Coalition Moderation Policy for Social Media & Listserv

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The social media accounts and email listserv of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition exist to support the mission of the Coalition, which includes “advancement of feminist research and pedagogy across histories, locales, identities, materialities, and media; and the education and mentoring of feminist faculty and graduate students in scholarship, research methods, praxis, and the politics of the profession.”

Towards this shared mission, the listserv and social media administrators use Twitter and Facebook to:
1. Feature feminist rhetorical practices in scholarly, public, and pedagogical contexts.
2. Amplify the work of coalition members and feminist scholars in rhetoric and composition.
3. Share opportunities for further feminist research, teaching, action, and leadership.

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#CallingAllFeminists to WSRL 2019

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Dear Coalition Friends and Colleagues,

As organizer of the 2019 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference, I invite you to submit your proposal(s) in response to our CFP, if you haven’t already done so. This year, we’d love you to join us on October 25-26 at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, to explore our theme of “Contemplative Rhetorics and Literacies.” While there is always a chance that we’ll have inches of snow on the ground by late October, it is more likely that our weather will be crisp, sunny and beautiful, providing an unmatched natural backdrop for the conference.

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Living Feminist Lives: Looking Forward & Reflecting Back on the Feminist Workshop at CCCC

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Guest Blog by Rachel Chapman Daugherty, Texas Christian University; Lydia McDermott, Whitman College; and Patty Wilde, Washington State University Tri-Cities

Greetings from the 2019 Feminist Workshop co-chairs! This year’s workshop, sponsored by the Feminist Caucus, “Living Feminist Lives: Materialities, Methodologies, and Practices” continues a conversation that we started in Kansas City last year on intersectionality. Both a tool for “critical inquiry and praxis” (Collins and Bilge 31), intersectionality calls us to recognize intragroup differences in experiences of oppression and work to dismantle the systems that create such inequities. Using this lens to consider both professional and personal issues, we began to explore ways that intersectionality can help us recognize, challenge, and change the inequities that we encounter in the everyday labors that we conduct as feminist teachers, administrators, scholars, and rhetors. This year, we turn this intersectional lens onto our lives as feminists. Echoing Sarah Ahmed, we urge panelists and participants to ask:

ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world…how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls. (1)

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No easy resolution to problems of diversification: showing up on March 13, 2019

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Conversations I have had with Coalition members tell me that members of this group for any length of time hold one particular trait in common: a strong conviction that, while it is hard work to position oneself at school or in the profession, we cannot risk leaving that positioning up to others. For most of us (if not all of us), it is only through long, tedious and recurring processes of articulating our identities and negotiating others’ perceptions of them that we begin to fit well in any given context. Even then, our fittedness occurs incrementally through extant classifications (i.e., we might be identified as multi-ethnic for purposes of institutional data-gathering, touted as “the rhetorician/writing specialist in the literature department” as a way of proving intellectual diversity, or otherwise engendered to help fulfill a quotient for national ranking or standing).

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Annual Membership/Volunteer Survey

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Just ahead of Winter Solstice (in the northern hemisphere), I send a request on behalf of the Executive Board. Please find a few (~5-6) spare moments to fill out our annual membership survey, available at this link (https://goo.gl/forms/DnNQLChHYuUYbVby1). Please feel free to do so now or just after the holidays as you contemplate returning to the vagaries of the next semester/quarter/term. The survey will collect responses through January 15, 2019.

May you all experience the realities of a peaceful, joyous, and humane new year, no matter the circumstances,

-Tarez Graban
CFSHRC President
(on behalf of the Executive Board)

2019 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference: Redefining Feminist Activism

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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 …

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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

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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

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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

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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