Peitho Seeking Short Memorial Pieces on bell hooks (deadline 2-28)

- Please send statements of about 500 words (may include images) to peitho-editorial-team@cfshrc.org by February 28, 2022.
The fact of the matter is, we wouldn’t have any feminism worth thinking about or writing about without the work of feminists of color. They have pushed feminism to be better and do better since the beginning. However, these feminists often are not afforded the credit they deserve for creating feminist spaces and demanding change within them. During the Suffrage Movement it was Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” at the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, in 1851 that demanded we recognize the voices and perspectives of all women. The work that Black women, lesbians and working class women did to push the mainstream white middle class feminism of the 1970s to speak across race, class, and sexuality made feminism stronger. Feminists of color in the 1970s writing in anthologies like This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, and But Some of Us Are Brave started building a third wave of feminism before the 1990s gave us the Third Wave. And it was a young Black woman named Rebecca Walker who first proclaimed “we are the third wave.” In short, it has always been the voices of feminists of color that pushed feminist movements to realize the radical notion that all womxn are people. In this issue, we are looking for scholarly complications to the discourse around white feminism that historically approach the idea: Feminism has never really been white.
This contemporary moment, perhaps more than any other has shown us the relevance and importance of race, feminism and rhetoric. The current global pandemic has put a spotlight on institutionalized inequities around race, class and gender. The on-going protests and unrest around police brutality and murders have forced us to come to terms with the meaning of solidarity and coalition in the struggle. Extreme nationalism has ripped children from the arms of their parents and placed them in cages going against every fiber of the founding lies of the United States. The recent election and the fact that yet again over 50% of the white women who voted cast their vote for Donald Trump has made clear that assumed alliances around gender are not to be taken for granted when we add race to the mix. Now more than ever we need to be in nuanced and critical conversations on race, feminism, and rhetoric.
From Fair Fight Now to the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black women have been the driving force behind the change we need in America today. In the wake of the 2020 US elections, we need to have more conversations about how feminists of color combat the normalization of the refusal to transfer power, concede losses, and acknowledge the truth. Like we saw with the Women’s March controversy, we can not continue to tolerate feminists of color being pushed to the margins in the spaces we created. This bridge can no longer be our backs. As “The Squad” on Capitol Hill grows to include even more women of color voices, we need to make space for complex conversations around what diversity and equality really means while continuing to hold our leadership accountable to the progress we have made. Now is not the time for half-measures, talking points for views, and conservative approaches. We need to center the voices of feminists of color who are doing the work to ensure our feminist futures. We hope that the essays in this special issue will help shed light on all the important and nuanced ways that race, feminism and rhetoric intersect across time, in this moment, and around the world.
The editors invite articles, manifestos, and alternative works that consider, but are not limited to, the following questions and topics:
Please send completed articles, manifestos, and book reviews. We are also open to accepting alternative formats such as digital, audio, and visual compositions. All submissions should be emailed to both editors, Gwendolyn D. Pough <gdpough@syr.edu> and Stephanie Jones <svjones@syr.edu>, by January 30, 2021. Peer review will occur during the winter of 2021, Revisions will be due in the spring of 2021, and the anticipated publication date will be summer of 2021.
The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC) is seeking an editor (or co-editors) for Peitho, our quarterly peer-reviewed online journal, beginning June 1, 2021.
In supporting the Coalition’s mission, Peitho seeks to publish research that advances the feminist study of our profession, including
In cooperation with an associate editor (Temptaous McKoy will hold this position until 2024) and Peitho’s editorial team, the editor has purview over the editorial content and production process of the journal, including managing the editorial board, issuing calls for papers, refining the journal’s submission process, and publishing the journal. The editor has the support of the Coalition’s Executive Board for all matters requiring approval.
Qualifications: A strong candidate will have:
Responsibilities:
Compensation
The Coalition provides a $250 stipend for each year of the editors’ 2-year term (April to April) and 1 complimentary conference registration for each year of their 2-year term (April to April) where the Coalition has a strong presence.
Financial arrangements regarding the Coalition’s funding for software and technology, training, interns, stipends, and other items related to the journal will be negotiated at the beginning of the editor’s term.
For full consideration, please submit the following materials in a single PDF file (with your name in the filename) to Suzanne Bordelon (bordelon@sdsu.edu) no later than February 15, 2021:
The Coalition is pleased to welcome Timothy Ballingall as our first Advertising Coordinator Intern for Peitho! Timothy is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric & Composition at Texas Christian University, where he teaches courses in composition, argument, and gender. His dissertation, Rhetoric to the Lovelorn: Women’s Newspaper Advice Columns between the Wars, uses feminist historiography, archival research, feminist interpretations of ethos, and qualitative content analysis to examine advice columnists in the 1920s and 30s. His work has appeared in Peitho.
As the Advertising Coordinator Intern, Timothy will be responsible for assisting in generating advertising revenue for Peitho (contributing to and maintaining a contact list of potential advertisers, soliciting ads, collecting revenue, and assisting with the publication of the ads within Peitho, etc.) over the next 11 months.
Many thanks are due to the Peitho Editorial Board members who served as the search committee for this position: Dr. Suzanne Bordelon, Dr. Lisa Mastrangelo, and Dr. Temptaous McKoy.
The year 2020 will be an important one for feminist citizens and scholars alike. Not only is 2020 an election year, but it also marks the 100-year anniversary of the 19th-amendment—the year women won the right to vote. This meeting of the moments is at once an opportunity and a concern for those interested in feminist politics and feminist coalition building. Indeed, there is an opportunity because this anniversary moment could galvanize and embolden present-day feminists by remembering a moment of collective action and political triumph. There is, however, a very real danger. The suffrage movement and feminist politics from that time on, in fact, have been marked by exclusivity and racism. For example, black women were not invited to the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, and they were routinely segregated from suffrage activism and events. Furthermore, white suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt courted the southern vote by overtly expressing racist remarks, with Catt infamously stating that “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.” These are all examples—and there are more—of how, as Angela Davis has written, “the woman suffrage campaign accepted the fatal embrace of white supremacy.”
Given the stakes and complexity of this moment, figures from Brent Staples to Ann Gordon have called attention to this issue, calling the American public to think critically about what a centennial celebration should look like and do. For example, in her New York Times opinion piece titled “How to Celebrate a Complicated Win for Women,” Gordon asks, “Can we celebrate a transformation that broke men’s monopoly on political power while we simultaneously face up to ways that the ugliest aspects of American history influenced how citizens achieved this victory and how they behaved afterward?”
This call for papers poses this question to the Peitho readership. As scholars of rhetoric and public memory invested in intersectionality and coalition building, how might we envision or evaluate public memory projects that engage the suffrage centennial? How are we bringing or might we bring this question to our communities and to our classes and students? What projects and course sequences are we, as feminist teachers, creating or envisioning to engage the suffrage centennial from an intersectional perspective? And how might we cast the centennial as a moment for coalition building—one that creates positive feminist momentum as the 2020 election draws near?
For the purposes of this special section of the Winter 2020 issue, we are looking for short, 2,500- to 5,000-word essays, that take up the impact, promise, and troubles of suffrage and suffrage memorialization with the goal of fostering new conversations for the next 100 years. Please submit your essay for the “Centennial Cluster” by June 15 to Jess Enoch at jenoch1@umd.edu. Please note “centennial cluster” in the subject title of your email and your document title.
Selections will be made through a review process by July 1. Peitho will publish the cluster in the Winter 2020 issue.