Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies

9. Charting a New Course for Research and Practice

131 9 Charting a New Course for Research and Practice I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written. —W. E. B. DuBois, “The Forethought” In this volume, we have sought to raise the veil of feminist rhetorical studies to reveal its practices and potential and bring to bolder relief ways that these practices impact rhetorical studies itself as an ongoing academic enterprise. One basic goal of the analysis has been to document the extent to which feminist rhetorical studies is demonstrating a capacity to enhance our understanding of rhetoric as an embodied social experience in ways that facilitate rhetorical work more generally. To accomplish this ambitious task, we focused on assaying examples of work that tend to cluster at the convergence of feminism(s) and rhetoric(s) as ideological constructs , drawing forth matrices that confirm two general claims. The first is that given the volume of work designed to rescue, recover, and (re)inscribe women in the history of rhetoric, we have now established the existence of women in rhetorical history in an evidence-based way. The second is related to the first. With clearer and substantial documentation of the existence of women in the history of rhetoric, we take note that women are indeed being more systematically included as a normal part of the rhetorical -studies landscape (history, theory, criticism, and pedagogy) in at least Conclusion 132 two ways: textually, in terms of the range of texts produced by women that are consistently deemed worthy of recognition, study, and use; and contextually , in terms of the ways in which women’s participation in various discourses and within the social circles in which they operate are helping to redefine what constitutes rhetoric and recast the ways in which we think about and interrogate the nature and consequence of rhetorical enterprises. Beyond these core claims as very much gendered assertions, however, we also proclaim that as a field, rhetorical studies is indeed experiencing tectonic reverberations from these shifts in regard and by such re-formations are continually expanding and recasting our ways of seeing and being, that is, changing the paradigms by which we function as professionals in the field. The import of such shifting is that at this point in rhetorical history, we are not just celebrating the recognition of women’s rhetorical lives and contributions but understanding rhetorical agency itself in new, more-dynamic terms with regard to the scope and nature of rhetoric as an embodied social praxis that enacts itself variously across cultures and around the globe. In keeping with Peggy McIntosh’s schema for disciplinary re-formation, we assert here that it is not enough to focus mainly on the fact of women’s existence in rhetorical history. We emphasize that indeed feminist rhetorical studies is moving beyond the fashioning of presence in the master narratives of rhetorical history toward the renegotiation of the paradigms by which we account for rhetoric as a dynamic phenomenon. We affirm that the three Rs (rescue, recovery, (re)inscription) constitute only one dimension of what potentially is a more substantial, ambitious, and ultimately far more compelling enterprise. In fuller scope, feminist rhetorical studies promises to be a dynamic framework, a model of action for enhancing our capacity as researchers, scholars, and teachers in rhetorical studies to deepen, broaden, and build rhetorical knowledge and to offer multiple mechanisms for enhancing our interpretive capacity with regard to the symphonic and polylogical ways in which rhetoric functions as a human asset. During the 1980s, McIntosh considered the phases for disciplinary growth and development to be a sequence for thinking innovatively and critically about disciplines (cited in chapter 3). She illustrated this re-formation process by taking her own discipline (history) through the process. In history, she focused on: phase 1, womanless history; phase 2, women in history; phase 3, women as a problem, anomaly, or absence in history; phase 4, women as history; and phase 5, history reconstructed, redefined, and transformed to include all (26). In this volume, although we see work in feminist rhetorical studies to have been functioning quite resonantly in engaging rather organically the same concerns, we consider the focal points that we have Charting a New Course 133...