All Journals

216 articles
Year: Topic: Clear
Export:
feminist rhetorics ×

March 2019

  1. Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment by Wendy Dasler Johnson
    Abstract

    Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo­ lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho­ lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his­ tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub­ category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop­ erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor­ ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John­ son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso­ nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal­ yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo­ ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0023
  2. Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato ed. by Robin Reames
    Abstract

    Reviews 209 Howe uses suggestive dialogue to persuade her male readers to admit her to their literary canon. Like Howe, Johnson seeks to legitimate sentimental poetry; however, Johnson does so by reading this verse through a rhetorical lens. Johnson's anal­ yses are rich and incisive. Sometimes, her larger argument gets lost in the details of her close reading. Moreover, while Johnson promises to offer readers a heuristic for reading sentimental verse, her analyses are often too local and deep to be generalizable to other texts. Regardless, Antebellum American Women s Poetry makes a valuable contribution to both rhetorical and literary scholarship, particularly feminist scholarship on nineteenth-century American women's writing. Demonstrating the importance of sentimental verse in nine­ teenth-century America, Johnson recovers a site of women's rhetorical activity that has otherwise been lost to the divide between literature and rhetoric. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robin Reames, ed., Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 191 pp. ISBN 9781611177688 The contributors to Logos without Rhetoric confront Edward Schiappa's so-called "nominalist" view of rhetorike techne - that it makes little sense to speak of a discipline of rhetoric before the coinage and circulation of the term rhetorike, which Schiappa famously attributes to Plato in the Gorgias. Rather than examine Schiappa's view directly, the contributors try to give substance to an "evolutionary" or "developmental" view. On this account, important ingredients of rhetoric appear in the fifth century and even before. These views do not, of course, conflict; they rather shift the question from (i) "when did the thing called rhetorike begin, and what is that thing so named?" to (ii) "what stuff if any within that thing predates its/their being called rhetorike?" The first question gets at a specific concept, its work, and its effects within Greek self-understanding, with the goal of reconstructing specific debates and conscious practices that deployed or were governed by that concept. The second question searches for any treatment of language as a "manipulation of persuasive means" (p. 8), an inquiry bound only by our own presumptions of relevance. Now, from an Aristotelian perspective, rhetorike (techne) is at once a sys­ tematic theory7 and an ongoing inquiry into the various kinds of persuasive manipulation. From that perspective, what one wants to find in an account of the origins of rhetorike is not particularly clever, routimzed, or flexible deployments of persuasive manipulation but rather evidence for the rise of a discipline, an increasingly concerted, increasingly self-conscious effort through time to understand the extent and nature of it. 210 RHETORICA Be that as it may, questions (i) and (ii) could differ markedly. The contri­ butors to Logos without Rhetoric draw the two questions together by trying to attribute a quasi- (or proto-) systematic quasi- (or proto-) consciousness to their various authors' use of persuasive manipulation, such that they could be seen not only as speaking well but also as coming to think about the task of speaking well. (The authors generally do not address the extent to which these efforts were concerted or dialectical - that is, a matter of public discus­ sion.) Success in the contributors' enterprise depends, then, on their actually identifying theoretical or disciplinary rudiments in texts. This is in principle possible since, whatever the coinage situation for the term, rhetorike must have been formed and accepted in response to some prior if rudimentary the­ oretical or disciplinary activity. As it turns out, the chapters themselves are of rather mixed success. Terry Papillon ("Unity, Dissociation, and Schismogenesis in Isocrates") contributes a short, jargon-heavy, and free-floating chapter about the rheto­ ric of divisiveness. It wavers between two theses, the rather grand and lessevidenced one that "Isocrates. . . redefined the notion of politics" (p. 17) and the rather mundane and quite plausible one that "Isocrates shows us a prac­ tical example of an early Greek rhetorical practice" (p. 18). Robert Gaines ("Theodorus Byzantius on the Parts of a Speech") argues that a pre-Platonic figure, Theodorus, distinguished oratorical speeches into twelve parts and that we see the adoption of this normative distinction in the (fragmentary) ps.-Lysianic Against Andocides for Impiety...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0024

January 2019

  1. Amanda K. Booher and Julie Jung, eds. <i>Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies: Human Bodies, Posthumanist Worlds</i>. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. 260 pages. $40.00 paperback.
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2019.1549414
  2. Decolonizing Community Writing with Community Listening: Story, Transrhetorical Resistance, and Indigenous Cultural Literacy Activism
    Abstract

    This article foregrounds stories told by Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune in order to distinguish “community listening” from “rhetorical listening” and decolonize community writing. Dorothy’s stories demonstrate “transrhetoricity” as rhetorical practices that move across time and space to activate relationships between peoples and places through collaborative meaning making. Story moves historic legacies into the present despite suppression enacted by settler colonialism, and story yields adaptive meanings and cultural renewal. When communities listen across difference, stories enact resistance by building a larger community of storytellers, defying divisive settler colonialist inscriptions, and reinscribing Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies across the landscapes they historically inhabit.

    doi:10.25148/clj.13.1.009089

2019

  1. Talking Justice: The Role of Anti-Racism in the Writing Center
    Abstract

    Abstract The article describes the process that four writing center consultants took to design and implement an antiracist workshop at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center (OSUWC). Using antiracist pedagogy, feminist invitational rhetoric, and inclusive writing center pedagogy, this essay documents the creation of an antiracist workshop designed for writing center staff and consultants, our presentation of the workshop at the South Central Writing Centers Association conference, the revision process, and training of writing center staff at the OSUWC. Rather than outline a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources.

  2. Service before Self: Military Leadership and Definitions of Service for Composition Studies
    Abstract

    This article revisits the relationships among gender, service, and composition pedagogy through a qualitative study of active-duty military officers who teach first-year writing at the United States Air Force Academy, one of the five major U.S. national military service academies. The U.S. national military service academies are under-studied sites of writing; there is little published about the experiences of the active-duty officers who comprise a significant portion of the first-year writing teaching faculty at these institutions. Interviews with the officers about their first-year writing pedagogy are framed by an analysis of military leadership policy as well as scholarship on writing teacher development, feminist composition pedagogy theories, and critiques of the role of service in composition studies. This study describes the officers’ first-year writing pedagogy and argues that the experience of these officers, framed through the theories of military leadership and the military service ethos, introduces a new way to understand how the concept of service could operate in first-year writing pedagogy. The officers’ experiences also support arguments that service in composition classrooms is still problematically gendered: even within a military environment, female officers report that they have less freedom than their male colleagues to demonstrate an ethic of care towards their first-year writing students.

November 2018

  1. Reviewing Conduct Books as Feminist Rhetorical Devices for Agency Reforms

October 2018

  1. Feminist Digital Research Methodology for Rhetoricians of Health and Medicine
    Abstract

    This article argues that rhetoricians of health and medicine can benefit from new methodological orientations that more fully account for conducting digital research within vulnerable online communities. More specifically, this article introduces a feminist digital research methodology, an intersectional methodology that helps rhetoricians of health and medicine contend with the overlapping rhetorical, technological, and ethical frameworks affecting how we understand and collect health information, particularly within vulnerable online communities. The author considers methodological shifts in Internet research ethics, rhetorics of health and medicine, and feminist rhetorics as well as definitions and conceptions of online communities and vulnerability. The author next draws from a 5-year case study of an online childbirth community to demonstrate how a feminist digital research methodology offers an alternative methodological orientation that helps researchers navigate ethical decision-making practices that arise from conducting health research within vulnerable online communities. Finally, the author outlines the broader implications of this methodology by suggesting three ways that scholars can use it within and beyond the field.

    doi:10.1177/1050651918780188

September 2018

  1. The Pluralistic Style and the Demands of Intercultural Rhetoric: Swami Vivekananda at the World’s Parliament of Religions
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT Intercultural contexts introduce unique sources of complexity into our theories of rhetoric and persuasion. This study examines one of the most successful cases of intercultural rhetoric concerning religion: the case of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from India who came to the United States in 1893 for the World’s Parliament of Religions. He arrived as an unknown monk, but he left America years later as the nationally known face of Hinduism. Facing a tense scene in 1893 that featured a plurality of religions and American organizers and audiences who judged Hinduism as inferior to Christianity, Vivekananda enacted a unique rhetoric of pluralism to assert the value of his form of Hinduism while simultaneously respecting other religions. This study extracts from Vivekananda’s popular performance at the parliament a pluralistic style of rhetorical advocacy, one that builds upon his unique reading of Hindu religious-philosophical traditions. This pluralistic style can be used to unravel some of the theoretical issues created by invitational rhetoric’s reading of persuasion as inherently violent to disagreeing others.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1526545

May 2018

  1. Changing the Landscape: Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, Five Years Later
  2. Louise Clappe and The Shirley Letters: Indirect Feminist Rhetoric and the Contradictions of Domestic Space
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.58680/ce201829641

March 2018

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

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

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0196

2018

  1. We Cannot Teach Composition in Isolation; Anything We Say is Culturally Shaped: An Interview with Shirley Wilson Logan
    Abstract

    In this interview, Shirley Wilson Logan reflects on her major roles as a scholar, teacher, and an administrator. She describes her journey as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, only one of a few black women to do so. Logan is also credited with launching the study of African American women’s rhetoric as a field, writing one of the early books on African American women rhetors. Logan discusses her motivations for writing this book, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women , and makes connections between her scholarly focus and her work as both a teacher and an administrator.

  2. Interrogating the “Deep Story”: Storytelling and Narratives in the Rhetoric Classroom
    Abstract

    This article posits that inviting students to interrogate and share their worldviews through personal narratives could promote mutual inquiry across difference. Detailing a series of assignments and activities developed from the model of invitational rhetoric, this article analyzes students’ writing and reflections to demonstrate how mutual listening and inquiry function as an effective means to cultivate self-reflexivity and ethical relations with others who do not share the same positionality.

August 2017

  1. Review: Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories, by Tarez Samra Graban
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.368

July 2017

  1. <i>Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric: Searching the Negative Spaces in Histories of Rhetoric</i>, Lydia M. McDermott
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1318351
  2. Feminist Historiography<i>As If</i>: Performativity and Representation in Feminist Histories of Rhetoric
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1317571

June 2017

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

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

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

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

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0013
  3. Haul, Parody, Remix: Mobilizing Feminist Rhetorical Criticism With Video
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2017.03.002

May 2017

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

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

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1227
  2. Rev. of Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories by Tarez Samra Graban

April 2017

  1. Multilingual Writers in the Writing Center: Invitational Rhetoric and Politeness Strategies to Accommodate the Needs of Multilingual Writers

January 2017

  1. <i>Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories</i>, Tarez Samra Graban
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1246029

2017

  1. The Undercurrents of Listening: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Listening in Writing Center Tutor Guidebooks
    Abstract

    Listening is often considered essential to the tutoring of writing; however, little attention has been devoted to the study of listening in writing center scholarship. This study takes up the question of how the field defines effective listening and how the field conceptualizes listening as a practice for the tutoring of writing. Based on a qualitative content analysis of eight writing center tutor guidebooks, the study's findings show that although listening is typically considered an effective strategy in addressing interpersonal aspects and writing concerns in the writing conference, it is not well defined in the field. Ultimately, the article suggests that the field may benefit from attention to rhetorical listening as a way to broaden how we define not only effective listening but also roles for tutoring and learning.

    doi:10.7771/2832-9414.1828

July 2016

  1. Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth-Century European Art
    Abstract

    Despite pioneering reclamation efforts, feminist rhetoricians have only scratched the surface of the multilayered historical reception and representation of Aspasia, a fifth-century BCE Milesian woman famous for the company she kept. Aspasia's penchant for historical perseverance means that her recovery must extend far beyond the ancient world. Throughout the centuries roused by the so-called Woman Question, she was on the lips and brush-tips of many on the lookout for antecedent and analogous women to serve as models or antimodels. Focusing on nineteenth-century Europe, we illustrate her powerful presence in art. Our discussion showcases Aspasia conversing (Nicolas-André Monsiau), instructing (Honoré Daumier), and contemplating (Henry Holiday). In their work Aspasia resists attempts to mute her colors and reemerges as a painted lady.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1178688

May 2016

  1. We’re Creating Ourselves Now: Crafting as Feminist Rhetoric in a Social Sorority

April 2016

  1. Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography
    Abstract

    Engaging with feminist rhetorical methodologies of critical imagination and interdisciplinary queer studies of gossip, this essay theorizes gossip as a methodology for feminist and queer historiography in rhetoric. Gossip as historiographic practice is then illustrated through the example of its uses to develop a queer history of rhetorical education and women’s epistolary practices.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1142845

January 2016

  1. A Few Good (Wo)Men: Integrating the US Submarine Force
    Abstract

    The US Navy admitted women into the submarine force in 2010, then one of the last male-only professions remaining in the Armed Forces. Examining rhetorical ecologies surrounding the integration decision, this essay charts the contextual forces and stakeholder discourses that shaped submarine assignment policy over a critical fifteen-year period. It also traces shifting assumptions about gender and space within that policy and their consequences for women. Time, then, is a vital component of policy analysis, permitting feminist rhetoricians to identify gendering processes in the workplace and discursive patterns of organizational change.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1107826
  2. Retórica e Eloquéncia em Portugal na época do Renascimento por B. Fernandes Pereira
    Abstract

    110 RHETORICA dialect when the sophists spread their teaching in the Hellenic world. The inscriptive evidence provides a strong case for the utility of sophistic rhetoric. This innovative volume builds a case for using physical artifacts along with textual evidence to research the histories of rhetoric. Researchers look­ ing into under-represented or marginalized traditions may find this book useful for providing a method to examine the cultural context of these understudied rhetorics. Enos is arguing for an expansion of method which feminist rhetoricians are already strongly embracing. Scholars looking to expand their repertoires in academic investigation may find these new ave­ nues for research rewarding. Robert Lively, Arizona State University B. Fernandes Pereira, Retórica e Eloquéncia em Portugal na época do Renascimento, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, 2012; 988 pp. ISBN 9789722719711 For most people, the rich history of Portuguese rhetoric is terra incog­ nita. The comprehensive survey of Belmiro Pereira offers a unique occasion to explore these unknown fields and discover their many treasures. Many ISHR members will be delighted to see their names in the footnotes of this extremely well documented book. It starts with an overview of medieval rhetoric and the transmission of ancient texts during this period; there are chapters on the artes dictandi and artes praedicandi, on classical rhetoric in medieval Portuguese culture, on reading the Fathers of the Church, on the growing interest in the works of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in the four­ teenth and fifteenth centuries. As in other parts of the book, Pereira indica­ tes where the manuscripts of these works are to be found: this precise information about the major places of learning in Portugal and Spain is very welcome. It also shows the aim of the author to present rhetoric in the wider context of education, culture and religion. This aim continues to be pursued in the second part of the book, which deals with rhetoric and the rise of humanism in Portugal. The prominence of rhetoric in Renaissance culture is considered in an international perspec­ tive, with special emphasis on developments in Spain, France and, more unexpectedly, in Germany and the Low Countries. Indeed, one of the major discoveries in this book is the importance of Northern humanism for the evolution of rhetorical education in Portugal. The author has founded his research on an extensive knowledge of the sources in the various countries under consideration. His reading of studies published in all these countries on the subject of Renaissance rhetoric is vast, up to date and accurate. A stu­ dent of German or Spanish rhetoric may learn a great deal from this book about his or her own field of interest. The presence of major works of ancient, medieval and Renaissance rhetoric in the more important Portuguese libraries is documented for two Reviews 111 periods, before and after the year 1537. The author singles out the years 1527 to 1548 for special consideration. In these two decades the King of Portugal, John the Third, sent his country's most promising students to Paris to have them acquaint themselves with the ideas and methods of Erasmian humanism. They gathered in a college run more or less perma­ nently by Portuguese scholars: Sancta Barbara, in French Sainte-Barbe. Moreover, the syllabus of the Santa Cruz monastery in Coimbra was reorga­ nised according to modern standards. Finallv, in the year 1548 the humanist Colegio das Artes is established by order of the King in the same city; and teachers educated in centres of learning in Paris and elsewhere in Europe are engaged to bring to Portugal the methods of reading and writing devel­ oped by major humanist educators. According to B. Pereira 1537 was a pivotal year: the centre of higher education was transferred from Eisbon to Coimbra and the King's brother Henry (D. Henrique) founded in Braga a new college, Saint Paul's. In this latter college, the influence of Northern humanism is conspicuous due to the presence of teachers such as N. Clenardus and J. Vasaeus. Pereira gives a great deal of attention to the career of A. Pinus (Pinheiro), educated in Paris and afterwards entrus­ ted with high offices at the Portuguese court...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0027

November 2015

  1. Embodiment: Embodying Feminist Rhetorics

September 2015

  1. Wikipedia's Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)action
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2015.06.009

July 2015

  1. <i>Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies</i>, by Rebecca S. Richards
    Abstract

    In recent years feminist rhetoricians from Communication Studies and English have urged scholars from these fields to keep apace with the developments in both transnational studies and transnationa...

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.1041209

February 2015

  1. Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights
    Abstract

    Arabella Lyon's Deliberative Acts begins with a rhetorical question: “Shall we speak of Abu Ghraib and torture; shall we educate the children of illegal immigrants; shall we guarantee health care for all or for most; shall we intervene in the governance of other nations; shall we ban the hijab (head scarf), medical marijuana, and prayer in the schools; shall we find one hundred million missing women, the lost boys of Africa, and los desaparecidos (the disappeared)?” (1) With this list of violations framed as a question, Lyon suggests that through the media, popular culture, and politics, we are constantly confronted with and compelled to deliberate on issues of rights, so much so that human rights have become the grounding for the work of democracy. Thus, Lyon's major intervention is located at this intersection of human rights discourse and the political deliberation necessary in democracies. She seeks to advance a theory of “performative deliberation” (3) that conceives of deliberation within theories of performance and performativity as an activity that refocuses on the present and the constitutive moment of recognition within the specific context of each speech act. In order to do so, Lyon turns to human rights case studies as represented in the media and life stories because they, by nature, attend to radical difference and because they “require examinations of both being and situated knowledge for the many coming to action, an action potentially transformative of being and knowledge” (4).Rhetorical studies has been surprisingly late in taking up a human rights critique. Although many have been engaged in critiquing human rights from a rhetorical perspective for years, and even more have been engaged in critiquing human rights through discourse analysis and literary analysis, the lack of conversation in rhetoric prompts Erik Doxtader to question whether rhetoric should have a role in human rights discourse in the first place.1 Despite his question, the past several years has seen a renewed interest in rhetorical approaches to human rights. In fact, a special issue of RSQ coedited by Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson in 2011 (subsequently published as a book in 2012) and Wendy Hesford's book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011) were among the first in this new wave of rhetorical studies to focus directly on human rights as such. Lyon's Deliberative Acts is situated within this relatively recent rhetorical turn to human rights and provides a useful and necessary theoretical grounding on rhetorical concepts and deliberation across difference as they relate to human rights case studies on which others can build. Additionally, for scholars engaged in conversations surrounding deliberative rhetorics, Lyon offers a convincing model of performative deliberation that accounts for the fluidity of poststructuralist notions of agency and subjectivity through an overdue rethinking of rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition, and performance/performativity in persuasion. However, for scholars participating in the conversation and critique directly surrounding human rights discourse, a critique that is predominantly located in the humanities and rapidly expanding out from its literary foundations, Lyon's book may be controversial, as it does not necessarily critique the discourse of rights itself, nor the amorphous “we” constructed in her first sentence. Rather, she is interested in critiquing how that “we” employs, deploys, and deliberates over human rights cases, including the claims made by Libyan woman Eman al-Obeidi's to Western journalists that she was raped and abused by Gaddafi's military, the Chinese one-child policy, Rigoberta Menchú's testimony, and women's suffrage in the United States.Lyon's introduction locates her intervention in the conversation surrounding deliberation and deliberative democracy in a global and transnational era. To begin, Lyon distinguishes deliberative democracy (a way for states to legitimize decisions) from deliberation (a rhetorical practice), a distinction that suggests that the problem with deliberative democracy is that “it finds difference disruptive rather than productively diverse” (11). This is problematic because “in responding to rights conflicts” Lyon claims, “citizens are asked to deliberate, to recognize interlocutors, to comprehend their competing claims, and weigh definitions of the issue and the consequences of their decisions on people whom they have never seen” (4). Lyon's introduction articulates three major critiques that scholars of deliberative theory might find very useful. First, she critiques its origins in procedural democracy, which engages in forensic rhetoric, rather than deliberative politics, which engages in deliberative rhetoric. Stated differently, deliberative democracy is future oriented and focuses on action and procedure rather than present context. Second, in its privileging of reason, deliberative democracy values Western notions of speech-action that delegitimize alternative and embodied strategies of persuasion. Thus, deliberative democracy ignores the contextual forces that constitute reason in the first place. Third, Lyon argues that deliberative democracy values consensus, which “creates problems for theorizing radical deliberation, because it is hard to imagine even basic norms of justice achieving practical consensus” (19).The first chapter, “Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification” theoretically situates the book and redefines some foundational rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition and persuasion. Lyon suggests that instead of deliberative rhetoric being a futurist discourse, it can instead be constitutive of the present, “a doing based in speech and act and not in persuasion and identification” (30). For example, identification predicated on recognition, argues Lyon, will always subsume difference and is thus inadequate for discourse across difference. Lyon critiques deliberation as a persuasive discourse on three grounds. It is inadequate for human rights and cross-cultural engagement since it is predicated upon an unequal relationship between speaker and audience (rather than an equal relationship between interlocutors); it is future rather than present oriented; and it assumes certain sets of communal knowledges that will always “seek to remove otherness” (31). In order to remedy these problems Lyon turns to “alternative rhetorics,” including feminist rhetorics and Confucian notions of remonstration, that can help scholars conceive of deliberation “as a dramatic event or a series of enactments” and as “the discursive acts responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants, their discourses, and their beliefs” (36–37). Ultimately, Lyon proposes a conception of deliberation as a continuum of political perspectives, suggesting that if each interlocutor values the other over the outcome, then deliberation can occur. If we understand deliberation as a “regularly occurring human act” (49), she claims, then recognition does not have to occur prior to deliberation; the act of deliberation is itself an act of recognition and thus humanizing.Understanding recognition as occurring in the moment of engagement with the other seems to solve the poststructuralist problem of the fixed individual of rights, but it gets more challenging when the subject of rights is not a subject who can engage in deliberation at all, such as third generation rights of/to the environment. However, in critiquing Aristotle's notion of persuasion so as to redefine deliberation not as a discourse oriented toward the future bent on persuasion but rather as one constitutive of the present bent on recognition, Lyon opens the possibility of deliberation across difference that does not reproduce the hegemonic structures always present in discourses of persuasive deliberation.The second chapter, “Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who,” begins with the story of Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who, according to Lyon, became a symbol of defiance against Gaddafi when she entered the Rixos Hotel in 2011 (a hotel where Western journalists covering the uprising gathered) and claimed that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's military. During this telling of her rape, Gaddafi's military entered the hotel and again abducted al-Obeidi despite the journalists' attempts to protect her. Lyon uses the story of al-Obeidi throughout the chapter to argue for a theory of performative deliberation as a way to account for the complexities of agency, recognition, and narratability in deliberative discourse. The chapter offers a further critique of identification and recognition through a close reading of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, Kenneth Burke's concept of performance, and Judith Butler's notions of performativity as “a continuum of form and forming” (25) that scales outward from the individual to the structural. In an attempt to locate individual agency within structural notions of subjectivity, Lyon then provides a close reading of issues pertaining to narration and agency that she traces through Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Adriana Cavarero. Through these theories and the story of al-Obeidi, Lyon proposes to extend speech act theory in four main ways. First, by analyzing “tensions between conforming and forming within speech act theories to reveal the agency inherent in discourse” (69), Lyon shows how al-Obeidi shifted the focus of her speech act from an individual act of rape when she was talking with the journalists in the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel to a violation within the normative and structural discourse of human rights when she was interviewed much later by Anderson Cooper on CNN. According to Lyon, this intentional slippage shifts blame “from the shame of the woman to the shame of the patriarchal state” (69). Second, because speech acts do not just conform to normative conventions but also maintain space for agency and can be inaugural sites themselves, then “the nature of the cultural change is visible in abnormal or infelicitous performances” (69). Therefore, she reads al-Obeidi's decision to burst in on the breakfast of Western journalists covering the war in Libya as an example of an infelicitous speech act that was able to redefine the norms of testimony. Third, Lyon seeks to find agency in the embodied performance of the speech act (69), and fourth, the chapter claims that agency is found in navigating existing norms by “using both felicitous and infelicitous acts to widen possibilities” (69), exemplified in al-Obeidi's navigation of the Western media. This chapter is one of the more compelling chapters because of its thorough critique of identification and recognition.The third chapter critiques U.S. media representations of what Lyon calls “the most major human rights crisis in the world today: missing women” (108) in Asia and China due to the one-child policy. The chapter, titled “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” with an intended pun on “missing women,” suggests that if the media, like literature, could work to foster compassion, then it could initiate the kind of relationships necessary for performative deliberation. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of the narratable self, Lyon modifies Arendt's view of compassion as an emotion that demands action rather than the slow movement of deliberation in order to develop a theory of deliberation that employs compassion from a distance. Her theory of compassion is the rhetorical equivalent of theories of literary witness articulated by Anne Cubilié in Women Witnessing Terror (2005) and Wendy Kozol (2011) in her essay “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine.” All three scholars articulate a notion of witness that demands action rather than spectatorship, the latter implying passivity and consumption. Lyon argues that the media representation of China's missing women revives Cold War sentiments and the fear of China surpassing the United States as an economic and global superpower. Negating any form of cross-cultural recognition, family planning gets mapped onto the United States' own political fears and Chinese women become allegorical figures for the nation-state. The U.S. media thus misses the missing women because they are not seen as a human rights violation but rather a symptom of family planning or abject suffering, made the subject of narratives, argues Lyon, that foreclose deliberation across difference. To counteract this, Lyon calls for a kind of “global citizen” who is located in the United States but who is educated and informed and who can advocate for women's rights in other cultures. Lyon argues that literature can offer this kind of compassionate education that underwrites performative deliberations and turns to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club as an example, thus contributing to the wealth of scholarship that suggest literature does human rights work. However, Lyon ends her chapter by backing away from the work literature can do, suggesting that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Arendt's Lies: Menchú's Political Strategy,” analyzes the reception of Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú and U.S. scholars' attempt to explain away the inconsistencies of the controversial testimonio. In so doing, the chapter “reconceives the ethics of lies, arguing that they are examples of imaginative, performative acts in the service of (potentially new) political regimes” (27). Returning once again to Arendt, Lyon furthers Arendt's sanction of lies for diplomatic political use, particularly those told to enemies, and legitimates Menchú's inconsistencies as an expression of her political agency by which she negotiates norms. Suggesting that Menchú's lies facilitate human rights deliberation, this chapter more deeply examines issues of recognition within normative conventions of the genre of testimonio. Thus, Lyon not only provides a helpful reading of the normative conventions of the testimonio in this chapter but also critiques the ways in which narratives are frequently recognized based on their adherence to normative conventions of testimonial veracity. The chapter ends with an apologia of sorts that explains why Lyon advocates the political tactic of lying, claiming that “the state's legitimacy relies on its truthful adherence to its laws, but citizen agents must speak back to dishonest states, even with lies” (149).The final chapter of Deliberative Acts, titled “Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference In Kind,” moves the discussion of rights onto U.S. soil and into the past in an examination of the deliberations over women's suffrage. One of the chapter's most interesting interventions is Lyon's claim that paradoxes are generative of deliberation because they counteract consensus and because they disrupt the stability of answers. This reframing of paradox is incredibly useful for human rights because of the inherently paradoxical nature of human rights, but it should be noted that Lyon articulates a particular definition of the paradox as “indicating a set of radical claims about women that challenge traditional beliefs and doxa” rather than “an irresolvable proposition” (154). Lyon examines four particular paradoxes: the tension between old and new ideas (exemplified by competing interpretations over time of the First Amendment and free speech), the tension between the normativity of rights and the inherent (de)limitations of those norms, the chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding the political origins of rights as they relate to the formation of the citizen, and finally, the irresolvable tension between language as describing rights and constituting them as such. The chapter examines these paradoxes through a detailed reading of deliberation surrounding the First Amendment, suggesting that Susan B. Anthony's illegal performance of citizenship and the Seneca Falls Convention's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, like al-Obeidi's testimony and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, are infelicitous performances that serve to negotiate and expand what was and is considered normative and thus expand the notion of “what it means to embody citizenship and rights” (172). Lyon ends her book by reiterating the performative, and nature of to the conversation surrounding rights discourse is in that she articulates how deliberation over human rights can potentially a subject of rights. In the Lyon to articulate a definition of rights, and thus a subject of rights, that is and are seen as relationships through speech acts and with the of being and situated they are as of in conversations among and out in or which them as and as through based and deliberation, and in However, seems to be a tension throughout the book on the one an of rights in their or discursive as an by a set of normative conventions and that and constantly on the an of them as political and by the critique are U.S. and the of rights are whom they have never seen” particularly in her that “performative deliberation must extend the concept of recognition from one of people visible to one of the it have understand recognition as a of being and rather than one of and or However, on recognition rather than persuasion and hegemonic discursive structures through “a agency in the present moment of seems to that all are at the and that all are as and studies has it is those who are not recognized as who rights the In other the is only human when she or is as a the Lyon this problem in chapter when she articulates the paradox of rights as the chicken-or-egg of what citizen who advocates for rights or the rights to the citizen as such. In Lyon's in chapter that al-Obeidi's to the of the violation from the individual to from the to the of the is also an analysis of the rhetoric of rights However, it could be interesting to on Lyon's by more deeply if this the norms of testimony the that the reason al-Obeidi was able to her claim and her testimony as a of rape was because she has a and had an audience the Western who both and that testimony and of it as a If the Western media had not been to the al-Obeidi's rape, and have as In other it is more through which normative cultural Libyan or al-Obeidi's speech is 4, does a account of the and problems of recognition, as in it Lyon offers a particularly reading of the norms surrounding Menchú's testimony and her of lies for political within the normative discourse of her useful critique of a an titled “The and many media in chapter Lyon out the ways in which the popular media representations of women not facilitate an space where may and initiate This chapter's critique of the popular representation across of missing women is to further Lyon's theories of performative deliberation in specific it the media for missing women and a rather view of the of U.S. Additionally, how Lyon's critique of the and other U.S. media as to a of engaged who can then in deliberation are by the on in China the one-child to to that will then to including the U.S. and the Chinese in the world of media and or what she of the recent turn to literature by human rights her that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” tension between the notion of normative rights as subject and the notion of rights as a set of that to be by a Western “we” lies at the of Lyon's but does not from her theoretical notion of performative deliberation as constitutive of human rights In fact, Lyon's reading of identification and the theoretical of deliberation, particularly in the first chapter, are very useful for scholars at the of human rights discourse and rhetorical particularly those scholars interested in of global transnational rhetorics, and deliberative democracy. If rights are and made normative by narratives, whether or Lyon's examination of deliberation provides a for the of reading across reading that is potentially subject Although the first of the book is theoretical and can across as from the of rights discourse and from the of rights claims example, what does it of of rights violations to suggest that they the possibility of a relationship with their or of Lyon's critique of the discourse of deliberation as persuasion and her of performative deliberation across difference is within more practical discourses in the second of the Lyon's critique of deliberation in human rights discourse, particularly her from identification as a in persuasion across is and should be a foundational one for those of in rights discourse because it to the very on which rights claims, particularly within like the have been In one of the more of the in chapter 4, Lyon Judith in claiming that one does not as a subject of recognition, to the and to be one must or the of that telling the is also problematic if it does not recognize as For scholars in human rights discourse to expand the notions of what is this is useful as we and critique that may or may or may not or may not be recognized as or existing normative of what human rights, rights narratives, rights claims, and of rights.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.48.1.0107

January 2015

  1. Embodying and Disabling Antiwar Activism: Disrupting YouTube’s “Mother’s Day for Peace”
    Abstract

    AbstractYouTube allows activists to broadcast their missions and engage global audiences. “Mother’s Day for Peace,” a 2007 video, features American actresses who recite Julia Ward Howe’s radical 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation and describe their personal thoughts on mothering. Analyzing this video with transnational rhetoric and disability rhetoric frameworks not only illuminates the persuasive possibilities and drawbacks for the video’s normative feminine gender performance and the spectacle of a war-injured Iraqi girl but also models an approach that prompts rhetoricians to examine larger rhetorical concerns revealed by the intersections of disability, race, gender, and globalization. Notes1 I am greatly indebted to RR peer reviewers Anne Demo, who helped me sharpen my focus, and Jay Dolmage, who both illuminated the broader implications of my analysis and introduced me to Meekosha’s invaluable work. Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson, Maggie LaWare, and Jason Palmeri also provided feedback that benefited my analysis during earlier stages of this project.2 Led by President Robert Greenwald, BNF produces film projects with activist causes, addressing such issues as improving US worker safety, ending petroleum drilling, revealing the power of billionaire Koch brothers, and uncovering US military spending. Greenwald has directed and produced numerous short films with his company Brave New Films, including exposés of Fox News, Walmart, and more. BNF’s activist videos clearly showcase their intention to inspire and create change toward progressive causes.3 For the description I draw on here, see http://archive.is/0RFII. For NMV’s updated website, see http://www.nomorevictims.org/newsite/about/.4 According to holiday historian Jones, Mother’s Day has facilitated a variety of political and social action. For example, in 1933 President Roosevelt issued a proclamation on Mother’s Day that called attention to mothers and children living in poverty (216), and in 1968 Coretta Scott King led a Mother’s Day march to support poor children and their mothers (217). Regarding peace-related political action, a “Mother’s Peace Day” parade was held in 1938, and decades later in the 1980s, Helen Caldicott founded the Women’s Party for Survival, organized against nuclear arms and proliferation. The Party led demonstrations on Mother’s Day. Most recently, on May 2, 2012, supermodel Christy Turlington’s organization, Every Mother Counts, which focuses on maternal mortality, uploaded the video, “No Mothers Day,” prompting mothers to be silent and “disappear” on Mother’s Day in order to “help raise awareness about the hundreds of thousands of women who die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth” (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0w669fZBH8).5 Established in 2002, CodePink (http://www.codepink4peace.org/) identifies itself as a grassroots peace and social justice organization. While not exclusively, its approaches and strategies are women-initiated, women-led, and often based on traditionally feminine tropes such as the color pink.6 Attending to the massive influence of Mother’s Day as a major cultural event in the US is beyond the confines of this article, but I encourage readers to look out for activist events that coincide with the holiday.7 This photograph can be viewed online: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005018835/.8 Widely available online, the full document can be read at CodePink’s website: http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=217.9 As of this writing, the site includes broken links and brief information on 2010’s International Women’s Day, another example of a lack of using YouTube’s ability to maintain a presence and further the ongoing discourse regarding Mother’s Day’s potential for antiwar activism.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAbby M. DubisarAbby M. Dubisar is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty member in women’s and gender studies at Iowa State University, where she teaches classes on women’s/feminist rhetoric, gender and communication, and popular culture analysis. Her research analyzes the rhetorical strategies of women peace activists in a wide variety of contexts, from archival holdings to YouTube.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.976305

2015

  1. Hearing Silence: Toward a Mixed-Method Approach for Studying Genres’ Exclusionary Potential
    Abstract

    Traditional Rhetorical Genre Study (RGS) methods are not well adapted to study exclusion because excluded information and people are typically absent from the genre, and some excluded information is simply unrelated to the genre because of genre conventions or social context. Within genre-based silences, how can scholars differentiate between an item of silenced information that suggests exclusionary practices and another item that is unrelated to the genre? This article serves as an example of how augmenting RGS with rhetorical listening and silence can benefit our pedagogy, research, and practice. Incorporating exclusion gives a more complete understanding of a genre’s social action and responds to cross-cultural issues with genre practices. To illustrate the benefits of this combination, the article draws from the researcher’s ongoing inquiry into the construct of the “well-rounded individual” that has become routinized in the U.S. résumé and cover letter.

July 2014

  1. <i>The Book of Margery Kempe</i> and the Rhetorical Chorus: An Alternative Method for Recovering Women ’s Contributions to the History of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This article defends the “rhetorical chorus” as a useful method for recovering women’s voices in the history of rhetoric. As distinct from the more amorphous term “collaboration,” which designates any act of cooperation in the production of rhetorical texts, the “chorus” offers a more nuanced way to identify and map the recording, preservation, appropriation, and alteration of works originally dictated by women rhetors. Using The Book of Margery Kempe as an example, the study traces both homophonic and polyphonic relationships between the lead voice of Margery and the voices of her scribes and annotators.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2014.933720
  2. Embroidered Feminist Rhetoric in Andrea Dezső’s<i>Lessons from My Mother</i>
    Abstract

    AbstractArtist Andrea Desző’s embroideries, inspired by the Romanian traditional sampler, belong to the material turn in cultural and feminist studies. Based on a comparison with first-wave feminist ideas in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Women and Economics, this analysis interrogates what embroidery—as a form of discourse—tells about the little-known Eastern-European woman’s condition. In the region significantly different from Western Europe in both postcolonialist and post-Marxist analyses, these artifacts reveal the ambivalent condition of women situated at the intersection of tradition, feminist thought, and Marxist practice, after Marxist-led governments had provided women with a workplace and equality, at least in theory. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAdriana Cordali GradeaAdriana Gradea is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University, specializing in rhetoric and cultural theory. She graduated from “Romulus Ladea” Visual Arts High School in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has a BA from “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a Graduate Certificate in Advanced International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, and an MA in English from Bradley University. Her research and teaching interests are in feminist and visual rhetorics, as well as Marxism, postcolonialism, and posttotalitarian approaches.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.917510

March 2014

  1. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900 by Jane Donawerth
    Abstract

    200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves­ tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don­ awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail­ able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the­ ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo­ ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven­ teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia­ logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen­ tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ­ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0013

January 2014

  1. Antinarcissistic Rhetoric: Reinforcing Social Inequities through Gender Performance
    Abstract

    Antinarcissistic rhetoric refers to the ways in which women rhetors appropriate patriarchal discourses in order to create an ethos with their audience. This rhetoric often reinforces the social inequities that require women's silence in the first place. A look to the rhetoric of two historical women, Hortensia and Queen Elizabeth I, theorizes antinarcissistic rhetoric in three parts: the dual gender performance, the use of psogos, and the dismissal of the corporeal body.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.856726

2014

  1. Performing the Groundwork: Building a WEC/WAC Writing Program at The College of St. Scholastica
    Abstract

    This program profile describes the efforts needed to develop a new writing program at a small college. The author explores how she cultivated relations with disciplinary faculty to collaboratively redefine a “problem” into an opportunity by adopting Krista Ratcliffe’s technique of rhetorical listening. She then outlines the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) components of the writing program. Additionally, the author offers lessons learned about writing program development and building productive college-wide relationships as well as some precautions. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on small college writing programs by addressing issues of program development and explores the possibilities of rhetorical listening for writing program administrators.

  2. Feminist Rhetorical Studies—Past, Present, Future: An Interview with Cheryl Glenn
    Abstract

    In this interview, Jess Enoch talks with Cheryl Glenn about her professional career as a leading scholar in feminist rhetorical studies. Through their exchange, Cheryl discusses the emergence of feminist historiography in our field; she identifies important trends in feminist research, and she pinpoints areas of scholarship that feminist rhetoricians might continue to explore. They conclude the interview with Cheryl underscoring the importance of feminist community building, collaboration, and mentorship.

December 2013

  1. Review Essay: Pieces of the Puzzle: Feminist Rhetorical Studies and the Material Conditions of Women’s Work
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Fitalicinism, and Public Policy Writing Rebecca Dingo Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 Jane Donawerth Fitalicinist Rhetorical Resilience Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, editors Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era— Lisa Mastrangelo— Fitalicinist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch

    doi:10.58680/ccc201324505

November 2013

  1. From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata
    Abstract

    This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

    doi:10.58680/ce201324272

October 2013

  1. Gender, Material Chronotopes, and the Emergence of the Eighteenth-Century Microscope
    Abstract

    This essay expands on previous feminist rhetorical scholarship to account for the ways that material, spatial, and temporal rhetorics operate together to enable gender performances and relations. Extending M.M. Bakhtin's concept of the literary chronotope, we offer the concept of the “material chronotope” to examine how routinized engagements with material objects, such as emerging technologies, and their surrounding material–rhetorical contexts facilitate particular embodied performances of gender. Drawing from the example of the eighteenth-century microscope, we demonstrate how three coexisting designs—the pocket microscope, the solar microscope, and the standard microscope—each positioned women users differently in time and space, facilitating different relationships to science, nature, and femininity. Whereas previous scholarship has emphasized the extent to which new technologies are incorporated into existing social institutions, becoming complicit in the maintenance of gender dichotomies, we draw from this example to argue that these boundaries are not simply maintained but constantly under renegotiation.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2013.828096

September 2013

  1. Review: Rhetorical Listening by Krista Ratcliffe

July 2013

  1. Women's Compilations of Recitations, Dialogues, and Tableaux: Building Feminist Rhetorics for the Twentieth Century
    Abstract

    As America entered the twentieth century, a number of women contributed to the popular elocution movement through their publication of compilations of recitation, dialogues, tableaux, and other elocutionary genres. An examination of woman-authored elocutionary compilations reveals a nascent feminism: Through their selection of pieces that examine women's changing roles and celebrate women's accomplishments—both within and beyond the domestic sphere—women compilers encouraged novice women speakers to rethink their gendered societal roles.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2013.797875

April 2013

  1. <i>Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies</i>, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2013.766858

December 2012

  1. Reviews
    Abstract

    Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan, Reviewed by Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Green, edited by Brooke Rollins and Lee Bauknight, Reviewed by Beverly Faxon, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vols. 1 and 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Reviewed by Rebecca Powell, Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, edited by David M. Sheridan and James A. Inman, Reviewed by Vincent D. Robles

    doi:10.58680/tetyc201221854

November 2012

  1. “Ain’t I a Woman”: Using Feminist Rhetorical Practices to Re-set the Terms of Scholarly Engagement for an Iconic Text