, which suggests the creation of a historically specific l'ecriture feminine.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391229
  3. “Telling the story her own way”: The role of feminist standpoint theory in rhetorical studies
    Abstract

    Abstract As the discourse of traditionally marginalized voices becomes increasingly salient in rhetorical studies, standpoint theory—which emphasizes the epistemological importance of the perspectives of oppressed groups—could play a significant role in textual analysis. This essay first outlines the central tenets of standpoint theory and the debate they have generated. We then suggest how standpoint theory, with some significant modifications and expansions, may function as a productive methodology for rhetorical analysis. We demonstrate this potential contribution to our field through analyses of two nineteenth‐century texts: Jane Austen's Persuasion and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391227

February 2002

  1. Casting and Recasting Gender: Children Constituting Social Identities through Literary Practices
    Abstract

    Considers how gender, identity and literacy are entangled and mutually constitutive. Concludes that social experience, desire, proximate others, and the ways in which children can draw upon these in the classroom are aspects of the situated condition that deserve more prominence in literacy and identity research.

    doi:10.58680/rte20021752
  2. Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Winner (Volume 35)
    Abstract

    Considers how gender, identity and literacy are entangled and mutually constitutive. Concludes that social experience, desire, proximate others, and the ways in which children can draw upon these in the classroom are aspects of the situated condition that deserve more prominence in literacy and identity research.

    doi:10.58680/rte20021753
  3. A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880-1940
    doi:10.2307/1512139

January 2002

  1. Learning, Reading, and the Problem of Scale: Using Women Writers Online
    Abstract

    Research Article| January 01 2002 Learning, Reading, and the Problem of Scale: Using Women Writers Online Julia Flanders Julia Flanders Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (1): 49–60. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-1-49 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Julia Flanders; Learning, Reading, and the Problem of Scale: Using Women Writers Online. Pedagogy 1 January 2002; 2 (1): 49–60. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-1-49 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2002 Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Cluster on Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2-1-49
  2. Gender and Modes of Collaboration in an Engineering Classroom: A Profile of Two Women on Student Teams
    Abstract

    Research suggests that men and women have different communicative styles that contribute to women's lack of acceptance in male-dominated fields. However, this perspective can lead to stereotypes that limit the range of interactional strategies open to individuals. This article profiles two women from student engineering teams who participated in a study on collaboration and the role of gender. The study, which used a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, showed that men and women alike displayed both gender-linked and non-gender-linked behavior. It also showed that successful collaboration was influenced less by gender and more by such factors as a strong work ethic, team commitment, and effective leadership.

    doi:10.1177/1050651902016001002
  3. Review of Untying the Tongue: Gender, Power, and the Word
    Abstract

    (2002). Review of Untying the Tongue: Gender, Power, and the Word. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 96-98.

    doi:10.1207/s15427625tcq1101_8
  4. Sappho's memory
    Abstract

    Abstract Archaic lyric provided opportunities for reflection on civic power and community values before the invention of prose and the emergence of democracy in Athens with its attendant rhetorical practices. The fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus, poets of 6th‐century Lesbos, can be read along side each other for an exploration of gender difference. Sappho's evocations of memory bespeak the situation of women excluded from public spaces of political deliberation and subject to displacement and loss. Gendered practices of memory are traced from Sappho and Alcaeus through the memory systems of classical Greek and Roman rhetoricians.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391219
  5. Historical studies of rhetorical women here and there: Methodological challenges to dominant interpretive frameworks
    Abstract

    Abstract This article examines theoretical premises of the historical study of rhetorical women, epistemological confusions caused by postmodernism, and challenges from the studies of black and Third World rhetorical women. On that basis it points out that the present difficulties in accepting discursive feminist methodologies in the study of rhetorical history are direct results of a continued adherence to certain established interpretive frameworks that dominate inquiry and knowledge construction in the field of rhetoric/composition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391222
  6. Feminist historiography: Research methods in rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract As a feminist scholar, I prefer to pursue primary research partly because it allows me to cooperate with other scholars instead of opposing them. I employ the feminist method of engagement with, not detachment from, the object of research, a holistic approach using rhetorical ethos and pathos as well as logos. However, I avoid taking positions excessively driven by ideology, or swayed by ultra‐relativism. Instead, I try to present the author's ideas in her own context. Feminist research is valuable as pure research, but it can also be useful in teaching. Future projects should include further study of the rhetorical theories of historical women, and some attempt to contribute to theorizing of sermo.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391224
  7. Telling evidence: Rethinking what counts in rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract After the thousands of years in which a masculine canon of rhetoric has been constructed, feminist scholars have recently worked to create a more inclusive tradition. While problems and concerns have arisen with regard to this change, my work with nineteenth‐century primary texts has convinced me that more time to explore extant texts can alleviate many of the apprehensions associated with this new research. Further time to recover, evaluate, and make meaning from additional information will allow for a more complete picture of women's rhetorical history. In addition, a greater breadth of knowledge will allow us not only to add figures to a more inclusive tradition, but to redefine what counts as evidence in evaluating rhetoric and rhetoricians. In this way we may create a more complete, honest, and interesting picture of the rhetorical tradition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391223
  8. Consciousness‐raising: Linking theory, criticism, and practice
    Abstract

    Abstract As a form of discursive practice, consciousness‐raising links recovery, recuperation, and the development of theory. The recovery of texts by women and recovery from the dynamics of suppression by which women's voices were silenced encompasses an enormous conversation among women through time. As a recuperative process criticism promotes an appreciation of women's artistry and eloquence and challenges the capacity of traditional theory to analyze or evaluate women's discourse. Finally, extracting theoretical principles from the practices of women through time suggests alternative ways of viewing rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391220
  9. The archaeology of women in rhetoric: Rhetorical sequencing as a research method for historical scholarship
    Abstract

    Abstract For well over a decade, a number of scholars have argued that a more thorough and representative account of the history of rhetoric can only take place after women are accurately included in the rhetorical tradition. If we are to provide a sensitive accounting of women in the rhetorical tradition, current methods of, and perspectives on, historical research need to be reconsidered and adjusted in three respects. First, our mentality toward rhetoric must expand beyond civic, agonistic discourse to include alternative modes of expression used by women. Second, our efforts to discover primary evidence must intensify so that a more representative body of sources becomes available. This expanded body of evidence must include non‐traditional sources that provide insight to the oral and literate practices of women. Third, historians of rhetoric must create methods of research and analysis that will provide a more sensitive accounting of primary material than current historical methods were designed to yield. This essay argues that these needs can be met by an archaeological approach to historical rhetoric. A method called “rhetorical sequencing”; is offered as an heuristic to facilitate historical research on women in the rhetorical tradition.

    doi:10.1080/02773940209391221
  10. Gender Issues in Technology and Writing

2002

  1. Fast Philosophy: Fast Feminism and Performance Writing (A review of Shannon Bell’s Fast Feminism)

December 2001

  1. Literary Transactions and Women Writers
    Abstract

    Considers how reading Jane Tompkins’ “Sensational Designs” helps foster a new appreciation of the ways in which students contribute to the creation of a literary work. Discusses how students responded to their semester-long study of various “neglected” 19th-century women writers.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc20011993

October 2001

  1. Theories of Visual Rhetoric: Looking at the Human Genome
    Abstract

    For too long, journal articles and textbooks on scientific and technical discourse have adopted a positivistic approach to visuals. Unfortunately, this approach is problematic. It ignores that visuals are constructions that are products of a writer's interpretation with its own power-laden agenda. For example, in representing a tamed and dominated nature, visuals become instruments of patriarchy. Reading them responsibly requires that we uncover some of the values attached to the strategies of creating visuals and to the objects created. This article reviews the current approach taken by composition scholars, surveys richer interdisciplinary work on visuals, and—by using visuals connected with the Human Genome Project—models an analysis of visuals as rhetoric.

    doi:10.2190/bx7b-nvrj-kf3k-bybl

September 2001

  1. REVIEWS
    Abstract

    A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940, by Katherine H. Adams; Everyone Can Write: Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, by Peter Elbow; Teaching Composition as a Social Process, by Bruce McComiskey.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc20011991
  2. John Wesley and the Liberty to Speak: The Rhetorical and Literacy Practices of Early Methodism
    Abstract

    In early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley’s “method” of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20011442
  3. John Wesley and the Liberty to Speak: The Rhetorical and Literacy Practices of Early Methodism
    Abstract

    early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to

    doi:10.2307/359063
  4. Off the Radar Screen: Gender, Adjuncting, and Teaching Institutions
    Abstract

    we read Michael Murphy's article, Faculty for a New University, we were surprised and troubled by the story about adjuncts that Murphy purports to tell. Murphy's argument, that a substructure in rhetoric and composition exists but remains invisible and that to recognize such a substructure would cost universities little, is based on a notion of universities that has not existed in most places for a very long time, if ever. Murphy's idea of a teaching track that supports full-time faculty research is based on a conception of a university at a handful of research institutions. Schools that train graduate students, produce the bulk of scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, and grant PhDs are about 7 percent of the total number of universities in this country (Phelan 76). To make an argument about adjunct work and adjunct labor without considering the other 93 percent of us seems to us to be thoughtless, at best, and unethical, at worst. The other aspect of adjuncting that Murphy leaves out is, of course, gender. As Theresa Enos writes, When a field has been feminized and when a disproportionate number of its workers are female, that field is devalued and is subject to both disciplinary and gender bias (43). As the latest report on Women in the Profession indicates, women are still more likely than white men ... to obtain jobs in lower-paying institutions .., and they tend to linger

    doi:10.2307/359067

July 2001

  1. Readers' Background Characteristics and Their Feedback on Documents: The Influence of Gender and Educational Level on Evaluation Results
    Abstract

    What is the influence of demographic variables such as gender and educational level on the reader feedback collected under the plus-minus method? To answer this question, an analysis was made of the problems detected in four public information brochures. The average amount of feedback per participant did not vary among the four brochures, but the severity of the problems did. Male participants mentioned more problems than female participants, but the problems detected by female participants were on average more severe. Highly educated participants detected more problems than participants with a lower level of education. No differences in problem types mentioned were found between male and female participants, and only one difference was found between the two educational levels: Highly educated participants focused more strongly on the structuring of information. In general, brochure characteristics had more effect on the types of feedback collected than the two demographic participant characteristics.

    doi:10.2190/0xj7-4044-g7lc-at8y

June 2001

  1. A conceptual framework for international Web design
    Abstract

    We develop a conceptual framework for exploring significant differences in how people from diverse cultural backgrounds and with diverse individual characteristics might perceive and use Web documents. This is the first stage of a large multistage empirical study of user satisfaction and effectiveness of various Web designs based on cultural and individual factors. We identify six cultural factors and six individual factors that could impact the effectiveness of Web documents. The six cultural factors include: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, anxiety avoidance, long-term versus short-term orientation, and polychronic versus monochronic time orientation. The six individual factors include: demographics (age and gender), professional knowledge, information technology knowledge, flexibility, information processing abilities, and cultural knowledge. Based on the conceptual model proposed, we develop a number of testable, specific propositions on how Web document effectiveness could be impacted by the cultural and individual factors in various Web designs. In order to measure document effectiveness of each design, we identify components of Web document effectiveness as perceived usability, reliability, clarity, and comprehension that, in turn, influence readers' overall satisfaction with Web documents. Using the propositions presented, one can measure and analyze how cultural and individual factors influence users' satisfaction, which will assist researchers, educators, and communicators working with various Web designs.

    doi:10.1109/47.925509
  2. Gender, commerce, and the transformation of virtue in eighteenth‐century Britain
    Abstract

    Abstract This article examines the shift in views of virtue in eighteenth‐century Britain as the emerging middle‐class attempted to legitimize commerce and forge a broader concept of citizenship. I illustrate how middle‐class values were sanctioned, in part, by relocating the source of civic virtue from the public to the domestic or private sphere. During this transition, women came to be seen as the “civilizing”; agents of society, and I demonstrate how this new ethical role prescribed for them was reflected and instantiated in eighteenth‐century culture through specific pedagogical practices. By analyzing eighteenth‐century conceptions of civic virtue in terms of how they were implicated in specific historical configurations of gender and class, I illustrate the need for further studies that approach ethics as a contingent, unstable category.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391205

May 2001

  1. The Passion of Conviction: Reclaiming Polemic for a Reading of Second-Wave Feminism
    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr201&2_4
  2. The Passion of Conviction: Reclaiming Polemic for a Reading of Second-Wave Feminism
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2001.9683377

March 2001

  1. Fusing horizons: Standpoint hermeneutics and invitational rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay emends Foss, Foss, and Griffin's invitational rhetoric to strenghten its philosophical undergirdings and release it from unfounded criticism. Standpoint hermeneutical rhetoric is the framework offered to position the theory more solidly in the canon. Three strategic moves include discovering and revising its epistemological stance to reflect Lorraine Code's concepts of knowing others and second personhood; connecting Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to rhetoric; and using Gadamer's emphasis on position and historicity to develop the connection to feminist standpoint theory. Conclusions point toward the implications of invitational rhetoric as dialogue linked to practical application in public communication and pedagogy.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391200