Monthly Archives: April 2012

Feminist Rhetorical Practices Adds Representin and Recognizin to its 3 Rs

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Jones Royster, Jacqueline, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print.

Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies serves as a metaphoric Richter scale for the seismic shifts that have occurred in both Feminist Rhetorical Studies (FRS) and Composition and Rhetorical Studies over the last 30 years. Royster and Kirsch use the metaphor of tectonic plates to describe and document the shifts and shifting that has occurred and is still occurring within FRS in terms of theories, research agendas, and research methods and methodologies.

Recognizin/g and Representin/g

In this metaphor they emphasize that there is not a single fault line, but that scholars working within and across the lines of Feminist Rhetorical Studies have been disrupting and shaking the foundation of Rhetorical Studies which at its core has traditionally been centered of Greco-Roman and Western conceptions of rhetoric and androcentric. I appreciate this metaphor for the necessarily dynamic and fluid flow (or stream to mix metaphors) that Feminist Rhetorical Studies is and for also denoting a degree of physical energy and in-your-faceness or “wreck” as Pough (2004) might call it.

In doing so, Royster and Kirsch also add “recognizin/g” and “representin/g” to the three Rs of Feminist Rhetorical Studies – rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription. As Carmen Kynard (2010) states, in urban language “recognizing” is about “publicly acknowledging what is going on and who the central perpetrators are” (48). This text resonated with me in part because of both Royster and Kirsch’s efforts to make their audience “recognize” the oppression and challenges, the work that has been done, and the work that still remains. What was particularly logistically persuasive to me, and I imagine others in feminist and Black feminist studies, was the argument that it would/ will not be until the least valued in the field, those silenced and marginalized women such as those of African descent (10) were recognized and valued in the field that the field would grow and reach its full potential. In her narrative about how she began feminist rhetorical research and became involved with Feminist Rhetorical Practices she stated that Rhetorical Composition and Literacy Studies was in need of a reform.

Royster and Kirsch’s deliberate and careful efforts to recognize the efforts of so many scholars within Feminist Rhetorical Studies can also be seen as a way to “represent.” “Representin,” Elaine Richardson (2007) explains, is a Black discourse practice that enacts solidarity and a type of fictive kinship. In doing so they demonstrate their notion of strategic contemplation which foregrounds this recognition and they said shows “how [others] have enabled us to stand where we are today, and how their visions make it possible for us to imagine a future worth working for” (23).

Royster and Kirsch not only historicize and boldly present the collective (although not admittedly not comprehensive) work that has been done in FRS to the present date, but argue that these strides have not only benefited them and other scholars and teachers doing this work, but the field as a whole:

“…research and practice in rhetorical studies have changed – and to the benefit of the whole… We now see more about the nature , impact, and consequences of language use. We recognize the importance of contexts and conditions in performance. We understand more about how rhetorical actions function in the human enterprise.” (15)

The book represents an embodied argument for the value of Feminist Rhetorical Studies as a major component of Comp-rhet and a cornerstone in its advancement. As Patricia Bizzell states in the foreword, “anyone who wants to do research in rhetoric, composition, and literacy, in any subfield, from now on will need to read this book” (xii)

As Bizzell foreshadows, this text is likely to be a landmark text; in a sense it feels as though it is capping off one era and launching us into a new one. With that said, I wonder if this book and its recognition of FRS to this point will mark the end of a “first wave” of Feminist Rhetorical Studies and if so, how will the new “wave” or generation of feminist rhetorical scholars take up the mantle?

Questions of the horizon:

As has been noted by feminist scholars regarding the first, second, and third waves of feminism, the hard fought gains of one generation and the privileges of the up-and-coming generation always sparks new questions, challenges,
and responsibilities. What are some of these new concerns you see arising?

Royster and Kirsch name some possible challenges on the next horizon:

“…because of the broadening nature and scope of rhetorical subjects, sites, and scenes we have set in motion the need to renegotiate the terms by which visibility, credibility, value, and excellence are determined…in effect we are re-forming the discpline and re-endowing the vision of our rhetorical landscape as a globalized, multi-dimensional human asset and not just the exclusive possession of Western, elite, white males.” (133)

In the last month CCR 635 has read Cintron’s Angels’ Town and Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe’s Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times both of which attempt to broaden the nature and scope of rhetorical subjects. What similarities do you see in their methodological approaches to Royster and Kirsch’s four methodological approaches of Feminist Rhetorical Studies, critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization, and how might they have employed them to more effectively broaden the scope?

Kynard – From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cypher: Narrating Black Females’ Color-Consciousness and Counterstories in and Out of School

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Kynard, Carmen. “From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cipher: Narrating Black Females’ Color-Consciousness and Counterstories in and Out of School.” Harvard Educational Review 80.1 (2010): 30-53. Print.

In her article, “From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cipher: Narrating Black Females Color-Consciousness and Counterstories in and Out of School,” Carmen Kynard, assistant professor of English at St. John’s University, takes the reader on a journey through time, place, and space. Kynard’s stated goal is to use multiple narratives that explore how digital technologies offer hush harbors for Black female college students’ social and literacy practices in what she describes as “digitized Candy Girls” (33). The phrase Candy Girls, originally adopted from the popular 80s New Edition song, described Kynard’s clique of African American girls that she attended school with and navigated various issues of Black girlhood with.

Kynard described her approach as an “unhushing narrative methodology” (48), rather than an ethnographic one, in her research because she was an active agent in the cipher’s (group’s) sense making, decision making, and survival making” (48). Kynard used narrative to “unhush” and disclose the ways in which the “hidey spaces,” or hush harbors that she and the Black female students in the cipher formed. These spaces contradicted and challenged traditional notions of literacy where the purpose of literacy is understood solely as a means to achieve money and power.

Kynard argued that her use of groups or ciphers also worked against “isolationism of Black women, and unhushing methodology works against the isolating of researcher and participant” (48). The unhushing narrative methodology “(re)values black radical female subjectivity” (48).

These methods serve a rhetorical purpose because by strategically making the private public, Kynard sought to move a deeper understanding of their hush harbor as a site for “new political lenses into, and therefore struggles against, schooling’s processes of ethnic cleansing” (48). This is no doubt necessary in light of the fact that the rest of the institution failed to “recognized” the cipher members or their activity. Kynard defined the urban, youth term “recognize” as being about “publicly acknowledging what is going on and who the central perpetrators are” (48).

“It is worth saying again: no one in the department where I met the sistas in the cyber cipher noticed their displacement or talent; nobody recognized. It didn’t have to be that way, and it can’t be that way if we intend to really dismantle the race, gender, and class hierarchies of educational institutions.” (48)

Through her unhushing narrative, Kynard shows the various ways that Black women in postsecondary educational settings assess their contexts and their positioning within them and seek to employ and/ or develop community literacy skills in order to survive and potentially thrive in in-school contexts.