Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies

Making Pathways: Inventing Textual Research Methods in Feminist Rhetorical Studies

89 Making Pathways Inventing Textual Research Methods in Feminist Rhetorical Studies Kathleen J. Ryan . . . rhetorical invention has migrated, entered, settled, and shaped many other areas of theory and practice in rhetoric and composition. Janice Lauer, “Rhetorical Invention: The Diaspora” As a scholar first trying to establish a research agenda as a tenure-track faculty member, I found that early efforts to articulate my research agenda to a general scholarly audience in faculty evaluation reports and grant applications were uncertain at best. I lacked a language to satisfactorily name my research methods and agenda in feminist rhetorics to make arguments for my scholarly potential. Because I was not practicing a more familiar research methodology like historiography or ethnography , I did not have a way to describe my work effectively in these important evaluative contexts, let alone for the sake of my professional development. I struggled over questions like these: Is feminist rhetorical studies a discipline or a subdiscipline of rhetorical studies?1 What are the characteristic questions, issues, and research methods of this disciplinary landscape? What shape can my contribution take? More concretely, how can I create a research agenda to identify my scholarly work to myself, to others? My experience illustrates challenges other junior faculty and graduate students in feminist rhetorical studies also encounter. Since disciplines are marked by methods of study (among 90 Kathleen J. Ryan other things), these are questions of disciplinarity and ones to guide individual scholarship. They should be seen as full of inventive possibility rather than sources of anxiety, extending what feminist rhetorical studies is and might become. My writing helped me to answer these questions. As I researched and drafted an article (see Ryan 2006), I became comfortable defining feminist rhetorical studies as a field of study that both overlaps with and distinguishes itself from rhetorical studies. More recently, I’ve come to understand feminist pragmatic rhetoric as the perspective that guided that project and continues to shape my scholarship. Feminist pragmatic rhetoric basically brings together feminist pragmatism and rhetoric. Richard Rorty writes that feminist pragmatists work to create “a better set of social constructs than the ones presently available” (1990, 35). My articulation of feminist pragmatism, which draws on the work of (among others) John Dewey, Paolo Freire, Lorraine Code, and Charlene Haddock Siegfried, emphasizes the importance of subjectivity, experiential knowledge, and ongoing reflection on experience and action in order to better act in the future. Janet Atwill’s research on rhetoric as techne (1998) complements feminist pragmatism’s emphasis on contextual, practical knowledge directed toward “beautiful results in the midst of power and oppression and ignorance” (Cherryholmes 1999, 5). My use of Atwill expands feminist pragmatism to include productive knowledge as a flexible, context-dependent way for people to intervene in and invent the world. Atwillian rhetoric likewise reinforces feminist pragmatism’s reformist agenda. The aim of rhetoric as techne is “neither to formalize a rigorous method nor to secure and define an object of study but rather to reach an end by way of a path that can be retraced, modified, adapted, and ‘shared.’ The purpose of such a path . . . is not to find a thing. [It is] to produce an alternative destination” (Atwill 1998, 69). Like feminist pragmatism, this art is an alternative to the analytic model of knowledge , which assumes knowledge is a neutral, certain, objective search for truth. Instead, a more appropriate model for feminists in the humanities is one that stresses situated knowledge making and acting in the world to better the world—a feminist pragmatic rhetoric. My aim in turning to feminist pragmatic rhetoric is to offer recovery and gender criticism, especially theorizing, as a feminist means to practice textual research as disciplinary invention, and thus to create a new pathway for articu- lating and conducting textual research in feminist rhetorical studies to continue to thoughtfully explore, invent, and transform this “dynamic territory” (Royster 1995, 389).2 In other words, this critical reflection— itself an enactment of feminist pragmatic rhetoric—offers a pathway for practicing feminist textual research as a means of individual scholarly invention and, more broadly, disciplinary invention. strategies for practicing recovery and gender critique My previous work offers composition and communication scholars an opportunity to consider the relationship between feminisms and rhetorics in the context of edited collections.3 In “Recasting Recovery and Gender Critique as Inventive Arts: Constructing Edited Collections in Feminist Rhetorical Studies” (2006, hereafter “Recasting”), I found that...