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.