Rhetoricians have long critiqued gendered (Gurak; Koerber) and racial (Banks; Haas) biases in rhetorics of science and technology. However, we have yet to fully consider how the patent, as a genre, perpetuates these biases both in the constraints it places on contemporary definitions of invention and innovation and in how it distorts historical narratives about who invented in the past. Delineating the patent's limitations as an index of inventive activity, this article advocates for more expansive understandings of invention. It argues that American patents have, since the nineteenth century, affirmed a dominant "rhetoric of innovation" that has since functioned as much as a marker of privilege as it has an index of inventiveness. Using the example of early twentieth-century Black hair culture, this article suggests other ways of recovering historical inventiveness among groups of Americans possessing their own, alternative "rhetorics of innovation" that reflect their culturally situated strategies for empowerment.

This essay compares the public memory narratives surrounding two key players in the invention of one important mid-twentieth century innovation: the disposable diaper. Although Procter and Gamble’s Victor Mills and the entrepreneurial inventor Marion Donovan have each been hailed as success stories in the history of invention, their stories have often been framed differently in popular media, such as website blurbs, newspaper articles, and obituaries. The essay considers how four gendered tropes surrounding the act of invention—space, motive, training and preparation, and scope—contribute to this differential remembering and, relatedly, to a tacit demarcation between high-status masculine invention and its amateur counterpart, feminine ingenuity.

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

This article considers how users employ extraorganizational technical communication to reshape technologies, both materially and symbolically, even after these technologies enter into common use. Specifically, I analyze how women bicyclists of the 1890s authored instructional materials to complicate gendered and classed assumptions about users implicit in manufacturer-produced texts. I argue that technical communicators, in their teaching and research, should consider the role that extraorganizational technical communication plays in generating vital and lasting cultural changes.

With its wide circulation and its resistance to old-fashioned morality, the popular magazine provided late nineteenth-century American women a location within which to counter doctors' long-held views of their physical frailty. In articles promoting the bicycle as an agent of women's health, nonmedically trained women countered medical commonplaces of women's limited energies and need for constant doctor scrutiny. Instead, they posited a renewable, self-governing female body capable of taking on both the bicycle and the challenges of the new century. In doing so, they influenced doctors' perspectives on women's bodies from outside professional boundaries.