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

2. Documenting a Need for Change in Rhetorical Studies

13 2 Documenting a Need for Change in Rhetorical Studies [F]eminist rhetorical research is alive and well, multifaceted and in motion, reaching into continuing and new branches of inquiry, places, and spaces. . . . We, feminist scholars in rhetorical studies, are constantly in motion, “working within, against, and across” methods and methodologies, “combining elements from different perspectives” and different disciplines, addressing questions about the value and purpose of the work we do, and working to reconcile our methodological differences even as we realize that some of those differences cannot be reconciled. —Eileen E. Schell, Rhetorica in Motion In this volume, we focus primarily on the history of rhetoric (as compared with composition and literacy) and undertake four critical tasks. First, we delineate major shifts in recent decades in rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape for narratives in the history of rhetoric. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted the landscape, they have also been instrumental in expanding the scope and range of factors that we now perceive as significant in determining the highest qualities of excellence in both performance and professional practice . Third, we create a topology for feminist rhetorical practices that is designed to be a springboard for articulating how researchers and scholars are stretching the boundaries of our work to reach beyond the basics (i.e., re-forming the master narratives in the history of rhetoric simply to include A Call for Action 14 women) toward the development of new paradigms for how our work itself might be shaped and how we as proponents of it might serve as a vanguard for knowledge making and knowledge using in the field. Fourth, from this type of enhanced rhetorical landscape, we propose a polylogical analytical model, an inquiry framework, for understanding, interpreting, and assessing feminist practices in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies.1 This combination of tasks has lead us to proclaim that at the hands of teachers and scholars in feminist rhetorical studies, research and practice in rhetorical studies have changed—and to the benefit of the whole. We now see more about the nature, impact, and consequences of language use. We recognize the importance of contexts and conditions in performance . We understand more about how rhetorical actions function in the human enterprise. Goals and Intentions A centrally important goal for Feminist Rhetorical Practices is to articulate a new analytical model, using feminist practices, for rendering women’s rhetorical performances in research, scholarship, and teaching that is based directly on the organic growth of the knowledge and understanding gained over the last few decades. Our core intention, however, is not to prescribe a singular path for analysis or knowledge making or pedagogical decision making. Instead, it is to embrace a set of values and perspectives, first of all, that honors the particular traditions of the subjects of study, respects their communities, amplifies their voices, and clarifies their visions, thus bringing evidence of our rhetorical past more dynamically into the present and creating the potential, even with contemporary research subjects, for a more dialectical and reciprocal intellectual engagement. Beyond this core intention, we consider it important also to pay attention, not just to ethics and representation but specifically to ethos, to the ethical self, both in the texts we study and the texts we produce. Another goal is to showcase critical and creative practices that center not just on work that involves rescue, recovery, or (re)inscription—as we normally talk about the three Rs of our work—in recognition of women as rhetors but also on finding innovative ways to engage in an exchange with these women both critically and imaginatively in order to enable a more dialogic relationship between past and present, their worlds and ours, their priorities and ours.2 From our perspective, modern researchers and scholars are fully challenged to learn how to listen more carefully to the voices (and texts) that they study, to critique our analytical assumptions and frames, to critique guiding questions reflectively and reflexively. We are also well Documenting a Need for Change 15 challenged to account for the impact and consequences of both the navigational tools and strategies that the women used to negotiate their lives, as well as ones that we ourselves use to negotiate academic tasks in studying, interpreting, and teaching about these women. This volume seeks to address these challenges. A Feminist-Informed Organizational Framework A Rhetorical Assaying Process To organize...