Beyond Affirmation: Reckoning with Imperial Legacies in Feminist Rhetorical Theory

Abstract

Beyond Affirmation inspires feminist rhetorical scholarship to shift attention from the speech and action of individual rhetors to analysis of how and with what consequence rhetorics circulate. The book considers the rise and historicizes feminist rhetorical theory in the political moment of the Cold War. Beyond Affirmation attends to the rhetorical legacies of the Cold War and its imperialist project, showing how sentimentality subsumed the US academy and dominant feminist rhetorical method of recovery, resulting in the creation of exceptional rhetorical figures. Demonstrating politics of recovery work, chapters offer new methods for the 21st century. Through distinct case studies, chapters track the rhetorical processes through which subjects establish certain gendered, raced, imperial, or national political objectives. The book argues that scholars must address the contexts within which social actors speak and act as well as how rhetorical agency and action can be picked up and circulated for political purposes. It ends by forwarding a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic as an alternative to rhetorics of affirmation–one that emphasizes solidarity. Rebecca Dingo is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. She is the coeditor of The Megarhetorics of Global Development.