This essay applies Craig Rood’s concept of rhetorical closure to the specific case study of the creation of feminist discourse communities to discuss sexuality. It looks at the editorial policies of two feminist discourse communities in order to more broadly analyze the ways that rhetorical closure operates constitutively along with invitational rhetoric. It connects these issues to past and current debates about censorship, echo chambers, safe spaces, and trigger warnings in order to show when and how rhetorical closure is intended to prevent harm. Like Rood, I do not resolve questions on distinguishing the effectiveness or ethics of rhetorical closure. Examining a radical feminist periodical of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere shows how invitational rhetoric works with and as rhetorical closure.

This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

This essay details the pedagogical possibilities of incorporating archival research assignments in undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses. It uses Susan Wells’s concept of the “gifts” of the archives to explore a pedagogy for undergraduate research that emphasizes uncertainty and exploration—a pedagogy that has applications beyond undergraduate archival research projects.

In the 1870s and ‘80s, more women discussed sex to promote free love and sex education in speeches, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. Some of these women inspired the 1873 “Comstock law,” which banned materials deemed obscene. This essay uses the fictional figure of Audacia Dangyereyes to illustrate the constraints on women discussing sex in public forums. It identifies the rhetorical moves necessary to accommodate constraining audiences through close readings of the works of Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, and Angela Heywood, all women deemed immodest by public standards and obscene by Anthony Comstock. To allay such charges, these women worked to redefine appropriate speech for women.

Nineteenth-century women speaking to promiscuous audiences about the taboo topics of sex and sexuality found evolutionary science an ally, rather than an enemy, to their aims. Feminists arguing for free love promoted their arguments with the popular evolutionary discourse. This essay identifies three warrants in their arguments with a basis in Darwin's theories of evolution and sexual selection.