Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of "resilience" has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces. Collectively, these chapters create a robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work.

FEMINIST RHETORICAL RESILIENCE

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction Feminist Rhetorical Resilience—Possibilities and Impossibilities Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady..................................11 Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity: Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World Eileen E. Schell.....................30Response On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls Arabella Lyon and Banu Özel...................................................54Reflection Eileen E. Schell...............................................................................................................................................572 The Traveling Fado Kate Vieira..........................................................................................................................................59Response Traveling Literacies Janet Carey Eldred..........................................................................................................................82Reflection Kate Vieira....................................................................................................................................................893 Virginity and Hymen Reconstructions: Rural, Migrant Women as Agents of Literate Practices in Turkey Iklim Goksel........................................................91Response Problematizing Literacy Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater................................................................................................................110Reflection Iklim Goksel...................................................................................................................................................1134 Diversity and the Flexible Subject in the Language of Spousal/Partner Hiring Policies Amy Koerber.......................................................................116Response Expanding the Sites of Struggle over the "Flexible Subject" in Academe Shirley K Rose............................................................................139Reflection Amy Koerber....................................................................................................................................................1425 A Case Study in Resilience: Fabricating a Feminine Self in a Man-Made Era Frances J. Ranney.............................................................................144Response Philanthropy as Interpretation, Not Charity: Jane Addams's Civic Housekeeping as Another Response to the Progressive Era Kate Ronald.............................174Reflection Frances J. Ranney..............................................................................................................................................1786 From "Mothers of the Nation" to "Mothers of the Race": Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric Wendy Hayden...................................................181Response Strategic Collusion in the History of American Women Rhetors Nan Johnson.........................................................................................205Reflection Wendy Hayden...................................................................................................................................................2097 No One Wants to Go There: Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg...............................211Response On Impossibility: A Response to DiGrazia and Rosenberg Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander..................................................................241Reflection Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg.........................................................................................................................247About the Authors..........................................................................................................................................................250Index......................................................................................................................................................................254

Chapter One

Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World

Eileen E. Schell

In "Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies," Wendy Hesford examines how "scholars in rhetoric and composition studies are meaningfully contributing to conversations about the pressures of globalization and the consequences of the new US nationalism." Hesford's examination of the "global turns" in rhetoric and composition—the turn to "global studies and transnational cultural studies"—is an important one as she surveys a wide swath of recent scholarship in the field: "nearly forty books nominated for the 2005 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and a number of other sources." As Hesford argues, we need to pay "particular attention to the methodological challenges we face as we turn toward the global." She urges scholars to consider how we engage in "an imagined global geography in rhetoric and composition studies," and how we "imperil or safeguard disciplinary identities and methods that take for granted the nation-state and citizen-subject as units of analysis and ignore the global forces that shape individual lives and literate practices" (788). Hesford's thoughtful assessment of the "global turn" in rhetoric and composition studies brings with it important insights to feminist rhetorical studies as well. How are feminist rhetorics being practiced to reflect a geopolitical feminist orientation? How can we factor transnational feminist rhetorics and rhetoricians into our discussions of difference in a US context? How can we affirm and engage in difference in a transnational rhetorical context?

Living in a globalized context means we interact and transact across the borders of the nation-state. We engage in what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan call "transnational cultural flows" of bodies, goods, labor, knowledge, and capital (17). Therefore, our definitions and enactments of rhetorics and feminisms must begin to account for transnational contexts, the ways in which "any local formation is shaped in part by the presence of global forces within it" (Friedman 26). In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Mohanty comments on "the kinds of feminist methodology and analytic strategy" that are needed to create a "transnational anticapitalist feminist critique." Mohanty speaks of the position and perspective that a transnational feminist analytic provides. First, it foregrounds "historical materialism and centralizes racialized gender." Secondly, it "begins from and is anchored in the place [and the rhetorical situation] of the most marginalized communities of women—poor women of all colors in affluent and neocolonial nations; women of the Third world /South or the Two-Thirds World." A transnational feminist rhetorical analytic involves a process of "reading up" rather than down the ladder of privilege, thus making "the politics of knowledge and the power investments that go along with it visible so that [feminists] can then engage in work to transform the use and abuse of power" (231). Finally, those practicing a transnational feminist analytic engage in cross-border organizing work, building linkages and "feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, and...