2023 Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Awards
/in Announcements, Coalition, FemRhet, News, President's Blog, Uncategorized /by CFSHRC AdminI write to share more good news! On behalf of the Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award Committee, I am pleased to announce this year’s recipients, each of whom will receive complimentary conference registration for Feminisms and Rhetorics and a $200 stipend to help offset travel costs. Many thanks to those who served on the committee for their time and careful consideration of our many applicants! Members of the committee included Stephanie Jones, Callie Kostelich, Shirley Wilson Logan, Tara Pauliny (Chair), and Kaia Simon.
Below are the recipients, along with information about their sessions at FemRhet. Congratulations to all!
Wendy Sharer, Immediate Past President and Awards Coordinator
_________

Marissa Boglin
Marissa Boglin, University of Alabama
F.2, “Centering Silence and Reflection for Justice in the Writing Classroom”

Samira Grayson
Samira Grayson, Middle Tennessee State University
L.2, “Methods: Co-Authorship, Rhetorical Mapping, and Tools to Become Agents of Change”

Juliette Holder
Juliette Holder, Texas Women’s University
F.1, “Interrogating White Feminism”

Julie Kidder
Julie Kidder, Carnegie Mellon University
A.2, “Critical Race Theory: Counterstory, Autoethnography, and Multiracial Bodies”

Jeanetta Mohlke-Hill
Jeanetta Mohkle-Hill, Michigan State University
F.4, “Finding Theory in Material Storytelling:
Embodied Textile Literacies of Social Justice Quilting, Home-Making, and Yoruba Weaving Practices”

Temitope Ojedele
Temitope Ojedele, Virginia Tech University
G.6, “Transnational Feminism in Multiple Contexts and Countries in the Global South” (Roundtable)

Sidney Turner
Sidney Turner, Syracuse University
G.2, “Interrogating Media Representations of the ‘Ideal’ Feminine”
2023 Shirley Wilson Logan Diversity Scholarship Recipients
/in Announcements, Coalition, Events, FemRhet, News, President's Blog, Uncategorized /by CFSHRC AdminFeminisms and Rhetorics Program
/in Announcements, Coalition, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentDear All,
The program for the 2023 Feminisms and Rhetorics Deconference is here! Looking at this fabulous program, I’m so excited to get to Spelman! Please check back in on the program for small changes and updates as the deconference gets closer. The accessibility guide to the conference is on it’s way as well.
Thanks to all who have been working so hard on this event!
Jess
Call for Applications: Peitho Web Coordinator
/in Archive, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentPeitho Journal Seeks Next Web Coordinator
Application Deadline: September 15, 2023
Peitho, the EBSCO-indexed flagship journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC), seeks its next Web Coordinator to serve a 2-year term (October 1, 2023 to April 30, 2025), with the possibility of extending or renewing. As part of a highly collaborative editorial team, the Web Coordinator will work with Peitho’s Editors to upload each issue of the journal (currently published four times per year) and to archive past issues.
Qualifications
We seek applications from graduate students, faculty, and/or independent scholars committed to helping Peitho maintain and expand its strong presence in the field through digital means. All applications will be considered, but strong candidates will have the following qualifications:
- Experience with Adobe In-design or similar publishing or page layout software;
- Experience with webpage building in WordPress;
- Familiarity with web accessibility standards;
- Strong communication skills;
- Strong record of collaboration and/or teamwork:
- Ability to meet deadlines;
- Commitment to serving the CFSHRC, which is the intellectual home of a diverse and growing group of scholars whose interests span histories of studies in gender and sexuality and feminist research in rhetoric and composition.
Time Commitment/Workflow
The time commitment for the position is roughly 50 hours per issue, with the bulk of that work occurring in the 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after each issue comes out. The schedule varies a bit, but the goal is to have the Summer issue out in late September, the Fall issue out in late December, the Winter issue out in late March, and the Spring issue out in late June. The incoming Web Coordinator will have the advantage of working with a larger than usual editorial team, receiving mentoring in the role, and helping Peitho to migrate to its new platform with the WAC Clearinghouse sometime in 2024. Also, because we are conducting the search a bit later this year, the incoming Web Coordinator will be responsible for helping with only 7 of the next 8 issues in the two-year term.
Remuneration
While this is a mostly volunteer position, remuneration is $500 for a two-year term, plus complementary registration once a year at a conference where the CFSHRC has a strong presence (e.g., CCCC, FemRhet, RSA, ISHR, NCA, etc.).
To Apply
Coalition members are encouraged to apply, but applicants need not be current members. Interested candidates need only submit a brief letter of interest and current resume or CV with references in a single file (PDF, with your name in the filename). Materials should be e-mailed to the Chair of the Peitho Editorial Board, Tarez Graban (tgraban@fsu.edu), by September 15, 2023.
Updates for the 2023 Feminisms and Rhetorics Deconference at Spelman College
/in Coalition, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentWe have updated information regarding the 2023 Feminisms and Rhetorics Deconference at Spelman College! On the conference website you can now find information regarding:
- Schedule: The website now displays the deconference schedule at-a-glance and the deconference special events.
- Registration: Registration will open next week, and another email notification will go out at that time. For now, please visit the deconference registration page to provide any information related to your access needs and to see registration details.
- Accommodations & Transportation: There are 6 hotel options in Atlanta with discounted rates for FemRhets attendees. Please visit the accommodations page to view these options. Should you need guidance on local transportation and how to get to Spelman, please see the transportation page.
- Presentation information: Please check your inboxes for an email with information regarding your presentation day and time.
Thank you to all those who worked on these important conference details; I look forward to seeing you in Atlanta very soon!
Peitho and EBSCO
/in Announcements, Coalition, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentThe editorial team and editorial board are pleased to announce that the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition has entered into an electronic licensing relationship with EBSCO Information Services, one of the more prolific aggregators of full-text journals, magazines, and other sources for teaching and research. As a result of this relationship, the full text of Peitho will soon be available via EBSCO’s databases, with indexing. Full indexing may occur gradually over the next few months, but in the meantime, you should begin to see that the journal has become available in some of the platforms hosted by your university or college libraries.
Seeking Donations for Fundraising Auction at FemRhet 2023
/in Announcements, Calls, Coalition, Events, FemRhet, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentThe CFSHRC Development Team seeks donated items for a silent auction at FemRhet 2023. Proceeds from the auction will be used to sustain/expand the Shirley Wilson Logan Diversity Scholarship and the Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award in future years. Descriptions of both awards, from the Coalition’s website, are included below.
Items should be small and light so that you can bring them to the conference with you and so that winning bidders can transport them back from Atlanta. Such items might include handicrafts, books, jewelry, clothing, etc. We also request that items connect in some way to the theme of the conference—“Feminisms and Reckonings: Interrogating Histories and Harms, Beginning Restorative Practices”—and/or to the mission of the Coalition.
If you have questions or are interested in donating an item, contact Wendy Sharer, Immediate Past President and Development Team Chair, at sharerw@ecu.edu. If you are considering donating an item, please provide the following in your email:
- a brief description of the item
- a photograph of the item (if possible)
- a reasonable opening bid amount for the item
Thank you for your efforts to assist fellow feminist scholars and teachers. I look forward to seeing everyone at Spelman in a couple month!
-Wendy Sharer, Immediate Past President
sharerw@ecu.edu
The Shirley Wilson Logan Diversity Scholarship
The purpose of the Shirley Wilson Logan Diversity Scholarship award is to encourage feminist scholarship (particularly historical in nature) by graduate scholars from diverse and historically un or underrepresented groups. The award will be given to first-time presenters at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference. The award includes both a monetary award ($500 each for up to 6 awardees) and participation in a specially designated session at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference.
The Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award
The Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award is presented biennially in odd years to graduate students working in the field of composition and rhetoric and it recognizes outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. The award is designed to enable students to attend the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference by providing $200.00 travel stipends plus conference registration.
Call for Article Proposals/2024 Special Issue “Small and Subtle Feminisms: Reconsidering Who or What Is Feminist Enough”
/in Coalition, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentThis open invitation calls for authors to submit 500-750 word abstracts for Peitho’s Summer
2024 Special Issue: “Small and Subtle Feminisms: Reconsidering Who or What Is Feminist
Enough.” This CFP is available at https://tinyurl.com/
The extremity of violence and dehumanization especially toward queer folk, trans folk, women,
and BIPOC demands action that is radical. In other words, these ongoing injustices require
feminist rhetorical action that recognizes the systemic nature of oppression and how people’s
experiences within patriarchal systems are also affected by race, class, and sexuality. As such,
radical action has recently been prioritized as loud, visible, and big–it’s in the Women’s
Marches, the BLM protests against police violence, and the #MeToo movement. Volume and
visibility contribute to radical change, but we hesitate to dismiss feminist acts that are small,
subtle, or quiet.
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards provide an early exploration of this
tension in Manifesta (2000), explaining “We dedicated it to the people who say ‘I’m not a
feminist, but. . .’ and to the people who say ‘I am a feminist, but . . .’ It was our observation that
many people felt like they were “disqualified” from feminisms because they hadn’t worked out
all of their shit” (qtd. in http://signsjournal.org/bad-
notion of being a “good feminist” or “feminist enough,” which Roxane Gay explores in Bad
Feminist (2014). Qualifying feminism and what it means to do feminist rhetorical work has been
an ongoing conversation, one worth revisiting in the face of proliferating injustices and
increasing calls for transformation. This conversation resurfaced in a keynote talk at the 2019
Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference with Lisa Melonçon’s talk on “Quiet Feminism,” which
triggered strong responses about the importance of being loud and visible in order to make
change. Melonçon’s notion of quiet feminism sparked our curiosity: Where does quiet feminism
fit with radical feminism, and how are we understanding different enactments of feminism? This
special issue calls for contributors to engage with the question: What constitutes “feminist
enough,” particularly in feminist rhetorical acts that are considered small, subtle, or quiet?
More than 30 years of feminist rhetorical scholarship has grappled with recovering, remembering,
enlarging, and amending women’s lived experiences throughout history (see e.g.,
Bizzell; Enoch; Ghimire; hooks, Ratcliffe; Rawson; Moraga; Anzaldua; Jarratt; Royster; Kirsch;
Logan; Wu; Lunsford; Glenn). What is “feminist enough” persists in fourth wave feminisms, and
postcolonial scholarship challenges the Western, democratic assumption that activism must be
loud, fierce, and visible (Koggel). Western feminisms have not only ignored the differences
between women, they have also privileged the same patriarchal tools to make equitable changes
that have oppressed many women (Lorde). Scholars argue that gender relations and practices are
deeply embedded in cultural, economic, and political institutions that necessitate a better
understanding of the many forms of feminist action in the West and across the world that can’t
look the same in place and time or satisfy a monolithic notion of “feminist” (Mohanty). In recent
years, scholarship has been published on feminist material practices, embodied rhetorics, and
feminist practices of remembering (e.g., Boling, et al; Clary-Lemon; Gruwell). Small and subtle
feminisms might be seen across a range embodied and material contexts: from women in sports
who hesitate to call themselves feminists, colleagues in rhetorics of science or technical
communication who have felt on the periphery of the Coalition, and LGBTQIA+ students who
are both vulnerable and called to take risks to exist on campus.
Contributors will be asked to rethink the potential of small, subtle, and quiet feminisms, even
when our moment seems to call for big, radical action. We are a Coalition because each of our
smallness adds to greater possibilities. Even as we turn up the volume; even as we dismantle
harmful stereotypes such as the so-called “angry Black woman”; even as we wave rainbow flags,
stand with/as trans folk, and chant “live loud and proud”–how do we also maintain and create
spaces for the small, the quiet, the subtle? What are the rhetorical choices we are making in how
we talk about feminist identities, experiences, practices, and activisms that call into question
what is and is not enough? A former student, of intersecting marginalized identities, once
explained that they created pockets of resistance in chats with janitors and whispered friendships
at the back of classrooms. This special issue seeks to recognize, recover, and reconsider these
pockets, these moments of small and subtle feminist rhetorical action that may not be loud but
are every bit as crucial–and are “feminist enough”–for our collective survival and movement
toward transformation.
Possible questions and trajectories:
• How do we hold space for small and quiet feminisms alongside big and loud activism?
• In what ways might we invite a diversity of feminisms–disrupting the system from
without and from within, being loud and quiet, acting both overtly and subtly, locally,
nationally, and globally, and engaging in ways that are big and small?
• How might we value small and quiet feminisms while recognizing contributions across
differences in race and class, which have been historically mischaracterized and
dismissed as “too loud” or “aggressive”?
• How is the notion of “feminist enough” linked to identity, performance, and politics?
• How might feminist rhetorical practices look different across different fields (i.e.,
technical and professional writing, rhetorics of science, medical rhetorics)?
• How might we more effectively describe the radical nature of mentoring and
administrative work if we recognize small and quiet feminisms?
• How might craftivism and other material/embodied feminist rhetorical practices work
alongside louder activisms?
• How do we engage in small, quiet, and subtle feminist rhetorics without being silenced,
rendered invisible, and/or dismissed?
• If all feminisms are inherently radical, then how do we reclaim the parts of it that are
small, quiet, and subtle?
Texts will be accepted based on reviewer guidelines for Peitho, including evidence of feminist
and rhetorical scholarly foundation, readiness for publication, and commitment to feminist
practices and methods. We welcome a range of genres associated with the special issue’s theme,
such as scholarly articles, essays, organizing/advocacy frameworks, creative works, or
multimodal works. Please submit queries and abstracts to Tammie M. Kennedy and Jessi
Thomsen at subtlefeminisms@gmail.com.
Timeline
• Abstracts with Working Bibliography due by November 1, 2023
• Acceptance notifications by December 1, 2023
• Full manuscripts due March 1, 2024
• Estimated date of publication September 2024
Bibliography
Baumgardner, Jennifer; Richards, Amy (2000). Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the
Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Boling, Brooke, Laura R. Micciche, Katie C. Monthe, and Jane E. O. Stone. “‘Go and Love
Some More’: Memorializing and Archiving Feminist Grief.” Peitho, vol. 24, no. 4, 2022.
https://cfshrc.org/article/go-
Breyer, Abby. The Blanks at Our Beginnings: A Graduate Student’s Reflection on Peitho’s
Contributions to New Scholars. Peitho, vol. 24, no. 4, Summer 2022
Clary-Lemon, Jennifer. “Selvedge Rhetorics and Material Memory.” Peitho, vol. 24, no. 3, 2022.
https://cfshrc.org/article/
Ghimire, Asmita. “Yogmaya Neupane: The Unknown Rhetorician and the Known Rebel”
Peitho, vol. 24, no. 3, 2022. https://cfshrc.org/article/
and-the-known-rebel/
Goggin, Maureen Daly, and Shirley K. Rose, eds. Women’s Ways of Making. Utah State UP,
2021.
Gruwell, Leigh. Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics. Utah State UP,
2022.
Koggel, Christine M., ‘ Global Feminism’, in William Edelglass, and Jay L. Garfield (eds), The
Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, Oxford Handbooks (2011; online edn, Oxford
Academic, 2 Sept. 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/
10 May 2023.
Lorde, Audre (1984). Age, Class, Race, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. pp. 114–123.
Melonçon, Lisa. “Quiet Feminism.” Plenary Talk at Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, 2019.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003-01-01). “”Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity
through Anticapitalist Struggles”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28 (2): 499–
535. doi:10.1086/342914. ISSN 0097-9740. S2CID 2073323
“Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay”. Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society. Retrieved February 2, 2016.
New Issue of Peitho
/in Coalition, President's Blog /by CFSHRC PresidentCoalition Members, Please check out this new fantastic issue of Peitho!