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ix F O R E w O R d Patricia Bizzell You are about to read a comprehensive and forward-looking account of what feminist research in rhetoric has accomplished over the last three decades—a period that happens to coincide with the core of my own professional life. I remember the mounting excitement as feminist work gradually unfolded over the years, and I waited eagerly for the next publication by many of the scholars whose work is represented here. I remember the mood of intense energy that vibrated among the participants in the 2007 symposium at Virginia Tech, where this book project began. I think we all had a sense that feminist research in rhetoric had reached a life-cycle milestone , that its theories and methods were ready to be consolidated and applied more broadly. Now Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch have done the work needed to launch these new applications. They not only gather key representatives of feminist work in these pages but also offer an original formulation of what this work has meant to scholarship in rhetoric more generally, a formulation that perhaps no one else in the field could have provided but that struck me as eminently and obviously right as soon as I read it. Before I introduce this book in a bit more detail, a feminist footnote: I spent some time thinking about how to refer to its authors here. Once their full names are given, Royster and Kirsch seem too brusque and formal as references to women I have known for a long time and hope to count among my friends. In the end, I decided that I might invoke an old-fashioned spirit of feminist sisterhood and call them by their first names, as I naturally do when I see them—with all due respect! In the beginning, as Jackie and Gesa explain, scholars felt that it was important simply to rescue women rhetors from historical obscurity and insert them into the rhetorical canon. As this work proceeded, feminist research found itself cross-fertilizing with many other fields, becoming interdisciplinary or perhaps even postdisciplinary like so many other contemporary Foreword x intellectual endeavors. Professional organizations and conferences dedicated to work on women and rhetoric emerged. Collaborative projects became normative, first perhaps in feminist work and soon in the field of rhetoric, composition, and literacy more generally. Gesa and Jackie outline key foci that have been developed in sophisticated ways in feminist research: gender, race, and ethnicity (these three never essentialized in biological terms), status (a more productive notion than social class), geographical sites, rhetorical domains, genres, and modes of expression (see chapter 4). All of this work tended to be “dialogic [balancing multiple interpretations], dialectical [seeking multiple viewpoints], reflective [on intersections of internal and external effects], reflexive [about unsettling one’s conclusions and deferring argumentative closure], embodied, and anchored in an ethos of care, respect, and humility” toward the research subjects and toward what one could hope the scholarship could accomplish (67). Scholars soon realized that research on women and rhetoric needed to go beyond traditional scholarly methods, once “we have . . . established the existence of women in rhetorical history in an evidence-based way” (131). The first of four methodological concepts that Jackie and Gesa articulate, “critical imagination,” invites hypothesizing beyond what traditional scholarship might regard as rigorously demonstrable, a technique made necessary by the fragmentary and faint character of much evidence on women’s rhetorical activities. The goal of this method is “to speculate methodically about probabilities, that is, what might likely be true based on what we have in hand” (71). “Tacking in” (the metaphor is Clifford Geertz’s) to the material by using traditional scholarly methods is thus supplemented by “tacking out” with alternative perspectives (see page 72). As is typical throughout this book, the authors use rich metaphors of their own as well to make their theoretical points vivid: in this case, suggesting that “tacking out” provides perspectives like that of seeing Earth from orbit where now-vanished rivers once flowed. “Critical imagination” also enables hope for the future, to visualize what could and should be and thus to find the energy to work for it. The second methodological concept developed here is “strategic contemplation .” I believe that Gesa and Jackie chose the term contemplation to emphasize their advocacy of critical moments of silence and reflection, pausing, ruminating, and reconsidering judgments that are forming. If the researcher will “linger deliberately,” as they put it, intuitions about...

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