Retellings: Opportunities for Feminist Research in Rhetoric and Composition Studies

In Retellings: Opportunities for Feminist Research in Rhetoric and Composition Studies, the contributors use the anniversary of the publication of Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, the first book to examine women's contributions to rhetoric across history, as an opportune moment to assess feminist rhetorical research and test out new possibilities. Together, the essays ask, what does it or should it mean to engage rhetoric from a feminist perspective?

Each chapter addresses one of four aspects of this question, including the place of feminist rhetoric in contemporary (real-world and transnational) politics; the relationship between feminist rhetorical studies and identity studies; the prospects for feminist research methods and methodologies; or the feminist rhetorical commitment to "paying it forward" through teaching and mentoring. Collectively, the essays push scholars to expand the national boundaries of rhetorical inquiry to include women's roles in global politics. Contributors also engage in intersectional analyses of gender and other vectors of power (including, here, religious affiliation and sexuality), considering identities as epistemic resources for rhetors. To develop richer methods and methodologies, contributors highlight the ethical challenges of research practices ranging from IRB submissions to archival research, critically interrogating the positionality of the researcher with relation to her subjects and materials. Finally, contributors address the needs and interests of diverse readers when they highlight how feminist perspectives challenge traditional models of teaching and mentorship.

Contributors include Heather Brook Adams, Jean Bessette, Michelle F. Eble, Jessica Enoch, Rosalyn Collings Eves, Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Cheryl Glenn, Anita Helle, Jordynn Jack, A. Abby Knoblauch, Shirley Wilson Logan, Briggite Mral, Krista Ratcliffe, Cristina D. Ramírez, Elaine Richardson, Wendy B. Sharer, and Berit von der Lippe.

Jessica Enoch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she teaches courses in feminist rhetoric, rhetorical theory and pedagogy, as well as first-year writing. She has published two manuscripts Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicana/o Students, 1865-1911 (SIUP, 2008) and Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women's Work (SIUP, 2019). With Dana Anderson, she co-edited the collection Burke in the Archives: Using the Past to Transform the Future of Burkean Studies (University of South Carolina Press, 2013); with David Gold, she published Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and with Cristina D. Ramírez, she published Mestiza Rhetorics: An Anthology of Mexicana Activism in the Spanish Language Press, 1875-1922 (SIUP, 2019). Her articles have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Journal of Curriculum Studies, and Composition Studies.

Jordynn Jack is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses in rhetorical theory, rhetoric of science, and women's rhetorics. She is the author of Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II (University of Illinois Press, 2009) and Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdisciplinary Neurorhetoric (Ohio State University Press, 2019), and an edited collection, Neurorhetorics (Routledge, 2012). Her articles have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Women's Studies in Communication.