The chapters collected in this book generate discussion about the intersections of feminisms and rhetorics, as well as the ways in which those intersections are productive. This collection focuses on the locations of feminist rhetorics, the various discourses that invoke “feminism” or “feminist,” and the scholarship that provokes, challenges, and deliberates issues of key concern. In focusing on challenge and location, this collection acknowledges the academic and socio-discursive spaces that feminisms, and rhetorics on or about feminisms, inhabit. Feminism, but also women and what it means to be a woman, is a signifier under siege in public discourse. The chapters included here speak to the challenges and diversities of feminist rhetoric and discourse in public and private life, in the academy, and in the media. The authors represented in this collection present potential consequences for communities in the academy and beyond, spanning international, geopolitical, racial, and religious contexts.

Despite decades of activism, resistance, and education, both feminists and gender rebels continue to experience personal, political, institutional, and cultural resistance to rights, recognition, and respect. In the face of these inequalities and disparities, Transgressing Feminist Theory and Discourse seeks to engage with, and disrupt the long-standing debates, unquestioned conceptual formations, and taboo topics in contemporary feminist studies. The first half of the book challenges key concepts and theories related to feminist scholarship by advocating new approaches for theorizing interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, critical race theory, trans studies, and genetics. The second half of the book offers feminist critiques or explorations of timely topics such as the 2017 Women’s March and Donald Trump’s election as well as non-Western perspectives of family and the absence of women’s perspectives in healthcare. Contributors comprise of leading scholars and activists from disciplines including gender and sexuality studies, African American studies, communication studies, sociology, political science, and media. Transgressing Feminist Theory and Discourse is a compelling examination of some of the most high-profile feminist issues today. It hopes to infuse future and current debates and conversations around feminism and feminist theory with intersectional, imaginative, provocative, and evocative ideas, inspiring bold cross-fertilizations of concepts, principles, and practices.

Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies collects original scholarship that takes up and extends the practices of inventive theorizing that characterize Sharon Crowley’s body of work. Including sixteen chapters by established and emerging scholars and an interview with Crowley, the book shows that doing theory is a contingent and continual rhetorical process that is indispensable for understanding situations and their potential significance—and for discovering the available means of persuasion. For Crowley, theory is a basic building block of rhetoric “produced by and within specific times and locations as a means of opening other ways of believing or acting.” Doing theory, in this sense, is the practice of surveying the common sense of the community (doxa) and discovering the available means of persuasion (invention). The ultimate goal of doing theory is not to prescribe certain actions but to ascertain what options exist for rhetors to see the world differently, to discover new possibilities for thought and action, and thereby to effect change in the world. The scholarship collected in Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies takes Crowley’s notion of theory as an invitation to develop new avenues for believing and acting. By reinventing the understanding of theory and its role in the field, this collection makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetorical studies and writing studies. It will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in diverse theoretical directions in rhetoric and writing studies as well as in race, gender, and disability theories, religious rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric. Publication supported in part by the Texas Tech University Humanities Center. Contributors: Jason Barrett-Fox, Geoffrey Clegg, Kirsti Cole, Joshua Daniel-Wariya, Diane Davis, Rebecca Disrud, Bre Garrett, Catherine C. Gouge, Debra Hawhee, Matthew Heard, Joshua C. Hilst, David G. Holmes, Bruce Horner, William B. Lalicker, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, James C. McDonald, Timothy Oleksiak, Dawn Penich-Thacker, J. Blake Scott, Victor J. Vitanza, Susan Wyche

Milne provides a comprehensive analysis of conviction outcomes through court transcripts of 14 criminal cases in England and Wales during 2010 to 2019. Drawing on feminist theories of responsibilisation and 'gendered harm', she critically reflects on the gendered nature of criminal justice's responses to suspected infanticide.

Pedagogies of Public Memory explores opportunities for writing and rhetorical education at museums, archives, and memorials. Readers will follow students working and writing at well-known sites of international interest (e.g., the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), at local sites (e.g., vernacular memorials in and around Muncie, Indiana and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania), and in digital spaces (e.g., Florida State University’s Postcard Archive and The Women’s Archive Project at the University of Nebraska Omaha). From composing and delivering museum tours, to designing online memorials that challenge traditional practices of public grief, to producing and publishing a magazine containing the photographs and stories of individuals who lived through historic moments in the Freedom Struggle, to expanding and creating new public archives – the pedagogical projects described in this volume create richly textured learning opportunities for students at all levels – from first-year writers to graduate students. The students and faculty whose work is represented in this volume undertake to reposition the past in the present and to imagine possible new futures for themselves and their communities. By exploring the production of public memory, this volume raises important new questions about the intersection of rhetoric and remembrance.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetoric explores the histories, concerns, and possible futures of feminist rhetorical work in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Featuring work from scholars across disciplines, this book explores where we have been, where we are, and where we might be going. Forwarding key areas of study in feminist rhetoric, the handbook is divided into five interrelated sections—Time: Discovering, Recovering, and Composing our Histories; Space: Setting and Testing Boundaries: Physical and Digital Locales; Movement: Exploring Activism, Migration, and Globalism; Being: Celebrating (and Insisting on) Embodied Praxis; and Becoming: Transforming Hopes into Feminist Practice. Throughout the handbook, contributors survey and document the critical work of feminist rhetoric, pointing to ongoing interests in history, politics, and activism while showcasing new lines of inquiry and new methods of analysis, critique, and intervention. The first of its kind, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, communication studies, and women’s and gender studies.

This edited collection disrupts tendencies in feminist science studies to dismiss rhetoric as having concern only for language, and it counters posthumanist theories that ignore human materialities and asymmetries of power as co-constituted with and through distinctions such as gender, sex, race, and ability. The eight essays of Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies: Human Bodies, Posthumanist Worlds model methodologies for doing feminist research in the rhetoric of science. Collectively they build innovative interdisciplinary bridges across the related but divergent fields of feminism, posthumanism, new materialism, and the rhetoric of science. Each essay addresses a question: How can feminist rhetoricians of science engage responsibly with emerging theories of the posthuman? Some contributors respond with case studies in medical practice (fetal ultrasound; patient noncompliance), medical science (the neuroscience of sex differences), and health policy (drug trials of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration); others respond with a critical review of object-oriented ontology and a framework for researching women technical writers in the workplace. The contributed essays are in turn framed by a comprehensive introduction and a final chapter from the editors, who argue that a key contribution of feminist posthumanist rhetoric is that it rethinks the agencies of people, things, and practices in ways that can bring about more ethical human relations. Individually the contributions offer as much variety as consensus on matters of methodology. Together they demonstrate how feminist posthumanist and materialist approaches to science expand our notions of what rhetoric is and does, yet they manage to do so without sacrificing what makes their inquiries distinctively rhetorical.

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies gathers significant, oft-cited scholarship about feminism and rhetoric into one convenient volume. Essays examine the formation of the vibrant and growing field of feminist rhetoric; feminist historiographic research methods and methodologies; and women’s distinct sites, genres, and styles of rhetoric. The book’s most innovative and pedagogically useful feature is its presentation of controversies in the form of case studies, each consisting of exchanges between or among scholars about significant questions.

This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional? Amanda J. Zink argues that white writers like Ferber and Willa Cather avoided the subject of their own domestic labor by writing about the performance of domestic labor by “others,” showing that American print culture, both in novels and through advertisements, moved away from portraying women as angels in the house and instead sought to persuade other women to be angels in their houses. Zink further explores lesser-known works such as Mexican American cookbooks and essays in Indian boarding school magazines to show how women writers “dialoging domesticity” exemplify the cross-cultural encounters between “colonial domesticity” and “sovereign domesticity.” By situating these interpretations of literature within their historical contexts, Zink shows how these writers championed and challenged the ideology of domesticity.

In the Archives of Composition offers new and revisionary narratives of composition and rhetoric's history. It examines composition instruction and practice at secondary schools and normal colleges, the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing from a broad array of archival and documentary sources, the contributors provide accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship. Topics range from the efforts of young women to attain rhetorical skills in an antebellum academy, to the self-reflections of Harvard University students on their writing skills in the 1890s, to a close reading of a high school girl's diary in the 1960s that offers a new perspective on curriculum debates of this period. Taken together, the chapters begin to recover how high school students, composition teachers, and English education programs responded to institutional and local influences, political movements, and pedagogical innovations over a one-hundred-and-thirty-year span.