Discussion on 3/1 and 3/15: Reconfiguring Feminist Paradigms

Dear All,

As my contribution for the day, I have promised a bridge between last class and today's set of readings, centered on the question of "What is being reconfigured"? Here are some various pathways to answering that question.

(1) Reminding ourselves of what we understand to be major trends in "feminist rhetorical theory" or "feminist rhetorical criticism" or "feminist rhetorical work," in order to better situate Hesford/Schell's, Jarratt's, Dingo's, Richards's, Kuehl's, and Maitra's projects as transformative, resistant, or deviant. 

This worksheet -- an artifact I was planning to bring to class -- provides some basic overview of "western feminist rhetorical theory" in the contemporary world, if only to give us a sense of major theoretical breakthroughs in feminist studies in rhet/comp. 

You'll see at the end of the worksheet that I have offered up one example of a "reconfiguration" of feminist rhetorical paradigms by Keith Lloyd, specifically for doing work in comparative and inter-cultural rhetorics. 

If we wanted to, we could easily populate the rest of the worksheet by looking back at our historical case studies this semester, and determining which of them offered feminist aims or outcomes.

(2) Observing collaborative and cross-disciplinary projects as they try to define "transnational rhetorical feminism."

For example, this site (now inactive) served as a timely discussion space for TNRF methodologies, circa 2010.


(3) Building intertextual conversations about methodology (such as we did on 3/1).

To that end, I can offer up pithy highlights from our last class discussion.

Jarratt (1998, 2004), "Beside Ourselves": What are the implications for us and the field? What’s in it for us? Women’s political performances in transnational contexts more broadly require an analytic theory that can accommodate alterity, account for transient discursive aspects of democracy in multicultural societies, and enable different cultural attitudes toward citizenship, social philosophy, and privilege. The problem is who speaks on behalf of whom? Who is listening? And how does this help us to understand how the "other" speaks?

“What strikes me as most apt in the specifically postcolonial rhetoric of these two feminists is the tension here between metonymic and metaphoric representation--between a poststructural dispersal of subjectivity and an ethical commitment to analyzing communication in terms of the material realities of speakers and listeners” (Jarratt, 2004, p. 121).

Hesford & Schell (2008), "Configurations of Transnationality": What's missing from the way we take up the field? Political economies. Merely folding Anzaldua into the canon is insufficient, because that might romanticize mobility and hybridity. Tokenizing writers gets in the way of performing a truly geopolitical analysis.

“Our goal is not to monumentalize transnational feminist critics or to position rhetorical studies as a passive recipient of transnational studies or vice-versa, but to establish a much-needed reciprocity among these fields and to encourage scholars to engage in an examination of transnational texts and publics and to question normative understandings of nation, nationalism, and citizenship” (Hesford & Schell, 2008, p. 466). 

Dingo (2008), "Linking Transnational Logics": How/why can we bring network models to transnational work? Transnational rhetorical links in public policy are created by neoliberal economics, neoliberal power relationships and permeable borders (2008, p. 493). A feminist analysis of the material effects of transnationalism (where material = policy) provides us a better metaphor for tracing and valuing this work.

“As my interrogation of World Bank and U.S. welfare policy shows, transnational situations that may seem radically different and disconnected are actually bound by transnational networks of power, neoliberal logics, and similar rhetorical practices that function to define and contain women’s agency in the global marketplace” (Dingo, 2008, pp. 502-3).

(4) Constructing original arguments about what What Keya Maitra calls a more “mindful response” to Mohanty’s notion of “Feminism without borders” (2013, p. 360): an ethic or ideology that moves us closer to a kind of rhetorical diplomacy. 

Several of us are working on these arguments this evening in our blog posts, for 3/15.

(5) Beginning to articulate our own "transnational rhetorical feminist" (TNRF) methodology by meshing together the concerns we have been observing at the intersections of identity, intercultural study, globalism, feminism, and rhet/comp.

Based on a quick scan of my class notes over the semester, I have thrown together this list, but I have no doubt we could revise it together:

• enables the study of communications outside of an Aristotelian framework (helps us to rethink framework)
• promotes a kind of self-reflexivity of our own reactions to texts (that are, themselves, tied to triggers, stereotypes, and prejudices) and also to their patterns of circulation 
• promotes linkages between local cultures and global problems
• involves learning how to question “development” and “globalization” as a text, an ideology, a movement
• pays attention to how “trans” means “changing the nature of something” and not just “moving through, across, or between”
• recognizes how globalization is uneven by looking at the multiple powers at work in/on a single location (commercial, ethnic, cultural, corporate, etc.)
• sees social and economic issues as intertwined and builds a critical vocabulary based on those things
• tries to avoid cultural hegemonic interpretation (where “hegemony” means one view is seen as naturally dominant over another)
• considers borders as discourses (i.e., ethnic borders, ideological borders), and assumes that borders change
• encourages us to understand “nation” as a discursive construct, and perhaps help us to know what values or ideals we are currently using to define and understand “nation.”
• involves reading the decolonization of a culture through its colonizing rhetorics
• asks how the local/vernacular can help promote models for transnational rhet/comp that might work from the ground up, where “verna” = relationship between the local and the institutional

In doing so, we might consider the list of key terms that we generated early this semester.

That's my offering for the week,
-Dr. Graban