Thursday, November 19, 2009

Spinning with Spinuzzi

One question I wanted to raise today is not only the question of researching networks in our field, but researching organizations and also how to situate Spinuzzi's work not only in ANT and AT, but also in the field of professional and technical communication. What questions are considered, and how do those questions compare/connect to questions asked in rhetorical studies and composition studies? I think one interesting challenge to consider today for discussion is simply trying to define as well as work through the vocabulary of ANT and AT--Spinuzzi is shot through with a all kinds of terms and definition work. So not only do we have his definitions of them, but his application of them as he studies Telecorps. I found this an interesting study for consideration of how one applies complex dense theory work to ethnographic/qualitative work and also historical work (his chapter on the history of the telecommunications industry). That's a combination that you don't always see in our field.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

ANT, AT, and Dead Dogs


Rereading Spinuzzi was a reminder and remix for me of some of the work I studied when I took at a tech comm course at Milwaukee. I feel like I've been learning a lot about Actor-Network theory and Activity Theory already from reading Justin's blog notes, but it was good to revisit Spinuzzi and have his definitions.

"Activity theory is primarily a theory of distributed cognition and focuses on issues of labor, learning, and concept formation; it is used in fields such as educational, cognitive, and cultural psychology, although it is making inroads in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, communication, and anthropology" (62).

"Actor-network theory is primarily an ontology-an account of existence--and focuses on issues of power in science and politics, rhetoric, production of facts, agreements, and knowledge. It's used in science and technology studies, philosophy, and sociology" (62).

Both are expanding and beginning, in Spinuzzi's words, "to grapple with" one another and "have sharp confrontations" (63). Bring it on baby! Who doesn't love a good fight. But Spinuzzi's argument is that both sides "just don't get it" and resort to "mischaracterization," which he says is a shame because both ANT and AT have a lot in common (63).

Activity theory is weaving, and ANT is splicing as noted in Ch 2. Spinuzzi goes on to discuss AT's formation in Marx/Engels/Vygotsky and dialectical materialism and ANT's location/connection in Deleuze and Guattari and Latour. It was interesting to read more about the origins of each. It's interesting as well to see how Spinuzzi unfurls these theories in sort of a spiral fashion, moving back and forth between them, drawing lines of differences and connections.

One of the repeated tropes in this study is "Rex," the dead dog, who is the result of "blackboxing" in organizational communication. Because someone down the line doesn't communicate adequately about Rex's presence in the yard, Rex ends up dead in the street, at the border of a neighbor's yard--a metaphor for what happened in this communicative situation within the network. The customer who has the problem with the telephone line told the customer service agent about Rex and warned about him going out the gate, but the phone tech, who works for a different connected branch of Telecorps and a ways down the line does not hear about Rex. He opens the gate in a customer's yard and frightens the dog who runs into the street and is killed by a car. Then the chain of addressing Rex's death begins. Where to lay blame? Where was the communicative break-down or omission in the network? Knottworking? Net work? I want to keep thinking about Rex, too, as "canary in the mine" to test out ANT vs. AT. More to come, but these are some preliminary thoughts for now!

Thursday, November 12, 2009

General Impressionism

I visited the Turner to Cezanne exhibit at the Everson Art Museum on Sunday. As I rocketed through the exhibit with my 7 1/2 year old (she doesn't go at my pace at all and was in a hurry to get to her favorite art forms--ceramics--in the basement), I thought of how like blogging can be like impressionistic painting at times. The outlines, contours, suggestion of light and shadow, but not the full representation of what one has encountered. This is the state I find myself in tonight as I try to think through all the complexities of what we've been reading this week.

Missy has wondered aloud on her blog about why Logan doesn't do much to describe her approach to doing history (her methodology and methods), nor offer a meta-reading of her sources. That's a good question, and it's one that Barb L'Eplattanier takes up in her recent _College English_ piece about archival research and the missing methodologies sections in most historians' accounts. I like the points made by Missy and L'Eplattanier. But let me play the Melvin Tolson's devil's advocate here. The story of Logan's research methodology and methods is, in part, in the endnotes in Logan's book, though, and that's an interesting factor to consider as we read historical research. What functions to notes play in the books/articles? There are 23 pages of end notes in this 134 page book. So we can track the origins and pathways of her reading and interaction with texts beyond the ones she can cite directly in the text itself. What I notice is that most of what she researches is availabe online in electronic archives or in published accounts, not necessarily in archives. This was interesting to see--how much can be found online--at Duke and Springarn. This is part of the changing face of archives and original materials-so many can be found online (not all, but a significant amount).

In Gold's study, we have a lengthy introduction that describes his take on the field's work with disciplinary and instituional histories, and he squarely locates himself in the tradition of revisionist history or third-wave history (6). He is a proponent of the microhistory, coming out of Levi who defines it as a "belief that microscopic obervation will reveal factors previously unobserved (95, 97)" (Gold 7). He argues that small scale histories can inform large scale histories in refreshing ways. He takes aim at the work of Berlin and others who wrote our histories of the field from the standpoint of "elite theorists" and "institutional artifacts" (6). In many ways, Berlin was doing a monumental history (term from Nietzsche) that had the overtones of critical history.

Given this description, I think we can see that Logan is also writing microhistories as well. The key diffference is that she is concerned with the community and self-sponsorship of literacy and rhetorical education in non-school sites. Gold is more interested in Chapter 1 in African American students and teachers engaging the curriculum in educational institutions. We see Enoch taking a similar microhistorical approach. This is a way to deal with scope and scale in historical research.

I wondered as I read this week about further connections to be drawn across Gold’s study and Logan's study. Did you notice how Logan mentioned Gold's study early on? I think we can draw a continuum of literacy practices across Gold and Logan's studies and perhaps even Enoch’s. What are those literacy and rhetorical practices? How do they choose to study them, and why do they pick these specific sites and locations to study? What rationales are we provided? How does the historian's own location fuel the selection of sites?

What methodological and methods-based considerations and challenges are these three authors facing as they strive to represent historical “others” and their pedagogies and literacy practices?

What do historical studies like these microhistories (Gold's term) yield? What do we gain as we read them? What kind of renewed understanding of our field?

Maybe I'll have more questions to add in the clear light of morning. But let me end with a paragraph from one of my favorite pieces by Nietzsche about the "services" that history provides (from "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" 1873):

"These are the services which history can carry out for living. Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but not as a crowd of pure thinkers merely peering at life, not as people eager for knowledge, individuals only satisfied by knowledge, for whom an increase of understanding is the goal itself, but always only for the purpose of living and, in addition, under the command and the highest guidance of this purpose. This is the natural relationship to history of an age, a culture, and a people: summoned up by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, held to limits by the plastic power within, the fact that the understanding of the past is desired at all times only to serve the future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a forceful living future."

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Follow-ups on feminist historiography and materialism

Missy asked in class on Thursday about feminist historiography in rhetoric. I’ve included below a segment from the introduction to my forthcoming co-edited book with K.J. Rawson _Rhetorica in Motion_ where I describe feminist research principles in general and in feminist comp and rhetoric studies. I also mention the Susan Jarratt article I was describing in class where she addresses two types of feminist historiography.

In “Sappho’s Memory,” Susan Jarratt divides the work in feminist historiography into two areas: “recovery of female rhetors and gendered analysis of both traditional and newly discovered sources” (11). As I noted in class, VTB is doing both in her study—recovering women rhetors and also doing a gendered analysis of traditional sources (Wesley). Jarratt has a number of articles on feminist historiography that range from 1992-2002. A particularly insightful look at feminist historiography is in the 2002 special issue of feminist historiography in RSQ. I think there is a good summary of feminist research principles in Gesa Kirsch’s work as well for anyone who wants to follow up on that.

Santosh wondered why VTB didn’t take up Marx or historical materialism or even Marxist feminisms when she talked about material rhetoric. That’s a really good question. I think she is talking about materiality and material culture (the culture of the book), but not historical materialism as in Marx or Marxist or materialist feminisms. If there is any interest from members of the class, I will post an essay I wrote on blackboard about how we use the concept of the “material” in rhet/comp that addresses a version of this question that Santosh poses . I’ve long been interested in why we “skip over Marx” and materialist feminism in our field when many of us talk about materiality. What I found when I researched the article is how differently people use the term “material,” and I look at how the term has been used in feminist rhetoric and others areas. Laurie Gries, in her dissertation, has also mapping discussions about material rhetoric across multiple areas of the field.


From Schell, Introduction to Rhetorica in Motion
What are the key principles of feminist research?

While feminist scholars across the social science and humanities have usually eschewed the identification of a unitary feminist method and methodology, they have often agreed upon a set of general principles that guide feminist research practices. Mary Fonow and Judith Cook summarize five main principles of social science feminist research:

· first, the necessity of continuously and reflexively attending to the significance of gender and gender asymmetry as a basic feature of all social life, including the conduct of research;

· second, the centrality of consciousness-raising or debunking as a specific methodological tool and as a general orientation or way of seeing;

· third, challenging the norm of objectivity that assumes that the subject and object of research can be separated from each other and that personal and/or grounded experiences are unscientific;

· fourth, concern for the ethical implications of feminist research and recognition of the exploitation of women as objects of knowledge;

· and, finally, emphasis on the empowerment of women and transformation of patriarchal social institutions through research and research results. (Fonow and Cook 2213) [i]

As Fonow and Cook argue, epistemology—who can know and how one comes to know—was and is a central framework in feminist studies through which to consider existing terminologies for discussing knowledge and research approaches, “including agency, cognitive authority, objectivity, methods of validation, fairness, standpoint, and context of discovery” (2212).

Yet even as they summarize these five areas, drawn from their earlier 1991 anthology Beyond Methodology, they argue that the “spectrum of epistemological and methodological positions among feminists is much broader” (2213). In their review essay, they define newer trends, debates, and dilemmas in feminist research, including “the epistemic and ontological turn to the body,” (2215), the conception and practice of “reflexivity” (2218), “the crisis in representation” brought on by postmodern theory, the implications of feminist research for social action and policy” (2223), and “new advances and insights into applying quantitative analysis as a feminist method” (2226).[ii] They call for feminist researchers to “continue to critique, expand, and invent new ways of doing feminist research and theorizing about feminist critique” (2230)–a goal that Kelly and I share with the contributors of this volume.

Attempts to synthesize, present, and critique principles of feminist research also have a pronounced history in rhetoric and composition studies over the last decade and a half. Of particular importance is Gesa Kirsch’s Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication, a 1999 monograph that analyzes the “methodological and ethical implications of feminist research for composition studies” (x), especially with respect to qualitative inquiry. In her overview of feminist principles for research drawn from a wide swath of feminist literature on method and methodology across the disciplines, Kirsch identifies seven principles for feminist research; she characterizes these principles as specific commitments feminist scholars make to:

· Ask research questions which acknowledge and validate women’s experiences;

· Collaborate with participants as much as possible to show that growth and learning can be mutually beneficial, interactive and cooperative;

· Analyze how social, historical, and cultural factors shape the research site as well as participants’ goals, values, and experiences;

· Analyze how the researchers’ identity, experience, training and theoretical framework shape the research agenda, data analysis, and findings;

· Correct androcentric norms by calling into question what has been considered ‘normal’ and what has been regarded as ‘deviant;

· Take responsibility for the representations of others in research reports by assessing probable and actual effects on different audiences; and

· Acknowledge the limitations of and contradictions inherent in research data as well as alternative interpretations of that data. (5)

While Kirsch’s exploration of feminist principles of research and ethical dilemmas are applied specifically to composition studies, her work is significant for feminist rhetorical scholars. Indeed, she characterizes feminist research in rhetoric and composition as taking three major paths: “recovering the contributions of women rhetoricians”; “studying women’s contributions to the history and development of writing studies”; “studying how gender inequity effects women professionals in composition” (22). This overview parallels the view of feminist methodology offered by Patricia Sullivan in her 1992 article “Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies,” where she notes that “feminist scholarship in composition” has been “reactive” and “proactive”:

It [feminist scholarship] focuses on received knowledge—as the existing studies, canons, discourse, theories, assumptions, and practices of our discipline—and reexamines them in light of feminist theory to uncover male biases and androcentrism; and it recuperates and constitutes distinctively feminine modes of thinking and expression by taking gender, and in particular women’s experiences, perceptions, and meanings as the starting point of inquiry as the key datum for analysis. (126)

While many feminist researchers have problematized the universal category of “woman” and the idea of uncovering “feminine modes of thinking and expression,” Sullivan’s concern is with theorizing how feminist research might proceed. To do this research, scholars have approached “two general strategies or approaches, one derived from the historical, critical, and interpretive practices of humanistic inquiry, the other from experimental and field-research models of the social sciences” (126).

The first branch of inquiry—“historical, critical and interpretive practices of humanistic inquiry”—has produced a rich network of “recovery and reclamation” scholarship in feminist literary studies and rhetorical studies. Second wave feminist literary scholars were particularly engaged in a significant project of recovering the texts of women authors who were lost or neglected in literary history, a massive archival recovery project sparked by second wave feminism that involved, in the words of 18th century literary scholar Jean Marsden, the twin challenge of “unearthing forgotten literature,” much of it out-of-print, and “uncovering as much information as possible about the women behind the texts” (657). The goal of this work was threefold: “to bring long-lost women writers and their work to light, to bring them into scholarly discourse, and to make their work available to students and scholars” (657). This groundbreaking work indelibly altered the literary canon.

Scholars in feminist rhetorical studies have followed a similar trajectory as their counterparts in literary studies by undertaking a massive recovery project to bring women rhetors to light. Much of this important work in feminist rhetorical studies has addressed rhetorical recovery guided by feminist historiography in rhetoric. In “Sappho’s Memory,” Susan Jarratt divides the work in feminist historiography into two areas: “recovery of female rhetors and gendered analysis of both traditional and newly discovered sources” (11). Jarratt notes that these two areas of rhetorical research have led us to reconsider and reconfigure “traditional rhetorical categories [the three proofs, five canons, topoi, tropes and figures], and along with them the relationships between past and present” (11). The intensive recovery efforts launched by feminist rhetoricians have produced a flurry of books and collections that uncover, collect, and analyze examples of women’s rhetorical practices and theories, thus contributing to the larger historical recovery project of feminist rhetorical histories. For instance, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, provides a wonderful sourcebook of women’s primary rhetorical texts and practices across the span of several centuries and continents. Likewise, a series of edited collections have provided a useful selection of essays assessing the contributions of various women rhetoricians: Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica mentioned at the start of this introduction, Molly Meijer Wertheimer’s Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, and Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe’s The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Shirley Wilson Logan offers ground-breaking work with the publication of the anthology With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women, which provides a set of speeches and writings by African American women rhetors, which she analyzes in further detail in her single-authored book “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women (see also Royster).[iii] Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s edited collection Teaching Rhetorica has framed the ways that the reclamation of women’s rhetorics has contributed to new understandings of the ways we teaching writing and rhetoric. As they put it succinctly: “In other words, how are scholars teaching Rhetorica, and what is Rhetorica teaching them?” (2).

At the same time that the reclamation and recovery work in feminist rhetorics has been incredibly generative, it continues to be fraught with particular challenges and debates over the potential normativizing effects of scholarship based on the category of woman (see Rawson, Leweicki Wilson and Dolmage this volume), over the proper approaches and body of evidence that can be gathered and assessed about women’s contributions (see Gale, Glenn, and Jarratt), over the need to account for the way gender intersects with race, class and culture (see Royster and Simpkins), and over ethics and embodiment in feminist research (see Kirsch). Another key question posed by feminist researchers concerns the following: “How can feminist research come to terms with the complexity of gender and other categories of social difference and lived experience?”


[i]See also the introduction to Feminism and Methodology where Sandra Harding argues that there is not a “distinctive feminist method of research,” but three distinctive features of feminist research: 1) a “[r]ecognition of the importance of using women’s experience as resources for ‘social analysis” with the proviso that there is no universal woman and that “class, race, and culture” are “always categories within gender” (7); 2) a focus on the idea that feminist inquiry has the goal of “provid[ing] for women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need” (8); 3) the idea that the researcher “must be placed in the same critical plane as the subject matter, thereby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of the research” (9).

[ii] For more on debates and discussion of feminist research in the social sciences, see Marge DeVault’s Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research and Nancy A. Naples’ Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research

[iii] For a useful bibliographic essay on feminist research methodologies that address historical rhetoric, see Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Holt-Underwood’s bibliographic essay “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to the Present.”


Works Cited from above as well as some helpful references


Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25.2 (1992): 140-161.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?" Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30.4 (Fall 2000): 5-18.

---. “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 11.1 (1992): 50-58.

--- ed. Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2002).

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. 2 vols. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

---. “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 26.2 (1993): 153-59.

DeVault, Marge. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.


Fonow, Mary Margaret, and Judith A. Cook. “Feminist Methodology: New Applications in the Academy and Public Policy.” Signs 30.4 (2005): 2211-2236.

Foss, Sonja. Rhetorical Criticism. 3rd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004.

Foss, Karen A., Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin. Feminist Rhetorical Theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.

---. “Feminist Perspectives in Rhetorical Studies.” Feminist Rhetorical Theories Foss, Foss, and Griffin 14-32.

---. Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004.


Glenn, Cheryl. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (January 2000): 387-9.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62.3 (January 2000): 387-389.

Harding, Sandra. “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 1-14.

Hesford, Wendy S. and Eileen E. Schell. “Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics.” College English 70.5 (2008): 461-471.

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 9.2 (1991): 201-29.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. Pluto Press, 2000.

Jarratt, Susan. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English. 62 (January 2000): 390-3.

---. “Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetorics.” Feminist Rereadings in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (1992): 1-6.

---. “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” 62.3 (January 2000): 390-93.

---. "Sappho's Memory." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32. 1 (Winter 2002): 11-43.

Jarratt, Susan, and Lynn Worsham, eds.. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. New York: Modern Language Association, 1998.

Kirsch, Gesa E. Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.

Kirsch, Gesa E., Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan –Rabideau, eds. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.

---. Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority and Transformation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Kirsch, Gesa E and Liz Rohan, eds. Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Process. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univeristy Press, 2008.

Kirsch, Gesa E., and Patricia A. Sullivan, eds. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Lauer, Janice. "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline." Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20-28.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. "We Are Coming": Nineteenth-Century Black Women's Persuasive Discourse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

---. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995.

Looser, Devoney. “Composing as an ‘Essentialist?’: New Directions for Feminist Composition Theories.” Rhetoric Review 12.1 (1993): 54-69.

Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

Lunsford, Andrea and Lisa Ede. “Crimes of Writing and Reading.” Ronald and Ritchie 13-30.

Lu, Min-Zhuan. “Review: Knowledge Making within Transnational Connectivities.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 529-534.

Marsden, Jean I. “Beyond Recovery: Feminism and the Future of Eighteenth Century Literary Studies.” Feminist Studies 28.3 (Fall 2002): 657-62.

Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Gen. Ed. Charles Schuster. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 39-53.

Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Naples, Nancy A. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Plain, Gill and Susan Sellers. “Introduction.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers. Cambridge University Press, 2007. 1-4.

Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” 70.5 (May 2008): 471-489.

Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. 210-231.

Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald, eds. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001.

Ritchie, Joy S. “Confronting the ‘Essential’ Problem: Reconnecting Feminist Theory and Pedagogy.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, Sheridan-Rabideau 79-102.

Ritchie, Joy S. and Kathleen Boardman. “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, and Sheridan-Rabideau 7-26.

Ronald, Kate. “Feminist Perspectives on the History of Rhetoric.” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. Ed. Andrea Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa Eberly. SAGE, 2008. 139- 152.

Ronald, Kate and Joy Ritchie, eds. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2006.

---. “Introduction: Asking ‘So What?’: Expansive Pedagogies of Experience and Action.” Ronald and Ritchie 1-12.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, eds. Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

---. “Marking Trails in the Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture.” Jones and Simpkins 1-14.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987.

Sullivan, Patricia A. “Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, Sheridan-Rabideau 124-39.

Sutherland, Christine Mason, and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds. The Changing Tradition:Women in the History of Rhetoric. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1999.

Tasker, Elizabeth and France B. Holt-Underwood. “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to Present.” Rhetoric Review. 27.1 (January 2008): 54-71.

Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

some basic historical research questions--feel free to add on to as we read

-What role and purpose does history serve in rhetorical studies? In composition studies?
--From your perspective, what has been the primary benefit of historical research in our field?
--What are the major methods and methodologies for conducting historical research? Archival research for instance? Social histories? Feminist histories?
--How do such methods vary based on what kind of history one is writing?
-- In what ways do historians have to confront the challenge of historiography—the writing of history?
--What role does ethics and affect play in historical research?
--What are some of the common biases or problems historical researchers have to constantly battle?
--Some argue that all research is historical in one way or another--how is your work historical?

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

I'm just asking--gotta ask!

I especially like Burton/Collins' work on Susanna Wesley, Hester Rogers, and all the Methodist women she writes about. I think her work on John Wesley is wonderful as well. I want to raise the question, though, of how to think about locating the subjects of the book. Women are interwoven into the fabric of Vicki's study of John Wesley. The two articles and Ch 2 we read are about women. Vicki's project starts with a vivid dream about Hester Rogers' spiritual journal. So given that, why focus a literacy study on John Wesley with him in the foreground and women in the background and why not focus it on Methodist women in the foreground with Wesley in the background?

This may seem like a cranky question (picture me in a high chair pounding a spoon and yelling), but I don't think it is. It's a sincere question (picture me in a chair looking thoughtful). Vicki offers a response on p. xv of the preface. This is a study of Wesley, but it is a study of looking at the "complex relationships between men and women in which women gain public agency with the assistance and support of a powerful man--relationships both fraught with power differentials and brimming with opportunity" (xv). This study is named for John Wesley, but it's also about "the roles of Methodist women and their relationships to Wesley as complicated and sometimes contradictory cases" (xv).

This is a book about Wesley's literacy and his sponsorship of literacies among the women and working classes of Methodists. Wesley is both supporter and controller, as noted (see Brandt on literacy sponsors). Given that, though, I do want to think about the title of the book--the word woman or even gender is not in the title. At the same time, Vicki points to the scholarship where Methodist scholars are asked to "stand with women." Her book clearly stands with women.

So what does this choice about the title and foreground/background mean? I know it is a principled choice, and I also know Vicki's study is a feminist one, and it may have been a particularly tough choice to make. John Wesley needs to be read into the rhetorical tradition. He is the most visible proponent/literacy sponsor. At the same time, there are many women who need to be read into the rhetorical tradition along with Wesley. So maybe we get the best of both worlds?

Coming back at this a second time after rereading Vicki's 1996 article in _Rhetoric Review_, I'm aware, too, of how she was/is trying to complicate our picture about 18th century Methodist women and the feminist impulse to recover feminist foremothers. She issues a caveat "proceed with caution." Vicki argues at the end of the piece that feminist rhetors looking at 18th century Methodist women need to proceed with caution and understand the complicated rhetorical situation faced by Methodist women: "Yet for some time I have been cautious about the feminist urge to automatically credit newly discovered rhetorical foremothers with bold, iconoclastic resistance that overwhelmed and destabilized the resident patriarchal power, for I believe the politics of such rhetorical situations is usually considerably more complicated." And then:
"The complexity of the Methodist women's rhetorical situation invites scholars to survey rhetorical territory with care, noting the roles powerful men and institutions have played historically in nurturing, controlling, and silencing women's discourse" (352).

So a point here is that the interaction of Wesley and other male agents authorized or sanctioned (again, literacy sponsors) women's speech, silence, and textual presences. These quotations really set up the work to follow--while Vicki's work is feminist recovery, it's also feminist recovery that fully acknowledges the fraught patriarchal contexts Methodist women were operating within and under. It also urges scholars not to over assign feminist agency and read 20/21st century feminist ideologies on to historical women (an important methodological caution about historical rhetoric/rhetorical recovery work). How do we avoid anachronisms and assigning our political agendas to historical figures? This is a critique we can find all over scholarship on feminist historiography. How do we resist appropriation of historical texts and voices? How do understand them in their own time and culture?

Finally, I think my question here is a question for all of us as we think about methods and methodologies and our own current and future research. How do we make difficult choices about how to foreground and background specific elements in our research? How do we make decisions about what will be the most important contribution we can make? How do we do historical work that allows for interarticulations across difference (the flux and flow and complex power relations between Wesley and Methodist women)?

On Feminist Material Rhetorics--a Reading of Burton's work embedded in feminist rhetoric

In feminist rhetorical histories, scholars have undertaken a widescale recovery project to both recover and uncover rhetorical texts by women and regender the rhetorical tradition (see Bizzell, Glenn). The concept of materiality is frequently raised in this work as feminist scholars have accounted for the ways in which women’s texts and perspectives were muted or controlled by specific material conditions—pregnancy, childrearing, domestic labor, and care of others--and strictures against women speaking, reading, writing, or taking part openly in public life. To describe some of these specific conditions, the concept of “material rhetoric” and material analysis has been offered as a method and methodology by a number of feminist scholars. I discuss this work to point to the helpful insights it has created, but also to address how this work has defined a material approach to rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies that is grounded in the concept of material culture and cultural materialisms, not historical materialisms.

A wonderful example of “material rhetoric” applied in a historical context can be found in the 1999 essay by Vicki Tolar Collins on the rhetoric of Hester Anne Rogers, a British Methodist who was an 18th century spiritual leader and mystic. Collins’ article sets forth a method and methodology for studying the work of Rogers that is grounded in material rhetoric, what Collins refers to as the “theoretical investigating of discourse by examining how the rhetorical aims and functions of the initial text are changed by the processes of material production and distribution” (547). Drawing on Michel Foucault, Jerome McGann, feminist Christina Haas and more broadly on reception theory and the history of the book, Collins argues for material rhetoric as a rhetorical methodology that “is interested in the broad implications of materiality, such as cultural formations and the shaping of gender roles” (547). Material rhetoric, according to Collins, examines “the rhetorical functions in relationships among authors, text(s), publishing authorities, discourse communities, and readers” (547). A key focus of material rhetoric with respect to gender is the act of accretion, “the process of layering additional texts over and around the original text” (547). Collins is particularly interested in studying how rhetorical accretion enacted on women’s texts helps feminist critics analyze “material practices as mechanisms for controlling women’s discourse and shaping representations of gender” (548). In other words, material rhetoric is useful for feminist rhetoricians as it will allow us to examine how women’s texts and voices have been “culturally silenced” or muted. Collins argues that material rhetoric, when joined with the work of feminist historiography and feminist ethnography, can help feminist rhetoricians compile “material evidence of social, institutional, and commercial structures that brought women’s rhetoric texts to print” and assess they ways in which they were modified over time to fit particular rhetorical purposes (50).

Through her analysis of the ways in which Hester Rogers’ text undergoes accretion through prefatory remarks by male authorities, Collins shows us how Rogers’ role in the Methodist church and her relationship with church founder John Wesley was modified to fit particular cultural narratives that diminished and muted Roger’s influence and leadership in the church and that redirected the cultural gaze away from her relationship with church founder John Wesley. Through the process of rhetorical accretion, Rogers’ life and contributions were strategically managed by patriarchal authorities, thus her cultural and political influence were muted. Through her analysis of the material process of rhetorical accretion, Collins provides readers with an intimate look at the gendered, material dynamics of the publication and circulation of women’s texts. Thus, Collins’ work is a key example of how histories of rhetoric have increasingly embraced the “materiality” of texts and social practices while drawing upon feminist theories of gender and culture.

It should be clear, though, that Collin’s focus is not specifically on the material conditions of women’s lives during Rogers’ time, although she does address that theme to some extent. Her interest is primarily in the ways that Rogers' persona is constructed and managed rhetorically by patriarchal authorities through the various published editions of her spiritual journal. Therefore, the physical artifact of the text and its various editions takes precedence in Collin’s analysis because it is a concrete, physical artifact to analyze, but also because the text allows her to demonstrate a site where power, authority, and control are materially enacted over the body, reputation, and legacy of a woman.

Likewise, also working in historical rhetoric, Roxanne Mountford and Carol Mattingly and a number of other feminist rhetoric scholars have addressed material culture quite specifically with a focus on material spaces and material artifacts. Mountford analyzes women’s rhetorical practices as preachers, analyzing how “space, the body, and delivery” operate (3). In the introduction to The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces, Mountford acknowledges the rich work of feminist rhetorical historians, but she notes that none of these theorists have engaged ethnographic research. Most feminist rhetoricians focus on textual studies—examining rhetorical texts and contexts, visiting archives and repositories to uncover women’s texts, but feminist rhetoricians tend not to engage ethnographic research. It was through her own ethnographic study of three contemporary women preachers that Mountford “recognized the need to focus on the materiality of rhetorical performance” (4). Her study contributes, as she notes, to not only focusing on a “neglected art in the history of rhetoric”—preaching—but on understanding the function of gendered “performance, space, and the body” through ethnographic study. Ethnography as a research method allows Mountford to capture the performative qualities of women’s preaching and to examine much more than just textual practices—actual bodies moving through space and time, living, breathing, and witnessing with and among a congregation. In addition, Mountford is interested in actual physical spaces—“lecterns, auditoriums, platforms, confession booths,” but specifically in the pulpit, “the embodiment of clerical authority, a gendered location” and, thus, “ a rich site for exploring rhetorical space” (17). Throughout the book, Mountford combines rhetorical analysis of the history of preaching and women preachers with close ethnographic observation of the material world, shuttling back and forth between analysis of historical texts and ethnographic analysis of the material world. In doing so, she analyzes how “the body is not only an instrument of expression, but it also itself expressive of meaning” (7). As Mountford puts it, “it is really not possible to think about rhetoric without drawing in considerations of the body” (8) Thus, refiguring delivery as a canon of rhetoric “is critically important for feminist transformation of rhetorical theory” (9).

Paralleling the work done by Mountford, other feminist scholars have considered how the body, delivery, rhetorical space, and rhetorical artifacts need to be considered. This work has taken a variety of tacks and strategies. Nan Johnson has examined gender and rhetorical space and women’s parlor rhetorics in antebellum America. Carol Mattingly has addressed the rhetorical uses and effects of dress and costume for women platform speakers’ and writers, focusing specifically on the connection between dress, costume, and delivery. Lindal Buchanan has analyzed the effects of the gendered body on delivery and public reception. Scholars such as Maureen Goggin and Liz Rohan have examined women’s material artifacts—samplers and quilts--as forms of rhetoric. Clearly, we have arrived at a place in feminist rhetorical studies where the body, lived experience, and material artifacts set the terms for rhetorical discussion, and where feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies are moving beyond rhetorical analyses that consider texts to rhetorical analyses that consider a wide variety of material practices and objects.