Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies by Jacqueline Jones Royster, Gesa E. Kirsch (review)

In Feminist Rhetorical Practices, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch theorize key ways in which, during the last thirty years, feminist researchers have reconstructed rhetorical studies. The authors depict some pioneering interdisciplinary feminist scholars who have traversed “a historically underinterrogated academic terrain,” opening inclusive spaces in the landscape of rhetorical studies (15) and shifting rhetorical studies from “the master narratives in the history of rhetoric” to a field the authors call “feminist rhetorical studies” (13). Royster and Kirsch “survey [this] terrain of current scholarship in order to articulate patterns in motion and patterns of change” (18–19). Their mining reveals the relationship among methods, methodologies, theories, ethics, and “an ethos of care, humility, and respect” (14). Royster and Kirsch “make explicit” the feminist rhetorical practices that have fostered the most excellent work in recent decades, which they call “critical terms of engagement” (19): critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization/globalizing the point of view. Consequently, this is an ideal book for teaching the pedagogical theories and practices of feminist research, an epistemology that is grounded in ethical action.

Royster and Kirsch are among the leading scholars in rhetorical studies, composition studies, literacy studies, and women’s studies, so this is not our first textual relationship with them. They co-authored the 2010 College Composition and Communication article, “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence” and articulated a theory for feminist research that comprised three of the four “critical terms of engagement” they include in their “volume” (3).

The authors frame their four-part book accordingly: part 1: “A Call for Action in Research, Teaching, and Learning” (chapters 1 and 2); part 2: “Re-visioning History, Theory, and Practice” (chapters 3 and 4); part 3: “Recasting Paradigms for Inquiry, Analysis, and Interpretation” (chapters 5 through 8); and part 4: “Conclusion” (chapter 9). In chapter 1, the authors contextualize their professional identities and feminist practices. Woven within their personal narratives are women, past and present, whose critical and creative practices have influenced the authors’ work. Chapter 2 reveals four goals for “feminist rhetorical practices,” elucidates a “feminist-informed framework,” and explicates Royster and Kirsch’s inquiry-based “critical terms of engagement.” Chapter 3 identifies groundbreaking scholarship that initiated the “tectonic shift” we are experiencing in rhetorical studies. One of the most useful parts of the volume is chapter 4, the epicenter of the book, which provides a list of diverse feminist scholarship and discerns the ways that ideological positions such as gender, race, ethnicity, and status as well as geographical sites, genres, and modes of expression, including advanced technology, have transformed rhetorical practices.

Part 3 (chapters 5 through 8) is devoted to the explanation and exemplification of Royster and Kirsch’s four “critical terms of engagement.” Royster and Kirsch liken the process of critical imagination to a kind of “educated guessing” (71). The authors mindfully reveal, however, that “critical imaging is neither easy nor common” (76). Additionally, strategic contemplation “asks us to take as much into account as possible but to withhold judgment . . . and resist coming to closure too soon in order to make the time to invite creativity, wonder, and inspiration into the research process” (85). The authors offer the work of feminist scholars who have used strategic contemplation to merge their public and private identities into their scholarship. Furthermore, social circulation, “help[s] us see how traditions [and] ideas circulate. . . resonate, divide, and are expressed via new genres and new media” (101). As feminist teacher-scholars have long advocated, no space is apolitical; social circulation shows us the whys and hows of this inevitability. Globalizing the point of view (globalization) is explained as “local knowledge (Western rhetoric / rhetoric in the United States) amid global knowledge (rhetoric within and across multiple cultures and national boundaries)” (111). In part 4, “Conclusion,” the authors do indeed summarize their arguments and assertions; they also offer...