Changing the Landscape: Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Five Years Later

Five years ago, Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster published Feminist Rhetorical Practices:  New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies.  Met with much critical acclaim, Feminist Rhetorical Practices offered historians of rhetoric and composition a way to read, interpret, and analyze historical texts through the lenses of social circulation, critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and globalization. An immediate success, the text had—and continues to have—a major impact on the historical feminist thinking in our field.

To that end, the Coalition’s 2018 Wednesday evening session* will revisit Kirsch and Royster’s work and how it has changed (and continues to change) our discipline. 

Questions presenters may want to address include:

• How has Feminist Rhetorical Practices challenged feminist models of history?  Historiography?
• How has the conversation about feminist historical research changed or evolved as a result of Kirsch and Royster?
• How has the Kirsch and Royster challenged readings of “alternative” histories (those that deal with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, and groups that are otherwise typically silenced)?
• How does this text complicate our readings of alternative texts?  Ephemera?  Digital texts?
• How do contemporary scholars using the Kirsch and Royster to complicate previous readings of historical texts?   Create new ones?
• How do Kirsch and Royster allow us to create connections between historical events/movements and current ones?
• What challenges are faced by those using the Kirsch and Royster as a framework for their work?
• What critiques of Kirsch and Royster are circulating, and how might they help us push the envelope for our own work?

Proposals are now being accepted for presentations for the Wednesday night SIG.  Presenters are encouraged to think about presentations that might be interactive, collaborative, creative, theoretical, co-authored, and otherwise innovative.   Proposals should be 250-300 words and include an abstract (no more than 140 characters).  Please submit to Lisa Mastrangelo (lmastrangelo919@gmail.com) by 3/1.

*NOTE: Because the Wednesday night Coalition session is, technically, a Special Interest Group (SIG), participants may also apply for a speaking role on the regular program.