Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies

by Eileen E. Schell (Editor), K.J. Rawson (Editor)

Rhetorica in Motion is the first collected work to investigate feminist rhetorical research methods in both contemporary and historical contexts. The contributors analyze the decision-making processes and methodologies employed in deciphering the origins, meanings, theories, workings, and manifestations of feminist rhetoric.
The volume examines familiar themes, such as archival, literary, and online research, but also looks to other areas of rhetoric, such as disability studies; gerontology/aging studies; Latina/o, queer, and transgender studies; performance studies; and transnational feminisms in both the United States and larger geopolitical spaces. Rhetorica in Motion incorporates previous views of feminist research, outlines a set of principles that guides current methods, and develops models for undertaking future inquiry, including working as individuals or balancing the dynamics of group research. The text explores how feminist research embodies what has come before and reflects what researchers, institutions, and instructors bring to it and what it brings to them. Underlying the discovery of this volume is the understanding that feminist rhetoric is in constant motion in a dynamic that resists definition.
 

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Kristin]

An excellent set of collected on essays on feminist rhetorical methodologies that seeks to be intersectional by offering a great variety of voices in feminist rhetoric, with a particular focus on including scholars of color and scholars of queer theory and on including perspectives on historical rhetorics. For me, the most useful components of the text are those that focus on historiography and archives (for obvious reasons, given my dissertation topic) and the final chapter on how feminist rhetorical methodologies can help teachers of composition in re-shaping the writing classroom (there are some really intriguing writing assignments/activities that have me thinking about the next time I teach composition). The historiography chapters problematize narratives of textual recovery in a way that echoes a lot of the scholarship I've been reading in historical rhetorics of late.