Critical Review Essay: RSTM at the Intersection of Feminism and Identity

J. Blake Scott's (2003) well-known book Risky Rhetoric outlined several different methodological moves in work on the rhetoric of science, including traditional rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis, a more contextual approach that examines knowledge-making practices, a focus on public rhetorical controversies about science and technology, and a hybrid rhetorical-cultural studies approach, the one he demonstrates in the book. In the decade and a half since Scott's book was published, rhetoric of science has become recognized by many (including at least one national organization) as the more expansive rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM), and it has witnessed a flowering of different methodologies and techniques: actor-network theory, kairology, multiple ontologies, various social science methods, and others. The three books reviewed here provide a sampling of these differing methodologies as they occur at the intersection of RSTM and identity—specifically, issues of gender, queerness, and disability. They also, in varying ways, reassert the value of a rhetorical approach to science, technology, and medicine, even as they push the boundaries of rhetoric.

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One of the main goals of Amanda K. Booher and Julie Jung's (2018) edited volume Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies: Human Bodies, Posthumanist Worlds is to build alliances among scholars who are working on similar issues across different fields. As the editors point out, "feminist rhetorical science studies" (FRSS), their admittedly somewhat clunky term for this new intersectionality, was chosen deliberately with an eye toward bringing feminist rhetorics and RSTM into conversation with feminist science studies. The adjectival correlation of "feminist" and "rhetorical" with "science studies" as their object signals the editors' intent to apply feminist and rhetorical frameworks, methodologies, and methods to the interdisciplinary field of science studies. Booher and Jung conceive of FRSS as one timely and effective approach to Scott's call for new hybrid approaches to rhetorical study; but unlike some other more extreme versions of posthumanist rhetorics that want to disavow rhetoric's discursive function, Booher and Jung also defend the value of older methods such as rhetorical criticism. In this, they locate what rhetorical studies has to offer science studies. While there is a disciplinary danger in moving beyond rhetoric's traditional focus on symbolic action, the editors argue that the project enacted in FRSS is worth it for helping to perhaps reveal and enact alternative material-discursive entanglements: as they write, "feminist posthumanist approaches to science that expand our understanding of what rhetoric is and can become have much to contribute, and they can do so without sacrificing the knowledge-making practices that render them distinctively rhetorical" (p. 32). For instance, while science studies tend to critique science for claims to objectivity and truth, rhetorical studies can explain how members of the scientific community are persuaded by certain claims and not others. Rhetorical studies can also shed light on the connection between science and capitalism (a frequent object of study by FSS) by showing how scientific discourse circulating in public can produce discourse about consumer choice.

The collection's second main goal is a critical examination of posthumanism in RSTM. While the editors generally embrace posthumanist approaches to rhetoric, one of the goals of the collection, as they put it, is "to challenge depoliticized uptakes of posthumanism in rhetorical studies writ large" (p. 1). Booher and Jung argue that in the process of challenging human exceptionalism, posthumanist scholarship has tended to elide and eclipse differences between humans, especially ones that influence how those humans are differentially affected by systems of power (including race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability). The FRSS approach directly confronts questions of the effects of differences between humans and attends...