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

1. Our Own Stories of Professional Identity

3 1 Our Own Stories of Professional Identity [R]hetoric can be studied not by asking if women say anything important, or if there are any great women speakers, but by asking what women say, how women use the public platform, how women speak. If, however, women’s concerns and styles are granted no place in cultural discourse, they will retain the mistaken status of academic “museum pieces”—interesting to observe but where essential function is missed. —Carole Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, “Women in Communication Studies” Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is designed to explore and engage the terrain of feminist rhetorical studies as an arena for intellectual work that is coming more clearly into its own. As the coauthors of this volume, we have come to our interests in this area from our work in rhetoric, composition, and literacy (RCL) and from our sense of the community of scholars in which we have been participating for over three decades. We have fashioned our professional identities and laid out paths for research, scholarship, and teaching within this vibrant context, and we have found (and especially so with the development of this project) that stories matter. Consequently, although we might have chosen to introduce this analysis in more-traditional ways, we have chosen instead to begin with our own stories of commitment and connection. We take into account the roads that we ourselves have traveled, sharing reflections and A Call for Action 4 key professional connections from each of us. In doing so, we claim and celebrate feminist rhetorical studies as a professional identity while underscoring , as the volume continues, how important it is—as professionals in this field—to critique this work and to fashion and sustain a strong sense of professional accountability. Moreover, given the feedback that we received at various stages of the production process, not only are we starting with our own stories but we also will continue to build into the analysis occasional reflective/reflexive moments as we focus throughout this volume on making a persuasive case for new directions for rhetorical practices, feminist-informed paradigms for research and scholarship, and deeper understandings of the impact of feminist rhetorical studies in the field at large and perhaps even with an eye toward the potential for impact in fields beyond our own. In doing so, we are sobered by the sentiment captured in our opening quotation from Carol Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, words that remind us that as professionals in rhetorical studies, we must learn to ask new and different questions and to find more and better ways to listen to the multidimensional voices that are speaking from within and across many of the lines that might divide us as language users—by social and political hierarchies, geography, material circumstances, ideologies, time and space, and the like. The two of us, in fact, reflect some of these differences. Gesa is a European-born, white woman; Jackie is a U.S.-born, black woman. Our life experiences have been different, but what we have in common is a love of language and the highest regard not just for the ways in which women have used language but also for the circumstances and conditions of these uses, as women, diversely defined, have managed to accomplish their goals, impact their lives and the lives of others, and reform their worlds. Gesa’s Story I have had a long-standing interest in and concern for including women’s voices, visions, and experiences in our work, for allowing them to speak— and be heard—in their manifold expressions, well beyond the “museum pieces” they so easily become when we impose our values, views, and judgments upon them, speaking only for or about them, not with them. This concern for representing women’s voices in all their richness was brought home for me when I conducted and published an extensive interview study with academic women across different disciplines and academic ranks (Women Writing the Academy). I was concerned with navigating the tension between two efforts: one focused on including interview excerpts long enough to represent women’s experience, voices, and visions broadly; the other on Our Own Stories of Professional Identity 5 engaging in the scholarly, analytical work necessary to identify patterns, make connections, illustrate case studies, and draw—however tentatively— conclusions about the information I had gathered. That is, I understood and wanted to...