Feminist Circulations

The scholars in FEMINIST CIRCULATIONS: RHETORICAL EXPLORATIONS ACROSS SPACE AND TIME work at the nexus of gender, power, and movement to explore the rhetorical nature of circulation, especially considering how women from varying backgrounds and their rhetorics have moved and have been constrained across both space and time. Among the central characters studied in this collection are early modern laborers, letter writers, petitioners, and embroiderers; African American elocutionists, freedom singers, and bloggers; Muslim religious leaders; Quaker suffragists; South African filmmakers; nineteenth-century conduct book writers; and twenty-first-century pop stars. To generate their claims, contributors draw from and make use of a breadth of archival and primary documents: music videos, tweets, petitions, letters, embroidery work, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and made-for-television movies. Authors read these “texts” with scrutiny and imagination, adding distinction to their chapters’ arguments about circulation by zeroing in on specific rhetorical concepts that span from rhetorical agency, cultivation of ethos, and development of rhetorical education to capacities for social networking, collective and collaborative authorship, and kairotic interventions. Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Jessica Enoch, Danielle Griffin, Nabila Hijazi, Shirley Logan, Elizabeth Ellis Miller, Karen Nelson, Michele Osherow, Ruth Osorio, Erin Sadlack, Adele Seeff, and Lisa Zimmerelli.

Chronicles twenty-five years of Ms. magazine and its impact on women's publishing and the recent history of feminism in America and addresses such issues as battered women and the struggle for reproductive rights. 15,000 first printing.

In this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production. Sylvanus brings wax cloth’s unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women’s identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities.

Rhetoric and feminism have yet to coalesce into a singular recognizable field. In this book, author Cheryl Glenn advances the feminist rhetorical project by introducing a new theory of rhetorical feminism. Clarifying how feminist rhetorical practices have given rise to this innovative approach, Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope equips the field with tools for a more expansive and productive dialogue. Glenn’s rhetorical feminism offers an alternative to hegemonic rhetorical histories, theories, and practices articulated in Western culture. This alternative theory engages, addresses, and supports feminist rhetorical practices that include openness, authentic dialogue and deliberation, interrogation of the status quo, collaboration, respect, and progress. Rhetorical feminists establish greater representation and inclusivity of everyday rhetors, disidentification with traditional rhetorical practices, and greater appreciation for alternative means of delivery, including silence and listening. These tenets are supported by a cogent reconceptualization of the traditional rhetorical appeals, situating logos alongside dialogue and understanding, ethos alongside experience, and pathos alongside valued emotion. Threaded throughout the book are discussions of the key features of rhetorical feminism that can be used to negotiate cross-boundary mis/understandings, inform rhetorical theories, advance feminist rhetorical research methods and methodologies, and energize feminist practices within the university. Glenn discusses the power of rhetorical feminism when applied in classrooms, the specific ways it inspires and sustains mentoring, and the ways it supports administrators, especially directors of writing programs. Thus, the innovative theory of rhetorical feminism—a theory rich with tactics and potentially broad applications—opens up a new field of research, theory, and practice at the intersection of rhetoric and feminism.

The magical saga of the women behind King Arthur's throne. “A monumental reimagining of the Arthurian legends . . . reading it is a deeply moving and at times uncanny experience. . . . An impressive achievement.”—The New York Times Book Review In Marion Zimmer Bradley's masterpiece, we see the tumult and adventures of Camelot's court through the eyes of the women who bolstered the king's rise and schemed for his fall. From their childhoods through the ultimate fulfillment of their destinies, we follow these women and the diverse cast of characters that surrounds them as the great Arthurian epic unfolds stunningly before us. As Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar struggle for control over the fate of Arthur's kingdom, as the Knights of the Round Table take on their infamous quest, as Merlin and Viviane wield their magics for the future of Old Britain, the Isle of Avalon slips further into the impenetrable mists of memory, until the fissure between old and new worlds' and old and new religions' claims its most famous victim.

Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.

Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors studies how marginalized groups use rhetorical strategies to craft legitimacy for themselves. Kinney uses archival research to parse the rhetorical devices employed by Mormon feminist women. The author assumes a pan-historical methodology by examining four unique examples of notable Mormon feminist rhetors that stretch across the 191-year history of this religion: Emmeline B. Wells (1828–1921), Fawn Brodie (1915–1981), Sonia Johnson (1936–present), and Kate Kelly (1980–present). Backed by intensive analysis, the author finds that Mormon feminist women take up the ancient rhetorical canons as a heuristic to cultivate a position of authority for themselves: Wells employs arrangement patterns, Brodie engages with memory, Johnson draws upon invention practices, and Kelly applies delivery strategies. Scholars and students of communication, rhetoric, religion, and women’s studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Gillian Brown explores the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in 19th-century America. Arguing that domesticity not only presumes but institutes distinctions of gender, class, and race, Brown reveals how these distinctions in turn inform identity. She offers a new reading of writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman.

Self-reflexive, critical accounts of how feminist writing studies scholars variously situated within rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies plan, implement, examine, and represent community-based inquiry and pedagogy.