2019 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference: Redefining Feminist Activism

The School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication at James Madison University invites proposals for the 12th Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference to be held at Hotel Madison in Harrisonburg, VA, November 13-16, 2019.

This year’s theme invites participants to reflect on or redefine current trends in and future possibilities for grassroots feminist activism in what we are calling “DIY feminist activism”– advocacy work that prioritizes inclusion and diversity by engaging in projects that are freestanding, self-supporting, and/or crowdsourced. DIY feminist activism is in tune with overlapping identities and, thus, is inherently intersectional; it celebrates the power of individuals to spearhead innovative, creative solutions to issues and problems that are often neglected or mishandled when left to institutional powers.   Read more

To the work you do …

Like many of you, I’m simultaneously intrigued and exhausted by watching, listening to, and reading about today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, investigating sexual assault allegations brought forth by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. As the positions from which various senators spoke oscillated between critiquing the process, critiquing the investigative ethics, questioning what counts as evidence, and making statements about one another’s motives and behaviors—and moreover, as the performances oscillated between expressions of maltreatment, expressions of solidarity, and expressions of mistrust—it became less clear to me what should be at stake in the hearing at this moment, let alone what will have been at stake when the hearing gets taken up in other historic moments. (What should have been clear became so easily obfuscated.)

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Re-Examining Intersectionality in our 30th Year

Dear All,

With CCCC 2019 notifications having gone out, we are pleased to share early details of the Coalition-sponsored session on Wednesday evening, March 13 (2019) in Pittsburgh!

Two-thousand and nineteen will mark the Coalition’s 30th year, and what better way to do so than through a critical re-examination of intersectional work? As usual, our two-part session will be open to all 4C19 conference-goers.

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Stone Walls and Summer Projects

Dear All,

The central terminal of the O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa is architecturally significant. Some of the walls are constructed of polished geologic stone as if to mark the origins of the continent, and on some of these stone walls the traveler will see a carving or marquee with an African proverb. The attribution of these proverbs is interesting – sometimes they are unknown, sometimes they are far too broadly attributed, and at other times they are mis-attributed but have become woven into the postcolonial discourses of an African country nonetheless. Regardless of its origins, this particular proverb has come to my mind repeatedly over the past few months, as an indication of how the Coalition’s idea of feminist scholarship has informed – and continues to inform – the work of the field at large: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

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CFP: Rhetorical Pasts, Rhetorical Futures: Reflecting on the Legacy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Future of Feminist Health Literacy

We are pleased to publish this call for proposals for a Special Issue of Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition

image of 3 different copies of our boidies our selves

Rhetorical Pasts, Rhetorical Futures: Reflecting on the Legacy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Future of Feminist Health Literacy

Special Issue Editors
Sara DiCaglio, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University 
Lori Beth De Hertogh, Assistant Professor, James Madison University

On April 2, 2018, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective announced that they would no longer publish updated print or digital versions of their foundational text, Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) due to financial pressures and the changing nature of online health information. Since its original publication in 1970, OBOS (then called Women and Their Bodies) has provided “evidence-based information on girls’ and women’s reproductive health and sexuality” to millions worldwide. It was included in the Library of Congress’ 2012 exhibit “Books That Shaped America” and recognized by Time magazine as one of the best 100 nonfiction books published in English (OBOS, About Us). As Susan Wells aptly puts it: “Our Bodies, Ourselves was not just a routine women’s health manual with a feminist twist. Nothing like it was available when the book was first published in 1970” and it was eagerly consumed by “an audience of women hungry for this information” (2). Read more

#TheFeministsAreComing To RSA 2018

#TheFeministsAreComing

Believe it or not, the Rhetoric Society of America’s 50th anniversary conference is next week! That means it’s time to dust off the conference duds, finish those talks, and fire up the social media accounts.
 
Two years ago at #RSA16 we held the happiest of happy hours, and we celebrated our new nomenclature. This time, the program boasts more than 100 sessions with feminist perspectives, including presentations on sex, gender, and sexuality in conjunction with all aspects of rhetorical studies. #TheFeministsAreComing all right.

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Coalition Curated Guide to #RSA50

The Rhetoric Society of America‘s 18th biennial conference promises to celebrate the past and build towards the future for scholars of rhetoric and composition. And feminist scholars are occupying important roles in these conversations. We are delighted and overwhelmed to see that the conference will include a robust range of feminist rhetorical scholarship, which you can find on each page of the program. We offer you this list of sessions featuring research, methods, theories, and performances that are of particular interest to feminist scholars in the history of rhetoric and composition. This is not a complete list, and we welcome recommendations from our members and readers. 

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Greetings for the 2018-2020 Term

The optimal way for me to begin this new (2018-2020) term is with the following six gratitudes and platitudes, calling attention to a collaborative leadership structure in which the Coalition has made an important and long-term investment.

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Coalition Welcomes First Peitho Web Coordinator

The Coalition is pleased to announce that Jen England, assistant professor of professional writing and rhetoric at Hamline University, now serves as Peitho journal’s first web coordinator. Given the journal’s growth and emerging need to become a platform that accommodates a range of web-based formats for publishing scholarly work, the time seemed right to create and fill this role. 

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Winner of the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award: Jean Bessette’s Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives

The Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award honors its namesake by recognizing outstanding, book-length contributions in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory in rhetoric and composition. For the 2018 award, the Coalition received an unprecedented 16 nominations, reflecting the great breadth and diversity of feminist academic work, from subject matter and research methods to modes of delivery and exigences addressed. We want to thank everyone who nominated publications this year as well as the publishers of the print and digital books that were nominated. In addition, we want to thank all of this year’s authors for their inspiring contributions to feminist work in our field.  The Coalition is pleased to announce that Jean Bessette’s Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives is the recipient of the 2018 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award.

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