Authority, invention, and context in feminist rhetorical criticism

ABSTRACT

Focusing on authority, invention, and context as key concepts in feminist rhetorical scholarship, this essay argues that contemporary feminist rhetorical criticism is distinguished by its attention to rhetoric's constitutive capabilities. In recent books treating topics ranging from political discourse to intersectionality to feminist activism, feminist rhetorical critics' attention to the diverse symbolic strategies that function to make women/gender/sex/feminism and difference itself meaningful in the always contingent contexts in which they operate fully displays the unique range of skills that rhetorical critics—of any variety—can and should bring to the understanding of public discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetorical criticism
• feminism
• intersectionality
• invention
• constitutive rhetoric

Notes

1. Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson, Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013); Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin, ed. Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012); Kristan Poirot, A Question of Sex: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences that Matter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

2. Bonnie J. Dow and Celeste M. Condit, “The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication,” Journal of Communication, 55 (September 2005), 449.

3. Kathleen J. Ryan, “Recasting Recovery and Gender Critique as Inventive Arts: Constructing Edited Collections in Feminist Rhetorical Studies,” Rhetoric Review 25.1 (2006): 22–40.

4. Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 142.

5. See, for example, John M. Murphy, “Inventing Authority: Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Orchestration of Rhetorical Traditions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83 (1997): 71–89.

6. Jane Sutton, The House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 85.

7. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989) 17.

8. Nathan Stormer, “A Vexing Relationship: Gender and Contemporary Rhetorical Theory,” in The Sage Handbook of Gender and Communication, ed. Bonnie J. Dow and Julia T. Wood (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2006) 255.

9. Sheeler and Anderson, Woman President, 3. Future references to this book will be included parenthetically in the text.

10. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News, 2. Future references to this book will be included parenthetically in the text.

11. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1969–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 117.

12. See Sheeler and Anderson, Woman President, 5.

13. Bonnie J. Dow, “Historical Narratives, Rhetorical Narratives, and Woman Suffrage Scholarship” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2 (1999), 329.

14. Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

15. Bonnie J. Dow, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

16. Kathryn Thoms Flannery, Feminist Literacies, 1968–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2007).

17. Dow, Watching Women's Liberation, 174.

18. Kate Ziglow Rogness, “The Intersectional Style of Free Love Rhetoric,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 63.

19. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansberg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 110.

20. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Inventing Women: From Amaterasu to Virginia Woolf,” Women's Studies in Communication, 21 (Fall 1998): 112.

21. Campbell, “Inventing Women,” 116.

22. Marsha Houston, “Foreword: Difficult Dialogues: Intersectionality as Lived Experience,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), xi.

23. Natalie Fixmer and Julia T. Wood, “The Personal is Still Political: Embodied Politics in Third Wave Feminism,” Women's Studies in Communication, 28 (Fall 2005): 235–57.

24. Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991); Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

25. Dow, Watching Women's Liberation, 120.

26. Stephanie Gilmore, ed. Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Roth, Separate Roads; Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation In Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

27. Carly S. Woods, “(Im)Mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical History,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 82. Future references to this chapter will be included parenthetically in the text.

28. Leslie A. Hahner, “Constitutive Intersectionality and the Affect of Rhetorical Form,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 149, 150. Future references to this chapter will be included parenthetically in the text.

29. Sara L. McKinnon, “Essentialism, Intersectionality, and Recognition: A Feminist Rhetorical Approach to the Audience,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 190. Future references to this chapter will be included parenthetically in the text.

30. Sara Hayden and D. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein, “Placing Sex/Gender at the Forefront: Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 97–124. Future references to this chapter will be included parenthetically in the text.

31. Rogness, “The Intersectional Style of Free Love Rhetoric,” 62–63.

32. Poirot, A Question of Sex, 4. Future references to this book will be included parenthetically in the text.

33. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, ed. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some Of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982).

34. Hahner, “Constitutive Intersectionality,” 164.

35. Kirt H. Wilson, “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8 (2005): 299–326.