Abstract
This essay revisits and expands upon the Leff–McGee text-ideology debate by coining the concept “contextual fields.” Contextual fields are the situating elements used to make sense of the rhetorical text, texts, intertexts, transtexts, paratexts, or even “discourse formations” under study. A contextual field may be the theory or theoretical field one uses to understand a text, the synchronic social-cultural context surrounding a text, or the diachronic history or genealogy that either anchors or situates the text temporally in some way. After situating contextual fields within the text-ideology debate and defining it conceptually, the essay then explores the way contextual fields manifest in intersectional rhetorical scholarship.
Acknowledgments
While I am wholly responsible for what is said here, I want to thank John Sloop, Marouf Hasian, Anjali Vats, Rachel Griffin, Sarah Projansky, and Joshua Ewalt for engaging me in a conversation about the subjects of this article. I also want to thank Oscar Mejía for his research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Save for Stephen H. Browne’s (Citation2001) very helpful discussion of context in his response to papers in 2001, published in Western Journal of Communication.
2. I use text in the singular throughout this article, but when I do I am including texts in the plural, even texts that grow so large in number as to make up what Foucault called a “discourse formation.”
4. There is much scholarship in rhetoric (e.g., Chávez, Citation2013; Flores, Citation1996, Citation2000; Griffin & Calafell, Citation2011; Moon & Nakayama, Citation2005; Wanzer-Serano, Citation2015) and communication (Halualani, Citation1995; Johnson, Citation2013; Moon, Citation1998; Nakayama, Citation1994) that has broached intersectionality. Many trace the origins for the initial inspiring conversations back to Patricia Hill Collins (Citation1990) and Crenshaw (Citation1991), and hence to Critical Race Theory (CRT). But, even before that, key proponents of intersectional thinking, such as Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and volumes such as This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldúa, Citation1983), Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Asian Women United of California, Citation1989), The Forbidden Stitch (Lim, Citation1989), The Combahee River Collective (Citation1986), and mixed-race scholarship by Root (Citation1997), Williams (Citation1997), Zack (Citation1994), and others had been published.
5. There are many, many additional advantages to an intersectional approach that have been spelled out well by those (already mentioned) founding scholars of intersectional scholarship in and outside the field of communication.
6. This is the subject of Lisa Flores’s article (Citation2016).
7. Obviously, scholars such as Karma Chávez provide an excellent counter to this norm.
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