The centennial of (white) woman suffrage: Gender and democratic engagement at the intersections

ABSTRACT

The centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment offers an opportunity to write a new story about women’s democratic engagement. The goal of this issue is to honor women’s democratic labor while disturbing the generic features of the typical suffrage story, considering, in particular, how suffrage and citizenship have affected and been engaged by women with diverse identities situated at various intersections. In the pages that follow, leading experts and new voices trouble temporalities, extend the cast of protagonists, and reconsider objectives, creating an expansive, contradictory, and intentionally untidy narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Woman suffrage
• 19th Amendment
• women and politics
• citizenship
• U.S. politics

In August of 2020, we mark the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the law that purported to extend voting rights to all women citizens of the United States. Many of us are familiar with the now famous anecdote of devoted son and Tennessee House Representative Harry T. Burn who, despite sporting the red rose that signified opposition to women’s suffrage, cast the deciding vote in favor of ratification at the insistence of his mother. In 2002, columnist Gail Collins set the stage for the dramatic reversal in her New York Times piece, entitled “Women’s Suffrage: How Febb Burn and Her Son, Harry, Saved the Day.”¹ Apparently, widow Phoebe (Febb) Ensminger Burn encountered an editorial cartoon in her local paper which featured “an old woman chasing the letters ‘RAT’ with a broom, trying to drive them up in front of ‘IFICATION.’”² The elder Burn penned a letter in which she jovially urged her son to “be a good boy and help Mrs. [Carrie Chapman] Catt with her ‘Rats.’ Is she the one that put the rat in ratification? Ha!”³ Collins’s recounting illustrates how satire, humor, resistive reading, and interpersonal communication shaped political culture long before late night television and social media, but these enticing details also underscore how the passage of the 19th Amendment has been immortalized as a good story. One that, in Collins’s words, featured “superhuman persistence, low comedy, unexpected heroics and tragic betrayal.”⁴ In this particular story, the people who “save the day” are white, conservative, and Southern. That the passage of the 19th Amendment marked a democratic tale’s “happy ending” is suggested by contemporary memorializations which announce that ratification represented “the largest expansion of democracy in the history of our country,”⁵ one which “forever protect[ed] American women’s right to vote.”⁶

Of course, the story is not that simple. As contributors to this special issue observe, Indigenous women of the Iroquois Confederacy participated in democratic leadership in North America long before individual U.S. states extended the right to vote to white women.⁷ Black women organized and agitated for universal suffrage as white movement leader Catt assured Southerners that “white supremacy [would] be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.”⁸ Laws excluding many Native Americans from voting unless they relinquished their tribal affiliations persisted well into the twentieth century, and in that same century, many people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry were denied the right to become citizens and exercise voting rights. Black Americans’ voting rights have been formally barred and legally undermined since the conclusion of Reconstruction—by Jim Crow laws, white terrorism, and the systematic closing of polling places in precincts with a majority of Black voters. Latinx voters also have also been affected by the scarcity of polling places, as well as by racial rhetorical containment and barriers to accumulating political capital in the border states whose boundaries were imposed on their forebears. If it marks anything, then, the centennial of (white) woman suffrage signifies the struggles and exclusions that our suffrage stories have too frequently failed to acknowledge.

This centennial also is a complicated one for rhetorical studies. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s pathbreaking research on the U.S. woman suffrage movement both recovered the voices of women orators and firmly established feminist rhetorical criticism and theory as a disciplinary specialty.⁹ Much of the research that built on that work examined women orators’ attempts to constitute a more capacious definition of citizenship, one that accommodated women as voters and leaders.¹⁰ Insofar as this work focused on discrete and discoverable democratic subjects—women of relative privilege whose words had been recorded and preserved, and who served as movement leaders and elected officials—it reinforced what Darrel Wanzer-Serrano has called the “modern, Western, colonial, anti-Black, racist structuration of rhetorical studies,”¹¹ something to which both Karma R. Chávez¹² and Ramie E. McKerrow alluded in the centennial issue of this journal.¹³ It’s not that the feminist rhetorical analysis of women citizens and suffragists was unreflective about power and privilege. Indeed, the widely observed and consequential debate between Campbell and Barbara Biesecker deeply engaged questions of authority, epistemology, and canonicity.¹⁴ But both Campbell and Biesecker (or, more precisely, their early 1990s incarnations) oriented their feminist interventions alongside familiar theoretical touchstones from white, male, Western philosophical traditions. Campbell sought to excavate a rhetorical history for women analogous to the “ancient and honorable” one constructed for men (vis-a-vis the ancient Greeks and Romans, and notable modern orators of Great Britain and the United States).¹⁵ Biesecker critiqued that impulse by invoking Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau.¹⁶ A less frequently cited book review essay of Campbell’s, however, published in the same year as Man Cannot Speak for Her, made an argument that was both prescient and audacious. After establishing the underrepresentation of women and feminist perspectives in rhetorical scholarship, Campbell asserted that women’s rhetoric must be researched, anthologized, and assigned, not because it was as good as men’s, but because it was better. She stated:

Because members of the largely white male political elite face fewer rhetorical challenges, their discourse is a less fertile field for rhetorical research. Those who must discover ways to subvert popular belief and to overcome unusually significant persuasive obstacles, such as prohibitions against speaking itself and stereotypes that reject them as credible or authoritative, must be more inventive than their advantaged counterparts. As a result, the rhetoric of outgroups is, comparatively speaking, more important for rhetorical criticism and theory.¹⁷

Thirty years later, we might choose a word other than “outgroups” and focus less on pragmatic rhetorical strategy, but Campbell’s impulse to boldly center rhetoric that had, at that point, just begun to traverse the margins of the discipline foreshadows more recent efforts to construct an unapologetically antiracist, decolonial, queer, crip, feminist, intersectional, and international disciplinary architecture. To raze and rebuild the House of Rhetoric.

The centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment offers an opportunity to write another story about women’s democratic engagement. Like all stories, this one is partial and particular, but the goal of this special issue is to honor women’s democratic labor while disturbing the generic features of the typical suffrage story. In the pages that follow, leading experts and new voices trouble temporalities, extend the cast of protagonists, and reconsider objectives, creating an expansive, contradictory, and intentionally untidy narrative.

Temporalities

Time is a salient feature of any centenary text, but it is particularly important to this narrative. The story of suffrage has long been understood in chronological terms, and the essays in this volume are presented in a loosely chronological order, beginning with nineteenth-century woman suffrage (and the public memory thereof), examining a range of feminist democratic engagements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and ending in an indeterminate moment in a speculative Afrafuturity. As Catherine H. Palczewski explains in her piece in this issue, however, the traditional narrative suggests that “woman suffrage activism started in 1848 at Seneca Falls and woman suffrage was won in 1920 when the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was ratified.” That chronology disguises itself as uncontroverted fact. In actuality, however, it is a reflection of a colonialist notion of linear time in which white people’s forward motion is characterized as positive progress, with justice an inevitable result.¹⁸ Palczewski notes that this chronology is a result of the careful memory work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and its acceptance as fact preserves Stanton’s and Anthony’s status as the uncontested leaders of the movement. A different chronology could disrupt that hierarchy, and for our story we look to the “temporal indeterminancy” that characterizes Indigenous notions of time.¹⁹ Rather than simply slotting Native American women’s democratic engagement in at the beginning of a standard suffrage timeline, we take up Valerie N. Wieskamp and Cortney Smith’s notion of “infinitive temporality” as an Indigenous chronology that “enables the past, present, and future to circulate freely.” Our suffrage story traverses and remixes time.²⁰

Several pieces encourage the reader to negotiate past and present simultaneously by reflecting on both the construction of the suffrage narrative and how that narrative is strategically invoked to make it usable in the present. Palczewski’s lyrical retelling of the suffrage tale offers multiple “beginnings” and “middles,” each of which foregrounds different leaders and participants. It resists the happy ending, noting that the quest for universal suffrage continued well after 1920 and persists today. Essays by Jessica Enoch and Alyssa A. Samek examine modern performative events (a suffrage centennial musical and a women’s rights conference, respectively) that appropriate and redeploy characters, images, and ephemera from the traditional suffrage story. In both cases, event planners presented a hagiographic account of their feminist forebears replete with anachronisms designed to foster intersectional inclusion. In both cases, that strategy had the opposite effect.

Belinda A. Stillion Southard’s contribution theorizes a particular mode of social protest, “shuttling rhetoric,” used by the National Women’s Party (NWP) and redeployed in subsequent social justice movements. Resisting a linear protest narrative in which, for example, an important speech or successful demonstration brings about major legislative change, Stillion Southard emphasizes how shuttling rhetorics are radical and risky, nimble and interruptible, cyclical and repetitive. She explains that protestors “adopt a posture to endure often-violent acts of state control” and “re-engage in protest following episodes of containment.” While they emerge in response to state sanctioned excessive force, their strategies assume both that protesters will be met with violence and that they will survive that violence to begin again. The women of the NWP protested outside the White House, were arrested and spent time in jail, then returned to the picket line. Shuttling rhetorics, then, depend on the safety and body privilege more often extended to white women than to people of color and, especially, to Black people. Stillion Southard’s essay was finalized prior to the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020,²¹ but the subsequent emergence of peaceful demonstrations insisting that Black Lives Matter, where police sometimes clashed violently with protestors, indicates the ways in which the study of the body rhetoric of woman suffragists is relevant to other movements for social justice.²² It also underscores the intense precarity of Black lives.

Invocations of George Floyd’s murder, along with those of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others point us to Ashely Hall’s contribution to this special issue—a rumination on Black death that inspires her theorization of an “Afrafuturist Feminist (AFF) rhetorical approach.”²³ Her theory is a rich reimagining of citizenship that functions as a temporal disrupter, examining how “Black women’s truthtelling, a fugitive act, operates rhetorically to create an elsewhere, a space beyond the now.” Her suffrage story is not tethered to either the nineteenth century, or to the current moment, projecting instead an aspirational future “not bound by the spatiotemporal logics/boundaries of antiblackness.”

Protagonists

Once the familiar temporalities of the suffrage story have been troubled, our new narrative can welcome a more diverse set of protagonists (and a few antagonists) who reveal how women’s positions in this narrative are radically different depending on their intersecting identities. In so doing, this story engages the project that Lisa A. Flores calls “racial rhetorical criticism” which is “rhetorical criticism that is reflective about and engages the persistence of racial oppression, logics, voices, and bodies, and theorizes the very production of race as rhetorical.”²⁴ Returning us to the nineteenth century, Leslie J. Harris assesses the rhetoric of anti-suffragists who deployed the racist tropes of “whores” and “Hottentots,” which presented Black women as uncivilized and hypersexual and associated white women suffragists with Black women’s alleged undisciplined sexuality. Harris concludes that not only was “a significant part of the controversy over woman suffrage … rooted in white supremacy,” but the “controversy over suffrage may have been as much about sustaining white supremacy as it was about expanding women’s rights.” Her piece suggests the importance of not relegating the racism of both proponents and opponents of woman suffrage to an unfortunate sidebar about the movement. Instead, she confronts the reality that “white women functioned as a rhetorical resource in a much larger battle over white supremacy in the national zeitgeist.”

Stacey Sowards and Carly S. Woods extend the slate of suffrage story protagonists by invoking names of women who are famous, but not necessarily recognized as suffrage leaders. Sowards writes about Dolores Huerta, best known as the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union and typically discussed exclusively in the context of labor movements. She not only advocated for voter registration, but also combatted the problem of unequal distribution of political capital in Latinx communities. Woods draws attention to the voting rights rhetoric of Congressmember Barbara Jordon, someone who certainly is recognized as a Congressional champion of voting rights, but who deserves more careful attention for, in Woods’s terms, “refigur[ing] dominant understandings of the ongoing struggle for the vote based on gender, race and ethnicity.”

Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal add two personas to the suffrage narrative which are extracted from media accounts of so-called “illegal” acts of voting by voters of color and “snafus” at polling places staffed by white people that make it more difficult for voters of color to vote. Observing the move made to categorize both stories within a metanarrative of “ignorance,” Flores and Villarreal identify two attendant tropes: the “ignorant” voter (of color) who is caught voting illegally and the “ignorant” (white) poll worker who mistakenly hampers the voting process. These parallel stories have distinct and different valences in the metanarrative. The “ignorant voters” are subjected to racialized containment, with “ignorance” “activating long-standing narratives of racial backwardness and inferiority.” The poll workers’ “ignorance,” conversely, is regarded as an “honest mistake.” That narrative also is racialized, but whiteness is being activated. Thus, the second set of stories is draped in the presumption of innocence and good will. Flores’s and Villarreal’s piece directs us to consider how everyday narratives about regular people constitute democratic identities which reinforce racist hierarchies.

Stephanie A. Martin and Isra Ali introduce new protagonists into this story by examining contemporary citizenship discourses at the nexus of race and religion. Martin tracks the insurgence of a subset of white, evangelical women who object to white evangelical support for Donald Trump and have crafted a new mode of republican motherhood to promote progressive change. Ali examines humorous memes created by Muslim students at American universities, arguing that they function as a form of cultural citizenship, helping women negotiate the perceived conflict between devout Muslim beliefs and progressive views about gender and sexual equality. These pieces remind us of the pivotal role that religious identifications play as they intersect with gender, race, and nationality.

Whereas Ali’s essay examines the complexities that arise when rhetorics of nationality collide in U.S. contexts, Zornitsa Keremidchieva’s contribution explores the intersection of feminism and democratic systems in international contexts. She recalls the “debates over the connection between parliamentarianism, women’s rights and anti-colonialism in the Third Communist International.” This historical case study wrests the topic of woman suffrage out of the U.S. and British contexts familiar to U.S. public address scholars and examines how these debates played out in the context of an anti-parliamentarian proletarian revolution.

Objectives

Perhaps the most significant disruption in this new story of intersectional feminist democratic engagement is how the narrative objective is conceptualized. The unambiguous goal of the familiar suffrage story was to extend full citizenship and voting rights to all people born or naturalized as U.S. citizens, and to make it possible for those living and working in U.S. society to have a legal path to citizenship. Not only has this been the political goal for movement leaders at different moments in history; expanding our understanding of citizenship to accommodate increasingly diverse conceptualizations has been the project of rhetorical critics working on issues of marginality since at least the 1960s. For a little over a decade, however, rhetorical scholars in Communication Studies have been reconsidering citizenship as an ideal objective and refiguring what it can, and should, mean. In 2004, Robert Asen forwarded a “discourse theory of citizenship,” regarding it as a “mode of public engagement” uncoupled from a legal status governed by the state.²⁵ Stillion Southard theorizes “cosmopolitan citizenship” in her assessment of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, suggesting citizenship practices that “highlight how and through what means people can relate to one another in an increasingly transnational world.”²⁶ Chávez presents a number of competing definitions of citizenship in her aforementioned contribution to QJS’s centennial issue, including Aihwa Ong’s notion of “cultural citizenship,” but ultimately she resists citizenship altogether as a “quintessential example” of a “kind of inclusionary process that serves not to transform structures, but to enhance them.”²⁷

Vincent N. Pham focuses more narrowly on the “racial matters of citizenship,” urging rhetoric scholars to “track and name the shifty ways [racism] reinscribes a preferred mode of national belonging that foregrounds white supremacy as the norm.”²⁸ He points to the heightened precarity of people who exist on the margins, near the “limits of citizenship.”²⁹ Contributors to this special issue enter the conversation at those margins. Inbal Leibovits examines homeless women as liminal citizens—individuals with legal standing as citizens, but who often are devalued as “the opposite of ‘good citizens’” due to welfare dependence, a presumed deficit in rational thought, and a present-orientation. Using rhetorical field methods to engage with homeless women, Leibovits demonstrates how practices of self-advocacy can enable civic recognition.

Two other essays, however, take a much more negative view of U.S. citizenship. Hall points out the ways in which “American civic identity and citizenship are founded on and confirmed through the active denial of Black humanity.” Consequently, she posits that “imagining citizenship as a Black fugitive practice conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically, offers an experimental vantage point from which to imagine the death of antiblack capitalist relations and thus (re)imagine Black agency.” While acknowledging the material importance of the vote, V. Jo Hsu cautions against regarding voting as an “untroubled good” and illustrates the ways in which “U.S. citizenship is an assimilatory mechanism for eradicating cultural difference,” and, as such, is a tool of settler colonialism. Moreover, they argue that the federal government’s piecemeal approach to alternately denying and doling out voting rights has created an anti-intersectional environment that depresses the meaningful coalition building which could offer a more dramatic systemic transformation than the measured and incremental changes fostered by individual acts of voting.

Conclusion

At the centennial of the 19th Amendment, contributors to this special issue offer a new narrative about suffrage and feminist democratic subjectivity. It centers women, but not the usual suffrage suspects. It focuses on political engagement, acknowledging the importance of the vote but recognizing that voting can be made to be antithetical to resistance. It acknowledges the violence that has been done in the name of civic practice. And, of course, there is more to say. While some contributors acknowledge queer civic marginality, we need to continue to theorize how queer, trans, and non-binary folx shape gendered voting stories. We need more robust and varied accounts of how dis/ability affects access to and forms of democratic engagement.³⁰ Although this issue examines how two different religious affiliations intersect with gender and political identity, we need to think more carefully about how a range of faith practices, including atheism and agnosticism, shape political agency and representation. We need to continue the work of recovering and preserving the stories of political ingenuity and struggle authored by those excluded from democratic practice, and we need innovative research methodologies to discover and reveal those voices.³¹ We need to develop a much more thorough accounting of Indigenous women’s democratic rhetoric and of feminist democratic engagements in international contexts and alternative electoral systems. This special issue is, then, a set of opening remarks, a speculative preface, and an invitation to join the conversation about the next hundred years of gender and democratic engagement at the intersections.

Acknowledgements

This special issue would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of planners of and participants in the Citizenship at the Intersections: 100 Years Since the 19th Amendment conference, sponsored by the Organization for Research on Women and Communication and held in spring of 2020 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I am particularly indebted to Leslie Harris for creating and curating a space where diverse voices could have challenging conversations about women’s political engagement. I also appreciate the enthusiastic support ORWAC officers extended when approached about partnering with QJS to publish some of the work developed for the conference. Additionally, I want to note the incredibly difficult circumstances under which contributors to this issue worked. When they signed on to this project, none of us knew that we would be completing it in the context of a global pandemic and an international uprising against racist police violence. That authors managed to write anything under those conditions is amazing, but pulling together a conversation on the fraught, challenging, and important topic of democratic engagement at the intersections is truly remarkable. The fact that no one dropped out of the project indicates how important we all think this work is. Finally, I am grateful to my editorial assistant Kristina Lee and the CSU editorial interns for helping me get 14 essays ready for publication.

Notes

1 Gail Collins, “Editorial Observer; Women’s Suffrage: How Febb Burn and Her Son, Harry, Saved the Day,” New York Times, July 28, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/opinion/editorial-observer-women-s-suffrage-febb-burn-her-son-harry-saved-day.html.

2 Collins, “Editorial Observer.”

3 Collins, “Editorial Observer.”

4 Collins, “Editorial Observer.”

5 “19th Amendment Centennial of Women’s Right to Vote,” Americanbar.org, n.d., https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/programs/19th-amendment-centennial/.

6 “Learn,” Women’s Vote Centennial, 2019, https://www.womensvote100.org/learn. This website was produced by the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, an entity constituted by Congress to “ensure a suitable observance” of the centennial. See “About the Commission,” Women’s Vote Centennial, 2019, https://www.womensvote100.org/about.

7 Jessica Nordell, “Millions of Women Voted This Election. They Have the Iroquois to Thank,” Washington Post, November 24, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/24/millions-of-women-voted-for-hillary-clinton-they-have-the-iroquois-to-thank/.

8 Associated Press, “Suffragette’s Racial Remark Haunts College,” New York Times, May 5, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/05/us/suffragette-s-racial-remark-haunts-college.html.

9 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989); Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: Key Texts of the Early Feminists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989). For a more expansive summary of the development of feminist rhetorical criticism and theory in the discipline of Communication Studies, see Bonnie J. Dow and Celeste M. Condit, “The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication,” Journal of Communication 55, no. 3 (2005): 448–78, doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2005.tb02681.x.

10 Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson, Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2013); Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Michigan State University Press, 2005); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Diane M. Blair, “The Rise of the Rhetorical First Lady: Politics, Gender Ideology, and Women’s Voice, 1789–2002,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5, no. 4 (2002): 565–99; Karrin Vasby Anderson, “From Spouses to Candidates: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Dole, and the Gendered Office of US President,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 1 (2002): 105–32; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1998): 1–19; Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Gendered Politics and Presidential Image Construction: A Reassessment of the `feminine Style’,” Communication Monographs 63, no. 4 (1996): 337–53; Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn, “‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgement in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79, no. 3 (1993): 286.

11 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/Ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 471, doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068.

12 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162, doi:10.1080/00335630.2015.994908.

13 Raymie E. McKerrow, “‘Research in Rhetoric’ Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 151–61, doi:10.1080/00335630.2015.994915.

14 Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 140–61; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26, no. 2 (1993): 153–9; Barbara Biesecker, “Negotiating with Our Tradition: Reflecting Again (Without Apologies) on the Feminization of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26, no. 3 (1993): 236–41.

15 Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 1.

16 Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.”

17 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Sound of Women’s Voices,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75, no. 2 (1989): 212, doi:10.1080/00335638909383873.

18 Randall A. Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991): 123–51, doi:10.1080/00335639109383949.

19 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

20 Valerie N. Wieskamp and Cortney Smith, “‘What to Do When You’re Raped’: Indigenous Women Critiquing and Coping through a Rhetoric of Survivance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 81, doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1706189.

21 Evan Hill, et al., “8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html.

22 Adam Gabbatt, “Protests About Police Brutality are Met With Wave of Police Brutality across US,” The Guardian, June 6, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/police-violence-protests-us-george-floyd.

23 Times Editorial Board, “Editorial: A Very Abbreviated History of Police Officers Killing Black People,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-04/police-killings-black-victims; Caitlin O’Kane, “‘Say Their Names’: The List of People Injured or Killed in Officer-Involved Incidents Is Still Growing,” cbsnews.com, June 8, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/say-their-names-list-people-injured-killed-police-officer-involved-incidents/; Meredith Deliso, “LGBTQ Community Calls for Justice after Tony McDade, a Black Trans Man, Shot and Killed by Police,” ABC News, June 2, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/lgbtq-community-calls-justice-black-trans-man-shot/story?id=71022981.

24 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5, doi:10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871. Also see this essay for a summary of the development of racial rhetorical criticism and theory in the discipline of Communication Studies.

25 Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 189–211, doi:10.1080/0033563042000227436.

26 Belinda A. Stillion Southard, “Crafting Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Rhetorical Leadership,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 396, doi:10.1080/00335630.2017.1360508.

27 Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion.”

28 Vincent N. Pham, “The Racial Matters of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 1 (2018): 105, doi:10.1080/00335630.2018.1414294.

29 Pham, “The Racial Matters of Citizenship,” 95.

30 Vanessa B. Beasley, “The Trouble with Marching: Ableism, Visibility, and Exclusion of People with Disabilities,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2020): 166–74, doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1752127; Christina V. Cedillo, “Disabled and Undocumented: In/Visibility at the Borders of Presence, Disclosure, and Nation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2020): 203–11, doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1752131; James L. Cherney, Ableist Rhetoric: How We Know, Value, and See Disability (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019).

31 For an example of this sort of methodological innovation see Pamela VanHaitsma, “Between Archival Absence and Information Abundance: Reconstructing Sallie Holley’s Abolitionist Rhetoric through Digital Surrogates and Metadata,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 25–47, doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1706188.