Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus' theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.

Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970, by Sara Hillin Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 Jennifer Keohane Jennifer Keohane University of Baltimore Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (4): 472–474. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Keohane; Review: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970, by Sara Hillin. Rhetorica 1 November 2021; 39 (4): 472–474. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.4.472 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 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.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Scholars in disability studies have recently sought to account for fatness, claiming an inseparable link between disability and fat scholarship. Interrogating the stigmas of fatness as a sign of bad character or lack of discipline, rhetoricians have advanced this thinking, illustrating how to be fat is to be rhetorically disabled. Contributing to these efforts, this essay argues that eating disorders, too, are often framed through deficit thinking, positioned as antithetical to mental fitness—a disparaging view echoed prominently by Hilde Bruch. Challenging normative perspectives of rhetoric centered in her theories, I analyze Bruch’s The Golden Cage, tracing descriptions of anorexia and pain through a feminist materialist lens, ultimately revealing how the rhetoricity of fat stigma can be read not only as a product of cultural, patriarchal norms but also as a complex, lived, felt experience of mental disability, expanding theories of rhetoric to the material intersection of gender and embodiment.

Makerspaces, hackathons, and technology incubators are key-emerging sites for communication practice and research. Yet, little is known about how resource-constrained, non-Western families practice DIY (Do It Yourself). Revisiting craft’s roots in families practicing artisanal trades, I find that the visibility of DIY innovation relies on the infrastructuring of family members who perform articulation work despite tremendous economic risk through traditional and transgressive family and gender roles and identities.

TABS: Aids for Ending Sexism in School was a journal founded by Lucy Picco Simpson and the Organization for Equal Education of the Sexes. Attention to this publication sheds light on feminist activism as it transformed in the wake of Title IX legislation in the late 1970s and 1980s. In examining the journal’s ability to facilitate networking, production, and accountability, we gain greater insight into how teachers and students were able to question normative messages about race, gender, class, and ability in educational materials and diversify the range of historical figures discussed in schools.

This article interrogates how hiphop composition pedagogies can interrupt what the author terms the "hiphop illiteracies" that circulate in predominantly white institutions (PWIs). An analysis of four college writing classrooms that integrate hiphop texts at one PWI reveals pervasive anti-Blackness in student attitudes, but also in the research and course design as well as in department-mandated course texts. The analysis demonstrates the need for writing pedagogies that name and teach Black language, writing, and meaning-making practices while also asking students, teachers, and administrators to reflexively examine their own identities' locations vis-a-vis those practices. The author advocates a reflexive pedagogy that asks students to locate themselves vis-a-vis power as a starting point for investigations of language and culture. The author concludes that hiphop pedagogies have significant critical social justice possibilities in institutionally white educational contexts, but these benefits are not automatic and demand pedagogies of reflexivity, sociolinguistics, and intersectional feminism.

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

A midst an increasingly globalized world, abetted by COVID-19 pandemic and its necessitation of online interaction, feminist scholars, activists, and community organizers alike have faced increasing pressures to return their collective focus to more localized struggles.We see this forced movement to the local occur within issues such as reproductive rights in Texas, United States in 2021.Despite this and parallel movements throughout the world, digitally cultivated spaces, as seen in social media platforms, have deepened the possibility for transnational collaboration across borders and boundaries. is collaboration is particularly visible within social justice e orts such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has become a central cry amongst anti-racist movements across the globe.is paradoxical contemporary context created the exigence for Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating eory and Activist Practice.Composed for a predominantly academic audience, Transnational Feminist Itineraries o ers extensive discussions of our contemporary context and how collaborative, feminist practices are being taken up not only within, but across nations.Transnational Feminist Itineraries is a collaborative collection of essays which aims to contribute to the development of feminist theory and practice through a vepart approach: (1) positing that the global socio-political context requires the tools and methods of transnational feminism; (2) positioning transnational feminism as running parallel, and not in opposition, to other feminist approaches; (3) exploring a historical context rich with cross-border activism; (4) arguing for both the "scaling out" in addition to the "scaling up" of feminist methods; (5) o ering critiques of transnational feminism to further complicate the conversation surrounding its place amongst alternative feminisms.Transnational Feminist Itineraries consists predominantly of case studies.Each chapter takes a unique approach to discussing the a ordances of transnational fem-

This work draws upon Hiphop feminism, studies of Black girlhood, and Black women and girls' literacies to illuminate the layered and violent narratives that shape society's treatment of Black women and girls, what these narratives look like in everyday life, how they are taken up and negotiated in different social spheres, such as an afterschool club for Black middle school girls and the platforms and artistry of women Hiphop artists and creatives. Richardson considers what activism is possible through juxtaposing Black girls as emerging creatives, celebrity corporate artist activists Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, independent activist artists such as Noname and dream hampton. Given the far-reaching representations of Black women and girls in popular culture, the art, lives and platforms of women in Hiphop are critical sites to understanding complexities, strategies and possibilities for social change.

Abstract This article examines the construction of and contestation over the idea of the nation through contemporary popular cinema in India. Building on his experience of discussing the Bollywood spy thriller Raazi (2018) in an English class, the author proposes that “reading” the film in terms of gender and genre can not only help students apply modes of textual analysis to narratives in other media but also alert them to the location of such narratives within larger discursive frameworks of defining national identities. Raazi presents a critical and ideological counterpoint to the generic conventions of the spy thriller within the increasingly polarized sociopolitical context of the Indian subcontinent. The film presents an unlikely female protagonist as both the physical agent and the psychological subject of the violence integral to the “action” of an espionage film. It also interrogates the oppositional relation between the patriotic “self” and the foreign “other” that lies at the basis of the militaristic conception of the nation and ultimately reveals the shared human vulnerability of both to the traumatic effects of pursuing the idea(l) of nationalism at the expense of individual moral integrity. Thus a close reading of the film's narrative structure and conventions, as well as a critical engagement with the historical context of its production and reception, can be pedagogically fruitful ways of understanding and critiquing the processes through which a nation is collectively imagined into being.

In this book, published in the CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, Mara Holt provides a historical overview of collaborative pedagogy in US writing classrooms. In fact, Holt argues that collaborative writing pedagogy reflects and is shaped by its historical context. The book defines collaborative learning broadly, as “a pedagogy that organizes students to work together in groups” (1). Although she focuses on collaborative writing, Holt casts a wide net to capture writing classroom practices that she sees as applications of John Dewey's philosophy of American pragmatism. Holt argues that the American pragmatism espoused by Dewey is enacted in many collaborative writing practices, allowing those pedagogies to transform classrooms into training grounds for participatory democracy.Holt, who is professor and director of composition at Ohio University, intentionally operates both as a historian and as a writing studies scholar. The book has roots in Holt's (1988) history-based dissertation, “Collaborative Learning from 1911–1986,” submitted over thirty years ago, and in what the composition theorist James Berlin (1987) calls the significance of history in writing studies. Holt identifies a social-constructivist perspective in Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism that aligns with her argument that collaborative learning practices are shaped by their temporal context. Pragmatism, Holt says, offers general principles to ground education: 1) a focus on praxis; 2) knowledge creation as social, and collaboration as potentially “authoritative” (6); 3) the importance of critical thinking; and 4) the classroom as a place to model democracy and prepare students to participate in it. While Holt admits that Dewey probably never used the term collaborative (12), she implies that his principles are enacted in the most democratic collaborative learning practices.After a chapter of introduction, the chapters of Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice each provide case studies of collaborative learning in US writing classrooms at a transformational moment in US political or pedagogical history. In the introduction, Holt asserts her underlying thesis that a historical overview of collaborative writing pedagogy is needed to help new generations of writing teachers understand that they are part of a tradition of using collaborative writing in the classroom for democratic pedagogical purposes. Holt also argues that a historical perspective is necessary for educators to fully understand and assess collaborative writing practices. Chapters 2 and 3 outline collaborative learning in writing classrooms during the Progressive Era and the Cold War; chapter 4 considers the impacts of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Chapters 5 through 7 consider moments of pedagogical shift—feminist theory, the creation of writing centers, and computer-mediated collaboration. The book concludes with a chapter in which Holt reflects on the future of collaborative learning as it intersects with three current movements: globalization, posthumanism, and Black Lives Matter.In some ways, Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is a contemporary complement to Anne Ruggles Gere's (1987) Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Writing at a time when social-constructivism was coming into its own, Gere outlines a theory to explain how writing groups, the collaborative writing pedagogy that she focuses on, are evidence of writing as a socially constructed activity. Holt's book, on the other hand, takes as accepted theory that writing is socially constructed and links that social interaction to Dewey's pragmatism. As a result, Gere and Holt share the notion that collaborative writing is affected by historical context. Like Gere, Holt includes historical background for the pedagogies she discusses, but Gere begins her history in the colonial era, starting at an earlier moment in US history than Holt, who extends the time line of collaborative writing into the twenty-first century.In addition to being a thesis-based history book, Holt's Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is part memoir. Holt weaves over forty years of personal experience as a writing studies scholar into her narrative. In the preface, Holt notes that her “first formal interaction with collaborative learning was at Kenneth Bruffee's Brooklyn College Institute in Peer Tutor Training and Collaborative Learning in 1980” (ix). Through her affiliation with the Brooklyn Institute she met Peter Elbow, Stanley Fish, Carol Stanger, John Trimbur, Harvey Kail, and Peter Hawkes. She read texts by Lev Vygotsky, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire. Her experiences at the Bruffee institute led Holt to pursue a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she met James Berlin, who was a visiting professor from the University of Cincinnati. Holt's dissertation director was Lester Faigley. Holt also acknowledges Victor Villanueva as a major influence. The array of scholars that Holt was taught by, wrote with, and thought with shows the depth of her connection to the foundation of the field. Her connection and experience in the field lends credibility both to her authority to survey the history of collaborative learning within the field and to select case studies not just with an eye to proving her point, but because they were some of the most important developments of collaborative learning in the field at that moment.Sometimes, however, these personal details can distract from her argument; they add names and dates to case studies already crowded with such information. Some personal details may also distance Holt from readers when she recalls memories in a way that requires insider knowledge. For example, she references the iteration of the “CUNY Graduate School on 42nd Street,” which she attended as the “pre-Giuliani pornographic version,” which assumes knowledge of both the pre- and post-Giuliani versions of the building (5). The text also includes other unnecessary details. For example, Holt notes that 1930s progressivism affected how first-year writing programs were administered; that's interesting history about first-year writing, but it says little about collaborative learning.Overall, Holt effectively argues that collaborative learning in writing classrooms was shaped by its historical context. For example, during the labor movements and nascent socialism of the 1930s, pedagogies emerged that were based on collective, student-centered practices. Likewise, during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in World War II, when international collectivist movements were viewed as oppressive, the use of collaborative pedagogies declined. In addition, Holt demonstrates that collaborative writing practices decades apart can mimic each other, proving her point that a historical knowledge of collaborative writing might prevent reinvention. For example, under the “Oregon Plan” of the 1950s, students critiqued each other's writing before revising it to be turned in to the teacher. These examples of peer critique foreshadowed Bruffee's peer revision of the 1970s, but Holt presents no causal link between the two pedagogies. In fact, Holt stresses that, while collaborative learning practices of one era may seem similar to those of another, their purposes will vary because their proponents are responding to different historical contexts and may be rejecting rather than amplifying democratic values. In the case above, Holt says that the Oregon Plan arose in a 1950s context in which students interacted with each other's texts suspiciously, whereas in Bruffee's context, students were encouraged to depend on classmates for educational gain.In chapter 6, Holt argues that writing centers, mostly through peer tutoring programs, have been key to the development of collaborative writing pedagogy. She also outlines current historical situations to which writing centers have responded in recent decades, including increasing numbers of underprepared and international students, and the shift from alpha text to multimodal composition. In focusing on the internationalization of writing centers, Holt also notes that American English is no longer the assumed standard in US writing centers and that institutions around the world have created writing centers of their own.In chapter 6 Holt traces the advent of computer-mediated collaboration in writing pedagogy by outlining how writing centers responded to the introduction of computers. In chapter 7 she extends her analysis of computer-mediated collaboration into the twenty-first century by acknowledging that much collaborative learning in writing classrooms is now mediated by technology. The tech-mediated case studies Holt considers in chapter 7 are the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment at the University of Texas in the 1980s and the more recent use of wikis in writing instruction. While Holt asserts that such tech-mediated pedagogies are “solidly connected to Deweyan/Bruffeean theory and practice” (109), her analysis overlooks the ideology of the infrastructure that supports tech-mediated collaboration—the technology itself. As a result, it may be that an updated version of a Deweyan/Bruffeean framework is needed to analyze collaborative learning in an increasingly tech-mediated classroom. As Holt persuasively shows, collaborative pedagogies in writing classrooms often embody democratic ideals, so a framework based on egalitarian principles is appropriate for their analysis, but perhaps that framework needs to have the capacity to analyze the infrastructure mediating the collaboration as well as the collaboration itself. Such a theoretical framework might be technofeminism, a framework concerned with issues of equity and access, but which also accounts for the ideology of the technology (Bates, Macarthy, and Warren-Riley 2018).Some readers may balk at the notion of examining collaborative writing pedagogies through any sort of theoretical framework at all. Indeed, educators from many ideological persuasions have used collaborative writing to help students improve their writing and thinking. Rather, what Holt implies is that collaborative writing almost by definition embodies elements of Dewey's democratic goals for education and that to practice collaborative writing is to enact Deweyism. Holt makes a strong case that collaborative writing pedagogies reflect the full context of their historical moment, and that many of them reflect Dewey's ideas of social reform; however, her survey also demonstrates that in an age of technology-mediated classrooms, a framework that incorporates the perspectives of colleagues who study technology through a lens of equity may be a way to productively analyze collaborative writing pedagogies in the future.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

Michele Kennerly's ambitious book sends a gust of fresh air through the field of ancient rhetoric. But that figure doesn't really suit her metaphorics—such a central aspect of the project. To hone in on these (a better figure, as we'll see), we need to come down to earth—to the material substance of wax tablets and papyrus book rolls, and the bodies of text produced on them. Editorial Bodies is a study of the ways ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators engaged in working on and over texts in a process of “recursive composing” (3) with consequences exceeding any narrow considerations of grammatical niceties. As Kennerly explains at the outset through a careful etymological introduction, our English word “editing,” understood as a late-stage form of “textual tidying” (1), often done by someone other than the author, cannot capture the kinds of work with texts performed and extensively discussed by these ancient wordsmiths. Honing, smithing, polishing, filing—these are a few of the gritty figures for textual work Kennerly excavates, and their object of attention, the text, is very often presented as a body. And here we arrive at the idea of “corpus care” (15), Kennerly's richly polyvalent figure for the processes and vocabularies referring to work on a text, itself a material body, for the bodies of the writers, and for those who received their work: a complex and multidimensional concept.Kennerly tracks the analogy of the body with the written text through an impressive number of authors in the Greek and Roman traditions. She argues for a consistency of reference across many sources, demonstrating that writing about writing in terms of the body pervades these ancients' extensive and careful attention to the crafting of rhetorical texts. An adjunct to this claim is the observation that insufficient attention has been paid to the relation between writing and oratory in the ancient periods. Editorial tendencies and terminologies, writes Kennerly, become absorbed into habits of writing, which, for orators, could “come to be absorbed into habits of extemporaneous speaking” (3). But Kennerly admits that delivery—the body of the orator on display—is not her concern here (172–73). Actual bodies appear from time to time. Aristotle warns that the bodily evidence of labor on a text should be hidden (9). Cicero in his dialogue Brutus relates his early experience of strain on voice and body, but after working with Molo in Rhodes, “both his body and speech [are] better defined for the unrelenting demands of public speaking” (90–91). We learn that Horace had a habit of debating with himself through shut lips (112) and that Ovid's body wasted away in exile (138–51). But Kennerly is far more interested in what bodies mean in Greek and Roman rhetorical culture, and in the textual analogy. Those signifying systems coalesce in the domain of gender, performing the normative work of “policing appropriate style and delivery” to secure “masculinity's approved cultural boundaries” (98).After an introduction setting up her terminology and claims, Kennerly begins with Athenian rhetoric in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE), surveying a daunting array of figures: Herodotus, Agathon, Alcidamas, dramatists Cratinus and Aristophanes, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Aristotle, and Anaximenes. Accumulating evidence of the “somatic-graphic analogy” (23), Kennerly performs some quite targeted readings here. Plato scholars will look in vain for the philosophical investments of the Phaedrus and his layering of voices in the Menexenus. These are set aside in favor of a reading of “rhetorical management,” attributed to Socrates rather than Plato (38–39). But this book is cast clearly as a material, rather than intellectual, history, and the method becomes more successful when we move to comedians and their “play and polemic” about rhetorical training. The Alcidamas text, On Those Who Write, offers much pertinent commentary on editing, but it is with Isocrates that Kennerly finds the richest exponent so far of “corpus care.” In his late and highly self-reflective Panathenaicus, Isocrates offers a “harrowing composition narrative” including “a view of how extensive and collaborative an editorial process can be” (45). The “insult-dense” oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines provides Kennerly with colorful evidence of commentary on modes of composition, and of moving from written to oral performance, invested by these archenemies with “considerable invective energy” (46).The next chapter, on the Hellenistic period, is a welcome addition, given that there is less attention to these centuries than to others in the existing scholarship in rhetoric. Kennerly offers a counterpoint to the familiar narrative of rhetoric's decline, making the case here that polis life continued to rely on democratic practices and the rhetorics that they demand even after the triumphs of Philip of Macedon and Alexander at the end of the fourth century. I appreciate the way she works at the seam between Greece and Rome in this chapter, pairing two Greek writers, Demetrius of Phalerum and Callimachus, with two early Roman ones, orator Cato and poet Lucilius, who lived during the same period (roughly). Because we have no surviving work by Demetrius, Kennerly interprets his style through Cicero's extensive reception of his work in Brutus, a survey of Roman orators, and Orator, on style. Trained in the Peripatetic school of Theophrastus, Demetrius led Athens for ten years under the thumb of the Macedonians and in this role made deliberative speeches (59–65). According to Cicero, his philosophical learning “softened” his speech (64) without feminizing it. Her treatment of Cato gives us a more nuanced view of a rhetor in process than the familiar shorthand version of a gruff and taciturn moralist. Close etymological work with the treatment of figurae—understood broadly as forms or styles—in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium provides Kennerly with abundant material for body-based rhetorical advice. The picture of Hellenistic rhetoric emerging from this chapter supports the assertion that the period is more accretive than derivative (76) and offers historians of rhetoric ways of rethinking the Roman relation to Greek rhetoric as more collaborative and less strictly oppositional. Where Kennerly does address the notion of a Roman inferiority complex—an anxiety of influence where letters were concerned—she attaches it to the imperial project: “editorial polish [is seen] as a solution to the general failure of Roman writing to spread and stick” (7).In chapter 3, Kennerly takes up one of her favorite figures, Cicero, highlighting his participation in a mid-first-century BCE large-scale cultural contest over style in its broadest sense (79). The struggle had to do with Atticism versus Asianism—inherited from the Greeks—and in keeping with the theme of the book, Kennerly shows how the struggle is carried out through (gendered) corporeal language. She makes the case indisputably for Cicero's interest in the use of writing before and after the delivery of the speech. There is in his process, Kennerly shows, a mix of “memory and monument,” the latter being Cicero's term for the finished text. After his exile in the mid-fifties BCE, Cicero stepped back from the vigor and intensity of his public oratory and applied his brilliance to philosophical and stylistic works on eloquence itself. In line with the purposes of her project, Kennerly does not delve into Cicero's philosophical contributions but notes that, for this consummate stylist, philosophy provides “silva (raw material; literally a forest)” (104). Later, she notes that Cicero, in his philosophical treatise De Officiis, praised the collaborative editorial practices of poets as a model for virtuous action: one should submit plans “to the scrutiny of trusted friends so that all mistakes can be caught and corrected” (151). We are treated to a more thorough analysis of Brutus and Orator, along with the less completely realized De Optimo Genere Oratorum (On the Very Best Kind of Orator). Far from simple formulae or a rejection of the new Atticism, Cicero advises a more expansive and flexible sense of style, Kennerly observes, matching each of three genres or duties of an orator—to move, to convince, and to delight—with three styles: “the weighty moves, the thin proves, and the moderate delights” (95). As with the Greeks, for Cicero the stakes are high where stylistic expertise is concerned. When an orator fails, it is not only his art or himself that he fails: it is “a client, friend, or the Commonwealth” (100). Kennerly addresses this entanglement of text, culture, and community persuasively.The chapter on Horace is refreshing, given that we have few rhetorical treatments of this poet. Kennerly highlights his compromised position in relationship to the first emperor, Octavian/Augustus, and reviews the implications for his poetic stance. Some of the most charming language in this chapter comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, where he pays a good deal of attention to style. He proposes a “compositional ethics of the slow,” advising restraint, scraping and scrubbing with the metaphorical file (127). His care in editing, Kennerly notes, is compatible with his “philosophic bent”: writing correctly arises from wisdom (130). In chapter 5 on Ovid's writings in exile, we read of his many pleas for attention, for collaboration, for editing in its most comprehensive sense. Ovid, Kennerly writes, shows an “acute rhetorical sensitivity to a situation”: his sad legal status as exile and harsh location influence his talk about writing (141). The penultimate body chapter on Quintilian is a significant one, and in it Kennerly brings to light the diligence with which Quintilian treats care of the text. She writes that he “made the managerial magisterial” (161), encouraging time, labor, and care in mastering the rhetorical art. Another important aspect of this analysis is Kennerly's attention to the gendered critical language running throughout Quintilian. A good style is always a masculine style marked by “an attractive fertility.” Tacitus and Pliny receive unusual and welcome attention at the end as well. Pliny's letters offer an accessible and revealing view of the sociality involved in composing, editing, and performing written and spoken texts in first-century CE Rome. The final chapter brings to light Cicero's famous and beloved amanuensis, Tiro: one known provider of the often unrecognized and coerced labor that went into ancient eloquence produced by elites. Kennerly ends with a reminder of the “ancient belief in the cross-indexical quality of the way one writes and the way one lives” (205).This is a beautifully prepared book; it's original and useful. The chronological movement—tracing the consistency of corporeal language across several centuries—enables the reader to follow the complex interrelations among writers and orators across the two cultures over six centuries. The attention to the original languages across the volume is meticulous. Kennerly's bibliography is very current, spanning the fields of classics, rhetoric, and poetics. She is evenhanded in her work with sources. As with all of her publications, Kennerly is a master stylist, showing how she has “love-labored” (a term from Isocrates) over this work. Her wordplay often delights. An example comes in her discussion of Isocrates, whom she characterizes as “figure-loving”: “political discourse without polish is all bluster whereas polished discourse without political import is all luster” (39). For some readers, the relentless word play may become distracting, and at times the clever tips over into the merely flip. But overall the style leavens a project entered into a field that may feel dusty and distant to students and nonspecialists. Scholars in composition / writing studies will be especially interested in the focus on writing process. At many points, we can see possibilities for contemporary comparisons and applications.Significantly, Kennerly is not pursuing stylistic manners for their own sake. She attends to contestation over what sorts of words best sustain communal life. Where I find the text really gaining purchase are the places where Kennerly points out the stakes of editorial work, and often they concern the status of the state. For example, she points out that Horace's enthusiasm for the editorial file (lima) was not only a poetic stance but also a civic one (19). We are urged to understand that editing, in the specialized sense elaborated here, is about not only the quality of the work and the status of the author but also political health and personal ethics.I will end where Kennerly ends, with comments on the canon. She claims to have shifted the canon by placing traditional names in untraditional scenes (211), and I agree that this is a contribution of the book. She also helpfully quotes and endorses Robert Gaines's proposal for an expansive reconsideration of “canon” so as to include “‘all known texts, artifacts, and discourse venues’” in a wide range of genres in “‘the ancient European discourse community’” (Gaines 2005, 65, qtd. on 210). This is an appealing invitation, one that led me to imagine how Kennerly's interest in the materials of writing and discourses of textual body care might be applied to an even wider swath of rhetorical activity in antiquity. For papyrus book rolls and wax tablets, as Kennerly knows well, were not invented in fifth-century Athens. She specifies at the outset that she will leave aside earliest examples—those with “a small chain of reception”—and concentrate on works “that have been heard and read by many” (1). This a reasonable criterion of selection. I did wish, though, that Sappho (and with her all the archaic lyric poets?) had not been dismissed so summarily (23), given the importance of the (woman's) body in her work and a substantial literature of reception. But a book can be about only so many things, and this book is about quite a few.Looking further afield, both temporally and geographically, we find many writers and speakers grappling with the materials of textual production—clay tablets in Sumeria, bone and tortoise shell in China, string knots in the Americas. And, in fact, some texts from those preclassical sites have been saved from the papyrus garbage heap. Just to take one example from the very rich repertoire of writing (on papyrus) in ancient Egypt, consider the anonymous tale “The Eloquent Peasant,” composed around 1850 BCE (Lichtheim 1973). This didactic tale features embedded speeches in the forensic mode that a peasant was required to deliver to a king/judge and then convert to writing (with the aid of a scribe) in order to get justice for a wrong. Embodied negotiations by multiple actors in the production of written and spoken texts, the quality of bodies—fine textual and debased working bodies: these are elements Kennerly has drawn on in her study of “corpus care.” The point of applying her method to such a text would be not only to expand the canon or corpus of rhetoric but also to grant the possibility of meta-consciousness about textual production not only to well-known elites of Greece and Rome but also to figures from distant times and places for whom we have only incomplete records. I'm grateful to Kennerly for her fine study and for the potential it opens up for further work in this vein.

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin Jennifer Keohane Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 It is easy to see why Amelia Earhart has soared over the public memory of women in aviation. She was charismatic, committed to promoting women in flight, and left behind a trove of speeches, articles, and books to analyze. Yet, this valorization of Earhart’s accomplishments as the main story of women in aviation is exactly what Sara Hillin writes against in her new book. Instead, Hillin argues, there are a number of female aviators who were not [End Page 472] only taking to the skies against stacked odds, but writing and speaking about it too. Hillin’s project is primarily based in recovery. She seeks to add the words of the rhetors covered here to fill gaps in feminist rhetorical historiography (1). Earhart does not feature prominently in the analysis; although the 99s—a vocal and organized group of female aviators—are covered, and Earhart was their first president. Instead, Hillin focuses on lesser-known writers and flyers including Harriet Quimby, the first women licensed as a pilot in the United States and a transportation columnist for Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Other important aviators include Bessie Coleman and Willa Beatrice Brown, African American stunt pilots covered extensively in the Chicago Defender; Mary Alexander, a flying mother who threw birthday parties for her children in the air; and Jerrie Cobb, a pilot who passed all the tests to join the Mercury program but was never allowed to go to space. The book follows a loosely chronological structure, moving from the 1910s to the 1970s, and features eight analytical chapters, each of which focus on a different woman or group of women. While these women confronted a variety of obstacles in taking to the air, the driving similarity is their rhetorical acumen. As Hillin writes, “Rather than simply describing their experiences, they harnessed their rhetorical intuition to get others to act—to accept women as aviators, to train them as equals with men, and to influence the overall development of aviation and space exploration” (10). The narrative Hillin tells is not one of slow but steady progress throughout the twentieth century. In fact, in its infancy, flight had not yet been gendered masculine. As per Hillin’s telling, “there was something uniquely magic, even divine” in the fact that Harriet Quimby was taken so seriously as an expert on flying in her columns for Leslie’s (22). Indeed, like many of the women examined here, Quimby relied on her personal experience as an aviator to build her ethos, which Hillin defines as an embodied rhetoric in which “her physical self and its connection with the tool (airplane)” granted credibility (35). The world wars of the twentieth century also provide an important backdrop. Many women wrote against using the airplane as a tool for war, while others took advantage of the need for trained aviators to expand their place in the field (49). Other aviators had to negotiate the unique demands of race politics in addition to gender. African American flyer Bessie Coleman engaged in barnstorming tours and stunt flying, visual rhetorics that proved her skill, while white female aviators could skip these dangerous venues for flight because they had access to other forms of funding, training, and media outlets (62). Likewise, by the time Jerrie Cobb sought access to space, the Cold War competitive mentality had hardened space travel as solely a masculine achievement (137). To study the first few decades of women’s involvement in aviation is to see women doing painstaking and effective rhetorical work to grab and maintain a place in a field in which they have consistently excelled since its inception,” Hillin concludes (165). [End Page 473] Hillin has undertaken an impressive amount of archival research, and the sources she uses to recover the rhetorical actions of these female aviators are wide-ranging. She analyzes personal letters, news coverage, books, speeches, and press releases (6). The theoretical through-line for Hillin’s rhetorical analysis is Kenneth Burke’s pentad (11). This orients...

Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus’ theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.

AbstractIn 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in González et al. (“Cotton Field”) v. Mexico that Mexico and the state of Chihuahua were responsible for cultivating conditions of feminicidio and pervasive structural violence against women. Drawing on theories of justice, agency, and responsibility, this essay examines the court’s legal decision to understand the power of rhetoric in creating the conditions for justice in the face of state-complicit structural violence. The court crafted a series of definitional, commemorative, and deliberative stipulations that Mexico had to recognize and implement to do justice to past and future victims of feminicidio. The Inter-American Court does important definitional work toward naming gender violence as structural violence, yet the court limits possibilities for justice in two important ways. The court figures Mexico as responsible and uses that frame to suggest that the state is the primary agent responsible for ensuring justice. While this is a common equation of agency and responsibility in legal cases, in matter of state-complicit structural violence, such configurations end up foreclosing the possibility of justice and augmenting the powers of the state.

This essay presents a theory of rhetorical decay, a rhetorical state that results from argumentative gestures that “derail” and suppress productive discourse (i.e., exchanges that produce new understandings, consensus, or “legitimate dissensus” between members of a public). Reviewing works from critical race studies, rhetorical criticism, and feminist rhetorical studies, the author identifies several individual preexisting concepts that can be classified as individual rhetorical decay–fostering practices. However, a gap remains in theorizing the larger category and understanding the outcomes of such rhetorics; this essay intervenes in this space by creating the metatheory of rhetorical decay, characterizing the family of gestures, examining affiliate concepts, providing an example of rhetorical decay in a contemporary public argument (over lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender marriage), and identifying precedents for mitigating such practices.

Accessing medical resources has not always been easy for marginalized communities. This article addresses a series of barriers trans African American patients experience. We examine two sites of resistance to explore (a) African Americans’ use of complementary and alternative medicine throughout history and (b) trans tactics addressing institutional oppression. We explore these experiences through an intersectional feminist lens. By providing these insights, we hope to make room for further research to be conducted to better assist marginalized communities.

By utilizing rhetorical analysis with a focus on agency and feminist rhetoric, this article focuses on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app – Babytree – to examine how users assume the mantle of technical writers, writing their pregnant and mothering experiences into online narratives and selling them to generate income. This article shows how Chinese women take advantage of the technical affordances of Babytree to share their embodied experiences and, in so doing, respond to and push back against the traditional norms of motherhood and healthcare provision. The women whose experiences are examined here participate in social media as a way to reenter job markets by using their embodied experiences, thus asserting their rhetorical agency politically and economically while implicitly critiquing the traditional situation of contemporary pregnant women and the state of motherhood in China.

Sor Juana, a criolla nun in Mexico’s colonial period, is most recognized for her letter, “La Respuesta” (or “The Response”), to the Bishop of Puebla where she fiercely championed women’s rights in the Americas. However, few discursive spaces take up critical examinations of her work. As such, she is often inscribed within the remnants of White, European intellectual legacies. But what if there was more? Sor Juana’s epistolary writing is a rich site of revisionary possibilities, especially as feminist archival methodology flourishes in rhetoric and composition. This article aims to complicate discussions of Sor Juana as a (proto)feminist rhetorician by including interdisciplinary and intersectional renderings of her embodied, epistolary writing. Drawing on Black feminist rhetorics, I argue that we can discursively (re)read Sor Juana not just as a rhetorician but as an intersectional, cultural, and feminist rhetorician.

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Since 2016, we have borne witness to an authoritarian leader who has wielded words to shape our national consciousness about people of color, women, immigrants, and disabled people in ways that have ignited the extreme right, resulting in a rise in hate crimes, the loss of protections for LGBTQ+ people, and, harrowingly, the indefinite detention and separation of immigrant children from their families. On January 6, just two weeks before the inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris, the vitriol of the past four years catalyzed an insurrection by Trump supporters, encouraged by Donald Trump himself, in which U.S. Capitol police were violently attacked and killed and lawmakers were chased and called to be hanged. Emboldened by their indignation and their immutable belief that Joe Biden’s win was the result of widespread voter fraud, the insurrectionists, mostly white people, many with ties to white supremacist groups, armed themselves with Trump’s combative rhetoric to launch a physical attack on our democracy.

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...

Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...

This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.

This quilt documents sexual violence migrant women experience and demonstrates Quilting as Method, a feminist, qualitative research method. The author argues that tactile approaches to research can deepen understandings of shallowly understood experiences.

This reflection offers an example of how one Writing Center director decided to approach antiracism through practices of mindfulness. Rather than a “how-to guide,” it encourages practitioners to think about what would work best for their contexts and offers a couple flexible activities one could adapt for their center at any given time. On June 19, 2020, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts observed Juneteenth for the very first time in its 100-year history. There was music, guest speakers, and about 300 virtual attendees who not only listened but also participated in challenging break-out discussions. Although I had only been hired as the Director of the Writing Center for less than a year at the time, I could tell it was an important historic moment for the Babson community, and it further cemented my commitment to ensuring that our Writing Center be an explicitly antiracist space on campus. Essentially, like many of us have felt over the course of 2020, it was another one of those “What can I do?” moments, and it felt incredibly urgent. With so much feeling out of my control and so much energy going towards immediate concerns over funding and safety, I turned to practices of mindfulness to ground the clouds of thought that were continually generating questions of what and how . I turned to breathing and writing, eventually making lists of the steps I could take: review the literature, talk to colleagues, survey my staff’s interest in pursuing this work with me, and reflect on my own position and motivations. For each task on the list, I broke it down into smaller steps I could take, realizing that, while the exigence was there, it didn’t have to happen in a day. That’s when it hit me: perhaps mindfulness could be the key. When hearing the word mindfulness, one might imagine a practice of “clearing your mind”; however, rather than pushing thoughts away, the goal of mindfulness is to be fully present—to be fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the body. This can be difficult, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, but our bodies are built with internal rhythms to help us relax and reduce spikes in cortisol (the stress hormone). Certainly, tools like guided meditation and movement can help when we cannot focus, but mindfulness offers something much simpler and accessible: slowing down and allowing space for your mind and body to connect, which could involve taking three intentional breaths or pausing for a few minutes to notice the sound outside your window. Mindfulness involves an intention and a goal to self-regulate—to honor one’s embodied thoughts and feelings before acting. Theories and practices of mindfulness complement many of the tenets of writing center work in important ways regarding student emotion (see Johnson, 2018; Kervin & Barrett, 2018), mentoring current tutors (see Concannon et al., 2020; Mack & Hupp, 2017), and training new tutors (see Emmelhainz, 2020; Featherstone, Barrett, & Chandler, 2019; Godbee, Ozias, & Tang, 2015). Although the scholarship cited here paints a picture of something relatively new, we understand that contemplative practices have been a part of human existence for millennia. In times of trouble, it is not uncommon for a person to deeply reflect on a situation whether through breathing, meditation, prayer, writing, or other modes of thought. Similarly, a review of the literature may suggest that attention paid to writing centers and antiracism is relatively new (see especially the International Writing Centers Association’s antiracism annotated bibliography prepared by Godbee, Olson, & the SIG Collective, 2014) though we’ve long known in this field that the same systems that have allowed writing centers to flourish are some of the very same systems that perpetuate oppression. As a POC, I have had to think about my own complacency in such systems and consider how I can do better. Can we have a “cathartic repudiation of white supremacy” at Babson (Coenen et al., 2019)? How do I embrace the “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et. al, 2013)? What informs an explicitly antiracist center? Given this topic explicitly centers around bodies, and thoughts and emotions associated with bodies, a potential entrance into this conversation could start from within our own bodies. In their article “Reflections on/of Embodiment: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Class,” Trixie Smith et al. (2017) explain that embodiment scholarship “works to continually remind readers, writers, researchers, and pedagogues that bodies matter to the paradigms, perspectives, relations, and decisions one has in a given situation” (p. 46). Like with teaching—and perhaps even more given the interpersonal proximity and less hierarchical relationship—tutoring professionals cannot separate the mind from the body in this work. Since bodies feel and then act on those emotions, it is important to reiterate Micciche’s (2007) argument that bodies do emotions; emotions do not just happen. Moreover, Micciche (2002) reminds us that writing projects are “a training ground for emotional dispositions that coincide with gender, race, class, and other locations in the social structure” (p. 438). In essence, writing tutors are always engaging in an emotional space when collaborating with students, which has only furthered my thinking that perhaps mindfulness could be a way to honor our emotions and work together through both the joys and difficulties. As Christie I. Wenger (2020) writes in her chapter on mindfulness from The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration , “Mindfulness helps develop resilience because it emphasizes agency; we practice mindfulness to cultivate resilience as a rhetorical choice and action in collective and communal networks” (p. 262). While I’m certainly not the first to do so, I do find an emphasis on embodiment and mindfulness to be a radical move for our writing center, which I view as a fruitful place for social justice work for reasons articulated by Laura Greenfield (2019) given the ways we are able to question ideas of power, negotiate identities and experiences, and have meaningful engagements wherein we recognize, particularly when working with multilingual students, that “we all stand in some kind of relationship to each other—indeed that our experiences are mutually constituted—but that our experiences differ because we are positioned differently within the systems of power in which we all operate (globally and locally)” (p. 123). That being said, I do think this is easier said than done and that we need more spaces that allow for students and administrators to start from within. In Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education , Beth Berila (2016) discusses the necessity for embodying knowledge. She writes, “One can be an expert on the sociopolitical factors that cause something to happen and still not know how it manifests deep in one’s body or why it produces certain responses in others” (p. 45). In order to undo systemic issues, we need both knowledge and presence; we need both body and mind. We can read articles from scholars like Romeo Garcia (2017) and Asao B. Inoue (2016); we can try to understand the “new racism” that scholars like Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan (2011) have put forth for us; but how do we embody the work especially as non-BIPOCs? Could, as Berila suggests, we make room to excavate ourselves in order to begin to recognize the power dynamics that we benefit from or that sustain our oppression? I started developing a way to do just that—to help our students look inward, perhaps uncomfortably, at the self in relation to our larger goals and communities. This ongoing project draws from practices of mindfulness to engage tutors and students in more-holistic approaches to antiracism in the writing center. It’s based on the idea that shifting a culture takes time, and I share its goals here now—in the middle of it all—not to showcase the findings of such a project but to perhaps inspire those who, like I had been, just aren’t sure where to start (particularly of the mind that we already try to design writing centers to be some of the most welcoming, most inclusive spaces). What are some small, concrete steps we could take based on the contexts of our own centers given the constraints of a global pandemic? As we weren’t building an antiracist center from the ground up, my first step was to get a sense of how my writing consultants viewed race in the Writing Center. When creating the fall schedule, in addition to the typical questions I ask about preferences for hours and if they’d be interested in visiting first-year writing classrooms, I asked consultants to freewrite on a few questions relevant to Fall 2020. Here are the instructions and questions I gave: Please freewrite on the following questions for 2-3 minutes each. With freewriting, I want you to just jot down what comes to your mind—no need to worry about spelling, grammar, or getting it “perfect”; rather, I just want to get a sense of where your head is at before we start working together this fall. Please set a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this! That being said, if you feel particularly compelled to keep writing, that is fine with me. The answers to the social question elicited some very thoughtful responses as one might imagine when thinking of their own thoughtful consultants, and, as suspected, there seemed to be a spectrum of students who were clearly interested in talking more and some who weren’t sure what to say. With Berila’s idea of embodying knowledge for social justice in mind, I planned to have consultants look inward by examining their own thoughts on race before moving our way to examining the larger forces at work within our institutional context. I had my first decision to make: do I fold this work into our regularly scheduled staff meetings, or should this be a separate series of workshops? As no one was studying abroad or otherwise taking time away from the Writing Center, I had already decided that having more small-group staff meetings for our much larger staff would be helpful in keeping a sense of community and giving everyone the space to speak, and I took my own advice to start small. When creating our small groups that would meet every other week to talk about tutoring, I asked for preferences on foci, which included antiracism, marketing, and online tutoring strategies. We had a core group of students who wanted to talk about antiracism and the Writing Center, and I figured we could co-construct ways to talk about race on a larger level with the whole staff eventually. Inspired by the article “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (Coenen et al., 2019), I recreated a version of an activity from the antiracist workshop the authors described. I asked my consultants to freewrite on when they first became aware of race as a concept. After the time was up, I then asked that everyone turn their writing into a six-word story (or thereabouts) that we would share anonymously. In the workshop described by Coenen et. al (2019), participants wrote their six-word stories anonymously on sticky notes, which were stuck along the walls of the room; participants then walked around the room and responded to the stories, again anonymously with sticky notes, before having a larger conversation. Given our online environment, I used Pinup , a free online sticky note generator that allowed participants to be anonymous . Each participant typed their story onto their own individual sticky note. Then I let them comment on each other’s posts by simply typing below the original story. With permission, here are some of the stories we shared: Again, imagining your own consultants, you might have a sense of how compassionate they were with one another’s words and how much thought these short, gentle excavations could reveal when we started thinking about them more deeply. While my intention was to simply talk about what we noticed overall, some students took ownership over their stories—“Okay, that one was mine”—and generously answered questions. As my main goal for this project is to start by meeting consultants where they are in terms of their discomfort with looking inward and gently excavating to better understand the larger systems of oppression that most likely benefit the majority of our staff and students, my expected goal is for all individuals involved with the Writing Center to take one small step forward in being mindful of their current contexts. To meet this goal, we’ll continue integrating writing and discussion activities to investigate the role that race plays in writing and interpersonal communication. Although we do need staff meeting time to talk about tutoring, I have to prioritize these types of discussions to slowly shift the culture of students currently working there. The end goal is to gently excavate our embodied experiences surrounding social justice issues in order to challenge our own practices while potentially also implementing more structural shifts in our center. I see this happening on three levels to start—in our ongoing professional development (staff meetings) for current tutors, in our sessions with students, and in our training for new tutors—though I could see this being of interest to those beyond the center’s immediate reach. In addition to the steps outlined above for current consultants, for students coming in to work on writing assignments, another goal will be to see if a mindful turn inward to thinking of self (i.e. excavating on the fly) will complement their writing processes especially as we see an increase in assignments grounded in social justice. Based on what we learn from our consultants and students, we should eventually be in position to implement changes into the tutor-training practicum—a full semester, advanced course—thus developing an antiracist curriculum that comes from the ongoing experiences of those living and working within the context of our institution as opposed to assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. As a team, we will keep reading, writing, discussing, and excavating in order to develop the kind of center that continually looks in and mindfully builds out.

This essay prompts us to explore how dominant temporalities work to contain racialized experiences. Engaging Say Her Name (SHN) as an archive of anti-Black policing, this essay illustrates the dis/continuous temporalities of living in (white) times of anti-Blackness. I theorize the rhetorical phenomenon of temporal containment as a specific modality of white linear time that serves to deny, ignore, or relegate racial harms to the past. I argue that discourses created and inspired by SHN are temporally contained through the “freezing” of stories about police brutality against Black women and a cultural fixation with “singular” discrete moments of anti-Blackness rather than an overlapping and unfolding singularity of violence. These two modalities lead us toward a linear politics of Black death that is both a result and form of temporal containment working to temporally erase the lived experiences of Black women and girls in and across time.

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South as a persuasive appeal to white Southern women in Greensboro, North Carolina. This essay takes an intersectional approach to argue Brown rhetorically appropriates the mammy trope within a combination of slave narrative and Southern romantic novella addressing white female Southerner’s responsibility to their Black counterparts. The result is a novella providing evidence of Brown’s conscious use of African American Southern identity disrupting white Southern moral superiority.

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

This case study demonstrates how a community-based literacy program, HELP, took up Black literate traditions, endarkened transnational feminism, and anticolonial practices to construct emancipatory literacy experiences for Haitian and Haitian American middle schoolers in Miami, Florida. Overall, the institutional practices of HELP worked to destigmatize the discourses of Haiti, center Black Haitian women's stories, and develop spiritual consciousness. Furthermore, this article discusses the "COVID-19 scramble" and its ability to detract from building socially just futures for Black transnational students. Lastly, the article ends with questions for consideration when confronting the cyclical violence of white supremacy in literacy programs.

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

Beyond growing and selling food, women farmers perform literacy work to establish and maintain legitimacy. As part of a larger interview-based dataset, this article analyzes the literacy practices that one woman farmer, Lauren, undertakes in relation to her legitimacy as a farmer. Informed by literacy studies research and feminist rhetoric scholarship, as well as interdisciplinary studies on women in agriculture, the analysis here illustrates how Lauren performs specific literacy practices. Audiences' gendered expectations necessitate such practices, which Lauren performs in order to be understood as a farmer in a masculine, patriarchal landscape shaped by her family, customers, and broader farming community. These literacy practices include crafting an image visually, interacting intentionally through verbal conversations, adapting to audience assumptions, and taking on community leadership roles.