Daniel Libertz Abstract Over the past decade, more attention to data, quantitative, and critical data literacies in writing studies has led to a variety of approaches for getting students to experiment with data in their writing projects. This article explores an approach combining “data feminism” and “quantitative rhetoric” that asks students to consider data literacy […]

Answering recent calls for more scholarship on LGBTQIA+ experiences in the writing center, this article reflects upon the joys and emotional labor involved in queering our center’s programming by offering an LGBTQIA+ literature writing group.

This Research Brief provides an overview of the current scholarship on transnational feminist rhetorics (TFR), drawing from interdisciplinary traditions. TFR inquiries should always begin with “a cogent analysis of power” (Dingo et al.), attending to how transnational power dynamics act on gendered bodies and how those bodies engage with and speak back to intersectional geopolitical forces. They rely primarily on the analysis of textual and visual artifacts in historical and contemporary contexts and use a variety of concepts and theories from rhetoric and elsewhere, grounded in the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The Research Brief ends with a discussion of future directions for this field, calling for more interdisciplinary inquiries, continued critical intersectional engagement with diverse transnational communities and subjectivities, reflexive and ethical research practices, and pedagogical applications.

Abstract Considering the recent erasure of LGBTQ+ representation in school curricula in states like Texas, this article explores the benefits of pairing medieval flytings (verbal battles with homophobic insults) in “Loki's Quarrel” from The Poetic Edda with recent homophobic discourse over rapper Lil Nas X's controversial music video “Montero.” It suggests that teaching such pairings of past and present queer texts and utilizing a range of inclusive practices and activities in the college classroom can highlight queer experiences and foster inclusion through representation. Through comparing insults that the trickster god Loki is ergi (a bottom) with Lil Nas X's Twitter defense reclaiming his agency as a “power bottom,” the article shows as well how homophobia and misogyny intersect in practices of medieval and modern bottom shaming. Moreover, it demonstrates how queer figures, whether in Viking culture or American pop culture, have always drawn power from queerness to challenge heteronormative masculinity.

Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and composition with queer theorizations of time, I argue for the utility of attending not only to time’s multi dimensionality but also its multi directionality. Doing so in writing instruction can help thaw binary polarization and foster more humanizing temporal and in turn ideological movements. To illustrate, I present an ethnographic case of students writing about the history of gendered clothing in 20th-century U.S. society. I examine how different temporal ideologies had consequences for students (not) reproducing antagonistic, polarized binaries with respect to oppressive values, in particular anti-LGBTQIA+ values as they intersect with class, race, and politics. Although my emphasis is how gender and sexuality intertwine with economics, race, and politics, this article suggests that attending to the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of time is a productive site for scholars and educators committed to praxes of justice in writing instruction.

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

Abstract Indigenous feminist voices have been long used as sources of inspiration for feminist movements, environmental justice movements, and other public facing work. When taken out of context, these voices can easily become clips and accessories to decorate other work. However, Indigenous women's voices have been central to change for Indigenous people and beyond. This essay focuses on the leadership of Zitkala-Ša, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, and Deb Haaland in their advocacy for systematic change while discussing how their locality and connection to their ancestral lands remains central to their rhetorical choices. By existing in what many Indigenous people describe as walking in two worlds, these three women serve as bridges through their Indigenous rhetorical choices helping show that Indigenous women have always been political and will not be silenced.

Abstract Queer rhetorical leadership describes performances of leadership with a queer disposition. As an idea, it exceeds the doing of traditional models of rhetorical leadership by queer rhetors for queer audiences on matters of queer concerns. Rather, queer rhetorical leadership subverts, inverts, and reconceptualizes many of the most common assumptions about how to do “good” leadership in order to lead others in the construction of more queer worlds. This essay explores the notion of queer rhetorical leadership by investigating the discourses of Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton in their influential text, The Ethical Slut (1997). In particular, the essay notes how the rhetors use radical revisioning, transformational vulgarities, and cultivating comfort in irresolution to lead readers toward a queerer world via the practice of polyamory.

Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.

ABSTRACT This article builds on the scholarship on violence at the nexus of rhetoric, philosophy, decoloniality, and human rights discourse to theorize what it calls a rhetoric of everyday violence. Moving beyond the focus on the politics of representation in slow violence, it brings a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic and a focus on the politics of recognition to illegible temporal violence, arguing that a rhetoric of everyday violence can help recalibrate human rights discourse to recognize temporal and gendered violence as human rights violations.

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of rhetoric and its further fulfillment through biosemiotics and pragmatist-inflected physiological feminisms. It situates itself in an era when rhetoric is undergoing conceptual change, with the social constructivism that guided much thinking since the 1970s supplanted in part by a family of postconstructivisms. In conversation with new materialist, affective, and biological strands of rhetorical theory, the article maps questions and risks involved in developing newer conceptions of rhetoric not limited to discourse, symbolic action, and exclusively human capacities. It argues that Peircean thinking provides resources for nonreductive understandings of how rhetoric emerges from life itself and is pluralistically mediated through the forming conditions and multimodal consequences that materially give it meaning. Contemporary biosemiotics and physiologically oriented feminisms like Teresa de Lauretis’s then move the promise of Peircean rhetoric closer to reality.

Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.

I offer a meditation on current challenges faced by literacy educators and researchers and uses those challenges to suggest new directions for the field. Citing the precipitous decline in interest in the humanities and the field of literacy education, I consider the significance of tools such as ChatGPT for the teaching of writing. I explore the significance of out-of-school literacies and the linguistic diversity of today’s students in terms of their implications for literacy instruction. I also remind us of the chilling political climate in which we find ourselves, especially with regard to LGBTQ+ identities. Given these contemporary challenges, I suggest that we in the field of literacy education rethink the nature of writing instruction, restructure our research paradigm to be more inclusive and democratic, and continue to be forceful political advocates for pedagogies, practices, and policies that will ensure a just and equitable literacy education for all.

Abstract The 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs provides an example of what I call “sport spectacle.” I define “sport spectacle” as a staged encounter in which the institutions of sports and media conjoin with the activities of individual athletes and the gaze of interested audiences to co-produce narratives in which athletic endeavors reflect, shape, or intervene upon social will in material and symbolic ways. Sport spectacle involves a contested co-production of meaning about a sporting event's social importance that occurs before, during, and—through the rhetorical processes of public memory—after the sporting event. I analyze how King and Riggs understood the match within women's movement discourse and the cultural evolution of tennis, in addition to how King and others have treated the match as a cultural touchstone that can be redeployed in public memory. Recent films When Billie Beat Bobby (2001) and The Battle of the Sexes (2017) offer very different characterizations of King's role as a social movement actor and the Battle of the Sexes as a social movement act. While When Billie Beat Bobby credits King with wide-ranging transformation of women's lives in a universe largely devoid of political context, The Battle of the Sexes anachronistically champions King as a closeted LGBTQ+ icon with a more nuanced understanding of sport spectacle as a transformational gathering that prepares spectators for political contestation. This case study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that attends to the nuanced rhetorical dimensions and political contexts of spectacle.

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

This essay examines the queer rhetorical capacities of what the pornographer, poet, professor, and tattoo artist Samuel Steward called latriniana—sexual graffiti located in public lavatories. While this genre’s rhetorical objective is often associated with sexual solicitation, this essay argues that latriniana proffers a destabilized logos—always in motion, roving along a continuum of cohesion and disintegration, while never truly landing on any definitive form. As a result, the genre exemplifies what Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes have cited as queer composition’s impossibility. Using samples of latriniana collected from gay bars in San Francisco and New York City, the essay traces the rhetorical gestures inherent to the genre, exploring the way latriniana enables a multiplicity of readings, and thus embodies the chimerical, uncontainable queer logos.

This article argues for the importance of British food writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) in questioning the centrality of power in feminist rhetorical studies and thereby furthering our capacity to understand the diversity of conservative women and their rhetorical projects. The article analyzes David's pathos in her landmark volume of gastronomical essays, <i>An Omelette and a Glass of Wine</i> (1986), and shows how this rhetoric develops a conservative "political culture" which privileges human motivations within food cultures that move beyond the negotiation of power.

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Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s work on “brick walls,” this article discusses a qualitative study of stories shared by twenty-five women writing center directors and the possible insights gleaned if we choose to “notice through feminism,” (Ahmed) and advocate for change across writing studies.

How do material and discursive arrangements, technologies and rhetoric, shape the subjects and objects of medical discourse (Scott &amp;amp; Melonçon, 2017; Selzer &amp;amp; Crowley, 1999)? How are the affordances of material and discursive arrangements seized by political actors? Tackling these and similar questions has been a growing preoccupation in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, where researchers have sought better ways of understanding the entanglements of the symbolic and material (Booher &amp;amp; Jung, 2018; Graham, 2009; Jack, 2019; Propen, 2018). A perspicuous case for this research is the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (UICA), an amendment to the Public Health Service Act mandating that women receive an ultrasound and have its images described to them before having abortions. Three US states have a version of this law, with over twenty others having laws similar to the UICA (Guttmacher Institute, 2019, n.d.). Through this law, antiabortionists are able to construct a kairotic situation through the mediating capacity of ultrasound where they can use the actual state of affairs (a woman seeking an abortion) to argue through images for a possible future (a woman foregoing abortion). This article analyzes the UICA to understand how the political speech of antiabortionists enrolls the moralizing capacity of ultrasound to construct a kairotic situation to intervene in women’s pregnancies. Starting from studies of actor-networks (Latour, 1983;1999a) and technological mediation (Verbeek, 2011; 2015), and departing to feminist rhetorical science studies (Booher &amp;amp; Jung, 2018; Frost &amp;amp; Haas, 2017) and rhetorical approaches to imagery and visualization (Propen, 2018; Roby, 2016; Webb, 2009), I argue that not only do translation processes and technical mediation distribute agencies; they construct the very situations where agencies are constituted. This study can widen our understanding of how political entities appropriate the rhetorical capacities of technology and discourse to translate their politics into legislature.

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.

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.

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&hellip; Continue reading Response to Activism and Academia in Community Work

AbstractThis article offers slow peer review as an approach to student-to-student peer review in the writing classroom. Slow peer review is based in the values and theories of rhetorical feminism and, when executed purposefully, can function as a fitting alternative to fake news rhetoric. In addition to articulating the steps of slow peer review, this article illustrates how two students in a sophomore-level writing class engaged in the practice. Initial results suggest that nondirective description can lead to meaningful changes in student writing. The article concludes with further considerations for writing teachers who wish to conduct slow peer review in their own classrooms.

With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and examinations of positionality, privilege, and power, the authors suggest three research methods that help capture the intricacies of blurred personal and professional lives: time-use diaries, embodied sensemaking, and participatory data collection and coding. These methods seek to illuminate the invisible work of women, as well as the diversity and range of experiences of home-based workplace communicators.

Transgender (trans) people always already live with health care precarity, particularly concerning gender transition. During a pandemic, this precarity is heightened. Trans people find themselves without access to necessary cross-sex hormones or isolated with unaccepting or hostile family members. As a result, some engage in tactical technical communication, using the Internet to source knowledge and supplies to manage their transition. This article analyzes these do-it-yourself forms of tactical technical communication that support gender transition in the time of COVID-19.

Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, challenges scholars to see and write past the limits of their own methods and knowledges.She advocates for writing not only about what we know about rhetoric, but what we don't know.Restaino frames herself as a writer and researcher who is figuring out how to move forward after the loss of her friend Susan Lundy Maute to cancer, recognizing how experiences and people change us and deepen our understanding of ourselves and our ways of knowing and being.Restaino's writing values narrative in scholarly discourse, embracing the idea of emerging as a presence to readers; this idea manifests in her work because she writes as a witness to the declining health and death of her friend.Restaino draws on the works of Jim W. Corder often in her book, and her writing reminds me especially of his argument that emergence is a risk of going out alone in writing, an exposure of ourselves and our narratives to the other.He writes that this kind of writing "requires a readiness to testify to an identity that is always emerging, a willingness to dramatize one's narrative in progress before the other; it calls for an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other" (Corder 26).Restaino demonstrates Corder's idea of argument as emergence in her writing, but she also forwards a key concept attached to this process that comes from feminist theory, the notion of surrender.She explains that we have to let go of a facade of wholeness, to render our subjectivity and knowledge for what it always already is: fragmented.She further describes how, when we face illness and death, we reach the unknown, and we have to let go, or release, "not only of what we know how to do (practice) and what we think we know (epistemology) but also of our subjectivit(ies) as writers and researchers" (13).In her own release of these things, Restaino works to come upon a different way of knowing and being after loss that she communicates to us as readers in the themes of her book, which I outline in this review.

If, as I argue, student-to-student peer review is animated by “improvement imperatives” that make peer review a form of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” then rhetoric and composition will need to imagine theories and structures for peer review that do not repeat cruel attachments. I offer slow peer review as a strategy for queer rhetorical listening that maintains our commitments to peer review without the limitations created through the improvement imperative.

Although many sentences capture Jessica Restaino’s purpose in Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, perhaps this early declaration does so most succinctly: “In essence, I cal...

This article examines student experiences of studying Shakespeare’s first tetralogy through viewing and writing about Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2017 Bring Down the House, a successful two-part adaptation of Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 directed by Rosa Joshi and the upstart crow collective, a Seattle theater company dedicated to producing classical works with diverse all-female and nonbinary casts for contemporary audiences. Through reflection on students’ responses to the adaptation’s all-female cast, as well as the analytical work they produced for an upper-level course titled Shakespeare: Context and Theory, this article articulates the pedagogical value of students’ experiences of representation in live theater performances of Shakespeare. The author argues for both the ethical imperative of introducing students to radical, inclusively cast productions and the enlivened learning that emerges in the literature classroom from students’ creative and analytical engagements with the diverse voices of modern all-female and cross-gender cast Shakespearean performance.

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical&hellip; Continue reading (Anti)Prison Literacy: Queering Community Writing through an Abolitionist Stance by Rachel Lewis

&#8220;By insisting that young people can determine their circumstances through properly regulating their fertility, Power to Decide continues to contribute to misleading rhetoric about young parents and inaccurate explanations of social inequality.&#8221;

Throughout Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope, Cheryl Glenn is attuned to her positionality and reminds readers why it has become standard and important to “announce one’s standpoint” (...

ABSTRACT This essay thinks through the relationship between dystopia and utopia, in particular, how the constellation of past and present in radical demands amid state and economic violence (what Weinbaum calls black feminism's philosophy of history) is that which creates “crisis”—an estrangement from the present, a reclaiming of past insurgency, and the possibilities for other worlds.

This article engages archival and oral history research to explore the documentation practices of Gays and Lesbians United for Equality (GLUE), a lesbian and gay organization active in Louisville during the 1980s and 1990s, and their effects on the production of an LGBTQ archive by local activist David Williams. I demonstrate one way of considering the rhetoricity of archives by attending to the situated rhetorical production of materials that comprise them, exploring the relationships between GLUE’s motivated production of organizational documents and the material made available to Williams’s archive. Organizationally, GLUE could not directly engage in explicitly political activity, leading to rhetorical decisions about what to include in organizational documents. These rhetorical performances, as circulated in GLUE’s documents, reflect complicated rhetorical strategies of what Jose Estéban Muñoz calls disidentification with politics.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.