ABSTRACTScholars across the disciplines have turned to theories of recognition to interpret recent cases of racial profiling, police brutality, and the militarization of the police in black communities. Social activists, too, have embraced the concept, staging recognition scenes to claim political legitimacy. I examine the rhetorical contours of five recognition scenes and the sociopolitical objectives that recognition is expected to perform: 1) dialectical recognitions, which showcase how recognition works hierarchically through dyadic configurations of structural inequalities; 2) intersectional recognitions, which break down the oppressor/oppressed binary through multiaxle identifications and analyses; 3) human rights recognitions, which attempt to hold liberalism accountable to its ideals; 4) recognitions in between, which draw attention to the limits of classical liberal and neoliberal logics of recognition and create alliances that may be impossible based on the logics of recognition; and 5) postracial recognitions, which invest in the temporal fantasy that race is no longer a structuring principle in inequality and fail to account for the power in which recognition operates.

Through her reading of the editors' introduction and ensuing four essays, Hesford approaches human rights as a discourse of public persuasion that envisions certain scenes of sociopolitical recognition, normative notions of subject formation, and paradoxical particularities. She joins contributors in their interrogation of the normative scenes of sociopolitical recognition on which the human rights paradox of exclusive universalism rests. Yet, she also maintains that in our efforts to construe a more inclusive human rights history that we are mindful of distinctions between the rhetorical tactics of individuals and social movements and differences of geopolitical scale and scope.

This special issue on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism challenges the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship. Such defining has tended to focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe. The result is, potentially, the reproduction of institutional hierarchies. Transnationality refers to movements of people, goods, and ideas across national borders and, like the term borderland, it is often used to highlight forms of cultural hybridity and intertextuality. To bring a transnational focus to our field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift our objects and areas of study.

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Raises questions about the representability of the trauma of rape and the purposes of its representation. Focuses on how the strategic enactment of a culturally dominant rape script can potentially open up a gap within which that script can be contested and the act of rape or death resisted. Discusses pedagogical challenges of teaching the literature of trauma and survival.