1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetoric
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetoric explores the histories, concerns, and possible futures of feminist rhetorical work in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Featuring work from scholars across disciplines, this book explores where we have been, where we are, and where we might be going. Forwarding key areas of study in feminist rhetoric, the handbook is divided into five interrelated sections: - Time: Discovering, Recovering, and Composing our Histories - Space: Setting and Testing Boundaries: Physical and Digital Locales - Movement: Exploring Activism, Migration, and Globalism - Being: Celebrating (and Insisting on) Embodied Praxis - Becoming: Transforming Hopes into Feminist Practice. Throughout the handbook, contributors survey and document the critical work of feminist rhetoric, pointing to ongoing interests in history, politics, and activism while showcasing new lines of inquiry and new methods of analysis, critique, and intervention.
The first of its kind, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, communication studies and women’s and gender studies.
Introduction
Jacqueline Rhodes and Suban Nur Cooley
SECTION I: TIME: DISCOVERING, RECOVERING, AND COMPOSING HISTORIES
1. Transnational Feminist Rhetorical Solidarities in the Viral Circulations of the LasTesis and Jina Movements
Mais T. Al-Khateeb, Sweta Baniya, Rebecca Dingo and Jennifer Nish
2. Decolonial Possibilities: Retheorizing Chicana Feminist Rhetorics from a Performance Studies Paradigm
Sara Baugh-Harris and Bernadette Calafell
3. Creating the “Shithole” Nation: Race, Gender, and Colonial Spacetime
Christina Cedillo
4. Holding Memory, Reclaiming Time: Women’s Biographies and Archives in the Arab(ic)-Islamic World
Rasha Diab
5. Suffrage Commemoration in Times of COVID
Jessica Enoch
6. Thinking Different: Exchanging Archival Data across Transnational Time and Space
Tarez Samra Graban
7. Writing War: A History of the Lebanese Feminist Movement
Nicole Khoury
8. Surfacing Ecofeminist Rhetorics
Kathleen J. Ryan
9. From “Feminine-ism” to “Women’s Rights/Power-ism”: Feminist Rhetorics in Post-Mao and 21st-Century China
Hui Wu
SECTION II: SPACE: SETTING AND THEN TESTING BOUNDARIES: PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL LOCALES
10. The Discursive Eviction of Muslim Women
Lamiyah Bahrainwala
11. Water Walks, Indigenous Feminism, and the Persuasive Power of Anishinabekweg
Guadalupe Gonzalez and Kristin Arola
12. White Streaming. Black Aesthetics: Using Black Cyberfeminism to Make Sense of Cultural Appropriation in Digital Platforms
Kishonna Gray and Kathryn Kohls
13. Towards Expansive Care Vocabularies and Configurations: Disabled and Trans Care Collectives as a Site of Feminist Resistance
Ada Hubrig
14. Land Remediation, Multi-Genre Writing and Rooting Feminist Rhetorical Practices
Vani Kannan and Alicia Grullôn
15. Caribbean Women Self-Creating Through Digital Footprints
Shewonda Leger
16. Third-Wave Feminist Rhetoric in the 21st Century: Rethinking Limitations, Possibilities, and New Directions
Valerie R. Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards
17. Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: Policing Gendered Bodies in Texas
Jen Wingard
SECTION III: MOVEMENT: EXPLORING ACTIVISM, MIGRATION, AND GLOBALISM
18. Fostering a New Consciousness of Material Relationality: Merging Ubuntu and Feminist New Materialisms in African Feminist Digital Activism in Africa (Ghana)
Mavis Boatemaa Beckson
19. Pursuing Autonomy: Movements in Reproductive Justice
Erin A. Clark
20. Transnational Chinese Digital Feminist Rhetorics: A Comparative Perspective
Chen Chen
21. Flux and Flow: Transgender Rhetorics and Abolitionist Praxes
Lore/tta LeMaster and Meggie Mapes
22. The Counterproductive Appeal of Shaming Gaslighters
Jennifer Lin LeMesurier
23. The Afterlives of Protest Images: The Myth of Togetherness in the Women’s Movement
Efe Plange
24. Intersectional Ecofeminist Food Rhetoric
Norie R. Singer
25. Queer(ing) Decolonial Feminist Rhetoric: SoVerano Boricua and Cuir Sentipensar
Karrieann Soto Vega
26. As Long as the River Runs: Rhetorics of Indigenous Feminist Activism
Luhui Whitebear
SECTION IV: BEING: CELEBRATING (AND INSISTING ON) EMBODIED PRAXIS
27. Complicating Public/Private Boundaries: Intimate Partner Violence Against Women and Micro-Performative Agency
Jennifer Andrus
28. Remembrance as Practice: Sankofa and Pathos as Frameworks for Seeing and Hearing Black Women across Time
Ronisha Browdy
29. Expanding Feminist Rhetorics: Toward an Embodied Fat Rhetorics
Katie Manthey
30. Gut Feelings: Black Feminist Reverberations of Intuitive Theory
Alexis McGee
31. Global Black Feminisms as Rhetorics of the Diaspora
Suban Nur Cooley
32. Necessary Foreclosures, or Notes on Consent as a Practice of Writing
Timothy Oleksiak
33. “We Won’t Back Down”: Feeling Abortion Rights Advocacy Rhetoric through Poetic Inquiry
Clancy Ratliff
34. Breaking My Own Text: Surrendering into Writing that Works
Jessica Restaino
35. Still/Now Here: Feminist Forgetting and Lesbian Presence
Jacqueline Rhodes
SECTION V: BECOMING: TRANSFORMING HOPES INTO FEMINIST PRACTICE
36. “Strength, Wisdom, Hope:” Transforming Menopause Stigma Through Feminist Rhetorical Practices
Lori Beth De Hertogh and Cathryn Molloy
37. Feeling Coalition with Asian American Student Publications
Allison Dziuba
38. “A Deep Relationality”: Reflections on Feminist Rhetoric from a Men’s Prison
Susan C. Jarratt
39. On Being Accountable: A Queer-Feminist Praxis of Refusal in but not of the Necropolitical University
Gavin P. Johnson
40. Postpartum and Disability: A Feminist Call for RJ-Crip Criticism
Stephanie R. Larson and Emily Winderman
41. Becoming Inhospitable, Becoming Imperceptible: Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in Videogames
Rebecca S. Richards
42. Chicana Feminist Rhetoric: Indigeneity and Activism
Iris Ruiz
43. The Methodological Promise of Black Feminism in Rhetoric and Writing Studies
Cecilia D. Shelton
44. Crip Temporalities of Hope
J. Logan Smilges
Biography
Jacqueline Rhodes is the Joan Negley Kelleher Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at The University of Texas at Austin. Her work on queer and feminist rhetorics has been published in journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, Pre/Text, and Rhetoric Review. She edited Rhetoric Society Quarterly from 2020-2023. Her books have won a number of awards, including the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and the 2015 Computers & Composition Distinguished Book Award. Notably, she is a three-time winner of the CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. In 2022, she was awarded (with frequent collaborator Jonathan Alexander) the CCCC Exemplar Award.
Suban Nur Cooley is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Michigan State University. She blends the rhetorics of identity and belonging, cultural and digital literacies, and Black feminist theory to help build understanding and broaden perspectives of how we define and value all forms of writing. She was the 2021 recipient of the CCCC James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award and the 2023 recipient of the RSQ Charles Kneupper Award. Her work focuses on the impact of migration and displacement on culture and global Black diaspora feminisms.
