Resilience is a powerful metaphor that, although heretofore absent from conversations within feminist rhetoric, can refocus the field in very productive ways. While similar to metaphors used previously by feminist rhetoricians, it is also distinct in that it places greater emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals. Resilience suggests attention to choices made in the face of difficult and even impossible challenges. Collectively, the contributors to Feminist Rhetorical Resilience create a robust feminist conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process. Too often resilience has been associated with psychological characteristics inherent...

In “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Wendy Hesford examines how “scholars in rhetoric and composition studies are meaningfully contributing to conversations about the pressures of globalization and the consequences of the new US nationalism.” Hesford’s examination of the “global turns” in rhetoric and composition—the turn to “global studies and transnational cultural studies”—is an important one as she surveys a wide swath of recent scholarship in the field: “nearly forty books nominated for the 2005 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and a number of other sources.” As Hesford argues, we need to pay “particular attention to...

Centered in the ethics of transnational feminism, the struggles of political and economic globalism, and the issues of biopiracy, intellectual piracy, biotechnology, and the patenting of biological life forms, Eileen Schell both introduces and analyzes the rhetoric of Indian environmentalist and scientist Vandana Shiva. In her analysis of Shiva’s work against hegemonic Western science and capital, Schell shows how Shiva deploys eclectic rhetorical traditions, including ecofeminism, transnational feminism, Ghandian principles of nonviolent persuasion, Hindu understanding of noncooperation, confrontational and identification rhetorics as described by Kenneth Burke, and the good old Greek synecdoche. In analyzing the complex global geography of Shiva’s...

Understanding the mutidimensional rhetoric of Vandana Shiva requires rhetorical stretching and imagining. Shiva’s rhetorical influences and geopolitical identifications are multiple and intersecting. Shiva is a transnational figure who addresses audiences in print books and environmental treatises, in person through speeches, and on the Internet. Yet she is also firmly rooted in Indian culture and society even as she travels the globe organizing protests, attending meetings, and delivering lectures.

In my chapter, I attempt to understand Shiva’s rhetorical strategies across the multidisciplinary areas of her work in ecofeminisms, agricultural discourses, and global trade policies. These have not been the traditional domains...

A fado is a Portuguese folk song characterized by saudade, a word that means “longing,” “intense sadness,” “nostalgia,” “a missing,” “a lack,” “a desire,” “a love.” It is akin to the Russian word toska, a pulling of one’s soul towards something just out of reach. This “something,” for the sailors, colonizers, and colonial subjects among whom the fado likely originated, is often a home. The fado thus conveys what feminist postcolonial theorist Avtar Brah calls “the homing instinct.” In its continual reaching and longing, the fado raises awareness of the impossibility of return to a land of origin. Its lyrics...

Kate Vieira’s “The Traveling Fado” is a fusion, a critical analysis that traverses new literacy studies, rhetorica, transnationalism, and creative nonfiction. To read her essay is to start with one ethnic group in one location, Azorean Americans in South Mills, and to take excursions into the criticism that will illuminate this particular immigration experience. To read her essay is also to foray into her family history, which anchors and enriches the critical questions she poses and answers.

At the core of the subfield now dubbed new literacy studies is the acceptance of the central term’s murkiness. “Literacy,” a cluster of...

Janet Eldred’s generous response illuminates much that we share: the contradiction of ethnic pride and ethnic shame enacted across the “national hysteria” of race, the history of migration that refuses to be “thrown overboard,” a taste for linguiça on pizza. And yet. I was never quite so “Portuguese” as to have been in a festa or to even have been very Catholic. My mother, a former nun, baptized me in the kitchen sink after my father had a theological argument with the priest. For all practical purposes, I have fulfilled the assimilationist “mythico-history” that I critique in my essay, having...

It was the early 1990s when news of virginity examinations swept the nation in Turkey. The reports of both the Turkish and Western media were consistently revealing stories about virginity examinations conducted on women. As the world began to read about the exams, the status of women in Turkey became a subject of much speculation and debate. And as the news coverage of the exams intensified, protests by women’s groups, nongovernmental organizations, and human rights organizations escalated. They declared that virginity examinations conducted on women at the request of family members and state officials were degrading and a violation of...

Not since Cher had her ribs broken to achieve a smaller waist has anyone been surprised at the ways women reconfigure their bodies in an effort to appear more desirable both to themselves and to men. Breast augmentation, labia reduction, hiney lifts, and body sculpting are common elective surgical procedures among Western women (six million American women a year seek cosmetic surgery). Surgical or cosmetic practices shaped by ethnic or religious norms such as foot binding, genital mutilation/circumcision, and neck and lip stretching suggest that they be understood within the context of particular cultures. And in spite of the collaboration...

Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, in her response to my essay, states that some brutal and dangerous practices need to be read in culturally specific ways and that to do this we must step into a culture to understand these practices. This thinking raises a series of problems, one of which is defining a culture, to quote Edward Said, with the “copula is” (72). Another problem is the tendency to seek “a truth” about the Other culture. Over the last two decades, scholars have been exploring the ways in which such tendencies can be overcome. Hence, by not seeking an objective reality about...

In the past, solutions to the “dual-career-couple problem” have largely depended on case-by-case efforts to piece together accommodation offers when there is an immediate need to attract or retain a desirable job candidate. But change is occurring in this regard, with universities and professional organizations becoming increasingly aware that the issues surrounding dual-career-couple hiring are too large and complex to be dealt with only on a case-by-case basis. Reflecting this growing awareness, within the last decade at least two major scholarly books have been published (Ferber and Loeb; Wolf-Wendel, Trombly, and Rice), providing long-needed research data that has sparked calls...

At the outset, permit me to note that my own academic career has been long enough that I have observed the transition from institutional policies against spousal/partner hiring on the grounds that such hires would constitute nepotism to current institutional policies explicitly endorsing spousal/partner accommodation hires. In my own department of sixty-some tenured and tenure-track faculty, we have a half dozen spousal/partner pairs, three or four faculty members who have been hired as spousal/partner accommodations into high-priority positions from other departments and colleges, and a couple of faculty members whose spouses’/partners’ hires have been accommodated by other departments.

Without exception,...

Like Rose, I am in a department that includes a number of married couples in which both partners are employed in tenure-track or tenured positions. We also have faculty members whose spouses or partners have become employed in other departments as a result of dual-couple-career accommodations. I am, in fact, part of a married couple who has benefitted greatly from our university’s willingness and ability to employ both my spouse and me as tenured faculty in the same department. When we began our tandem job search several years ago, my spouse and I were both made acutely aware of the...

The texts excerpted above are taken from two sources. The first comes from an article published in 1928 in the Journal of Heredity by one author of California’s compulsory sterilization laws. The second comes from a case file contained in the archives of the Luella M. Hannan Foundation, a senior-citizen resource and social services center located in downtown Detroit. The file is that of an elderly woman who applied to the foundation for financial aid in 1929, shortly before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. Over the course of the fourteen years that this woman received aid,...

“Fabricating a Feminine Self” got me thinking about another effort at helping women during the Progressive Era, one that coincides with the work of the Hannan Foundation and operated just west of Detroit and Hudson’s, the department store that Fontia R. so wanted to shop in, alone and independently. Reading Ranney’s wonderfully woven essay, I couldn’t get Jane Addams’s Hull House out of my mind. Opened in 1889, and thriving through the New Deal, Hull House, like the Hannan Foundation, offered assistance in its Chicago neighborhood and, in similar ways, tried to help people (called “citizens,” not “clients”) negotiate the...

I begin to write within thirty seconds of my first reading of Kate Ronald’s response to my essay about my now much-loved Fontia R., and my first thought is simply—what a wonderful response! And then I take a break for lunch because, as always, Kate has given me a lot to think about.

There is no indication in Fontia R.’s file that anyone involved in the case—least of all Fontia R. herself—ever thought of her situation as anything other than a charity case. And yet, if Luella Hannan’s original plan to buy and maintain a home in...

Throughout the nineteenth century, women argued for education and other rights on the basis of “Republican motherhood”—they would be raising the nation’s future citizens.¹ In the late nineteenth century, however, women’s importance as the bearers of these future citizens, whose minds and bodies they could mold before birth, created a new rhetoric of women’s rights—they were also the “mothers of the race.” As “mothers of the race,” many women argued that they required education, including scientific and hygienic education, recognition of their importance and their work in raising children, an identity within marriage, and rights to protect them...

In “From Mothers of the Nation to Mothers of the Race: Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric,” Wendy Hayden examines how nineteenth-century American feminists combined a “mother of the race” rhetoric with popular theories of eugenics to justify more extensive rights and opportunities for women. Offering a close reading of the rhetoric of Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, Adella Hunt Logan, Juliet Severance, Victoria Woodhull, and Lois Waisbrooker, Hayden explores how these feminists utilized the social capital of emerging scientific theories of evolution and cultural theories of prenatal and hereditary transmission in their advocacy of social purity, racial uplift, and free...

In a post-Darwinian world, feminists who used eugenic “mothers of the race” rhetoric to support women’s rights not only colluded with ideologies that go against feminist values, but also helped shape the eugenic ideology that emerged decades later. The collusion of feminist appeals with the scientistic racism of eugenics can be seen as a mệtistic move, a rhetorical shape shifting seeking to outwit the sociopolitical order by taking on dominant logics and values. While my analyses have focused on particular women rhetors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, Adella Hunt Logan, Juliet Severance,...

This chapter began with a regional conference paper presentation a few years ago.¹ The theme of the conference was Teaching Writing in Diverse Settings. Our panel was the only one on the agenda that examined gender and sexual diversity yet there were few people in the audience. Could this lack of interest be indicative of a more systemic problem? Our sense is that regardless of the commitment of our field to address issues of diversity, heterosexism is so institutionalized that the issues of gendered and sexual diversity generate interest in very limited ways.

Scholars within various disciplines note that efforts...

We’ll begin by revealing a new bias we have come to have as queer compositionists: it’s impossible for composition, really, to fully engage with the queer. We thus approach DiGrazia and Rosenberg’s article from an angle, perhaps a particularly queer angle; given our sense of the impossibility of queerness for composition, how might we respond to their call to go there, “there” being the space of a possibility we increasingly cannot fathom? What we hope follows is not a détournement of the article, but rather a calling-out of some of the shortcomings of pedagogy, or at least the institutionalized variety...

Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander’s “On Impossibility,” their response to our essay, challenges us again to examine how our desire to queer the writing classroom can be hopeful and productive. Given the shortcomings of any institutionalized field, including our own, how can we continue to envision our project as possible? To the extent that composition is institutionalized and thus normalized, we agree with Rhodes and Alexander’s claim about the essential “impossibility of queerness for composition” (241). We, too, are mindful of Judith Butler’s warning that “‘normalizing the queer would be, after all, its sad finish’” (qtd. in Rhodes and Alexander...