Feminist Rhetorical Resilience 9780874218794, 9780874218787

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F e m i n i s t R h e to r i ca l R e s i l i e n c e

F e m i n i s t R h e to r i ca l Resilience

edited by

E l i z a b e t h A . F ly n n Pat r i c i a S o t i r i n A n n Br a dy

U TAH STATE U NI V E R SITY P R ESS

Logan, Utah 2012

© 2012 by the University Press of Colorado Published by Utah State University Press An imprint of University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of The Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State College of Colorado. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Cover design by Barbara Yale-Read Chapter 1, by Eileen E. Schell, includes an excerpt from “Framing the Megarhetorics of Agricultural Development: Industrialized Agriculture and Sustainable Agriculture” by Eileen E. Schell, from The Megarhetorics of Global Development, edited by Rebecca Dingo and J. Blake Scott, © 2012. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN: 978-0-87421-878-7 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-87421-879-4 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feminist rhetorical resilience / edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, Ann Brady.        p. cm.   ISBN 978-0-87421-878-7 (quality paper) — ISBN 978-0-87421-879-4 (e-book) 1.  Feminist theory. 2.  Rhetoric—Social aspects. 3.  Resilience (Social aspects) 4.  Women— Communication.  I. Flynn, Elizabeth A., 1944- II. Sotirin, Patricia J. III. Brady, M. Ann   HQ1190.F463125 2012   305.4201—dc23                                                             2011051146

We dedicate this book to our children: Kate Elena, Tara, Tavis, and Zakris Chris, Noah, and Casey

May they lead resilient lives.

Contents

Introduction Feminist Rhetorical Resilience—Possibilities and Impossibilities 1 Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady 1 Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity: Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World 30 Eileen E. Schell Response On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls 54 Arabella Lyon and Banu Özel Reflection

57 Eileen E. Schell

2 The Traveling Fado Kate Vieira

59

Response

Traveling Literacies Janet Carey Eldred

Reflection

89 Kate Vieira

82

3 Virginity and Hymen Reconstructions: Rural, Migrant Women as Agents of Literate Practices in Turkey 91 Iklim Goksel Response

Problematizing Literacy Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater

Reflection

113 Iklim Goksel

110

4 Diversity and the Flexible Subject in the Language of Spousal/ Partner Hiring Policies 116 Amy Koerber

Response Expanding the Sites of Struggle over the “Flexible Subject” in Academe 139 Shirley K Rose Reflection

142 Amy Koerber

5 A Case Study in Resilience: Fabricating a Feminine Self in a Man-Made Era 144 Frances J. Ranney Response Philanthropy as Interpretation, Not Charity: Jane Addams’s Civic Housekeeping as Another Response to the Progressive Era 174 Kate Ronald Reflection 6

178 Frances J. Ranney

From “Mothers of the Nation” to “Mothers of the Race”: Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric 181 Wendy Hayden Response Strategic Collusion in the History of American Women Rhetors 205 Nan Johnson Reflection

7

209 Wendy Hayden

No One Wants to Go There: Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom 211 Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg Response

On Impossibility 241 Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander

Reflection

247 Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg

About the Authors Index 254

250

Acknowledgments

This book had its origins at the Fifth Biennial International Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, “Affirming Diversity,” coordinated by the three of us and held at Michigan Tech October 5-8, 2005. The seven essays that appear here began as papers presented at the conference, though they now bear little resemblance to those papers, since our authors revised, reworked, and reconceptualized numerous times. We solicited the responses later, though several of our respondents, Kate Ronald, Nan Johnson, and Jackie Rhodes, also attended. Reflecting on that conference, we realized that everyone who made it to Houghton that week demonstrated remarkable resilience because a storm closed our local airport. So during the first two days of the conference, out of town participants, some of whom came from as far away as the Middle East, had to fly to Minneapolis, our hub airport, or other regional airports and make the rest of the trip by rental car or bus. For example, Kate Ronald rented a car in Minneapolis and drove the distance (a 7-8 hour drive in good weather) by herself. However, our own weather problems were eclipsed by then-recent events in New Orleans, and we dedicated the conference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina which had devastated New Orleans in late August. Resilience proved to be an appropriate emergent theme of that conference. In addition, our understanding of resilience derives not only from our scholarly concerns but also from our lived experience—we are all single mothers who managed and are managing careers and child/teenager/young adult rearing/relating. We thank Bob Johnson, then chair of the Department of Humanities, for encouraging us to bring the conference to Michigan Tech and who provided the financial support we needed to do so. The Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition sponsored the conference. An enthusiastic cadre of colleagues, students, and staff assisted with the organizational and operational details on campus; in particular, Diane Keranen designed an impressive conference program booklet. We also thank the very efficient staff at Utah State University Press for doing such a fine job editing and producing the book. Kami Day

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was a thorough and careful editor; Kelly Neumann handled the many changes to the manuscript in two stages and was efficient and enthusiastic the whole way. Michele Bourdieu prepared the index within a week and did some invaluable proofreading as well. Finally, we thank Michael Spooner, director of USUP, who kept things on track, was wonderfully supportive, and weathered two financial crises during the time we worked with him. He says this book on resilience helped him through.

F e m i n i s t R h e to r i ca l R e s i l i e n c e

Introduction Feminist Rhetorical Resilience—Possibilities and Impossibilities Given that life subjects all of us to tensions and suffering, and that relationships as well as individuals are buffeted by forces that create pain, disconnection, and the threat of dissolution, the capacity for relational resilience, or transformation, is essential. Judith V. Jordan, “Relational Resilience”

Resilience is a powerful metaphor that, although heretofore absent from conversations within feminist rhetoric, can refocus the field in very productive ways. While similar to metaphors used previously by feminist rhetoricians, it is also distinct in that it places greater emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals. Resilience suggests attention to choices made in the face of difficult and even impossible challenges. Collectively, the contributors to Feminist Rhetorical Resilience create a robust feminist conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process. Too often resilience has been associated with psychological characteristics inherent in some individuals or cultures and absent in others. We demonstrate, however, through the seven essays, responses, and reflections included in our book, that a feminist conception of resilience is best seen not as fundamentally psychological but as rhetorical, relational, and contextual. The essays also suggest that feminist resilient communicative action can include multiple and sometimes contradictory strategies that must be worked out situationally. Our contributors, by focusing on a range of sites and issues, together construct a conception of feminist resilience that provides new directions for feminist rhetorical inquiry and new models for leading fulfilling, healthy lives. Within the context of this book, feminist rhetorical resilience includes actions undertaken by rhetors, usually women, who, with varying degrees of success, discursively interact with others, resulting in improved situations despite contexts of significant adversity. Such rhetorical interaction, the essays suggest, can take many forms and occur within a variety of situations, including environmental activism in the form of letters, press releases, protests, and critiques of corporate documents within global contexts (Schell); performances, musical and

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written, that enable multidirectional assimilation of immigrant groups (Vieira); communication involved in obtaining medical procedures that enable young women who have had sex outside marriage to pass as virgins (Goksel); institutional policy statements regarding employment for dual-career couples that place responsibility on individuals rather than institutions (Koerber); archival reports regarding the interactions between a needy individual and representatives of a foundation that provided financial support to needy individuals (Ranney); writing by nineteenth-century feminists that provides evidence that they colluded with reactionary ideologies such as eugenics in order to promote their cause (Hayden); teaching that involves negotiating queered texts with students to expand their empathetic engagement and relational awareness (DiGrazia and Rosenberg). Like the metaphors feminist rhetoricians have used recently to describe the present-day and historical situation of marginalized groups—Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands, Jacqueline Royster’s stream, Cheryl Glenn’s silence, Krista Ratcliffe’s listening, Nedra Reynolds’s geographies, Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s advocacy, Eileen Schell and K.J. Rawson’s motion, and Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan’s walking and talking—the concept of resilience connects feminist rhetoric to the rich history of feminist discourse that attends to gender as well as other factors such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Like borderlands, streams, silence, listening, geographies, advocacy, motion, and walking and talking, resilience resonates with concerns about feminist agency and rhetorical action in the face of pernicious social and material forces, such as white privilege and heterosexism, that trouble even feminist rhetorical studies. E x t e n d i n g F e m i n i s t R h e to r i c

Feminist rhetoric is maturing in exciting and satisfying ways. The Selected Bibliography in Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen Ryan’s Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, published in 2010, includes forty-eight books and monographs. Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Royster’s “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence,” the lead article in the June 2010 issue of College Composition and Communication, provides an extensive literature review of seventyfour books and essays and criteria for assessing the excellence of research in feminist rhetoric. Characterizations of the field provided by the introduction to the Buchanan and Ryan book and Kirsch and Royster’s essay

Introduction      3

are excellent indications of ways in which well-established and emergent directions have merged to create an area of inquiry that is beginning to be recognized within the larger field of rhetoric and composition. Buchanan and Ryan identify five major strands in the work of feminist rhetorical scholars: (1) reclaiming forgotten or disparaged women’s rhetorics and rhetoricians; (2) examining the interrelationships among context, location, and rhetoric, and tracing how these shape women’s discursive options, strategies, and choices; (3) searching for gender bias and, when it is found, retheorizing (or regendering) rhetorical traditions; (4) interrogating foundational disciplinary concepts—such as rhetorical space, argument, genre, and style—in order to expand and, when necessary, redefine the realm of rhetoric; (5) challenging traditional knowledge-making paradigms and research practices (including criteria, methods, and methodologies) when they prove inadequate for investigating women rhetors and women’s rhetorics and developing inventive and robust alternatives (xviii–xix). Kirsch and Royster emphasize that work in feminist rhetoric is moving far beyond “rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription” (642). They identify scholars who have done pioneering work that reframes Westernized traditions, scholars who have attended to the ways in which feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition is being done and is transforming the field, sometimes in relation to pedagogical theories and practices; scholars who seek to articulate new methodological patterns; and scholars who are actively engaging in the push in the field toward better-informed perspectives on rhetoric and writing as a global enterprise (645–6). Feminist rhetoric has clearly found its voice within rhetoric and composition. Work in our collection extends the developments mentioned by Buchanan and Ryan, Kirsch and Royster, and others, at the same time pointing toward new directions for feminist rhetoric. None of the works included in the Buchanan and Ryan or Kirsch and Royster bibliographies and discussions mentions resilience. One reason, no doubt, is that it has not been a central issue within rhetoric and composition as a whole. This is unfortunate. In other fields, such as psychology and communication studies, it has been a concern for decades and is becoming increasingly important. The 2010 presidential address of the president of the International Communication Association, Patrice Buzzanell, for instance, is titled “Resilience: Talking, Resisting, and Imagining New Normalcies into Being.” In the address, Buzzanell identifies five communicative processes of resilience: crafting normalcy, affirming identity

4    feminist R hetorical resilience

anchors, maintaining and using communication networks, putting alternative logics to work, and legitimizing negative feelings while foregrounding productive action (3). In attempting to define resilience and demonstrate its usefulness for feminist rhetoric, we reach out to other fields and at the same time suggest ways in which a feminist rhetorical approach to resilience can enrich them. A feminist perspective, for instance, can demonstrate that Buzzanell’s processes always take place within hierarchies in which some enjoy considerable privilege while others suffer deprivation. The essays in our collection contribute to feminist rhetoric and to fields exploring the theme of resilience in other ways as well. One of the essays explores the contributions of Eastern activist and rhetorician Vandana Shiva within contexts that have been underdeveloped within feminist rhetoric, such as ecofeminism and biodiversity (Schell). Our collection also extends the concept of diversity to include individuals from groups not previously emphasized within feminist rhetoric, such as young women from squatter communities in Turkey, “illiterate” by Western standards, who attempt to negotiate the considerable challenges of their poverty and marginality with intelligence and skill (Goksel). Another is a middle-class though impoverished elderly widow trying to live with dignity despite reliance on the charity of a foundation (Ranney). The collection also raises questions about just what it means to be “Western.” Are Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, the subjects of one of the essays, a colonized people? They are marginalized at least two times over and far removed from the centers of European power and authority (Vieira). Other groups considered here that have not been examined extensively by feminist rhetoricians include dualcareer couples at universities (Koerber) and feminists from other eras who have had to advance their causes by colluding with those who embrace reactionary ideologies (Hayden). Finally, we consider the situations of queered classrooms, spaces in which teachers’ efforts to expand student capacities for critical thinking have not been center stage within feminist rhetoric (Rosenberg and DiGrazia). Extending Conceptions of Resilience

In developing our approach to feminist rhetorical resilience, we were surprised to discover how frequently the term resilience is used in academic and nonacademic contexts outside feminist rhetoric and composition. It has been a central concern in numerous academic books and articles in fields such as queer studies, social work, literary studies,

Introduction      5

education, urban studies, environmental studies, business, nursing and health studies, psychology, counseling, and Holocaust studies. Steven M. Cahn concludes his chapter on graduate school in his book From Student to Scholar with the question, “[W]hat is the most important ingredient for success in graduate school?” His answer is not “brilliance” but “resiliency” (5).1 The term resilience also resonates with the civic public. Evidence for the wide appeal of the term is found in the numerous popular self-help books appearing recently that have resilience as a central metaphor.2 Resilience has also been a concept invoked in discussions of the present state of the economy,3 of the worlds of work,4 and of education.5 The term has been used extensively within the social sciences, especially in relation to the resilience of children who were raised in adverse circumstances, and within the field of social work.6 We find that many existing conceptions of resilience are limited because they (1) prioritize the heroic (self-sufficient) individual; (2) constitute resilience as a psychological or social property rather than a process; (3) fail to radically contextualize resilience as a rhetorical response; (4) overemphasize a return to a previous state of equilibrium, thereby obscuring the transformative potential of resilience; and (5) neglect relationality and mutuality as constitutive dynamics of resilience.7 Conceptions of resilience in therapeutic, corporate, educational, and popular contexts are often especially limited. The therapeutic model tends to focus on the individual divorced from social context. Corporate appropriation can be exploitative with its attempt to create “resilient employees.” Within educational contexts, resilience is sometimes defined narrowly to suggest academic success understood and measured in traditional and conservative ways. Popular conceptions often define it as a static, one-dimensional state. Feminist discussions of resilience are rarely rhetorical in emphasis.8 Before we explicate the features of the feminist rhetorical resilience we are developing, we want to reiterate that our conception of resilience differs from more commonsensical and popular understandings. Our conception sees resilience as communal, relational, and social. Commonsensical and popular understandings, in contrast, tend to emphasize the self-sufficient, heroic individual. Resilience becomes an inherent psychological trait rather than a rhetorical action. According to the Resiliency Center website, resilience is “the power to bounce back.” Popularly, resilience is taken as the ability to respond positively in the face of adverse conditions and calamities, to gain ground where

6    feminist R hetorical resilience

others might give in to difficulties and obstacles. The ends of resilience are often limited by depictions of a simple return to balance, the “happy ending” of a life story, and an individual triumph over circumstances. In the popular media, stories of resilience are often goal oriented and character driven. For example, the descriptions in Bartimus et al.’s War Torn, a collection of stories by women reporters looking back on their experiences during the Vietnam War, emphasize the powerful individual agency of these women, some of whom paid their own way to report on the war, all of whom dealt with dangerous, near-impossible odds to do so. These women saw horrific battles and their consequences for soldiers and civilians alike; despite these horrors, they remained steadfast in their goal to report on the carnage and costs of war. The stories in War Torn are about their self-sufficiency and efficacy. These stories do not celebrate community but, rather, individuality and personal strength— the women are depicted as strong, brave, courageous, competent, and determined, and as triumphing over dire circumstances because they remained committed to their goals of pursuing news stories and personal careers. While they represent the resilience of the individual, we propose a conception that is more relational and community oriented. The conception of resilience evident in professional therapy and social work literatures comes closer to our rhetorical conception in that resilience is acknowledged as systemic and interactive, but this literature also falls short in that the emphasis on the development of strengths rather than compensation for deficiencies remains centered on the heroic individual, albeit well nurtured. Over the past decade, there has been a shift from a pathology model of treatment, with its “incessant focus on problems and maladjustment, stress and adversity,” to a strengths perspective that “concentrate[s] professional practice on coping rather than risk, on opportunity rather than on fatalism, on wellness and self-repair rather than on illness and disability” (Norman 1). As Katy Butler observed, “What we call resilience is turning out to be an interactive and systemic phenomenon, the product of a complex relationship of inner strengths and outer help throughout a person’s life span. Resilience is not only an individual matter. It is the outward and visible sign of a web of relationships and experiences that teach people mastery, doggedness, love, moral courage and hope” (26). Our conception of resilience is similar to representations in therapy and social work literature in that it emphasizes interaction and communicative action within complex systems. It differs, however, in that it

Introduction      7

is set within a feminist rhetorical framework and attends, especially, to concepts such as agency, mêtis, and relationality. In doing so, we draw upon feminist concepts such as social justice, equity, care, and gender, thus complicating conventional rhetorical understandings of terms such as context, engagement, audience, production, and exigency. We focus on process and context rather than individual qualities and behaviors. For us, resilience is not a state of being but a process of rhetorically engaging with material circumstances and situational exigencies. We see resilience not as a quality of the heroic individual but as always relational, not only because individuals learn moral qualities and derive social and material support through “a web of relationships” but because resilience is in itself a form of relationality. Resilience does not necessarily return an individual life to equilibrium but entails an ongoing responsiveness, never complete nor predetermined. Finally, resilience is transformative not necessarily through affecting a change in circumstances—which may remain bleak or oppressive—but in changing the way a life is lived. Resilient living can involve determination, perseverance, hope, and imagination. In elaborating on this feminist conception of resilience, we focus especially on three concepts—agency, mêtis, and relationality. Agency

In proposing resilience as rhetorical agency, we defer the traditional understanding of rhetorical agency as vested in a strategic rhetor marshaling the available means of public action and responding efficaciously to the demands of immediate circumstances and larger historical-structural forces. Against the assumption that rhetorical agency is the province of those who can marshal resources and have access to forums for public action, resilience allows us to focus on those who have neither available resources nor taken-for-granted access. Clearly, resilience begins from a place of struggle and desire. Resilience is creative, animating the potential of whatever comes to hand as a suitable rhetorical “resource,” be it music, linen, or family narratives (see chapters in this collection). Further, a feminist conception understands resilience not as a character trait of the rhetor but as relational, hence dismissing the heroic individual rhetor in favor of an understanding of relational webs as the basis for resilient agency. Thus resilience realizes possibilities and resources by shaping and enacting relationships among selves and others, speakers and audiences, things and dreams, bodies and needs, and so on. In this way, we find resilience to be a significant feminist alternative to traditional conceptions

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of rhetorical agency in that the pregiven nature of rhetors, resources, exigencies, or change is replaced by a conception of dynamic creativity, reshaping possibilities, opportunities, meanings, and subjects. Resilience as feminist rhetorical agency is thus a relational dynamic, responsive in and to contexts, creating and animating capacities and possibilities. We stress that resilience as we conceive it is not about individual psychological qualities but rhetorical engagement; resilience is rhetorical action within pernicious circumstances. This action is neither static nor goal oriented; it is pragmatic, situational, and kinetic. Rhetorical resilience is about recognizing and seizing opportunities even in the most oppressive situations. A feminist rhetoric of resilience mobilizes the power of imagination and reflexive meaning making in order to continually reinvent selves and possibilities and to precipitate change. This may not be dramatic or global change but change as small, local, fluid, provisional, and ongoing. Resilience as rhetorical agency continually recreates possibility. There is a riskiness to resilient rhetorical action: there may be little latitude for change in the material and historical circumstances. Yet feminist rhetorical resilience entails ongoing refashionings of identity and possibility, not just maintaining but recreating meaningfulness. Feminists use the term resilience in these ways to describe feminism itself. In Estelle Freedman’s retrospective history of the feminist movement in the US, she argued for the resilience of feminism conceived of as continual self-reinvention: “Feminism is a process, not an inherited dogma; only continual reinvention has allowed it to flourish” (85). Less sanguinely, she also charged that white racism has been a resilient theme in feminism, a concern we will discuss later in this essay. Pat Harrison (2005) also highlighted the resilience of feminism. Reflecting on a series of lectures, “Voices of Public Intellectuals: Feminisms Then and Now,” featuring feminists from different generations, she observed, “American feminism has always been a stop-and-go affair. No matter how often feminism has been declared dead, it has always managed to come bounding out of the coffin roaring with life.” The resilience of feminism entails self-reinvention, reflexive meaning making, and an ability to respond proactively, even when the future looks bleak. Mêtis

We draw on the Classical Greek tradition of mêtis as a contextualized intelligence. It is associated with opportunity and luck guided neither by reason nor structured rules. Mêtis entails inductive, conjectural

Introduction      9

knowledge, resisting coherence and reshaping itself to remain in motion. Mêtis combines forethought, resourcefulness, opportunism, even deceit, to create circumstances where opportunities can be seized and possibilities exploited. Scholars developing the idea of a “positive” organization have promoted resilience in a way that highlights what we take to be mêtis. In a heavily cited essay on workplace resilience, Diane Coutu (2002) argues that resilience offers an alternative when rational thought and action may be ineffective. At the same time, she notes that the alternative logic of resilience is realistic and pragmatic. According to Coutu, resilience theories she has encountered in her research almost always overlap in three ways: “Resilient people . . . possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise” (48). In expanding on the improvisational attribute, she advances the concept of “bricolage,” which she attributes to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Coutu sees bricolage as “a kind of inventiveness, an ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper or obvious tools or materials” (52)—in short, a mêtistic orientation. This emphasis on situational intelligence and innovative resourcefulness rather than rational planning is well illustrated in the following description of resilience by organizational scholars Carolyn Youssef and Fred Luthans: “Resilience recognizes the need for flexibility, adaptation, and even improvisation in situations predominantly characterized by change and uncertainty. It goes beyond the successes and failures of the current situation. The resilience capacity uniquely searches for and finds meaning despite circumstances that do not lend themselves to planning, preparation, rationalization, or logical interpretation” (780). We incorporate a sense of mêtis in our understanding of feminist rhetorical resilience, specifically intuitive knowledge, bricolage, and “shape shifting,” to realize engagement without confrontation. The notion of shape shifting alludes to the goddess Mêtis in Greek mythology who changed shape to meet the exigencies of her circumstances. This is a different way of thinking about how people might confront power—not with aggression or overt confrontation but with flexible, subtle, active responsiveness to the constraints and possibilities of varying circumstances, alliances, and contingencies. We acknowledge that mêtis also entails deceit, wiliness, and cunning. For example, one of the mythological representations of mêtis is an octopus, which creates a camouflage in order to survive, to escape, or to engage the powerful without explicit confrontation.

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Scholars of ancient Greek culture Marcel Détienne and Jean-Paul Vernant, in Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, describe mêtis as both mythological goddess and embodied intellect, as both Zeus’s first wife and as wily intelligence. Those who possessed this gift often prevailed in adverse circumstances, though they lacked exceptional strength or resources. They were not, however, always successful. Zeus swallowed Mêtis, his first wife and the goddess who represented such intelligence, after he realized she embodied, and would use, her cunning to undermine his authority. While Détienne and Vernant’s book remains the most extended recovery and discussion of mêtis in classical times, several scholars have recently used the concept to explain how power imbalances might be overturned in contemporary contexts. One study (Brady) focuses on how women technical communicators in the workplace, perceived and treated as subordinates by subject-area experts, use deception and metaphoric shape shifting to construct professional identities. Debra Hawhee’s case for mêtis as embodied intelligence points the way to rhetorical strategies that do not depend on positivistic reasoning but on an overlooked alternative: the ability to understand shifting contexts and the opportune moments for change or subversion that emerge through them. The Greek myth suggests that the cunning god Hephaestus, deformed at the same time he is the embodiment of mêtis, offers ways to construct a rhetoric of disability grounded in the abject other, Medusa, a character in whom the animal and the human merge, as they often do in stories of mêtistic victory. Jay Dolmage underscores the Western vilification of such resistance by invoking Hélène Cixous’s interpretation of Medusa. Just as Medusa’s head of writhing snakes is reminiscent of the polymorphic nature of mêtis, her disfigurement and murder, Dolmage argues, offer a powerful parallel to social and institutional fears of female agency. Nonetheless, Dolmage also juxtaposes mêtis with the mestiza, the Western subaltern, thus pointing to their shared ability to subvert power imbalances; the mestiza transforms Western religious practices into her own blend of faiths. Shannon Walters has recently examined the work of autistic women researchers and writers Temple Grandin and Dawn Prince Hughes. Noting their abilities to interact with animals—Grandin with cattle and Hughes with gorillas—Walters proposes mêtis as a basis for an interspecies rhetoric. Revised in this way, rhetoric resists the dualities of human and animal, of ability and disability, and foregrounds “intersections between cognition, communication, and civilization among species” (685).

Introduction      11

Popular writer Anne Lamott exhibits the sense of mêtis we articulate here. Lamott has chronicled the ongoing but changing challenges of her life in popular essays and novels over the past three decades. Her work demonstrates the agile intelligence of mêtis; for example, she has crafted a spiritual self that “shifts shape” by always embracing change, incorporating diverse traditions (Buddhist, Christian, new wave spiritualist) in an ongoing process of self-invention and bricolage that is about communal relations as much as self-identity (Plan B). Lamott articulates the inductive responsiveness of mêtis as an agency undaunted by the immensity of expectations, demands, or significances. Recalling a time her brother felt overwhelmed and immobilized by the hugeness of a major grade school research report on birds long put off and due the next day, she said, “Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird’” (Bird by Bird 19). The story, she explains, is about hope, “the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate” (19). More importantly, the story is about making do, taking small steps toward change, outwitting the powers that be, acting in the face of desperation and impossibility, and finding strength in vulnerability. This is hope not as an affective state but as practical agency. Rather than the lone cunning of the mêtistic rhetor, we emphasize the communality of mêtis as an aspect of a feminist rhetorical resilience. Mêtis in this sense is tempered by a relational ethic. Relationality

In contrast to the popular notions of resilience that celebrate the selfsufficient individual, a feminist rhetoric of resilience emphasizes relationality, mutuality, and an ethic of connection. We draw on the feminist therapist Judith Jordan’s conception of feminist resilience. Jordan posits a model of relational resilience that moves away from a focus on individual coping to mutual empathy and empowerment. Jordan argues that a feminist conception of resilience eschews the relational dynamics of “control over” another and illusions of self-sufficiency and denial of vulnerability; instead, she advocates “supported vulnerability” or a vulnerability that admits the support of another. Rather than a one-way need for support, she advocates a “mutual empathic involvement.” Rather than individual self-esteem, she posits the importance of relational confidence. In addition, she encourages mutual growth and constructive conflict in order to foster a relational dynamics of

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mutual empowerment rather than the exercise of “power over” each other. Finally, her model of resilience emphasizes meaning making but not through self-centered self-consciousness; rather, she advocates an “expansive relational awareness” (32). For Jordan, resilience is not an individual capacity or action but relationally embedded: the goal of relational resilience is mutuality, growth-fostering relational connections, and relational and cultural competence. An example of the relationality of a feminist rhetoric of resilience is the ongoing project of The Vagina Monologues (VA). Written and first performed in New York in 1996 by Eve Ensler, the play continues to be staged, motivated by local exigencies and responding to the oppressive cultural biases and violence against women that inspired the play’s creation. Yet at the same time, any production of VA is also a reinvention of circumstances and meanings in the sense that any performance always reinvents the play, its subject, its audiences, its message, and its impact. Initially a message from women of different ages, backgrounds, and situations, telling different stories that articulated a shared experience of marginalization, silenced sexuality, and misogyny, VA has been both criticized for its “second wave” assumptions and antiheterosexual bias and reframed as a vehicle for grassroots gender activism. The play itself illustrates the relationality of resilience: through their stories, the characters articulate women’s resilience by giving voice to and supporting vulnerabilities; the play reshapes and resists tenacious linguistic and cultural shackles and creates community in dialogue, connecting actors and audiences across race, culture, age, and identity, opening possibilities for critique as well as commonality. It is this very persistence that has proven so radical—the play has not triumphed over the biases against women’s sexuality but persists in opening possibilities for recirculating, recreating, reforming, reshaping, and engaging those experiences. The project is itself a rhetoric of resilience that precipitates emotional awareness of self-in-connection, communal growth, and dialogic divergence as well as convergence. F e m i n i s t R h e to r i ca l R e s i l i e n c e : E nac t m e n t s a n d E x p l o r at i o n s

The chapters in this book are analyses of rhetorical agency that, together, demonstrate agency, mêtistic cunning, and relationality, hence resilience. Each piece, along with its commentary, suggests dimensions, directions, and even limits to our understanding of the term. Discussions of

Introduction      13

individuals, organizations, or institutions provide glimpses of resilience despite challenges such as poverty, opposition, insensitivity, and changing sociological and historical factors. Common themes include adaptability and vibrancy, or remedies to intransigence such as pedagogical or policy changes that will make adaptability or vibrancy possible. The responses to the essays provide a valuable counterpoint. Often they reinforce themes related to successful projects, activities, and innovations. At times, however, they also make evident areas in which the essays are silent, underdeveloped, or limited in focus. If resilience seems possible in the essays, the responses sometimes point out ways in which it is at times elusive, limited in duration, constantly shifting, or nearly impossible. The authors then reflect on the responses, continuing the dialogue and enabling articulation, clarification, and further development. Eileen Schell, in “Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity: Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World,” describes the resilience of a public intellectual in India, Vandana Shiva, within the context of the organization and farm she has created, Navdanya, as well as a branch organization, Diverse Women for Diversity. Shiva, through these organizations, deals with issues such as biopiracy and women’s struggles for economic and environmental rights. The essay illustrates collective agency in feminist activism, an alternative to the conventional model of the individual, heroic activist. Shiva’s ongoing work against incessant counterforces suggests resilience as a relational ethics that responds to exigencies with and for others. Trained as a theoretical physicist, Shiva decided not to pursue an academic career as a Western scientist but, rather, to turn her considerable intelligence and energy to trying to help alleviate poverty in India. One consequence of this decision is that she has had to deal with the disrespect of the scientific community, though this disrespect did not deter her. She was also influenced by the tragic consequences of extreme situations, such as the 1984 genocide in Punjab, India, and the Bhophal gas leak from the Union Carbide pesticide plant that same year that killed 3,000 people and injured many others. Both events motivated Shiva to devote her life to attempting to solve environmental problems. Schell describes Shiva’s work as “investigating the interconnection between issues of technology, ecology, social inequality, and gender” (35). Shiva’s collective activism has been successful in combating the biopiracy of the Texas corporation, RiceTec. Collective rhetorical strategies have

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included writing letters, issuing press releases, and engaging in direct action by staging peaceful protests and making appeals through a memorandum to the US ambassador as well as pressuring the US Patent and Trademark Office to strike four claims out of twenty on RiceTec’s patent. She has had to deal, however, with the proponents of the agricultural biotech world trying to discredit her. Shiva has become a successful author and political activist despite constant attempts on the part of a number of different organizations and individuals to keep her projects from succeeding. Her education, her strong commitment to social justice, and communities of like-minded supporters have no doubt sustained her. In their response to Schell’s essay, “On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls,” Arabella Lyon and Banu Őzel focus on Shiva’s effectiveness as a rhetorician who speaks to “flexibility in shifting and contextualizing political debate across immense geopolitical space” (54). They see her success and hence her resilience as an ability to blend Western rhetoric with local Hindu traditions of speaking. Had Shiva’s education been limited to Western science, she would not have had the same rhetorical power since, as Lyon and Őzel remind us, an exclusively Western standpoint obscures and occludes difference. It is polyphonic and blended rhetorics that have power in a globalized world. Shiva models successful communicative abilities in an era defined by “evolving technologies, increased mobility, widening cultural displacements of people, and cultural clashes” (56). Lyon and Őzel also remind us, though, of some limitations of our attempts, as Western academics, to understand and represent rhetoricians such as Shiva. They say, “Given the ‘scattered hegemonies’ of our transnational world, rhetorical criticism may be always inadequate to the task” (55). They point out that Schell has erred on the side of “Shiva’s West” and has ignored the rhetorical traditions of the great Hindu epics (55). Lyon and Őzel conclude that the need for knowledge of the “material conditions” and discursive traditions outside the West “are the greatest task of not just our disciplines, but our lives” (55). The resilience described by Kate Vieira in “The Traveling Fado” is that of immigrants from the Azores, nine islands first settled in 1439 that are about 1,000 miles from Lisbon, Portugal, and 2,400 miles from the East Coast of the US. The majority of immigrants from Portugal to the United States are from the Azores. Many came in 1870 to work in the whaling industry, but by the turn of the century most were employed by the cotton mills of what Vieira calls South Mills and New Bedford. The

Introduction      15

largest influx of immigrants, however, came between 1965 and 1980, according to Vieira. The group works hard to achieve educational equality and is anxious about its ethnic identity since it is not quite white nor Latino/a and does not fit with either old or new immigration patterns. Vieira suggests that the resilience of the group has been enhanced by a traditional literary and musical form, the fado, which has provided the immigrant group a means of multidirectional assimilation, a form that enables it to incorporate the new without leaving behind the old. The genre originated as Portuguese folk songs characterized by longing, intense sadness, and nostalgia. Vieira defines the genre and explores ways in which variations on it sustained members of her family, including her great-grandfather’s poetry and the writing of her grandmother. According to her grandmother’s family history, her great-grandfather’s literacy, one manifestation of which was his poetry, was integral both to his integration into US culture and his maintenance of ethnic ties. Vieira explains that fados are gendered in that the homeland is always female. The essay suggests that resilience is a dynamic, historical process. Vieira’s essay is not just the story of one family’s resilience but of the tactics or “available means” that constitute a resilient response in the context of migration, inequality, and discrimination. It is also the story of the resilience of the fado itself as a musical tradition and response. Janet Carey Eldred’s response to the Vieira essay, “Traveling Literacies,” like Lyon and Őzel’s response to Schell’s essay, emphasizes the essay’s rich diversity of perspectives. Calling it a “fusion,” she sees it as traversing new literacy studies, rhetorica, transnationalism, and creative nonfiction. Vieira, Eldred suggests, may start with a particular ethnic group, Azorean Americans, and may focus on her own family, but the essay also reflects on and complicates much larger issues of assimilation and immigration. As Eldred points out, the migration Vieira discusses might more accurately be described as politically or economically inspired exile. This migration also involves a group that is more accurately classified as Hispanic or Latino rather than white European. Migration is also never simply unidirectional, as the suadade of the fado reminds us. There is always a return to the homeland, even if that return is spiritual and emotional rather than physical. The story Eldred tells of the impact of her mother’s Azorean heritage on the family she raised focuses, too, on the complexities of her assimilation, its contradictory and multidirectional movement. Both Vieira and Eldred’s essays remind us that a feminist rhetoric of resilience necessitates radical cultural contextualization.

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In “Virginity and Hymen Reconstructions: Rural, Migrant Women as Agents of Literate Practices in Turkey,” Iklim Goksel describes the resilience of young women in dire circumstances whom she observed and interviewed in her ethnographic research. They are impoverished rural migrants of settlements on the outskirts of Ankara, Turkey, who can neither read nor write and who must undergo virginity examinations when they marry. Most have never gone to school or had to withdraw from school at an early age because of poverty. Employment possibilities for them include domestic work in upscale neighborhoods or jobs in factories or warehouses. The men in these communities are equally burdened. Jobs available to them include gardener, street sweeper, garbage collector, and factory worker. Goksel observes that members of these communities nevertheless “display a state of survivorship and pride” (97). They are resilient. As a way around the prohibition against premarital sex, the young women sometimes undergo hymen reconstructions so they will appear to be virgins on their wedding night. Goksel sees their efforts as forms of literacy, what David Barton and Mary Hamilton define as “vernacular literacies,” in that the young women reflect on their circumstances, make decisions to improve their situations, and take action. Preparing for a reconstruction, according to Goksel, requires organization, patience, and a careful calculation of resources and time. These women cannot rely on their families for support because they must maintain secrecy. Rather, they create communities with other women who, like them, have to travel far from home to find a suitable physician. Quite remarkably, then, these young women with neither formal education nor financial resources learn to become critical thinkers and independent readers of their world with no help from family. Acting in communion with others, they demonstrate a kind of relational resilience illustrated in many of the essays in the collection. In her response to Goksel’s essay, “Problematizing Literacy,” Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater observes that while the activities in which the rural, migrant women engage in their quest for a return to virginity status are resilient, they are also desperate. The young women run the risk of getting caught, of getting an infection, and/or of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous doctors. As Chiseri-Strater suggests, they would certainly be better off if they knew how to read and write. Since this is not a possibility, they do what they can to survive. Chiseri-Strater’s essay enables readers to imagine these women returning to a culture that is

Introduction      17

threatening in a multitude of ways. Even if they pass the virginity test on their wedding night, they have the considerable task of dealing with the pressures and challenges of marriage, childbirth, and child rearing in a rigidly stratified society in which, because of their class and their gender, they are at the very bottom of the hierarchy. Their resilience is a fragile one. Amy Koerber’s essay “Diversity and the Flexible Subject in the Language of Spousal/Partner Hiring Policies” briefly reviews flexibility theory in fields such as anthropology, economics, and management. Such theory urges organizations to be more fluid and flexible so they can adapt to dramatic change. According to some proponents of this theory, organizations need to become more like biological systems that successfully survive in nature. Some critics of the approach, however, argue that it is little more than a form of neosocial Darwinism and serves the interests of those who are already in positions of strength rather than the interests of those in more vulnerable situations, such as minorities. Koerber finds that the policy statements dealing with the dualcareer-couple problem, two of which take an idealistic position and two of which are university policies, reveal some of the complexities posed by a cultural ideal such as resilience. Whereas the idealistic rhetoric of professional organizations espouses a proactive stance toward dualcareer-couple hiring and seems to reflect feminist ideals of relational resilience, the university policies reflect a way of thinking in which it is primarily the academic couple that needs to be flexible rather than the institution. Koerber hopes that, in the future, the responsibility for flexibility and resilience will shift, at least to an extent, from individuals to institutions. Her essay reminds us that resilience requires ethical vigilance and highlights the need for systemic re-visioning in order to redress insidious inequities perpetuated through institutional and ideological power relations despite seemingly progressive language and alliances. Her analysis underscores the reason we temper the mêtistic responsiveness of a rhetoric of resilience with an ethical commitment to feminist relationality and social justice. Shirley Rose, in her response to Koerber, “Expanding the Sites of Struggle over the ‘Flexible Subject’ in Academe,” acknowledges at the beginning of her essay that within her own department, she has seen numerous examples of successful spousal/partner accommodations. Without exception, she says, her department has benefited from these hires. She points out, however, that the problem of how to accommodate

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spouses/partners is even more complicated than Koerber represents it as being. There is tension, for instance, between the ideals of faculty autonomy and the goal of achieving equity. Often these two desirable goals are at odds, and it is often difficult to achieve both in attempts to accommodate spouses/partners. She also points out that departments are not the only sites of political struggle in these situations. The relationship of the couple itself has political dimensions, and the administrative structures beyond the department are also highly charged politically. Attempting to make decisions in the midst of these complexities, that is, achieving resilience, is often extremely difficult. Frances Ranney’s “A Case Study in Resilience: Fabricating a Feminine Self in a Man-Made Era” and Wendy Hayden’s “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to ‘Mothers of the Race’: Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric,” provide historical perspectives on women’s resilience. Ranney’s essay is a richly contextualized case study of Fontia R., a woman from Detroit who found herself, in 1929, shortly before the stock market crash, a widow in need of financial aid. The archives of the Luella M. Hannan Foundation are the source of the documents Ranney researched. Ranney situates Fontia R.’s story within the ideologies of the Progressive Era, including social Darwinism, laissez-faire economics, Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption and its effects on fashion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist economics, and eugenics, the study of ways to improve the race through selective breeding. Ranney says of Fontia R. that she “maintained her standards of fashion at every level” (170). She did so by purchasing fashionable items and returning them. She was resilient—at risk because of unfortunate circumstances but taking control of her life. Fontia R. is not the conventional hero who, through her individual efforts, returns to a “state of equilibrium.” She does not recover the trappings of her former, comfortable life, nor does she come to moral or ethical epiphanies. Furthermore, she does not attempt to transform the welfare system that both abets and oppresses her. While she might be viewed as a victim of poverty, dependent on charity, she uses the very system that would mark her victim and dependent to survive it. She does, in other words, recognize and seize opportunities for co-opting it and using it to serve her own purposes. In doing so, she perseveres, despite the oppressive system she faces, and demonstrates an ongoing responsiveness to it that is both practical and suggests undocumented inner strengths. Fontia R.’s story speaks across generations, classes, cultures,

Introduction      19

and sexual orientations to articulate women’s vulnerability and tenacity in the face of pernicious circumstances. In so doing, it creates community and opens up the possibility for critique as well as commonality, one outcome of relationality. Charity is a concept that needs to be critiqued, according to Kate Ronald. In her response to Ranney’s essay, “Philanthropy as Interpretation, Not Charity: Jane Addams’s Civic Housekeeping as Another Response to the Progressive Era,” Ronald suggests, as did Addams, that charity is really interpretation, a complex relationship between giver and recipient. Ronald asks, “What difference would it make to think about the work of the Hannan Foundation not as assistance but as observation and critique?” (175). For Addams, the giver, the interpreter, can engage in “affectionate interpretation” (175). listening to people’s concrete experiences without assuming a position of superiority, too often the situation of the philanthropist. Addams also cautions against the model of industrial “success” in the interpretive work she advocates since success in the sense of assisting the majority of those in need is not possible. Addams says, “The unsuccessful will always represent the majority of the Citizens” (177) Ronald makes clear that Fontia R. may be resilient, but she has limited ability to understand the ideological forces that control her life. Addams’s conception of social work based on an ethic of mutuality and care is a form of relational resilience. In addition, Addams advises a focus on singularity, not individuality, in order to enable the democratic participation and social connection of all citizens. This is a vision of hope and societal transformation as well as a blueprint for an alternative social ethic. Wendy Hayden focuses on the collusion between feminism and nineteenth-century eugenic rhetoric as a way of achieving resilience. Feminist discourse of the time, Hayden argues, made productive use of rhetoric extolling motherhood as a means of improving the race. She describes the diverse ways in which late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminists—Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, Adella Hunt Logan, Juliet Severance, and Lois Waisbrooker—used eugenic discourse to promote the cause of women’s rights. Like Ranney’s analysis of the ideologies of economics, eugenics, and fashion that constructed Fontia R., Hayden is critical of eugenic rhetoric, linking it to defenses of established racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Like Ranney, Hayden also moves beyond critique by recuperating transformative possibilities in the discourses she is studying. She speaks, for instance, of Anna Julia

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Cooper’s emphasis on womanhood’s “vitalizing, regenerating, and progressive” influence (190). She also acknowledges, though, that in their rhetoric, the women whose work she is analyzing also reinforce some of the more racist aspects of the science from which they draw. Hayden concludes that it is important to recover and analyze feminist rhetorical moments, however intertwined they may be with reactionary discourses. Collusions with these discourses enabled progress in women’s struggle for equality and suffrage. Hayden’s essay demonstrates that a feminist rhetoric of resilience must engage the historical and institutional contexts of any particular situation. In examining the ideological collusion that a situational politics might exploit, she suggests that a feminist rhetoric of resilience is complicated and must be radically contextualized, not only drawing out the complexities of present exigencies but also the diachronic entanglements of institutional and historical horizons. It is reminiscent of Joan Scott’s argument for poststructuralist feminism, in which identities, alliances, or relations and discursive links might shift radically across situations. “Is collusion inevitable in gendered rhetorical space?” (207). Nan Johnson concludes “Strategic Collusion in the History of American Women Rhetors,” her response to Hayden’s essay, with this question. Johnson speaks of the ways in which many feminist rhetors demonstrated resilience by colluding with Christianity to promote their cause, thereby making use of established cultural discourse. She points out ways in which Christianity was wed to new sciences such as eugenics in the work of rhetoricians such as Frances Willard, who proposed that the ideal wife and mother was an educated Christian woman. Johnson finds Hayden’s argument as yet more evidence that strategic collusion was necessary in order for feminist rhetoricians to make gains. Hayden’s study makes clear, according to Johnson, that it was necessary for nineteenth-century feminist rhetoricians to make effective use of ideological frameworks that already had cultural authority. Johnson reminds those readers who might be dismissive of alignments with supremacist and racist arguments that it is impossible to get outside the ideological context and rhetorical climate of one’s time and invites us to reflect on the collusions of present-day feminists. The current critiques of second-wave white liberal feminisms and the resilience of racism in feminist traditions (as we noted earlier, citing Freedman’s history of US feminism) are reminders of the necessity for ethical vigilance and careful contextualization in feminist analyses. Unfortunately, feminist

Introduction      21

rhetorical agency and resilience sometimes involve colluding with individuals and causes that work against feminist ideals. We do not condone such collusions; our conception of resilience invites reflexive analyses of such moments. The context shifts to how instructors who enact resilience can address the challenges of deeply-rooted institutionalized heterosexism in the composition classroom and within the composition community in Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg’s essay, “No One Wants to Go There: Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom.” Their essay focuses primarily on negotiating queered texts with students in order to expand their empathetic engagement and relational awareness. Drawing on material from a qualitative study and observations in their own first-year writing classes, DiGrazia and Rosenberg suggest that teaching queer texts, defined as texts that interrogate social norms and their effects, can be beneficial. Students, however, who seem willing to examine queer as a form of sexuality, are often unable to move beyond queer as an identity category. The instructors in the study offer a solution infused with resilience and aimed at encouraging students to question conventional values, attitudes, and structures. One instructor’s move to explore queer as a reading and interpretive strategy offers her students opportunities for constructive conflict as a means to “mutual empowerment rather than the exercise of ‘power over’ others in that classroom space” (12). All three instructors in the study hope that the critical, deconstructive lens they propose can enable students to “oppose oppressive systems, to think critically, innovatively, and resiliently (221). To accomplish this end, they use the classroom as a site where they enact a rhetoric of resilience, queering texts and embodying relationality as an ethics of connection and mutuality. Rather than locate themselves as self-sufficient and invulnerable, these instructors encourage diverse interpretations of texts, bodies, and bodily awareness, as well as their students’ empathetic engagement and expanded relational awareness. Although small, provisional, and local, these queer teaching moments prepare the way for possible change in student attitudes in the future. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander, however, are not nearly as sanguine as DiGrazia and Rosenberg about the possibilities of creating queer classrooms that enable students and the profession as a whole to become resilient and successful. In “On Impossibility: A Response to DiGrazia and Rosenberg,” they declare: “It’s impossible for composition,

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really, to fully engage with the queer” (241). In a subsection of the response, Rhodes questions the field of composition studies’ commitment to diversity and suggests that actual practice points to a different commitment. In Alexander’s subsection, he says, “Queer poses huge challenges to what can be reasonably accomplished in the classroom” (244).In their combined subsection, they emphasize that queer texts, such as writing by Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, and Dennis Cooper, films by Todd Haynes and Bruce LaBruce, art by Francis Bacon, and music by Ani DiFranco are very disturbing and unsettling. Rhodes and Alexander suggest that the queer is by definition impossible. It is that which cannot be contained. It is that which cannot be composed. It lacks composure. They conclude, “But we argue that we need to begin accounting for how such work, even rhetorically and materially engaged work, pushes the boundaries of what composition is” (246). To queer is to resist, to question, to challenge—to resile. A n I n v i tat i o n t o O n g o i n g C o n v e r s at i o n s

We close by inviting readers to participate in the conversations these essays have suggested about feminist rhetorical resilience. Taken together, they initiate much-needed reflections about resilience within feminist rhetoric. Focusing on resilience enables fresh perspectives on feminist themes of empowerment, growth, health, and transformation. This collection also enables reconsiderations of oppression and trauma. It can also provide a utopian dimension to feminist explorations of oppression. The conception of resilience we advance here also contributes a much-needed feminist rhetorical perspective to resilience studies, a field that has arisen primarily out of social-scientific rather than humanistic fields. Feminist rhetoric insists that psychological and sociological realities always have an interpretive dimension. Resilience, then, includes complex, always shifting, often contradictory meanings and is always embedded in a rich cultural context. Merging feminist rhetoric and resilience opens up possibilities for new areas of interdisciplinary research and provides new perspectives on the histories and presentday challenges of groups and individuals whose circumstances are frequently difficult to overcome. N ot e s 1.

In the past three decades, resilience has come to be a defining concept within academic feminism (Balsam; Franz and Stewart; Freedman; Hernandez and

Introduction      23

Roberts ; Kinsel; Lam and Grossman; Moen; Williams and Mickelson), within queer studies (Oldfield and Johnson), and within academic fields such as social work (Grant; Greene and Conrad; Stuht; Valentine and Feinauer), literary studies (Challener), education (Downey; McMahon; Payton; Taylor and Wang), urban studies (Driskell, Bannerjee, and Chawla), environmental studies (Gunderson and Pritchard), business (Berman; Dufresne and Clair; Luthans, Avey, Avolio, Norman, and Combs; Richman and Brooks; Sheffi; Youssef and Luthans), nursing and health studies (Gattuso; Leipert and Ruetter; O’Leary and Ickovics; Wagnild and Young 1990), psychology (Boss; Butler; Haeri; Ryff and Singer; SandauBeckler, Devall, and de la Rosa), counseling (Everall, Altrows, and Paulson), political science (McCreight), and Holocaust studies (Tec). Some recent nonacademic works that deal with resilience include Resilience at Work: How to Succeed No Matter What Life Throws at You by Salvatore R. Maddi and Deborah M. Khoshaba, The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change, Thrive Under Pressure, and Bounce Back from Setbacks by Al Siebert, The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté, The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence, and Personal Strength in Your Life by Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein, Nurturing Resilience in Our Children: Answers to the Most Important Parenting Questions by Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein, Resilience: Discovering a New Strength at Times of Stress by Frederic Flach, and The Art of Resilience: 100 Paths to Wisdom and Strength in an Uncertain World by Carol Orsborn. 2. The late Elizabeth Edwards’s inspirational book, Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities, was a best seller. The Resiliency Center’s self-help website, provides information and support, and Resilience is the name of a four-piece punk rock group from Santa Rosa, California. 3. The current recession has spawned considerable interest in marketplace resilience. Consider: “Fostering Resilience in Clients” in The Community Banker (Richman and Brooks); “Small Business Resilience” (Berman); “Moving Beyond Media Feast and Frenzy: Imagining Possibilities for Hyper-Resilience Arising from Scandalous Organizational Crisis” (Dufresne and Clair); and “Science, Technology and the New President: Advancing Security, Prosperity, Resilience and Stability for 2009 and The 21st Century” (McCreight,). Disaster preparedness agencies are also committed to resilience in the face of infrastructure, social, and economic disaster. Consider Web sites like the Community & Regional Resilience Institute sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security; or the Resilient Futures network (www.resilientfutures.org), linking businesses and communities to enable them to flourish despite financial fluctuations. Resilience has been applied to the work world as well. In the wake of the ongoing 4. financial and political crises that have shaken the corporate world, the concept of organizational resilience has been advanced as the ability of a firm to “bounce back” from such a crisis (Sheffi). In the workplace, organizational behavior scholars drawing on the psychological conception of resilience have advanced a model of positive organizational behavior. Luthans and colleagues have developed measures and conceptual elaborations of resilience as positive organizational behavior and “psychological capital,” leading to greater commitment and workplace “happiness” (Luthans, Avey, Avolio, Norman, and Combs; Youssef and Luthans). These researchers concur with Coutu that resilience is not only reactive in the face of dismal conditions but proactive; as a quality of the workplace, resilience offers an alternative when rational thought and action may be ineffective. 5. There has been considerable interest in addressing risk and resilience in the secondary school environment, attending to at-risk students, and addressing risk factors

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at home and in the school (Downey; Nicoletti, Spencer-Thomas, and Bollinger; Payton). In addition, scholars adopting a critical pedagogical approach have linked resistance and resilience (MacMahon, “Resilience Factors”). 6. Work on resilience in the social sciences began in the 1970s as a way of explaining why not all children who experienced adversity were negatively impacted. Emmy Werner was one of the first social scientists to use the term resilience. She studied a cohort of children from Kauai, Hawaii, who grew up with unemployed, alcoholic, or mentally ill parents. One-third of those studied did not exhibit destructive behavior as teens, thus leading Werner to call them “resilient.” Other social scientists have made productive use of the term resilience for decades, especially in relation to the adaptability of children, though they too often see resilience as static and essential rather than as a relational action. However, Suniya Luthar, Dante Cicchetti, and B. Becker, in “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work,” define resilience as a dynamic process in which individuals exhibit positive behavioral adaptation when they encounter significant adversity or trauma. Luthar and Cicchetti, in “The Construct of Resilience: Implications for Interventions and Social Policies,” clarify that it is a two-dimensional construct involving the exposure to adversity and positive adjustment to that adversity. Resilience emerged as a major theoretical and research topic from the studies of children of schizophrenic mothers in the late 1980s. Results from Ann Masten, Karin Best, and Norman Garmezy’s 1989 study, “Resilience and Development: Contributions from the Study of Children Who Overcome Adversity” demonstrate the adverse effects on children of schizophrenic parents, as well as the coping strategies that some children deployed to counter those effects. Researchers in the social sciences attempted to discover the protective factors that explain adaptation to adverse conditions, focusing on, for instance, maltreated children (Cicchetti and Rogosch), on child survivors of catastrophic events (Frederickson, Tugade, Waugh, and Larkin), and on children living in urban poverty (Luthar). Empirical work then shifted to understanding the underlying protective processes. Roberta Greene’s edited collection Resiliency: An Integrated Approach to Practice, Policy, and Research provides a good example of this turn. In her introductory essay, she explains that work on resilience emerged from studies of children at risk from situations such as child abuse, poverty, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy (4). Researchers discovered that between one-half and two-thirds of children growing up in adverse circumstances are successful in coping with their situations, so they began to investigate ways in which children at risk become “confident, competent, and caring adults” (5). Numerous studies document the strengths of resilient children, such as a strong capacity to form relationships, to solve problems, to develop a sense of identity, and to plan and hope (5). Studies of resilience within this context focus on examining the risk factors that could lead to maladjustment as well as the protective factors that become shields so that maladjustment does not occur (36). Greene and coauthor Ann Conrad, in a chapter in Greene’s collection, say “the word resilient has generally been applied to people who overcome the odds” (37). A recent work, Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, Alex Zautra, and John Stuart Hall, shifts the emphasis from children to adults, enabling examination of processes of resilience across the lifespan. Resilience has commonly been used to denote an ability to triumph over adversity, 7. bounce back, and rebound from major setbacks, though there has been a shift in emphasis recently from reactive coping or adaptation to proactive meaning making associated with hope and transformational change. According to the online Miriam-

Introduction      25

Webster’s Dictionary, resilience is defined as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change” (http://www.mirriam-webster.com/dictionary/resilience). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “resilience” derives from the verb “resile,” an adaptation of the obsolete French words resiler and resilir and the Latin word resilire, which mean “to jump back or recoil.” Resilire is an adaptation of the prefix re added to the Latin word salire, which means “to jump or leap” (2509). 8. Some studies focus on women’s concerns, while others are more explicitly feminist in orientation. Survivors of sexual abuse (Hyman and Williams; Lam and Grossman; Valentine and Feinauer), battered women, impoverished women (Williams and Mickelson), racial/ethnic minority women (Bachay and Cingel; Sparks), lesbians (Balsam), elderly women (Kinsel; Gattuso; Wagnild and Young), rural women (Leipert and Reuter), mothers with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, suicidal teens (Everall, Altrows, Paulson), daughters of incarcerated mothers (Grant), and the stress of women’s roles (Moen) have been studied for evidence of resilience. O’Leary and Ickovics championed a model of women’s resilience focusing on women’s strengths and abilities to thrive despite adversity rather than a model focused on women’s vulnerabilities and deficits. More explicitly, feminist perspectives embrace resilience as a strategy of growth and renewal. Franz and Stewart’s edited collection of psychological case studies of women’s lives thematizes women’s daily “modes of resilience, coping, and resistance” (7) against the particular oppressions of each life and characterizes resilience as everyday creativity and resourcefulness. The Feminist Majority sponsored Women Healing: Honoring Resilience, a conference in Seattle, Washington, in 2000 devoted to bringing clinicians and trainers in resilience together with professionals working with women in risk conditions (http://feminist.org/calendar/cal_details. asp?idSchedule=258). Worell and Remer argue that, in addition to empowering women to meet adversity, feminist therapy should promote well-being and effective functioning, both of which they characterize as resilience. Other feminists have used the concept of resilience in attending to issues such as violence against women, sexual abuse, poverty, and discrimination. Haeri recounts the strategies of posttraumatic recovery of two Pakistani women in the context of cultural, political, and structural violence. Hernandez and Roberts identify resilience in the life stories of women involved in human rights activism. Almost Touching the Skies: Women’s Coming of Age Stories, edited by Florence Howe and Jean Casella, is described as a collection of stories from two dozen women writers that “pays tribute to the diversity and vitality of American women writers . . . through a compelling range of life experiences” (feministpress.org/books). Cast Me Out if You Will: Stories and Memoir by Lalithambika Antherjanam offers “clear-eyed and chilling testimony to the brutal oppression suffered by Indian women, ‘cast out’ if they dared to stray from enforced subjugation” and a celebration of their “resilience, resistance, and vitality” (feministpress.org/books) Finally, Joan Rabin and Barbara Slater identify US lesbian communities as “pockets of resistance and resilience” (169). Works Cited Antherjanam, Lalithambika. Cast Me Out if You Will: Stories and Memoir. New York: Feminist P, 1985. Feministpress.org books. Web. 1 July 2009. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Print. Bachay, Judith B., and Pamela A. Cingel. “Restructuring Resilience: Emerging Voices.” Affilia 14.2 (1999): 162–75. Print.

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Balsam, Kimberly F. “Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Sexual Minority Women: Rising Like the Phoenix.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 7.4 (2003): 1–8. Print. Bartimus, Tad, Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas, Edith Lederer, Ann Bryan Mariano, Anne Morrissy Merick, Laura Palmer, Kate Webb, and Tracy Webb. War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2002. Print. Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. Berman, Eileen L. “Small Business Resilience.” Industrial Management 51.1 (2009): 6. Print. Boss, Pauline. Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. New York: Norton, 2006. Print. Brady, Ann. “Interrupting Gender as Usual: Mêtis Goes to Work.” Women’s Studies 32.2 (2003): 211–33. Print. Brooks, Robert, and Sam Goldstein. The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence, and Personal Strength in Your Life. New York: McGraw Hill, 2003. Print. Buchanan, Lindal, and Kathleen J. Ryan, eds. Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P, 2010. Print. Butler, Katy. “The Anatomy of Resilience.” Family Therapy Networker (1997): 22–31. Print. Buzzanell, P.M. “Resilience: Talking, Resisting, and Imagining New Normalcies into Being.” Journal of Communication 60 (2010): 1–14. Print. Cahn, Steven M. From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print. Challener, Daniel D. Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff. New York: Garland, 1997. Print. Cicchetti, Dante, and Fred A. Rogosch. “The Role of Self-organization in the Promotion of Resilience in Maltreated Children.” Development and Psychopathology 9 (1997): 797–815. Print. Coutu, Diane L. “How Resilience Works.” Harvard Business Review 80 (May 2002): 46–55. Print. Détienne, Marcel, and Jean-Paul Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Print. Dolmage, Jay. “‘Breathe Upon Us an Even Flame’: Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 25 (2006): 11–40. Print. ———. “Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, Medusa: Rhetorical Bodies across Rhetorical Traditions.” Rhetoric Review 28 (2009): 1–28. Print. Downey, Jayne A. “Recommendations for Fostering Educational Resilience in the Classroom.” Preventing School Failure 53.1 (2008): 56–64. Print. Driskell, David, Kanchan Bannerjee, and Louise Chawla. “Rhetoric, Reality, and Resilience: Overcoming Obstacles to Young People’s Participation in Development.” Environment and Urbanization 13 (2001): 77–89. Print. Dufresne, Ronald L., and Judith A. Clair. “Moving beyond Media Feast and Frenzy: Imagining Possibilities for Hyper-Resilience Arising from Scandalous Organizational Crisis.” Law and Contemporary Problems 71.4 (2008): 201–14. Print. Dunne, Joseph. Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique. South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1993. Print. Edwards, Elizabeth. Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities. New York: Broadway Books, 2009. Print. Ensler, Eve. The Vagina Monologues, The V-Day Edition. New York: Villard Books, 2000. Print. Everall, Robin D., K. Jessica Altrows, and Barbara L. Paulson. “Creating a Future: A Study of Resilience in Suicidal Female Adolescents.” Journal of Counseling and Development 84.4 (2006): 461–70. Print. Flach, Frederic. Resilience: Discovering a New Strength at Times of Stress. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988. Print.

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Franz, Carol E., and Abigale J Stewart. Women Creating Lives: Identities, Resilience, and Resistance. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1994. Print. Fredrickson, Barbara L., Michelle M. Tugade, Christian E. Waugh, and Gregory R. Larkin. “What Good Are Positive Emotions in Crises? A Prospective Study of Resilience and Emotions Following the Terrorist Attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.2, (2003): 365–76. Print. Freedman, Estelle B. Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Print. Gattuso, Susy.“Becoming a Wise Old Woman: Resilience and Wellness in Later Life.” Health Sociology Review 12 (2003): 171–77. Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print. Grant, Darlene. “Resilience of Girls with Incarcerated Mothers: The Impact of Girl Scouts.” The Prevention Researcher 13.2 (2006): 11–14. Print. Greene, Roberta A., and Ann P. Conrad. “Basic Assumptions and Terms.” Resiliency: An Integrated Approach to Practice, Policy, and Research. Ed. Roberta R. Greene. Washington, DC: National Association of Social Workers, 2002. 29–62. Print. Greene, Roberta R., ed. Resiliency: An Integrated Approach to Practice, Policy, and Research. Washington, DC: National Association of Social Workers, 2002. Print. Gunderson, Lance H., and Lowell Pritchard. Resilience and the Behavior of Large Scale Systems. Washington DC: Island Press, 2002. Print. Haeri, Shahla. “Resilience and Post-Traumatic Recovery in Cultural and Political Context: Two Pakistani Women’s Strategies for Survival.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 14.1 (2007): 287–304. Print. Harrison, Pat. “Around the Institute: Three Generations of Feminists Speak at Radcliffe: Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Rebecca Walker.” Radcliffe Quarterly (2005): n.pag. Web. 5 June 2010. Hawhee, Debra. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. Austin, TX: U of Austin P, 2004. Hernandez, Pilar, and Janine Roberts. “Resilience and Human Rights Activism in Women’s Life Stories.” Comprehensive Handbook of Psychotherapy: Interpersonal/ Humanistic/Existential. Ed. Florence W. Kaslow, Robert F Massey, and Sharon Davis Massey. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. 413–32. Print. Hesford, Wendy S., and Wendy Kozol, eds. Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. Howe, Florence, and Jean Casella, eds. Almost Touching the Skies: Women’s Coming of Age Stories. New York: Feminist Press, 2002. Print. Hyman, Batya, and Linda Williams. “Resilience Among Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse.” Affilia 16. 2 (2001):198–219. Print. Jordan, Judith V. “Relational Resilience.” The Complexity of Connection: Writings from the Stone Center’s Jean Baker Miller Training Institute. Ed. Judith V. Jordan, Linda M. Hartling, and Maureen Walker. New York: Guilford Press, 2004. 28–46. Print. Kinsel, Beth. “Resilience as Adaptation in Older Women.” Journal of Women & Aging 17.3 (2005): 23–39. Print. Kirsch, Gesa, and Jacqueline J. Royster. “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence.” College Composition and Communication 61.4 (2010): 640–72. Print. Lam, Judy N., and Frances K. Grossman. “Resiliency and Adult Adaptation in Women with and without Self-Reported Histories of Childhood Sexual Abuse.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 10.2 (1997): 175–96. Print. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print. ———. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Trade, 2006. Print.

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Leipert, Beverly D., and Linda Reutter. “Developing Resilience: How Women Maintain Their Health in Northern Geographically Isolated Settings.” Qualitative Health Research 15. 1 (2005): 49–65. Print. Luthans, Fred, James B. Avey, Bruce J. Avolio, Steven Norman, and James G. Combs. “Psychological Capital Development: Toward a Micro-intervention.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 27 (2006): 387–93. Print. Luthar, Suniya S. Poverty and Children’s Adjustment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. Print. Luthar, Suniya S., and Dante Cicchetti. “The Construct of Resilience: Implications for Interventions and Social Policies.” Development and Psychopathology 12 (2000): 857–85. Print. Luthar, Suniya S., Dante Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71 (2000): 543–62. Print. Maddi, Salvatore R., and Deborah Khoshaba. Resilience at Work: How to Succeed No Matter What Life Throws at You. New York: American Management Association, 2005. Print. Masten, Ann, Karin M. Best, and Norman Garmezy. “Resilience and Development: Implications from the Study of Children Who Overcome Adversity.” Development and Psychopathology 2 (1990): 425–44. Print. McCreight, Robert. “Science, Technology and the New President: Advancing Security, Prosperity, Resilience and Stability for 2009 and the 21st Century.” Review of Policy Research 25.6 (2008): 614–18. Print. McMahon, Brenda J. “Conceptions of Resilience: Compliance or Transformation?” The Educational Forum 71.1 (2006): 49–58. Print. ———. “Resilience Factors and Processes: No Longer at Risk.” The Alberta Journal of Educational Research 53.2 (2007): 127–42. Print. Moen, Phyllis. “Women’s Roles and Resilience: Trajectories of Advantage or Turning Points?” Stress and Adversity Over the Life Course: Trajectories and Turning Points. Ed. Ian H. Gotlib and Blair Wheaton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997. 133–57. Print. Nicoletti, John, Sally Spencer-Thomas, and Christopher Bollinger. Violence Goes to College. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas P, 2009. Print. Norman, Elaine, ed. Resiliency Enhancement. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. Print. Oldfield, Kenneth, and Richard Greggory Johnson III, eds. Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class. Albany: SUNY P, 2008. Print. O’Leary, Virginia E., and Jeannette R. Ickovics. “Resilience and Thriving in Response to Challenge: An Opportunity for a Paradigm Shift in Women’s Health.” Women’s Health 1.2 (1995): 121–42. Print. Orsborn, Carol. The Art of Resilience: 100 Paths to Wisdom and Strength in an Uncertain World. New York: Three Rivers P, 1997. Print. Payton, Fay Cobb. “Resilience: My Pathway to the Information Technology Professoriate.” Diverse Issues in Higher Education. 11 Jan. 2007. n.pag. Web. July 1, 2009. Rabin, Joan S., and Barbara R. Slater. “Lesbian Communities Across the United States: Pockets of Resistance and Resilience.” Lesbian Communities: Festivals, RVs, and the Internet. Ed. Esther D. Rothblum and Penny Sablove. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park P, 2005. 169–182. Print. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print. Reich, John W., Alex J. Zautra, and John Stuart Hall, eds. Handbook of Adult Resilience. New York: Guilford, 2010. Print. Reivich, Karen, and Andrew Shatté. The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. Print. “Resilience.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Web. 1 July 2009. “Resilience.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. 1971. Print.

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Resiliency Center. 8 May 2009. Web. 1 July 2009. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print. Richman, David, and Robert Brooks. “Fostering Resilience in Clients.” Community Banker 18.3 (2009): 36–8. Print. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among AfricanAmerican Women. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000. Print. Ryff, Carol D., and Burton H. Singer. “Flourishing under Fire: Resilience as a Prototype of Challenged Thriving.” Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-lived. Ed. Corey L.M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. 15–36. Print. Sandau-Beckler, Pat, Esther Devall, and Iván A. de la Rosa. “Strengthening Family Resilience: Prevention and Treatment for High-risk Substance-affected Families.” Journal of Individual Psychology 58 (2002): 305–27. Print. Schell, Eileen E., and K.J. Rawson. Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2010. Print. Sheffi, Yossi. The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Print. Siebert, Al. The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change, Thrive Under Pressure, and Bounce Back from Setbacks. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005. Print. Sparks, Elizabeth. Against All Odds: Resistance and Resilience in African American Welfare Mothers. Work in Progress No. 81. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Center for Women, Wellesley College, 1999. Print. Stuht, Amy Colcord. “Resilience Factors for At-Risk Teens.” Leadership 37.4 (2008): 14–15. Print. Taylor, Ronald D., and Margaret C. Wang. Resilience across Contexts: Family, Work, Culture, and Community. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. Print. Tec, Nechama. Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Valentine, Lanae, and Leslie L. Feinauer. “Resilience Factors Associated with Female Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 21.3 (1993): 216–24. Print. Wagnild, Gail, and Heather M. Young. “Resilience Among Older Women.” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 22.4 (1990): 252–55. Print. Walters, Shannon. “Animal Athena: The Interspecies Mêtis of Women Writers with Autism.” Journal of Advanced Composition 30 (2010): 683–711. Print. Werner, Emmy E. “Risk, Resilience, and Recovery: Perspectives from the Kauai Longitudinal Study.” Development and Psychopathology 5 (1993): 503–15. Print. Williams, Stacey L., and Kristen D. Mickelson. “The Nexus of Domestic Violence and Poverty: Resilience in Women’s Anxiety.” Violence Against Women 10.3 (2004): 283–93. Print. Worell, Judith, and Pam Remer. Feminist Perspectives in Therapy: An Empowerment Model for Women. New York: Wiley, 1992. Print. Youssef, Carolyn M., and Luthans, Fred. “Positive Organizational Behavior in the Workplace: The Impact of Hope, Optimism, and Resilience.” Journal of Management 33.5 (2007): 774–800. Print.

1 Va n da n a S h i va a n d t h e Rhetorics of Biodiversity 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

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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 belief” (250). Thus, transnational feminisms involve significant attention to rhetorical advocacy work. Building linkages and solidarities, however, requires an understanding of transnational cultural flows, the ways in which bodies, labor, and capital move (or not) across borders and the ways in which gender is part of that equation (Grewal and Kaplan 17). Grewal and Kaplan warn, however, that if Western feminists wish to understand transnational linkages and build solidarity, they must “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations.” Without a strong understanding of those material conditions, feminists will not know how “to construct an effective opposition to current economic and cultural hegemonies that are taking new global forms. Without an analysis of transnational scattered hegemonies that reveal themselves in gender relations, feminist movements will remain isolated and prone to reproducing the universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures” (17). Grewal and Kaplan’s eloquent call to consider the politics of transnational cultural flows pushes those of us who do feminist rhetorical analysis to consider our understandings of the “transnational scattered hegemonies” at work across the globe, but also in feminist rhetorical studies, which has taken as its focus American and European rhetorical contexts,

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largely excluding the voices and perspectives of people who live outside those borders. To illustrate the Euro-American geopolitics of feminist rhetorics, we can consult Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede’s important 2006 chronology of feminist rhetorical historiography compiled since Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s 1989 two-volume history Man Cannot Speak for Her. Ede and Lunsford’s impressive forty-four-title list spans 1990 to 2005, and it includes significant refigurations of feminist and women’s rhetorics. Yet the list also shows that, with few exceptions, feminist studies of women’s rhetorics focus on North American and European rhetorical figures, groups, movements, and educational institutions. Studies of women’s rhetorics in antiquity are mostly focused on the Greco-Roman world, although Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley’s edited collection Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks introduce other geographic and cultural spaces for historical study. Thus, our maps for feminist and women’s rhetorical histories have been drawn and even redrawn from the vantage point of the West. While Euro-American texts and contexts still dominate feminist rhetorical studies, there is, nevertheless, a subtle, yet palpable geopolitical shift underway as scholars have begun to consider rhetorical theories and practices across transnational contexts. The scholarship on transnational feminisms and rhetorics is slowly becoming a significant area of inquiry (see Dingo; Friedman; Hesford; Hesford and Kulbaga; Lyon; Queen; and Schell), and the Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conferences have been a proving ground for transnational feminist work.1 In addition, a May 2008 College English special issue that I coedited with Wendy Hesford explores the potential connections between transnational feminisms and rhetorics.2 This work reminds us that our efforts to remap feminist rhetorical histories (see Glenn) need to account for global maps that show transnational linkages across borders. In this essay, I offer a transnational remapping of contemporary feminist rhetorics through an analysis of the rhetorical advocacy work of Indian feminist, environmental activist, and transnational public intellectual Vandana Shiva, whom Chandra Mohanty refers to as “one of the most visible leaders of the antiglobalization movement” (232). I analyze how Shiva makes use of symbolic action—words, signs, images—and direct action to persuade citizens across the globe to pay attention to the issue of biodiversity. In particular, I examine her strategic deployment of symbolic resources—the use of synecdoche, rhetorical identification (Burke 20), and visual rhetorics that draw on colonial and postcolonial

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historical legacies—as a way to connect transnational cultural and economic flows of indigenous cultural resources (seeds) with the practice of biopiracy, which she links to the social and economic oppression of women. In Kenneth Burke’s words, Shiva engages multiple publics in a process of rhetorical identification (20–22) with the struggles of TwoThirds World peoples, reminding us all that the issue of biodiversity is one we cannot afford to ignore no matter who we are or where we are. Through rhetorical identification, Shiva has brought environmental activists and farmers from the One-Third World together with those of the Two-Thirds World to protest unjust global agricultural policies, biopiracy, and damaging environmental conditions. As Ineke Lock has argued, Vandana Shiva has “stood beside people in their struggles against destructive forestry practices, large-scale dams and multinational dominated agribusiness.” As a rhetorical figure and organizer, Shiva displays the qualities of rhetorical resilience and agency described by the coeditors in the introduction to this volume. Shiva, as the coeditors note, “recogniz[es] and seiz[es] opportunities [for social change] even in the most oppressive situations” (8). Yet, at the same time, she is not a rhetorician who acts alone; Shiva works in solidarity with other individuals, groups, and movements, marshaling rhetoric toward collective action and change. In her rhetorical practice, Shiva enacts the principles of transnational feminisms in concert with what Ellen Gorsevki calls the “peaceful persuasion” of Gandhian rhetoric. Yet Shiva’s engagement with Gandhian rhetoric and practice is heavily seasoned with the confrontational rhetoric of the antiglobalization and radical environmental movements. Moreover, Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy is symptomatic of the turn from the nationalist public sphere to the transnational public sphere. Part of the shift in contemporary feminist rhetorics to considering transnationalism is a result of the transnational rhetorical paths and webs of public discourse in a globalized world. Nancy Fraser, in her lecture “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere,” analyzes the widespread use of the term transnational public sphere as a way to account for “the existence of discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states.” While Fraser is cautious about the blanket appropriation of the term transnational public sphere, she finds it useful as it helps us map the “contours” of the transnational and account for the “flow of images and signs” or rhetorics across the borders of the nation-state. Rhetorical study of transnational feminist public intellectuals like Vandana Shiva

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is one way in which feminist rhetorical scholars might contribute to the examination of transnational rhetorics. W h o i s Va n da n a S h i va ?

Many Western feminists and environmental activists are familiar with Vandana Shiva’s public intellectual work—her many influential books, lecture tours, and interventions on the world stage—but many in the US academy may not be familiar with her rhetorical advocacy work in India on behalf of indigenous farmers via her feminist research institute Navdanya. Therefore, a short biographical introduction seems required. Vandana Shiva began her education in biodiversity on her mother’s farm in India. Her highly educated mother chose to be a farmer “because she believed that the highest state of human evolution is to be a peasant” (Shiva qtd. in Scopacasa). As the daughter of a farmer, Shiva became fascinated at an early age with “figur[ing] out how nature works” (Scopacasa). She took inspiration from Einstein and trained to be a nuclear physicist until she realized the ethical and environmental baggage of pursuing work in that arena. Turning away from a nuclear branch of physics, Shiva became a theoretical physicist working on quantum theory. While finishing her doctorate in physics in Canada, she contemplated a career as a university professor. Rather than pursuing an academic position, Shiva decided instead to investigate a contradiction she saw between her university science education and the status of most of the citizens of India. Although India has the “third biggest scientific community in the world,” it is still “among the poorest of countries” (Kemker). As Shiva points out, “Science and technology are supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap? Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” (qtd. in Kemker). These questions motivated her to pursue research on the scientific “progress” gap in India, a decision that has made her unpopular and an object of suspicion among her scientific peers, who frequently accuse her of being antiscience and/or a proponent of “junkscience” (see Prakash). Shiva, though, is neither. Rather, she engaged in what the coeditors in this volume refer to as mêtistic thinking or “contextualized intelligence” (9). Her commitment to science is complemented by her embrace of indigenous knowledges and environmental activism whereby the stakes of scientific progress are measured against their real impact on real people and the environment. In fact, Shiva actively measures the impact of science on people and the environment instead of simply pursuing science

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in the name of progress, profit, and new technologies, and her stance has drawn criticism from some of her fellow scientists, which I address at a later point in this chapter. Shiva’s decision to pursue activism and research instead of an academic career is also deeply rooted in her ongoing experiences as an environmental activist. Before going to graduate school, she was an activist in Chipko, the women-led environmental movement in India engaged in protecting the Himalayan forest from commercial logging and development (“Chipko”). The Chipko activists prevented loggers from cutting down old-growth forests by physically embracing tree trunks. Indeed, the Chipko movement motivated the nickname “tree-hugger,” which is now used, often derisively, to describe environmentalists in the West. With farming and environmental activism deep in her life roots, Shiva moved from obtaining a doctoral degree in physics to investigating the interconnection between issues of technology, ecology, social inequality, and gender. The Indian Ministry of the Environment commissioned her to examine mining in her native valley; she did the study, stopped the mine, and continued to work on ecology. Beyond that initial work, two events galvanized her to remain actively engaged in rhetorical advocacy on environmental issues. The first was the 1984 genocide in Punjab, India, over changes in agricultural policies, which she documents in her book The Violence of the Green Revolution. The second was Bhophal, where a gas leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhophal, India, killed 3,000 people and injured thousands of others, many of whom are still suffering devastating health problems. The Punjab genocide and the Bhophal incident led her to explore two questions: “Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides—weapons of mass destruction?” (Shiva qtd. in Paget-Clarke). Since posing those initial questions, Shiva has focused her rhetorical advocacy work on three interrelated areas: biotechnology, the intellectual patenting of biological life forms, and biodiversity, or the conscious maintenance of a diversity of life forms. N av da n ya a n d D i v e r s e W o m e n f o r D i v e r s i t y: A F e m i n i s t Research Institute

As an activist, Shiva has deployed the rhetorical and material strategies of coalition building, solidarity politics, and savvy alternative institution building. Yet she is not a solitary activist, or what the coeditors of this collection refer to as a “heroic individual” (7) Her rhetorical resilience and agency are located in collective organizing and in a “web

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of relationships” with other activists and networks. Her stance toward knowledge making is focused on the collective good of indigenous peoples in the Two-Thirds World and on building solidarity across nations. The primary organizing vehicle for Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy work is Navdanya, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and feminist research institute that is a program of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, RFSTE. Navdanya refers to the “nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security.” It is also an actual place, a “seed bank and organic farm spread over an area of 20 acres in Uttranchal, north India.” Navdanya as an organization works on biodiversity and conservation—helping “support local farmers, rescue and conserve crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction and make them available through direct marketing.” The members of Navdanya “rejuvenate indigenous knowledge,” create “awareness of the hazards of genetic engineering,” and “defend people’s knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalization” (“Introduction”). The scope of Navdanya’s rhetorical advocacy is both local and global; activists for Navdanya work across national borders through symbolic and direct action to gain attention to biodiversity. However, Navdanya also has an explicitly feminist agenda carried through a number of its projects and its branch organization, Diverse Women for Diversity. Founded in 1996 and headed by women scientists from India, Africa, Europe, Mexico, and the US, Diverse Women for Diversity differs greatly from most environmental and advocacy organizations many of us may be familiar with in the West, such as the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. Diverse Women for Diversity (DWD) seeks to build an international coalition from the South to the North, the East to the West, “creating diverse solutions at the local level and a common defense at the global level.” DWD’s rhetorical platform is particularly important as it seeks to correct the bias in international policymaking from the global North, biases that were apparent at the Cairo Women’s Conference and the International Women’s Conference in Beijing, where differences between the agenda of women’s rights in the global North and South were glaringly visible: “While reproductive rights have held attention since Cairo and Beijing, the economic and environmental rights for which women struggle in their everyday lives have been neglected both by international agencies and by the academy” (“The Movement”). To correct that bias, Diversity Women for Diversity seeks to “build an international coalition acting in coherence on issues that concern

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the women of the South most—food security, health security, economic security, environmental security and peace.” As stated on its web site, DWD seeks to: • Articulate our concerns on our terms, from our realities; • Intervene in the most urgent economic, political and environmental issues at the international level with collective strength; • Find our partners in the North on the basis of our priorities and processes initiated by us. (“The Movement”) For both Navdanya and DWD, the process of rhetorical identification is initiated and launched from the global South, not the North, and under the terms and conditions of the people living in that geographical locale. As an organization, DWD functions as a rhizomatic “network of networks” and “movement of movements.” Six areas comprise the work of the organization: “women’s food security networks, health networks, biodiversity and biotechnology networks, knowledge and intellectual property networks, globalization and economic diversity networks, and peace and cultural diversity networks” (“The Movement”). DWD does not organize local movements; it allows them to network, thus creating a network of networks across the six areas. Representatives in each of the six areas coordinate meetings and events and build coalitions that go across knowledge bases, regions, and cultures. The model of a “network of networks” fits in well with the kinds of organizing strategies deployed by a number of antiglobalization and alternative globalization movements that use a decentralized model of cross-border coalition building and solidarity politics. The aforementioned transnational feminist perspective of “bottomup” epistemic privilege is carried through in Navdanya and DWD’s feminist research rhetorics and methodologies. Shiva, in the founding statement for Navdanya and Diverse Women for Diversity, notes that her goal was and is “to do research in a participatory mode with people, not on them—and to do research with an interdisciplinary approach—reflecting the interconnections in the web of life, not teaching them apart with reductionist violence” (“Dr. Vandana Shiva”). Navdanya’s inclusive and participatory research methods and its multipronged organizing platform enable the organization to work on a range of issues: biodiversity, food security, the impact of structural adjustment policies, and the impact of global trade policies. Navdanya has taken up the Intellectual

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Property Rights (IPRs) on life forms as extolled by the World Trade Organization. Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy work on intellectual property rights and the patenting of biological life forms is crucial because the current state of trade relations makes it possible for multinational corporations to patent the process of life itself and make profits from it. As a result, women engaged in subsistence farming gain lesser benefits as globalization has allowed corporations to “take resources and knowledge that have hitherto been under women’s control and the control of Third World Communities [such as seed keeping and healing using plantbased medicine] to generate sustenance and survival, and put them in the service of corporations engaged in global trade and commerce to generate profits,” a process Shiva refers to as biopiracy. Globalization, therefore, “dramatically [restructures] systems of production and systems of knowledge generation and utilization” and further destroys “women’s work and intelligence and nature’s work and the integrity of ecological processes” (Shiva, “Women”). As will be illustrated later in my discussion of the rhetorical struggle over the US-based Basmati rice patent, there are huge economic, social, and rhetorical consequences and conflicts when acts of biopiracy are committed. Tr a d i t i o n s o f R h e t o r i c a l I n f l u e n c e

The philosophical, political, spiritual, and rhetorical traditions that Shiva draws on to effect social change are complex and multifaceted: ecofeminisms and transnational feminisms, Gandhian philosophy and principles of nonviolence and noncooperation as intertwined with Hindu principles, and aspects of confrontational rhetoric developed from current antiglobalization and alternative globalization socialprotest traditions. None of these elements can be separated from each other; each forms a distinct strand of a larger weave of influences and rhetorical strategies that Shiva deploys in her rhetorical advocacy efforts. E c o f e m i n i s t a n d Tr a n s n at i o n a l F e m i n i s t R h e t o r i c and Practice

Shiva is perhaps best known by Western feminists as a proponent of ecofeminism, although her location in the Two-Thirds World aligns her closely with principles of transnational feminisms as discussed earlier in this chapter. In her 1993 book Ecofeminism, coauthored with Maria Mies, Shiva refers to “ecofeminism, [as] a ‘new term for an ancient wisdom’ [that] grew out of various social movements—the feminist, peace, and

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the ecology movements—in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though the term was first used by Francoise D’Eaubonne, it became popular only in the context of numerous protests and activists against environmental destruction, sparked-off initially by recurring ecological disasters” (13). Such ecological disasters as Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Union Carbide’s deadly gas leak in Bhophal, India (mentioned earlier in this essay), and the Chernobyl disaster are events around which ecofeminists have rallied to protest state public policies and corporate practices that have led to the devastation of environments and widescale loss of life (13–15). A key component of Shiva’s ecofeminist rhetoric is the articulation of a bottom-up transnational feminist perspective as described by Mohanty. A bottom-up perspective is the idea that women in the global South have a key epistemic privilege in understanding the processes and consequences of globalization: “Women in the South working and living, fighting for their immediate survival are nearer to it [globalization] than urban, middle-class women and men in the North” (Mies and Shiva 20). Women in the Two-Thirds World, contends Shiva, have a “unique contribution to make, because in their daily lives they embody the three colonisations on which modern patriarchy is based; the colonisation of nature, of women and of the Third World” (qtd. in Lock). In an increasingly globalized world, it is women of the global South [who] pay the highest price for economic globalization in terms of food insecurity and health insecurity. They lose the most knowledge, skills, and livelihood when new technologies are introduced, or when their knowledge is appropriated through ‘biopiracy’ and intellectual property rights. They are the worst victims of civil wars, ethnic and religious violence. And they pay the biggest price through increasing poverty under globalization and structural adjustment programmes. (“The Movement”)

For Shiva,“The struggles of Third World women act like a prism through which other types of oppression can be understood” (Lock). In positing this connection, Shiva creates a central—rather than marginal—rhetorical position for Two-Thirds World women. In doing so, she creates a sense of rhetorical identification in which One-Third World women are called upon to identify with the struggles of Two-Thirds World women and to understand the solidarities and linkages necessary to prevent social injustice.

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G a n d h i a n R h e to r i c a n d P r ac t i c e : N o n v i o l e n t P e r s u a s i o n a n d C o n fr o n tat i o n a l R h e t o r i c

Shiva’s notion of bottom-up epistemic privilege is also influenced by Gandhian rhetoric and practice and by her spiritual practices as a Hindu woman.3 In her work to prevent pesticide companies from monopolizing seed distribution in India in the 1990s, Shiva worked with farmers and other groups in India to sponsor rallies focused on “Seed Satyagraha— the non-violent, non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totally by Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking up the salt and saying, ‘You can’t monopolize this which we need for life’” (Kemker). Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha, his famous salt march, took place in 1930 as part of his campaign of nonviolent social protest against the British salt tax, which prohibited Indian people from gathering and making the salt they needed. In the late 1990s, eighteen groups in India joined Shiva’s organization Navdanya in the movement to start Bija Satyagraha (translated from Hindi to mean bija, or “seed,” and satyagraha, which refers to the struggle for truth). Bija Satyagraha is a “movement to defend biodiversity and people’s rights to biodiversity” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 50). Like Gandhi’s struggle against the salt monopoly of the British empire, Bija Satyagraha involves the rhetorical struggle against transnational corporations seeking to dominate seed distribution and food security through trade agreements and intellectual property patents of biological life forms. As Shiva, Asfar Jafri, and Shulani Bhutani state, “Bija Satyagraha is the refusal to accept the colonisation of life through patents and perverse technologies, and the destruction of the food security by free trade rules of WTOs” (51). Shiva’s work to prevent seed monopolies addresses three key concepts deeply influenced by Gandhian principles: • Swadeshi—which means the capacity to do your own thing—produce your own food, produce your own goods. • Swaraj—to govern yourself and to have the right to water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj—water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food freedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty. (In regard to these fronts) Swa means self—that which rises from the self and is very, very much a deep notion of freedom. • Satyagraha, non-cooperation. (Shiva qtd. in Kemker).

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In keeping with the Gandhian tradition of nonviolent noncooperation, Shiva exercises what Ellen Gorsevski calls “peaceful persuasion” or nonviolent rhetorical action (2). Nonviolent rhetorical action is a term many of us are familiar with because of the Gandhian-inspired rhetoric of nonviolence practiced by Dr. Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights Era. As a rhetorical tradition, nonviolent or “peaceful persuasion” emphasizes the principles of “community, collectivity, mutual responsibility, and a pointed use of cooperation or noncooperation” (Gorsevski 3). In her rhetorical advocacy work, Shiva is a strong proponent of nonviolent persuasion mixed with aspects of confrontational rhetoric drawn from the radical environmental and antiglobalization movements where confrontation of those in power—through street theater, mass marches, and political documents—has been a mainstay. Confrontational rhetoric, as defined by Robert S. Cathcart, is a form of rhetoric associated with “ritual conflicts” and agonistic exchange. Involving symbolic display of differences, confrontational rhetoric is a “ritual enactment that dramatizes the symbolic separation of the individual from the existing order” (103). Drawing on Kenneth Burke, Cathcart argues that confrontational rhetoric is a “symbolic enactment which dramatizes the complete alienation of the confronter” (108). Confrontation thus highlights divisions between those doing the confronting and those being confronted. It also allows those doing the confronting to affirm their membership in a movement unified against a specific group or agent. Deploying the abovementioned rhetorical traditions—ecofeminist and transnational feminist rhetorics and practices, Gandhian rhetorics and practices, and confrontational rhetoric—Shiva has engaged in a variety of rhetorical advocacy campaigns involving the use of symbolic and direct action to preserve biodiversity across the globe. One of her most publicly acknowledged campaigns—one that has involved activists in India, Pakistan, Thailand, the US, the UK, and Europe—has been the campaign against biopiracy. B i o d i v e r s i t y a n d R h e t o r i c a l S t ru g g l e : T h e C a s e o f R i c e T e c ’ s B a s m at i Pat e n t

To cite a common example of how biopiracy unfolds and how transnational coalitions such as Shiva’s have deployed rhetorical advocacy to combat it, we can consider the case of the Texas corporation RiceTec, which in 1997 won a patent (US patent 5,663,484) on basmati rice lines

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and grains (see “TED Case Studies: Basmati”). Many of us can locate RiceTec products on the shelves of our local supermarkets in the US, where it is now sold under the catchy label “Tex-mati,” thus appealing to consumers who are looking for “American-grown basmati” rice. However, basmati rice has been developed over centuries by indigenous farmers in India and Pakistan—many of them women. In addition, basmati rice grown in India and Pakistan is a significant agricultural export worth $250 million a year, with the United States as one of the chief markets. According to Ben Lilliston from the US-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the original patent allowed “the company [RiceTec] to grow and sell a ‘new’ variety [of rice], which it claims to have developed under the name of basmati, in the U.S. and abroad.” The problem with the patent is that it is not for a new invention, but that it involves crossbreeding American long-grain rice with basmati varieties developed over centuries by Indian and Pakistani farmers. As Lilliston put it, “The patent falsely claims a derivation [emphasis mine] as an invention. This is a clear example of biopiracy which the US government, perhaps unwittingly, supports.” In a statement on Navdanya’s Web site, Shiva identifies how Patent 5,663,484 engages in biopiracy: (1) the piracy of unique cultural heritage embodied in the name of Basmati; (2) the economic piracy of export markets from farmers and countries who have evolved this unique aromatic rice (claim 4, 15, 16, 17); (3) the piracy of farmers’ innovation and nature’s creativity in the claim of inventing a novel rice line (claims 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20). (Shiva, “Basmati”)

Indian environmental activists like Shiva, farmers, and nongovernmental organizations across the globe reacted with furor to the announcement of RiceTec’s patent on basmati rice. To combat the patent, Shiva and others engaged in significant rhetorical advocacy work. They produced tracts arguing against RiceTec’s patent, and they wrote letters to the Indian government, to the RiceTec Corporation, to the US patent office, and to the US ambassador to India. They issued press releases from various organizing groups, and reporters from alternative and mainstream presses interviewed them. The coalition also engaged in direct action by staging peaceful protests. One of the coalition’s claims against RiceTec’s patent was to argue that the US-based corporation is engaged in a form of biopiracy, a robbery of Indian’s plant resources for its own benefit. In the rhetorical

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advocacy work launched by Shiva and her collaborators against RiceTec, the concept of biopiracy becomes a synecdoche that stands in for a variety of exploitive social, political, and economic relations between India and the US. In addition, the synecdochal portrayal of biopiracy is achieved through a visual rhetoric of colonial legacy embodied in the form of a political cartoon of a top-hatted capitalist. S y n e c d o c h e a n d V i s u a l R h e to r i c s o f C o l o n i a l i s m and Neoliberalism

In the Campaign Against Biopiracy, a casebook of tracts and organizing materials addressing various biopiracy cases, Shiva and her coauthors, Afsar Jafri and Shulani Bhutani, register objections and protests against various intellectual patent claims made by the US for India’s natural resources. The book’s cover depicts a fat, top-hatted, white capitalist man in a tux and tails running full speed with a bag full of seeds. The seeds trail out from the overly full bag and suggest a return to their origins: the Third World country they were taken from. A symbol of bourgeois excess, Western neoliberalism, colonialist legacy, and capitalist patriarchy, the top-hatted capitalist is a familiar one found in political cartoons portraying the US and other capitalist countries. Unlike the cigar-chomping capitalist with the monocle riding in a motorcar, this particular figure is literally running away from the scene with the goods: stolen seeds and genetic material from Third World countries. In many ways the capitalist cartoon figure is running away with the labor and resources of Two-Thirds World women, those who have engaged in subsistence farming to feed their families. Moreover, the facial features of this capitalist man “on the run” are more sinister than usual. He is graced with a mustache reminiscent of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, a selfsatisfied smirk, and a black left eye patch that appears to be a direct commentary on his status as a biopirate, plundering the biological resources of India. The visual rhetoric of this image is synecdochal, representing the larger exploitive, one-sided relationship between the US and developing nations as manifested in US patent laws and WTO agreements. As Shiva notes, “Projections are that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.S government is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things” (Shiva qtd. in Paget-Clarke). This image also represents the historical legacy of plunder that Indian people experienced under colonial British rule, where acts like the salt tax mentioned earlier were

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commonplace. Thus, the visual rhetoric of the top-hatted capitalist biopirate running away with seeds is a reminder of a colonial legacy of British exploitation continued under a new neoliberal “hat”: multinational corporations intent on patenting seeds developed by Indian and Pakistani farmers. To protest the RiceTec patent, the coalition, on April 3, 1998, peacefully amassed fifty thousand farmers and activists outside the US embassy in Delhi to register their complaints against RiceTec. In conjunction with the peaceful protest, Shiva and members of the Bija Satyagraha coalition deployed the genre of the political memorandum/protest letter, a form of nonviolent persuasion and confrontational rhetoric intermixed. In the “Memorandum by People’s Organisations against Basmati Patent,” the coalition appeals to Richard Celeste, the US Ambassador to India, to do the right thing—to ask RiceTec to “withdraw its Basmati patent” and “instruct the Patent and Trademark Office to avoid accepting patent claims based on the traditional heritage of the Third World countries in general and India in particular.” While these ethical claims are made politely, the letter also makes use of confrontational rhetoric to show the division present between the US and the Indian people assembled outside the US embassy. The letter accuses the US and the US ambassador of “wronging” the Indian people with their unfair trade agreements and exploitative corporate practices. In particular, the US ambassador to India is reprimanded for using “official forums to browbeat the Indian officials into submission” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 31). The confrontational rhetoric of division instead of identification is clearly evident here. Throughout the memorandum, the synecdoche of the biopirate, as embodied in the image of the top-hatted capitalist, is used to stand in for a system of trade that is unfairly weighted toward US interests. The memorandum claims that the “US has a history of robbing and plundering the biological and genetic wealth of Third World countries and monopolizing the products made of them through their patent system.” Thus, the power inequities between the One-Third World and Two-Thirds World are clearly highlighted. The memorandum makes it clear that the “biopirate” pictured in the political cartoon described earlier does not synecdochally stand in for a single corporation, RiceTec, but a network of laws and organizations that sanction biopiracy, namely US patent law and the World Trade Organization and World Bank, both of which allow American biotechnology, pharmaceutical and seed industries, to

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“loot” India’s biological resources (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 28). The memorandum continues on to point out the irony of US corporations filing piracy claims against India when, in fact, the US, according to the authors’ use of United Nations Development Program data, purportedly steals “genetic wealth worth some US $3.2 billion” (29). In a fit of ironic reversal, the authors of the letter flip the script, using the terms of US patent law regarding property and royalties to pose two rhetorical questions to the US ambassador: “Do you pay any kind of royalty or a commission on these resources? Isn’t India one of the biggest free donors of genetic resources to America?” The ironic reversal is not lost on the letter’s intended audience, the US ambassador: great profit is being made by “stealing” away genetic resources from India and then claiming, through the American legal system of patents, that India actually steals those resources from the US “to the tune of US $120 million every year” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 29). In contrast to the top-hatted capitalist making away with his genetic loot, the letter constructs Indian society as a society of sharing, conservation, and democracy, again emphasizing a strategic rhetoric of division through confrontational rhetoric: “We will never compromise on this great civilization, which has been based on the culture of sharing the abundance of the world and will continue to maintain this trend of sharing our biodiversity and knowledge. We will never allow your culture of impoverishment and greed to undermine our culture of abundance and sharing.” Shiva and the cosigning organizations contrast traditional knowledge based on sharing and conservation with that of patent laws that favor one party (a corporation or individual) owning genetic resources. The US is portrayed not only as a biopirate, but as a neoliberal capitalist bully (the top-hatted capitalist image reverberates again) forcing the Indian people “to accept the American doctrine of economic supremacy” as enforced through US patent law, and global intellectual property agreements (TRIPs), as enforced through the WTO (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 31). Several policy demands are made throughout the memorandum as well. The first asks the US to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity: “Let us make it very clear that unless the United States first ratifies the Convention on Biological Diversity, a bill that is held up with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we will ensure that India takes all democratic steps to protect its existing patent regime.” The second calls for a change in US patent law to acknowledge

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traditional knowledge and to honor India’s approach to patent law: “It is the U.S. Patent Law, which is weak and needs [to] change. U.S. patent laws should recognize the traditional knowledge system of the Biodiversity rich Third World countries in order to deny ‘novelty’ and ‘non obviousness‘ criterion to the patent claims based on such knowledge. We want to say firmly to change your patent laws first and stop exerting pressure on the government of India for changing its patent law” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 30). Finally, the memorandum puts teeth into these claims by threatening to use their own pressure tactics and people power to call for the withdrawal of the Indian government from the WTO: “If [the] US will not desist from such pressure tactics, the people of India will force the Indian government to come out of [the] WTO” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 30). Behind such words are the literal bodies and voices of the organizations and groups that stood outside the US embassy on April 3, 1998, as the “Memorandum” was delivered to the US ambassador. Behind such words are also the perspectives of Two-Thirds World women who, as pointed out in “The Manifesto on the Future of Seed” statement, are identified as the “protagonists [emphasis mine] of biodiversity”: Globally, women represent the majority of the agricultural work force and are the present and traditional custodians of seed security, diversity and quality. Women are also the prime depositaries and disseminators of knowledge about the quality and methods of processing food. As such their central role in safeguarding biodiversity and in conserving, exchanging and reproducing seeds in post-industrial agriculture must be supported and enhanced.

Shiva, too, through her rhetorical efforts in this campaign and others, has foregrounded gender as a central issue in the debates over biodiversity and intellectual patenting. Thus, in contrast to the protagonist of the top-hatted capitalist making a run for it with his sack of plunder, we have the indigenous woman farmer as a protagonist of biodiversity. The April 3, 1998, protest, coupled with continued efforts to address the patent, brought eventual results, sparking rhetorical identification between Indian farmers, the Shiva-led coalition, and others across the globe who felt similarly threatened by seed patents.4 The Indian government, spurred on by a global coalition of activists of which Shiva was a significant leader, succeeded in pressuring the US Patent and Trademark Office to strike four claims out of twenty on RiceTec’s patent on August 14, 2001. Shiva summarizes the claims struck down:

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1. The generic title of the RiceTec patent No. 5663484, which earlier referred to Basmati rice lines. 2. The sweeping and false claims of RiceTec having ‘invented’ traits of rice seeds and plants including plant height, grain length, aroma which are characteristics found in our traditional Basmati varieties. The collective cumulative innovation of our farmers was thus being pirated by a Texas based company. 3. Claims to general methods of breeding, which was also piracy of traditional breeding done by farmers and our scientists (Of the 20 original claims only three narrow ones survive) (Shiva, “The Basmati Battle”). The victory against RiceTec, though, has been only partial. The Shivaled global coalition’s actions pushed India’s government to challenge RiceTec’s patent bid in the first place; without their prompting, the patent might have gone unchecked, with potential costs to small-scale Indian and Pakistani farmers, most of whom are women. Shiva points out that the Indian government “challenged only 3 claims related to basmati grain, and hence to basmati exports. It did not challenge claims related to basmati seeds and plants, and hence to farmers’ rights & traditional knowledge even though the research done by the CFTRI (Central Food Technology Research Institute, in Mysore) and ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) established that the basmati seed claims covered our traditional varieties” (Shiva, “The Basmati Battle”). At the same time, RiceTec executives claimed that “there has been tremendous misunderstanding about [the] patent. The patent is actually for the breeding method RiceTec invented, not for the name or word ‘basmati’. We spent more than 10 years developing the variety of rice through this breeding method and our patent protects our investment in the U.S.” (”We Are Flattered”). However, Shiva and others in India disagree, citing That it is an egregious example of biopiracy. Clearly, Shiva’s work on behalf of the international coalition against RiceTec proved to be crucial in curbing the corporation’s potential piracy of indigenous plant-breeding knowledge and of the name “basmati,” but the fight against biopiracy has increased as multinational corporations in recent years have raced to file patents on life forms. The success of a movement is often demonstrated by the ferocity with which opponents object to it and with which they begin to perpetuate

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its ideas even as they attempt to satirize and discredit it. The success of Navdanya and Diverse Women for Diversity and Shiva’s organizing efforts around RiceTec can be measured by the fact that proponents of the agricultural biotech world are paying attention and trying to cast doubt on her claims. In many ways, the actions taken to discredit Shiva fit squarely into the rhetoric of environmental hysteria, characterized by Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer as the tendency to accuse environmental activists of excessive affect and discount them as “exaggerators” (45). In the case of Shiva’s work, accusations of environmental hysteria are gendered in specific ways. American and Indian biotechnology scientists have made pointed rearguard actions against Shiva and Navdanya/Diverse Women with Diversity, trying to discredit her work at every turn. The pattern of public critique of Shiva is to discredit her for not being a good scientist, for not being a real farmer, for discounting science in her advocacy efforts, and for being “hypervisible” as an Indian woman and scientist. In many ways, critiques of Shiva focus on her not fitting into any one camp or discipline. As noted earlier, however, Shiva is a mêtistic thinker who draws on contextualized knowledges to meet the exigencies of her circumstances. Often the public criticism of her work is quite gendered, with American reporters often focusing on her traditional Indian clothing and “motherly appearance.” As journalist Brad Tyer wrote in his satirical coverage of a protest attended by Shiva at RiceTec’s international headquarters in Alvin, Texas: “Shiva’s manner is plump and motherly. She touches you on the forearm to signal comfort while she patiently explains the alarming proposition of the world going to hell in a handbasket, and probably not even a handbasket woven by indigenous peasants, but some mass-produced piece of crap from Pottery Barn.” Scientists and academics often focus on her credentials and critique Shiva for being antiscience. At the online archive of Agbioworld, the organization posted the statement Diverse Women for Diversity made after September 11, 2001, with a note from C.S. Prakash, Professor in Plant Molecular Genetics and Director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology at Tuskegee University: “Our Vandana Again . . . blaming all the ills of the world on biotechnology, globalization, pesticides, capitalism, NATO, World Bank, monoculture . . . and without providing one solution . . . she never has . . . CSP.” Prakash continues: We must be on guard against rhetoric and dubious arguments of the kind made by Ms. Shiva and her ilk. She is using the Hindu’s columns to confuse

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readers by creating a mish-mash of false arguments to trigger fear, and interspersing them with legitimate issues related to the biosafety of genetically modified crops. Her purpose is not to spread rational, scientific knowledge and promote a quest for answers, but to foist a fear of scientific developments in agriculture on a gullible public and to block progress. Biotech crops have been grown on 125 million acres this year in more than a dozen countries, and they have been grown cumulatively on 400 million acres since their inception six years ago, without a single credible instance of harm to humans, livestock or the environment. Farmers and consumers in countries such as USA, Australia and Argentina continue to benefit from this technology. Using irrelevant arguments to deny Indian farmers the benefit of these crops is deceitful.

Interestingly, while many scientists discredit Shiva for her critique of biotechnology, many sustainable and organic farmers in the West and in the developing world consider her a folk hero. In June 2005, when I was attending the Community Food Security Coalition conference at Kenyon College, one of the keynote speakers, a sustainable dairy farmer from rural Pennsylvania, said that the greatest honor of his life was to meet and shake the hand of Vandana Shiva. This was an interesting moment of kairotic identification, in Wendy Hesford’s words, and an interesting moment of cross-border solidarity between a sustainable farmer from Pennsylvania and an antiglobalization activist and ecofeminist from India. This example is not an uncommon one, as many have drawn inspiration from Shiva’s example. Shiva’s global reach from the South to the North, the East to the West, as an activist, author, and sought-after speaker, is notable; she is one of a growing group of transnational public intellectuals who address gender and the environment as central features of her work (see also Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for the Green Belt Movement in Kenya). Conclusion

Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy efforts have influenced agricultural trade negotiations, shaped international policymaking, and sparked coalitions between diverse groups of farmers, environmentalists, public-interest scientists, and concerned citizens. At the core of her organizational rhetoric and activism is an ethic, politics, and rhetoric of transnational feminisms, Ghandian rhetoric and practice, and nonviolent persuasion seasoned with confrontational rhetoric. She also demonstrates a radical rhetorical resilience that allows her to bring a sense of hope

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and possibility—no matter how difficult the odds—to all the collective action-based rhetorical work she engages. Through the feminist research institute Navdanya and her branch organization Diverse Women for Diversity, Shiva centrally connects the struggles of indigenous farmers, many of whom are women, in the global South to the struggles of small farmers and concerned citizens in the global North. She has helped both parties work against the multinational control of agriculture and protect biodiversity. Her bottom-up “just advocacy” efforts (see Hesford, “Kairos”) offer those of us in feminist rhetorical studies an important model for demonstrating how the rhetorical resilience of transnational feminism and ecofeminism can be used to build cross-border solidarity and to create a more just and sustainable planet. N ot e s 1.

2.

3.

4.

The 2003 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference at Ohio State University Included the terms “geopolitical” and “public policy” in its call for papers and hosted several panels featuring feminist rhetorics in transnational contexts. The 2005 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference at Michigan Technological University also included a number of transnational feminist rhetoric panels and drew participants from across the globe. Successive conferences have continued to engage transnational feminist work. The literature on transnational feminisms and rhetorics is small, but growing. Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s coedited collection Just Advocacy: Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (2005) provides two articles by Wendy Hesford and Arabella Lyon that focus specifically on rhetorics and feminisms within transnational contexts. Elizabeth Flynn’s book Feminism Beyond Modernism offers an important reading of the ways in which “feminisms are historically and geographically situated and hence context-specific” through chapter 2’s focus on “Reading Global Feminisms” (79). In addition, a strong thread of transnational feminist rhetorical analysis is emerging through doctoral dissertations in rhetoric and composition studies. For example, see Mary Queen’s “Technologies of Representations: Fields of Rhetorical Action in Transnational Feminism” and Rebecca Dingo’s “Anxious Rhetorics: Globalization’s Terministic Screens in Late Twentieth Century US Culture.” See also the special issue of College English, Transnational Feminist Rhetorics, coedited by Hesford and Schell and published in May of 2008. Another source of Shiva’s philosophical and spiritual practice emerges from the spiritual traditions and practices of Hinduism. Indian feminist Krisha Sen argues that Shiva is guided by “the mythopoeic ecological vision of the Hindu Vedas, and the powerful and generative connections established in the Vedas and the Upanishads between Nature on the one hand, and the cosmic feminine principles of Prakriti and Shakti on the other—a relationship articulated in the figure of the Devi of the Devimahatmya. . . . Thus, Shiva derives her world view ‘“from her roots, in an image of Nature/Woman as a configuration of power.’” One such example is the high profile case of Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer who was sued by Monsanto Corporation when Monsanto’s patented genetically engineered canola seed blew into his fields from passing trucks. The genetically

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engineered seed fertilized his canola plants, and Monsanto sued, claiming that he had “stolen” or “pirated” canola seeds from them. After a grueling lawsuit, Schmeiser was ordered to pay Monsanto a fee of $15.00 per acre, sparking Vandana Shiva and others to join forces with him against the intellectual patenting of biological life forms. Works Cited Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U P, 1989. Print. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall, 1950. Print. Cathcart, Robert S. “Movements: Confrontation as Rhetorical Form.” Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest. Ed. Charles E. Morris, III and Stephen H. Browne, 2001. 102–11. Print. “Chipko Movement, India.” International Institute for Sustainable Development. Web. 29 January 2012. Dingo, Rebecca. “Linking Transnational Logics: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Public Policy Networks.” College English 70.5 (2008): 490–505. Print. ———. “Anxious Rhetorics: Globalization’s Terministic Screens in Late Twentieth-Century US.Culture” 2005. Web. 29 January 2012 “Diverse Women for Diversity.” Navdanya. 2009. Web. 2 Oct. 2005. “Dr. Vandana Shiva.” The Venus Project. Web. 30 January 2012. Flynn, Elizabeth A. Feminism Beyond Modernism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Print. Fraser, Nancy. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere.” March 2005. Web. 29 January 2012. Republicart: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy.” Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice. Ed. Marianne DeKoven. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2001. Print. Glenn, Cheryl. “Remapping Rhetorical Territory.” Rhetoric Review 13.2 (1995): 287–303. Print. Gorsevski, Ellen. Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2004. Print. Grewal, Inderpal , and Caren Kaplan. Introduction. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. 1–33. Print. Hesford, Wendy. “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” PMLA. 121.3 (2006): 787–801. Print. ———. “Kairos and the Geopolitical Rhetorics of Global Sex Work and Video Advocacy.” Hesford and Kozol. 146-172. Print. Hesford, Wendy, and Wendy Kozol, eds. Just Advocacy?: Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. Hesford, Wendy, and Theresa A. Kulbaga. “Labored Realisms: Geopolitical Rhetoric and Asian American (Im)migrant Women’s (Auto)biography.” JAC 23.1 (2003): 77–108. Print. Hesford, Wendy, and Eileen E. Schell. “Introduction: Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics.” College English 70.5 (2008): 461–470. Print. ———, eds. Transnational Feminist Rhetorics. Spec. issue of College English. 70. 5 (2008). 461-534. Print. “Introduction to Navdanya.” Navdanya. Web. 2 October 2005. Kemker, David. “Earthkeeper Hero: Dr. Vandana Shiva.” My Hero Web Project. 10 Nov. 2009. Web. 2 October 2005.

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Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. “The Discourse of ‘Environmentalist Hysteria.’” Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment. Ed. Craig Wadell. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 35–54. Print. Lilliston, Bob. “Stop Biopiracy—Drop Basmati Patent.” Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Environmental Thought Online 24 (2001). n.pag. Web. 10 January 2007. Lipson, Carol, and Roberta Binkley, eds. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2004. Print. Lock, Ineke. “Vandana Shiva: Saving Seeds, Fighting Multinationals, and Preserving Indigenous Knowledge.” The Parkland Institute. Web. 1 October 2005. Lyon, Arabella. “Misrepresentations of Missing Women in the U.S. Press: The Rhetorical Uses of Disgust, Pity, and Passion.” Hesford and Kozol. 173-94. Web. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. “Crimes of Writing and Reading.” Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Ed. Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann/Boynton-Cook, 2006: 13–31. Print. Maathai, Wangari. The History of the Greenbelt Movement. New York: Lantern Books, 2003. Print. “Manifesto on the Future of Seed.” International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture. 2003. Web. 1 July 2007. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1993. Print. Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Across Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Paget-Clarke, Nick. “Interview with Vandana Shiva: The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization. In-Motion Magazine, 23 March 2004. Web. 1 October 2005. Prakash, C.S. “Unpublished Letter to the Editor of The Hindu: Response to ‘Bioterror and Biosafety’ by Ms. Shiva.” AgBioWorld. Web. 2 October 2005. . Queen, Mary. “Technologies of Representations: Fields of Rhetorical Action in Transnational Feminism.” Diss. Syracuse U, 2005. Print. ———. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” College English 70.5 (2008): 471–89. Print. Schell, Eileen E. “Gender, Rhetorics, and Globalization: Rethinking the Spaces and Locations of Women’s Rhetorics.” Teaching Rhetorica/Rhetorica Teaching: The Expansive Consequences of Women’s Rhetorical Practice. Ed. Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie. HeinemannBoynton/Cook, 2006. 160–73. Print. Scopacasa, Paolo. “Vandana Shiva: In Her Own Words.” Ecoworld. 6 March 2004. Web. 30 January 2012. Sen, Krisha. “Minding Our Lives: The Ecofeminism of Vandana Shiva and the Indian Cultural Context.” Abstract. Web. 1 Oct. 2005. Shiva, Vandana. The Basmati Battle and Its Implications for Biopiracy and TRIPs. Centre for Research on Globalisation. 10 Sept. 2001. Web. 10 January 2007. ———. “Basmati Biopiracy: RiceTec Must Withdraw All Patent Claims for Basmati Seeds and Plants.” Navdanya. 20 Nov. 2000. Web. 10 January 2007. ———.The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London: Zed Books, 1991. Print. ———. “Women, Ecology and Economic Globalisation: Searching For An Alternative Vision.” Women and Environment: Centre for Symbiosis of Technology, Environment, and Management, Bangalore, India. Web. 27–30 Dec. 1995. Shiva, Vandana, Afsar H. Jafri, and Shulani Bhutani. Campaign Against Biopiracy. New Delhi, India: Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, 1999. Print. “TED Case Studies: Basmati.” Trade Environment Database Projects. American University. Web. 10 Jan. 2007. “The Movement.” Navdanya. 2009. Web. Oct. 2005.

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Tyer, Brad. “RiceTec Paddy Whack.” HoustonPress.com, 23 Nov. 2000. Web. 10 Jan. 2007. “‘We Are Flattered by the Attention but Don’t Wish to be Flattened.’” Rediff on the Web. 7 July 1998. Web. 1 Oct. 2005.

Response On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls

Arabella Lyon and Banu Özel Centered in the ethics of transnational feminism, the struggles of political and economic globalism, and the issues of biopiracy, intellectual piracy, biotechnology, and the patenting of biological life forms, Eileen Schell both introduces and analyzes the rhetoric of Indian environmentalist and scientist Vandana Shiva. In her analysis of Shiva’s work against hegemonic Western science and capital, Schell shows how Shiva deploys eclectic rhetorical traditions, including ecofeminism, transnational feminism, Ghandian principles of nonviolent persuasion, Hindu understanding of noncooperation, confrontational and identification rhetorics as described by Kenneth Burke, and the good old Greek synecdoche. In analyzing the complex global geography of Shiva’s engagement with US-based RiceTec Corporation and its patent of Indian/ Pakistani basmati rice lines and grains, Schell demonstrates Shiva’s flexibility in shifting and contextualizing political debate across immense geopolitical space. Schell’s analysis of Shiva foregrounds the ways in which her improvisations and heterogeneous methods travel across geopolitical and sociocultural boundaries and transform the public sphere, despite the resistance of global capital. It is the richness of Shiva’s undertaking, and thus Schell’s undertaking, that interests us. Shiva’s resilience derives from a blending of Western rhetoric and local and Hindu traditions of speaking. We take this heterogeneous approach as itself a synecdoche for the best rhetorics of transnationalism; in other words, as transnational feminists of the developing world suggest, start with Southern initiation, activism, and understanding, and include only the necessary Western strategies and support. Within this understanding of global commitment, feminist action might be truly transformative or, at least, have some of Shiva’s success in speaking back to the three colonizations of modern patriarchy (nature, women, and the Third World).

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As Schell notes, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan write that Western feminists need to “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations” if they are to avoid “universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures” (17). The difficulty of interpreting different worlds and words from a Western standpoint, a position of dominance and privilege, cannot be overly acknowledged. To understand the resilience of women in other cultures, Western scholars must leave their positions to whatever extent possible. Universalizing dangers lurk when one applies Western systems of trope, modernist conceptions of the public sphere, and Kenneth Burke’s theory to the rhetoric and politics of a Hindu, Indian, feminist, self-identified farmer. Even Gandhian rhetoric must be handled with care because, as Ellen W. Gorsevski warns us, Gandhi’s rhetoric allowed him to be seen as a “standin Euro” (xxi) because of his impeccable English. Yet in a world of global education and global Englishes, rhetoric is not limited to the standpoints and traditions within each disparate culture; transnational movements place the activists and industrialists of many nations in struggle and dialogue, creating a polyphony of traditions, rhetorics, and cultures. Analyzing comparative rhetoric or intermingled and blended rhetorics, as Schell describes Shiva’s mélange, is an intellectually and ethically fraught enterprise. Significantly, Schell exposes some of the junctures, intersections, fragments, and leaps inherent in Shiva’s address to multiple audiences; that is, she reveals the rhetorical diversity necessary for effective speech in a transnational public sphere. Transnational agency entails transnational awareness. Still, we cannot help but wonder what Schell might have seen differently if she had acknowledged the rhetorical traditions of the great Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, or if she had addressed the work on Hindu nationalist rhetoric, work such as that of Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen or Indian social historian Romila Thapar. If Schell’s purpose is to elucidate the multiple locations from which Shiva speaks, she has erred on the side of Shiva’s West and its rhetorics of modernization. Given the “scattered hegemonies” of our transnational world, rhetorical criticism may be always inadequate to the task. Language exceeds the limits of our understanding, our standpoints. The need for knowledge of “the material conditions” and discursive traditions outside the West are the greatest task of not just our disciplines, but our lives. In recognizing new geopolitical rhetorical spaces and locations, scholars denationalize and denormalize notions .

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of rhetoric in ways that are not yet fully understood. By studying speakers such as Vandana Shiva, who address audiences characterized by multiple subjectivities that can affect their responses to nations, capitalist enterprises, and revolutionary politics, rhetoricians can grasp new means of communicative power in an era defined by evolving technologies, increased mobility, widening cultural displacements of people, and cultural clashes. Our goal in such analysis should be to develop dialogic models that admit a multiplicity of discursive traditions. In looking at a particular text in a particular moment, Schell shows the interplay of diverse factions across contemporary cultures. In demonstrating the importance of multiple rhetorical traditions in linking small farmers in South Asia with concerned citizens in the global North, Schell illuminates how contemporary transnational feminist rhetoric(s) might work as a countersystem of knowledge and power and offers a case of resilience in the face of monocultural capitalist patriarchy. Works Cited Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Print. Thapar, Romila. Cultural Past: Essays in Early Indian History. New Delhi: Oxford, 2000. Print.

Reflection Eileen Schell

Understanding the mutidimensional rhetoric of Vandana Shiva requires rhetorical stretching and imagining. Shiva’s rhetorical influences and geopolitical identifications are multiple and intersecting. Shiva is a transnational figure who addresses audiences in print books and environmental treatises, in person through speeches, and on the Internet. Yet she is also firmly rooted in Indian culture and society even as she travels the globe organizing protests, attending meetings, and delivering lectures. In my chapter, I attempt to understand Shiva’s rhetorical strategies across the multidisciplinary areas of her work in ecofeminisms, agricultural discourses, and global trade policies. These have not been the traditional domains of humanists, or of many rhetoricians, for that matter. Even grasping some of her arguments about biodiversity and agriculture may prove to be a challenge to traditionally trained humanists and rhetoricians who may not be knowledgeable about agricultural or agrarian rhetorics or global trade policies. To undertake the rhetorical work of analyzing Shiva and her social movement work is to struggle mightily in a sea of unfamiliar discourses, even for someone who has an agricultural and family farming background, as I do. In this piece, I have been primarily concerned about, as Lyon and Őzel put it, “demonstrating the importance of multiple rhetorical traditions in linking small farmers in South Asia with concerned citizens in the global North” and in examining how “transnational feminist rhetoric(s) might work as a counter system of knowledge and power” (56). I have been interested, as Lyon and Őzel observe, in offering up “a case of resilience in the face of monocultural capitalist patriarchy” (56). I also have been interested in expanding our feminist canon of rhetorical figures to account for transnational feminist figures and movements on the global stage—an area of research that is growing, but is still in the earlier phases of development As Lyon and Őzel point out, my analysis tends to favor the Western side of Shiva’s rhetorical strategies. They argue that my chapter does

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not acknowledge the influence of “the rhetorical traditions of the great Hindu epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana,” and it does not locate Shiva’s work in relation to work of Indian scholars such as “Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen or Indian social historian Romila Thapar” (58). They offer an effective critique of the limits of the rhetorical resources and analytics upon which I have drawn. At the same time, my analysis makes use of terms that Shiva herself sets forth in her published work in very direct and explicit ways—terms from ecofeminism, a discourse and theory she helped solidify in collaboration with Maria Mies; terms drawn from Gandhi’s rhetoric and philosophy, which she acknowledges as foundational to her environmental advocacy; and terms from global agrarian social movements and alternative globalization movements located in India and other countries, including her organization of women scientists, Diverse Women for Diversity. Thus, Shiva’s work speaks to multiple publics on agrarian issues, marshaling resources from a variety of discourses and locations. As Lyon and Őzel indicate, “transnational movements place the activists and industrialists of many nations in struggle and dialogue, creating a polyphony of traditions, rhetorics, and cultures” (58). I have sought out Shiva as a figure of rhetorical resilience, as a solidarity figure who builds local and global coalitions to achieve environmental policy changes and raise awareness about how globalization looks and feels from the Two-Thirds World. As the editors of the introduction to this volume indicate, Shiva is a figure who works toward “collective agency in feminist activism” (13); she builds solidarity and interconnections among various stakeholders as she works to preserve biodiversity and keep indigenous farmers on their lands.

2 T h e Tr a v e l i n g F a do 1 Kate Vieira

A fado is a Portuguese folk song characterized by saudade, a word that means “longing,” “intense sadness,” “nostalgia,” “a missing,” “a lack,” “a desire,” “a love.” It is akin to the Russian word toska, a pulling of one’s soul towards something just out of reach. This “something,” for the sailors, colonizers, and colonial subjects among whom the fado likely originated, is often a home. The fado thus conveys what feminist postcolonial theorist Avtar Brah calls “the homing instinct.” In its continual reaching and longing, the fado raises awareness of the impossibility of return to a land of origin. Its lyrics gesture to home, constructing it even as it recedes. This chapter, then, is a story about home. In particular, it is about how the gendered musical and rhetorical form of the fado, carried to the United States in part from the Portuguese Azorean Islands, both changes and persists in the literacy lives of generations of Azorean immigrants as they write themselves into national and ethnic belonging. The study of ethnic rhetorics and their transmission from one generation to the next is, of course, not new in feminist rhetorical work. Jacqueline Jones Royster, most famously, has used the metaphors of stream and river to evoke the shared rhetorical legacy from which generations of African American women draw. Amanda Cobb, similarly, coins the term continuance as a way to frame her exploration of the literacy education of Chickasaw women at the Bloomfield Academy. At the end of her book, she signs her name, symbolically having enrolled in the institution from which her grandmother matriculated. These notions of continuance and stream are powerful ways to frame a rhetorical heritage; they imply a connection and indebtedness to the past, at the same time as they resist essentialization by allowing for change. Here I take a transnational perspective on these concepts to ask how rhetorics are passed down across national and linguistic borders to negotiate an ethnic American identity. I suggest that such culturally specific rhetorics as the fado can facilitate resilience among immigrant women and their

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descendants, as these rhetorics are taken up to respond to new circumstances and new audiences. Moreover, I propose that such rhetorics themselves are resilient, living in the words of generations of women. To explore the rhetorical resilience of the fado, I focus on one ordinary Azorean American family (my own) in South Mills, Massachusetts2—a community that has struggled to adapt to Anglo forms of literacy, but, I hope to show, has made use of the fado to put down its own unapologetically hyphenated rhetorical roots. I am interested in what makes the rhetoric of the fado endure, as well as how it changes as it bumps up against other rhetorical traditions. More specifically, I ask the following questions: How have Azorean immigrants used, passed down, and adapted the form of the fado to create a sense of national or ethnic belonging? How does gender affect who can take up this form as well as how? And what might the possibility of such a transnational or traveling rhetoric mean for literacy in South Mills and elsewhere? To answer these questions, I will look to, among other sources, my grandmother. A z o r e a n A s s i m i l at i o n o n t h e T e n t h I s l a n d

Azorean Americans have long had a vexed relationship with the notion of assimilation and with their place in the sociocultural landscape of American immigration—an anxiety, I will show later, that their fados skillfully negotiate. This discomfort stems at least in part from the difficult-to-categorize nature of Azorean immigration, which does not fit neatly into the immigration history of most other white ethnics. The Azorean experience seems to lie somewhere between what immigration theorist Marcelo Suárez-Orozco describes as “old” immigration (turn of the century from Europe) and “new” (current immigration, often from Latin America). It is even geographically unclear, in fact, whether the Azores are part of Europe or not. An “autonomous region” of Portugal first settled in 1439, the Azores are nine islands located in the middle of the Atlantic, about 1,000 miles from Lisbon and 2,400 from the East Coast of the US, where, not coincidentally, many Azoreans live. Portuguese Studies scholar Onésimo Teotonio Almeida has written that “it was believed by a few that the Azores lay in the place of Plato’s Atlantis, but the Azoreans themselves did not believe it. Their Atlantis lay further west” (The Sea Within 20). Nonetheless, this tale speaks to a land that, bordered by oceans and framed further out by the continents of Europe and North America, is so in-between it is imagined to have

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mythical roots. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Azoreans have left in high numbers for more solid ground. Almeida has referred to the US as the “Tenth Island” because so many of its Luso Americans are Azorean or of Azorean descent (Portuguese Spinner 25). In fact, according to Jerry Williams, Azoreans make up between two-thirds and threefourths of the “Portuguese” in the United States (And Yet They Come 75). The majority of Portuguese immigrants in the US, then, do not exactly hail from Europe, though neither do they come from an easily categorized elsewhere. The less fanciful reason for the intensity of Azorean migration to the US is connected to the island’s history. Similar to other white ethnics associated with “old immigration,” most Azoreans came to the US for economic opportunity. Although records show arrival in the US at the beginning of the 1800s, many Azoreans came in 1870 to work in the whaling industry and by the turn of the century were primarily employed in the area’s cotton mills. The US then, as now, needed cheap labor. “America beckoned” is my grandmother’s lovely turn of phrase. But if America has beckoned the Azoreans, Portugal has also pushed them: the Azores were not exactly a colony of Portugal because there was no indigenous population,3 but they were treated differently from mainland Portuguese. Robert Santos writes of the Azorean system: the lands were farmed by peasants who had no ownership and had to pay high rent and taxes. This system lasted for centuries and was one key reason for the high Azorean emigration. There simply was no way the peasants could advance up the socioeconomic ladder (68–69). The Azoreans were also left to starve when the overpopulated volcanic island faced unfavorable farming conditions, and they were sent to wars in Portugal’s other colonies—a fate, family lore has it, that my great-grandfather avoided by emigrating to South Mills. He was part of the second biggest wave of Azorean immigration to the US, which occurred between 1910 and 1920. What makes the Azorean experience in part so unlike other European immigration is that the largest influx of Azorean immigrants arrived in the US between 1965 and 1980. Moreover, much like other more recent immigrant groups, Azoreans living in the US tend to maintain close ties to the islands (Moniz), and they continue to struggle in achieving educational equality.4 This in-between migratory status is also reflected in Azorean racial and ethnic categorization, a fuzzy, if hotly debated, issue. Prompted

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in part by Time Magazine’s 2005 inclusion of Portuguese as making up 1% of the US Hispanic population, and in part by the inclusion of Azorean American senators in the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, the Portuguese American Historical and Research Foundation web site recently hosted a lively debate about whether to check the White or Hispanic box on national census forms.5 As part of this debate, George Perry’s article, “Portuguese-Americans: The Lost Hispanics,” calls on Azorean Americans to identify as Hispanic, pointing out similarities between Azorean and Latin American immigration, history, culture, and social status in the US. Robert Harney’s chapter on the history of Portuguese racialization across geographic areas of migration ultimately concludes that Portuguese in the West Indies, southern New England, California, and Hawaii continue to be “seen as other than the mainstream racially and culturally” (131). These debates point to an anxiety about ethnic identity that plays a central role in both the fados this chapter explores and in the ways the community’s literacy practices have thus far been studied. Not quite white and not quite Latino/a, not fitting neatly within either “old” or “new” immigration patterns, the Azorean American community has also not quite unidirectionally assimilated to the mainstream—even though researchers have been calling since 1923 for assimilation as at least a partial solution for Azorean American educational woes (Taft). As early as 1923, anthropologist Donald Taft conducted an extensive study of the area’s Portuguese populations in an attempt to discern whether the community’s high rate of infant mortality was due to the Azoreans’ “racial traits” or “adverse surroundings” (17). He devotes a substantial part of his analysis to Azoreans’ widespread illiteracy, concluding that cultural assimilation could improve Portuguese educational status. In part echoing Taft’s 1923 sentiments, the authors of the recent University of Massachusetts Dartmouth study (2005), entitled “Education and Ethnicity in Southeastern Massachusetts II: 1980–2000 (A Continuing Challenge),” write, “As the Portuguese assimilate and their English language skills improve, it is expected that educational attainment will come into line with other residents in the area. However, this should not be the only aspiration among the Portuguese, as the overall educational attainment level in the area is well below the state average” (44; emphasis added). In both 1923 and 2005, then, studies of Portuguese Americans suggested that cultural assimilation would improve the community’s

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educational attainment. These claims warrant further investigation into the kinds of literacy practices Azorean Americans already make use of and the ways these practices among generations of writers construct an ethnic identity that both accommodates and resists unidirectional assimilation. It is not as if Portuguese Americans have not attempted assimilation to the mainstream. Their efforts are evident in, for example, the common practice of changing their surnames from “Ferreira to Smith, Martins to Martin, Pereira to Perry, Morais to Morris” (Almeida, Portuguese Spinner 24), or as my father once lobbied for in our family, “Vieira to Wyatt”— although living in Texas, it has often seemed a more appealing prospect to just get rid of what a Chicano friend calls my “extra i.” But as the persistence of South Mills’s Portuguese community shows—with its Azorean religious festas, its Catholic churches, its Portuguese bakeries and groceries, and its bilingual population—unidirectional assimilation, cultural or linguistic, is a painful prospect. I will suggest in the rest of this chapter, however, that the fado reveals a way out of the double bind of the unidirectional assimilation that has been promoted in response to Azoreans’ uncertain ethnic and migratory status in the US. In fact, despite the word’s history of ethnocentrism and racism, I propose that we think of Azorean assimilation in terms of what Alba and Nee refer to as a cultural mixing that acknowledges multiple influences. This kind of assimilation would be multidirectional, not one way only. That is, it could incorporate the new without having to leave behind the old. The fado is a rhetorical form that allows for this kind of mixing: it is not an isolated or purely cultural artifact but is rather a record of travels and border crossings. It thus facilitates resilience, providing a rhetorical form in which generations of Azorean immigrants can negotiate assimilation by writing themselves into a fluid national and ethnic home. A z o r e a n D i a s p o r i c Spa c e a n d t h e H o m i n g I n s t i n c t o f t h e Fa do

What, exactly, is a fado? Rodney Gallop, one of the first American ethnographers to write about the fado in 1903, describes it as “always sad”: Usually in the minor, it retains even in the major the melancholy character associated with the minor. It may be wild and finely exultant in its sadness, seeming to revel in tragedy; or, more often, striking a note of pathetic and almost languid resignation. Its sophisticated cadences breathe a spirit of

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theatrical self-pity combined with genuine sincerity. It is emotional, passionate, erotic, sensuous, one might say meretricious, and yet, like some rustic courtesan, fundamentally simple and unpretentious. Perhaps this is because these qualities, however irreconcilable to the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking, are nevertheless reconciled in the Portuguese temperament, or at least in one aspect of it. (200)

The narrator of Azorean American writer Katherine Vaz’s short story, “Fado,” concurs. “We are so sad, so chemically sad, that it leaks from us,” she says. “The fados wailing from our record players remind us that without love we will die, that the oceans are salty because the Portuguese have shed so many tears on their beaches for those they will never hold again” (98). It may sound melodramatic, and may perhaps “breathe a spirit of theatrical self-pity” (Gallop 200), but this is precisely the point. The guitar does a light introductory dance, and a woman’s deep voice wails out her impossible saudades for the land or the person that she loves. “Her fado of bitterness . . . that hurt voice saddens who passes by,” sings contemporary fadista, Mariza (from the song “Vielas de Alfama”), who performs some devastatingly sad fados herself. “I have always been like a dead sea,” she sings, “A sea without tides, without waves or harbour / Where the sails of dreams were torn apart” (from the song “Caravels”). And consider these lines, from a song rather too optimistically entitled “Spring”: “The dry bread of solitude / It’s the only thing . . . to be fed on / What matters if the heart / says yes or says no / If it keeps on living.” Many Brazilians call the fado simply “the Portuguese blues.” I’d like to insist for a moment, however, on the fado’s particularity as a complex expression of Portugal’s colonial past and its diasporic present. There are three theories as to where the fado comes from.6 Some believe it is a style of the Moors, some of whom apparently continued to live near Lisbon even after the crusades. Others think the form derives from Brazilian slaves, whose lundum music arrived in Portugal with Portuguese sailors in the 1820s. And yet a third possibility is that the fado comes from Portuguese minstrels of the middle ages who engaged in both love songs and political and social critiques, common subjects of fado songs. The fado is perhaps at once Arabic, African, and European. The fado thus simultaneously evokes a guilty history of colonization and slavery, a resistance to oppression, as well as romantic longing induced by migration.

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It is in part its irreconcilable history that produces the fado’s desperate sadness, which has provided catharsis and community for the Portuguese working class at home and abroad. While Paul Vernon, in his worshipful history of the fado, insists that it was brought to the Azores only when the Portuguese were visiting their colonies (89), it seems to me that the fado is part and parcel of the journey itself—to the colonies from the mainland, or from the colonized’s perspective, to the mainland or elsewhere. The fado is, if nothing else, associated with journey and displacement. Amália Rodrigues, the most famous fadista of the twentieth century, sings a fado creation myth that goes like this: “Fado was born one day when the wind was blowing badly and the sky prolonged the sea, in the deck of a sailboat and the breast of a sailor man who was singing of his sadness.” These lyrics express not just loneliness, but exile. The sky lengthens the sea; the sailor is nowhere. At the same time, the sailor creates the idea of “home” through the fado in the very act of singing for its loss. In other words, the fado is a diasporic form, which raises awareness of the impossibility of return to a land of origin, even as it inscribes, as Avtar Brah puts it, a “homing desire” (177). In her analysis of immigrant women’s narratives, Heike Paul connects such constructions of home to the act of writing itself, which becomes “a way to create a feeling of home and to recreate a home” (21). More specifically, the fado’s nostalgia allows migrants or travelers a narrative way of understanding the past’s relation to the present that can be healing. Andreea Ritivoi, for instance, in her work on nostalgia and immigrant identity, writes that nostalgia “can replenish and rebuttress our sense of identity by consolidating the ties with our history” (39). In its focus on the pain of loss and remembering in the present, the fado embodies rhetorical relationality, as it looks both forward and backward, consolidates ties with history even as it acknowledges the ways in which this history is irrecoverable. The fado, in short, perpetually looks toward shore, but remains out at sea. In fact, the only translated anthology I have seen of Azorean poetry, many of whose poems have a certain longing mood or tone I associate with the fado, is entitled The Sea Within. The diasporic space this form inhabits makes it uniquely suited to immigrant writing, in particular the writing of Azorean Americans. In fact, Onésimo Almeida has pointed out to me that there were few cultivators of the fado in the islands themselves; it was actually in US communities that the fado became an Azorean tradition. Catarina Avelar, who some say is one of the best fadistas today, is an Azorean American born

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in New Bedford, Massachusetts (message). The fado, after all, is a transnational form. It begins at a border crossing, and, as Azade Seyhan puts it in Writing Outside the Nation, “Narratives that begin at border crossings cannot be bound by national borders, languages, and literary and critical traditions” (4). To translate this notion to the field of composition and rhetoric, the fado seems to me to be an example of what scholars have called “border” or “transcultural” rhetorics. LuMing Mao, for example, writes that such border rhetoric can “create and nurture new forms of expression” (432). And Luisa Rodriguez Connal, in her celebration of women’s linguistic diversity, writes that transcultural rhetorics, “allow speakers or writers to create new uses of language and rhetorical gestures within old contexts, as well as in new ones” (216). The fado, because of its diasporic nature, opens up possibilities for such rhetorics and provides a way for ordinary immigrants to negotiate displacement and belonging, to exercise the kind of intellectual resourcefulness that rhetoricians refer to as mêtis. Such a negotiation is, of course, gendered, as I will show later in my analysis of my great-grandfather’s and grandmother’s writing. In 1910, fados were written in a published journal for the first time, as a culturally familiar way to involve common people in politics (Vernon).7 Because women in Portugual and the Azores were not as literate as men (Taft) and were also excluded from politics, these lyrics or poems were penned mostly by men. If men have long written fado lyrics, however, it is notable that the most famous fadistas—that is, the singers and performers of these written lyrics—have been women. As the nonprofit site World Music Central states, “Fado can be performed by men or women, although many aficionados prefer the raw emotion of the female fadista. Dressed in black with a shawl draped over her shoulders, a fadista stands in front of the musicians and communicates through gesture and facial expressions. The hands move, the body is stationary. When it’s done correctly, it’s a solemn and majestic performance.” While it is problematic, of course, to ascribe “raw emotion” to only the female fadista, the appellation fadista nonetheless carries cultural capital that cannot be ignored. Amália Rodrigues, for example, was the most well-known fadista of the twentieth century, creating a career that spanned many of Portugal’s former colonies, Cuba, Europe, and the US. Today Portuguese Canadian hip-hop star, Nellie Furtado, claims Rodrigues as a major influence in her work. And pop fadistas Mariza and Cristina Branco have also found international acclaim. At a recent concert in Madison, Wisconsin, Branco’s deep voice

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was mesmerizing, and she was clearly in control of both audience and her (all male) accompanying guitarists and pianist. She also, however, explicitly decentered herself as author of her songs, giving credit before each to the male poet whose words she had transformed into lyrics—with the exception of one song she sang in English by Joan Baez. Without underestimating the importance of the role of women performers, then, I want to call attention to the absence of women fado writers and to suggest that writing one’s way into an ethnic identity vis-à-vis the transnational rhetorical form of the fado works differently for men and women. C a e ta n o M e d e i r o s , Fa dista

I look first to the poems of a man—my great-grandfather, Caetano Medeiros (1885–1974), a first-generation immigrant to South Mills from the island of São Miguel, Azores, who self-published a book of fados around 1943. How do these fados facilitate his rhetorical agency, allowing him to write himself into national and ethnic belonging? And how does his act of writing in this patriarchal tradition both authorize and constrict the writing of his daughter and my grandmother, Deolinda Medeiros Vieira? I came across my great-grandfather’s poems only by reading my grandmother’s History of the Family. Deolinda emphasizes Caetano’s literacy in her writing, giving us some clues as to how to interpret Caetano’s poems. She writes: Pa was a good son and corresponded with his parents, this he did throughout their life time. Illiteracy was very prevalent among the Portuguese immigrants. The Portuguese government didn’t provide public education, so many of his neighbors could not read or write. Pa read the mail they received from their families and answered for them. People sat on their steps or out in the yard for a little rest and fresh air in the summer time. Pa used to read to the men for entertainment and some would play the Portuguese guitar. Mom noticed this young man and was impressed; she lived in the same neighborhood, having arrived with her family a few years earlier from Providence. (3-4)

Caetano’s literacy seems to have allowed him several different roles: corresponding with family at home, helping his community, entertaining them, attracting a wife. In fact, Deolinda notes of her mother that: “Other boys had their eyes on her, young men better looking than he,

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but they weren’t as smart” (7). Writing, it turns out, was even necessary for courtship. During the Azorean feast of the Holy Spirit, Caetano and Maria first acknowledged each other in writing: “Ma’s best friend, Eliza Camara, knew how to write and Ma did not, so Pa and Ma’s courtship, with the help of Eliza, grew to the point that grandpa’s approval was sought” (8). Maria’s father eventually decided to go back to the “balmy Azores,” and informed Caetano that the engagement was off (9). But Caetano and Maria decided to elope. Deolinda writes victoriously, “Ma was not going back; she was going to get married and stay in America” (9). In Deolinda’s account, Caetano’s writing and reading ability was intimately connected to his position within the Portuguese community in South Mills. Perhaps most importantly, he was able to facilitate communication between those at home in the Azores and those in the US, keeping the Azores alive in South Mills and maintaining national or ethnic belonging in an immigrant community that was, as many immigrant communities are, partly “here” and partly “there” (Suárez-Orozco 70). Moreover, for Deolinda, his literacy seems to be connected to his heterosexual masculinity allowing him a wife, who instead of following her father back to São Miguel, stayed in South Mills to create with Caetano a new family of second-generation Azorean Americans. His very ability to write and read, then, allowed for a particular kind of ethnic Americanness. Indeed, in the days when Caetano was reading letters to his neighbors and courting his future wife through his notes, the Immigration Act of 1924 (that prevented my great-uncle Manuel from immigrating) was using “literacy tests” to justify a racist quota system that kept certain groups out.8 In this context, Caetano’s literacy was integral to both his official belonging within the US and his maintenance of ethnic ties. Not only his ability to write, but his writing itself, his fados, reflect this negotiation. His careful spacing, the numbering of pages, stanzas, the titles of poems, the hand-written Portuguese accent marks, and the systematic rhyme scheme suggest thorough attention. Perhaps Caetano, as an authorized reader of letters in his community, also became an “authorized” writer, writing his own fados to accompany the Portuguese guitar that Deolinda mentions as joining reading entertainment. The following longing fado for his home island, São Miguel, comes first in the small self-published book (untitled), foregrounding Caetano’s authorial identity as an immigrant. One can imagine it being popular for an audience of fellow Micaelenses:

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from “Fado de São Miguel” Quando de longe o teu nome Eu ouvi pronunciar, Não te julgava tão linda Ó bela pérola do mar. ... Quem não te foi costeando Às quintas e jardims teus; Quem não mediu teus pomares Como medi com olhos meus. Dizem ser lindas outras terras, Por saberem o que encerra; Chamar-te-ei jardim Enquanto eu tiver vida; São Miguel, ilha querida, Cheia de belezas sem fim. Caetano Medeiros

When from far away your name I heard pronounced, I had not been considering you that gorgeous Oh beautiful pearl of the sea ... Those who never walked your shores Your blocks and your gardens; Those who never measured your orchards As I have measured them with my eyes, Claim the beauty of other lands, For knowing what you hide; I will call for your garden As long as I live; São Miguel, beloved island, full of endless beauty. Translated by Ricardo Leme9

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Here the transnational “homing instinct” of the fado is unmistakable. In the first lines of this poem, when the speaker hears the name São Miguel, he is launched into a reverie about the island, noting that only when he was far away from it did he judge it to be beautiful, “the pearl of the sea.” He writes, in other words, from a position of exile or diaspora, constructing a “home” that takes on significance precisely because it is written about from afar. This fado form, which makes this revision of home possible, is gendered. I don’t think I overreach to read the island as a personification of a romantic interest, with the speaker’s direct address to the island (“When I heard your name pronounced,” for example) and the descriptions of its “terreno fértil e viçoso,” its “fertile and exuberant landscape.” Only the speaker understands the island’s endless beauty and will continue to call for her “garden” as long as he lives: “Chamar-te-ei jardim / Enquanto eu tiver vida.” Moreover, of the five fados in this collection, three are explicitly about or for women, making it easy to read heterosexual romantic desire into the described landscape of São Miguel. The poem immediately following the fado for São Miguel uses these gendered tropes to make sense of the relationship between the speaker’s new home in the US and the one he longs for in the Azores. It is entitled “Fado de um Enjeitado,” fado “of the rejected,” from the perspective of a child whose mother abandoned him. “Minha mãe sem caridade” (“my mother without generosity”) is contrasted with another “mulher que chegou/teve de mim compaixão / e como filho me adotou” (“a woman who came to me with compassion and adopted me”). Because it is set right next to the poem for São Miguel, I can’t help but read this poem as a metaphor for homeland. The speaker is rejected by one land, the Azores, abandoned by the Portuguese motherland. He is accepted by another woman, perhaps the US, a mother figure who nonetheless cannot compensate for his original loss. Even with the caridade of the new mother, the speaker continues to live “sem consolação,” “without consolation.” The gendering of the fado works not only to feminize the Azorean homeland, but figures women as the objects of desire, as home. Two of the fados in his collection are explicitly love poems (“Fado for the Brunette” and “Fado for the Blonde”), mirroring some of the language used to talk about the island. The speaker, for example, longs for the “morena que passeia / Tanto me fazes penar” (“the brunette who passes by and causes me such pain”). Just as hearing the name of São Miguel causes the speaker to dream, seeing the passing brunette inspires a

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poem. And just as the speaker promises to call for the garden of São Miguel for his entire life, in this poem he will live as a “prisoner” of her love “until death.” In these songs of immigrant nostalgia, then, the home is figured female. And the female, similarly, is figured as home, as the one to give “conforto e alanto / Neste ancioso momento” (“comfort and support / in this anxious moment”). Caetano, then, makes use of his literacy skills to negotiate displacement in the form of the fado, in which the very act of gesturing towards the lost homeland both constructs this home and posits its irrecoverability. While many Azorean immigrants remigrated to the Azores, or went back for periods of time, Caetano did not. The high rate of retromigration, in fact, is explained by Portuguese anthropologist Esthelie Smith as rooted in saudade, the same untranslatable emotion that the fado aims to convey and create (85). Perhaps because the form of the fado involves longing for lost loved ones separated because of a journey, in Caetano’s fados this home seems to be gendered female, just as the women the speaker longs for are marked as “home.” Caetano’s assimilation, as facilitated by these gendered fados, thus seems to have moved in multiple directions. He neither unidirectionally assimilated to the Anglo mainstream, nor isolated himself from it. Rather, his writing allowed him (and perhaps those who read or listened to his poems) to follow a path of multidirectional assimilation as he negotiated the journey between one community and another. How, then, does the rhetoric of the fado and the kind of assimilation it allows change in a second-generation woman’s writing? How does Deolinda, Caetano’s daughter, as a female and (bilingual) English speaker, claim the agency to make use of a tradition that often posits women not as writers, but as subjects to be written about? Au t h o r i z i n g D e o l i n da

My grandmother’s Unedited Family History was written with modest materials: a lined composition book with a green cover from Vernon McMillian Inc.; a blue ball-point pen that runs out of ink and is replaced on page 30; pages that are cut out; and pages that are put loose between the covers, listing names and dates of births and deaths, arrival dates in this country, as well as a seemingly unconnected description of World War II. Underneath this unassuming veneer, her History of the Family invokes the rhetorical legacy of the fado at the same time as it embodies the traditionally Anglo forms that suit her rhetorical situation. Generically

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speaking, her history is a family autobiography, but she also inflects this genre with rhetorical traces of the fado that link her writing to that of her predecessors. That is, Deolinda activates an authorial agency that does not put her at odds with her family and culture, but that builds from them in imaginative ways. She takes up the fado and adapts it to her English-speaking, United States context; these multiple influences allow her narrative to negotiate an ethnic American female identity. What strikes me in the first few pages is how from such humble materials Deolinda gathers momentum to write, beginning modestly and then launching into a sweeping narrative that spans continents and cultures—a move she makes by embodying a mêtistic rhetoric, strategically using the patriarchal forces that “authorize” her writing to develop her own writerly ethos. The most obvious authorizing agent in her book is my father, Jerry, who asked her to write it in the same year he was putting together a family tree on our first home computer. In fact, on the cover of the composition book, written above and to the side of the title, Unedited Family History, she has written in her careful cursive, “For Jerry Vieira.” And early on in the pages of the book is his small straight handwriting in red pen, forming an outline of topics she might cover, although refusing the red pen’s authority, she seems to get swept up in her narrative and forget the outline soon afterwards. Again, mêtistically, she both bows to and subverts the authority this outline represents. In an introduction page, she writes, “Jerry asked me to do this, but I’m a poor writer, so the reader will note. My life is almost over. I’m 81 now, so I’ve set myself to put down on paper this account. I’ve attempted to do this and have never succeeded so bear with me; It’s a sloppy job I know. Deolinda Vieira 1991” (i). Deolinda only finished the ninth grade because, like many Azorean American women, she went to work in the textile mills. While she bitterly regretted not finishing high school, she is most certainly not a poor communicator. She well knew that her friends and family considered her smart and funny. I can remember her, in a neat skirt and jacket outfit, with a small hat perched on her white curly hair, in the center of a group of laughing people at a family gathering. At one such gathering (and I remember it outside, in a park, all the old people on benches, music playing) Aunty Mary removed her fake teeth, Tio Tony danced, Uncle Pat discussed his plants, Aunty Bella talked about her children, and I ran around offering peanut butter cookies my cousin and I had made that morning. All the while, Deolinda was entertaining people with her wit.

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She also did the crosswords, went to mass every day, and wrote me letters while I was in college about scientific discoveries she had heard about in the news or read in the papers. This factory worker, homemaker, daughter of immigrants, was also an intellectual, though from all outward signs—her income, gender, ethnicity, education, generation, neighborhood—she shouldn’t have been. Perhaps she prefaces her book with an apology to acknowledge her pretension. Her work is not “a sloppy job,” but maybe saying as much is a mêtistic move, allowing her to more fully seize the rhetorical possibilities of her narrative. Deolinda writes within a clearly patriarchal society, framed by her actual father, patriarchal religion, and culture. As Jerry Williams has noted, if in subsequent generations of immigrants, Portuguese language dominance has decreased, the father nonetheless remains the authority of the household. This could help explain how Deolinda authorizes herself at the very start of the narrative: “Our Father, Caetano Medeiros, came to the United States in November 1906 after a stormy voyage across the Atlantic Ocean which took almost two weeks” (1). Our Father is capitalized, signifying at once her father (Caetano) and Our Father, recalling the familiar Christian prayer. The Our situates her as one of several children and as a Catholic. As the eldest child, the one whose husband had passed, whose son’s family had moved far away, she is, at least in part, writing on behalf of her siblings. Her subject position here seems subordinate—to Jerry’s, to her father’s, to Our Father’s, to the siblings she, as the eldest child, helped raise. And yet, it is from this subordinate position that she locates authorial (and perhaps spiritual) agency. In other words, she seems to make use of the men in her life and her position as a woman to authorize herself as a legitimate writer of this family history. Much like a fado, in which traditionally a male guitarist plays some light introductory notes before the female singer launches into the moving melody of the song, Deolinda frames her writing with the men in her life. Soon after crossing this border, however, Deolinda sings hers way across another, mixing both Portuguese and English rhetorical forms to begin her narrative with her father’s voyage to the United States. He left his native home in the Arrifes, a town in S. Miguel, or St. Michael in English, in the Azores, Portugal. Everyone dreamed about coming to America in those days and there was work in New England in the flourishing textile industry.

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His ship landed in Boston, and Pa was very impressed with the hustle and bustle of the big city. However, his destination was South Mills, where many Portuguese immigrants had settled. Among them lived his uncle and cousin. They were roomers in a boarding house, and Pa was welcomed by the couple who ran the place. He had a fine supper of baked beans and home baked bread, always a favorite of his. The three men shared an attic bedroom. Snow came in through the badly fitted window and they shared a mattress laid out on the floor of the cold room. He was soon at work in Hargrove mill as a roving hoister in the card room and then learned to run the speeders. (1-2)

Her imagined audience here is not just Jerry and not even her grandchildren, but a reader who does not know that many Portuguese settled in South Mills, that Arrifes is in São Miguel, or even that São Miguel is Saint Michael’s in English. This broader audience seems to demand certain generic conventions, and her writing takes on the feel of an English realistic novel. The action begins with the big picture, a stormy trip across a wide ocean, and then focuses in on a supper of baked beans, a badly fitted window, the speeders, the particularities of an immigrant’s life. She has taken hold of the objective, and perhaps the masculine, third-person perspective, seeing not only the boat, but the inside the men’s sleeping quarters and the mill. Underlying the English realist tradition is the unmistakable melody of a fado. Like the fado itself, her story begins with a stormy solitary sea voyage. As I read, I am humming along to Amália Rodrigues’s famous fado about the lonely sailor, and the “sky that prolonged the sea.” Although in Deolinda’s narrative Caetano meets an uncle and cousin later, he is figured as traveling alone. Deolinda’s family memoir produces a rhetorical effect similar to the fado; it connects us to both São Miguel and to South Mills; it gestures backward and forward. The fado form appears most heartbreakingly in Deolinda’s description of the death of her own grandmother, Maria Moniz, back in Arrifes. Deolinda writes, “I was sixteen when we received the sad news of our vavo [grandmother] Medeiros’ passing away. We would never again receive the sweet letters she wrote. Pa always read them aloud and we’d cry with him when we saw his tears. She had a way with words; she never saw him again, once he embarked for America. I’m sure she kissed our

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photographs often, as grandmas the world over do; and shed tears of longing for their absent loved ones” (38). This passage is both painful for the granddaughter who was absent from her grandmother most of her life and a tear-jerking example of the way the fado plays throughout Deolinda’s prose. Not only do we see Caetano’s and his children’s tears, but Deolinda piles sadness on sadness, imagining in detail the feelings of Caetano’s mother, Deolinda’s vavó. I think here of places in traditional fados where the guitar comes to a halt and time seems to stop, as the vocalist sings a capella lyrics that speak the deepest emotion of the song. Perhaps this feeling is appropriate here, as Maria Moniz’s death signals a break with the Azores that would never be repaired. The ultimate fear that the fado expresses, losing one’s homeland (imagined or not), is fulfilled with the cessation of her sad letters. Moreover—and this made me nearly drop Deolinda’s composition book when I read it—this section suggests that Caetano’s mother, Deolinda’s grandmother, Maria Moniz Medeiros, writing mournful letters of longing, was herself a fadista. How Maria, a peasant whose children had to leave the Azores to make their livings, had access to literacy is a mystery. What is clear, however, is that an example of a powerful female writer regularly came into Deolinda’s home in the form of a longing letter, at least until Maria Moniz’s death, and that the echoes of the fado play out not only in Caetano’s poems written in Portuguese, but in Deolinda’s autobiography written in English. The fado, then, seems to have been passed down, like an inheritance, from Azorean mother to Azorean immigrant son, to Azorean American Deolinda. Maria Moniz Medeiros’s writing reaches across the Atlantic. For Caetano Medeiros, the fado becomes an expression of exile and community, a literary endeavor that both helps sustain an ethnic community stateside and gestures back across the ocean to a female-gendered homeland. When Deolinda calls on her (F)ather’s (and grandmother’s!) literate powers in order to write the family history, she takes up the fado differently, in a North American context, writing her family’s immigrant experience into an American English autobiography, shot through with strands of fado melodies, within the seemingly contradictory position of a writing woman. The fado itself has proved to be a resilient rhetorical form, just as it has facilitated the cultural resilience of its practitioners. Like her father’s fados, Deolinda’s writing looks not only back towards the Azores and towards her family’s history, but attempts to

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stake out a position within an American society that allows for multidirectional assimilation for herself and her descendants. Of her own education, she writes, “Children went to work when they reached their fourteenth birthday if they had completed six years of schooling. We had no problem there since we all started in the first grade when we were five. Our parents believed in education. We all graduated from the ninth grade and were then off to work. I went to work in the mill in 1924 after I had graduated from Junior High” (35; emphasis added). The tone seems just a shade shy of defensive here, as if she is writing to an audience that doubts that the Portuguese care about education. And yet she simultaneously maintains pride in the Azorean work ethic and in her parents’ support of education. While Deolinda always regretted not finishing high school, she creates a rhetorical space in which work and education need not conflict and are both integral parts of Portuguese American culture. Similarly, Deolinda connects her family’s religious practices with citizenship: “We were all practicing Catholics, baptizing all babies, attending Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation, seeing to it that our children had a good religious background. Bill and Tony served as altar boys. We were taught to keep the ten commandments, the best rule for a good life and good citizenship as well” (40; emphasis added). Rather than opposing Azorean religious practices to mainstream American ones, she points out how her family’s Catholicism makes for good citizenship. Just as she mixes the rhetorical form of the fado with autobiography written in English to tell a wonderfully rich story, she connects Portuguese culture and mainstream American culture, allowing for them to coexist. Deolinda thus strategically uses and adapts the rhetoric of the fado to position both herself and her family as Azorean American, suggesting not unidirectional assimilation, but an embrace of multiple identities that need not conflict. She has written a memoir that, as Seyhan writes of immigrant women, suggests both “an explicit or implicit dialogue between the writer and the community, ancestors, or family” (66) and that “marks a space of intervention in the cultural contexts in which it moves” (93). Such writing embodies a kind of mêtistic hybridization in which Deolinda draws from her multiple cultural contexts in order to argue for an American identity that is also linked to other times and places. Deolinda, who passed away in 2007, has marked a “space of intervention” with more than just her writing. As the eldest daughter and a working-class second-generation immigrant woman born in 1910, she spent

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her life caring for others: she took care of younger siblings as a child, sometimes bringing them to school with her and making sure they sat quietly; quit school to work in the factories; took care of her ailing parents; cared for her husband after he had a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair; saw the death of one child; raised my father; had all her brothers and sisters over for coffee on Sunday mornings; made the most delicious arroz doce; boiled chouriço with chicken for a taste I have never been able to replicate; and prayed for the family’s souls. She also kept an impeccably neat apartment decorated with small glass religious figurines; knitted gloriously colorful blankets; always had ice cream in the fridge for visiting grandchildren, nieces, nephews; and could tell a good joke. As her granddaughter, I am grateful that in addition to all this, she also wrote our family’s story. Conclusion

Deolinda’s fado ultimately sings a song to both her ancestors and her descendants, who, true to Portuguese tradition, had set sail for other lands (in our case, Texas). These are her story’s final sentiments: “Jerry, my dear son, asked me to write this account but what can an uneducated person write that clearly paints a picture of the lives of people involved. He is a graduate of Manhattan College” (57). She leaves off her fado gesturing towards the third generation, who, she suggests, in line with what Suárez-Orozco has called the “mythico-historical” account of “old” immigration, could perhaps be unidirectionally assimilated into the Mainstream (71). At the same time as it taps into this mythico-history, Deolinda’s story is also one of privilege, a privilege that perhaps (who knows?) stretches even further than Maria Moniz Medeiros’s unusual letters from Arrifes, São Miguel, to South Mills, Massachusetts. This history, then, seems to at once hold our family to the norms of contemporary myths of past immigration (by the third generation, most Azoreans naturally assimilated and became “American”) at the same time as it points to a seeming exceptionalism (because of literacy, this family assimilated more fully than other Azoreans). But neither of these contradictory interpretations, perhaps connected to Azoreans’ uneasy social position between “new” and “old” immigration, between “white” and “ethnic,” seem to get at the heart of the story my grandmother tells or the rhetoric she and Caetano employ. Azoreans have not quite unidirectionally assimilated, and as Harvey Graff and Sandra McKay have shown, literacy by itself (in a first or second language) does not make for social mobility.

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The rhetoric of the fado, rather, allows for a multidirectional assimilation that exemplifies a feminist relationality. It embodies its practitioners’ relationships with the past and the future; with family and outsiders; with here and there. When taken up strategically, the fado accommodates the potentially fracturing experiences of global movement, allowing for resilience as opposed to alienation. Moreover, as a primarily oral musical tradition, the fado is accessible in both writing and in music. My father, who is among other things a composer of sentimental songs, draws on the fado in his music, as anyone who has heard his bittersweet trumpet melodies will testify. This rhetoric comes, after all, from songs of loss accompanied by the Portuguese guitar. The fado not only can be adapted to both written and oral forms, but it is also necessarily hybrid. It has evolved and changed through migration, though, as with many patriarchal traditions, this is one which Azorean American women have had to strategically adapt to other forms that suit their purposes. Whether written or sung, however, the fado is a rhetorical resource from which Azorean immigrants and their descendants can draw. Arjun Appadurai writes that “standard cultural reproduction (like Standard English) is now an endangered activity that succeeds only by conscious design and political will, where it succeeds at all” (54). Neither Caetano’s fados written in Portuguese, nor Deolinda’s family history, nor this essay represents a standard cultural reproduction. We move among geographies, languages, and rhetorical forms that have their origins in cultures we have taken up and made use of to make our points, to express a story, to communicate with ancestors in writing. All of our writing looks back, constituting a home, with the aim of making sense of our present lives, narrativizing our identities. As I gesture towards what I remember as the warm welcoming South Mills I left as a child, I reconstruct it, putting on my black shawl and singing a fado for what feels like my land of origin—the house on Brandon Ave., cousin Chucky’s convenience store where my brother and I “worked” in those deliciously long summers, dancing Tio Tony, Grandma Vieira telling jokes. These origins recede further and further, as Deolinda sings for her ancestors, Caetano sings for his in the Azores, and his parents and grandparents perhaps sang for theirs. This rhetorical form of the fado has had a staying power across generations of immigrants and across national borders. It is not pure or innocent, and gender, along with other factors, influences how it can

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be taken up and by whom. And yet the form is one with rich possibilities—particularly for an immigrant community whose displacement might be seen not as the cause for their struggles with literacy, but rather as the key to unlocking what Suárez-Orozco calls the “new energies and potentials” of mixing the “old” culture with the “new” (80). Laurinda Andrade, the Azorean American teacher who fought to teach Portuguese in Massachusetts high schools in the 1940s, as Caetano was writing his poems, understood this point well. In her 1968 memoir she writes, “The most important of all is the young people themselves, both American-born and newly-arrived immigrants who are bringing in a good and already well-cultivated background” (232–233). I will end my own fado with a memory of South Mills. My cousin Kim and I are playing in the basement of our grandparents’ house, the threefamily tenement apartment building where Grandma and Grandpa live with our young aunt, and where Kim lives with her mother and brother. It must be summer because we only go back to Massachusetts then, partly to escape the Texas heat and partly so my mother and father can see their families. There is commotion upstairs, as usual. In my memories of South Mills, there is always commotion. My mother and her sisters laugh the loud inhaling laugh that Kim and I have both inherited; my father and his cousins tell jokes and play music. There is a bit of the Lebanese (kibbe eaten with yogurt and Syrian bread from Sam’s bakery) and a bit of the Portuguese (my aunt’s salty Azorean bacalhau). Like the city of South Mills, we are an ethnically mixed clan. And then there are the old people speaking loudly, some in their languages, but mostly in ours. There is something comforting about the muffled noise upstairs and the quiet spot in the basement near the washer/dryer and the shelves of canned food where Kim and I sit. We are playing, I think, dogs, as Kim wants to be a veterinarian. All of a sudden, though, she stops her whining and barking and says something unintelligible: “Zhhhh a rrree a zhhha ash ca, eh?” she asks me, as if she really means it. And then, showing off, “It’s Portuguese. Auntie taught me.” Ah. Yet another thing I am missing out on in our new life in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, where the only occasional ambassador from South Mills is my grandmother, a small impeccably dressed elderly lady bearing Portuguese sweet bread, whom it hasn’t occurred to me to enlist in the teaching of Portuguese. Kim doesn’t teach me either, as we are soon interrupted by our boy cousins, who have found a piece of cardboard big enough for us all to break dance on.

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N ot e s 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

For their sensitive and thoughtful readings of this essay, I’d like to thank Onésimo Teotonio Almeida, Deborah Brandt, Janet Carey Eldred, Elizabeth Flynn, Susan Stanford Friedman, Beth Godbee, Ricardo Leme, and my parents. I have chosen South Mills as a pseudonym to protect participants’ identities in the larger ethnographic project of which this essay forms one piece. Anthropologist Miguel Moniz has pointed out that the Azores were used as a “blueprint and trial case” for the Portuguese colonization of Brazil (xxix). As a result, the Portuguese sent a diverse population to settle there: “In addition to the majority Portuguese population were also many Jews, Spanish, Bretons, Moors, Africans, and a sizable population from Flanders” (xxix). The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 2005 study and 1998 US Census figures show that East Coast Portuguese by and large have solid working-class jobs and make an above average amount of money for the region, but they have well below average completion of high school and college. Here are some sample comments from the forum (http://www.portuguesefoundation.org/hispanic.htm): “I am confused because people can’t figure out what I am, I am told that I look Latino or Brazilian, some say I look even Moroccan (I am so confused) Portuguese people call me “morena” I don’t really know how to classify my self when it comes to the race stuff. I know I don’t look like a typical white girl but I check off white;” “Hispanic, no. Latino, yes!”; “Portuguese are white and European, saying otherwise is just too ridiculous to mention”; “How about working for unity? Most of my Hispanic friends love Portuguese and Brazilians and consider us their brothers. And no, they do not call us Hispanic, but fellow Latinos as well”; “When I joined the Air Force we had to put our ethnicity and race on our paperwork. My recruiter put ‘Hispanic/of latin descent’ . . . Which confused me because I never claimed myself as Hispanic, but Portuguese.” Other sources describe these roots as well, but Cesar Silva et al.’s Web site, “Fado: The People’s Soul,” does it best: http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~fado/eng/index-eng.html. According to Vernon, these journals were censored in 1926; with the arrival of the dictatorship the fado itself was not censored, however. In its musical form it was, rather, a protected folk tradition under the Salazar regime. Uncle Manuel ended up immigrating to the Bahamas instead. All subsequent translations are by Ricardo Leme and the author.

Works Cited Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee. “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Assimilation.” The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Ed. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Carola Suárez-Orozco, and Desiree Baolian Qin. New York: Routledge, 2005. 35–66. Print. Almeida, Onésimo Teotonio. “Azorean Dreams.” Portuguese Spinner: An American Story. Ed. Marsha L. McCabe and Joseph D. Thomas. New Bedford, MA: Spinner Publications, 1998. 20–29. Print. Almeida, Onésimo Teotonio. Message to the author. 16 Aug. 2006 and 23 Aug. 2006. E-mail. Almeida, Onésimo Teotonio, ed. The Sea Within: A Selection of Azorean Poems. Trans. George Monteiro. Providence, RI: Gavéa-Brown, 1983. Print. Andrade, Laurinda. The Open Door. New Bedford, MA: Reynolds-DeWalt, 1968. Print. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Print. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Cobb, Amanda. Listening to our Grandmother’s Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chicasaw Females, 1852–1949. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Print.

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Connal, Luisa Rodriguez. “Hybridity: A Lens for Understanding Mestizo/a Writers.” Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford and Lahoucine Ouzgane. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2004. 199–217. Print. Gallop, Rodney. “The Fado (The Portuguese Song of Fate).” The Musical Quarterly 19.2 (1933): 199-213. Print. Graff, Harvey. The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, ME: Transaction P, 1991. Print. Harney, Robert F. “‘Portygees and Other Caucasians’: Portuguese Migrants and Racialism of the English-speaking World.” Portuguese Migration in Global Perspective. Ed. David Higgs. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990. 113–35. Print. Mao, LuMing. “Rhetorical Borderlands: Chinese-American Rhetoric in the Making.” CCC 56 (2005): 426–269. Print. Mariza. Fado Curvo. Estudios Xangrila, Lisbon: Times Square Records, 2003. McKay, Sandra Lee. Agendas for Second Language Literacy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1993. Medeiros, Caetano. “Fado de São Miguel.” Self-published, circa 1945. ———. “Fado de um Enjeitado.” Self-published, circa 1945. ———. “Fado de uma Loira.” Self-published, circa 1945. ———. “Fado de uma Morena.” Self-published, circa 1945. Moniz, Miguel. “Azores.” World Bibliographical Series. Vol. 221. Oxford: Clio P, 1999. Print. Paul, Heike. Mapping Migration: Women’s Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950s to the 1990s. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1999. Print. Perry, George. “Portuguese-Americans: The Lost Hispanics.” Portuguese American Historical Research Foundation. 30 Aug. 2005. Web. 10 Nov. 2006. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield P, 2002. Print. Rodrigues, Amália. The Art of Amália. EMI Abbey Road Studios, London, England (19521970); Estudios Valentim de Carvalho, Paco d’Arcos, Portugal (1952-1970): Blue Note Records.1998. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among AfricanAmerican Women. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000. Print. Santos, Robert. Azoreans to California: A History of Migration and Settlement. Denair, CA: AlleyCass Publications, 1995. Web. February 2, 2012 Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 2001. Print. Silva, Cesar, et al. Fado: The People’s Soul. February 2, 2012. Web. Smith, Estellie M. “The Portuguese Female Immigrant: The ‘Marginal Man.’” International Migration Review 14.1 (1980): 7–92. Print. Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. “Everything You Every Wanted to Know about Assimilation but Were Afraid to Ask.” The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Ed. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Carola Suárez-Orozco, and Desiree Baolian Qin. New York: Routledge, 2005. 67–84. Print. Taft, Donald. Two Portuguese Communities in New England. New York: Columbia UP, 1923. Print. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Center for Policy Analysis. Education and Ethnicity in Southeastern Massachusetts II: 1980–2000 (A Continuing Challenge). August 2005. Web. January 31, 2012 Vaz, Katherine. Fado and Other Stories. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Print. Vernon, Paul. A History of the Portuguese Fado. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998. Print. Vieira, Deolinda Medeiros. Unedited Family History. Unpublished, 1991. Print. Williams, Jerry. And Yet They Come: Portuguese Immigration from the Azores to the United States. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1982. Print. World Music Central. “Fado.” Web. Sept. 6, 2004. Web.

Response Traveling Literacies

Janet Carey Eldred

One

These masses point to nothing we can know. Perhaps, just this: that it’s not possible to pin the spirit by an act of will David Yezzi, “Azores”

Kate Vieira’s “The Traveling Fado” is a fusion, a critical analysis that traverses new literacy studies, rhetorica, transnationalism, and creative nonfiction. To read her essay is to start with one ethnic group in one location, Azorean Americans in South Mills, and to take excursions into the criticism that will illuminate this particular immigration experience. To read her essay is also to foray into her family history, which anchors and enriches the critical questions she poses and answers. At the core of the subfield now dubbed new literacy studies is the acceptance of the central term’s murkiness. “Literacy,” a cluster of critics have argued, is not a scientific measure but instead a concept, so loose as to qualify even as a metaphor—politically, spiritually, and culturally freighted, as all metaphors are (Scribner). Literacy also is seen as a recognizable trope (Brodkey) and a discernible narrative genre (Eldred and Mortensen). Vieira’s fado urges us to rearrange the literacy tropes and literacy narratives we’ve figured and emplotted, starting by looking more carefully at terms (assimilation, immigration) and histories we think we know well. Vieira’s extended example exposes one such narrative: Portuguese immigrants are white, and like the Italian or the Irish, they faced initial obstacles, but because of their racial characteristics, they eventually were able to assimilate. It’s a pretty story, one that can be told within a multicultural framework. But it doesn’t factually hold up. And as Vieira shows, it’s the very foundation of this narrative that’s poorly

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tailored. Start with origin: from where precisely did these Portuguesespeaking individuals or groups of individuals come? To come from the Azores is not to come from Lisbon or rural Portugal or Cape Verde or Brazil. Vieira insists that we baste the seam in the way social scientists favor—by precise invocation of location, in this case the Azores, or perhaps nine locations since nine different islands form the Azores, and Azoreans frequently identify by individual island. But this is not enough. Layering critical approaches, Vieira sets her seam tighter, stitching with the precision of rhetorical exigency. When and why did immigration occur? Might some of this migration be more accurately described as politically—or economically—inspired exile? Were these land-locked Azoreans looking for the new economic opportunities provided by nineteenth-century whaling? Or were they joining the ranks of workers in the early twentieth-century textile mills, where Azoreans worked side by side with and married Lebanese and French Canadian Catholics? Were these Azoreans in the US as a result of the l957 volcanic disaster that resulted in two Azorean Refugee Acts and the emigration of 50% of the islands’ populations? Or were these immigrants here as the result of the 1970s political revolution, which some believed was sponsored by a United States government that wanted to shore up espionage capabilities during the Cold War? (In a 1975 article for The Nation, Howard Dratch reports that “suspicions run high that the American CIA is behind the separatist movement” (456).) In still another layering of critical apparatuses, Vieira applies questions from whiteness studies, analyzing how and why and what kind of whiteness is composed by and for Azoreans. For whatever reason, the genetic makeup of Azoreans has been a fascination for historians and human biologists. The newest research (1999; 2005) continues to support the claim that Azoreans have an “admixture of high frequency Caucasoid, Mongoloid and, to a lesser degree, Negroid HLA genes” (Bruges-Armas, et al.; Fernando, et al.). In response to this fragile whiteness, Azoreans in the US have actively composed, and not without great anxiety, the kinds of white identities they believe important in the United States. Rose Emery Peters writes about how her mother designed sunbonnets for her daughters that were “like blinders on a horse—you could only see straight ahead. . . . Probably in the back of Mama’s mind was the epithet ‘black Portagee,’ which was sometimes hurled at people in the heat of argument” (113). Such efforts at pristine whiteness ultimately failed. Based on cultural factors (religion, immigration patterns, literacy rates,

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food—there’s not much difference between chorizo and chouriço), and likely also on skin color, which ranges widely even in families, Portuguese Americans are now encouraged to classify as Hispanic or Latino. All of this analysis is valuable. However, work done by scholars like Kate Vieira and John Duffy and LuMing Mao does more than just bring a global context to the already established practice of disfiguring literacy tropes and (re)reading literacy narratives; this work does more than color our literacy map with new, more colorful, and more exotic examples—the pink space of China or the blue space of Vietnam or the green space of the Azores. What rhetoricians are doing is fundamentally changing the critical map, asking us not to assume a recognizable journey from a point of origin, through the expected and unsurprising period of conflict in which there are clear protagonists and antagonists, to a denouement that spells either success or failure. In our familiar critical narratives, an individual or group, with this stable ethnic or racial identity, originating from a fixed (if often imprecise) place, assimilates or doesn’t assimilate, achieves or doesn’t achieve literacy, faces or doesn’t face obstacles such as prejudice because of skin color or other national hysterias. In 1992, when Peter Mortenson and I wrote “Reading Literacy Narratives,” we were identifying and naming a master narrative, which once named, we hoped, would open for critique. Like others in new literacy studies, we were using Graff’s formulation of a literacy myth to underscore problems with easy rags-to-riches narratives, questioning the economic Cinderella magic that was all but insured by the acquisition of reading and writing skills. Still, though we were unraveling narrative threads, the culturally powerful idea of assimilation was providing the fabric and form for the analysis. In US contexts, the immigration story looms large, to the point that it functions metonymically for all literacy stories. Immigration and assimilation close the logic of other narrative possibilities. In other words, whether immigration is present as a fact or not, a person’s life story becomes scripted along immigration plot lines: an individual (or group) is looking to break into, assimilate, merge with another. Everyone who isn’t a part of the elite cohort of Hirsch-defined cultural literacy is an immigrant of sorts. The trajectory is always in some way connected with the perceived goal of assimilation, even when multiculturalism invites us to question that goal, to ask whether assimilation is desirable or psychically healthy. In other words, our critical narratives, even those attempting to resist literacy myths, rest on the foundations of this culturally engrained plot trajectory.

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It’s only when Vieira focuses on a particular artifact of Portuguese literacy, the fado, that she begins to compose a different plot, one rooted in the resilience of saudade. Saudade is powerful enough to draw the emigrant back, and for immigrants who stay in the United States, saudade is powerful enough to make Azorean men write and rewrite the islands, and to inspire fadistas to honor them through song. When the fado is sung, Vieira argues, complete, unidirectional assimilation is impossible. Travel is invoked as the way to be fully in the world. Two

It is possible that by speaking English my mother also wished to deny her heritage. . . . When she was in her nineties she told me that many years before, when she was riding through San Leandro on an “electric car” . . . one woman said to another in the seat ahead, “This looks like a nice town to live in.” Mama was shocked by the insulting response, “Yes, but a lot of Portagees live here.” She never forgot it. Rose Peters Emery, Footprints in the Soil: A Portuguese-Californian Remembers I gave a start. It was as if I had been unmasked. My immediate suspicion was that he was needling me. But I knew he couldn’t have been. There was no way he could have known I was Portuguese. Charles Reis Felix, Through a Portagee Gate

Resilience is culturally and contextually defined, and thus generational. I might credit my resilience to my mother—in many ways, I think she embodied the word—but my resilience is necessarily different from hers, if for no other reason than that she came of age during the politics of assimilation, and I during the politics of multiculturalism. At some level, my mother understood that successful assimilation would require the kind of forgetting that, as Vieira argues, Portuguese spirituality and art and temperament don’t allow for. My mother was born and spent her childhood and early adulthood in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a kissing cousin to South Mills. She was schooled to work in textiles and raised to marry. Yet when an engagement fell through, she went to stay with her brother in Southern California, and there she met my father, who was not Azorean, and she assimilated, successfully. It was a process of identity formation, of normalcy crafting, which required severing some communication networks and building others. It was a process that took constant work. She frequently disparaged Portuguese culture. She

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preached that success could only be had by getting beyond, pulling away from, moving ahead of the Portuguese and the places they inhabited. One simply had to leave all things and all people Portuguese behind, or be trapped, pulled back, held down, hobbled by old bootstraps not designed for modern living. So she said, but I grew up watching my mother lapse into Azorean culture again and again. She and my father moved our family from Los Angeles to the San Joaquin Valley (I was eight at the time), back into a sizable Azorean population. It was familiar to her: except when it was convenient for her to do otherwise, she pretended it wasn’t. She proudly did not speak Portuguese (she of course understood it), did not participate in festa, and did not attend Portuguese mass. She did enroll us in Our Lady of Fatima School. She also picked flowers for us to present to the Virgin during the May crowning, even as she preached to us that the Virgin didn’t really exist, except as an old-world, green-horn invention. Naturally, faced with her best friend’s cancer, she lit candles in front of the Virgin’s statue, passing by Our Lady of Carmel to find Our Lady of Fatima. And even before then, during those years in Los Angeles, each time she gave birth to a child, she entrusted and consecrated us to the Virgin. She gave all her daughters the middle name Marie; to my brother she gave the middle name Joseph. We were not to notice the contradictions. To voice them raised her temper. Nor were we to notice the things she missed, the saudade that permeated our household. She missed the ocean. She missed fishing culture; our house was filled with memorabilia (“A Dead Whale, or a Stove Boat!”). She didn’t miss the food; she served it. Linguiça and beans and kale, even the blood sausage morcela, took their places in the rotation of casseroles she cooked using recipes from mainstream magazines. She added linguiça to pizza. She didn’t object when I started going with my friend to Portuguese mass, and when I was invited to do festa, she involved herself in the preparations and saved up the cash. It was an honor, despite the bribing and insider fighting that went into the selection. She knew that and lifted her head at just the right times. On one point, however, she was absolutely consistent: we weren’t to marry Portuguese men. Speak to them? Yes. Dance with them? Sure. Marry them? Absolutely not. After my father’s death, my mother had a single date with a Portuguese farmer. He’s rich, I thought. He’s handsome, I told her. And he was. He’s Portuguese, she said. End of story, sort of: eventually she married a not-so-rich, not-so-handsome, decidedly

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not-Portuguese farmer. The marriage edict, incidentally, didn’t extend to other people. My sister married a second-generation Mexican American gardener. He was as welcomed as the flowers in May. It was clear: we weren’t to think we were really Portuguese. Her family had been, at one time. They no longer were. We children never had been. She had saved us from this. We had only not to lapse. It might have worked, but I entered college in the late 1970s, when multicultural literature took off. I asked a professor about literature written by Catholics, looking, as I had been taught, for an artistic rendering of my experiences. She gave me Mary McCarthy, but I said, no, I thought McCarthy was more like memories of Protestant girlhood. It wasn’t anything I recognized. She gave me J.F. Powers, and sure enough, there were priests and nuns and Catholicism and ethnicity. It was closer, but it still wasn’t wholly familiar. I read Graham Greene, and I read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and I felt the powerful, recognizable guilt and redemption and communion. Naturally, I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was a sermon my mother would have preached: Fly past those nets! Finally, however, when I read Faulkner, I found the experience I was looking for. His plots, the obsession with race and racism, with history, with blood, the impulse to flee and venerate place—all this seemed deeply familiar to me though I had never set foot in the South. I couldn’t quite explain why that would be. Thirty years later, Vieira’s careful unpacking of race and ethnicity, her explication of the role that fadistas play in Azorean culture, offer me a critical framework that explains. Central to the Azorean experience, third generation, fourth generation, saudade lingers, that powerful yearning for what was lost, given up, thrown overboard. The fado, as an art form, grows beyond its minimal origins, Vieira argues, because it insists on mobility, on traveling, on holding together the contradictory desires to stay home and faithful to home and embrace and commit to a new one, the impossible desire to be faithful to both simultaneously. The fado makes travel possible; the further we travel, the more we need. Yes, singing the fado impedes full assimilation, but it offers a way to soften or beautify its psychic violence and mitigate the pathological impulses of saudade, the agonias to which Azorean immigrants succumb (James, et al.). Later in her life, my mother wrote a reminiscence about growing up in New Bedford. It sings the fado, remembering what was lost. My own essays have been described by people as “melancholy.”

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It is fitting that Vieira’s critical essay engages the spirit of the fado, an art form that invokes desire for the beloved, employing art to bring it closer, even as it recedes. It is also telling that her fado doesn’t promise to begin or end, but instead, is a process that records transnational travels. A fado’s resilience rests in the act of positioning itself as just one of many, successive songs. It invokes, sings to and with others. If I had to use a single word to describe Vieira’s work, it would be traveling, a key term which for her absorbs and supplants the two we now turn to—immigration and assimilation. Vieira writes about the literacies that travel with us and through which we record our journeys—political, spiritual, and aesthetic—journeys deeply personal. She invites us to consider when and how and why people move—and how literacy moves them or moves with them or, conversely, immobilizes. It’s a powerful critical framework. Works Cited Brodkey, Linda. “Tropics of Literacy.” Journal of Education 168 (1986): 47–54. Print. Brugest-Armas, J., J. Martinez-Laso, L. Allende, E. Gomez-Casado, J. Longas, P. Varela, M. Gonzalez-Granado, A. Arnnaiz-Villena, and B. Martins. “HLA in the Azores Archipelago: Possible Presence of Mongoloid Genes.” Tissue Antigens 54.4 (1999): 349–60. Print. Dratch, Howard B. “High Stakes in the Azores.” The Nation 8 Nov. 1975: 455–56. Print. Eldred, Janet Carey, and Peter Mortensen. “Reading Literacy Narratives.” College English 54.5 (1992): 512–39. Print. Felix, Charles Reis. Through a Portagee Gate. Dartmouth, MA: Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, U of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2004. Fernando, Olga, Paulo Mota, Manuela Lima, Catarins Silva, Rafael Montiel, António Amorim, and Maria Joao Prata. “Peopling of the Azores Islands (Portugal): Data from the Y Chromosome.” Human Biology 77.l2 (2005): 189–99. Print. James, Susan, Geoffrey S. Navara, Juanne N. Clarke, and Jonathan Lomotey. “An Inquiry into the ‘Agonies’ (Agonias) of Portuguese Immigrants from the Azores.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Science 27.4 (2005): 547–64. Print. Peters, Rose Emery. Footprints in the Soil: A Portuguese-Californian Remembers. San Jose, CA: Portuguese Heritage Publications, 2003. Print. Scribner, Sylvia. “Literacy in Three Metaphors.” American Journal of Education 93.1 (1984): 6-21. Print. Yezzi, David. Azores: Poems. Athens, OH: Swallow P/Ohio UP, 2008.

Reflection Kate Vieira

Janet Eldred’s generous response illuminates much that we share: the contradiction of ethnic pride and ethnic shame enacted across the “national hysteria” of race, the history of migration that refuses to be “thrown overboard,” a taste for linguiça on pizza. And yet. I was never quite so “Portuguese” as to have been in a festa or to even have been very Catholic. My mother, a former nun, baptized me in the kitchen sink after my father had a theological argument with the priest. For all practical purposes, I have fulfilled the assimilationist “mythico-history” that I critique in my essay, having lived a privileged, middle-class life often free from pesky markers of ethnicity. (“¿Eres Mexicana?” a colleague asked on my first day of teaching in a majority Mexican American school in Texas in 2001, looking at my face and hair in a searching way I have come to recognize. “The kids want to know,” he said. “No,” I shrugged, genuinely sorry to disappoint.) Which brings me to what Eldred identifies as the center of my essay: travel. She emphasizes that to trace the rhetorical paths along which our ancestors have traveled is not simply a genealogical project. Rather, it is a personal and transnational reckoning with the sociohistoric forces that have carried so many from one land to another. Through this lens of mobility, the rhetorical journeys of others can also come into focus as we make sense of our distinct, tentative, and interrelated locations, the ways we have been inscribed and the ways we write in response. An example. In an ongoing ethnographic project involving Azoreans and Brazilians in South Mills that has followed my initial drafting of “The Traveling Fado,” I had a conversation with a Brazilian mother and daughter to whom I felt especially close: we spoke in their tidy apartment down the street from my cousin’s house, in the comfortable country Brazilian dialect that I picked up in recent years and that we share. Simone—resourceful, smart, mature—was working her way through college. Her mother, Sandra, was a teacher, like me. But Sandra checked my easy identification with them at the end of our first interview. She glanced at my digital recorder and then fixed me with a quiet look:

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“You have understood by now that we are without documents,” she said, pointing out the social fact that had colored their literacy lives since their arrival in the US eight years earlier. Sandra, Simone, and I share some language, some culture, some ethnicity. Yet we arrived here differently, and we write our lives from these distinct positions, with their particular restraints. As I continue to write about literacy in migrants’ lives, I return to this metaphor of travel. Seeing us all in sociohistoric and geographic motion gives me a vantage point from which to negotiate this dialectic of knowing and not knowing, of proximity and distance, of self and other. This is how I understand the feminist relationality that the editors discuss in the introduction to this volume. Caetano, Deolinda, Simone, Sandra, Janet, and I temporarily meet in these pages, riding the fast-moving currents of literacy and history that brought us, and so many others, here.

3 Virginity and Hymen R e c o n s t ru c t i o n s Rural, Migrant Women as Agents of Literate Practices in Turkey1

Iklim Goksel Kızın en büyük serveti bikridir “A girl’s most valuable possession/wealth is her virginity” Turkish proverb

It was the early 1990s when news of virginity examinations swept the nation in Turkey. The reports of both the Turkish and Western media were consistently revealing stories about virginity examinations conducted on women. As the world began to read about the exams, the status of women in Turkey became a subject of much speculation and debate. And as the news coverage of the exams intensified, protests by women’s groups, nongovernmental organizations, and human rights organizations escalated. They declared that virginity examinations conducted on women at the request of family members and state officials were degrading and a violation of their human rights. Although their stories and media reports did not explain when and in which contexts virginity examinations were first initiated in Turkey, they did point to the weight placed upon virginity as a norm for women. Among stories told about virginity examinations, two incidents were sources of significant concern. The first event took place in 1992 when two female high school students attempted to commit suicide in order to save themselves from a virginity examination. According to media reports, a group of girls went to a picnic with boys in a small Anatolian town called Simav. Upon their return, the superintendent of the school notified the girls about his intention of having them undergo virginity examinations. Several years later in 1997, a group of girls fled from the dormitory of the Society for the Protection of Children in the city

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of Istanbul. They spent the night out in the city without notifying the school and obtaining permission. After discovering they would be forced to undergo a virginity examination the next day, they attempted to commit suicide by eating rat poison. It was clear that the girls preferred to die rather than to undergo the examination. The practice of virginity examinations points to virginity as an appropriate gender role in the Turkish context. It reaffirms the status of the hymen as the sole determinant in establishing a woman’s virginity. Hence, virginity examinations reconstruct the hymen as a powerful tool in reinforcing virginity as an ideal model of womanhood. This makes premarital sexuality and a woman’s loss of her virginity before marriage a widely scrutinized matter. As a result, women in Turkey either do not engage in premarital sexuality or choose to refrain from sexual activities that would lead to the rupturing of their hymens. However, there are also those women who freely experience premarital sexuality and lose the sole signifier of their virginity only to have it reconstructed later. Women accomplish these reconstructions by means of a medical intervention known as a hymen configuration. In this paper, I explore hymen configurations as rhetorical strategies women employ in the context of virginity examinations in Turkey. I read the practice of hymen configuration as a resilient gaze directed against the authority of established norms. It is mobilized by women’s mêtistic motivations; women’s abilities to make connections with others allow them to be agents of their own lives. By looking specifically at the lives of women who cannot read and write, I argue that women’s engagement in hymen configurations not only allows them to construct alternative spaces for themselves but also complicates attitudes toward what may be considered as literacy and illiteracy. Hence, I argue that as hymen configurations disrupt the mandates of virginity and signal women’s resilience, they also point to the construction of new forms of literacy practices undertaken by women that challenge dominant notions of literacy. Thus, starting with the premise that literacy is not merely the ability to read and write, I argue that literacy is critical thinking and authorship. As Paolo Freire and Donaldo Macedo state, in order to read, one must learn to read not just the word but the world, because “language and reality are dynamically interconnected” (29). Becoming an active participant in life entails a critical reading of the world in which one is an actor. This kind of reading involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting of what is read (Freire and Macedo). Along similar lines,

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David Barton and Mary Hamilton point to the importance of understanding vernacular literacies so that we may be able to explore literacy practices that are not patterned by social institutions and power relationships. This understanding is important because dominant literacy practices supported by powerful social institutions often push everyday practices of people to the margins and render them invisible (10). In a context where their practices are invalidated and voices are silenced, active participation in social life is often denied to these marginalized groups. David Schaafsma’s work with middle school students demonstrates how this state of oppression can be reversed. In his study, he looks at the ways in which literacy practices, such as telling stories, can work against conventional notions of knowledge so that the existing social and educational order can be challenged. According to Schaafsma, literacy practices, such as telling and sharing, have the potential to deconstruct monolithic and stereotypical constructions. H y m e n C o n f i g ur at i o n s

Dünya kadar malın olaca ğına bir damla kanın olsun “Better to have a drop of blood than all the world’s riches” an Anatolian saying

Hymen configurations are practices women initiate on their own in conditions of secrecy. They are operations performed by physicians that involve the stitching up of a ruptured hymen so that in the event of a married couple’s first sexual intercourse, bleeding will occur and the groom will be convinced he has married a virgin. In other words, it is an attempt to restore the ability of the hymen to bleed during intercourse on the wedding night. The operations are sometimes performed a couple of days before the wedding day when the first sexual intercourse between the bride and the groom is expected to take place. Physicians explain that the timing of each surgery is dependent upon a woman’s anatomy. They point out that, in some cases, the stitches do not hold the hymenal tissue together very strongly and are vulnerable to being dismantled. Therefore, performing the surgery closer to the wedding day is a safer option for some women. A hymen configuration is an outpatient procedure performed under local anesthetic. That the availability of hymen configurations allows women to take charge of their sexualities is an understatement. By means of the surgeries, women not only get a chance to repossess what they have lost,

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but they also seize the opportunity to undergo the operation more than once. That is, a hymen configuration allows a woman to “lose her virginity” not once but several times. Ordinarily, women choose to have their hymens configured because they have engaged in premarital sexual relations and do not wish their prospective husbands to know about it. However, there are also those women who experience premarital sexuality and hymen reconstruction numerous times. More importantly, hymen configurations construct another kind of woman in Turkish society. For many women who have been left outside the formal educational system and who consequently cannot read and write, a hymen configuration is not only a means to reconstruct a lost hymen but rather a literacy event. By means of engaging in activities related to these surgeries, women face the many-layered challenges of the world and learn to come to terms with the things they witness and experience. As a result, they become sources of knowledge and producers of multiple literacies. Women who cannot read and write create spaces for themselves whereby they independently engage in literacy practices as agents of rhetorical action. As they immerse themselves in tasks so they can undergo a hymen configuration, their activities pose a challenge to traditional notions of literacy and illiteracy. V i r g i n i t y E x a m i n at i o n s

Tarlayı düz kadını kız al “Buy a field that is flat, a virgin for a wife” Turkish proverb

Virginity examinations are practices that make the hymen visible as an object of spectacle. They also fix the hymen as a sexual physical characteristic and naturalize the body into womanhood. Because virginity examinations are the only practices that officially disclose the status of a woman’s hymen, they have a direct influence on women’s decisions to undergo hymen configurations. When women fail to bleed on their wedding nights, they are faced with the possibility of being taken to virginity examinations by their husbands or families. This is an especially common practice among the migrant populations of the squatter settlements, who tend to have a conservative orientation and feel that they need to protect themselves from the ‘degenerating impulses’ of city life. Hence, the decision to undergo a hymen configuration is often based on the idea of saving oneself from a virginity examination.

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Virginity examinations are performed by physicians on women to determine the status of the hymen as either ruptured or intact. During virginity examinations, an intact hymen confirms a woman’s virginity, whereas a ruptured hymen confirms its loss. Hence, based on the premise that a woman is a virgin if her hymen is intact, individuals resort to virginity examinations to establish a woman’s virginity. Virginity exams are performed at hospitals or at private doctors’ offices. Following the exams, medical reports are prepared to officially verify the status of the hymen as ruptured or intact and, subsequently, the woman as a bakire (“virgin”) or bakire de ğil (“not a virgin”). L i t e r at e P r a c t i c e s

For most women in Turkey, virginity as a normative value presents a “limit-situation” (Pinto qtd. in Freire 80) that hinders them from experiencing premarital sexuality. For illiterate women who already live on the margins of society, the gravity of virginity as a limit-situation is even more overwhelming. Not only do they struggle with the hardships of poverty, but they also suffer under the immense burden of virginity as a norm. In a context where premarital sexuality is encoded as inappropriate and immoral, women’s confrontations with the everyday signifiers of femininity and womanhood become sources of challenge and struggle. This is especially true for women of squatter settlements, who do not enjoy the privileges of financial means and social security. Nevertheless, they strive to overcome the many-layered difficulties in their lives by insistently transforming the spaces they inhabit. My interviews with women in the squatter settlements of Ankara, Turkey, not only introduced me to a terrain of transformative practices but also confirmed Alvaro Vieira Pinto’s analysis of limit-situations as real boundaries where all possibilities begin (Pinto qtd. in Freire 80). In the field, I observed that women convert their limit-situations quickly into what Pinto defines as “limitacts.” The significance of converting limit-situations into productive and transformative acts is that they represent tasks undertaken by women to counter obstacles. Women’s limit-acts are their critical responses to limit-situations. These acts represent their abilities to reflect upon their circumstances and take action to improve them. Thus, during my conversations with women of the squatter settlements, I witnessed that by means of hymen configurations, women who cannot read and write mêtistically design alternatives in their lives and engage in constant dialogue with the world.

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I listened to women’s stories that brought a liberating dimension to the strict demands of virginity for the first time at the squatter settlements known as gecekondu in Turkey. Meaning literally “put at night” in Turkish, the gecekondu are squatter settlements built on the outskirts of major metropolitan cities like Ankara where rural migrants from various regions of the country live. In addition to their poverty-stricken appearances, most of the gecekondu in Ankara are distinct due to their location on the slopes of the hills and mountains that embrace the city. The brick homes with zinc roofs stand out with their white and blue painted walls. In the summer, colorful flowers planted in tin olive oil containers and plastic yogurt cups accompany the white and blue on windowsills. A stroll in the streets of the gecekondu provides one with the remnants of old Ankara neighborhoods in a bizarre way. Homes in the gecekondu have backyards where children play and where newly washed laundry waves on ropes tied between the oleaster, quince, and mulberry trees. In the afternoons, housewives and the elderly are often seen seated on the steps of their homes talking or glancing around aimlessly. My ethnographic fieldwork in Ankara began in December 2003. I spent what comprised four months at the gecekondu until the completion of my fieldwork in June of 2005. My conversations with women focused on virginity and on their lives. As they engaged in long discussions and shared their stories with me, they repeatedly emphasized premarital sexuality as socially unacceptable conduct for women in Turkish society. I already had discovered this for a fact at other field sites, which included middle- and upper-class neighborhoods composed of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and professionals. However, although my female informants at the gecekondu expressed their discontent with the restrictive elements of virginity as well as of poverty, they also presented me with a world that negated their confines and moved on. Here, the dynamics of class segregation and the symptoms of unequal distribution of wealth are most revealing. Among women, employment as domestic workers in upscale neighborhoods is the most favored form of earning a living. For others, employment opportunities at factories and warehouses are appealing. In spite of very low earnings, it is better than tending to daily household chores in their gecekondu homes, they told me. Most of them do not know how to read and write because they either have never gone to school or were withdrawn from grade school by their parents in their first year of enrollment due to poverty.

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Lack of resources at the gecekondu does not affect women alone. The men of the gecekondu share the same disadvantages as their female counterparts. Burdened with low standards of living and financial hardships, men take jobs as gardeners, street sweepers, garbage collectors, and factory workers. To quote Fatima Mernissi, their lives manifest that “men do not have as in the so-called abundant Western societies gloring advantages over women. Men and women are equally exploited; illiteracy and unemployment are suffered by males as well as females” (176). Nevertheless, the gecekondu display a state of survivorship and pride in it. The women of the gecekondu cannot read the daily newspapers or magazines. Every day, they look at the colorful photographs of outdoor advertisements displayed on huge billboards. Although they can guess the messages the advertisements convey, they are never able to read the slogans that accompany the photographs. When grocery shopping, they never make lists of items to be purchased; they simply rely on their memory skills. At their weddings, all had an index finger dyed black because they could not sign their names on the marriage certificate. And they have never kept a diary to record important life events or to tell their stories. Finally, they have never written a love letter with a pounding heart. However, the fact that they cannot draw letters and words on paper nor decipher letters and words drawn by someone else does not situate them in an alienating world of authority that excludes them from full participation in it. On the contrary, they partake in ordinary everyday activities of life with their families and friends, many of which can be categorized as vernacular literacies. David Barton and Mary Hamilton define vernacular literacies as hybrid practices that are learned informally and that “are rooted in everyday experience and serve everyday purposes. They draw upon and contribute to vernacular knowledge. Often, they are less valued by society and are not particularly supported, nor regulated, by external social institutions” (251–52). Barton and Hamilton categorize these practices as ones that organize life: using appointment books; engaging in personal communication, such as writing birthday cards; documenting life, such as recording finances; and enjoying private leisure time, such as reading magazines (248–49). Women of the gecekondu engage in similar activities, some of which fall under the category of vernacular literacy. For example, although they cannot read nor write, they do organize their lives by going shopping and arranging informal gatherings in their homes. They also engage in personal communication by gossiping, or document their

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lives by taking photographs of their family members. Hence, women of the gecekondu are practitioners of vernacular literacies. And, their involvement with hymen configurations brings a new dimension to the ways in which their literate practices can be understood. My interviews with women at the gecekondu revealed that undergoing a hymen configuration requires organization, patience, and a careful calculation of resources and time. In order to undergo a hymen configuration, women make inquiries about the operation, learn about its health risks, calculate the appropriate time to have it, make predictions about its consequences, negotiate its price with physicians, raise the money needed for the operation secretly, make decisions about its place and time, and finally make arrangements to meet for the operation on their own terms. Such tasks are especially important for women who cannot read and write and do not work outside the home yet find the means and courage to undertake such planning and organization privately. Because many women undergo hymen configurations secretly without the knowledge of their families and members of their communities, they also become the bearers of the immense burden secrecy carries. The first phase of this challenging endeavor is locating a physician who will perform the operation. Very few women consult their close relatives, friends, and neighbors as they search for a physician. Unless they have a friend they can trust, most of them conduct the search on their own for fear of scrutiny and negative consequences. Hence, for all women, the most challenging aspect of the process is the search. While many women look for a physician who is outside their social circle to reduce the likelihood of having a mutual acquaintance, others go as far as traveling to another town. However, for most women who live in the squatter settlements, seeking a physician out of town is not an option. Although most do have female relatives in other towns throughout the country that they can confide in, undergoing the operation at another town does not secure confidentiality. For this reason, women find refuge in distant neighborhoods where they will not be recognized. The travels of these women to unfamiliar zones of distant neighborhoods within the city they live in are indicators of their resilience and skills in constructing places of encounter. Mikhail Bakhtin presents these universal motifs in The Dialogic Imagination as follows: “The road is a particularly good place for random encounters. On the road, the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people—representatives of

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all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages—intersect at one spatial and temporal point. People who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet; any contrast may crop up, the most various fates may collide and interweave with one another” (243–244). Hence, Bakhtin is an inspiration in thinking about women’s spaces on the road as places of random encounters where women meet with people they otherwise would not. On the road, women ask for directions, seek the help of strangers in unfamiliar places, and reach the offices of the physicians whom they will meet for the first time. For these women, the road is rich with possibilities, and they make use of it by engaging socially with others to develop a sense of agency. By strengthening their relationality, they allow the universal motifs of meeting and encounter to become a part of their public and everyday lives. When these women seek the help of a friend, they tackle their tasks not in isolation but rather by cooperating. On the road, they learn to become “universal audiences” (Crosswhite) for each other and build “communities of practice” (Wenger). And as Etienne Wenger tells us, individuals learn how to negotiate meaning when they work together. This negotiation involves learning how to handle tasks and finding ways to complete them together. As people invent new ways of dealing with the tasks, they still maintain different understandings of the task, and the task affects their lives in different ways. Hence, when they work together, these “illiterate” women learn to invent new ways of completing their task of finding a physician and undergoing a hymen configuration. On the road, they generate mutual accountability and decide what matters and what does not through the process of completing their tasks through relational resilience. In the end, they develop a shared repertoire. That is, they end up creating ways of doing things, gestures, and concepts specific to their own contexts. In new situations, this repertoire gains new meanings. In these communities of practice they invent, they discover how to engage in given tasks, develop relationships, and invent new concepts and strategies. My meeting with Zehra pointed to the difficulties of the road and to women’s finding ways of converting the unknown into something familiar: “I knew the name of a doctor who performed hymen configurations. His private office was just by the hospital where my cousin works. Although I had never been there before, I knew that I could easily get there by bus, but I was afraid of being recognized by one of his friends. I mean someone who knew me could happen to be walking by. I could

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not take such a risk. So, I went to a clinic in Köstence by taking the suburban train with my friend. I had never been on a train before.” Her friend Esma continued: We first started to practice. We walked to the train station every day and kept track of the time. Each day, we walked faster to understand how much time we would need to reach the train station. Once we sorted that out, we talked to some people about the train hours. The timetables were hung on the wall but we could not read them. So, as people told us the times, we made sure that we would remember them correctly. For example, I tried to remember the train’s arrival and departure times by thinking about my son’s different ages. For example, I remembered that the train in the morning departed at 8:00 a.m. by thinking about my son’s eighth birthday. It really worked! And Zehra was responsible for listening to the names of the stations. I did not occupy my mind with those station names because I still had to remember the train departure times for our return back home.

Women’s journeys in knowledge making continue on the road as they memorize colors and signs to reach their destinations for the surgeries. It is the signification of these threads of strategies, moments of critical inquiry, that capture women’s literate abilities. Indeed, women’s critical enterprises begin at the crossroads when they purchase train tickets and discover their different designs. “Pink tickets are for adults and the blue ones are for children,” Zehra commented. “You have to make sure that you have the correct ticket,” she concluded. And the transit system’s logo on the tickets furthermore furnishes a platform for observation and inquiry to the critical mind. Aysel, who had traveled to the city a couple of times in search of a physician, pointed to her engagement in the knowledge-making process. She said, “The trains are not so bad but they are usually not very clean. It should not be so hard to keep them clean. I mean, if they can afford fancy train tickets with pictures [logos] on them, then they can certainly clean the trains. I think that they are spending more money on making colorful tickets than on cleaning the trains. . . it is as if poorer people do not deserve clean trains. But do they realize that everyone, including people like us, deserve to ride on clean trains?” Perhaps the most suggestive component of Aysel’s commentary is her awareness of the social environment and her ability to express it. As she analyzes the tickets and contrasts them to the cleanliness of the trains, she also engages in a reading of a complex situation directly related to her own life. Where her life suggests poverty, the train she rides on

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further spotlights it. As she observes codes of behavior and languages outside her social circle on the train, she uses the expression “people like us” to refer to herself and her poverty. The threads of protest in her analysis allow her to arrive at conclusions about social class inequalities and her place within them. The women’s abilities in expressing the relationship between themselves and the world are just the initial steps that hint at their reading and interpretation skills. It is on the road that they begin to negotiate with virginity as a normative value. By disagreeing with virginity and its requirements, they locate themselves in a conflicting position. However, women are comfortable and feel safe in these locales. What society has instructed them to do quickly dissolves into something that can be altered, if not wiped out. Consequently, focusing on what women do to deconstruct master narratives makes the dissolving boundary between literacy and illiteracy clear. It shows that reading and writing are not isolated practices employed by the schooled. Women’s abilities in stepping outside the confines of virginity to think outside the parameters of what they have been provided works against notions that they are illiterate. Their experiences with writing and reading subvert dominant definitions of literacy practices. And it is in moments of anguish that they struggle to engage in independent research and generate knowledge. The initial meeting with a physician is also another barrier women must overcome. Women explained to me that introducing the subject matter to a physician is a challenge. Sema, a woman in her early thirties, puts it as follows: “I was nervous. I did not know whether to shake the doctor’s hand or not. I did not know where to sit and where to stand. The whole office environment made me nervous.” A woman sitting next to her added, “I did worry about whether the doctor would judge me or accept to perform the operation. But, I was more nervous about the amount of money he was going to ask for. You see, it took me months to save up the money and I was afraid that the doctor would ask for more.” Her friend added, “Usually, the doctors ask for more and you have to reason with them. In the end, they accept your offer because they are still making lots of money. I told him. I said, ‘Look, this may not equal the amount you request from your other patients, but it is still a good amount of money. And if you don’t take it then some other doctor will. I can always find another doctor who will take this money. Do you really want to lose the chance of making money?’”

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The knowledge these women possessed about the practice of hymen configurations as a profitable business in Turkey was striking. However, they were not merely aware of the fact that physicians profited immensely from performing these operations. In their view, physicians would only refuse to perform an operation if they felt they were not compensated adequately. Hence, in light of their knowledge about physicians’ monetary requests and profits, these women were not reluctant to bargain with them. “They make money because of us. What would they do if we did not exist?” another woman added. Our conversations on that particular day in this remote corner of Ankara revealed that hymen configurations present a domain where women’s bodies and medicine become commercialized. However, as women become active consumers of their bodies, they also use this commercial zone to their own advantage. They reason with physicians and bargain in order to obtain medical services at the lowest possible cost. As they do so, they use tools such as argumentation, applied criticism, and various forms of reasoning. They demonstrate the skill and ability to present an argument to persuade an “educated” medical professional who has countless years of schooling and training. By seeing themselves in a larger context, they make sure their experiences of the world are taken into account. Hence, as they convince physicians that the hymen configuration must be performed at the price they themselves establish, they situate themselves in a process of developing their ability to reason and become generators of discourse. I refer to these women’s practices of literacy as a critical literacy that “entails an understanding of the relationships between language and power together with a practical knowledge of how to use language for self-realization, social critique, and cultural transformation” (Knoblauch and Brannon 152). These women’s stories reveal the many facets of their experiences as well. They live in a squatter settlement, do not possess basic reading and writing skills, and are short of financial resources. Yet, they initiate plans to undergo a hymen configuration on their own without the knowledge of others. This undertaking is unique because these women find the means to tackle a process that is not prescribed for them. Rather, they initiate it. They do not accept the world as it is presented to them. They transform it by means of taking charge of their realities and inventing new strategies. They interpret the everyday and give meaning to social facts. Premarital sexuality and the loss of one’s virginity are presented to them as social norms. However, they mêtistically develop methods that

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allow them to analyze and evaluate these facts. In the end, they find their own solutions. A woman at the gecekondu pointed to this endeavor: I lost my virginity before I got married. I thought I was in love and willingly lost my virginity. Later, I was introduced to my husband by my family. They did not force me to get married but I agreed. However, I could not let anyone know that I was not a virgin. So, I secretly saved money and underwent a hymen restoration. This is my secret. No one ever has to know. It was my decision. My choice. My husband does not think that women should experience sexuality before marriage. I don’t agree with that idea. But I also cannot argue about it. I can never change my husband’s point of view.

Female virginity mirrors the nature of gendered social relations. In some communities it plays a role in the formation and reproduction of gender roles in the family, and in others it contributes to the production of a moral discourse. In others, it maintains societal practices that favor one gender over the other. In the Turkish context, virginity is appropriated for the female body. As everyday discourses rhetorically construct the female body as feminine and womanly, an intact hymen establishes virginity as an ideal status for women. However, by means of hymen configurations, women of the gecekondu disrupt the hierarchies these discourses support. Hence, women’s mêtistic strategies deconstruct the strict binary of virgin vs. not a virgin. This suggests a variation within gender roles women are prescribed in Turkey. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble presents the idea of “variation” as a force that allows resistance against hegemonic norms. According to Butler, gender roles exist as a result of being performed in accordance with the heterosexual norms of society. Individuals perform the acts and discourses prescribed for them by repeating and citing them. These actions seem natural because they are repetitive. After pointing out that gender identities do not exist prior to their performance, Butler questions whether the individual has the means of resisting the hegemony of norms in society. Suggesting that the possibility for resistance exists within performativity, Butler states that the “law can be cited and reiterated differently to coopt its power”(15). She says that “all signification takes place within the orbit of compulsion to repeat; agency, then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation of that repetition” (185). Literacy practices allow women to become the kind of agents that Butler discusses. By utilizing hymen configurations, women deconstruct totalizing notions regarding female virginity in Turkish society. In a

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context where virginity persists as an appropriate gender role, women offer a variation of it by initiating hymen configurations. By reconstructing their hymens, women blur the strict definitions imposed for bakire (“virgin”) and bakire de ğil (“not a virgin”). This intriguing skill of resistance echoes Michel de Certeau’s idea of perruque, the practice of “manipulating the mechanisms of discipline and conforming to them only in order to evade them” (118–122). Like the workers that de Certeau presents us with in The Practice of Everyday Life who create new objects from scrap materials, I conclude that women in Turkey manipulate the mechanisms of virginity to create alternative spaces for themselves. Hymen configurations allow them to accomplish this. The very act of undergoing a hymen configuration is a testament to a woman’s resilience and ability to manipulate the mechanisms of discipline. When virginity is presented to them as a normative value, they conform to the idea. They understand and accept the fact that they must preserve their virginities until marriage. However, this conformity does not hinder them from engaging in premarital sexuality. They secretly experience it and lose their virginity. When the time for marriage approaches, they have their ruptured hymens reconstructed. Thus, a hymen configuration allows them to evade the disciplinary force of virginity. In spite of having experienced sexuality and having lost their virginity, the surgeries allow women to still be virgins. Hence, by employing mêtistic strategies, women manipulate the mandates of virginity by both conforming to them and evading them. Thus, hymen configurations tell us that women form discourses by blending elements of their own discourse with that of others. Women embrace the authoritative discourses that ask for the blood-stained sheet on their wedding nights. However, these women reject these discourses in the form they are presented to them. They first internalize the authoritative discourses and then they synthesize them with their own. By doing so, they claim their own spaces and live outside the forced normativity of virginity. They devise alternative ways to claim their bodies and to derive sexual pleasure without confining themselves to strict definitions of virgin and not a virgin. After all, who is a woman who has undergone a hymen reconstruction after she has experienced premarital sexuality? Is she a virgin or not a virgin? Additionally, women’s experiences with hymen configurations are stories of adaptability in the Turkish context because they render adaptation to change. In Turkey, the lives of many illiterate women span

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periods of critical and rapid cultural change. My interviews with women in the field revealed that many of them have experienced profound transformations in their lifetimes. A close look at the Turkish context confirms this changing structure of Turkish society and the many challenges it brings, especially for marginalized groups, including women. The military coup of 1980 followed by the introduction of a free-market economy, and the country’s swift transition from a state-controlled economy to privatization, are some of the corresponding examples of these changes. Indeed, among women who work as domestic workers and live in the gecekondu, change is a reality of the everyday. The circulating global mass media images, the import of information technologies, and the influence and entry of English words into Turkish are just some of the sources that bring challenges into daily life. Initiating a hymen configuration amidst these forces is a reflection of strength and resilience in a culture undergoing rapid changes. It is an adaptation and survival strategy in a world that demands adaptability to social, cultural, and economic transitions. In this world, the women who undergo hymen configurations become problem posers. Although these women can neither read nor write, they enhance their abilities to think critically and make sense of the world. For them, the world is not ready made but filled with possibilities that they can discover. They are active participants in social life; they transform their worlds by interpretation, and they are in charge of their realities. They face the world and come to terms with the things they witness and experience. Although they do not assimilate to the markers of literacy and education, their skills in organizing, calculating, and negotiating point to their ability to read the world. The literacy practices of these women are captured by their abilities to undertake a task and to devise strategies to complete it. Master narratives in society label them as “illiterate.” However, their skills in formulating alternatives reveal that they are critical thinkers and independent readers of their world. They develop methods of establishing credibility while they talk to physicians. They engage in critical questioning independently as they make decisions about the safest location to undergo a hymen repair. As they analyze, question, criticize, and evaluate their circumstances, they do not reproduce previously learned knowledge. When in need, they vocalize their assumptions and work in teams. By developing relational resilience, they learn to achieve their goals together.

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The dynamics of women’s willingness to accept socially prescribed roles only to evade them point to women’s constructions of alternative modalities that undermine the authority of social norms and the hierarchies of literate vs. illiterate. By means of their competence to disrupt notions of ideal womanhood, women bind their discourses with those of others only to tell their own stories. Finally, organizing a hymen reconstruction is also a laborious process of invention because women produce an approach to a social issue. As they make plans to undergo an operation, they not only manipulate the mechanism of virginity as a norm but also appropriate hymen configurations as an alternative and a means to move beyond the structures of the gender system. This process presents as a controversial issue in the Turkish context. While some people regard it as the source of a series of ethical, moral, and religious controversies, others consider it as a reflection of social injustice and hypocrisy that confirms social inequality between men and women. For example, hymen configurations are sources of considerable profit for physicians and become a means of acquiring additional income for many of them. Although the 1992 resolution of the Turkish Physicians Association Central Council (Türk Tabibler Birliği Merkez Konseyi) and the 1994 resolution of the Turkish Physicians Association Ethics Committee (Etik Kurulu) regard hymen configurations as unethical, the operations are practiced. In addition, hymen configurations are not taught in medical schools, and they are not found in any textbook of gynecological surgery. Some assert that physicians participate in deceit by agreeing to perform the operations. According to Dilek Cindoğlu, physician engagement in hymen configurations is a form of alliance with patriarchy in which physicians contribute to the reproduction of patriarchal value systems (226). Clearly, these concerns lead to the production of a moral discourse that problematizes the dynamics of women’s lives and overlooks female competency to make decisions. Indeed, it is women’s competency that allows them to socially construct what womanhood and femininity entail in their communities of practice. As such, they redesign the parameters within which women can experience premarital sexuality. This engagement with reading and rewriting an already made world that is presented to them as fixed not only provides alternatives to women’s lives but also offers a new interpretation to notions of virginity and womanhood. The socially constructed ideas about virginity suggest it is immoral for women to engage in premarital sexuality. The strict demands of virginity

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not only deny women sexuality until marriage but at the same time make premarital sexuality a gender-specific activity that strictly belongs to the male domain. Women re-establish and identify their place within this system by performing a close reading of the requirement and by challenging it. By means of hymen configurations, women lay claim to their right of premarital sexuality. For instance, a woman in her early twenties who worked as a domestic worker said that she would continue to enjoy her sexuality until it was time for her to get married. She said, I have already slept with two men. I did not fall in love with them and I am happy for it because I would have suffered a lot. You see, men do not marry the girls they sleep around with. When it is time for marriage, they seek the help of their parents to find a virgin girl. So, I enjoyed the sex without any expectations. But soon . . . my family will want me to get married. When it’s time I will have it [hymen] put back together [reconstructed] . . . and I will never let anyone know. It will be my secret.

Her friend who was sitting next to me and had been merely sipping her coffee and listening broke her silence. She said, We are always taught by our parents and everyone else in our families that a girl’s most valuable possession is her virginity. I do not agree with that idea. I do not understand why my brother who is just a few years younger than I am can go about and have all the sex he wants while I have to wait for my husband. It is unfair! If it is virginity that our husbands want when we get married, we will give it to them. If it is the stain on the sheet, we will give it to them. I will clean houses, more and more houses. I will work even on Sundays and will save my money. And I will be a virgin again before I get married.

As these women’s comments reveal, women of the gecekondu do not constrain themselves to make a choice between virginity that prohibits premarital sexuality, and its loss, which subjects a woman to much scrutiny. Instead, they develop their own sense of womanhood based on their own desires. And, it is the ability to use their literacy skills that endows women with such potential to determine and to choose. Having the literacy skills required to act affords them the ability to re-establish and identify a woman’s place within the patriarchal arrangement that demands virginity. Hence, women’s endeavors show us that literacy is a “means to some other end” (11) because “people are active in what they do, and literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices” (Barton and Hamilton 11). Indeed,

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women’s readings of virginity, their discussions and explorations of its requirements, take them to other domains where they reach an interpretation that is outside the parameters of what they have been provided. By employing literacy, they identify a goal, reach it, and re-establish and identify a woman’s place within the patriarchal arrangement they live in. Shifting forcefully from strict definitions of literate and illiterate, the literate practices of these women inspire new attitudes towards literacy. Hierarchies of literate vs. illiterate quickly fade as new ideas evolve in our minds. We owe this evolution to women who relentlessly resist virginity and its prohibition of premarital sexuality. Within the context of virginity examinations, this perruque-like undertaking challenges any notion of an absolute and static understanding of literacy. Cathy Fleischer and David Schaafsma also challenge this notion in their study of literacy: “If a literate person was someone who could read and write well enough to survive, what about those who couldn’t read or write well but were surviving (at least in economic terms) just fine? And what about those who could read and write, but found those abilities meaningless in their struggle to survive? What did it really mean to read or write well?” (xiv–xv). In the field, I witnessed that women of the gecekondu orchestrate language. In this way, they give meaning to their own worlds and deconstruct tendencies to think of a monolithic reality for women. Hymen configurations demonstrate that we cannot totalize women’s lives only to label them as oppressed. Oppression has multiple meanings relative to context. A close reading of women and their accomplishments always reveals the possibilities for alternative forms of expression. In a context where virginity is a signifier of the female body, woman is designed and marked through various practices. Although a woman’s body serves as the medium through which the established normative value of virginity is maintained, women’s everyday practices reveal the kind of marginal and resistant modes of experience that Chandra Mohanty finds it necessary to seek in order to go beyond essentialist constructions regarding women’s lives.2 Among the myriad practices women employ in Turkey, hymen configurations stand out and pose challenges to any phallic mastery.

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N ot e s 1.

2.

The ideas discussed in this essay are part of a larger ethnographic study of virginity I conducted in Turkey and were developed as part of my doctoral dissertation titled Rhetorics of Virginity in Turkish Modernity, submitted to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009. “The category of ‘sexually oppressed women’ is located within particular systems in the third world which are defined on a scale which is normed through Eurocentric assumptions,” and “this mode of analysis, by homogenizing and systematizing the experiences of different groups of women, erases all marginal and resistant modes of experience” (Mohanty 219).

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print. Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. Print. Cindoglu, Dilek. “Virginity Tests and Artificial Virginity in Modern Turkish Medicine.” Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies. Ed. Pinar Ilkkaracan. Istanbul: Women for Women’s Human Rights, 2000. Print. Crosswhite, James. Rhetoric of Reason. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. Print. Fleischer, Cathy, and David Schaafsma. Literacy and Democracy. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1998. Print. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. 1970. New York: Seabury P, 1993. Print. Freire, Paolo, and Donaldo Macedo. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Harvey, 1987. Print. Knoblauch, C.H, and Lil Brannon. “Critical Literacy.” Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 1993. Print. Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 51–80. Print. Schaafsma, David, Antonio Tendero, and Jennifer Tendero. “Making It Real: Girl’s Stories, Social Change, and Moral Struggle.” English Journal 88.5 (1999): 28–37. Print. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Response Problematizing Literacy

Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater Not since Cher had her ribs broken to achieve a smaller waist has anyone been surprised at the ways women reconfigure their bodies in an effort to appear more desirable both to themselves and to men. Breast augmentation, labia reduction, hiney lifts, and body sculpting are common elective surgical procedures among Western women (six million American women a year seek cosmetic surgery). Surgical or cosmetic practices shaped by ethnic or religious norms such as foot binding, genital mutilation/circumcision, and neck and lip stretching suggest that they be understood within the context of particular cultures. And in spite of the collaboration of some women in perpetuating what seem to outsiders as brutal and often dangerous practices and rituals, there are reasons to read these in culturally appropriate ways. Given that the goal of ethnographic research is to step into a culture in order to understand it, this perspective is a valuable one, particularly to feminists trying to connect with women who live lives different from their own. Iklim Goksel’s ethnographic study of hymen reconstruction among illiterate women in Turkey asks that we understand the insider’s point of view of the demand for this procedure. Further, Goksel asks us to envision the women who seek hymen reconstruction as engaged in a set of literate practices within their restricted culture. The former argument I can fully agree with because of the rich data the ethnographer collects, and the analyses she shares that underscore her informants’ need to appear as virgins. The latter argument, that women seeking hymen reconstruction are agents of literate rhetorical practices, I find wanting for reasons that will be explored here. Goksel frames her paper by reviewing for us a media situation in 1990 that called attention to a case where young Turkish women were brought before authorities for examination to verify their virginity. She reminds us that these women attempted suicide rather than undergo such medical scrutiny. Goksel argues that the demand for virginity

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examinations displays “virginity as an appropriate gender role in the Turkish context” (92). While these exams do indeed take place among all classes of women in Turkey, I would suggest that they are culturally sanctioned by a patriarchal society that allows women no say in the matter of virginity, most aptly illustrated and quoted in Goksel’s article by a popular Turkish proverb, “A girl’s most valuable possession/wealth is her virginity.” For truly literate and liberating rhetorical practices to take place in this culture, I would argue that this saying needs to be revised to “A girl’s most valuable possession/wealth is her mind.” Obviously, much cultural work needs to be done for this type of revision to take place in this culture as well as our own. Goksel’s informants are illiterate women living in squatter settlements on the outskirts of a major city in Turkey where the researcher conducted her ethnographic interviews. She achieves an intimacy with them that allows her to empathize with their situation and to underscore that they create what Butler would say is a “gender variation” on the concept of virginity. Through seeking hymen reconfiguration, these women evade the traditional notion of virginity and rebuild their own definitions as neither virgin nor not virgin but virgin enough to pass and thereby resist societal norms. And, as Goksel points out, the physicians who perform these procedures also contribute to this notion of gender variation while continuing to reproduce patriarchy. Whether or not their complicity reveals resistance or greed from market demand is not addressed in Goksel’s article since it is written from the informants’ point of view. What is clear is that the researcher admires the persistence and resilience of her informants, who reject being outcasts through the laborious and financial energies involved in seeking this operation. Goksel as the ethnographer presents informative interview data about the challenges her informants undergo to accomplish their goal of reconstructive surgery because they have engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage. Given that they have no value in the marriage market without intact hymens, the option to have sex with the possibility of hymen repair can be seen as liberating to women living powerless under a patriarchal religious society. Goksel argues that hymen reconfigurations represent “a resilient gaze directed against the authority of established norms” (92). While I do see how knowledge of hymen repair can be a fallback option for women who choose to be sexually active, I would argue that such operations are desperate practices, particularly for powerless poor women who must seek physicians in secrecy and

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at great personal expense. Still, I agree with Goksel when she invokes Freire to say that the women she is studying are indeed being active participants in reading their world and seeking ways of acting in that world, one in which their sexuality has been publicly prescribed for them. As an ethnographer, I would have liked Goksel to include more about her own positioning in her study as it is not clear how she obtained access (she says she spent four months in the slums), who exactly she had access to as informants, and what language barriers, if any, she faced. Because she was an educated woman working with uneducated informants, I would have appreciated more documentation about what her role in the ethnographic process was and how she chose informants, documented their stories, and triangulated her data. Nonetheless the stories gathered from her interviews about women’s secretive journeys to locate physicians, their travel by public transportation, and their arrangements to pay for these operations with few resources are fascinating and inspiring. And yet at the same time these stories instill anger at the situation these women face and help perpetuate through complicity with patriarchal norms. While Goksel is able to show that her informants recognize the inequities of social class and access while arranging these operations, thus “reading their worlds,” the actual literate practices of reading and writing might make better tools for active participation in their lives. Whether or not I agree with the argument that hymen reconstruction is a rhetorical and literate practice, her research shares an instructive look at a cultural practice that most Western women know little about and probably could not even imagine. Ethnographic narrative provides a kind of clarity and empathy much needed in feminist research to show the resilience many women around the world share.

Reflection

Iklim Goksel Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, in her response to my essay, states that some brutal and dangerous practices need to be read in culturally specific ways and that to do this we must step into a culture to understand these practices. This thinking raises a series of problems, one of which is defining a culture, to quote Edward Said, with the “copula is” (72). Another problem is the tendency to seek “a truth” about the Other culture. Over the last two decades, scholars have been exploring the ways in which such tendencies can be overcome. Hence, by not seeking an objective reality about a “culture,” an ethnographic study that contextualizes the field site will not lean towards essentialism to create differences. In this way, scholarly work can go beyond interpreting an ethnographic text such as mine to mean what Chiseri-Strater calls “a cultural practice that most Western women know little about and probably could not even imagine” (112). Often, essentialized views of tradition and culture help sustain socalled differences between the West and its Other. Discourses on women’s experiences with patriarchy and violence further emplace them within a binary frame and speak on their behalf to tell their stories in absolute and totalizing terms. Yet, one of the recurring themes that emerges from women’s narratives in this study is that virginity as a norm does not confine women to fixed spaces within oppositional categories of liberated vs. oppressed or empowered vs. marginalized. Rather, virginity points to varying shades and nuances within women’s lives in Turkey. Although the ideals of virginity apply to the female body in the Turkish context, women’s experiences with virginity are different across the many-layered spaces they inhabit. All women in Turkey are not alike and they do not lead constant lives. Hence, this study locates women at the center, not to elaborate traditional culture and values but to contextualize their lives. In spite of the literacy and language revolution of 1928, it is unsettling that many women in Turkey cannot read and write. However,

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despite such limitations, women’s mêtistic abilities in creating alternative discursive spaces and literate practices manifest themselves in manifold ways. Women’s strategic engagements with hymen configurations point to their abilities in creating spaces outside conventional writing systems. Instead of using a textual medium, these women articulate a new medium and write texts of their own. By engaging in thinking, reflection, and conflict resolution, they construct their own narratives and speak on their own behalf. As such, they recognize themselves as subjects and legitimate their entry into the regulated spaces of the printed text. Their negotiation and problem-solving skills not only move them beyond such restrictive boundaries but also allow them to create a relationship between their own texts and those of the world. The journeys of these women capture practices that are produced by a range of social, political, and historical conditions. They are stories of virginity crucial in understanding the aspirations, resilience, and hopes of women. The practice of hymen configuration is a reflection of the demands of society within the patriarchal framework. However, they also expand the limits of how we may think about the local situation of the Other. If we accept that practices that fetishize the hymen do not enter social spaces in a vacuum, and that they are rather motivated by a range of wider influences in heteroglot spaces, it becomes enormously difficult to naturalize virginity and hymen configuration as signs of women’s oppression. The contents and effects of a normative value such as virginity raise broader questions about gender inequalities, power relations, and women’s agency. In this vein, this fieldwork was based on the premise that ethnographic research must not rely on a research model that seeks to corroborate premeditated conceptions destined to seek certainty and absolute universals. It used a qualitative research methodology known as participatory action research so that participants of the study could selfreflect and identify the issues that needed to be discussed. Due to the collaborative aspect of the research, my role as the person in charge was quickly minimized, and I transitioned from being an ethnographer into being a misafir (guest) and kom șu (neighbor). By generating discourse, by being moderators, and by introducing new topics for discussion, all of the women revealed their abilities in relational resilience and leadership within the focus-group settings. And their voices underlay a complex womanhood composed of desire, emotion, strength, and creativity that subverted any static notions of a passive victim.

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Chiseri-Strater defines the actions of the women as “desperate” and states that these women’s stories instill anger. Such remarks do not leave any room to discuss possibilities for resilience, mêtis, and agency in women’s lives. Works Cited Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

4 Diversity and the Flexible Su b j e c t i n t h e L a n g u a g e o f Sp o u s a l / P a r t n e r H i r i n g P o l i c i e s Amy Koerber In the past, solutions to the “dual-career-couple problem” have largely depended on case-by-case efforts to piece together accommodation offers when there is an immediate need to attract or retain a desirable job candidate. But change is occurring in this regard, with universities and professional organizations becoming increasingly aware that the issues surrounding dual-career-couple hiring are too large and complex to be dealt with only on a case-by-case basis. Reflecting this growing awareness, within the last decade at least two major scholarly books have been published (Ferber and Loeb; Wolf-Wendel, Trombly, and Rice), providing long-needed research data that has sparked calls for change at both the national level (American Council on Education) and at individual universities (Earth Institute; Task Force on Women Faculty). As a result, many universities now have policies that formalize the practice of dual-career-couple hiring, offering options to administrators and sometimes even making funds available to help departments when a top candidate’s acceptance of the job offer depends on what can be offered to the spouse or partner. Interestingly, such policies often foreground faculty diversity as one of the primary reasons to address the dual-career-couple problem, marking a dramatic turn away from a notso-distant past in which spousal/partner appointments were seen as a form of discrimination or were forbidden by antinepotism policies. This essay examines some of the rhetorical dimensions of these shifts in understanding of the dual-career-couple problem. In particular, I explore how the rhetorical connections that dual-career-couple policies forge between spousal/partner hiring and issues of faculty diversity relate to larger social and political trends that scholars such as Lisa Adkins, Emily Martin, and Nigel Thrift have attributed to the emergence of the flexible subject as a cultural ideal. The concept of flexibility and

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the theoretical discussions that have developed around it, I contend, resonate in important ways with resilience as it is theorized in this book. In particular, both concepts, when enacted as cultural ideals, force us as feminist scholars to confront questions about agency and responsibility: Who is expected to adapt and change their existing practices to live up to these ideals? Could academic institutions foster relational resilience as they work to make well-entrenched practices of hiring, promotion, and tenure more flexible? Or as our culture comes increasingly to idealize qualities such as resilience and flexibility, will the burden for possessing these qualities ultimately fall back on the individual? As the editors note in this book’s introduction, “Resilience . . . includes complex, always shifting, often contradictory meanings and is always embedded in a rich cultural context” (22). Reflecting this idea, and keeping in mind the m ệtistic, shape-shifting qualities of public rhetoric, this chapter’s analysis calls attention to the contradictions emerging as flexibility is invoked in various forms of institutional and cultural rhetoric currently developing around dual-career-couple hiring and diversity. In much of the idealistic rhetoric that is urging universities to address the dualcareer-couple problem, I demonstrate, the move to connect this hiring issue to diversity efforts can be seen as an attempt to enact the aspects of cultural flexibility that theorists deem most promising. Specifically, these idealistic rhetorics in support of dual-couple-career hiring practices, often based in careful research of this problem from the perspectives of institutions as well as individuals, call on administrators to find innovative ways to make the university hiring process more flexible; one might say these rhetorics encourage institutions to become more resilient in a manner potentially compatible with the feminist rethinking of resilience as relational and network based rather than a trait possessed (or not possessed) by an individual. Toward this end, such idealistic rhetoric links the dual-career-couple problem to other aspects of the tenure-track work environment, such as parental leave policy and daycare availability, that have already been acknowledged to be in need of reform if universities want to attract and retain a more diverse workforce. Because the cultural rhetorics that I examine in this chapter seem to depict flexibility as a quality that can be built into systems rather than just a quality demanded by successful or heroic individuals, this chapter’s analysis makes clear that scholarly conversations on the cultural idealization of flexibility resonate in some important ways with our efforts to rethink resilience from a feminist perspective—clearly, the demand that

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institutions become more flexible in response to dual-career couples’ needs is a notion that warrants reflection from feminist scholars interested in theorizing relational resilience. But when we shift our focus away from the idealistic rhetorics of the professional organizations and task forces that are calling for large-scale change in dual-career-couple hiring practices and instead take a closer look at the specific language of the policies that particular institutions have developed in response to these calls for change, a different picture of relationships between institutional flexibility and relational resilience starts to become visible. This picture is less sanguine and is more compatible with traditional notions that posit resilience or flexibility as traits possessed by individuals. In fact, the rhetoric of the policies I examine does not always necessarily deliver on the positive changes we are encouraged to hope for from idealistic calls for change. Rather, this bureaucratic language emphasizes institutional benefits and strategic hiring opportunities aimed at ameliorating the dual-career-couple situation for administrators but doing little or nothing to protect candidates. Although the language of such policies does ostensibly connect dual-career hiring to diversity issues, it does not seem to be realizing the promise of large-scale changes being called for by some of the stakeholders in this controversy. Such language might be thought of as m ệtistic, or shape-shifting, in this sense, although this is the aspect of m ệtis we must engage with ethical vigilance. Ultimately, then, the chapter’s analysis reveals that the language used in these university dual-career-couple hiring policies highlights not only the promises and possibilities but also some of the difficulties we are likely to encounter as we attempt to put into practice the ideas emerging from feminist efforts to theorize resilience as processual or relational. Although dual-career-couple hiring has received a great deal of attention from empirical researchers, theoretical attention to the issue has been minimal. My hope is that this essay will spark further theoretical discussion of the subject, starting conversations that will guide us in evaluating institutional changes that are beginning to occur and in making conscious decisions about future directions for change. The essay begins by providing some historical context on the dual-career-couple problem. I then connect this problem to contemporary trends that theorists in anthropology, economics, and gender studies have described as the emergence of the flexible subject. Next, I use the related concepts of flexibility and resilience as a lens through which to analyze the rhetorical connections being forged between spousal/partner hiring and

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diversity in four different policy documents. The first two policy documents reflect the more idealistic stance adopted by professional organizations and task forces that have called on universities to be more flexible with regard to dual-career-couple hiring practices, and the second two reflect the efforts of two different universities to answer this call. Although the dual-career-couple problem is often defined broadly to include couples with all types of careers, the particular focus of this essay is on policies that address couples in which both partners desire tenuretrack positions. A Br i e f H i s t o r y o f t h e Du a l - C a r e e r - C o up l e P r o b l e m

Before the 1960s, dual-career-couple employment was generally not seen as an issue worthy of societal or institutional attention. Of course, societal expectations at this time made it less common than it is now for both partners in a traditional marriage to expect professional employment. But even for couples who did depart from social norms in this regard, employment at the same university was not conceived as a viable option because most colleges and universities had antinepotism policies that would have prevented them from employing two married partners even if it were possible or desirable to do so (Norrell and Norrell 207). The emergence of the dual-career couple as a problem significant enough to deserve societal and institutional attention can be traced to the 1960s and 70s when the percentage of US doctorates awarded to women sharply increased (Stephan and Kassis). In response to this shift and the corresponding rise in the need for dual-career-couple employment, since the 1970s, most institutions have removed antinepotism policies, thereby removing one significant formal obstacle to dual-careercouple employment (Ferber and Loeb 6). The turning point in general beliefs about the dual-career-couple problem seems to have occurred sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In a 1984 survey, most respondents expressed regret that they had lost top candidates because their institutions were unable to assist in spousal/partner employment, but the same respondents still largely believed that the dual-career-couple problem should be dealt with by individual job seekers, not by institutions (Spenser and Spenser qtd. in Norrell and Norrell 208). By contrast, in a 1991 commentary, Gordon Gee makes the following observation, based on his several years of experience as a university president: “The burden of developing strategies for dual-career couples is shifting inexorably away from individual

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applicants and toward the institution. Despite a variety of arguments asserting that a university cannot and, in fact, should not attempt to address every personal concern and problem encountered by its potential employees, there is little doubt that some level of assistance for dualcareer couples will be required” (46; emphasis in original). A widely cited report that conveys the findings of a 1999 survey on dual-careercouple hiring in the sciences echoes Gee: “Although, to a degree, the dual-career problem is a personal one, which couples must resolve in their own ways, the solutions are inevitably influenced by the institutions where one or both partners are seeking employment. The response of potential employers can either ease or exacerbate the dual-career problem” (McNeil and Sher 33). This pragmatic approach has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. The current sentiment, which is the focus of this essay, is that universities need to do much more than just remove formal obstacles to spousal/partner employment—rather, they should formalize the practice of hiring spouses or partners and implement policies to guide and support the various stakeholders involved in dual-career-couple situations. In fact, current research suggests that administrators at today’s universities (especially the larger research institutions) feel they have to either find creative solutions to the dual-career-couple problem or run the risk of losing top candidates to other institutions that do a better job in this regard (Wolf-Wendel, Twombly, and Rice, Dual Career Couples; Two Bodies). It is in the rhetoric surrounding this emerging understanding of the need for institutional solutions to the dual-career-couple problem that we start to see the connections among spousal-partner hiring, diversity, flexibility, and resilience. F l e x i b i l i t y a s a Cu lt ur a l I d e a l : P r o m i s e s a n d P r o b l e m s

Recent efforts to theorize the flexible subject, originating in fields such as anthropology, economics, and organizational theory, provide a useful framework for understanding some of the larger cultural forces surrounding the current push to develop institutional solutions to the dual-career-couple problem. As scholars in various fields have recently noted, organizations of all types are now urged to be more fluid and flexible so they can adapt to dramatic changes, such as increased reliance on information technology, a more diverse US workforce, and an increasingly global marketplace. Because the recent rhetoric urging institutions to develop solutions to the dual-career-couple problem

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reflects some of these same ideals of fluidity and flexibility, which have some obvious parallels with resilience, these scholars’ observations provide a useful starting place for analysis of such rhetoric. Emphasizing the aspects of organizational flexibility that seem most promising from a feminist perspective, anthropologist Emily Martin observes that experts in various fields are urging corporations to “become like biological systems that successfully survive in nature” (208). In contrast to the “linear work sequence of the moving assembly line, its machinery dedicated to mass production and mass marketing,” today’s ideal organization is “a fleeting, fluid network of alliances, a highly decoupled and dynamic form with great organizational flexibility” (209). The same phenomenon to which Martin refers is also discussed in other ways. As Nigel Thrift observes, today’s companies “live in a permanent state of emergency, always bordering on the edge of chaos, and no longer concerned to exercise bureaucratic control” (674). Thrift describes the new organizational characteristics demanded by this change: “‘Organization man’ is gone. In his stead, new subject positions must be invented. Managers must become ‘change agents,’ able, through the cultivation of new disciplines and skills, to become the fastest and best” (674). The parallels to resilience are evident in such language, which describes the mêtistic nature of the contemporary managerial change agent. Clearly, the focus on rational planning and logical action has given way to a more situational, inductive, and chaotic mode. In the rhetoric that surrounds this newly emerging organization, we might say organizations are being encouraged to adopt more flexible practices so they can become more resilient in an increasingly competitive, demanding, and complex world. On the surface at least this idea seems quite compatible with feminist efforts to rethink resilience as relational, processual, and network based rather than as a personality trait or capacity. Despite all this apparent promise, though, cultural theorists also sound a note of caution about the new emphasis on organizational flexibility. These critics’ concerns arise from the fact that the rhetoric that idealizes flexibility does not always make clear how much of the demand for flexibility falls on the organization and how much falls on the individual. In other words, there is a less sanguine side to the rhetoric of organizational flexibility, and it is often masked by the upbeat nature of the rhetoric that promotes this ideal. Specifically, such critics observe, the same rhetoric urging today’s organizations to become more flexible and innovative also creates new subject positions for workers in

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the organizations—subject positions that lead to new divisions between those workers who are flexible or fast or resilient enough to keep pace with the new economy and those who are not. As Thrift observes, today’s organizations demand “‘fast’ subject positions that can cope with the disciplines of permanent emergency” (675), and “for there to be faster subjects, there have to be slower ones” (688). He points to contradictions that arise in the rhetoric of flexibility because of these demands: And the rhetoric of this new business ecology is all nice. This is a world where business is smart and fast, but also has values and reaches out to the community. . . . Or it may be something else, and this is my second conclusion. Maybe what we are seeing is a new phase of imperialism. In the nineteenth century, a great map of mankind was developed by the ideologues of western nations based upon the distinguishing characteristics of race. . . . Now, perhaps a new great map of personkind is coming into existence, a map based upon other attributes of personhood and, most specifically, potential for innovation and creativity. (688)

Similarly, Martin refers to the potential downside of the new emphasis on flexibility as an “emerging form of neo-social Darwinism.” It is distinguished from traditional social Darwinism by the notion that the fittest subjects are those most able to adapt to changing situations rather than those who must accept the limitations of what they are born with: “Unlike Darwinism, the outcome is not linked to the original biological material with which one was born. This kind of evolutionary adaptation is focused on the ever-changing individual in his or her unique environment” (240). In short, these critics speculate, even though there seems to be a great deal of pressure on organizations to become more flexible, there might be less visible, more subtle pressures that operate on employees as well: some might come to be seen as more fit than others because they already possess the kind of adaptability and flexibility deemed necessary to survive and do not require organizations to grant them flexible schedules, paid personal leave, and the like. Of course, we have to worry that this phenomenon will have specifically gendered dimensions. It is too simplistic to assume that gender binaries will be abolished in the new, more flexible organizations being called for; rather, we must assume that gender binaries might be rearranged. Perhaps they will even reappear in forms that are at first hard to recognize. As Lisa Adkins argues, “While the new workplace ideals of flexibility and mobility may signal an end of a traditional masculine/

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feminine binary, gender in contemporary culturalized economies is not simply being undone but rather is being arranged in new ways, an arrangement that I suggest concerns positions of flexibility and immanence” (670). Along these lines, Adkins refers to previous workplace research suggesting that “only some workers are able to achieve mobility in relation to subject positions” (686). In more specific terms, this research suggested that “while men professional workers can ‘take on’ the aesthetics of femininity and perform ‘reversals’ and new gender hybrids, women professional workers not only find it difficult to ‘take on’ masculinity, but performances of masculine aesthetics often have negative workplace consequences” (686). Clearly, there is enough similarity between flexibility and resilience as cultural ideals that we should certainly heed the note of caution feminists are expressing in regard to flexibility. In fact, the concerns these critics have voiced about flexibility as a cultural ideal relate in interesting ways to some of the current business literature on resilience. Much of this literature seems to realize the worst fears that critics have expressed in regard to the flexible subject by placing the responsibility for fostering resilience more on the employee than on the organization. One recent study, for instance, defines resilience, along with hope and optimism, as “positive psychological resource capacities” and sets out to determine how these capacities impact “desired work-related employee outcomes” (Youssef and Luthans 774). In fact, a growing body of research in business and related fields provides empirical data that will presumably help organizations foster qualities such as resilience in their employees (e.g., Sutcliffe and Vogus; Waite and Richardson; Zunz). These critics’ observations leave us with several important questions about the ultimate impact of the flexible, resilient subject on gender relations for the twenty-first century. If flexibility and resilience are to be increasingly idealized, how will this changing situation impact gender relations in today’s workplaces? Who exactly is being urged to become more flexible and thus to foster resilience? In the next section, I explore these questions more deeply by looking at the language being used to forge connections among spousal/ partner hiring, diversity, and institutional flexibility in four different policy documents. As I demonstrate, both the promise and the potential problems in the recent push for institutional flexibility in the face of the dual-career-couple problem can be understood with reference to the issues that theorists such as Martin, Thrift, and Adkins have

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identified in the emerging idealization of flexibility at various levels in late-capitalist society. F l e x i b i l i t y I d e a l i z e d : R e p o rt s o f t h e A m e r i ca n C o u n c i l o n E d u c at i o n a n d t h e H a rva r d Ta s k F o r c e o n W o m e n Fa c u lt y

Theoretical observations about both the promise and the problems inherent in the emergence of the flexible subject as a cultural ideal, and the attendant value placed on resilience, creativity, and proactive responsiveness, provide a useful backdrop for examining some of the key policy documents surrounding the push for institutional solutions to the dual-career-couple problem. In this section, I examine two documents that represent a more idealistic approach; both documents urge universities to develop solutions to the dual-career-couple problem without stipulating the details of such solutions or addressing the logistical difficulties that can arise. As such, these two documents mirror the more promising side of institutional flexibility as a means of fostering the relational resilience discussed in the previous section. The 2005 American Council of Education report, which has brought national attention to the dual-career-couple problem, calls for dramatic changes in university hiring and tenure practices that explicitly reflect the same ideals of fluidity and flexibility that Martin and others identify in today’s corporate rhetoric. In fact, the report is titled An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Careers. Echoing Martin’s observations about the idealization of organizational flexibility, its executive summary urges universities to “create more flexible career paths for the tenure-track professoriate.” Creating such flexibility is a necessary move, according to this report, if universities want to attract and retain top faculty and remain competitive on the global level—or, we might add, if they want to remain resilient. Similar to much of the corporate rhetoric that scholars such as Martin and Thrift examine, the ACE report’s executive summary mentions gender and ethnic diversity as one of the primary forces creating this need for flexibility: “There is a growing need for higher education faculty to reflect the diverse demographics of students.” Adding a post-9/11 twist, the ACE report even relates the need for increased flexibility to issues of national security: “As national security issues heighten and the number of international scientists who study and work in the United States decreases, this country will increasingly depend on the capacity of U.S. research universities

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to continue to produce American scientists and engineers who engage in innovative research” (iv). As the executive summary goes on to say, “Career flexibility for tenure-track faculty is key to attracting and retaining this scientific workforce in academia.” The report calls specifically on presidents and chancellors to develop innovative solutions that will make universities more flexible. Along these lines, one of its recommendations for making the tenure track more flexible is to “provide assistance to new faculty hires with spousal/partner employment needs and other family-related relocation issues” (9). Similarly, in a recent call for institutional change, the Harvard’s 2005 Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty advises implementation of a dual-career-couple policy alongside other reforms such as improved daycare availability and parental leave policies as moves that are necessary if the institution wants to achieve its goal of increased gender and ethnic diversity. As noted in the first sentence of the Harvard report’s executive summary: “In spite of more than three decades of concern, Harvard has made only limited progress in its efforts to create a genuinely diverse faculty” (4). Like much of the rhetoric currently surrounding dual-career-couple hiring, the Harvard report targets university officials, calling on them to implement changes from the top down, starting with the creation of a new position titled Senior Vice Provost of Diversity and Faculty Development. One of the Harvard task force recommendations is to “establish a University-wide dual-career program” that “would be charged with facilitating dual-career opportunities (both academic and non-academic) for partners or spouses of new hires or of current tenure-track and tenured faculty” (34). The report recommends a twopronged approach, which would involve coordinating spousal/partner employment within Harvard but also forming a consortium that would help locate opportunities in the region. The rhetorical connection among dual-career-couple hiring, diversity, flexibility, and resilience in documents such as these can be seen as reflecting feminist ideals of the embodied subject. The emphasis on dual-career-couple hiring as a means of increasing faculty diversity could be deemed compatible with the feminist objective to achieve gender and racial equity. In fact, much of the recent research suggests that dualcareer-couple hiring is a women’s issue, positioning it along with parental leave and childcare issues as targets for institutional changes crucial to recruiting and retaining talented women faculty (see, for example,

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Didion; Earth Institute; Macfarlane and Luzzadder-Beach; McNeil and Sher; Rushing). Such efforts relate to feminist resilience insofar as they seem to call on institutions, rather than just on individuals, to adapt to changing circumstances—to become more resilient by adopting more flexible hiring and employment practices. Viewed against the cultural backdrop theorists such as Martin describe, it seems that as the ACE report and the Harvard task force report articulate connections between spousal hiring and diversity, they also articulate a new flexible subject as the ideal for both the people involved in academic hiring and those they try to recruit. Calling for these kinds of changes seems to acknowledge that it is not feasible anymore to think of new hires as disembodied intellects floating freely from one job to the next in search of the best opportunity. In the best-case scenario, from a feminist perspective, this idealistic rhetoric suggests that dual-career-couple policies should make the playing field more even so the candidate with a partner who needs employment can compete more equally with the unattached one. It also suggests that implementing dual-career-couple policies is one of several reforms universities can undertake to accommodate tenure-track demands to the situations of people who have family members to care for and other responsibilities outside work. Few would deny that dual-career couples and faculty diversity are both pressing issues for university administrators today. But what exactly does it mean to rhetorically connect these two issues, and to couch them in terms of the flexible subject, as the ACE report does? The connection, after all, is not inevitable. In fact, as Wolf-Wendel, Twombly, and Rice point out, one of the most persistent criticisms of dual-career-couple policies is that they discriminate against those who are not married or partnered (The Two-Body Problem 120–24). It is, in some ways, hard to reconcile this criticism with the current emphasis on diversity. One point that helps clarify this situation is that, as Wolf-Wendel, Twombly, and Rice point out, academic careers have always demanded some type of flexibility. Traditionally, the expectation for flexibility landed on the wife, who was expected to move whenever necessary to accommodate her husband’s career. As such, one could argue, the need for flexibility was hidden; it was a private concern rather than public. This way of thinking seems compatible with traditional notions of resilience in that it casts the successful wife as one who is resilient because she is flexible: the ideal wife is one who can pick up and resume her life

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at whatever location her spouse’s job might lead her. Of course, this type of individual flexibility is still demanded in today’s situations, except that with more women receiving PhDs, there is a less clear-cut gender divide to dictate which partner will have to be flexible and resilient. In a bestcase scenario, we could hope that dual-career-couple policies would shift this burden for flexibility or resilience, or at least part of that burden, to the hiring institution rather than the academic couple. C o m p e t i n g D e m a n d s : A C l o s e L o o k at T w o I n s t i t u t i o n a l P o l i c i e s o n Du a l - C a r e e r - C o up l e H i r i n g

My analysis in this section focuses on the dual-career-couple policies of two major research universities, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan. The two policies are similar in that they indicate a proactive stance toward dual-career-couple hiring on the part of the university, treating it as an incentive that can be used to attract job candidates, especially those in target minority groups, who are likely to have competing offers from other institutions. In adopting such a proactive stance toward the dual-career-couple problem, it would seem these institutions are responding to a call to enhance their resilience by adopting more flexible practices. These are also two of the most ambitious and thorough policies that my research turned up, and they are notable because they indicate that, at least in certain exceptional cases, the university will provide funds to help out departments that face dualcareer-couple hiring situations. By looking closely at the language of these two dual-career-couple policies, we see evidence of critics’ observations about the competing demands between institutional and individual flexibility and resilience. In contrast to the more idealistic rhetoric of the ACE report and Harvard’s Task Force on Women Faculty report, turning to the rhetoric of actual institutions’ policies reveals some unresolved tensions on the question of who will bear the burden for the increased flexibility and resilience demanded in today’s world. The general aim of these two policies seems in some ways compatible with the institutional flexibility called for in the documents examined in the previous section—organizations are urged to increase their resilience by allowing for greater flexibility when a strategic hiring opportunity might be missed if spousal/partner employment is not an option. For example, titled the Faculty Strategic Hiring Initiative, the University of Wisconsin’s policy is supported by a “Strategic Hiring

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Fund of one million dollars per year that the Provost’s Office will use to help fund the initial years of high-priority faculty hires” (par. 1). The University of Michigan’s policy includes similar language, although it is less explicit about the amount of funding available to assist departments and the means through which departments can attain such funding. The Michigan policy simply states that upper administration “provides supplemental resources to help the schools and colleges and other academic units to hire and retain a diverse faculty, to assist the dual career partners of tenure track and tenured faculty, and to respond to unique opportunities” (par. 1). In the University of Wisconsin’s policy, the connection to diversity is made clear in the part of the policy that explicitly lists those categories of hires that would be considered “high-priority”: tenured or tenuretrack minority faculty, tenured or tenure-track women, dual-career couples. The policy memo further specifies under the latter heading that “priority will be given to dual-career hires that will contribute to faculty diversity; i.e., where hiring the partner/spouse will help in hiring or retaining a targeted minority or woman faculty member.” It is important to note in this policy that dual-career-couple assistance is only one way the designated funds can be used to attract high-priority candidates; funds from the million-dollar annual pool can also be used “to help provide competitive salary or to enhance start-up packages.” By implementing policies and funding initiatives such as these, it is clear that these universities perceive an employment offer to the spouse or partner of a first-choice candidate as a way to gain a competitive edge in cases where such a candidate or his/her partner might have multiple job offers. Such policies tend to treat spousal/partner accommodation as one of many possible incentives the university can offer when there is an exceptional candidate to be recruited, emphasizing that such incentives are most likely to be granted when doing so will add a woman or minority faculty member to an area in which they are underrepresented. In this manner, institutional flexibility seems to be emphasized in formal policies on dual-career-couple hiring; the more flexible institutions can be, the more likely they are to win the contest over top candidates and, thus, the more resilient they will be in the ongoing competition with other academic institutions. Making funds available would seem to enhance these institutions’ abilities to enact m ệtis by acting resourcefully to turn what could be perceived as a serious problem into a great opportunity.

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This approach, which focuses on the options available to those who make the job offer, raises some important questions. Does such a policy actually change the reality for dual-career couples, or does it just formalize and provide institutional support for the case-by-case approach that has typically been used in the past? In the case-by-case approach, it is likely that the candidates who are most highly sought-after by multiple institutions will be the ones who manage to find suitable employment for both partners at the same institution because of institutional response to market pressure. Does a formal policy really alter this situation? Having a dual-career-couple policy at the college or institution level, such as those of Wisconsin and Michigan, ostensibly compels departments and search committees to increase their resilience by making their hiring practices more flexible. In the best-case scenarios, such a policy would be supported by funding to partially cover the cost of employing a spouse or partner. This potential for moving the dual-career-couple situation above department politics, I would argue, is the most promising aspect of the recent policy rhetoric. As Patrice M. Buzzanell observes, “crafting a new normalcy” can be an important strategic move toward resilience, and in this case, such policies seem potentially able to contribute toward such a goal. As Norrell and Norrell observe, the typical academic hiring process, which is usually handled at the department level, can be “a structural impediment to the hiring of dual-career couples” (209). There is plenty of research and anecdotal evidence indicating that such situations can still cause duress and uncomfortable politics at the department level, but the move to address the situation at levels higher than the department suggests that, at least in certain exceptional situations, the concern for strategic hiring can outweigh the concern for departmental autonomy that can otherwise be an obstacle to spousal hiring. Connecting strategic hiring to diversity makes the case all the more compelling in response to those stakeholders who might resist or resent the perceived loss of departmental autonomy. In situations where the university bears some of the cost for such hires, this might also potentially relieve some of the negative department politics that could arise if the department had to bear the entire burden. However, even when the terms are specified and the funding is promised, as in the policies of Wisconsin and Michigan, it could be argued that policies such as these do little more than formalize the practice of handling dual-career couples on a case-by-case basis. It is hard to see how such policies, even if widely adopted by universities across the

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country, would lead to the same kind of large-scale change we can reasonably hope for in regard to other reforms often listed alongside dualcareer-couple policies, such as parental-leave policies. Taking Wisconsin as an example, providing a million dollars to help out departments seems quite generous compared to what other institutions promise (which is usually nothing), but given the terms of the funding allocation and the expense of covering salary and fringe benefits for faculty positions, it is hard to believe that the university would be able to come close to addressing all of the dual-career-couple needs presented to them in a given year. Rather, it seems more likely that the policy will just formalize the practice of offering spousal/partner accommodations to the academic stars who are most likely to have competing offers. Returning to critics’ observations about the more troublesome side of the new emphasis on flexibility, one has to wonder about the effects of such policies on job candidates. Recalling such critics’ observations about the new hierarchy of subjects that could emerge as flexibility is increasingly idealized, the potential problem arises if some candidates are seen as more inherently flexible and thus more resilient than others. Will we end up with a situation in which some candidates (unattached women or men) are seen as inherently flexible and thus resilient, whereas others (those with spousal/partner hiring needs) are seen as requiring institutions to bend and adapt? Could this set of circumstances have unintended consequences? Although it is clear that such policies offer institutions more options when facing a potential dualcouple hire, it is less clear what the policies promise for the job candidates in such situations. It is interesting, for instance, that neither of these institutional policies addresses the job candidates’ rights to not disclose their partner status during the search process. This can pose a dilemma for job seekers as well as the departments who recruit them. In some cases, disclosing his or her status early in the search might benefit the candidate because it will allow departments and administrators more time to work on the problem, but in other cases, it is bound to hurt the candidate because the institution will rule them out and opt for someone else who does not come with the baggage of a spouse or partner who needs employment. Right now, we only have anecdotal data in this regard, and very little at that. But the data we do have suggest that at least some couples have experienced discrimination on the job market because of their personal status (McNeil and Sher 34). McNeil and Sher describe it as a

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“delicate dance”: “One of the most delicate issues surrounding the twobody problem concerns the appropriate time to discuss the situation with the prospective employer. Half of our survey respondents told a potential employer about the dual-career situation before or during the interview; the other half did not” (36–37). Another concern in this area is what the currently available data are showing about the gendered dynamics of the need for dual-career-couple policies and who is benefiting from them. We do have some empirical data on this subject. For instance, McNeil and Sher’s 1999 survey of physicists revealed that the dual-career-couple problem is more likely to impact women’s careers than men’s for two reasons. First, their data showed that women scientists are more likely to be partnered with other scientists. In their survey, 79% of married women were partnered with other scientists, whereas only 18% of married men were partnered with other scientists (32-33). Second, anecdotal evidence from their survey suggested that women physicists were more likely than men to place their scientific careers on hold or settle for a lesser job so their partners could accept an ideal job (33). Extending McNeil and Sher’s findings, more recent research shows a definite hierarchy of people who are likely to be helped by dual-career hiring policies: minority candidates, full professors, and women are at the top of this list, and men are at the bottom (Wolf-Wendel, Twombly, and Rice, Dual Career Couples; Two Bodies). Does this mean that institutions are more likely to hire the partner of a woman than the partner of a man? Or are women more likely than men to ask for help in attaining employment for their partners? Can we assume that women continue to be less mobile than men on the whole? Some of the data on scientists strongly support this speculation: women physicists, for instance, are much more likely to be married to another physicist than are men physicists. If this is the case, as I suspect, then it could result in unintentional backlash—if women candidates are perceived as more likely to need spousal/partner hiring assistance, then this perception could become (and probably already is, in some cases) another reason to steer away from them. We must be cautious about creating policies that unintentionally reinforce a perception that might be, to some extent, based in fact. As Norrell and Norrell comment, “The presence of [dual-career-couple] programs does not guarantee their effectiveness” (220). Furthermore, Norrell and Norrell observe, “Although overt discrimination is now prohibited, the decisions to hire, promote,

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and tenure women are not often public” (205), and “Although formal anti-nepotism policies that formerly represented overt discrimination against dual-career couples have now been challenged, subtle discriminations that affect academic couples have been apparent” (206). This type of subtle discrimination is also noted quite frequently in anecdotal evidence from academic couples who have been on the job market together. Again, open-ended responses in the McNeil-Sher survey are telling in this regard: “Our respondents reported that some institutions actually give reduced consideration to dual-career couples, claiming that it is easier to hire and retain people who are unencumbered” (33). As a possible solution to this dilemma, it would be a great improvement if dual-career-couple policies could stipulate some kind of institutional mechanism to allow candidates to confidentially communicate their partner/spousal employment needs to someone not in the department or search committee, similar to the manner in which university equal opportunity employment offices typically collect demographic data about the applicants for a particular job without disclosing that data to search committees. This mechanism would allow the appropriate people from the institution to start looking for spousal/partner employment without allowing the candidate’s personal status to factor into the search committee’s decision process. This process seems to follow naturally from the policy’s efforts to raise the spousal/partner hiring issue above the level of department politics, and it is one example of a way in which an existing policy could be revised to allow more flexibility for job candidates rather than just for the institution. At the very least, it might be possible to include language that reinforces the candidate’s right to be considered on his/her own terms without consideration for personal status. The need to rethink and revise policy language along these lines might be said to reflect Buzzanell’s suggestion that we should “envision resilience as a design aspect rather than mistaking the entity or person for the process” (3) and, more specifically, her assertion that “communication processes” can play an integral role in such efforts to design resilience. Of course, as we engage in such a rethinking and revising, we must temper our understanding of institutions’ m ệtistic resilience with feminist concerns for social justice and relationality. The University of Michigan’s policy is interesting in this regard. Their promotional materials, published on the university website and readily available to anyone, seem to emphasize the many ways in which the university is equipped to be flexible in dual-career hire situations. These

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promotional materials boast about the strength and longevity of the university’s dual-career-program: “Having long recognized dual career partner assistance as a crucial element in recruiting and retaining its excellent faculty, the University of Michigan has developed one of the strongest dual career programs in the country.” Such rhetoric might be said to reflect the same rationale as the first two policy documents I examined, which urged institutions to become more resilient by adopting more flexible hiring practices. By contrast, the informational materials intended for those who have already received a job offer and are beginning to consider the options available for their spouses or partners place much more burden on the individual job candidate. For instance, this part of the website emphasizes individual responsibility for the partner job search, reminding job candidates and their partners that a successful job search depends on patience and flexibility. This language seems to shift the conception of resilience to one of the heroic individual, thereby potentially undermining the more relational promise of the promotional rhetoric. These informational materials are buried deeper in the site and are less likely to be found by the casual browser. This rhetoric leaves the institution a lot of leeway, simply suggesting that funds may be available for unique hiring opportunities, but not specifying what these opportunities might be. Interestingly, faculty diversity is not mentioned at all in these informational materials. C o n c l u s i o n s a n d I m p l i c at i o n s f o r a F e m i n i s t C o n c e p t i o n o f R e l at i o n a l R e s i l i e n c e

Clearly, current rhetoric connecting dual-career-couple hiring with gender and ethnic diversity represents a radical shift in thinking from just a few decades ago. The need for a more systematic way to address this multifaceted problem is emphasized by Wolf-Wendel, Twombly, and Rice and is reflected in several smaller-scale studies suggesting that women faculty see it as one of their top concerns and most important potential obstacles. The pragmatic approach this research calls for is reflected in the dual-career-couple policies that have been around the longest, such as those at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan. It is in the language of policies such as these that we see most clearly the rhetorical connections being forged among spousal/partner hiring, faculty diversity, and flexibility as a strategy for enhancing institutional resilience. Much of the recent research on dual-career-couple hiring has attempted to solve the problem from the perspective of university

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administrators, and my analysis has aimed to show that this same perspective is the one most clearly represented in the innovative policies of schools such as Wisconsin and Michigan. Although addressing the problem from an administrative perspective might be a useful first step, it is very important at some point to make sure these policies are actually helping the people they were intended to help and that they are actually enhancing faculty diversity in the manner intended. As Frances Ranney observes, too often workplace policies are written to solve organizational problems without taking users’ needs into account. It would be easy for a dual-career-couple hiring policy to fall into this trap. In particular, I could see this situation posing a problem in institutions where there is a policy in place but little or no funding to support spousal/partner positions. In a situation such as this, the policy might make the institution appear friendly to spousal/partner hiring, which would encourage candidates to disclose their personal situations when they otherwise might not. Their disclosure might then result in discrimination when the institution turns to someone else who appears to be an easier catch because they are unattached (or appear that way because they have not disclosed their status). Of course, this is just speculation, but the point is, we need to do quantitative and qualitative research that solicits the perspectives of faculty on all sides of the dual-career-couple hiring issue: in Ranney’s terms, these people are the intended users of the policies that institutions are writing, and they are the ones who should be directly involved in deciding and evaluating the policies. This research should aim to solicit opinions from everyone involved: faculty who sit on search committees, department heads, faculty who have benefited from such policies by getting a job or having their partners get a job, and even faculty who are innocent bystanders and might have mixed feelings (This could be an area with great potential for external funding). Policies such as the one at the University of Wisconsin explain precisely how institutional efforts to address the needs of dual-career couples are intended to increase diversity by giving institutions more flexibility when faced with strategic hiring opportunities. But there is a danger if we make too many assumptions about the relationship between dual-career-couple hiring and diversity, if we too easily assume both problems can be addressed by simply developing policy statements that mention both in the same paragraph (especially if they do not make any institutional commitment to help departments deal with the problems). As I have demonstrated, these potential dangers can be understood with

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reference to social critiques of the flexibility ideal. Dual-career-couple policies in many ways seem to reflect the larger cultural emphasis on flexibility. From a feminist perspective, though, we must remain critical—as theorists are pointing out, the idealization of flexibility is a double-edged sword, with a lot of potential for new gender relations but not a lot of promise for precisely what these relations will be. It is easy to see evidence of this ambiguity in today’s spousal hiring policies. On the one hand, the policy language seems to be compatible with feminist ideals of embodied subjectivity and seems to demand more institutional flexibility. But on the other hand, it is easy to see potential for the burden to be shifted toward the job candidate rather than the institution. Embedded in this language, it seems, is the ever-present possibility of a shift back to the burden of the resilient individual. Ultimately, the questions that critics are asking about flexibility as a cultural ideal, and the partial answers I have offered by analyzing specific examples of dual-career-couple policy language, should remind us to be constantly engaged in the critical reflection that the editors of this collection call for as we continue to monitor the ethical effects of institutional efforts to achieve resilience. Whereas traditional notions of resilience suggest an ability to bounce back from adversity, feminist resilience, as theorized in this collection, connotes an ever-present ability to adapt to constantly changing, dynamic circumstances. As noted in the introduction to this collection, traditional notions of resilience are often connected to therapeutic ends: the resilient individual is one who can restore mental or physical health, defined as the return to a previous state. As we rethink resilience from a feminist perspective, by contrast, we want to think more about transformation than restoration—that is, resilience might be conceived as the new mode of being achieved by responding positively to adversity. Rather than a return to a previous state, this transformation, then, is envisioned as something new, different, and hopefully better or stronger. Resilience, theorized as a capacity for m ệtistic creativity both on the parts of individuals and of institutions, implies an ability to bend or adapt to ongoing change—whether that change appears to be for the better or for the worse when it first occurs. Because they acknowledge the need for organizations, rather than just individuals, to adapt to ever-changing circumstances, the cultural critics who are urging institutions to become more flexible might seem to resonate in other ways with our desire to rethink resilience in feminist terms. Specifically, such arguments seem potentially compatible

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with the notion of “relational resilience,” described by the editors of this collection as a feminist rhetorical process that is collective rather than individual, social rather than psychological, contextual rather than isolated, fluid rather than static, and transformative Rather than therapeutic. Reflecting this apparently promising dimension of the rhetoric that promotes organizational flexibility, it is not uncommon, for instance, to hear workplaces using language such as “flexible schedules” as a way to demonstrate that they are “family friendly” or otherwise attuned to the personal needs of their employees. Listening to the warnings and criticisms certainly does not mean we should abandon our efforts to rethink terms like flexibility or resilience from feminist perspectives. And it certainly should not be read as an argument to abandon universities’ current efforts to address the dual-career-couple problem through formal policies. Rather, we should remain ethically reflective and vigilant as we continue in our efforts to theorize current cultural ideals in a way that makes them more compatible with feminist principles, even when that is difficult to do, and even when we do not all agree on what those principles are, which is often the case in regard to issues such as spousal-partner hiring. We must also, of course, continue to address the problems with conventional conceptions of resilience and make sure we temper the excesses of m ệtis or optimism in our feminist conception. And, in the practical example of dualcareer-couple policies, we need to supplement our theoretical efforts with empirical research that monitors the effects of such policies so we can make sure they are having the hoped-for effects. Reflecting the editors’ remark that a feminist understanding of resilience requires “m ệtistic cunning” or “shape-shifting,” we have to suspect that gender binaries will not necessarily be abolished but that they might be rearranged; they might turn up in new forms we do not at first recognize. As such, we might need to keep adapting and improving dual-career-couple policy initiatives to do a better job in this regard. There is nothing wrong with the effort to connect diversity to the dualcareer-couple issue. As I have demonstrated, there is a lot of research suggesting the two are related. However, just because the research suggests this is an important concern for women does not mean formal institutional policies will be effective simply because they mention both diversity and dual-career-couple hiring in the same paragraph. As is the case for any institutional policy language, we must be wary that language such as this represents a bureaucratic effort to appear concerned

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without really accomplishing anything. As the editors of this collection observe, processes of resilience “always take place within hierarchies in which some enjoy considerable privilege while others suffer deprivation” (4). Certainly, the same could be said in regard to the kind of resilience we hope might be fostered by university spousal-partner hiring policies. Future research might explore how such policies could work toward a conception of resilience that anticipates and responds to these inevitabilities, creates new possibilities within them, and is situated not only within couples and individuals but also within the social networks and institutions that constitute the gender relations surrounding spousal hiring. On a positive note, this chapter’s analysis has shown an example of institutions trying to become more resilient by enacting flexible practices that might seem to represent what the editors of this collection describe as “policy changes that will make adaptability or vibrancy possible” (13). Through analyzing multiple forms of rhetoric related to such efforts, however, the chapter has made clear both the promises and the limitations inherent in such efforts. From a feminist perspective, we might conclude, such institutional efforts will succeed insofar as they truly foster relational resilience—a form of resilience that comes to exist in the institutions themselves, the administrators and faculty who make hiring decisions, the job-seeking couple, and even in the larger culture outside of academe—and remain vigilant against the ever-present possibility that the burden for such resilience will unintentionally shift back to the individual job seeker. Thus, we must remain ethically vigilant about both the promises and the potential problems inherent in the m ệtistic, shape-shifting capacities of rhetorical activity and policy efforts that claim to idealize resilience. Works Cited Adkins, Lisa. “Cultural Feminization: ‘Money, Sex and Power’ for Women.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26.3 (2001): 669–95. Print. American Council on Education. Office of Women in Higher Education. An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Faculty Careers. New York: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 2005. Print. Buzzanell, Patrice M. “Resilience: Talking, Resisting, and Imagining New Normalcies Into Being.” Journal of Communication 60 (2010): 1–14. Print. Didion, Catherine Jay. “Dual Careers and Shared Positions: Adjusting University Policy to Accommodate Academic Couples.” Women in Science (1996): 123–24. Print. Earth Institute ADVANCE Working Group on Science & Technology Recruiting to Increase Diversity (STRIDE). A Proposal for Recruiting and Retaining Dual-Career Couples. 7 October 2005. Web. 19 June 2006.

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Ferber, Marianne A., and Jane W. Loeb, eds. Academic Couples: Problems and Promises. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. Print. Gee, E. Gordon. “The Dual-Career Couple: A Growing Challenge.” Educational Record (1991): 45–7. Print. Harvard University. Task Force on Women Faculty. Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005. Print. Macfarlane, Allison, and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. “Achieving Equity between Women and Men in the Geosciences.” GSA Bulletin 110 (1998): 1590–1614. Print. McNeil, Laurie, and Marc Sher. “The Dual-Career-Couple Problem.” Physics Today (1999): 32–7. Print. Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in the American Culture—From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Print. Norrell, J. Elizabeth, and Thomas H. Norrell. “Faculty and Family Policies in Higher Education.” Journal of Family Issues 17.2 (1996): 204–26. Ranney, Frances. “Beyond Foucault: Toward a User-Centered Approach to Sexual Harassment Policy.” Technical Communication Quarterly 9 (2000): 9–28. Print. Rushing, Beth. “From the SWS President: Academic Work and Personal Lives.” Gender and Society 16.5 (2002): 581–84. Print. Spenser, E.F.D., and G.B. Spenser. “Recruiting the Dual-career Couple: The Family Employment Program.” Initiatives 54 (1984): 37-44. Print. Stephan, Paula E., and Mary Mathewes Kassis. “The History of Women and Couples in Academe.” Academic Couples: Problems and Promises. Ed. Marianne A. Ferber and Jane W. Loeb. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. Print. Sutcliffe, K. M., and T. Vogus, T. “Organizing for Resilience.” Positive Organizational Scholarship. Eds. Kim S. Cameron, Jane E. Dutton, and Robert E. Quinn. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003. 94–110. Print. Task Force on Women Faculty. Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty. Harvard University. 2005. Print Thrift, Nigel. “Performing Cultures in the New Economy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90.4 (2000): 674–92. Print. University of Michigan. Office of the Provost. Provost’s Faculty Initiative Program (PFIP). Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2005. Web. 19 June 2006. . University of Wisconsin-Madison. Office of the Provost. Faculty Strategic Hiring Initiative 2011–2012. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin-Madison. 30 Sept. 2011. Web. 27 January 2012. . Waite, P., and G. Richardson. “Determining the Efficacy of Resiliency Training in the Work Site.” Journal of Allied Health 33 (2004): 178–83. Print. Wolf-Wendel, Lisa, Susan B. Twombly, and Suzanne Rice. “Dual-Career Couples: Keeping Them Together.” The Journal of Higher Education 71.3 (2000): 291–321. Print. ———. The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Policies in Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 2003. Print. Youssef, Carolyn M., and Luthans, Fred. “Positive Organizational Behavior in the Workplace: The Impact of Hope, Optimism, and Resilience.” Journal of Management 33.5 (2007): 774–800. Print. Zunz, Sharon. “Resiliency and Burnout: Protective Factors for Human Service Managers.” Administration in Social Work 22:3 (1998): 39–54. Print.

Response Expanding the Sites of Struggle over the “Flexible Subject” in Academe

Shirley K. Rose At the outset, permit me to note that my own academic career has been long enough that I have observed the transition from institutional policies against spousal/partner hiring on the grounds that such hires would constitute nepotism to current institutional policies explicitly endorsing spousal/partner accommodation hires. In my own department of sixty-some tenured and tenure-track faculty, we have a half dozen spousal/partner pairs, three or four faculty members who have been hired as spousal/partner accommodations into high-priority positions from other departments and colleges, and a couple of faculty members whose spouses’/partners’ hires have been accommodated by other departments. Without exception, our department has benefited from our university administration’s willingness to support these hires. We have gained and retained department members who have made invaluable contributions to our local work and to the profession, and I am proud to have them as colleagues. As assistant head of our department when several of these hires were made, I have experience with many of the procedural ins and outs of spousal/partner accommodations, and as a frequent faculty search committee member, I understand the ways these accommodations can both simplify and complicate faculty recruitment. These experiences have provided me many occasions for reflecting on issues surrounding academic dual-career placement, but Amy Koerber’s essay has helped me to better understand the ideological conflicts spousal/partner accommodation (or nonaccommodation) practices create—or expose. As any regular reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education knows, spousal/partner hiring policies and practices have been the subject of numerous columns, blogs, and other opinion pieces that serve as sources of good sense, commonsense, and sometimes nonsense. Koerber’s review of recent scholarly work on dual academic careers demonstrates that

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they have also come under some more rigorous study in the last decade or so, but little of that work has taken the fruitful approach Koerber has chosen. By applying methods of rhetorical analysis to universities’ dualcareer accommodation policies, her essay helps us understand why the policies might potentially work to undermine academic women’s career opportunities as well as enhance them. She demonstrates that the policies are typically contextualized in university documents in ways that present them not as affirmations of a commitment to gender equity but as mechanisms for assuring faculty diversity by maximizing the institution’s flexibility in hiring practices. Koerber’s analysis helps us see that providing support for institutional flexibility in hiring by authorizing spousal hiring accommodations, while usually well-intended as a means for achieving diversity goals, not only cannot guarantee spousal accommodation, but may effectively undermine gender equity in hiring. Koerber’s discussion of the development of dual-career accommodation policies and practices in terms of the idealization of flexibility for the institution not only sheds light on the often mysterious practices of spousal/partner hiring, it helps readers to understand the changing expectations of university and college faculty. Koerber’s concerns about the threat that the idealization of worker flexibility poses to an individual faculty member’s ability to pursue a practically autonomous research career, especially in the humanities disciplines, which do not require large infusions of funding from outside agencies or organizations, are no doubt well grounded. Further, in her discussion of the complications of department-level “politics” involved in dual-career hires, Koerber recognizes the threat these practices pose to the faculty’s collective autonomy. I’d like to explore her point just a bit further in hopes of possibly clarifying why spousal/partner hires can be a site of significant ideological conflict. The issue, for me, comes down to a matter of locating the site or sites where increased flexibility is required and the consequences of that increased flexibility. That is, who has to be willing to be flexible to make satisfactory dual-career placement not just a possibility, but a reasonable expectation of partnered academics, and what might be threatened or undermined by that flexibility? What degree of flexibility is it reasonable for individuals who offer their intellectual labor for hire and the institutions who compensate that labor to expect of each other? And is it possible to distinguish the ability to be flexible from the exercise of autonomy?

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The choices academic couples must make in order to reconcile conflicts between pursuing their individual work aspirations and maintaining their relationship are generally understood as personal decisions. Choices college and university administrators must make in developing and implementing spousal/partner accommodation policies at the level of deans’ and provosts’ offices are generally understood to be institutional decisions made in the collective interest. Yet, as Koerber has noted, the results of those decisions are played out in the day-to-day work of the academic department. Koerber has called the inevitable conflicts and issues that arise in the department’s work—in the course of developing a curriculum and staffing courses, supporting research and community engagement—“political,” and argues that the “potential for moving the dual-career-couple situation above department politics . . . is the most promising aspect of the recent policy rhetoric” (129). But the department is not a more “political” site than a faculty couple’s relationship or the offices of central administration. It may simply be that the conflicts are most visibly played out at the site of academic departmental work, as faculty experience some lessening of both the customary degree of individual autonomy in choices of teaching assignments and research projects and the customary degree of collective autonomy in hiring decisions. Developing and implementing equitable and just spousal/partner hiring policies will depend upon the willingness of faculty, acting individually and collectively, to acknowledge and to attempt to understand the politics in play at these other sites where ideals of both equity and autonomy may be difficult to adhere to simultaneously.

Reflection Amy Koerber

Like Rose, I am in a department that includes a number of married couples in which both partners are employed in tenure-track or tenured positions. We also have faculty members whose spouses or partners have become employed in other departments as a result of dual-couplecareer accommodations. I am, in fact, part of a married couple who has benefitted greatly from our university’s willingness and ability to employ both my spouse and me as tenured faculty in the same department. When we began our tandem job search several years ago, my spouse and I were both made acutely aware of the political dimensions to which Rose refers. At that time, these politics seemed to be squarely situated in the departments, perhaps because that is where a job candidate makes the most contact with the university in a typical job search. Yet Rose’s point about the many levels of politics surrounding dual-career-couple hiring is an important one. As she reminds us, “The department is not a more ‘political’ site than a faculty couple’s relationship or the offices of central administration. It may simply be that the conflicts are most visibly played out at the site of academic departmental work” (141). This is a point well taken, and Rose is correct to point out that raising the dual-career-couple hiring decision above the politics of the department, as my essay recommends, is far from a panacea. In fact, with a few years now separating me from my own direct experience with the politics of spousal hiring, I would add to Rose’s observations that the politics of spousal hiring do not end at the locations she identifies either. To fully account for the gendered politics of spousal hiring, we need to consider the wider world beyond the university, a world that still treats men’s and women’s decisions about career paths in fundamentally different ways. Considering the gendered politics that exist at all these levels echoes the editors’ observation that resilience is not a once-and-for-all resolution of a bad situation, but an ongoing process: “Resilience does not necessarily return an individual life to equilibrium but entails an ongoing responsiveness, never complete nor predetermined” (7). This insight is an important one to keep in mind as we continue to grapple

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with the many complexities that surround dual-career-couple hiring. If we take these observations seriously, we need to not only consider politics in multiple spaces, as Rose suggests, but also to think about politics that might play out at different moments in a couple’s academic career. Although much of the intensity and attention seems to occur at the site of the hiring decision, academic careers are typically long, and the intensity can increase over time as members of the couple face tenure and promotion decisions and all the years of reviewing and scrutiny that lead up to those decisions. Echoing the notion of resilience as a longterm process, it is important to note that gendered politics feature into every moment of dual-career-couple employment, from the moment the job search begins, to the weeks, months, and years after both partners are employed in some manner. These politics operate in some obvious ways, but they can also have a m ệtistic, hard-to-detect quality that resides in comments and judgments and of course in a couple’s internal relationship and both partners’ ongoing feelings about the employment situation. If we are to fully understand what it means to be resilient as an academic couple, and for institutions and society at large to foster such resilience, any future research conducted on spousal hiring policies must examine such policies in the context of these long-term effects. If resilience is to be theorized as “not a state of being but a process of rhetorically engaging with material circumstances and situational exigencies” (7), as noted by the editors of this collection, we must make conscious decisions about who is going to define those exigencies, who will be rhetorically engaged, and what will be the terms of that engagement. As we move forward with efforts to theorize a feminist rhetoric of resilience, I hope that we will keep such questions in mind and that we will address such questions through research that honors feminist principles of care, empathy, and critique.

5 A C a s e S t u dy i n R e s i l i e n c e Fabricating a Feminine Self in a Man-Made Era

Frances J. Ranney The number of persons carrying inheritable physical defects or dispositions of a serious nature is even larger than that carrying the more severe forms of mental abnormalities. In the number are the small groups of blind, deaf, crippled, and the like. Paul Popenoe, “Eugenic Sterilization in California,” The Journal of Heredity 1928 Dear Mrs. W., I have not the courage to go shopping in Hudsons, with a crutch and mouth minus teeth that resembles a Cheshire Cats grin when I try to talk. I simply cannot do it until I am able to look like a human being. Fontia R.1 Letter # 57, June 1937

The texts excerpted above are taken from two sources. The first comes from an article published in 1928 in the Journal of Heredity by one author of California’s compulsory sterilization laws. The second comes from a case file contained in the archives of the Luella M. Hannan Foundation, a senior-citizen resource and social services center located in downtown Detroit. The file is that of an elderly woman who applied to the foundation for financial aid in 1929, shortly before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. Over the course of the fourteen years that this woman received aid, her case file collected numerous artifacts; they range from medical and dental reports to her private letters and the detailed case notes of her assigned social worker, or “Visitor.” I chose to excerpt these particular passages because they illustrate both institutional and personal responses to the exigencies and discursive resources particular to the Progressive Era, a period that stretched roughly from 1860 to 1930. This period of professed faith in the competition and adaptation that should, if all went well, result in the survival

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of the fittest was also rife with anxiety over the pace of evolutionary progress and the form it might eventually take. “Others,” characterized as such by the scientific and economic discourses of those of privileged class and racial status, became the object of deep scrutiny, particularly with respect to their alarming rates of reproduction. Whether their reproductive methods were seen as social, as in the case of immigrants, or more literally biological, as in the case of assimilated Americans of nonwhite races, volumes of Progressive-Era language were disseminated as institutions and individuals dedicated themselves to human “improvement” through reproductive control. In current everyday understandings of the term, Fontia R. may not seem to be an exemplar of resilience. She arrived at the door of a private social services agency on the threshold of the Great Depression, penniless and jobless, at the age of 71. She remained dependent upon the meager pension she received from the Luella M. Hannan Foundation for the rest of her life and died in poverty, without even a decent dress for burial, at age 86. During those last fourteen years of her life, she sometimes expressed her gratitude for the assistance she received, but she was often quite demanding of her Visitor and of the foundation, requesting advances on her pension and fashionable updates to her wardrobe. Her case file documents numerous negotiations, often in querulous language, and a power balance that frequently shifted from Fontia R., to her Visitor, to the foundation, and occasionally back again. Fontia R. was no heroic individual, and she never found her way back to the comfort and status she had enjoyed prior to her financial fall. Nevertheless, I intend to show that Fontia R. was a resilient individual in terms of the agency she contrived to exercise through her clever manipulation of her material circumstances and social relationships. In that sense she exhibited what has been called “rhetorical agency,” an ability to orchestrate resources (Geisler 14) towards an end that, while it may never be achieved, does alter life circumstances for individuals and groups. The case of Fontia R. provides the opportunity for a close look at the microlevel processes whereby the dominant discourses of a cultural moment sift into an individual consciousness that then uses those discourses as the material resources to shape a life. I draw here not only from letters and notes in the case file, but also from the contemporary works on eugenic breeding and laissez-faire economics that dominated the discursive landscape, whether these works took themselves

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to be descriptive of women’s presumed role in the economy or instead directed themselves to women to help them carry out a role more accurately characterized as prescriptive. In addition, because the case file I examine is permeated by references to clothing, fabrics, and fashions, I draw on contemporary fashion theory that, no less than any other discourse of the time, attempted to describe itself in evolutionary terms. Finally, I offer in my conclusions a fuller description of rhetorical agency as it relates to the concept of resilience. The Progressive Era was dominated by social and economic discourses that drew upon what was then considered state-of-the-art science by many. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s biological theories in The Origin of Species, the “social Darwinism” that was first named as such in Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics claimed that not only human beings but also their social creations must have evolved through competition for resources and adaptation to their environments. This trend, seen as the steady progress from lesser to more “civilized” societies, was assumed to have reached its peak in the American (if you were American, or British if you were British, and so on) social structure. Resources and environments were not only natural, of course; more “evolved” civilizations required an economic environment and resources as well, and their development was assumed to be as natural as that of biological species. The “natural selection” provided by economic competition was therefore not to be tampered with lest the social structure regress, or “devolve.” Thus, the laissez-faire economic practices that characterized the era were justified in scientific terms as cooperating with evolutionary processes toward a higher civilization. Concurrently, a practical program began to emerge to hasten the progress of social evolution through artificial means. The focus of eugenics, as its name suggests, was ostensibly not economics but genetic inheritance. Though it took many forms, this “science of right breeding,” or “scientific humaniculture” (Fisher qtd. in Smith 888) attempted to control human reproduction in order to ensure that only the “fittest,” defined in elite class and racial terms, would survive. The eugenics movement was quite successful in permeating the social consciousness; it spawned The Journal of Heredity and other academic outlets, and its precepts were widely represented publicly. Not only in schoolhouses, but also in upscale culture through Chatauqua lectures, in more mundane culture through state fair contests for “Better Babies” or the “Fitter Family,” in religious thought through sermon contests, and finally

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directly to wives, mothers, and daughters through “ladies” magazines— advice about “better breeding” was everywhere (Hasian 37–43, 83). Eugenics cannot be accurately characterized as a “scientific” discourse; even a “pop culture” or “pseudoscience” label, though more accurate, is still too limited to describe this widely disseminated belief system. It worked not only as a “natural” science but also as a “social” science, in tandem with the economic mindset and quite synergistically (in its more conservative formulations) with laissez-faire thought. Thus, social and economic programs established to aid the poor or the ill (to “interfere” with “natural” processes) were denounced not only by laissez-faire economists as government interference, but also by prominent eugenicists as “dysgenic,” given their tendency to artificially prolong the existence of the unfit. Seeing in social programs the disruption of “Nature’s plan,” by such human capacities as “sympathy and charity,” two authors of a eugenic article complained that “the weak and defective are now nursed to maturity and produce their kind” (Gosney and Popenoe qtd. in Ladd-Taylor 304). This chapter is intended to provide a close look at one woman’s private experience of laissez-faire economics and eugenic thought, including both her acquiescence to those discourses and her cooptation of them towards her individual ends. Born into an upper middle-class family in 1859, the woman I call “Fontia R.” was a true child of progressivism whose social fitness came undone just as the era drew to its close. Finding herself fallen upon hard times at the advanced age of 70, she applied for aid from the Hannan Foundation; following a long period of decline from physical and mental fitness into disability and senility, she died at the age of 86 in 1945. My reasons for choosing her case for this study are several. First, because Fontia R. (like most of the foundation’s other clients) was female, she allows us to observe the construction of gender in the discourses of her time, including those she produced herself. The late life of Fontia R. also provides, through her constant quest for fashionable clothing and her distress at her deteriorating physical condition, insight into the workings of eugenics and economics in her daily life. However, I must admit honestly that I find the case of Fontia R. not just theoretically intriguing but personally fascinating as well. Her obsession with fashion (nearly 200 of the 498 entries in her case worker’s notes deal at least in part and often in full with her clothing needs) and her insistence on particular cuts of clothing and high-quality fabrics

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(she desired both silk and fine linen, but both abhorred and feared rayon) are interesting in themselves. Her many contrivances, both manipulative and pragmatic, drew in particular on fabrics and fashions as the material representations of the discourses that ruled the day, allowing Fontia R. to alter and present her physical self as a “fit” member of the community despite her fall into poverty. At first blush, her efforts seem thwarted: despite her insistence on shopping for styles and materials, sometimes by herself or accompanied by her social worker (who controlled the purse strings) on trips to Detroit’s premier department store, Hudson’s, Fontia R.’s clothing never seemed to fit. Sleeves of dresses extended inches past her fingertips, hems of skirts and coats dragged on the ground. Even the cobbler inadvertently built up the wrong shoe for her broken and shortened leg. This attention to the fit of her clothing resulted in a constant pattern of commerce between her residence at any given period and Hudson’s downtown, just a few blocks south on Woodward Avenue from the Hannan Foundation’s offices. Contradictorily, then, choosing clothing that did not fit allowed Fontia R. to demonstrate that she herself “was fit.” This pattern of consumption and reconsumption through purchases and returns; of readyto-wear clothes that did not fit; and of the simultaneous operations of desire (to shop) and shame (at her physical condition) provide clues to the collaboration of economics, eugenics, and the permutations of fashion in the rhetorical agency of Fontia R. and thus to her individual version of resilience. The case of Fontia R. provides us with a rare opportunity to watch a proud, stubborn, and witty woman find the means available in restrictive discourses to present herself as socially acceptable in their terms despite her placement in pernicious circumstances. Rejecting the man-made rayon, sometimes railing against poor quality ready-to-wear clothing, she managed to display her class alliances and thoroughly feminine gender identity through conspicuously constant consumption on a highly restricted budget. How she managed to do so, and why, are the descriptive and theoretical tasks of this chapter. To orient the more difficult theoretical task, I begin with the descriptive, with an overview not only of Fontia R.’s life, but also with the preoccupations of eugenics. Noting these preoccupations as they surface, sometimes in the language of the fund that supported her and sometimes in her self-descriptions, we begin to understand her confusion and defensiveness as she becomes in her own eyes an “old beggar” and a “cripple” (Letter #29; Letter #34).

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C h a r i t y i n t h e A g e o f Eu g e n i c s : T h e I m p o r ta n c e of Being Worthy

The poverty of the incompetent, the distress of the careless, the elimination of the lazy and that pressure of the strong which sweeps aside the weak, and reduces so many of them to misery, are the necessary results of an enlightened and beneficial general law. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics She is a woman of great refinement, and used to a life of plenty. She has striven to the best of her ability to support herself. . . . Last winter she sometimes went hungry. Mrs. S., Letter of reference for Fontia R. I know her to be worthy of assistance. Mrs. K., Letter of reference for Fontia R.

The fund that supported Fontia R. throughout her decline and death was established in 1925 at the bequest of the surviving widow of William Washington Hannan, a Detroit real estate magnate. Its mission, to provide financial and other assistance to the poor, was nevertheless restricted by the terms of Luella Hannan’s gift to those needy who had become so through “no fault of their own.” Its initial clientele was made up primarily of elderly women of middle- to upper middle-class standing; most if not all were white, and many were well educated for the times. Quite a few were widows of reduced means due to the deaths of their husbands or some other catastrophic loss of financial support. Mrs. Hannan’s establishment of this fund just prior to the stock market crash of 1929 was thus, if not prescient, at least fortunate for women rendered ironically helpless by their social prestige. Luella Hannan’s stipulation that her gift should serve only the “worthy wealthy” (Ranney, Ray, and Gorzelsky) demonstrates her allegiance to contemporary notions of worth. It is further significant that the criterion of worthiness was phrased in the founding documents such that it could supersede other considerations as the trustees chose whom to support; thus “worth” could trump “need” though not, as we might suppose, ironically. Then even more than now, or at least more explicitly, the “unworthy” or “needy” were considered responsible for their own predicaments, and the most radical of the eugenicists actively discouraged aid intended to sustain them. Mrs. Hannan’s original intention, to use the trust fund to construct a residence for those worthy and formerly wealthy persons in the prosperous Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, was

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thus eugenically correct, as we might now say. It was because the residents of Grosse Pointe, no less eugenically correct, refused to allow such a home to be constructed in their neighborhoods that the trustees eventually chose to disburse funds directly to the elderly poor, who could then remain in their own homes (or in residence hotels or boarding houses) as long as they were physically able. Fontia R.’s file is among the most extensive of those in the archives, which altogether constitute eighteen linear feet and include the records of nearly 1,000 cases. For the fourteen years she was a Hannan Case, the foundation’s caseworkers (called “Visitors” in the case notes) kept meticulous records of all expenditures on her behalf and of most of her activities, including her moves from one residence hotel to the next, her medical and dental procedures, her occasional vacations to visit her cousins in Chatauqua, and her shopping trips for clothing. The Visitors were the first to meet applicants for aid who had been referred by friends or other associates, and they recorded in typed case notes their initial observations and all later transactions involving the clients the foundation accepted. It was thus that on June 20, 1929, after receiving reassurances from personal references that Fontia R. was “in every way worthy of any help” they could give her (Letter #1), LWF, the first Visitor briefly assigned to Fontia R.’s case, drove to her lodgings in the Gladstone Hotel on Stimson Street for an in-person assessment. As she wrote in her case notes: “W[oman] occupies a room in a first class hotel in the downtown district. The room is nicely furnished, and the hotel is very clean. The furniture consists of a single brass bed, one dresser, a chest of drawers, a rocking chair, and a small writing desk. . . . Mrs. [R] is of medium height and build, has thick gray curly hair and brown eyes. W looks very much younger than a woman of seventy-one years. She was neatly dressed in a flowered voile dress, gray silk hose, and black kid slippers” (Visitor Notes 1). A keen judge of character, LWF noted not only that Fontia R. was “cultured and refined” but also that she was “proud. . . . She has a great deal of ambition and fight in her.” She notes in a short paragraph Fontia R.’s recent firing from the Stearns Fudge Shoppe and her prior failed real estate career which, establishing a pattern that would become all too familiar, Fontia R. said she had given up “because she did not have carfare and money to buy the clothes which she needed to meet the public” (Visitor Notes 1). At this time Fontia R.’s living expenses totaled $76.00 per month: $28 for rent, $28 for food, $15 for clothing, and $5

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for “incidentals” (2). Upon accepting Fontia R. as a client, the trustees committed to supply her with $50 per month, a considerable reduction that would plague all parties involved for years to come. But to give Fontia R. an additional financial boost at the beginning of her aid, LWF recommended to the trustees that she be given an additional one-time clothing allowance of $50—a precedent that would also plague all parties for years to come. The trustees were careful to specify that she would not be awarded any additional funds to pay off her $591 debt to the Hotel Gladstone, an amount representing twenty months’ back rent (2). On Christmas Eve, 1929, LWF was replaced as Fontia R.’s Visitor by Alma W., who would remain with Fontia R. for the next sixteen years; together, and not always harmoniously, they would negotiate the terms of Fontia R.’s daily existence with the president of the foundation’s board of directors, Mr. Snow. Their relationship seems at times affectionate and at other times contentious; while Fontia R. was certainly demanding, she was also occasionally grateful for the aid she received. In one of her early letters, she expresses her gratitude to the founder of the trust fund, saying that “if blessings count, I think there is a special seat on the throne for Luella Hannan” (Letter #12). She also had a sense of humor that suggests she may have been a quick and witty conversational partner. Having moved four times between October 3 and December 7, 1931 (partly to save money by living with friends or relatives), she wrote to Alma W., “Your tramping old lady has found a ‘happy hunting ground’ at above address & thinks it will be a permanent home” (Letter #18). In her case notes, having called on Fontia R. at her new apartment on Peterboro Street, Alma W. described her situation: “W is living in a very homelike little suite of rooms, consisting of living room, bedroom, kitchenette and bath for which she pays $25.00 per month and has maid service. She has never been so happy for many years and hopes that she can continue to live here until her death” (Visitor Notes 10). In the many years that followed, Fontia R. sometimes lost her humor, and her gratitude sometimes lapsed. In June 1934, having asked for stamps more than a month earlier, she wrote, “Have you forgotten the old beggar on Jefferson E. that is waiting, waiting, waiting for stamps money, etc?” (Letter #29). In September the same year she told Alma W., in Letter #34, that she was “in financial difficulties—Do not see how I can possibly get along on the twenty five for food. . . . I have 30 cts in my purse at present & there are nine days more before the first” (Letter #34). Again, in November 1934, she somewhat disingenuously suggested

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that Alma W. drop her off at Hudson’s with a friend “early in AM someday, & leave us there until PM, when we could meet at appointed department, & you arrange the purchase of things that I would locate.” This way, she added, Alma W. could be “free from the crippled old woman” (Letter #52). One suspects that Fontia R. may have been more concerned with her own freedom than that of her Visitor. A savvy Alma W. subsequently did not drop Fontia R. and her friend Mrs. M. off at Hudson’s, but she did begin to select various items of clothing and have them shipped to Fontia R.’s hotel, with mixed results. Of a coat sent from Hudson’s in February 1937, Fontia R. wrote, “While it is all I thought, it does not fit— It touches the floor, in length, and the sleeves are several inches over my hands . . . It will have to be returned. The little sweater . . . is very pretty but I wanted one, called the Bolero, I think” (Letter #44). But in March 1939, having received some sheer cotton gowns and a satin slip from her Visitor, Fontia R. was delighted: “I feel like a little girl with a new Doll— the articles are so dainty and sweet; Just suits me in all ways—Thank you sincerely for thinking of me” (Letter #60). Alma W. seems to have been ideally suited and well trained for her work, possessed not only of a college degree in social work from the University of Michigan but also of seemingly infinite patience, coordinating Fontia R.’s trips to the dentist, to the doctor, and to Hudson’s. It appears she searched doggedly for clothing that contained no rayon, which Fontia R. despised and feared; on one occasion she wrote that she had found a new shipment of “lovely sheer cotton gowns at Hudson’s and could not resist sending [Fontia R. ] two of them” (Letter #x). However, she was also capable of exerting some discipline where discipline was required—in the matter of Fontia R.’s handling of her finances. At first able to continue some part-time work at the Stearns Fudge Shoppe, where she could earn up to $1.50 per evening, Fontia R. eventually lost even that small income and began, unbeknownst to the foundation, to get behind on her rent and meal tickets. By March of 1930, eight months after her initial application for aid, she came to the foundation’s offices and, according to the notes, “stated she was down to her last dollar and asked for an advance. . . . Mr. Snow [the foundation’s director] told her that it plainly showed she could not manage money if by the 11th she had spent her entire check for the month” (Visitor Notes 5). In June, Fontia R. again visited the foundation’s offices to ask for an advance; in October, when she refused to move to a cheaper hotel, “V

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cautioned her to live strictly within her income and make any necessary plans accordingly” (7). By November, “V gathered from W’s conversation that she was having a rather difficult time to get along financially” and concluded “she will never be able to manage money to any great advantage” (8). Of course by then, more than a year after the stock market crash of October 1929, countless others had also become destitute. In 1931 the trustees began to administer a new organization established in 1931, the John Scudder Foundation for Old People, that supplemented the Hannan Fund. This foundation, which did not stipulate “worthiness” as a condition for aid, was at first used for the needy who seemed questionable in Hannan Fund terms. Eventually, however, the trustees ceased to distinguish between the funds, providing financial aid from whichever had sufficient resources at the time. They also began cutting back on aid to their clients, requiring them to make some small economies and, in Fontia R.’s case, requiring not only that she stop asking for advances and start paying her bills on time, but also that she move to cheaper lodgings. Notified by Alma W. on March 13, 1933 that she would have to move to the Madison-Lenox Hotel in Harmonie Place near the Detroit Opera House, she responded with righteous ire. As Alma W. noted in the case file under the label “ATTITUDE”: “W immediately began to fume about, stating that the Board was not conducting the Luella Hannan Memorial Home in the spirit that Mrs. Hannan had intended. She stated that it would be a lot better to make a few people comfortable than to keep body and soul together for a larger number. She insisted that she not be made to go to the Madison where she would have to associate with all kinds of people. She inferred that she was a lady and desired to associate with only ladies and gentlemen” (Visitor Notes 13). Fontia R.’s concern was not for the masses but for the survival of the fittest, into which category she obviously placed herself. But the trustees, contrary to eugenic principles, were committed to helping both the fit and the unfit, so Alma W.’s next entry in the case notes reads simply, “Transferred to Madison-Lenox Hotel, Room 559” (13). One important provision of the Hannan and Scudder funds was that of complete privacy. Whether they were Hannan or Scudder cases, the clients’ receipt of assistance from the foundation was kept strictly confidential, and not even their closest friends were ever to know they were receiving charity unless the clients themselves chose to disclose that information.2 This shame at the specter of need, along with the

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emphasis on individual worth, suggests attitudes characteristic of the era in its preoccupation with the improvement of “the [American] race.” Such “improvement” played out in particularly harsh ways on immigrants, people of nonwhite ethnicity, and on women—especially poor or disabled women, but also, to a lesser degree, those like Fontia R. who were, or had been, relatively privileged. The range of expression permitted to white men of generally Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the Progressive Era was such that they could unabashedly characterize those they deemed “other” in obviously sexist and racist terms. Particularly vivid examples of this linguistic freedom are provided by eugenic discourses about African Americans—and the lack of such discourse about black or working-class women. Prevailing radical accounts contended that those of the “darker races” could not even aspire to “evolve;” as the “unfit,” they could only expect to die out in the inevitable march of human evolution (Hasian 53). Kinder, gentler souls held out the hope that such persons might eventually “turn white” from exposure to higher (white American) culture (Horsburgh 538). Such faith in the workings of evolution could be called the laissez-faire eugenic stance, a contention that “progress” would occur with the passage of time; those who held it have come to be called “negative” eugenicists for their lack of interest in hurrying the pace. Those who were disappointed by evolution’s slow pace, who actively pursued legislation to slow the pace of reproduction of groups they considered unfit, came to be called “positive” eugenicists.3 Either through sexual isolation during the reproductive years of the “feebleminded” (a blanket eugenic term that covered the socially inept, the physically disabled, and the truly mentally ill) or through compulsory sterilization under increasingly common eugenics legislation at the state level, positive eugenicists like Paul Popenoe worked to both enhance the reproduction of the worthy and retard the reproduction of everyone else. In California, Popenoe’s home and the state that adopted compulsory sterilization most enthusiastically, state hospitals performed at least 6,255 sterilizations, 45% of them on women, between 1909 and 1929 (Ladd-Taylor 305). Though upper middle-class women were eugenically “protected” from the demands (and privileges) of the paid work reserved for their male relatives, their presumed fragility did not extend to black women, or to any women of lower social classes—that is, to working women. As workers they were not specifically exempt from eugenic protection; it seems they simply were unrecognizable within the prevailing discourse

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as women. As Quentin Bell’s study of the fashion of the nineteenth century explains it, the idealized (and generalized) woman was expressly to be “a dead weight upon society[,] incapable of any bodily exertion, and requir[ing] assistance in the performance of any physical task.” Blinded by this vision, perhaps, idealists failed to notice what Bell’s additional comment points out, that “it is to be remembered that [the idealized woman] existed contemporaneously with women who worked twelve or more hours a day in factories and mines” (142). This idealized, privileged woman was valued not for her inherent worth, but for the potential contributions she could make to the improvement of the race in her role as breeder. African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois understandably saw nothing of value in the supposedly scientific racism of eugenic thought (Taylor 459). Less understandably, some feminists who were his contemporaries, and who had largely established themselves as a coherent and organized force through their earlier participation in the abolition movement, did not grasp the negative implications of progressive thought for either raced or gendered subjects. At a time when even the phenomenon of lynching could be, and was, construed through the eugenic lens as evolutionarily effective—the result of the black man’s supposedly instinctive attempt to improve his race through the (presumed) rape of white women (Taylor 452)—we might expect former abolitionists to remember their prior political sentiments. Nevertheless, some first-wave feminists saw in social Darwinist principles an opportunity to argue for feminist reforms. Unlike DuBois, who saw no means within the discourse of eugenics to argue against racism, feminists, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, seemed willing to invoke the racist assumptions of eugenics to argue against those that were sexist. In a move made familiar by their abolitionist roots (a move later made by second-wave “rights” feminists) they drew an analogy between racial and sexual discrimination; unfortunately, the only evidence eugenics provided to support their argument, the only evidence on which such feminists could draw with which both social Darwinists and eugenicists could agree, was the “evidence” provided by racial bias. In Women and Economics, for example, Gilman claims that the exclusion of women from the economic sphere of production has encouraged in them “the vices of the slave” (333). In terms explicitly evolutionary, she says it is only natural that women would be “unintelligent,” would make “ceaseless demands” of men, and would exhibit a “perverse, capricious

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willfulness in little things” as long as “race development” took place only in the male half of the population (121, 334, 75). At the nexus of these swirling discourses, Fontia R. had lived a relatively quiet and unremarkable life. Expressing no particular feminist sentiments in her late-life letters, though (as we have seen) on rare occasions inclined to object to association with particular others on ambiguous grounds, she asserted herself as an individual accustomed to relative privilege. Born into the “white race,” she received a common school education until she reached the age of 13; afterward, a sign of her class status as the daughter of an attorney, she was tutored at home for several years. Her marriage at age 24 to William R., a prosperous man with a good career, led to a ten-year residence in London, from 1906 to 1916. Though she had no children and thus neglected one primary moral responsibility of women of her class, her life would have drawn little, if any, eugenic attention. But when her husband died suddenly upon their return to the United States, Fontia R.’s life abruptly changed and became more remarkable in progressive terms. At age 58 she became a working woman, attempting to stretch her inheritance by supplementing it through ventures in real estate. We do not know how successful she was in these ventures, but we do know that she managed to support herself for roughly fourteen years before her funds ran out. At that point, unable to dress in the style appropriate to a professional woman, she began to turn to friends when she needed money for food—at least, that is what her letters of recommendation say. Well aware of the necessity of constructing Fontia R. as a person worthy of the Hanna Foundation’s aid, her friends made no mention of her real estate career, saying only that she had been left “penniless” by the death of her husband and had tried to support herself, to no avail (Letters # 1 and 3). Recently fired by the Stearns Fudge Shop on Woodward Avenue—“her age alone,” writes her former employer, “is the only reason why we could not retain her” (Letter #7)—Fontia R. appeared before the foundation as a well-bred woman who had, as required by the terms of the trust, come to be poor through no fault of her own. Neither do we know whether Fontia R. ever disclosed her status as a charity case, even to the friends who had recommended her to the foundation. We do know that she sometimes expressed compassion for “invalids and convalescents as well as the feeble minded”; in October 1942 she called them the “Poor Souls!!—The unwanted ones! . . . Derelicts

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in the sea of Life, floating with the tide—Thank God,” she added, “for my mind & brain polarizing thought of health & Life instead of Age & decay!!” (Letter #104). In contrast to those she deemed less fortunate—though, as a boarder in the same rooming house her own situation was nearly identical to theirs—she maintained her right to better treatment and food, asking for “proper food & quiet surroundings as well as intelligent people . . . I’m alive & enjoying life as a gift from God Almighty. . . . . I simply cannot live with disagreeable, greedy, conditions about me” (Letter #102). As we will see, Fontia R. was stoutly maintaining both class and gender identities in the face of circumstances that clearly questioned both. Whether overspending, overdressing, or even “overliving,” she was acting just as economic theory would have predicted for a woman of her privilege. However, before turning to the economic theory that could well have used her life as empirical verification of its well-honed probabilities, we will turn to the fabrics, the clothes, and the fashionable politics she used to fashion her public life. T h e Fa b r i c s o f H e r L i f e — a n d Our s : Fa s h i o n a b l e P o l i t i c s

Rayon drapes well and has a soft silky hand. fabrics.net Am just recovering from a rayon attack, and I have really suffered— Fontia R. Did your stockings kill babies? slogan of 1937 silk boycott

Raw cloth probably carries more cultural significance than most of us would readily notice. In ancient times a gift of cloth had great economic, ritual, and even spiritual significance, and in more recent history “sumptuary” laws in both Europe and the American colonies (in the seventeenth century) restricted certain kinds of fabrics, and certain ornaments, to those certain people whose net worth exceeded a certain amount (Crane). Today we are more likely to notice the clothing than the cloth, but like many centuries of women—and men—before us, we respond emotionally and psychologically to both the cloth and the clothing once it has made its final transition into “fashion.” Our largely unconscious rhetoric of cloth thus measures significance on an escalating scale from raw materials, to bolts of cloth, to clothing, to fashion.

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Because these significances are layered, none are eliminated in the process whereby a cotton boll, for example, becomes fashion; indeed, the raw materials that go into the creation of a piece of fashionable clothing are of utmost importance in determining its aesthetic qualities, cost, and, hence, the social standing of the person who wears it. The development of fashion, what Quentin Bell calls “the essential virtue in a garment without which its intrinsic values can hardly be perceived,” is a relatively recent and European invention (57, 105). According to Bell’s theory (as well as Veblen’s, of which we will see more in the next section), fashion appears in cultures characterized by at least a modicum of social mobility and is itself mobilized by a process of emulation, or imitation. This emulative process begins, at least theoretically, with the wealthy, who initiate fashions that then seep into the lower classes, becoming, of course, more and more literally vulgar, as Bell explains, in the process (108–9). Fashion is thus both a capitalist phenomenon and, potentially, a democratizing force. This fact was surely not lost on the millions of immigrants who streamed into the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As soon as they could, Crane’s history tells us, they discarded their traditional clothing in favor of “American” fashions, the better to assimilate into American culture. Based on this phenomenon, at least for a while, the United States was thought of as a center of fashion democracy, where shop girls could foolishly spend their money to dress “above their station” (Richardson) and everyone seemed, at least to the European visitor, to be all of one class (Crane). That appearance was, however, an illusion that could be dispelled upon a close look; detachable, celluloid shirt collars (Mulligan), seersucker suits (Crane), or cotton stockings (Glickman)—these unworthy imitations of the linen, wool, and silk exemplars worn by those of greater wealth—all betrayed the class of their wearers. More, the clothing that shop girls, immigrants, and factory workers could afford tended to be ill fitting or slightly out of style; either they (in the case of the shop girls) or their wives (in the case of male workers) made their clothes at home using rudimentary one-size-fits-all patterns to imitate current fashions, or they bought them in the cheap stores to which the out-of-style clothing of the wealthy made their way through the business of thrift shops and rag pickers (Bell). However, toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the working classes were buying more and more of their clothes ready made.

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This phenomenon had begun both humbly and exploitatively at the turn of the nineteenth century with the manufacture of so-called Negro clothing (also known as “slop”)—a one-size-fits-all work outfit of crudely cut coarse fabric that was shipped to southern plantations or sold to sailors in “slop shops” (Ewen and Ewen 161–2). In the mid-nineteenth century the industry found in the Civil War a huge market for military uniforms (167) and also increased its expertise in terms of both production and design; thus slop became ready-to-wear. While the advent of paper patterns, home sewing machines (available through installment payments), and standardized sizes all improved the quality of clothing that middle-class women could make at home, by the 1880s most clothing was becoming man, rather than woman, made. Sold at first through mail-order catalogs like Montgomery Wards and Sears, ready-to-wear finally made its debut at the turn of the century in increasingly common department stores (194). One such department store was the Detroit Hudson’s, which opened in 1881 as a clothing store for men and boys (Baulch). In 1911, Hudson’s moved to Woodward Avenue; by the time Fontia R. was in the care of the Hannan Foundation, the store had expanded into a new twenty-five-story tower, and was serving a high-end clientele in nearly two million square feet of space that took up an entire city block (“J.L Hudson’s”). Despite its good reputation, though, Fontia R.’s relationship with Hudson’s seems to have been a marriage of convenience or of necessity, and made of her relationship with Alma W. nearly a ménage à trois. As the wife of a successful business promoter in London, she surely must have had custom-made clothing; from her case file we know she had also learned (and loved) to sew. On many occasions she asked Alma W. to buy the fine fabrics she wanted so she could make her own clothing, better than what she could afford to buy in Hudson’s bargain basement. In July 1931 she was permitted to do so, and Alma W. noted (under “EMPLOYMENT”) that “W has made for herself a charming three piece suit out of the material which was purchased for her,” adding, “She stated, however, that the inexpensive hat which was purchased shrank considerably when she was caught out in the rain with it” (Visitor Notes 9). Six years and many shopping trips later, Fontia R. was still dissatisfied with her fashion options. “I don’t wish to complain,” she wrote in June 1937, “but I rather have a hat dress etc. once in five years and have them presentable, than a lot of cheap junk every few months” (Letter

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#47). Still stubbornly insisting on her ability to sew her own clothes at the age of 81 in 1940, and with the exasperation born of years of effort, she wrote, “Dear, dear Mrs. [W.]: you cannot make me into a ready to wear model—no use in trying—I’m truly sorry—It’s a waste of time & energy—It means I must still make my suits etc” (Letter #69). Again in December of that year, she insisted that she could make her own nightgowns, at least—“as cheap if not cheaper than those we buy & they would be comfortable” (Letter #82). Representing herself as one of a kind despite her reliance on a network including her Visitor, the foundation, and the economic conglomerate known as Hudson’s, she triumphantly proclaims, “No more ready made dresses slips etc for me.” But then, perhaps exhausted by the next February, she concedes: “After thinking things over, I have concluded that I have no right to ask you to change your way of clothing your needy ones—so we will think no more of yard goods, patterns etc—I’ll do my best with ready made garments—will watch the ads & let you know by mail, what I would like—a couple of thin cotton Philippine night gowns, Bust 40—color pink—” (Letter #83). Given this love-hate relationship with Hudson’s Department Store and its manufactured clothing, we should not be surprised by Fontia R.’s tormented relationship with the very first man-made fabric—rayon. Created and marketed by Du Pont as a less expensive substitute for silk, it was also generally perceived as a distinctly inferior substitute in the manufacture of clothing ranging from undergarments and hosiery to dresses and suits. First marketed in the United States in the 1920s, rayon did not appear until August 22, 1938, in the file of Fontia R., who, according to her custom, had until then been wearing garments of far finer fabric. As Alma W. writes of the first “rayon attack”: “W showed V[isitor] spots on her arm which had been rubbed by various types of clothing. Because W’s skin is so sensitive to some materials V agreed that W should have the yard material and make her own nightgowns and underwear” (Visitor Notes 36). This entry by the scrupulously professional Alma W. betrays little sense of the drama of Fontia R.’s reactions—physical and emotional—to the demon rayon. A particularly virulent rayon attack, according to her letter of December 1940, was the result of a pink slip that V had thoughtfully sent from Hudson’s. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Fontia R. writes, but “I wore it for five hours, and I was ablaze with fever & terrible [pain] wherever it contacted my flesh. I simply cannot wear anything but linen or silk or fine cotton” (Letter

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#82). Similarly, she did not dare to even remove from its box a dress that arrived in September 1941; “When I saw it was rayon,” she wrote, “unless I wish to commit suicide or live in misery, I would not dare to wear it” (Letter #90). Of a shipment from Hudson’s in February 1943 that included nightgowns, slips, hosiery, and undervests picked out for her by Alma W., Fontia R. wrote that, sadly, she could not use anything but the nightgowns. “It really does not matter,” she added, “for I see that I could not possibly wear such illy proportioned things & I do not dare put such common rayon next to my skin” (Letter 106). In fact, “to even think of Rayon, Makes me shudder.” This delayed (though prolonged) reaction was brought about not only by rayon but also, as Glickman’s account of the politics of fashion tells us, by fast-moving and world-shaking events. These events began with the Sino-Japanese War in 1937; followed by mass political actions by American students in 1937 and upper-class women in 1938, the war led to a silk boycott that in turn led to public political endorsements of rayon. The silk boycott received its first national attention in December 1937, when the leftist American Student Union passed a resolution supporting the boycott of Japanese products. Meeting on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, the ASU membership also (at the urging of a male student from Chicago) built a bonfire into which all assembled tossed their silk goods. While the men removed their ties, the women removed their stockings—and other, more intimate, apparel. As reported in publications such as Time and Life (with photographs), the event bore out the wisdom of one ASU member who said years later that just about any political position could benefit from the spectacle of a bonfire “into which all the girls threw their silk panties” (Glickman 592–4). Collective action by women of varying affiliations took up where the students’ movement left off as a fashion show staged for an elite audience of 600 in Washington DC in late January, 1938, employed remarkably similar strategies. With the obvious approval of the show’s sponsor, the League of Women Shoppers (yes, shoppers, not voters), fashion models strutted down the runway wearing fashionable apparel with hemlines raised sufficiently to show that not only their dresses but their stockings, too, were made of rayon. But the League of Women Shoppers had competition from an equally strategic group—three hundred women from the American Federation of Hosiery Workers who, concerned about the loss of their jobs with the loss of the industry’s primary material,

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marched outside the fashion show hall wearing similarly shortened dresses to display their lovely silk stockings. A spokeswoman for the union declared on a radio broadcast that same night that there was no suitable substitute for silk; that “American women should not settle for lower standards of dress”; and that, as workers and women both, the union protestors had been not only “victims of a foreign war” but also “fashion victims” (Glickman 573–6). Undeterred, the boycott movement continued for the next year to invent catchy slogans that touted the beauty of alternatives to silk (“make lisle the style!”) and heaped shame upon the uncooperative (“did your stockings kill babies?”) (581). A spectacle in almost any sense of the term, the simultaneous demonstrations received a great deal of press coverage though—as we might expect—that coverage used up most of its column inches on descriptions of the display of an unusual number of inches of “limbs.” Time waxed poetic about film star and boycott supporter Eleanor Powell’s legs, saying they seemed “superhuman and mordantly adept, as if animated by a baleful intelligence of their own.” A reporter for one local paper characterized the union demonstration as “the greatest leg show the city has ever witnessed,” adding, “lots of people didn’t know what it was about” (qtd. in Glickman 577). Thus trivialized by the press, the boycott shows us that women’s political activities were tolerated, patronizingly, especially when titillation was involved. But these women’s movements also demonstrated the intuitive understandings of two disparate classes of women—“society ladies” and “factory girls”—who knew exactly what role they could play in politics and how they could play it. Society ladies could permit their daughters to engage in a bit of sexual display, indoors, before a high-society audience, and for a good cause; factory girls could take it to the streets. Perhaps unwittingly getting conservatives and liberals on the same page—of the Washington Post, no less— they also attempted to construct an alternative rhetoric of cloth that recognized not only its aesthetic and functional properties but its economic and political valences as well. Intriguingly, in the process, they enacted a rhetoric of “woman” that was strongly interwoven with that of cloth— and the thread that wove them together was economics. By 1938, silk had become extremely difficult to find. Everyday hosiery was made of rayon or cotton lisle, and Fontia R., who certainly had not participated in any collective actions, became a (fashion) victim of world events. In October 1941, she wrote to Alma W. requesting two pairs of lisle hose. But she quickly added, “Be sure there is no rayon or nylon

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mixed with them—number 9—light flesh colored” (Letter #92). Fontia R. was down, but not out. M a n - M a d e : W o m e n , Fa s h i o n , a n d E c o n o m i c s

Attention to conspicuous waste of substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of the woman. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class All fashion ends in excess. Paul Poiret, En Habillant L’Epoque

We might summarize the interwoven Progressive Era rhetorics of cloth and women this way: like cloth, women perform an organizing function as items of male property with varying levels of exchange value. With women, as with cloth, aesthetic properties are in constant competition with functionality—both, if they must be put to work, must also be coarse. Those samples that are pretty and of high quality are also likely to be delicate and thus expensive to maintain; those who maintain them can expect very little return on their investments other than the social capital earned through their display. Women and cloth, then, tend to depreciate over the years; though they may retain some exchange value for a significant part of their lifespan, that value will unravel with time. Women and cloth are, in fact, nearly inseparable, the one displaying the other in order to make public the achievements of those who bought them both. Such an account obviously requires more support than I have thus far offered. For that support, I now turn to the discourse of economics—to Thorstein Veblen and his articulations of conspicuous consumption, leisure, and waste; to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s competing theory of the relationship of economics and women; and to Paul H. Nystrom’s Economics of Fashion. I also turn to Quentin Bell’s On Human Finery, a book of fashion theory that distills the economic work of Nystrom and Veblen but, though quite compatible with Gilman’s, does not recognize it. Veblen occupies the first six chapters of his Theory of the Leisure Class with a description of his economic theory of conspicuous consumption. Once he has laid this extensive groundwork, he turns in chapter seven to a discussion of what he calls its “most apt illustration, . . . expenditure on dress” (67). He justifies his use of fashion this way:

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It is especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress, although the other, related principles of pecuniary repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of putting one’s pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance. . . . It is also true that admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any other line of consumption. (67)

In the event his readers are not yet convinced by this turn to frivolous fashion, Veblen adds that wasteful consumption is “true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items of consumption . . .; so that it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate, for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed . . . . The need of dress,” he concludes, “is eminently a ‘higher’ or spiritual need” (67). In this relatively concise justificatory statement we find many of the elements of Veblen’s basic economic theory set forth. Clearly, consumption is key to his theory, and waste is key to consumption. Furthermore, we engage in consumption through display, at its most obvious through fashion, in order to demonstrate our “pecuniary standing” or “repute.” The only element left out of this very brief justification by Veblen is the idea, absolutely basic to his account, that consumption and waste must be vicarious if a capitalist society is to have a “leisure” class. And because for Veblen women are the vicarious consumers par excellence, it is not at all surprising that fashion provides the exemplar by which other forms of consumption may be measured. In the simplest of summaries, we can say this about Veblen’s theory and the role of women and fashion therein: in a society more obviously “classed” than that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—say, in early eighteenth-century England or France—one’s leisure was entirely dependent upon one’s social class, which itself was entirely dependent upon one’s genealogy. The income associated with such elevated standing permitted a degree of ostentation in dress, speech, and manners that obviously would have been impossible achievements for those who needed to spend their time on gainful employment. With the advent of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, mass production and waged labor, and so forth, income came to be more widely distributed and the luxury of leisure spread from the upper classes to the upper-middle

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and eventually middle classes, who needed a method of displaying their newly elevated standing. Furthermore, because the new middle classes relied on the labor of the male members of the family for their livelihood, each man’s consumption, his waste, and even his leisure had to be handled by his agents—perhaps, for the upper classes, by his elegantly clad servants, but certainly in all “leisure” classes by his elegantly dressed female possessions. As displays for their husbands’ ability to provide for them in excess, women were to play the role of “vicarious consumers,” engaging in the conspicuous consumption that demonstrated male wealth, and in the sham of home-bound “vicarious leisure,” while the men worked to earn the means for the display. Even Veblen knew that women’s leisure in the home was a fantasy; either they worked to supervise a staff that maintained the household for them, or they engaged in the “drudgery” of housework themselves (26). Nevertheless, the ability of women to enjoy for men the consumption, waste, and leisure the men now had to earn rather than inherit was a key theoretical construct on which Veblen’s entire theory rested. Without the vicarious experience of women, conspicuous consumption was impossible for those who used their time and labor to earn the money they needed to waste. One year after Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption was published, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her own theory in Women and Economics. In some ways her theory is similar to his; she depends upon an evolutionary explanation for the development of sophisticated economic structures and thus, like Veblen, begins with the presumed economic state of “barbarian” or “savage” human civilizations (Gilman 6; Veblen 1). Gender, obviously, is also a key component of her economic account. But where Veblen sees women’s contributions to the human economy as vicarious, Gilman sees women’s life experiences as direct and as a meaningful sign regarding the unhealthy state to which the human economy has come. With various nonhuman species serving as comparative examples, Gilman studies the development and function of sex distinction between males and females. Pointing to the male peacock as her example, she notes that the secondary sex characteristics that distinguish him from the female, his crest and tail feathers, “do not help him get his dinner or kill his enemies. . . . On the contrary, they react unfavorably upon his personal gains, if, through too great development, they interfere with his activity or render him a conspicuous mark for enemies” (33).

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The male peacock’s exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics, including the feathers often used by humans to exaggerate their own attractiveness, would create an “excessive sex-distinction” in any species, Gilman says. Specifically, in humans, the exaggerated distinctions between the sexes serve to direct the effort of one sex to occupy and intensify the sexual drive of the other. Humans, she says, are unique among the animals in this excessive sex distinction (33), and that form of uniqueness leads to another: the human female becomes the only female who is economically dependent upon the male for survival, the only female animal for whom the sex relation is economic (5; emphasis added). The male human has become not only the female’s “food supply,” but, “in supporting woman, has become her economic environment” as well (38). Women, then, literally obtain their food through sex (141). Gilman deals with clothing only qua clothing; despite the obvious use of dress to further the sexuoeconomic distinction, she is not at all interested in the role played by fashion in women’s lives or in the political economy. For our male writers, however, fashion is serious business, along with gender—in the female of the species, and in the irrationality of the evolution of “women’s” fashions, they find an illuminating contrast to the (presumably) inevitable “progress” of other human institutions. For fashion, they say, unlike almost every other human phenomenon so far subjected to the scrutiny and rules of social Darwinism, refuses to contribute to the survival of the fittest. Indeed, according to Nystrom, it seems that “styles . . . go as far as possible” to hinder the movement and activity of their wearers (103). Least-fit fashions thus contribute to the survival of the least-fit wearer, she who “does not and, as far as it may conveniently be shown, can not engage in productive labor” (Veblen 69–70). The discomfort of the corset and the motion-restricting design of the (aptly named) “hobble” skirt, then, work to meet the requirements of conspicuous leisure; the man who no longer has time for his own may still demonstrate his wealth vicariously through the leisure enforced by the restrictive design of his wife’s clothing (Nystrom 299; Veblen 69). Thus, not only the corset or the hobble skirt, but also the vestigial remains of such practical clothing elements as the fringe on a shawl (the remainder of the warp), are wasteful reminders of a leisurely past, and even functional items such as the lowly safety pin may be made of gold and, thus rendered impractical, worn as an entirely useless brooch (Bell 61).

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Such contrivances and even entire “looks” are not necessarily beautiful, says Veblen, but are said to be so simply because they are fashion. Indeed, the requirement of waste that demonstrates leisure is naturally abhorrent to “all men—and women perhaps even in a higher degree” he writes; therefore fashionable dress, far from beautiful, is in fact “intrinsically ugly.” Seasonal and yearly fashion changes thus not only exhibit waste but provide their wearers relief from the “essential ugliness . . . of [last year’s] fashionable attire” (71). Veblen admits that the need for waste (throwing out last season’s dresses) and ugliness (required to convince women to do so) cannot explain “why conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be” (69). Nystrom, taking up this question by way of a very long examination of human psychology, is able to conclude only that fashions change primarily out of sheer human boredom (81); Bell, considering the influence of fashionable individuals, Nystrom’s “human nature,” great political or spiritual events, or even “the intervention of a Higher Power,” cannot offer any insight into the reason for fashion change beyond those of his predecessors (105). All of these male scholars do agree, however, about the intrinsic link of fashion change to “human nature.” Veblen, we have seen, sees both fashion and change as spiritual needs (67); Nystrom’s psychological evaluation considers (in addition to boredom) human needs for affiliation and recognition, their propensity to curiosity, and their disappointment with their achievements as factors contributing to fashion change (66–70). He rejects sexual attraction (the idea that women dress for men, not that men may dress for women) as a cause of specific fashion changes. “Are the new fashions, whatever they may be, ever dominated by what men prefer or like?” he asks, concluding (somewhat like Veblen) that “sex hunger” is inadequate to explain why a particular fashion becomes the vogue (70–71; emphasis in original). As Bell concludes, when we talk about fashion we are talking about normal human behavior—it’s just that “when we begin to reflect upon it we discover that our normal behaviour is crazy” (17). The course of fashion evolution is, apparently, a mission to lead us to a condition of normal insanity through the contrivance of mutilations (Veblen 74), the creation of the hideous (Nystrom 9), and the survival of the useless (Bell 140). Those conclusions lead us back to precisely what Gilman had already asserted, that the sexuoeconomic relation of human males and females had distorted our social roles. Because for Gilman “a noble home life is

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the product of a noble social life,” our cultural belief in the opposite— that the home creates society—had made the home “a definite limit to social progress” (223). But the human propensity for habit, even uncomfortable habits like the corset, in Gilman’s time having been found injurious to women’s health, made our distorted sexuoeconomic relation so comfortable that to remove it, just as to remove a corset, was to cause “a distinct sense of loss” (78). With women as nonproductive (she does not say “vicarious”) consumers completely dependent upon men for their support, and as domestic creatures whose sole responsibility was to the sustenance and comfort of their husbands and children, we had come to the point where all those coddled individuals maintained by the work of others developed “an exaggerated sense of the importance of food and clothes and ornaments to themselves” (120). Phrased thus, this statement might prompt us to consider whether it is the sexuoeconomic relationship, rather than boredom, attraction, or emulation, that leads to fashion change. Indeed, Bell makes a number of points similar to Gilman’s, though they lead him to different conclusions. He adds to that initial observation the fact that men’s fashions, which once did vary, have changed very little since the eighteenth century, but that women’s fashions continue to change. By the period between 1830 and 1906, he says, the gender differences in clothing had become so extreme that one might well conclude “that there was at this time a more complete opposition between the sexes than has ever been before or since.” With the opportunity to notice the excessive sex distinction, the sexuoeconomic relation, and the unnatural position of human females vis-à-vis human males, he hastens to conclude instead that “pretty obviously” the male-female distinction was not more marked at that period than in prior ages despite the fact that “it is what one might fairly conclude from a study of the costume of the period” (143). Instead, he suggests that the greatly increased sex distinction suggested by the differences in men’s and women’s fashions “arises from the fact that the exhibition of wealth on men no longer depended upon a demonstration of futility” (144). With their wives available to demonstrate futility for them, men were free to wear more practical clothing. Of course it is highly unlikely that Fontia R. would have read either Veblen or Gilman to understand her finances or her insatiable desire for fashionable clothing. It is far more likely that she would have read the popularized accounts of economics in the ladies’ magazines from which she clipped pictures from advertisements to guide the shopping

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of Alma W. And though she may not have read Bertha June Richardson’s The Woman Who Spends, she would have absorbed a discourse of economics similar to what Richardson brought into the well-educated popular sphere through her book of advice for women who bore the responsibility of vicarious consumption. In keeping with the social Darwinism of the time, Richardson produces an extended biological metaphor to explain the relationship between an organism (the human being) and its environment (the consumer culture). An organism must, she explains, both draw on its environment and distinguish itself from it. Translating the biological example into economic terms, she explains that imitation occurs through technologies that allow us to make many exactly matching objects. Thus we may have cheaper and more goods, but we must be careful not to go too far. The resulting poor variation “weakens the independent life of individual and community” (70). Thus, someone must distinguish herself from the many and “possess things worth imitating;” such, she says, “is the office of the woman of taste” (74). Richardson’s debt to Veblen is clear, as is her use of the eugenic idea that poor exemplars, whether humans or fashions, dilute the quality of the whole to which “women who spend” owe the benefits of their superior taste. She thereby also directs our attention to the not entirely intuitive link of economics to eugenics and of the mutually sustaining discourses they produced. In fact, according to recent scholarship, Progressive Era economics “was deeply impacted by eugenic ideas” (Rutherford 886). According to this scholarship, that impact may be seen in the development of two economic concepts; the phenomenon of underliving and the invention of human capital. “Underliving” was simply the ability of any given individual to survive poor living conditions, such as poor housing, close quarters with noisy (and smelly) others, and impossibly low wages (Smith 894). Underliving exhibited itself, if we may be permitted some irony, through inconspicuous consumption; those who engaged in underliving made insufficient purchases and engaged in a low level of waste that betrayed their social inadequacy. Based on this reasoning, both conservative and liberal progressives supported the ingenious idea of the minimum wage, seeing in it not only a way to bar the unworthy from good occupations through employers’ unwillingness to pay the wage, but also a way to spot them; the minimum wage, they believed, would enable the market to “reveal truth” (893–4) about human worth. However, it is through the concept of human capital and the person of the economist who coined it that we see the clearest connection

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between economics and eugenics. Irving Fisher was both an economist and a eugenicist; in fact, he came to believe that where economic theory failed to support eugenic programs, such theory should be rethought. Eventually he became so attached to eugenics that he began to see it not only as superior to economics, but as “a universal matrix for all social sciences” (Cot 795). “Human capital” was, then, an economic construct drawn from eugenic principles. It referred to the value of a nation’s “germ plasm,” what eugenicists called the hereditary material of a given “race,” and it was to be improved and preserved through any means possible, including the careful breeding of the fit and the reproductive control of the unfit. Fisher was so convinced of the reliability of this construct that he believed it possible to literally calculate a nation’s worth, and thus assign to it an interest rate, based on (racist) assumptions about the value of its germ plasm (804). Thus some childlike or savage races were, like women, incompetent judges of their future needs (805); failing to set aside resources to supply those needs, both women and those savage races were a risky investment. Anything those nations made up of “superior” races might choose to contribute toward the development of lesser nations must, therefore, generate a high rate of interest to compensate for the low expectation that their debts would be repaid. Though we may seem to have come a long way, we have only returned to Fontia R., a conspicuous consumer of others’ money and a debtor who rarely repaid even principal, let alone interest. Operating as an ideal image of the “economic woman” assumed by male theory, and forced due to her age to give up working for $1.50 a night at the Stearns Fudge Shoppe, she took up her attempts at a more genteel existence through the charity of others. A pioneer of overliving, Fontia R. maintained her standards of fashion at every level. R e s i l i e n c e a n d R h e to r i ca l Ag e n c y

Resilience is a process involving the use of one’s relationships and other materials at hand in one’s circumstances to construct personal agency. Not an individual character trait, it is a specifically rhetorical process in the sense that it is time and place sensitive; aims at affecting the quality of conditions in the social world; may employ a number of varying kinds of appeals, on occasion deceptively, to do so (including logical, ethical, and emotional pleas); and may or may not succeed. Fontia R.’s fourteenyear process—her ongoing attempt to shape herself and her everyday circumstances by drawing on the people, discourses, and institutions

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available to her (including both the Hannan Foundation and Hudson’s Department Store)—is exemplary of this process. She achieved no lasting triumph; though her manipulations, arguments, humor, and gratitude did yield occasional successes, she never “bounced back” to her former state of plenty. Further, she did not aim at changing the world; rather, she aimed at changing her world, and in the process brought about changes in the world of her Visitor, Alma W., and even that of the board of directors of the Hannan Foundation, which occasionally discussed her requests and modified some long-standing policies to accommodate her from time to time. Fontia R.’s resilient process resulted in a form of agency that itself has been called “rhetorical.” An ongoing discussion that began at a conference of the Allied Rhetoric Societies (see Geisler) and that continued through numerous publications has generated a description of rhetorical agency that notes (with some disputation, of course; see Koerber; Nicotra; Turnbull; Villadsen) these primary characteristics: 1. Rhetorical agency is partial. It is limited by the ability of the “speaker” to garner an audience as well as by her physical and ideological circumstances. 2. Rhetorical agency is collective. Not only must a speaker draw from contextually available resources, but she also must attempt to create a meaning for those resources that others (from one to many) may acknowledge. 3. Rhetorical agency may be pragmatic. The speaker may aim to create social or individual, concrete change. 4. Rhetorical agency may be spontaneous. The most agile speaker will be able to draw upon whatever resources are ready-to-hand in order to speak. 5. Rhetorical agency may be disruptive or deceptive. Though the speaker may well use logical and ethical appeals, the speaker may also use manipulation, deceit, or the “cunning intelligence” of mêtis to achieve her aim. Fontia R. did not engage in a valiant struggle against the ideological forces of her time—she used them to her own ends and thus, as Koerber has suggested, worked to disrupt their disciplinary power without escaping their grip (95). But even if she had never succeeded in her attempts

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to wheedle extra money, or a bolero sweater, out of the foundation, she would still have exercised rhetorical agency through a process of resilience because neither requires that an individual’s efforts result in externalized effects (Nicotra 42). Instead, she exercised agency through a process of what Nicotra has called “fascination,” or seduction, a process of being “charmed” by a text and engaging with it—in her case, a text made up of eugenic ideas, a privileged economic situation, and a meager wardrobe containing not one thread of rayon. Perhaps the fascination in this case was mutual. Charmed by the text that was Fontia R., a text that consisted of her considerable personal energy, her playful manipulations of the social—whether social ideas or social workers—and even by a fall into senility that found Fontia R. mindlessly cutting holes into clothing, draperies, and upholstery with her sewing shears, the foundation gave in to the world she created over and over again. And Alma W.? When the time came, Fontia R.’s Visitor found a lovely suit for her—a red suit, one suitable for burial, and one Fontia R. would no doubt have loved. N ot e s 1.

2. 3.

All names of individuals from the case file are pseudonyms. Fontia R.’s words, and those of her “Visitor,” Alma W., have been presented without correction for grammar or spelling. Source: Ruth Ray interview with Ellen Kayrod, the last surviving Hannan Foundation social worker from Fontia R.’s era. Current research (see for example Ladd-Taylor) questions this simple binary.

Works Cited Baulch, Vivian M. “How J. L. Hudson Changed the Way We Shop.” The Detroit News. March 17, 2000. January 28, 2012. Web. . Bell, Quentin. On Human Finery. London: Allison & Busby, 1992. Print. “J.L. Hudson’s Department Store.” Controlled Demolition, Inc. January 28, 2012. Web. . Cot, Annie L. “‘Breed Out the Unfit and Breed in the Fit’: Irving Fisher, Economics, and the Science of Heredity.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64.3 (2005): 793–826. Print. Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Ed. Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Oxford U P, 1996. Print. Ewen, Stuart, and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. Print. Geisler, Cheryl. “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 9–18. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Print.

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Glickman, Lawrence B. “‘Make Lisle the Style’: The Politics of Fashion in the Japanese Silk Boycott, 1937–1940.” Journal of Social History 38.3 (2005): 573–608. Print. Hasian, Marouf Arif, Jr. The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. Print. Horsburgh, Beverly. “Schrodinger’s Cat, Eugenics, and the Compulsory Sterilization of Welfare Mothers: Deconstructing and Old/New Rhetoric and Constructing the Reproductive Right to Natality of Low-Income Women of Color.” Cardozo Law Review 17.2 (1996): 531–82. Print. Koerber, Amy. “Rhetorical Agency, Resistance, and the Disciplinary Rhetorics of Breastfeeding.” Technical Communication Quarterly 15.1 (2006): 87–101. Print. Ladd-Taylor, Molly. “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe.” Gender & History 13.2 (2001): 298–327. Print. Mulligan, Roark. “From Low-Cost, Detachable Collars to American High Culture: Dreiser’s Rhetoric of Cloth.” English Language Notes 35 (December, 1997): 64–9. Print. Nicotra, Jodie. “The Seduction of Samuel Butler: Rhetorical Agency and the Art of Response.” Rhetoric Review 27.1 (2008): 38–53. Print. Nystrom, Paul H. Economics of Fashion. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1928. Print. Popenoe, Paul. “Eugenic Sterilization in California.” The Journal of Heredity 19.2 (1928): 73–82. Print. Ranney, Frances J., Ruth Ray, and Gwen Gorzelksy. “Constructing Philanthropy, Community, and Worth: An Invitation to International, Online Collective Feminist Research.” Paper presented at the Australian Women’s Studies Association Conference. Melbourne, Australia, 9 July 2006. Richardson, Bertha June, A.B. The Woman Who Spends: A Study of Her Economic Function. Boston: M. Barrows & Co., 1925. Print. Rutherford, Malcolm. “Comments on Four Papers on Economics and Human Heterogeneity.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64.3 (2005): 881–6. Print. Smith, Mark M. “Finding Deficiency: On Eugenics, Economics, and Certainty.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64.3 (2005): 887–900. Print. Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics, Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. New York: D. Appleton, 1872. Print. Taylor, Carol M. “W. E. B. DuBois’s Challenge to Scientific Racism.” Journal of Black Studies 11.4 (1981): 449–60. Print. Turnbull, Nick. “Rhetorical Agency as a Property of Questioning.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.3 (2004): 207–22. Print. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. MacMillan, NY: 1899. Project Gutenberg. January 28, 2012. Web. . Villadsen, Lisa Storm. “Speaking on Behalf of Others: Rhetorical Agency and Epideictic Functions in Official Apologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38.1 (2008): 25–45. Print.

Response Philanthropy as Interpretation, Not Charity: Jane Addams’s Civic Housekeeping as Another Response to the Progressive Era

Kate Ronald “Fabricating a Feminine Self” got me thinking about another effort at helping women during the Progressive Era, one that coincides with the work of the Hannan Foundation and operated just west of Detroit and Hudson’s, the department store that Fontia R. so wanted to shop in, alone and independently. Reading Ranney’s wonderfully woven essay, I couldn’t get Jane Addams’s Hull House out of my mind. Opened in 1889, and thriving through the New Deal, Hull House, like the Hannan Foundation, offered assistance in its Chicago neighborhood and, in similar ways, tried to help people (called “citizens,” not “clients”) negotiate the threats and opportunities of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. More particularly, the term charity pervades my response to Ranney’s work, research I’m sure Addams would applaud for its careful observation and its insistence on connections between individual lives and social contexts. Therefore, I want to offer Addams’s insistence that what she was doing at Hull House was not charity. When asked what drove her to help people, she replied, “Philanthropy is not ‘helping’; it is interpretation.” Addams wrestled, as did Fontia R. and Alma W., with this distinction all her life, exploring the relationship between giver and recipient again and again in speeches, essays, books, and in her daily acts on Halsted Street in Chicago and around the world. In fact, reading her work over the years of the Progressive Era, one can see her working out this difference and connecting it not only to problems of labor, sanitation, or hunger but to issues of war, peace, and the role of nations. Along the way she used the term civic housekeeping to define the role of philanthropists and citizens alike. Therefore, here I would like to put the work of the Hannan Foundation and the relationship between its clients and visitors into that context. What difference would it make to think about

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the work of the Hannan Foundation not as assistance but as observation and critique? What difference would it make to see both Fontia R. and her “Visitors” as engaging in civic housekeeping rather than charity? Addams introduced the term civic housekeeping in her first public speech in 1880, as a junior at Rockford Seminary. Entitled “Breadgivers,” the speech first laid out her vision of women’s work as extending beyond caring for the home and family and tending, further, to the needs of the neighborhood, community, nation, and planet. To be a “breadgiver” was, to Addams, the highest calling, and from that concept she developed the notion of “municipal (or civic) housekeeping” as a sphere of action, not a closed-door haven (or prison). She developed this idea most fully in Twenty Years at Hull House, first published in 1910 and never out of print since then. Addams catalogs the “extension” of women’s work from the house to the street to the neighborhood to the city to the nation and beyond. Hull House was founded as an “experiment” in looking at the concrete situation and learning from it what could and must be done so that every citizen—never a client—could retain dignity, food, healthcare, a community of friends, and participation in democracy at home, in the neighborhood, and in the nation. As exemplified through her work with Hull House, Jane Addams recognized that in order to foster peace and social justice there must exist a spirit of cooperative goodwill to mediate difference and promote community. For Addams this meant cultivating spaces where people come together by means of nurture and hospitality, those familial values associated with home and hearth and which traditionally belong in the woman’s sphere. When social problems are addressed through this kind of affectionate engagement, the work of civic housekeeping begins. The idea of civic housekeeping finds meaning in the way one applies hospitality and traditions of homemaking to the civic arena. In other words, the work of Alma W. might be reinterpreted not as competition, but as collaboration. (I’m not suggesting that Ranney oversimplifies in the way I am here, but I do see that both women are focusing on competing claims: other clients’ needs, the desire to appear fit and fashionable, assumptions about worthiness, to name just a few). As Ranney so clearly explores, these two women were caught in the Progressive Era’s belief in the connection between competition and survival. My response, then, offers another model. For Addams, affectionate interpretation meant the work of observing, attending, and listening to people’s concrete experiences—a determination to enter into others’

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lives without the arrogance to assume that she knew their experiences better than they did. In “A Modern Lear,” whose title was a reference to George Pullman, Addams argued that “so long as philanthropists are cut off from the great moral life springing from our common experiences, so long as they are ‘good to people’ rather than ‘good with them,’ they are bound to accomplish a great deal of harm” (172). Certainly Fontia R’s visitors strived to be “with” her, but as Ranney shows, quite often their efforts ignored or deprecated her actual experience, especially of being allergic to rayon. It’s interesting to note in passing that much of Addams’s work was devoted to clothing sweatshop workers. Perhaps some of Hull House’s citizens made the garments that Fontia so despised (or desired). Addams teases out the distinction of charity vs. interpretation more fully in “The Subtle Problems of Charity,” and it might also be interesting to think of the “charity visitor” as Alma W. and the “head of the family” as Fontia R., substituting the “saloon” for Hudson’s Department Store: The (charity) visitor is continually surprised to find that the safest platitudes may be challenged. She refers quite naturally to the ‘horrors of the saloon,’ and discovers that the head of her visited family who knows the saloons very well, does not connect them with ‘horrors’ at all. He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the free lunch and treating which go on, even when a man is out of work and not able to pay up; the poor fellows who are allowed to sit in their warmth when every other door is closed to them; the loan of five dollars when the charity visitor was miles away, and he was threatened with eviction. (67)

Earlier in this essay, Addams describes the typical charity visitor as a cautionary example for Hull House’s “residents,” most of whom come from the same background and impulses. She is a “young college woman, well-bred and open minded.” When she visits the family assigned to her, she is “embarrassed” to find that she is “obliged” to give advice that “stresses the industrial virtues” and to “treat members of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrial system” (63). Like Alma, she “insists that they must be self-supporting; that the most dangerous of all situations is idleness; that seeking one’s own pleasure . . . is the most ignoble of actions” (64). Addams has no easy answer for this embarrassment, except continual interpretation of the concrete situation with the ideal of democracy

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always in mind. While acknowledging the “incredibly painful difficulties which involved both giver and recipient,” Addams cautioned against the model of industrial “success” (63). She thought it necessary to turn to the “unsuccessful” for the source of affectionate interpretation. She posits that “if successful struggle ends in blatant and tangible success for the few only, government will have to reckon most largely with the men who have been beaten in the struggle, with the effect upon them of the contest and the defeat; for after all, the unsuccessful will always represent the majority of the citizens, and it is with the large majority that selfgovernment must eventually deal” (Newer Ideals 36). I’ll end with more of Addams’s words about the charitable relationship and her insistence that affectionate interpretation, a difficult path, must remain open to the widest possible experience. Again, in “A Modern Lear,” she explained that the “individual virtues” that Pullman (and industrial capitalists) “pleaded for,” such as sobriety, self-control, hard work, and property rights, were inadequate and out-of-date, the “virtues received from our fathers” (171). She replaces those old virtues with striving to know or possess “the largest share of the common human qualities and experiences,” not “peculiarities.” Affectionate interpretation and civic housekeeping provide then, contemporaneously with Ranney’s research, a “new code of ethics,” whose “rhythm is in sync with the common heartbeat of the rest of the world” (172). Yet, Addams is not suggesting here that common hearts mean identical experiences. “Our thoughts,” she insists, “will be warped unless we look all men in the face” (176). Ranney argues that we “cannot ignore the mechanisms of sameness against which we struggle.” I believe that Jane Addams’s insistence on affectionate interpretation might help us to struggle more successfully. Works Cited Addams, Jane. “Breadgivers.” 1880. Elshtain 8–9. ———. “A Modern Lear.” 1912. Elshtain 163–76. ———. Newer Ideals of Peace. 1907. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2007. Print. ———. “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements.” 1893. Elshtain 14–28. ———. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: MacMillan, 1910. Print. Elshtain, Jean Bethke, ed. The Jane Addams Reader. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Print.

Reflection Frances J. Ranney

I begin to write within thirty seconds of my first reading of Kate Ronald’s response to my essay about my now much-loved Fontia R., and my first thought is simply—what a wonderful response! And then I take a break for lunch because, as always, Kate has given me a lot to think about. There is no indication in Fontia R.’s file that anyone involved in the case—least of all Fontia R. herself—ever thought of her situation as anything other than a charity case. And yet, if Luella Hannan’s original plan to buy and maintain a home in Grosse Pointe for her worthy and formerly wealthy clients had been carried out, she may very well have created a place of dignity where some Jane Addams-style civic housekeeping could have taken place. Perhaps—but the worthy and currently wealthy neighbors made sure it didn’t happen. And why, I ask myself, did I not think to read Jane Addams? The idea that philanthropy could be thought of as interpretation is one that it seems to me we should take seriously today. Though I suggest in my chapter that the prosperous felt more free in the Progressive Era to openly blame “the poor” for their own poverty, it is quite clear from our public discourse that we still, as a culture, hold such beliefs very dear. Perhaps it is American short sightedness, or our insistence on individuality and responsibility, or our lack of a sense of history, or our outright panic over “socialism”—whatever the causes may be, claims of the privileged that they have worked hard for their privileges deny the joint inheritances of both poverty and plenty. If we were, indeed, to think of philanthropy as interpretation, we might be akin to a group of Australian citizens that I, along with my colleague Ruth Ray, met at the Australian Women’s Studies Association conference a number of years ago. We were presenting papers on our findings in the Hannan archives, and had included the word philanthropy in the title of our panel. Suffice it to say that our panel was not particularly well attended, and when we discussed that circumstance with other attendees at the conference, we learned that in Australia

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philanthropy is, if not a dirty word, at least one that carries a negative connotation. Why? Well, in the terms Kate has provided me, it’s because Australians believe that it is the job of the civic body to do its own civic housekeeping! I am attracted to the idea of philanthropy as interpretation for a number of reasons. First, of course, it involves the contributions of people who would otherwise be thought of as charity cases in solving what are clearly systemic, not individual, social problems. Second, it is alluringly rhetorical in its emphasis not only on interpretation, which I see as the lesser half of what rhetoric can do, but also on production. Let me explain: in the classical (Aristotelian) sense, what we may call the “art” of rhetoric was a techne, a term that may be translated as art, craft, or expertise, and that Aristotle proposed was the habit of mind characteristic of those who engaged in poiesis, or “production.” Those who produce rhetorically must draw on the materials available to them in any given situation, meaning not only that they cannot “import” materials that are not ready to hand but also, and significantly, that they must work with the inherent properties of those ready-to-hand materials. Doing so requires a quickness of wit that, in the case of subordinate peoples (or, at any rate, those who are less powerful than others present in a given situation) may be characterized as mêtistic. And who, pray tell, is Mêtis? In Greek mythology, she was the first wife of Zeus, a clever and beautiful goddess who employed trickery and forethought to fool many gods—among them Zeus himself. She took many forms, the myths tell us, in part to avoid Zeus’s amorous advances. Zeus eventually won that struggle, however, and Mêtis became pregnant with a daughter. She foretold that she would also have a son by Zeus, one more powerful than his father—at which the concerned god swallowed her up so that he later gave birth to their daughter, the mighty Athena, through his forehead. Thereafter Mêtis remained within Zeus, from which covert place she offered him wise counsel (a summary of various Mêtistic myths is available at http://www. theoi.com/Titan/TitanisMêtistic.html). Was not Mêtis supremely resilient? And is she not an apt symbol of what Fontia R. managed to do? Changing and disguising her shape through her many fashion choices, Fontia R. drew on the materials ready to hand, eventually resigning herself to ready-made fashions if not to man-made rayon—no, never to rayon. Swallowed up by a global economic crisis, she worked from her covert place to issue counsel

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(wise or no) as she could. Or perhaps, as a daughter of Mêtis, like Athena, she ventured bravely into the hostile world, clad in the gorgeous robes of battle.

6 F r o m “ M o t h e r s o f t h e N at i o n ” to “Mothers of the Race” Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric

Wendy Hayden

Real progress is growth. It must begin in the seed. Anna Julia Cooper, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” Criminals are often made years and years before they are sentenced to prison. Alas! Too often made criminal before they are born. Adella Hunt Logan, “Hereditary and Prenatal Influences” [The] salvation of the world can only come through better children. Victoria Woodhull, “Tried as by Fire”

Throughout the nineteenth century, women argued for education and other rights on the basis of “Republican motherhood”—they would be raising the nation’s future citizens.1 In the late nineteenth century, however, women’s importance as the bearers of these future citizens, whose minds and bodies they could mold before birth, created a new rhetoric of women’s rights—they were also the “mothers of the race.” As “mothers of the race,” many women argued that they required education, including scientific and hygienic education, recognition of their importance and their work in raising children, an identity within marriage, and rights to protect them from marital abuses. Most startling, some of these feminist rhetors began to demand sexual pleasure and the freedom to choose sex partners, regardless of the marriage laws, in order to bear healthy and intelligent children. At a time when many feminist advocates focused exclusively on suffrage, women in the social purity, racial uplift, and free-love movements proved the resilience of

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feminist rhetorics by showing that women’s rights went beyond suffrage to include sexual freedom. Their methods, however, complicate the ways we analyze feminist rhetorical resilience. The feminist rhetors analyzed in this chapter employed a “mothers of the race” rhetoric to argue for their very different women’s rights agendas, but their discourse proved similar in participating and becoming complicit in the eugenic rhetoric beginning to proliferate in nineteenth-century arguments. This chapter tracks the collusion of feminist rights discourse with a discourse of eugenics. Admittedly, this is a collusion that may offend current feminist sensibilities. Yet it is critical that in regendering the rhetorical tradition, we do not shy away from acknowledging unpopular and unethical arguments. Furthermore, reading this uncomfortable facet of nineteenth-century feminist rhetoric within the context of rhetorical resilience helps us understand their often baffling rhetorical choices. “Mothers of the race” rhetoric demonstrates feminist resilience in the specific context of late nineteenth-century ideological and institutional relations. This chapter first examines these relations by elaborating the primary influence on the “mothers of the race” argument: the new sciences of the nineteenth century. The theories of evolution of Lamarck and Darwin, as well as theories of prenatal and hereditary transmission circulating in the medical community, helped to instigate this new dimension to women’s rights rhetoric because of the social capital of science in nineteenth-century culture. Thus, the rhetors discussed in this essay demonstrate m ệtis, or the shape-shifting nature of feminist rhetorical resilience, by framing their arguments within a discourse valued by nineteenth-century audiences. Next, this chapter reviews how women rhetors in three different social movements—social purity, racial uplift, and free love—incorporated eugenic arguments to argue for their very different feminist agendas. While scientific and medical knowledge had often helped support ideologies that restricted women from receiving rights, these women rhetors used the new sciences of evolution and heredity to support arguments for women’s rights. The sciences not only provided an exigence for elevating women’s roles, but also gave feminist rhetors a method to critique prevailing ideologies of female sexuality. However, in doing so they participated in, and even helped shape, a new discourse of eugenics. In attempting to transform a “child culture”—a culture that revered children as the “hope of the race”—into a “woman’s culture” (Waisbrooker, Eugenics 17), feminists used eugenics as a means to attain women’s rights, and this chapter examines the popularity and

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implications for feminist rhetorical resilience of this “mothers of the race” argument. Eugenics, or the idea of improving the race through selective breeding, was a term coined by Francis Galton in 1886. Eugenic theories came out of the sciences of evolution and heredity and out of population theories posited by Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer. Eugenic theories went from encouraging the “superior” to reproduce, known as “positive eugenics,” to discouraging the “unfit” from reproducing (or even forcing them to submit to procedures that made reproduction impossible), known as “negative eugenics.” Eugenic practices, such as sterilization, became institutionalized through laws in the early twentieth century. Yet, nineteenth-century American feminists preceded the institutionalization of eugenics. They demonstrated the shape-shifting nature of eugenic rhetoric at this particular moment by employing eugenic arguments for strikingly dissimilar ends: Frances Willard (1839– 1898) to promote ideals of social purity and “scientific motherhood”; Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) and Adella Hunt Logan (1863–1915) to promote racial uplift, and specifically women’s roles in racial uplift; and Juliet Severance (1833–1919), Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), and Lois Waisbrooker (1826–1909) to promote free love. Why did eugenic discourse become so prominent among such different rhetors? What was its appeal? Did the rhetoric of eugenics prove more resilient than the feminist rhetors who employed it? And what does the use of such discourse say about the history of women’s rhetoric during this time period and our scholarship on women’s rhetoric? Despite its appeal to nineteenth-century feminists, few scholars have addressed this prevalence of eugenic rhetoric. A rare exception is Stephanie Athey’s “Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America: Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells,” which identifies eugenic arguments used by four famous rhetors and focuses on how they reinforced white supremacy and imperialism with their use of eugenic discourse. While I agree with Athey’s assessment, further analysis of the trend in eugenic discourse and its context in the social movements and the scientific discourse that produced such rhetoric reveals even more complexity. “Mothers of the race” discourse became a method to speak about sexuality and motherhood, a method, however, that reinforced ideologies of race, class, nation, and gender. The fact that “mothers of the race” arguments cross ideological, institutional, and feminist social

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movement boundaries reveals not only how these rhetors responded to specific exigencies, but also how the rhetoric itself proved resilient. Eugenic rhetoric “traveling” across these boundaries proves its adaptability. However, does this mean that the rhetors discussed here lacked agency? Not at first, but we will see how their use of “mothers of the race” arguments opened the door to the rhetoric becoming more of an agent than the rhetor. I n s t i t u t i o n a l a n d I d e o l o g i c a l R e l at i o n a l i t y: N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t ur y S c i e n c e a n d M e d i c a l K n o w l e d g e

The prominence of eugenic rhetoric in nineteenth-century feminism emerges from alliances with the scientific theories of the time. One of the answers to why this rhetoric seemed so appealing to feminists lies in the cultural capital science exerted at this particular moment. A century of the professionalization of the medical field left its mark. Scientific theories concerning evolution and heredity gained prominence at the same time eugenic implications emerged in feminist rhetorics. It is tempting to dismiss the science behind eugenics, especially the understandings of heredity at this particular time, because of its subsequently discredited nature, but historian Nancy Stepan warns against dismissing eugenics as a “pseudoscience”: “Calling eugenics pseudoscientific is a convenient way to set aside the involvement of many prominent scientists in its making and to ignore difficult questions about the political nature of much of the biological and human sciences” (5). Eugenics as a theory gives us insight into what scientific theories gained from popular value systems. As a practice, eugenics reveals nineteenth-century concerns about imperialism, immigration, and race relations, as well as how rhetors could adapt such theories for different purposes. For feminists, eugenics represented a way to make women’s rights arguments more exigent and timely. Drawing on an argument from expediency and the discourses of “Republican motherhood,” they gave a new spin to this role: they would not only require the right to raise informed citizens, but also to bear healthy and sometimes “superior” children. Theories from the scientific community on evolution and heredity provided scientific credence for arguments for women’s rights to education, the importance of the role of motherhood, and reforms of the marriage system. Furthermore, while these claims would not seem to have the backing of our modern sciences, at their specific moment they were on the cutting edge of scientific discovery, applying

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the ideas of noted scientists such as Charles Darwin, Jean Lamarck, and August Weismann. Darwinian discourse and social Darwinism permeated many different disciplines and popular theories in the nineteenth century. Female rhetors in these social movements used evolutionary theory to show that the human race could not evolve without giving freedom to women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics is perhaps the most famous example of applying Darwin to feminism in its argument that restricting women from working hinders progress, but writers in the radical free-love movement also capitalized on the new science, arguing that humans had advanced past stifling marriage laws. Free-love feminist Hulda Potter-Loomis’s 1890s pamphlet, Social Freedom: The Most Important Factor in Human Evolution, argues that laws suppress the expression of natural sexual instincts: “No one can be happy while chafing under the restrictions which society now enforces upon the strongest and, without doubt, the best instincts of our nature, namely, that which manifests itself through the affections” (7). Thus, evolutionary theory’s focus on progress and natural instincts gave these radical feminists a framework for their argument that human laws impede women’s natural rights by presuming to override nature (Hayden 117–120). These feminists also found Darwin’s theory of sexual selection useful to their aims. Sexual selection theory attributes choice in mating to the females, who must choose mates from the most “superior” males of the species. Feminists extended this choice to cover both choice in mates and choice in when and how they would engage in sexual relations (120–122). Eugenic thought enters this discourse when these women posit that giving women such choice will produce better children, a position also informed by theories of heredity. Jean Lamarck’s evolutionary theory focusing on acquired characteristics was also useful to feminists of the time. Lamarck’s theory that acquired characteristics could be passed on to future generations was incorporated into many of the hereditarian ideas of the nineteenth century. Thus, his theories resonated with social reformers since any positive changes would improve future generations. Parents who became educated, for example, could pass their improved attributes on to their children. Similarly, in Darwin’s arguments, both heredity and environment play a part in natural selection and sexual selection. Hereditarian ideas through much of the nineteenth century were based on a Lamarckian view that accounted for the impact of environment

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and allowed for education and self-improvement to be transferred to offspring. This theory of heredity granted power to the parents since they could improve their own conditions and thus improve their children, which became a central tenet of this new “mothers of the race” rhetoric. “Mothers of the race” rhetoric also finds a basis in medical texts aimed at female audiences by physicians who also adapted science to promote women’s rights. For physician John Cowan, who wrote The Science of New Life, there were three stages at which a parent could pass on characteristics and influence their offspring: the period of introductory preparation, the period of gestatory influence, and the period of nursing influence. He even argued that parents could choose the profession of their child before conception and take action to create impressions that would ensure a child with a predilection for that profession would be born. For physician Russell Trall, author of the popular health manual Sexual Physiology: A Scientific and Popular Exposition of the Fundamental Problems in Sociology, parents would transmit all characteristics experienced during the act of sex at the time of conception. Therefore, both parents should experience pleasure to ensure healthier and happier children. Physician and activist Mary Gove Nichols, in her 1854 treatise on marriage and free love, put a feminist spin on similar ideas of prenatal influence when she said that if a pregnant woman experiences pain or has negative or murderous thoughts about her husband as a result of her political and personal subjugation, the child will be born a murderer. For prominent physician Elizabeth Blackwell, parents could create better children through adopting new habits. In these ideas, the premise that like produces like plays a large role. Older superstitions found scientific merit through physicians’ theories about prenatal influences. When reading “mothers of the race” rhetoric as feminist rhetorical resilience, we should contextualize the complicated factors and the scientific and medical theories contributing to their ideology. In this instance, science and medicine legitimized their rhetoric and provided exigence, leading to their troubling descent into eugenic rhetoric. F r a n c e s W i l l a r d a n d Eu g e n i c s a s a M e a n s t o “ H o m e P r ot e c t i o n ”

Frances Willard’s rhetoric of reform, though less radical than the rhetoric of free-love advocates discussed in this chapter, shows the power of appeals to motherhood in the late nineteenth century and proves the adaptable and resilient nature of “mothers of the race” rhetoric. One

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of the most prolific rhetors of the time, Willard applied her skills to a variety of topics: not only temperance and suffrage, but also “social purity” and reforms concerning sexuality, such as urging changes in age of consent and laws that allowed marital rape. Her intention to elevate the status of womanhood and motherhood found support in the new sciences; her interest in abolishing alcoholic beverages, for example, had the added backing that alcoholism could be passed on through heredity. She also attempted to “scientize,” or professionalize, the role of motherhood in her concept of “scientific motherhood.” She elaborates this concept in her 1891 presidential address to the National Women’s Council, urging a shift from “the empirical maxims and old wive’s [sic] fables of the nursery . . . to the hard-earned results of scientific investigation” (27). Willard employs the term science here in a different sense than I am; she refers to giving motherhood a method and theory in order to professionalize it. In other parts of the speech, however, she indicates more traditional meanings of science in her references to hereditary and prenatal influences: “The best work of the mother will be intelligently done, on the bases of heredity, pre-natal influence, and devout obedience to the laws of health” (27). Willard’s rhetoric matches the arguments of nineteenthcentury medical advice books: in order to bear healthy children and have these children survive their early years, women need education in hygiene, considered a science by many medical schools and women’s colleges in the nineteenth century. In Willard’s ideal of mothers with the proper education, “Children will be born of set purpose and will cut their teeth according to a plan” (27). Thus, the right of females to education had more exigence: if they were to bear children that would survive their first year, they needed extensive education. Willard repeatedly emphasizes the role of educated mothers in this speech.2 Her arguments allude to eugenics as a method for bearing and raising a “happy specimen of scientific babyhood, who rapturously greets this scientific woman as ‘ma-ma.’” (28). Willard’s exigence concerns the mortality rate of children during the time period, an “imperfection” (in Bitzer’s terms) also noted by other feminists. Bitzer theorized that rhetors respond to situations containing an “imperfection” requiring “positive modification.” For Willard, the mortality rate is such an imperfection that will only be modified by giving women rights. It is here that her eugenic rhetoric becomes more explicit:

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Four hundred thousand babies annually breathe their first and last in the United States—being either so poorly endowed with vital powers or so inadequately nourished and cared for that they can no longer survive. Onethird of all the children born depart this life before they reach five years of age. In Oriental countries they swarm thick as flies, and the existence of woman (a being so impure that her husband begs pardon for referring to his wife at all) is tolerated only because she is a necessary prerequisite to the transformation of a man into a father of sons. It thus appears that exclusive devotion to maternity has not resulted in the best good of woman or the highest development of humanity. In those same Oriental countries, the Anglo-Saxon race has conquered the native and holds it in subjection, though outnumbered at the rate of twenty-five hundred to one. Possibly if fewer children were born, and of a better quality, it might be a blessing to all concerned. (“Address” 27)

Willard criticizes the subjugation of women in order to show that women need more than an “exclusive devotion to maternity” to bear and raise healthy children. Her goal to elevate the role of wives and mothers is evident in her attack on the position of “Oriental” women seen as “impure.” Her language choices, such as “thick as flies” to refer to the children of “Oriental” society, not only critique the position of women, but also imply a racist critique of a society so low on the evolutionary scale that outsiders, the Anglo-Saxon race, have conquered it, thus creating a mixture of feminist and racist rhetoric typical in “mother of the race” discourse. Her eugenic ideal also influences her belief that “it seems to be a law of nature that quantity decreases as quality improves” (“Address” 27). For Willard then, women not only require education and improved status, but also need to pay attention to producing a “better quality” of children. This implicit eugenic rhetoric reveals the racist ideologies produced by more explicit eugenic theories, but also stresses the role of honoring and educating women with the goal of producing “better quality” children. Willard creates a new version of the voluntary motherhood arguments suffragists championed: for Willard, women should choose when and how often to have children and choose to have fewer children to improve their quality. Like her discussion of motherhood, Willard’s discussion of sexuality also contains eugenic implications. In “A White Life for Two,” she critiques the double standard that allows men free reign over their wives and does not hold men to the same standard of purity as women. She

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criticizes laws that allow marital rape and grant custody to fathers rather than mothers. She adds, Last of all, and chiefest, the magnum opus of Christianity, and Science, which is its handmaid, the wife will have undoubted custody of herself, and as in all the lower ranges of the animal creation, she will determine the frequency of the investiture of life with form. My library groans under accumulations of books written by men to teach women the immeasurable iniquity of arrested development in the genesis of a new life, but not one of these volumes contains the remotest suggestion that this responsibility should be equally divided between husband and wife. (336)

Her reference to the “lower ranges of the animal creation” incorporates evolutionary theory by showing that in subjugating women, human beings do not adhere to natural laws. That they should choose when to have sex and bear children based on the rule of female choice followed in the animal kingdom is a popular argument in “mothers of the race” discourse, one also employed by free-love feminists. This line of argument is an attempt to give scientific backing to voluntary motherhood. The phrase “arrested development” in relation to “the genesis of new life” not only refers to the practice of abortion, but also implies the argument found in other feminist texts that restricting women from choosing when to have children, and subjecting them to undesirable conditions to bear children, will not produce the “better quality” of children that are the “hope of the race.” Her argument that “this responsibility should be equally divided between husband and wife” also echoes some of the free-love arguments that emphasize how equality in the marriage bed will produce better results and implies the argument that men are just as responsible for “arrested development,” or “degenerate” children in later discourse, as women. Willard’s rhetoric of sexuality and eugenics is less explicit, but the more explicit rhetoric of the more radical feminists reveals how Willard is participating in this larger discourse while also creating her own trademark rhetorical style, blending and adapting religious and scientific language to her goal of “home protection.” Willard attempts mutual empowerment through the use of a nationalistic-based rhetoric as a larger, collective agency in her argument that a nation cannot survive if it neglects women’s rights and therefore produces “inferior” children as future citizens. Her goal of mutual empowerment fails, however, since it only applies to white women in Western, upper-class societies.

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Eu g e n i c s a s a M e a n s t o R a c i a l U p l i f t i n A n n a Ju l i a C o o p e r a n d A d e l l a Hu n t L o g a n

Anna Julia Cooper, whose goal was to elevate womanhood within the discourse of African American racial uplift, shares some similarities with Willard’s rhetoric in her goals and language choices. Like Willard, she blends religious, nationalistic, and scientific language and only implies a connection between “mothers of the race” discourse and women’s sexuality. Her speech “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” points to the importance of women in the goal of racial uplift, but also alludes to arguments about sexuality and motherhood. Her references to an “impure homelife” (54), and to the Christian church’s influence on the marriage relation, reveal a subtle critique of ideologies of women’s sexuality. For example, in speaking of the ways the Christian church has prevented the elevation of womanhood, she says, “Making of marriage as a sacrament and at the same time insisting on the celibacy of the clergy and other religious orders, [the church] gave an inferior if not an impure character to the marriage relation, especially fitted to reflect discredit on woman” (56). Her argument seems similar to those of the free-love advocates, especially Lois Waisbrooker’s, who criticize the way the Church positioned sex as impure, thus demeaning and degrading women’s position. Cooper shares with Willard the insistence that women and men should be held to the same standard of morality (57). The very title of Cooper’s work implies a eugenic argument, but it is her metaphors that show how she is participating in the same scientific and cultural discourses as Willard. Unlike Willard, rather than focusing on women’s role as mothers of children, Cooper emphasizes how women’s role in society holds back “real progress,” such as when she refers to “the vitalizing, regenerating, and progressive influence of womanhood on the civilization of today,” and the “narrow, sickly and stunted growth” of nations (58). She also mentions “the hope in germ of a staunch, helpful, regenerating womanhood on which, primarily, rests the foundation stones of our future as a race” (62). Here she refers to “regeneration” and “progress,” two terms often employed in evolutionary and hereditarian discourses. The reference to the “narrow, sickly and stunted growth” of a nation correlates to the rhetoric used to describe “inferior” children in eugenic discourse. The “germ” of “regenerating womanhood” recalls hereditarian ideas, such as August Weismann’s germ theory of heredity,

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but does so in metaphor to show how women’s bodies hold the promise of regenerating the race. She indicates hereditarian thought when she refers to “[women’s] influence on the individual personality, and through her on the society and civilization which she vitalizes and inspires” (60). These metaphors reveal how Cooper hopes to elevate women’s role in racial uplift by comparing womanhood to nationhood. Yet, rather than the more popular interpretation of such metaphors as the woman as nation, we can see Cooper also applies a eugenic ideal: women are the hope of uplifting the race since they hold the “germs” to future generations, which can “regenerate” rather than “degenerate” the race. According to scholar Stephanie Athey’s reading of feminism and eugenics, Cooper reconfigures what counts as “inheritance” to include the legacy of institutionalized racism, which in turn affects future generations (par. 45). Cooper observes that African Americans not only inherit the physical and mental characteristics of their parents, but also inherit a legacy of inequality encompassing social and economic factors. She legitimizes this argument by connecting it to Lamarckian ideas of heredity. In Cooper’s speech “What are we Worth,” Athey finds evidence of explicit engagement with eugenic theories as Cooper expands the discourses on heredity to show that centuries of oppression have produced hereditary inequalities. Cooper sees in women of the race the promise of overcoming such obstacles and creating a more positive legacy for the future generations they will grow and nurture. Athey adds, “Cooper . . . alters the emphasis of ‘regeneration’ from strictly reproductive citizenship to an emphasis on women’s role in training and regenerative reform” (par. 45). Thus, Cooper’s mixture of the discourses of science, religion, and nationhood creates a rhetoric of racial uplift that forefronts the role of women, combining “Republican motherhood” discourse with “mothers of the race” discourse. Another rhetor on racial uplift, Adella Hunt Logan, makes explicit what Cooper alludes to in metaphor in her 1897 address “Prenatal and Hereditary Influences.” Logan presented this speech at the Second Conference for the Study of Problems Concerning Negro City Life in Atlanta. Her speech was the only one by a woman at the conference not delivered at the separate women’s meeting (169); in it, she argues for the duty of the mother to raise good children, but her argument relies less on the kind of Republican motherhood and scientific motherhood rhetoric found in Willard and more on the hereditarian thought of the late nineteenth century. She urges attention both to

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prenatal care and to acquired characteristics. Logan applies the argument of women’s “vital element in the regeneration and progress of the race” to a more literal situation: in Logan’s view, it is through production of children and attention to heredity and prenatal influences that racial uplift will occur. Logan begins her speech by noting the common ideas associated with hereditary transmission: “The boy takes his large nose from his grandmother, the small mouth from his father, and a quick temper from his mother.” She even brings in the question, “How is it that the young man seems prone to the social sin?” (211). She urges attention to the “silent, but powerful, thing known as heredity” (212) and also advocates a scientific education for those involved in racial uplift. Unlike Willard, however, when she uses the word science, she refers not to the need for a method or theory of childbearing and rearing, but to the hereditarian theories of the scientific and medical communities. While her insistence on the impressions made by a mother’s thoughts and feelings on the unborn child seem more like old wives’ tales than science, medical literature, such as John Cowan’s book, supports such an argument. Logan’s speech focuses on both the physical attributes parents can transmit through heredity and the “intellectual” and “ethical” attributes. Her thoughts echo Lamarckian ideas when she argues, Before the body is ready to begin life as a separate being, as a new personality, it is molded and cast by the combined traits of the father and the mother from whom this new creature must draw its individual existence. And the intellectual and ethical cast will follow as closely the law, ‘Like begets like,’ as will the physical. We do not expect to find the children of white parentage having black faces or kinky hair, nor the children of black ancestry having fair brows, blue eyes, and flaxen locks. It would be just as unreasonable to expect the intellectual and ethical characteristics of children to be radically unlike those of their ancestors as it would be to expect their physical features to be radically different. (212)

Logan’s argument reveals the emphasis on like begets prevalent throughout post-Darwinian nineteenth-century culture. She adds a new dimension to the racial uplift arguments of the late nineteenth century since individuals would not only elevate themselves and the race through personal improvements, but also future generations. Her word choices also reveal troubling attitudes about color present in some racial-uplift discourse of the time.

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Earlier hereditarian thought often privileged one parent over the other in hereditary transmission, theories the scientific community refuted throughout the late nineteenth century. Logan, aware of these advances, makes the important distinction: “The unborn child draws its physical and in large measure its intellectual and ethical make-up from its father and its mother. Not from the mother alone, as many suppose, but from both.” She goes on to say, “Both parents contribute to the possibilities for health, good or bad, and furnish the germs for character creation and development just as certainly as they together originate physical life” (213). Here, her use of “germs” likely refers to August Weismann’s germ theory of heredity in emphasizing that both parents supply such germs. However, Logan elaborates that while both parents supply traits, prenatal influences emphasize the special circumstances of women in passing traits to their children. Logan’s argument relies on theories of prenatal influence circulating in the medical literature of the same time period when she insists, “Few women seem to appreciate the fact the sensitive embryo receives the impression made upon the mind of the mother.” A new exigence for women’s rights emerges in the importance of these impressions: “Let it be distinctly understood that the development of germ life depends upon the original germ and equally upon the culture and treatment of that germ—in short, teach that the prenatal development of a child depends largely on whatever affects the mother.” She elaborates, “If the pregnant woman is constantly wishing that her unborn child were dead or that the man who has given her this burden—as she has learned in chagrin to regard the child—were dead; who can wonder that out of such murderous thought there should come in very truth a murderer!” (214). Logan’s example of murderous thoughts translating into producing murderers is the same example used by physician Mary Gove Nichols almost fifty years earlier, and one also employed by later freelove radicals Severance, Woodhull, and Waisbrooker. Logan’s argument also expands the scope of environmental factors since environmental influences can include more than just intelligence and ethics, but also the emotional environment of the mother. Her argument then supports women’s rights since she insists that women need to be in positions where they will not dwell upon their oppression and lowly position; their position should be elevated to prevent such thoughts. Women need to be in a position where children won’t be unwanted or perceived as a burden to the father or the mother, where the parents’ inequality won’t

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cause resentment, and where the subjection of the mother and father won’t cause thoughts of rage to be transmitted to the unborn children. This ideal “mother of the race” needs such rights to fulfill her special role in racial uplift. Logan’s and Cooper’s arguments precede and influence the kind of eugenic rhetoric employed by W. E. B. DuBois, whose early twentiethcentury appeal to the “talented tenth” of the race to reproduce is an example of positive eugenics. In positive eugenics, the goal is for the more “superior” or “talented” to reproduce in order to generate those same qualities, in contrast to negative eugenics, where the goal is to prevent the “unfit” from regenerating their “degenerative” qualities. However, separating these two types of eugenics, as many scholars do, proves misleading since many of the positive arguments imply condemnation of the “unfit,” even when the rhetor does not employ such condemning rhetoric. The racial uplift movement provides a good example of the inherent contradictions of “mothers of the race” rhetoric. While Logan and Cooper employ eugenic rhetoric in an effort to support the elevation of women toward the goal of racial uplift, by participating in such rhetoric, they reinforce some of the more racist aspects of the science from which they draw. Thus, locating agency in “mothers of the race” rhetoric actually contradicts their original goals. Eu g e n i c s a s a B e n e f i t o f F r e e L o v e i n t h e R a d i c a l R h e t o r i c o f Ju l i e t S e v e r a n c e , MD , V i c t o r i a W o o d h u l l , a n d L o i s Wa i s b r o o k e r

The more radical goals of free love required even more radical interpretations of the new sciences. Free-love feminists critiqued the current system of marriage that allowed husbands “ownership and control of their wives’ sex organs.”3 They believed that societal expectations and economic necessity forced women to enter a corrupt marriage system for the wrong reasons and advocated eliminating marriage to give women sexual freedom—which they defined as the freedom to choose a partner regardless of church, state, or other compulsory influences. Eugenics became a part of their feminism, but it also appeared in earlier incarnations of free love. For example, utopian free lover John Humphrey Noyes had encouraged a practice known as “stirpiculture” in his Oneida commune at midcentury. This practice urged the “best” women and men to become sexual partners for “superior” results. The women supporting free love in the 1870s and 80s, however, rejected such ideologies

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and created their own theories of eugenics to match their more feminist goals. Eugenic rhetoric then became a central tenet of free-love theory, resulting in radical anarchist Moses Harman changing the name of his free-love periodical from Lucifer, the Light Bearer to The American Journal of Eugenics in 1907. The name change marked the end of a focus on women’s rights in free-love ideology, and the women discussed here contributed to that end by using eugenics to support their radical goals. Juliet Severance, a physician and free-love speaker who lectured throughout the Midwest in the 1870s and 1880s, explores eugenic arguments in her 1881 pamphlet and lecture, A Lecture on Life and Health, or How to Live a Century. Like Willard, Severance identifies a problem to be solved by referring to the childhood mortality rate, and offers attention to heredity and prenatal influences as the solution: Are we fit to reproduce? This is the question! How many fathers and mothers ever think of, much less seriously consider, this question? They see puny, sickly, half-made-up children born to them, living out a few years of miserable existence and then, with streaming eyes and lacerated hearts, they place their little forms around which cluster so many tender memories and loving associations, beneath the sod and call it a dispensation of Providence. It should be said that every child who dies, had better never have been born. Aye more: Those who live to grow up filled with disease and pain, a constant burden to themselves [and] all around them, should never have been born and would never had their parents been instructed in the grand law of parentage. (5; emphasis in original)

While Willard, Cooper, and Logan only imply the issue of “fitness” for reproduction in their arguments, Severance draws attention to it, and thus reveals the false dichotomy between positive and negative eugenics. It seems that most feminists asserted a positive eugenics. Cooper, for example, wants to encourage breeding that would uplift the race. Willard, Cooper, and Logan do not address the question of negative eugenics, of keeping the “unfit” from reproducing. Severance’s statements, however, highlight what Willard, Cooper, and Logan left unstated. Severance’s rhetoric reveals the presence of negative eugenics, even when it is not explicit, and shows how women’s rhetoric, in participating in eugenics to argue for women’s rights, implies a “fit” and “unfit” mentality. Severance uses eugenic theory to support free-love ideology by insisting that the reason these children become “a constant burden” is the

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corrupt marriage system that demeans women. Marriage, she argues, places obstacles in the way of women producing healthy children since it does not require love and choice between sexual partners. Like other free lovers, she insists that the marriage laws that allow husbands to dominate and own their wives hinder the conditions for creating healthy children. She proclaims, “Man alone, of all the animals, takes from the female the control of her person and compels her to maternity, and . . . he has invented and maintains laws to perpetuate this usurpation. Woman wants the control of her person and right to exercise her maternal instincts under her own direction. These our present marriage system takes away” (A Lecture 7). Her wording and comparison to the animal kingdom evoke the free-love emphasis on evolutionary theory and sexual selection theory: a woman should have control over her own body and choices since withholding such choice violates the natural order found in the animal kingdom (Hayden 121). Consequently, Severance’s first “prerequisite for proper parentage” is “woman should exercise the right entrusted to her by virtue of her functions, to determine when, and under what circumstances she will, and under what she will not become a mother, and it is her right and sacred duty to do this inexorably” (A Lecture 6). For Severance, “Proper parentage is not a question of legality” (9). She not only focuses on the law’s role in ensuring proper conditions for proper parentage, but also the woman’s role. Similar to Willard and the medical advice aimed at women of the nineteenth century, Severance urges women to question the habits of the man “who seeks to associate himself with her” to ensure that he is not a drinker or tobacco user who would impart such habits to their offspring (9). Women, she argues, should ask of their potential partners, “Are you as pure and free from the effects of social vice as you expect me to be?” (9), a question that recalls Willard’s goals to insist on the same standard of morality and sexual behavior for men and women. Finally, her speech asks women to reject unions based on economic necessity, tradition, or compulsion, and only accept unions based on mutual love as they ask themselves, “Is the attachment between us worthy to be called love? and will it secure the transmission of our best instead of worst qualities; is either of us induced to this association for any reason, other than that of love? Is either of us seeking any selfish gratification incompatible with proper parentage? Do I seek a home, position, fortune, or any other thing more than a father for my children and a lover for myself?” (9). Severance’s “mothers of the race” discourse

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urges women to claim choice and freedom for themselves as a “prerequisite for proper parentage” (6). She differs from Willard, Cooper, and Logan in her emphasis on sexuality and the nature of the relationship between sexual partners. Severance’s works do not always incorporate eugenic arguments as prominently. In fact, many of her speeches and pamphlets focus on the law’s abuses of married women. Her 1901 treatise, Marriage, for example, concentrates on critiquing legalities of marriage until the very end when she mentions the benefit of free love in producing better children. That the eugenic implications of free love receive such prominence in other works speaks to the persuasiveness of such discourse to nineteenth-century audiences—if critiquing the position of women within the marriage system did not stir these audiences to reject such a system, Severance assumes that the beneficial end, better children, would. Severance also participates in the argument on prenatal influences, and her similarities to Logan suggest that these women considered this line of argument to have rhetorical efficacy. Severance writes, “As certainly as like begets like, as surely as temperament, traits of character, complexion, color of eyes and hair are imparted by parents to offspring, so surely is the loathing, the pollution, the hate that filled that mother’s mind transmitted to her child” (Marriage 29–30). This image of the mother’s resentful feelings creating resentful and hateful children recurs across social movements, though employed for different ends. It reveals the adaptability of “mothers of the race” discourse to different situations. Severance’s eugenic “mothers of the race” arguments do not dominate her work on free love to the same extent as other free-love feminists. It is Victoria Woodhull’s rhetoric that shows how eugenics comes to supersede women’s rights in free-love discourse. Woodhull, the epitome of self-reinvention, bounced back from a scandal-plagued life in America to earn “respectability” in England. Just like her self-reinvention, her rhetoric undergoes dramatic transformations: in her early career, she highlights the importance of love between parents to produce healthy children; later, she gives more emphasis to how a woman’s health is improved by giving her more freedoms, which in turn produces healthy children; finally, her later work drops women’s rights arguments and promotes a more purely eugenic ideology. During the 1870s, Woodhull delivered speeches urging increased sex education and more liberal marriage and divorce practices and laws. She conducts her personal “war against marriage,” often calling for

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the abolition of a marriage system that degrades women. Her 1873 and 1874 speeches, The Elixir of Life, or Why do we Die? and Tried as by Fire, or The True and the False Socially, incorporate eugenics to justify her radical social reform goals: if women gain more knowledge about sex, heredity, and prenatal influences, and if they have the freedom to choose sexual partners regardless of marriage laws, they will produce “superior” children that will be the “hope of the race.” Woodhull’s arguments even go so far as positing that pleasurable sexual lives will lead to more “superior” offspring. Woodhull and Severance both emphasize the importance of the “proper” conditions for women to reproduce. For Woodhull, these conditions include a sexual partner that observes “mutual love” and “reciprocal benefit” (Tried 15). Similar to Severance, she insists, “[Marriage] stands directly in the way of any improvement in the race, insisting upon conditions under which improvement is impossible” (7), because it is a system that keeps partners together when love is not present and does not always uphold “reciprocal benefit.” She proposes that relationships that observe these rules will see the results in their offspring, whether they are married or not. She juxtaposes these two types of relationships and results when she says, “[A] woman who bears a dozen or less scraggy, scrawny, puny, half-made-up children, by a legal father, is a disgrace to her sex and a curse to the community; while she who bears as many perfect specimens of humanity, no matter if it be by as many different fathers is an honor to womanhood and a blessing to the world” (30). Her rhetoric is similar to Willard’s in its characterization of the “disgraceful” children populating the earth, but rather than focusing agency on nation and womanhood, as Willard does, Woodhull concentrates exclusively on womanhood. Like Severance’s, Woodhull’s arguments imply a “fit” and “unfit” standard, but they redefine “fit” and “unfit” to include a feminist argument: give women rights and give them sex education and they will no longer bear “inferior” children. However, Woodhull’s earlier speeches do not endorse the type of eugenics that earlier male free-love advocates encouraged. For example, she rejects the stirpiculture practice of the Oneida commune since it focused on ideal physical and mental attributes rather than love between partners: “When a woman desires a child she should select for its parent, some person, who, from physical health and perfectness, should be something like an ideal man. I utterly repudiate all such stirpiculture as this. I do not believe it possible for a woman to produce her

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best child, except by the man whom she loves best and for whom she has the keenest sexual desire” (Elixir 11). Woodhull refutes these practices of free love since they neglect women’s rights. She argues that it is not any “superior” attributes of the parents but the sexual conditions that produce “superior” results. For Woodhull and Severance, the love between parents will create a happy and stable environment, and those feelings will be passed on to the healthy child due to environmental and prenatal influence. While these ideas certainly do not seem scientific by any of our standards, they did have a basis in some of the theories of prenatal influence circulating in the medical community, and on some level these ideas persist today in beliefs about playing classical music to unborn children and creating a friendly environment for and relationship with the fetus. Woodhull’s rhetoric undergoes another shift in the late 1880s with her books Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race, which endorses the practice, and The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (both published under the name Woodhull Martin). These works emphasize the feminist arguments less and the eugenic arguments more, to the point where eugenics becomes an end in itself rather than a means to argue for feminist reform. Her shift into negative eugenics becomes complete in her 1891 book The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, which displays this tendency in its title itself. Though Woodhull had attempted to redefine “fitness” and “unfitness” as focusing on sexual conditions in earlier speeches, she now champions a more “hard-line” eugenics, discouraging the poor and ill from procreating, lines of arguments later picked up by birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Woodhull does discuss social causes of “unfitness” in this text, noting that some workers are worked so hard that their bodies become unhealthy, which then prevents the bearing of healthy children, but the sense of an inherent hereditary “unfitness” reveals itself in her reasoning. The shift from free-love advocacy to a more purely eugenic discourse does not go uncontested in this radical community. Lois Waisbrooker, a prolific speaker and writer on free love and anarchism throughout the late 1800s, puts a different spin on hereditarian ideas in her 1907 book on eugenics. Her book responds to the many rhetors after Woodhull who used eugenics to promote the benefits of free love. Waisbrooker noticed how the shift at the turn of the century again placed the responsibility for the deficiencies of offspring on the mothers of the race, and more arguments had appeared urging women to change their habits

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to benefit their future offspring and thus elevate the race. The idea that changed habits could become hereditary was a popular argument in the medical field, one that physician Elizabeth Blackwell promoted. Waisbrooker, however, rejects certain interpretations and redefines what counts as an acquired characteristic. For example, she notes that if a woman stops drinking for the benefit of her child, or future children, her child will still be born with a tendency to drink. However, if the woman stops drinking for her own benefit, her child would inherit the change and not be born with a tendency to drink. Waisbrooker, then, attempts to take the end out of the means. That is, she shows those using eugenics for women’s rights who believe that giving women sexual freedom will produce the result of more “superior” children their mistake: “The transformation from sex slavery to living for the next generation is not freedom” (Eugenics 65). Yet, Waisbrooker endorses eugenics even as she critiques it. For example, she implores women, “You are the material out of which the race is built, and only as you live for yourself do you live for the race.” She also compares the womb to the chemist’s lab (Eugenics 10), a comparison strengthened by a fifty-year focus on heredity and producing stronger children in medical and popular literature. In her 1893 book The Fountain of Life, or the Threefold Power of Sex, she offers eugenics as the way to clear out jails, but only if the laws “supply women with the very best conditions” (81). In these conditions, no undesired sexual relations will occur (Eugenics 30). Therefore, even though she critiques the way some adapted eugenics to feminism, she does not reject eugenics entirely and does not question the goal itself. Eugenic arguments in free-love feminism begin by focusing on health, then shift to discussing the conditions under which children can be produced, both lines of argument used to promote women’s rights in marriage and sexual relationships. In doing so, however, these feminists reinscribe gendered norms and end up contradicting their original goals since they respond to exigence rather than ethics. They indicate how the rhetoric became more resilient than the rhetor. C o n c l u s i o n : T h e “ M o t h e r s o f t h e R a c e ” Ar g u m e n t

Waisbrooker proposes, “Instead of child culture I would have the movement called eugenics named woman culture” (Eugenics 17). All of the rhetors examined here attempt to do just that: create a “woman culture” out of a theory positing raced, classed, and gendered stratifications. The

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“mothers of the race” discourse premised in difference and based in a highly gendered field of science incorporated prevalent class and race ideologies to actually support women’s rights. The rhetoric itself proved resilient in crossing social, racial, and movement boundaries. The feminist rhetors discussed here used eugenic rhetoric for very different ends, but their arguments share several features: the combined exigence of the new knowledge produced by evolutionary and heredity theories and the mortality rate of young children; the use of the language of the new sciences to legitimize such rhetoric across many spheres; and a new ethos for women rhetors as “mothers of the race.” In addition to the cultural capital of science in the nineteenth century, adopting the language of the new science of eugenics gave women rhetors a way to explicitly critique previously forbidden issues. When early nineteenth-century women spoke of sexuality, they used veiled terms and argued in the context of medicine and hygiene; eugenic theory allowed later women to speak on previously taboo topics since they spoke as “mothers of the race.” Nan Johnson has shown how nineteenth-century female speakers extended the domestic sphere by positioning themselves as “mothers of the nation”; in feminist eugenics, the “mother of the nation” metaphor transforms into the physical “mother of the race.” The rhetors discussed here demonstrate several aspects of feminist rhetorical resilience. Most clearly, they connect their acts to a larger collective agency: Willard to nationhood and womanhood; Cooper and Logan to race, nationhood, and womanhood; and Severance, Woodhull, and Waisbrooker to womanhood exclusively. But the m ệtistic shape-shifting nature of eugenic rhetoric ends up proving the resiliency of the rhetoric rather than the feminist rhetors who employed it. The rhetors shaped eugenic rhetoric into a “mothers of the race” discourse, proving it adaptable to their ends, but in responding to this exigence, they contributed to the eventual institutionalization of eugenic policies. The early twentieth century saw states enacting laws for “protection” with eugenic premises: states required men to be tested for venereal disease before marriage on the basis that such disease caused “degeneration,” a reform that spoke to the social purity advocates’ goal of “home protection.” Later eugenic laws, however, did not have this connection with feminist “home protection” goals, such as the Supreme Court’s upholding of laws requiring compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded” in 1927. In early twentieth-century

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eugenics, the women’s rights arguments drop out completely, as illustrated by such laws. The end of the feminist argument in eugenic rhetoric also coincides with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work4 disproving environmental influences on heredity and Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. His work forced the rhetoric of women’s rights to drop out of the discourse since women would no longer pass their acquired improvements to their offspring. Once Mendel’s work refuted that important line of reasoning, eugenics became strictly about inherent “fitness” and “unfitness,” but we already start to see those ideas in feminist texts. Thus, basing their rhetoric in the ever-adapting rhetoric of science also backfired on the feminists employing eugenic rhetoric. What do we, as scholars of women’s rhetoric, make of such discourse and what does it teach us about feminist rhetorical resilience? First, we must acknowledge that recovering and analyzing such rhetoric does not automatically affirm or celebrate it. By analyzing the specific rhetorical moments and reading them in the context of the larger web of ideological and institutional relations, such as science and medicine, we gain insight into the rhetorical choices that failed feminist rhetors of the past. Rather than dismissing feminist uses of eugenics because of their racist implications and distancing their goals from our feminism, we learn about the nature of rhetorical resilience and how we must maintain a critical and reflexive stance about such strategies, even when they seem beneficial to women’s rights. We reinforce the belief that feminist rhetorics must remain cognizant of the implications of ignoring race, class, and other social locations in favor of gender. N ot e s 1. 2.

3. 4.

I thank Patricia Sotirin and Jeanne Fahnestock for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Her repetition of the “educated mother” and emphasis on testimony from educated mothers could also be a response to Edward Clarke’s famous 1873 argument in Sex and Education: A Fair Chance for Girls that educating young women would do harm to their reproductive systems and prevent women from becoming mothers. Willard’s emphasis could be an implicit refutation of that argument by showing that education is a necessary prerequisite to motherhood. “Ownership and control of her sexual organs” is a phrase often found in free-love discourse that Potter-Loomis, Severance, and Woodhull employ at different times. August Weismann had previously refuted Lamarck’s theory of acquired characteristics, but it was Mendel’s rediscovered work that proved his refutation.

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Works Cited Athey, Stephanie. “Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America: Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells.” Genders 31 (2000). n. pag. Web. 21 September 2005. Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1.1 (1968): 217–27. Print. Blackwell, Elizabeth. Essays in Medical Sociology. 1902. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Print. ———. The Human Element in Sex: Being a Medical Inquiry into the Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. London: J. and A. Churchill, 1894. Print. Cooper, Anna Julia. “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race.” With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Ed. Shirley Wilson Logan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. 53–74. Print. Cowan, John. The Science of a New Life. New York: John B. Alden, 1889. Print. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Print. ———. The Origin of Species. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics: The Economic Factor between Men and Women as a Factor is Social Evolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Print. Hayden, Wendy. “(R)Evolutionary Rhetorics: Science and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Free-Love Discourse.” Rhetoric Review 29.2 (2010): 111–28. Print. Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Print. Lamarck, Jean Baptiste. Zoological Philosophy. An Exposition with regard to the Natural History of Animals, 1809. Hugh Elliot, translator. London: Macmillan, 1914; reprinted by U of Chicago Pr, 1984. Logan, Adella Hunt. “Hereditary and Prenatal Influences.” “We are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Ed. Shirley Wilson Logan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. 211–14. Print. Nichols, Mary Gove. “The Murders of Marriage.” Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. Ed. Nancy Cott. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. 303–8. Print. Noyes, John Humphrey. History of American Socialisms. Reprint of 1870 ed. New York: Hillary House Publishers, Ltd., 1961. Potter-Loomis, Hulda. Social Freedom: The Most Important Factor in Human Evolution. Chicago: M. Harman, c1890. Print. Severance, Juliet. A Lecture on Life and Health, or How to Live a Century. Milwaukee: Godfrey & Crandall, Printers, 1881. Print. ———. Marriage. Chicago: M. Harman, 1901. Print. Spencer, Herbert. Herbert Spencer on Social Evolution: Selected Writings. Ed. J.D.Y. Peel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972. Print. Stepan, Nancy Leys. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991. Trall, Russell. Sexual Physiology: A Scientific and Popular Exposition of the Fundamental Problems in Sociology. 1866. New York: Arno Press, 1974. Print. Waisbrooker, Lois. Eugenics; or, Race Culture Lessons. Chicago: 1907. Print. ———. The Fountain of Life, or the Threefold Power of Sex. Topeka, KS: 1893. Print. Willard, Frances. “Address of Frances E. Willard, President of the Woman’s National Council of the United States . . . at its First Triennial meeting, Albaugh’s Opera House, Washington, D.C., February 22–25, 1891.” Lib. of Congress. Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848–1921. Web. 22 July 2006. .

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———. “A White Life for Two.” Man Cannot Speak for Her: Key Texts of the Early Feminists. Ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Vol. 2. New York: Greenwood P, 1989. 317–38. Print. Woodhull, Victoria. The Elixir of Life, or, Why Do We Die? New York: Woodhull and Claflin, 1873. Print. ———. Tried as by Fire; Or, The True and the False Socially. New York: Woodhull & Claflin, 1874. Print. Woodhull Martin, Victoria. The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit. London: 1891. Print. ———. Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race. London: 1888. Print.

Response Strategic Collusion in the History of American Women Rhetors

Nan Johnson In “From Mothers of the Nation to Mothers of the Race: NineteenthCentury Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric,” Wendy Hayden examines how nineteenth-century American feminists combined a “mother of the race” rhetoric with popular theories of eugenics to justify more extensive rights and opportunities for women. Offering a close reading of the rhetoric of Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, Adella Hunt Logan, Juliet Severance, Victoria Woodhull, and Lois Waisbrooker, Hayden explores how these feminists utilized the social capital of emerging scientific theories of evolution and cultural theories of prenatal and hereditary transmission in their advocacy of social purity, racial uplift, and free love. Hayden’s analysis of the role “feminist eugenics” plays in the rhetoric of prominent American women reveals another compelling illustration of the rhetorical versatility required of nineteenth-century American women in the advancement of reformist claims. Scholarship on the role of women in the history of American rhetoric has established that nineteenth-century women claimed credibility as well as intellectual and moral authority by aligning their characters, motives, and goals with established ideologies and conventional cultural narratives. Christian teachings and the admirable examples of women across history who had taken up public works were extremely effective foundations for nineteenth-century feminist arguments, as Carol Mattingly points out in Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Temperance leaders such as Frances Willard relied heavily on Christianity, the culturally popular icon of the Christian woman, and an alignment of the aims of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (hereafter WCTU) with God’s will to argue for temperance reforms and to recruit women into the organization. WCTU leaders made deft use of women’s prescribed role both to establish their authority and to challenge traditional limits for women, thereby refashioning the image of women to better satisfy their own needs and wishes

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(40). Closely related rhetorical strategies are observed by Shirley Wilson Logan in “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Logan demonstrates how nineteenth-century African American women employed conventional cultural values to argue for abolition and racial uplift. For example, in her study of the rhetorical practices of Lucy Wilmot Smith, journalist and speaker, Logan points out that Smith adapted the logical authority of historical example to answer the question “Can women do this work?” Proof of her capabilities are demonstrated by the great number that has taken front rank in the march of progress. It matters not in what walk of life you enter, footprints of women are found who have gone before. . . . Powerful and sagacious queens have wielded the scepter, and like Napoleon, the most illustrious were creators of Kings. Scores of authors have done much with their pens to improve human society. To name the philanthropist would be to name the majority of American and English women who have been known by the public in the last fifty years. Painters, sculptors, poets, song-birds, orators and lecturers abound. (Smith qtd. in Logan 223)

Smith’s use of historical example to claim opportunity for “the educated Negro woman,” and the WCTU’s call to women to do their Christian and feminine duty, are typical of how nineteenth-century women in the public eye made use of established cultural discourses to extend the rhetorical reach of women’s domestic authority to the political and social spheres. Hayden’s analysis of Frances Willard and Anna Julia Cooper’s use of eugenics illustrates that arguments that added a scientific logic to the “mothers of the race” rhetoric could redefine the rights and potential of American women. Willard effectively weds a discourse of motherhood to the WCTU goal of “home protection.” Striving to elevate the status of womanhood and motherhood, Willard uses the new sciences to argue that only educated women can have the requisite knowledge of prenatal influences, heredity, and the laws of health upon which healthy childbearing relies. Willard relies on a popularized understanding of eugenics to compare the superiority of mothers and children of the Anglo-Saxon race to those in “Oriental countries” and to argue for the importance of voluntary motherhood in order to prevent the birth of “degenerate” children. Ultimately, Willard hopes to extend marriage rights for women under the “mothers of the race” banner and to reiterate one of her familiar themes: the most virtuous and healthy wife and mother is an educated Christian woman.

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Hayden examines how Anna Julia Cooper relies on both eugenics logic and Christian values to argue for the important contribution that African American women could make to “regenerating” the nation as mothers of the race. Functioning as a synonym to “uplift” in her speech, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of the Race,” Cooper uses the popular understanding of regeneration as the passing on of positive traits through hereditary to metaphorically define a role for the African American woman as mothers to a healthier race and nation. Hayden suggests that these and other instances of the use of eugenics provide proof of a “collusion of feminist rights discourse with a discourse of eugenics . . . [that] may Offend current feminist sensibilities” (207). Hayden goes on to argue, “it is critical that in regendering the rhetorical tradition, we do not shy away from acknowledging unpopular and unethical arguments” (182). Hayden’s case study of nineteenthcentury women’s use of eugenics assumptions—assumptions we might reject now as intellectually and politically suspect—is not, in and of itself, the only complex issue that “collusion” with feminist eugenics highlights. What intrigues me as a feminist historian of rhetoric is that Hayden’s study provides further proof that strategic “collusion” of some kind was necessary in order for American women to gain a significant measure of rhetorical influence. We have seen in case after case that the nineteenth-century woman crafted an effective ethos and credible logical arguments only by justifying her claims in terms of ideological frameworks that already had cultural authority. In a seemingly neverending contest with the rhetorical authority of men, nineteenth-century women met the challenge of gaining voice, securing attention, and motivating change by whatever rhetorical means were available. Several questions are left to consider. Did Willard and Cooper actually believe the eugenic theories they deployed? Does it make a difference to how we evaluate rhetorical collusion if we can distinguish belief from selfconscious strategy in women’s rhetorical practices? As women of their cultural and historical times, could women rhetors in earlier eras actually have gotten “outside” the ideological context and rhetorical climate of their own world? Finally, are women rhetors in our present times still faced with the “collusion” dilemma? Is collusion inevitable in gendered rhetorical space?

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Works Cited Logan, Shirley Wilson. “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Print. ———. “‘Can women do this work?’ The Discourse of Racial Uplift.” “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. 152-180. Print. Mattingly, Carol. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. Print. Nichols, Mary Gove. “The Murders of Marriage.” Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. Ed. Nancy Cott. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. 303–8. Print.

Reflection Wendy Hayden

In a post-Darwinian world, feminists who used eugenic “mothers of the race” rhetoric to support women’s rights not only colluded with ideologies that go against feminist values, but also helped shape the eugenic ideology that emerged decades later. The collusion of feminist appeals with the scientistic racism of eugenics can be seen as a m ệtistic move, a rhetorical shape shifting seeking to outwit the sociopolitical order by taking on dominant logics and values. While my analyses have focused on particular women rhetors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, Adella Hunt Logan, Juliet Severance, and Lois Waisbrooker (and we might add other well-known feminists of the time who also employed a “mothers of the race” strategy, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Sanger)—I have emphasized that such m ệtistic cunning must be seen not as a resilient attribute of these individual women but as contributing to the resilience of a rhetoric of women’s rights. As the editors of this volume note in their introduction, these collusions with reactionary discourses enabled progress in women’s struggle for equality and suffrage. In seeking to understand such rhetoric as feminist, we must set lived exigencies in historical and institutional contexts and remain open to the possibility of feminisms different from those in which we participate today. In her response to my essay, Nan Johnson points out that rhetorical inventiveness and flexibility were necessary if feminist arguments for reform were to gain a public hearing. Her examples of women rhetors’ calls for an expanded public role for women in support of temperance and racial uplift illustrate m ệtistic shape shifting in the collusion of these rhetorical appeals with dominant cultural narratives and ideologies. As Johnson points out, in the “seemingly never-ending contest with the rhetorical authority of men,” the resilience of feminist arguments entailed a continual self-reinvention, often taking on guises that seem to radically alter feminist commitments and alliances. This is, as Johnson aptly puts it, the “collusion dilemma,” one that may well be “inevitable in gendered

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rhetorical space” (207). She reminds those readers who might be dismissive of alignments with patriarchal, supremacist, or racist arguments that it is impossible to get outside the ideological context and rhetorical climate of one’s time, and invites us to reflect on the collusions of present-day feminists. What implications does a rhetorical resilience drawn on collusion have for our goals as feminist rhetoricians? Kirsch and Royster have commented on our task in studying feminists whose arguments we don’t agree with, “whose values we don’t share, whose worldviews might be foreign to us.” They suggest our goal is “to attend to our own levels of comfort and discomfort, to withhold quick judgment, to read and reread texts and interpret artifacts within the contexts of the women’s chronologies, to interrogate the extent to which our own presence, values, and attitudes shape our interpretations of historical figures and periods” (652). They urge an “ethos of care” (655), which I take to be akin to the relationality of a feminist rhetoric of resilience. The communality of resilience not only denies the self-absorbed autonomy of the lone “hero” but draws energy from reciprocated vulnerabilities. Engaging the collusions of earlier women rhetors must entail a careful interrogation of our own allegiances, collusions, and unacknowledged privileges and prejudices. We must apply the same ethical vigilance and studied contextualization to our own perspectives as we do to those whose values and worldviews we cannot share. In this way, we reinvent a caring feminist rhetoric of resilience with each analysis of m ệtistic wiliness. Works Cited Kirsch, Gesa E. and Jacqueline J. Royster. “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence.” College Composition and Communication. 61.4 (2010): 640-72. Print.

7 N o O n e Wa n t s to G o T h e r e Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom

Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg This chapter began with a regional conference paper presentation a few years ago.1 The theme of the conference was Teaching Writing in Diverse Settings. Our panel was the only one on the agenda that examined gender and sexual diversity yet there were few people in the audience. Could this lack of interest be indicative of a more systemic problem? Our sense is that regardless of the commitment of our field to address issues of diversity, heterosexism is so institutionalized that the issues of gendered and sexual diversity generate interest in very limited ways. Scholars within various disciplines note that efforts to publish and conduct research about gender and sexuality are often thwarted. For example, Suzanne de Castell and Mary Bryson recount the ways their research and publishing efforts were stymied within the academy because they were working with material that addressed and theorized gender and sexuality in ways that threatened heteronormative thinking and assumptions. As they note, “A willful cloak of heavy silence continues to shroud sexualities as important sites for both the production and reification of differences both in the textually constructed subjects of educational discourses and in the actual embodied subjects who inhabit the contexts of institutional schooling” (97). Harriet Malinowitz claims that “leaving sexual identity out of the classroom is not an accident; it is an expression of institutionalized homophobia, enacted in classrooms not randomly but systematically, with legal and religious precedents to bolster it and intimidate both teachers and students” (23). This scholarship points to discursive and material causes and effects of heterosexism, which sustain ideas about gender normativity and the belief in a static identity. We suggest that,

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despite composition’s commitment to egalitarian methods of evaluation, pedagogical application, and theory, gender and sexuality are still not really being discussed in ways that offer a sustained challenge to gender(ed), classed, and sexual status quos. Queer theories and pedagogical practices take gendered and sexual identity categories as starting points. Queer theorists analyze language in order to decenter heteronormative notions and illustrate how various discourses—legal, academic, cultural—sustain those norms. Their task is particularly difficult because language itself is steeped in heteronormative assumptions. As Ruth Goldman notes, “Queer theory, despite attempts to avoid normativity, harbors a normative discourse around race, sexuality and class” (179). Perhaps some of Goldman’s “normative discourse” is inherent in language, which both enables us to know and simultaneously limits what we can know. As Wittgenstein asserts, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (qtd. in Fogelin 93). As noted by queer theorists, feminists, and rhetoricians, deconstructing language and its material and discursive effects is an ongoing challenge. Only those most obviously invested in deconstructing heteronormative and ableistic notions tend to engage readily with queer theory, and as Goldman notes, engagement is limited because the concepts currently available to us come wrapped in language. A number of publications have started the difficult work of articulating the many connections between queer theory and pedagogical practices.2 Still, we believe there is a lot of work to be done to challenge assumptions about when to include queer texts in a course and how to approach such texts so they can be used to productively investigate the limits of academic language, social norms, and the way people think about sexual diversity. Like the institution within which writing courses are conducted, teachers and scholars in composition may resist queer theory and the use of queer texts in composition classrooms as much as some of the students we teach. Some composition scholars believe queer theory and queer texts are too esoteric for use in the writing classroom, but we hear their unwillingness as resistance. Because interacting with a queer text can destabilize students’ understanding of what is “real” or “normal,” it has the potential to challenge the institutional structure in ways that can disrupt teachers’ and students’ sense of a seemingly safe classroom space. We argue that using some of the tenets of queer theory within a writing classroom can enable students and teachers to acknowledge and reflect

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on material space and institutional values as well as the relationship between them. As compositionists who desire to bring a queer lens to the material and institutional space of the composition classroom, we recognize that we are sometimes taking on contradictory roles. As writing teachers, we have been hired to help students with the act of composing something coherent and persuasive for an audience. As representatives of academic institutions, we are contractually obliged to serve the goals and values of our field and of academic discourse in general. We struggle with the tension implicit in these goals, and that struggle is further complicated by our commitment to queer theory and to the possibilities we want to envision for queering the writing classroom. We argue too, in keeping with the theme of this collection, that the efforts made by teachers and students to negotiate queer texts, the space in which they are taught, and the institutional context are acts of resilience. We believe that by engaging with queer texts, recognizing queer moments, and seeking to destabilize conventions of normalcy, students and teachers display the kind of resilience that can enable a disruption of heterosexist boundaries and critique material (including institutional) space. As Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady explain in the introduction, [R]esilience is rhetorical action within pernicious circumstances. This action is neither static nor goal oriented; it is pragmatic, situational, and kinetic. Rhetorical resilience is about recognizing and seizing opportunities even in the most oppressive situations. A feminist rhetoric of resilience mobilizes the power of imagination and reflexive meaning making in order to continually reinvent selves and possibilities and to precipitate change. This may not be dramatic or global change but change as small, local, fluid, provisional, and ongoing. Resilience as rhetorical agency continually recreates possibility. There is a riskiness to resilient rhetorical action: there may be little latitude for change in the material and historical circumstances. Yet feminist rhetorical resilience entails ongoing refashionings of identity and possibility, not just maintaining but recreating meaningfulness. (8)

When students are encouraged by their instructors—or when students make the choice on their own—to interact with queer texts, teachers provide them an opportunity to enact a kind of agency that demonstrates a particular kind of resilience: a desire and creativity with which they and their professors can reflect upon, confront, and speak out against the effects of heteronormative assumptions. When instructors

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and students speak out, recognize excess, encourage reflections on the material and the discursive, together they enact mêtistic practices that can lead to rhetorical agency. We interpret these acts also as expressions of individual and relational agency. We propose that a queer text invites students to acknowledge and interrogate the role of the body within larger sociocultural and academic contexts. We believe teachers can provide opportunities for students to become more aware of the presence of their bodies in academic contexts by capitalizing on many of the potentially queer moments that already occur in the space of the composition classroom. As we will explain, practices such as speaking out, recognizing bodily excess, encouraging reflections upon the relationship between the material and the discursive, and assigning a queer text can provide teachers, scholars, and students with numerous opportunities to examine the impact a queer text and queer pedagogical practices might have. Rather than assume that queer texts and perspectives should only be consigned to discussions of identity, we suggest that teaching queer texts and perspectives can enable the critical thinking many composition scholars and teachers value. We argue that reading queerly does not necessarily mean reading about issues related to gender and sexuality. Our definition of a queer pedagogy focuses on acts of reading and critiquing with an eye towards constant interrogation of social norms and their effects. We have read work by those who theorize about possibilities for queering composition classrooms (Kopelson; Koski; Spurlin;), and we know of theorists (Alexander; Malinowitz; Schneider; Wallace; Zeikowitz) who examine the actual effects of putting queer tenets into practice. Drawing upon their work, we ask, How can queer theory and queer texts be used within the composition classroom? How might queer texts function within mainstream composition classes to enable students and teachers to become aware of material space, bodies, and regimes of power and knowledge? Does such awareness allow students and teachers to imagine alternative ways of being and knowing? W h at i s Q u e e r T h e o r y ?

The very word queer resonates differently among different populations. To some, it is a slur, to others a source of pride, and to others still, simply a denotation of something “odd” or “abnormal.” The term queer often acts as a short-term, catchall phrase for “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender”; however, queer can also indicate and describe thinking that

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challenges basic assumptions, truths, and norms. While we are invested in both interpretations, we recognize and support queer theory’s roots in GLBTQQI discourses and bodies. Annamarie Jagose, author of Queer Theory: An Introduction, suggests that “broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. . . . Demonstrating the impossibility of any ‘natural’ sexuality, it calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (3). In other words, according to Jagose, the term queer resists the notion that there are “natural” or “true” understandings of men, women, gays, straights, and so forth. Queer theorists aspire to deconstruct those terms because the words don’t necessarily account for lived experiences. Similarly, queer intersects with the idea of feminist resilience since, according to both perspectives, there are no preconceived or fixed ways of being. According to a feminist notion of resilience, terms and lived experiences are fluid. Our bodies and our language are changeable. Contexts, identities, and experiences change, as do their meanings. In our efforts to define the word queer  within an academic context, we have resisted the impulse to reach for a fixed definition (“queer is,” “queer is not”). In our discussions and understandings of queer, we use the term with the goal of calling attention to how it functions as a process. We use queer as an adjective (i.e., queer texts, queer pedagogy), as a verb (queer the classroom) to suggest that queer is a dynamic state of dislocation and interrogation, and as a noun. Queer can encompass understandings that are not primarily relegated to a strict association with gender and sexuality; nonetheless, it is important not to lose sight of these often dismissed and grossly underregarded identity markers. The purpose of looking at sexuality as a starting point is that heterosexism is an undertheorized and often unrecognized way of ordering the world. In his opening to the special issue of College English on queer pedagogies, English and GLBTQQI professor William Spurlin points out that queer theory “functions as a mode of analysis and as a strategy of opposition that circulates in culture and disrupts not only normative ideologies pertaining to sexuality, but . . . the family, child-care, the body, health-care, censorship, health and reproductive politics, citizenship, national affiliation and neo-imperialism in addition to sexuality” (“Theorizing” 10). In other words, our understandings of gender and sexuality impact, and are impacted by, our understandings of family,

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medicine, sociocultural, and legal structures and determine who has access to these structures and institutions. Furthermore, Spurlin describes queer theory as mediating “in culture between normative ideologies and material practices, between intellectual inquiry and social activism, between text and context, between teaching and learning.” As a mode of critical analysis that offers strategies for disruption, Spurlin sees queer theory as a “site of social transformation” (“Theorizing” 10). We argue that the potential of that site to challenge heteronormative hegemony depends on enacting a continual critique of rhetorical and physical acts, such as speaking back to culture by resignifying discourse, but also by speaking on behalf of the experience of the body as a material social being. Applying queer theory to composition involves exceeding boundaries of content, form, and genre for the purpose of calling attention to the ways dominant practices are ideological. Applying queer theory and pedagogical techniques also means calling attention to actual bodily excess and its effects by insisting on constantly challenging norms in order to expose limitations, exclusions, and biases. Calling attention to bodily excess and challenging societal norms are also indications of feminist resilience. An interrogation of our standards of critique and of our own writing practices can allow writing teachers and students to challenge our notion of how we make meaning. In this way, we believe, we can begin to rethink our writing practices by engaging in the ongoing process of resignification; that is, we can continually question the act of attributing meaning (Butler). As feminist scholars who hope to imbue within our students a sense of rhetorical agency, we look to queer pedagogy as a means to intervene in mainstream classrooms with the purpose of encouraging students to challenge their thinking about how they read, interpret, and write in response to identity and culture. We are aware that implementing a pedagogical approach that embraces as well as resists institutional values and ways of knowing runs counter to common practices of teaching writing, and (as we have acknowledged), in some cases, the institutionalized goals of academe. In our desire to attempt the impossible, we are, perhaps, idealistic. However, we also see desire and the pedagogical moments that arise from it as examples of resilience, instances where the goals of queer theory and the purposes and goals of composition can be placed in an uneasy and useful tension. Sometimes this tension may be played out

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within the composition classroom itself. This tension can be understood as mêtis in action. Given our theoretical and practical goals and ambitions, we want to investigate further what happens when we use queer texts in the writing classroom. Drawing from the work of queer theorists and on the notion of resilience as discussed by Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady in the introduction to this collection, our goal is to investigate further what it means to use queer texts in the writing classroom. When thinking about a queer pedagogy, there is a tendency to quickly jump to narratives of queer identity, specifically coming-out narratives. However, not all queer theorists would agree that writing and reading coming-out narratives or readings on queer identity are necessarily interventions. Karen Kopelson argues that “what queer theorists see instead, however, is that coming out simply obeys and reinforces the laws of sexual categories, and of their knowable, nameable selves” (21). Claiming an identity like lesbian, gay, or straight reinforces the understanding that lesbian, gay, and straight are knowable, finite aspects of identity. Although Kopelson admits that identity categories will not go away and should not be ignored, she struggles with what teachers might actually do to queer the classroom and encourage students to interrogate the assumptions that drive their writing and thinking. If not coming out, then what? How can a queer text or how can queer theory be applied in the service of deconstructive practices and critical thinking? And, how might students and teachers then demonstrate and enact agency representative of resilience? Like Karen Kopelson, and also Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter, David Wallace places the responsibility for making changes in the academy on queer people and queer allies, especially tenured faculty like himself, who he claims have the influence to encourage traditional colleagues to experiment with texts from other perspectives. He believes that for teachers concerned with queering the university, “The challenge is to move beyond the homosexual/heterosexual binary and to ‘queer’ dominant ideologies and discursive practices by creating a discourse that undercuts homophobia and other forms of domination” (“Out” 54). Similar to Malinowitz, he believes that by speaking out in the academy, we begin to make political interventions into dominant culture. In “Out in the Academy,” Wallace describes his own challenge to come out in ways that don’t reassert the primacy of a seemingly discreet aspect of his identity. Wallace calls this awareness a “double consciousness.” His struggle with his double consciousness makes apparent the reality that

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we all identify with more than one subject position: “We never speak, listen, read, or write from only one aspect of our identities. Sexuality always intersects with other identities such as race and class, and our discursive performances reflect the intersectionality of identities.” Wallace notes, for those of marginalized identities, that “finding the means to speak may be the primary issue in rhetoric.” He claims that speaking (out) can be a form of queering in itself because it “speaks back to cultural narratives that write one as either invisible or illegible” (65). Queering the classroom, as we see it, can go beyond writing and reading about queer identity. We understand queering to mean a disruption of the way we make meaning for the purpose of examining things differently. One scholar we see attempting to enact the disruption and investigation we suggest is Jonathan Alexander, who considers how a transgender rhetoric might offer new possibilities for queering our classrooms. We highlight Alexander’s assignment because it calls attention to the way a queer approach allows for examination of normative cultural behaviors. Alexander argues that a transgender rhetoric can help students “transit” from one gender to others and thus see the potential to exceed gender categories. Alexander seeks to expand notions of gender beyond Butler’s concept of performativity, which he believes is too “loosely” termed to take into account transgender narratives of the body. A transgender rhetoric is unique, according to Alexander, not only because it offers the potential to expand understandings of gender but also because it can reflect back on itself. Alexander proposes that “paying closer attention to transgendered ways of being and knowing might offer us profoundly different ways of understanding gender and its rhetorics” (53). Alexander’s research concentrates on an exercise he did with his students in which same-sex pairs wrote a fictional piece from the perspective of the “opposite” gender, with the purpose of “reflect[ing] on the process of gender/sex switching” (58). While the assignment could be criticized as too contrived or too obviously directed toward producing stereotypically sexist narratives, Alexander found it useful for calling students’ attention to assumptions they make about gender, particularly a gender that is not (and is often referred to as “opposite”) their own. The narratives did “reveal a complex if intuitive sense of gender as embodied” (61; emphasis in original). The fact that students wrote clichéd stereotypes of gender seemed important for their subsequent

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analysis of gender construction. As Alexander asserts, “The exercise opened up a space in the classroom to talk not only about the performance of gender but also about the embodiment of gender—and how normalizing constructs of gender are inscribed on both mind and body” (66). Performance is not a matter of the moment but also a matter of deeply embodied experience “at the level of flesh” (70). Assumptions about gender run into performances so deeply ritualized that they are inscribed on the body’s experience. W h at i s Q u e e r P e da g o g y a n d W h at Ar e I t s P urp o s e s ?

In addition to identity, scholars have applied queer theoretical perspectives and practices to a wide range of disciplinary material, coining the term queer pedagogy. While relying upon elements of identity politics, most theorists suggest that the goal of queer pedagogy is to challenge the very nature of what we assume is knowledge or truth within a particular context. There are various methods for queering  a pedagogy or recognizing and using queer material in a classroom. Some focus upon how reading queer texts or reading queerly can lead students and teachers to conceptualize issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and identity in less binary and heteronormative ways. As both Goldman and Wallace have pointed out, queer texts need to do more than challenge homophobia. In “Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight,” Deborah Britzman argues that queer texts must “question the very system that sustains heteronormativity” (174) and encourage students to “think the unthought” (151). Queer texts and queer authors present ideas about gender, sexuality, ability, race, the body, or home in ways that students may not yet have encountered within other texts. Furthermore, we would like to consider how reading queer texts, reading queerly, and capitalizing on queer moments in the composition classroom encourage feminist resilience. The instructors’ and students’ experiments with queer texts and with reading queerly that we examine in our article reflect feminist values of relationality, rhetorical agency, and mêtis because they illustrate the ways in which students and instructors have a larger capacity to shift positions, identities, and understandings both in relation to a text’s meaning and in terms of choices they make in the composition classroom. As our experiences, observations, and discussions will illustrate, students (and some teachers) experience queer texts as combative, aggressive, and angry in voice or tone. While this isn’t true of all queer texts,

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women’s studies scholar Suzanne Luhmann notes, “Queer aims to spoil and transgress coherent (and essential) gender configurations and the desire for a neat arrangement of dichotomous sexual and gendered difference central to both heterosexual and homosexual identities” (145). Queer texts do tend to shake up readers’ assumptions about a range of issues. Both Spurlin and Luhmann explain that these assumptions condition our thinking about almost every aspect of identity; yet despite the pedagogical potential outlined by Spurlin, Luhmann, Schneider, Zeikowitz, Malinowitz, Wallace, Kopelson, and others, queer literature or queer pedagogies aren’t often used in beginning writing course curricula. We believe teachers’ apprehensions about whether queer literature is appropriate in a first-year course, and their projections of how students might resist a queer approach, prevent them from making a pedagogical move that might be valuable for critiquing cultural norms and behaviors. We argue that when a queer text is introduced into a firstyear class, it challenges students’ ways of reading and making meaning as well as teachers’ approaches to interpreting a text. We turn now to a number of observations made by students and teachers who studied Eli Clare’s “The Mountain” as part of their text-wrestling assignment (see endnote 1).  In “The Mountain,” Clare critiques pity as a form of oppression perpetuated by able-bodied people upon impaired people. According to Clare, social constructions of ability rely upon able-bodied assumptions and realities that don’t account for the lived experiences of those who are impaired. While Margaret Price analyzed Clare’s essay for the ways it could be used pedagogically to challenge assumptions of normalcy in the writing classroom, it had never been studied for its value as a queer text.3 In the introduction to “The Mountain,” the textbook editors describe Clare as a “genderqueer writer and activist” who has physical disabilities. The autobiographical narrative tells the story of Clare’s attempt to hike up Mount Adams in New Hampshire’s White Mountains; however, partway up the trail sie becomes overwhelmed by hir physical limitations and chooses not to complete the ascent.4 In the process of describing the pain and frustration of the unfinished hike, Clare presses readers to look at the mountain symbolically as an easy ascent that is possible for the able-bodied but that poses an impossible conquest for hir as an impaired person. Readers are put to the test: How do you interpret Clare’s body, impaired by cerebral palsy, as sie attempts this climb?

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Do you fall into the trap of pitying hir, of wanting hir to succeed as a “supercrip” who can overcome disability? Some readers are frightened or offended by Clare’s call to examine their own assumptions about normalcy, ability, and gender. In the latter part of the essay, sie writes more directly about hir queer body and how others have gazed upon it. In an excerpt from the “Home” section of “The Mountain,” Clare explains hir reconciliation of hir body within a social context: “The body as home, but only if it is understood that language too lives under the skin. I think of the words: crip, queer, freak, redneck. None of these are easy words. They mark the jagged edge between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized peoples and how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile, living on the metaphoric mountain” (79). To determine their goals and objectives, Jennifer spoke with teachers before and after they taught Clare’s essay. None of the teachers had taught the essay prior to the time of the study. Each of them had different reasons for selecting Clare’s essay. For instance, Lauren, one of the teachers, had an interest in the experience of the student’s body in the material space of the writing classroom. Another teacher, Molly, wanted to see if gaining knowledge about how to read a queer text might allow students to read differently, in effect, to read other texts and contexts queerly. Our understanding of reading queerly is based on the premise that teachers/scholars and students can approach a text with an interrogative eye, especially toward issues of sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism, and other dynamics that render persons or discourses as having power over others. In the classes Jennifer observed, and in our own practices, students engaged in a queer reading are encouraged to constantly ask themselves questions when they read (not only texts but the world around them): What is normal? What assumptions seem to be operating within and about this text? Who benefits from those assumptions? The goal is for students to read in a way that takes apart meaning, to question the function of identity categories so that student readers and writers can begin to understand how they operate, and finally, to analyze their own assumptions about sexuality, gender, economics, race, and ability. When we talk about teaching our students to read queerly, we hope to offer them a deconstructive lens that will allow them to recognize and, sometimes, actively question and critique the world they live in. Ultimately, we hope they can gain the confidence to oppose oppressive systems, to think critically, innovatively, and resiliently.

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In addition to tracking how teachers used “The Mountain”  in their classes through a series of interviews and classroom observations, Jennifer also spoke with students to get a sense of their response to reading, interpreting, and writing back to Clare’s essay. She spoke with them after they had read the text and discussed it with their class and again after they had written an essay using Clare’s text as evidence for a claim they were investigating. Jennifer was especially interested in various forms of resistance to the text and in ways students may have come not only to think differently through the process of working through the essay but also to demonstrate resilience and mêtistic practices. She examined the ways students responded to Clare’s essay and how they applied their analysis of it in their own text-wrestling essays. S c e n a r i o 1 : Ar t i c u l at i n g M at e r i a l i t y a n d C h a l l e n g i n g I d e n t i t y C at e g o r i e s

Adelle was one of nine students with whom Jennifer spoke after students in the three classes read and discussed Clare’s text and wrote an interacting-with-text essay in their college writing class. Adelle talked about Clare’s essay from the position of an African American woman who had been an honors student throughout her education. Although Adelle claimed that she felt ill equipped to respond to Clare with anything other than pity, she identified and borrowed stylistic strategies from those she found in Clare’s text to challenge perceptions and assumptions about black people, particularly assumptions like “black people are gangsters” or “black people only listen to rap music.” Although Adelle didn’t refer directly to Clare’s text in the essay she wrote, she claimed that Clare’s text influenced her choice of topics. For example, Adelle identified with Clare’s frustration with people’s negative reactions to hir impairment because Adelle has heard people make similar assumptions about her “because I’m Black. Starting from middle school onward.” When she wrote her essay, Adelle said that the ways Clare addressed issues of disability provided her with a model she followed in her essay to challenge the assumptions she knew people harbored about black people. Referring to Clare’s text, she stated, “I was kinda basing it on how she talked about hir disability and how society views hir, and so I wanted to talk about how that applies to me.” Clare’s uncompromising challenge to normative understandings of impairment, combined with class discussion and Adelle’s own initiative, provided a model whereby Adelle hoped to challenge racist assumptions.

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In many introductory writing course curriculums, it is common for teachers to introduce students to a range of stylistic and rhetorical techniques, including the conventions of academic discourse. As Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady point out in their introduction, mêtistic flexibility “entails inductive conjectural knowledge, resisting coherence and reshaping itself to remain in motion. Mêtis combines forethought, resourcefulness, opportunism, even deceit to create circumstances where opportunities can be seized and possibilities exploited” (9). We see Adelle’s teacher offering students these sorts of options: they could write a reflective and analytical essay that responded to either Clare’s text, Bobbie Harro’s “The Cycle of Socialization,”5 or another essay of their own choice from The Original Text-Wrestling Book. By offering options, Adelle’s instructor presented students with opportunities to reshape the assignment in terms that fostered their rhetorical agency. While academic discourse differs according to the discipline within which it is being used, Patricia Bizzell asserts that asking students to write with and inhabit ways of knowing implicit in the conventions of academic discourse isn’t necessarily easy or comfortable. Furthermore, Bizzell suggests that academic discourse reflects the cultural preferences of the most powerful in the community, explaining that “following these language-using conventions shapes participants’ ways of looking at the world—their worldview—including notions of what’s real, normal, natural, good and true” (1). That cultural preference has evolved over time and is now more reflective of a culture that has been influenced and reshaped by those once-labeled “outsiders” to the academy—people of color, women, nonheterosexuals, the impaired— those who have not historically been included in the culture of power (Royster, “Academic” 24); however, it is still reflective of certain assumptions about what “good academic writing” looks like. Bizzell explains that academic discourses and personas continue to be described as “objective, trying to prevent any emotions or prejudices from influencing the ideas in the writing” (2). These understandings of academic discourse signify a particular way of writing and require students to construct an ethos that may or may not reflect their actual thinking. The expectations they associate with academic discourse may encourage students to focus too narrowly and assume they cannot demonstrate the connection in writing that they made in their thinking. As Bizzell states, “Not surprisingly, the persona is argumentative, favoring debate” (2). Such an understanding of

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academic discourse could encourage students to reject the uncertainty fostered by a text like Clare’s in favor of the more certain ethos presented in a text like Harro’s because it enables them to present the more certain ethos they think is required when writing for an academic audience. Adelle’s instructor gave her the opportunity to disrupt academic discourse, a pedagogically mêtistic act that recognized that an academic audience was not the only one students might want to address. While she conformed to the requirements of the assignment, Adelle also challenged those views she saw as representative of academic discourse in her address of multiple audiences. Her audience was certainly not only academics but also those people who, unlike her, were unable (as Adelle explains in her comments) to change their circumstances. While she was demonstrating her ability to take on academic discourse by challenging those in power to see her as legitimate, she also was committed to disrupting assumptions about other people’s realities and their ability to change them. For students like Adelle who might not be schooled in dominant ways of thinking, assuming academic discourse and its conventions can challenge not only the ways they use language, but their worldviews. Although Adelle claimed she wanted to use Clare’s text in her essay, she didn’t feel as if she had the writing skill to do so while narrating her own story and issuing a challenge to racist attitudes. She was concerned that Clare’s focus on and challenge to our understandings of impairment would detract from her challenge to racism, and she worried that she couldn’t do justice to both forms of oppression. Because Clare’s and Harro’s essays differed stylistically, Adelle may have found Harro’s text easier to reference and more accessible overall. Students tended to assume Harro’s position as a social scientist was more “objective” and Clare’s personal narrative more “subjective” or “biased.” As mostly first semester, first-year college students, the people Jennifer interviewed were generally accustomed from their previous experiences to associating scientific texts with a lack of bias, and therefore to viewing them as more valid. Scholars such as Royster (“Academic”), Bizzell, and Donna LeCourt point out that, for many students, the use of academic discourse as a means to engage inquiry and to entertain uncertainty represents a different way of writing and thinking than their previous experiences allowed. Clare’s text demands a different way of reading and thinking than what students have been exposed to in previous texts and assignments.

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There is little in our training as teachers or students that encourages us to critically examine the ways we each unconsciously perpetuate dominant culture and ideology or to develop a critical awareness. Instead, we are encouraged to seek and conform to the comfort and familiarity of various communities that shape our sense of self. Like the concept of mêtis, which Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady articulate in the introduction, a queer text “resists coherence and reshapes itself to remain in motion” (9). We are drawn to the potential of queer texts to model ways writers and texts can continually shape shift, partly because such texts model for our students ways they too can continually question their own status and ideas by remaining fluid in their thinking and by reflecting that thinking in writing. A queer text capitalizes on our capacities to reflect on our own self-understandings and to think critically about the communities that have shaped our selves. Academic inquiry and the language used to frame it can also support that reflection. However, when students grasp at what they take to be the certainty of academic writing combined with the thinking a queer text has facilitated, they may reject what is “unknown, unarticulated” about a variety of normative ideologies in favor of an ethos and subject position that reflects certainty—and thus provides them with a sense of credibility—about the point they want to make in writing. In this way they resist mêtis as they take solace in the known. Adelle wrote her essay not only to challenge nonblack people’s assumptions about black people but to encourage black people to do something about what she referred to as “negative stereotypes” about their intellectual capacity. She claimed that she herself challenged those assumptions in high school by taking honors courses, provoking reactions like “‘Wow, she is actually taking honors classes. This Black girl with the White girls. She’s trying.’” Adelle thus resists categories, something that mêtis also does, and which we have already observed her doing in her comments about negotiating academic discourse. In addition, she explained that she was continuing to challenge racist assumptions about intelligence and ability by getting a college education. Adelle said she wanted to enact change through example: “I’m getting a great education, while there are others out there who are on welfare and the government takes care of them. . . . It’s a way of life, and to break it is a way to influence change.” She believed her essay modeled that influence, and she hoped others would follow her example. We recognize Adelle’s efforts as resilient. Although she makes small gestures toward taking on Clare’s text and focuses on challenging racist

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attitudes, Adelle clearly reaches beyond her comfort zone and experience in response to the assignment. Adelle confronts assumptions of normalcy, including raced assumptions, through her rhetorical choices. Even her anxiety about not being skilled enough to take on the assignment reflects her desire to relate the texts to her experiences in and outside of school. Yet her writing did not reflect the thinking and questioning of normative ideology that Clare’s text provoked and that she articulated when speaking with Jennifer. While questioning assumptions, “truths,”  and that which is thought to be “good”  and “normal”  is a queer pedagogical objective and in keeping with the purpose of academic inquiry, the difficulty Clare’s text presented may have exceeded Adelle’s writing ability. Although Adelle would have liked to use Clare’s text, she abandoned that opportunity in favor of producing an essay she thought would be more effective for her class audience. We can also attribute Adelle’s unwillingness to take on Clare in her essay in favor of a more conventional text in a number of ways. The challenge of writing about Clare’s unpopular and socially more difficult text may have pushed Adelle past her comfort level, especially when she was already struggling to assimilate new discourses. However, we also note that marginalized knowledges, such as those we think are representative of mêtis and queer, are often silenced by the power of more conventionally acceptable work. As the editors of this collection highlight in their discussion of the myth of Mêtis, “Zeus swallowed Mêtis, his first wife and the goddess who represented such intelligence, after he realized that she embodied, and would use, her cunning to undermine his authority” (10). Mêtistic knowledge, which we view as positively destabilizing and presenting ever-changing possibilities for knowing, can also be understood as threatening to existing power and conventionally accepted paradigms. The shape-shifting, kaleidoscope-turning quality of mêtis (which we find exciting for both our teaching and theorizing), promotes the possibilities provided by a queer text. Simply put, a queer text disrupts the training readers—whether we are students or teachers or both— receive from other sources. It doesn’t necessarily mean we need to be queer, think exactly as queer theorists think, or completely reject dominant ideology, but it does encourage a critical awareness of dominant culture and ideology. While simultaneously introducing a queer text and academic discourse conventions can present students with a doubly formidable task, it doesn’t preclude students from drawing upon the

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techniques, tone, or style in order to acknowledge and challenge unjust assumptions about their material reality or to challenge the effect identity categories have had on their own self-understanding or the understandings they felt projected on them by others.  S c e n a r i o 2 : M o v i n g fr o m t h e B o dy t o T h e o r y a n d Bac k Ag a i n

One of the teachers, Molly, had purposefully come out as queer during the first week of class. Despite her awareness that the act placed her in a vulnerable position (and, as some GLBTQQI theorists argue, it could have placed her students in a vulnerable position as well), Molly’s insistence on coming out demonstrated one way instructors might enact resilience, quietly disrupting assumptions students may have and creating a space in which it may be safer for some students to disclose or enact nonheteronormative identities. Her calculated risk seemed to yield results. In subsequent discussions with three of her students, all of them mentioned that her act had influenced their readings and small and large-group classroom discussions of “The Mountain.” After teaching Clare’s text in her class, Molly moved from text to film to see if students could take their understanding of Eli Clare’s essay and use it to enact a queer reading of another text in a different medium. She showed a clip of the classic western Red River. The clip was a scene between Montgomery Clift and John Wayne. In it, the two men were about to embark upon a cattle drive. They were comparing notes about, and expressing admiration for, the size and make of the other’s gun. Clift asked, “Say, can I try that?” He proceeded to shoot Wayne’s gun. Then Wayne shot Clift’s gun. After the men exchanged mutual compliments about their ability (“Say, that’s some mighty fine shootin’!”), Molly ended the clip. Molly then asked students to analyze their assumptions about this film. What readings could be imposed upon a text, and what limits might a text set for readers? Students engaged readily with the first half of the class discussion, which involved naming common assumptions about westerns; however, when Molly asked whether or not they could read a western queerly or queer their understandings of what was taking place amongst the characters in the clip she showed, the class’s silence betrayed their confusion.  As a way to bridge the divide and once again attempt to ease students into the act of reading queerly,  Molly lowered the stakes. She

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reviewed a scenario of the two cowboys as they discussed guns, watches, and women. In the scenario, Clift asked Wayne, “What’s better than a good Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere?” Wayne responded, “Have you ever had a good Swiss watch?” Both times, students laughed at the exchange. Molly asked, “Why did you laugh, why did people laugh at that line?” One male student offered a response: “Because they were, they seemed desperate for, for booty” After the laughter, one woman interjected, “I thought it was funny how when they were talking about women and Swiss watches, he said, ‘Have you ever had a good Swiss watch?’” The male student’s response, accompanying laughter, and the female student’s interjection are indicative of the heterosocial public space that comprises most classrooms. Students were able to appreciate the sexual implications of Clift and Wayne’s exchange as long as they interpreted the lines from a common heterosocial position, yet they were unable to meet Molly’s challenge to interpret the text from a queer perspective. As Malinowitz, Wallace, Kopelson, and other GLBTQQI writers note, unless heteronormativity is deliberately interrupted, it operates, like understandings of disability, impairment, and pity, unchecked and uncensored. Malinowitz points out that heteronormativity makes the act of composition tricky for students who don’t identify as such. She states, “Heterosexuals, like white people, insofar as that part of their identity is not regularly challenged or scrutinized, are free not to regard it as a significant fact demarcating their selfhood; it is possible for them to experience it instead as part of the seamless garment of ‘humanity’” (24). As the example of students’  heteronormative readings of the western illustrates, other readings or interpretations aren’t seriously considered. Furthermore, the laughter with which the class responded to the student’s assertion demonstrated, to some degree, their complicity with that naturalization. The female student’s equation of watches, women, and what men can “have” also underlines the heterosexist assumption that all men have the ability and desire to “have” women. Heteronormativity was confirmed when, a moment later, Molly once again asked why the scene and discussion struck them as funny. One student responded with a question, “Because he assumes the guy has already had a woman?” Molly shifted the conversation to get students to address various assumptions. She asked what assumptions students had about Switzerland. They discussed chocolate, watches, sheep, and, finally, neutrality. Molly asked if there might be a connection between

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women and Switzerland in terms of neutrality. She prompted, “So, Switzerland kind of has a reputation of not fighting . . . not engaging in battle . . . do you think women might be seen similarly? As not fighting, not being involved? Is he making some kind of joke? . . . You’ve also got this symbol of death, power, destruction, authority [the gun] . . . anything come to mind?” There was silence.  At that point, Molly referenced their prior class discussions about Clare’s text. She stated, “We’ve been talking . . . about the issues Clare raises and maybe stepping away from dominant or natural readings, maybe the sort of things our mother culture tells us about the right way of reading something. Let’s say, for example, that we read this from a queer perspective, to try to queer the scene. Anything come to mind?” Once again, there was silence. Finally, a student brought up the line in which one cowboy says to the other, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,”  asking, “Is that the idea? I mean, it’s a stretch, but . . .” Molly challenged him: “Is it a stretch . . .? I mean, a gun can be a symbol of . . . could be a symbol of what?” The student responded, “A gun is a classic phallic symbol.” Molly then asked, “Any other ways we could look at that queerly? Would a queer reading look at that line about a good woman or a Swiss watch in any particular way?” There were a few halfhearted attempts, but mostly, students were silent or looked quizzical. The student’s halting acknowledgement that the gun may represent a “phallic symbol”  suggests he recognizes that something having to do with sexuality may be enacted in that scenario. Two men “shooting” their guns is an example not only of how men might compete (size matters!), but suggests the seemingly mutual admiration between the two men. Each desires to “shoot” the other’s gun. The students’ refusal to analyze that scenario is indicative not only of homophobia, but of an erotophobic culture that demonizes homosexual desire. Rereading the western from a queered perspective would require students to recognize the ways homosexual desire can disrupt seemingly naturalized cultural representations of the American West as well as naturalized representations of masculinity and femininity. Molly’s early request that students articulate cultural assumptions about westerns didn’t necessarily carry through to students articulating cultural assumptions about masculinity, heteronormativity, or women. Asking students to reread their own resistance to a queer interpretation would require them to recognize, and maybe even to challenge, a deeply held heterosexist consciousness. It would also require them to express the resilience

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necessary to resist their own assumptions and the views commonly held by their classmates. Although some of the students in that class on that day may not have been straight or may have recognized the homoerotic or queer reading Molly was attempting to encourage them to articulate, the classroom culture, despite the work Molly had done to make it less heteronormative (for example, she identified herself as queer, she assigned and discussed the nuances of a queer text and of a queer writer, and she asked them to queer their reading of a western), none of the students would attempt a queer reading in the public space of their writing classroom. In 1996, Malinowitz claimed that “most academic institutions and the communities that contain them are still homophobic enough to discourage teachers and students from coming out or even speaking out strongly for change” (7). Although it may no longer be completely taboo in certain contexts to acknowledge and discuss same-sex desire, the scenario from Molly’s class indicates that such recognition and discussion is perhaps not necessarily something students can recall or enact beyond the confines of a specific text, author, or teacher. Although Molly’s actions revealed her own resilience and modeled a mêtistic pedagogy, her students’ reactions demonstrate how conventional knowledge tends to silence alternative lenses of critique. In mainstream culture, and in most students’ appreciation of or understanding of cultural and historical genres, heterosexism maintains its supremacy. Students tend to avoid, challenge, or dismiss readings that indicate otherwise. Later discussion and reflection of this scenario led us to two conclusions, one of which has already been discussed. First, as noted, the example illustrates the pervasiveness of heterosexist assumptions. Second, we were interested in what the scenario might suggest about reading queerly. While the students seemed to accept their teacher’s identity as queer, and didn’t challenge Eli Clare’s identity as a queer author, their understanding of queer remained rooted in identity. Students appeared to accept queerly identified people but wanted to maintain their understanding of queer as an aspect of identity. Instead of asking questions about what implications Molly’s body and Clare’s body had for the ways they “read” the clip from Red River, students relied upon the assumptions and knowledge available to them already. Those assumptions and that knowledge rested upon an understanding of queer as an identity category.6 We believe this scenario illustrates a disjuncture between the material and the theoretical. As long as the connection between theory and

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experience remains abstract or contained, we don’t need to account for the ways they are dependent, the ways in which the material informs the theoretical. As teachers, we not only need to make those connections ourselves, we also need to help students make the connection between their own theoretical and material understandings and experiences. As many of the texts in this collection illustrate, enacting mêtis and resilience often involve making the connection between the personal and the theoretical. As the first scenario illustrates, Adelle found Clare’s queer text applicable to her writing, thinking, and the message she hoped to send to her audience; yet she felt stymied by the conventions of academic writing about how to use the actual text. Instead, she used the ideas and a tone similar to the one she found in Clare’s text in order to assert an antiracist message, but cited the more recognizable academic genre of Harro’s text. The second scenario illustrates that students seemed willing to examine queer as a form of sexuality, but were unable at that time to move beyond queer as an identity category. Like Molly, we want to examine queer as a strategy, a means of interpretation, and as a process of reading. The students in each of the scenarios helped us recognize that the value of a queer pedagogy remains unrecognized in the real, material space of the writing classroom and that the concepts of resilience, agency, and mutual empowerment must be continually enacted and re-enacted as we work to introduce new material to students. In addition, Molly’s introduction of herself as queer is an example of mêtis. By coming out to her students and then by attempting to use her queer identity as a means to guide students toward a queer reading of “The Mountain” and Red River, Molly enacts mêtis. She models a self that is challenging heterosexism while interrogating normative assumptions. As their instructor, she encourages her students to enact a similar critical disruption, yet they comply only to a point. Molly’s mêtis presents too much of a challenge to her first-year students, who are steeped in mainstream culture and also negotiating academic discourse for the first time. The theories of rhetorical agency, relationality, and mêtis that Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady describe as comprising their concept of feminist resilience offer an additional lens for understanding how a queer pedagogy can operate. Yet, the resilience this collection’s editors argue for depends on a desire to see things differently and to make gestures toward change. When our students resist mêtis as we saw in Molly’s classroom, or when they embrace academic discourse as we saw in Adelle’s essay choice, we witness them grappling

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with conventions yet not making a move toward the rhetorical agency we hope for. Based on our analysis of Adelle’s and Molly’s examples, as well as others with whom Jennifer spoke, we propose that a new kind of rhetorical listening might be a strategy for applying a queer pedagogy in the writing classroom. Rhetorical listening offers a relational approach to negotiating both texts and classroom practices in ways that are aligned with Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady’s notions of agency and resilience. Jacqueline Jones Royster advocates a practice of rhetorical listening when she insists that teachers need to change our practices if we are to talk across boundaries. She asks, “When do we listen? How do we listen? . . . How do we translate listening in language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response?” (“When” 38). We believe that by paying closer attention not only to individual voices but to the relationships created between people and their experiences, we can begin to listen more effectively. In this way, we can enact a pedagogy that interrogates norms and biases and that seeks to interpret texts and experiences differently. According to Royster (“When”), we need to redefine voice and redefine listening. We can listen better by recognizing that the voice is not only the person speaking; we can hear voice as setting off a sense of relationship. To Royster, listening is a relationship between bodies. In Royster’s terms, the relationships between bodies can include those between the student-writer and class members, the teacher as a body, and even Clare (the author) as a body. In our view, the inability to listen is resistance to the Other, usually to the unfamiliar body of the Other. Irreconcilable differences often reflect differences in subject position. Clashing views stem from positions influenced by power relations—for instance, how one is raced, classed, or gendered. Resistance to listening masks the inability to contend with foreign or opposing positions and the bodies attached to them, bodies whose position is not only unknown, but is potentially threatening to one’s sense of a stable subject position. As a result, many feminists—and, we would add, many writing teachers—avoid the conflict that queering texts and bodies may make unavoidable because of the potentially painful and destructive atmosphere it might allow. As Molly’s experience in the classroom illustrates—and as teachers’ experiences with Clare’s text show us in general—students’ resistance to alternative readings demonstrates the difficulty of challenging normative discourses.

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Krista Ratcliffe expands on Royster’s idea of rhetorical listening in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Building upon Royster’s claim that we must listen differently and more effectively, Ratcliffe asserts, “As a trope for interpretive invention, rhetorical listening signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture. . . . My particular interest, however, lies in how rhetorical listening may be employed to hear people’s intersecting identifications with gender and race (including whiteness), the purpose being to negotiate troubled identifications in order to facilitate cross-cultural communication about any topic” (17; emphasis in original). We support Ratcliffe’s project of employing rhetorical listening as a means for “negotiating troubled identifications” and thus developing deeper understanding between speakers, texts, and cultures. A rhetoric of listening assumes feminist principles of relationality, agency (Ratcliffe argues that we gain personal agency from the “contradictions and gaps within the embodied discourses that socialize a person” [65]), and mêtis for the listener, who takes in and continually revises her understanding of the speaker. A rhetoric of listening calls attention to the process of queering texts as well as to the experiences of queer bodies. What can we do to create the kind of listening relationship that will allow us to think differently? And how can we enact rhetorical resilience in such a way that our students develop a sense of their own agency as they both speak out and listen to the words (and witness the actions) of others? Most often we get our best ideas from our experiences with our students. For example, one of Lauren’s students who came to the university from a farm struggled with the theme of social acceptance in all of his writing. His work reflected his effort to come to terms with the way he was seen by his peers who read him as “redneck.” On the last day of class when he turned in the portfolio of his semester’s work, this student, who was typically a quiet, occasional participant, handed Lauren a CD. In the introduction to his self-reflexive final essay, he had written something like the following (she wishes she had saved the letter so she could quote him directly): “This is the music I listen to when I write. I want you to listen to this recording of some of my favorite songs while you read my portfolio so that you can know what was in my head when I wrote for your class.” The combination of country-western music with his writing took Lauren to a place of understanding she never could have arrived at in the context of the classroom, or even in an individual conference. By adding the CD, this student had contextualized his writing in a way that

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invited her to listen more deeply and to hear the connection between his writing and his self. In effect, this student had queered himself by presenting himself and his body of work in a way that challenged how he had performed throughout the course. Lauren was thrilled by the opportunity to know her student through a different lens, but she would not have had a similar reaction had the student presented in a way that disrupted or aggressively opposed her way of teaching. In another situation, she found it harder to take a student’s speaking out against her in his writing, although she tried to discipline herself to listen carefully through the criticism. In that case, she had accidentally been sent an e-mail message in which the student had ranted to another student about Lauren’s response to one of his papers. Eventually she was able to identify the conflict as a clash of subject positions. Both these instances reinforce for us the need for teachers to be open to being challenged, even queered, by our students. The second situation in particular reminds us that queering the classroom is an ongoing process and one that is not always easy. Having agency depends on breaking out of ritualized performance— iterating in a new way—as Butler would suggest. Acts of speaking out and/or writing back to culture are neither easily recognized nor performed. Speaking out, acting out, writing back, queering text—all of these discursive disruptions originate in an understanding of how culture is being played out on the body. Our bodies live and experience pain, frustration, oppression, pleasure, in ways that are not always apparent to us discursively. Sometimes our linguistic awareness lags behind bodily awareness. Many times we learn what we think from our bodies and people’s reactions to them. Discursive performance depends on the lived experience of the body. Theories of resistance must take into account material conditions, for they construct us just as thought does. For feminist writing teachers and queer theorists to work towards resignifying the terms gender, masculinity/femininity, and man/woman we must understand that such concepts are not most significantly discursive, that sign and body must always intersect, that thought is vacant without the material being in place. We would like to argue for a pedagogy that takes into account corporeal as well as discursive experience (also what editors Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady discuss as examples of mêtis). Kristie Fleckenstein provides something we believe Butler’s queer theory leaves out, the idea of body as not only determined by culture and thought but by its “participation” in the

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world. Fleckenstein offers a viable model for looking at the experience of bodies in the material world. Body and discourse are linked together; the body exists within discourse just as discourse is within the body. In this way, Fleckenstein submits, the body moves back and forth from the corporeal to the discursive. It is never situated solely within one or the other. We can reclaim the body then without giving up poststructuralist insights. Fleckenstein sees the body as “being-in-a-material-place,” that is, as neither strictly object, nor sign, nor identity, but as the condition of being at a particular moment in a situation. Identity emerges from the situatedness of being in space and time. Fleckenstein’s notion of the body extends to ways of learning, the emotions, physical environment, and the relationship between body and mind (Embodied Literacies 79). She writes, “Through somatic literacy, students conceptualize meanings as multi-sensual and as sited, incorporating into writing-reading the sensuality and positionality necessary for our physical existence within the world” (80). Similarly, we understand Fleckenstein’s notion of the body “being” located momentarily within time and space as mêtistic because bodies are already always in flux, shifting, changing shape, and in this way both challenging established or static ways of knowing while also creating the disruption necessary to embody space differently. Being-in-a-material-place can refer to various conditions of embodiment. Theories for thinking about the body consider space and place (Reynolds), the significance of emotion (Worsham), and rhetorics of listening (Ballif, Davis, and Mountford). Such ways of thinking about the body can explain what Molly and Jennifer observed in their classrooms and may help us begin to think about a rhetoric of listening as a way to consider queering the writing classroom and thus re-envisioning our classrooms as places where students can demonstrate and develop resilience as well as develop greater agency. An important aspect of being-in-a-material-place is affect, which Lynne Worsham argues is ignored for the most part in the classroom and by society at large. She defines emotion as “the tight braid of affect and judgment, socially and historically constructed and bodily lived, through which the symbolic takes hold of and binds the individual, in complex and contradictory ways, to the social order and its structure of meanings” (216). Displays of public violence—or wilding—are, in Worsham’s view, symptomatic of late capitalism in that many are subordinated while power is granted to a dominant few. Worsham attributes some of the worst violent outbursts in recent US history to unattended

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emotion. She makes the point that emotion cannot be ignored by composition theory or by society. It will bubble up anyway in uncontrolled ways that show the effects of a culture that constrains and silences. We can see the repercussions of a society that disallows expressions of mêtis. In Worsham’s view, students, like other inhabitants of our late capitalist society, “school” themselves and others to contain their emotions. We believe that interacting with queer texts also provides a “break” from traditional understandings of emotion and what it means to be “schooled,” offering students another more mêtistic vantage point from which they can evaluate culture with a sense of their own resilience and agency. The emotions Worsham discusses, including anger, rage, and bitterness, find their way into the writing classroom because they are aspects of students’ affective lives. As Jennifer learned when discussing the essay with students and instructors, part of what students respond to most strongly in Clare is what they label hir “anger” or “bitterness.” Often students want to dismiss “The Mountain” because they claim that “sie really wants us to feel badly for her,” a message they feel undermines hir assertion that sie doesn’t want “pity.” As one student asked, “If not pity, then what does she want?” Perhaps Clare wants us to listen. Feminist composition scholars Michelle Ballif, D. Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford come together in a trilogue to discuss some of the problems faced by contemporary feminism and to examine ways of negotiating differences by developing a rhetoric of listening (“Negotiating”). The task for current and future feminists, as they see it, is to work out strategies for negotiating what seem to be unresolvable conflicts. Their view is aligned with Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady’s central argument in this collection. Just as Baliff, Davis, and Mountford acknowledge the need to address the seemingly insurmountable, so too does this collection take on the need to consider resilience as a rhetorical process: “While similar to metaphors used previously by feminist rhetoricians, it is also distinct in that it places greater emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals. Resilience suggests attention to choices made in the face of difficult and even impossible challenges” (1). Strategies such as those suggested in the feminist trilogue and by Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady might encourage teachers to send students back to “listen” again to Clare’s text and help students find a way, whether in words or through the structure of their text, to articulate the difficult and complex messages they may be able to feel or conceptualize but not yet represent in writing (for example, Adelle’s

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inability to use Clare’s text to challenge racism). As the collection editors note in their definition of resilience, “Resilience does not necessarily return an individual life to equilibrium but entails an ongoing responsiveness, never complete nor predetermined. Finally, resilience is transformative not necessarily through affecting a change in circumstances—which may remain bleak or oppressive—but in changing the way a life is lived. Resilient living can involve determination, perseverance, hope, and imagination” (7). Negotiating difference through a rhetoric of listening and by consciously practicing acts of resilience seems to us to be the most hopeful way of approaching our practice. It is a strategy that attracts us because we find, like Ratcliffe, Royster, the trilogue writers, and this collection’s editors, that we rarely listen deeply enough to hear the Other. The quality of listening these writers advocate demands that we interrogate our own positions while paying attention to the voice of the Other in a way that focuses on who we become in the process of the listening relationship. By listening, we can hear the intersection of ways of being, speaking, and thinking about the world. For instance, as she completed a recent semester of first-year writing, Lauren found herself particularly drawn to students’ narratives about their writing anxieties. Comments such as, “I am a logic and math person who isn’t good at writing,” or “my mother checked over all my work before she would let me turn it in,” reminded her of the complexity of past experiences that shape our students’ views of themselves as writers. Finally, we want to propose that writing teachers entertain the notion of queer pedagogy as a process. The three incidents we have highlighted—Adelle’s desire to challenge racism after reading Clare’s text, Molly’s attempt to enact a queer reading of a western, and Lauren’s experience listening to the CD made by her student from a farm—stand out to us as queer moments. What actually occurred in these moments cannot be planned for. We see such moments as arising in response to an array of influences, from reading and discussion to reflection and the kind of probing that occurs when one is trying to sort things out, the kind of analysis that makes one want to speak or act differently, both in and outside the classroom. We see queer texts as setting the stage for such possible spontaneous moments. Defining queer as spontaneous moments means that understanding and interpreting the world cannot be fixed in language. It is always in flux. We propose a queer pedagogy that focuses

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on performative moments that raise the possibility for putting identity in flux. Judith Butler’s explanation of gender not as something you are but as something you do underscores the flexibility of identity as performance. So too do we assert that queer pedagogical moments are spontaneous performances. We cannot necessarily plan for them, but we can be prepared to pay attention to them, to listen deeply when they occur. We believe that the specific scenarios and techniques we have offered illustrate that queer theory has much to offer the field of composition. Queer texts can enable students and teachers to imagine what has been previously unimagined, thus opening up our ways of thinking to the possibility that not only can the self can be more fluid, but that as teachers and students we do have agency already. We have the ability to recognize, to rethink, and to assert our understandings of what is “normal.” N ot e s 1.

2.

3.

The data for this article comes from an IRB-approved study Jennifer conducted in 2003 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Jennifer worked with three teacher-participants who introduced Eli Clare’s “The Mountain” in their firstyear writing classes. She chose Clare’s essay for a number of reasons. The goal of her project was to see how teachers would teach, and how students would respond to an explicitly queer text. At the University of Massachusetts, the firstyear writing curriculum requires all teachers to concentrate on an Interacting with Text unit that asks students to read published writing and examine their interpretations of it in their own “text-wrestling” essays. Students were supposed to “wrestle” with the ideas in the essays they read, an assignment adapted from Peter Elbow. Students were asked to incorporate one or more texts in the form of summary, quote, and paraphrase. In this way, the writing program hoped to encourage students to “enter” academic conversations that were taking place on paper in the required course textbook, The Original Text-Wrestling Book (Curtis et al., 2001). Eli Clare’s essay, “The Mountain,” was included in this book. Although “The Mountain” was sanctioned by the university for use in the Interacting with Text unit, it was not a popular choice with teachers. It was sometimes taught by teachers with an interest in queer pedagogy, gender, or disability issues, but it was generally reported to be a text students and teachers struggled with because of the author’s confrontational style and overtly critical stance on mainstream ablebodied society. For example, the 2002 special issue of College English, Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Pedagogies, edited by William J. Spurlin, and the “Special Cluster on Queer Theory” in a 2004 issue of JAC, edited by Lynn Worsham, focus on queer issues. In her dissertation, Writing From Normalcy: Disability Studies and Composition, Margaret Price documented a study in which she, as a teacher-researcher, examined how disability studies enables the critical thinking that should take place in a mainstream composition classroom. Her study involved group interviews and observations as her class read, discussed, and wrote about “The Mountain.”

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4.

5.

6.

As the editors explain in their introduction, “Clare uses the terms sie (pronounced “see”) and hier (pronounced “here”) rather than s/he and his/her to refer to hierself; these pronouns were coined by some of those who identify as transgender or genderqueer to signify a gender identity other than male or female” (Curtis et al. 71). The text referenced here is Bobbi Harro’s “The Cycle of Socialization,” which explores and presents a scheme outlining the ways we are socialized depending upon the identities we are assigned at birth. In contrast with Clare’s text, Harro’s text is written in a social science genre, using a diagram and explaining each point in turn. We owe a debt of gratitude to Mary Wilson, whose interpretation of this scenario helped us develop our own thinking and analysis.

Works Cited Alexander, Jonathan. “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 45–82. Print. Alexander, Jonathan, and Michelle Gibson, eds. “Special Cluster on Queer Theory.” JAC 24.1 (2004). Print. Ballif, Michelle, D. Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford. “Negotiating the Differend: A Feminist Trilogue.” JAC 20.3 (2000): 583–625. Print. ———. “ Towards an Ethics of Listening.” JAC 20 (2000): 931–942. Print. Bizzell, Patricia. “The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourses.” Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses in the Academy. Ed. Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 1–10. Print. Britzman, Deborah. “Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop, Reading Straight.” Educational Theory 45-2 (1995): 151-65. Print. Bryson, Mary, and Suzanne de Castell. “Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect.” Canadian Journal of Education 18.3 (1993): 285–305. Print. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Clare, Eli. “The Mountain.” Curtis, et. al. 71–80. Print. Curtis, Marcia, Benjamin Balthaser, Michael Edwards, Zan Goncalves, Robert Hazard, Noria Jablonski, Brian R. Jordan, Shauna Seliy, and Peggy Woods, eds. The Original TextWrestling Book: The Writing Program of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2001. Print. De Castell, Suzanne and Mary Bryson. “Queer Ethnography: Identity, Authority, Narrativity and a Geopolitics of Text.” Ristock and Taylor. 97-110. Print. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. “Writing Bodies: Somatic Mind in Composition Studies.”  College English 61.3 1999: 281-306. Print. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. Print. Fogelin, Robert J. Wittgenstein (Arguments of the Philosophers). New York: Routledge, 1987. Print. Goldman, Ruth. “Who Is That Queer Queer?: Exploring Norms Around Sexuality, Race and Class in Queer Theory.” Queer Studies. Ed. Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, New York: New York UP, 1996. 169–82. Print. Harro, Bobbie. “The Cycle of Socialization.” Curtis, et al. 169–78. Print. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York UP, 1996. Print. Kopelson, Karen. “Dis/Integrating the Gay/Queer Binary: ‘Reconstructed Identity Politics’ for a Performative Pedagogy.” College English 65.1 2002: 17–35. Print. Koski, Fran F. “Queer Theory in the Undergraduate Writing Course.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Washington, D.C. March 23-25 1995. Print.

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LeCourt, Donna. Identity Matters: Schooling the Student Body in Academic Discourse. Albany: SUNY P, 2004. Print. Luhmann, Suzanne. “Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy is a Pretty Queer Thing.” Queer Theory in Education. Ed. William Pinar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 141–55. Print. Malinowitz, Harriet. Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1995. Print. Price, Margaret. “Writing From Normal: Critical Thinking and Disability in the Classroom.” Diss. U of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2004. Print. Red River. Dir. Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson. United Artists, 1948. Film. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print. Reynolds, Nedra. “Composition’s Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace.” College Composition and Communication 50.1 (1998): 12–35. Print. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea.” Ed. Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell. 23–30. Print. ———. “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own.” College Composition and Communication 47.1 (1996): 29–40. Print. Schneider, Jeffrey L. “Secret Sins of the Orient: Creating a (Homo)Textual Context for Reading Byron’s The Giaour.” College English 65.1 (2002): 8–95. Print. Spurlin, William J. “Theorizing Queer Pedagogy in English Studies After the 1990s.” College English 65.2 (2002): 9-16. Print. ———, ed. Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Pedagogies.  Spec. issue of College English 65.2 (2002). Print. Wallace, David L. “Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness.” College English 65.2 (2002): 53–66. Print. Worsham, Lynn. “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion.” JAC 18.2 (1998): 213–45. Print. Zeikowitz, Richard E. “Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes.” College English, 65.1 (2002): 67–80. Print.

Response On Impossibility

Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander We’ll begin by revealing a new bias we have come to have as queer compositionists: it’s impossible for composition, really, to fully engage with the queer. We thus approach DiGrazia and Rosenberg’s article from an angle, perhaps a particularly queer angle; given our sense of the impossibility of queerness for composition, how might we respond to their call to go there, “there” being the space of a possibility we increasingly cannot fathom? What we hope follows is not a détournement of the article, but rather a calling-out of some of the shortcomings of pedagogy, or at least the institutionalized variety (in which we find ourselves engaged). F i r s t- P e r s o n S i n g u l a r : J a c k i e

Like the authors, I’ve been frustrated by the invisibility of sexuality studies at our conferences. It’s been my experience at a number of conferences—including feminist conferences—that there weren’t many queers there, or at least not many lesbians. Sometimes, queer appeared to be a hot topic, but this delightfully unstable identification took on a false and exclusive stability, depending on the queerness and/or feminist politics of the speakers themselves. A workshop on queer pedagogy at a New York CCCC defined queer as virtually synonymous with gay, and rather than challenging straight ways of teaching/writing/teachingof-writing, focused on a charm bracelet sort of inclusion strategy. I’ve attended and been part of (to my ongoing unease) similar panels since then. How can we, these earnest panels ask, make our classrooms “safe spaces” with texts that included an occasional “gay perspective”? Other queer discussions challenged heteronormativity, false-inclusion strategies, “straight” teaching, and the like, but did so at the expense of feminist theory. Often, feminist contributions to discussions of gender and writing were characterized as rather dusty, quaint, cultural-feminist interventions that were hopelessly outdated (especially in

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the face of vigorous, edgy queer theory). My visceral resistance to the erasure of feminism in discussions of sexuality led me to an increasingly critical view of queerness in the academy. It also led me to posit lesbian as a less-domesticated, more subversive critical stance. As I have written elsewhere, I do not believe the queer has quite met its “sad finish”; in fact, it takes only a quick look though the CFP-L archives or MLA/CCCC programs to see that “queer” is doing at least as well as “feminist” in terms of critical legitimacy. The term still has the power to disturb, to evoke reaction, and indeed to describe a particular sense of discursive work. In using the term lesbian, however, I follow Terry Castle deliberately: “Indeed, I still maintain, if in ordinary speech I say, ‘I am a lesbian,’ the meaning is instantly (even dangerously) clear: I am a woman whose primary emotional and erotic allegiance is to my own sex” (15). It is this sense of first-person signification (to which Sedgwick alludes) that must inform any embodied feminist praxis. (Alexander and Rhodes, “Queerness,” 205)

Given my own lesbian turn here, and given the imposed stability of the term queer in public scholarship, and given my ongoing interest in an embodied, feminist, and—dare I say?—queer praxis, I both sympathize with and resist the authors’ argument about what the lack of audience means. DiGrazia and Rosenberg speculate that “despite composition’s commitment to egalitarian methods of evaluation, pedagogical application, and theory, gender and sexuality are still not really being discussed in ways that truly challenge gender(ed), classed, and sexual status quos” (212). Part of their concern arises out of a sense that no one is really paying critical attention to rich potential intersections of queerness and writing. They point out, “Our sense was that regardless of the commitment of our field to address issues of diversity, heterosexism was so institutionalized that conference attendees found it either irrelevant to hear our presentations or had no interest in the topic” (211). What about the other possibilities? Is it that, like me, other lesbians and other queer folk worried that we’d encounter yet another apologia for sexual diversity? Is it that, as often happens, the only other panel on sexuality was cross-scheduled? As I add to the list of potential explanations, I find myself troubled by the premise that informs these questions: that our field has “a commitment” to addressing “issues of diversity.” As I’ve written elsewhere, such discussions often remind me of “Writing Theory: Theory Writing,” in which Susan Miller “asks us to look at ‘the theory we say we have’ and ‘the theory we actually do have,’ as evidenced in our teaching practice.

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To extrapolate here: what is the ‘commitment to diversity’ our field says it has, and does actual practice point to a different commitment?” (“Who Are We?” 128). Put another way, are we as multiculturally resilient as we think we are? F i r s t- P e r s o n S i n g u l a r : J o n at h a n

I find myself very gratified, even humbled, that my article, “Transgender Rhetorics,” is one the authors identify as indicative of the kind of work that challenges constructions and narrations of gender and sexuality. Such work, apparently, prompts them to maintain hope: “Still, we believe that there is a lot of work to be done to challenge assumptions about when to include queer texts in a course and how to approach such texts so they can be used to productively investigate the limits of academic language, social norms, and the way people think about sexual diversity” (212). These seem laudable goals—ones that a handful of others (see Alexander and Gibson’s “Special Cluster in Queer Theory” in JAC) have promoted, Jackie and I included. But the potential impossibility of this task is detectable in the language the authors use. Note the move from the verb investigate—a good, strong academic verb—to the object of investigation, “the limits of academic language.” Certainly, when we introduce the queer into the academic classroom, we begin challenging all sorts of assumptions—about identity, about community, and even about knowledge and its construction. We dispel the normative by recognizing the presence of desires and trajectories of affectional investment that are different than most of those always already assumed in the classroom. We question the limits of democracy by interrogating the construction of citizenship and how certain bodies are excluded from enfranchisement, and certain desires denied material recognition. And in understanding those desires as at least in part socially constructed, we question what is known and knowable, querying the dominant discourse that our genes are responsible for everything. We even queer responsibility itself, insisting that all of us own our desires. And we mean own as not just acknowledging the homoerotic that pervades marketing in our postcapitalist economy, but own as in acknowledging the centrality of the homoerotic to the maintenance of so much social, intimate, and economic exchange, to the very conceptualization of the straight, to the basic structures around which so many people organize their very heteronormative lives—structures that would be insensible without the necessity of the abject other of the queer.

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Isn’t this queering then a kind of resilience testing? Indeed, queer poses huge challenges to what can be reasonably accomplished in the classroom. Even in just composing the above paragraph, my heart begins to d’thump, d’thump a bit harder as I register somatically the challenges posed by the queer—and the limited amount of time we have with our students to do this kind of work. No wonder so many people opt out of outing the heteronormative and focus instead on the doable work of inclusivity. F i r s t- P e r s o n P l ur a l : J a c k i e a n d J o n at h a n

DiGrazia and Rosenberg argue that interacting with “a queer text . . . has the potential to challenge the institutional structure in ways that can disrupt teachers’ and students’ sense of a seemingly safe classroom space” (212). But what is a queer text? Certainly, there are “queer texts” such as your standard anthologized coming-out narrative—the narrative that asks for a sympathetic reading, that normalizes the queer, and that seems safely inclusive. However, as Jackie has pointed out, “To out your text creates the illusion that queer texts can be written, that an author’s relationship with a text is simply a matter of interplay between two points on a rhetorical triangle. Such a relationship is, however, a multifaceted intersection of shifting bodies, fingers, tongues that speak, not-so-silent emotions, a series of conflicts not to be (re)solved but to be exploded into language” (“Homo” 388). In other words, queer texts are, really, queer: disturbing, unsettling. They are savage. We’re thinking here of texts by Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Dennis Cooper, and films by Todd Haynes, and Bruce LaBruce. We’re thinking of art by Francis Bacon and music by Ani DiFranco. These are texts that insist that their genres be queered, not to include the queer but to articulate (in the materiality of their very composition) that the queer lies outside the normative, the generic, even the thinkable—perhaps even the resiliently thinkable. Such is the queer’s true impossibility, its essential impossibility. Queer refuses to be contained, for it is the excess, the abject, the outside. It’s what lies outside the composed. It’s what lacks composure. Even DiGrazia and Rosenberg must acknowledge this. Or, at the very least, the language they use acknowledges this, with all of its talk of “disruption” and “challenge” and making the classroom “unsafe.” (Ok, they don’t explicitly say they want to make the classroom “unsafe” but how else might one read this sentence: queer “can disrupt teachers’ and students’ sense of a seemingly safe classroom space” (212).

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Don’t get us wrong: we don’t necessarily disagree in theory with the authors, and we believe as they do in the necessary disruption of normalcy, even in the classroom. Challenging the norms of thought isn’t just queer; it’s how knowledge is made. But what would such a classroom— unsafe, disruptive, challenging—look like? Can this theory we say we have, the commitment we say we want, coincide with the theories and commitments we actually do have in the composition classroom? Can the composition classroom become queer—and queer with all of the savagery of a novel by Dennis Cooper, a poem by June Jordan, a song by Pansy Division? We use the term savage for embodied purpose. What is often left out of discussions of gender and sexuality in the classroom is sex itself—bodies doing things with themselves and other bodies. The “toothless” queer theory that offers only inclusion is not the savage, sexual, fucking queer theory; it is not the spectre of lesbian sexuality, as Jackie would have it, and it does not get at the embodied, somatic reality of queering a classroom. A good deal of what is fascinating about the “savage other” is its existence as the alter ego, as an idealized abstraction of what lurks beneath the veneer of civilization. It is crucial to remember this point, for it is the queer subject’s own “savageness” in the classroom that both licenses her to speak (by giving inside/emic knowledge) and makes her suspect. The automatic and presumptive sexualizing/fetishizing of the queer body constructs us as Other, destabilizes our Be-ing, forces an intimacy with anyone in our orbit. The body of the queer becomes the “public sphere” of the multicultural classroom, mediating private self and state authority (as expressed in the narratives of inclusion underlying multicultural classrooms). As we have written elsewhere, It is alarming to realize that one’s body is not one’s own, particularly if one is in a context (the classroom) in which “bodies” and “passions” and “emotions” are not supposed to exist at all. To be “embodied” by others and then filled with meaning is disconcerting, and it is threatening. How are we to ‘compose ourselves’ in such a system? Such composition comes at unacknowledged personal cost—moral, social, religious, sometimes legal cost. Sometimes it comes at great physical cost. Is it worth it? Maybe. There’s not a right answer to that question. (Alexander and Rhodes, “Queer”, 199)

But we can’t help but wonder if, even in posing such a question, we exceed the boundaries of the composition classroom—testing composition’s resilience, perhaps bending it to the breaking point. Ultimately, what we are arguing for is not the abandonment of the kind of work that

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DiGrazia and Rosenberg propose, but a recognition that doing it, even just approaching it, asks us to reconceive the work of composition—in toto. As in, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” To queer composition is to push it beyond the “composure” its very name implies. It is to “to push at and even exceed the boundaries of composition, even as that field itself seeks to help students create boundaries around their own texts, to produce the ‘composed’ text, to produce texts that have composure” (Rhodes, “Who Are We?” 125). Still, we nod, agreeing, hearing the authors argue that queer theory, as a site of social transformation, can challenge heteronormativity through a “continual critique of rhetorical and physical acts, such as speaking back to culture by resignifying discourse [and] by speaking on behalf of the experience of the body as a material social being” (216). Yes, we have no doubt that’s what the queer can do—rhetorically, materially, personally, and politically. But we argue that we need to begin accounting for how such work, even rhetorically and materially engaged work, pushes the boundaries of what composition is. Works Cited Alexander, Jonathan. “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body.” CCC 57:1 (2005): 45–82. Print. Alexander, Jonathan, and Michelle Gibson, eds. “Special Cluster on Queer Theory.” JAC 24.1 (2004). Print. Alexander, Jonathan, and Jacqueline Rhodes. “Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 31.1–2 (2011): 177–206. Print. ———. “Queerness, Multimodality, and the Possibilities of Re/Orientation.” Composing (Media)/Composing (Embodiment): Bodies, Technologies, Writing, the Teaching of Writing. Ed. Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2012. 187-211. Print. Butler, Judith. “Against Proper Objects.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2-3 (1994): 1–27. Print. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Print. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End, 1990. Print. Miller, Susan. “Writing Theory: Theory Writing.” Methods and Methodologies in Composition Research. Ed. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 62–83. Print. Rhodes, Jacqueline. “Homo Origo: The Queertext Manifesto.” Computers and Composition 21.3 (2004): 387–90. Print. ———. “Who Are We? What Do We Want to Become? A Response to Jonathan Alexander.” Writing Program Administration 33.3 (2010): 125–29. Print.

Reflection Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg

Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander’s “On Impossibility,” their response to our essay, challenges us again to examine how our desire to queer the writing classroom can be hopeful and productive. Given the shortcomings of any institutionalized field, including our own, how can we continue to envision our project as possible? To the extent that composition is institutionalized and thus normalized, we agree with Rhodes and Alexander’s claim about the essential “impossibility of queerness for composition” (241). We, too, are mindful of Judith Butler’s warning that “‘normalizing the queer would be, after all, its sad finish’” (qtd. in Rhodes and Alexander 242). In fact, Rhodes’s metaphor of queer pedagogy as a kind of charm bracelet of identities helps reinforce for us how a queer approach can be misappropriated when it is simply added on as an effort toward a more inclusive classroom. As we strive toward something else, we are continually aware of the limitations and misappropriation of queer theory when we discuss or posit it as being primarily about the inclusion of identity markers. Instead, as Alexander urges, we challenge the field of composition by proposing a model of queer that is based on the willingness to recognize, critique, and disrupt normative behaviors, including institutional conventions. Such disruptions—or subversions—are illustrated in our examples of Molly’s curriculum and teaching practice and Lauren’s student when he produces the writing and CD to exemplify his self-examination and challenge to normative academic discourse. Theoretically, the integration of queer and composition may be impossible, but in our practices we are looking at actual moments that are dynamic, fluid, unstable, and that occur regularly in the interactions within the space of the composition classroom. While we agree with Rhodes and Alexander that any efforts to queer composition will be met with opposition inherent in the shortcomings and limitations of the field of composition itself, we cannot accept the “impossibility” of our project. We cannot abandon our position because of its difficulty. Yes, we propose a harder place to be in the composition

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classroom, and we acknowledge that such an approach can feel more chaotic; however, by introducing queer, we believe we give students permission to access alternative discourses that not only challenge heteronormative academic conventions but also provide them with opportunities for exposure to thinking and writing that is, in a word, queer. Using what bell hooks calls “the master’s tools,” perhaps it is impossible to truly queer composition, yet it may be possible to alter it by challenging our students and ourselves to think more reflectively, responsively, stubbornly, and cunningly. We already see our goals being enacted in our classrooms in the daily exchanges between readers, writers, and texts, and in the work that we do. When we situate ourselves differently by implementing a queer approach that flies in the face of academic conventions, and when we ask our students to do so as well, we are undermining conventional discourse by enacting mêtis and providing students with the possibilities for resilience that Flynn, Sotirin, and Brady advocate in this collection. The result is increased rhetorical agency for our students and our selves as instructors. As the editors assert, “There is a riskiness to resilient rhetorical action: there may be little latitude for change in the material and historical circumstances. Yet feminist rhetorical resilience entails ongoing refashionings of identity and possibility, not just maintaining but recreating meaningfulness” (8). Furthermore, we enact feminist pedagogical values using queer texts. Throughout our essay, we look at the efforts by teachers to queer their practices, and by students to speak and act out in their writing, by making small gestures that are part of the process of working towards relational agency. If, as our editors suggest, relational agency is a rhetorical process, then the moves our students make within our classrooms, which we have argued are examples of mêtistic knowledge and gestures toward queering, exemplify our ongoing commitment to acts that challenge students and instructors to examine our thinking, the positions we adhere to, the behaviors and ideas that oppose those assumptions, and the disruptions we can make by challenging established views when we teach and write. When we talk about queering the classroom, we’re talking about using mêtis—as cunning, strategizing, ironizing, and recognizing one’s limitations—to one’s advantage, and thus acting in the face of incredible odds. We give our students permission to be shape shifters, to acknowledge ways that knowledge is partial and shifting. What one knows in any moment can be abandoned and changed. What we want is to give

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students more tools to recognize, envision, and try on the many options available to them as thinkers in the university and beyond. Our desire to write about queer and pedagogy is itself an act of resilience. If it is impossible for us to do so, then it is impossible only within conventional academic terms and only using traditional tools. What we have done in writing this piece is to challenge the possible, to try on what may not work, and to speak about what happens in the interstices within language. We offer these models to our students when we decide to use a text like Clare’s, and when we make discussion and analysis of that text the focus of our inquiry. Even though the instructors we feature in our essay suspect from the outset that their efforts to introduce queer textual interpretations in their classrooms will be met with resistance, they do it anyway. The exchanges some people might interpret as unsuccessful—Molly’s queering of the western, Adelle’s uncertainty about taking on Clare’s text, Lauren’s student’s insistence on an unconventional representation of his self in the CD (and her response to it)— we understand as important and productive because our students and colleagues are making gestures toward recognizing and then exceeding limitations within their own thinking and within composition. We see these moves as essential to gaining greater rhetorical agency and enacting social change by challenging the prominence of heteronormative ways of thinking, writing, and acting.

A b o u t t h e Au t h o r s Elizabeth Flynn is a professor of reading and composition in the department of humanities at Michigan Technological University. Published books include Feminism Beyond Modernism, Gender and Reading (coedited) and Reading Sites (coedited). She has also published numerous book chapters as well as singly authored or coauthored articles. She was president of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages and served twice on the executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She also served twice on the delegate assembly of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and on two executive committees of divisions of MLA. In 2005, she, Ann Brady, and Patty Sotirin coordinated the Fifth Biennial International Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference. She is on the board of the Copper Country Guatemala Accompaniment Project. Patty Sotirin is a professor of communication at Michigan Technological University. Her published work focuses on gender, resistance, and feminist critique. She is editor of Women & Language and has coauthored (with Laura Ellingson) a study on aunt/niece/nephew communication, Aunting: Communicative Practices that Sustain Family and Community Life (Baylor Press). She has published numerous articles and book chapters. Ann Brady is an associate professor of rhetoric and technical communication and director of the Scientific and Technical Communication Program at Michigan Technological University. Working at the intersections of feminism, rhetoric, technical communication and technology studies, and interdisciplinary studies, she has published in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, Women’s Studies, Technical Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and Nordic Studies of English.

Jonathan Alexander is a professor of English and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as campus writing director.  He is the author or editor of seven books, including Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies and the coauthored Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies. In 2011, he was honored with the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing. Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater is a professor of English at UNC-Greensboro where she teaches courses in composition and rhetoric, specializing in ethnography and literacy. She is also a faculty member in the women’s and gender studies program at UNCG. With her long-time friend, Bonnie Sunstein of the University of Iowa, she has written two books, Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford/St. Martin’s fourth edition, 2011) and What Works? A Practical Guide for Teacher-Research (Heinemann, 2006). She is currently studying a homeless day shelter where she serves as an editor of a street newspaper, The Greensboro Voice. Jennifer DiGrazia mostly teaches courses in writing and coordinates the composition program at Westfield State University. This coauthored text (and the exchange) has spurred her thinking about the limitations and possibilities of teaching composition through a queer lens. She has also recently been lucky enough to teach some courses with Queer in the title.

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Janet Eldred is a professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky, where she also directs the new eStudio in the college of engineering, a space for students to compose, rehearse, and edit in old and new media that integrate written, oral, and visual literacies. In spring 2012, the University of Pittsburgh Press will publish her book Literate Zeal, which is about gender magazine editing and the making of twentiethcentury literature. Her latest work is on literacy in the Portuguese diaspora. She serves on the editorial board (“scientific committee”) for the Sharing Cultures and Heritage and Sustainable Development Conferences sponsored by the Green Lines Institute. Iklim Goksel obtained a BA in English from Bilkent University in Turkey and an MA in English from Eastern Michigan University in the United States. She earned a PhD in English with a concentration in rhetoric and ethnography at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009. Her recent publication titles include “Virginity and Masculinity,” in Men of the Global South: A Reader (Zed Books, 2006) and “Cultural Formations, Middle East,” in the International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (Routledge, 2007). She is currently an independent researcher and is multilingual in Turkish, Swedish, and German. Wendy Hayden is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches courses in writing, composition theory, history of rhetoric, and feminist rhetorics. Her research interests include the connections between science and feminism, nineteenth-century women’s rhetorics, and archival research practices. Her book, Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Feminism, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press’s Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Nancy Johnson, a professor in the Department of English at the Ohio State University, is the author of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (1991), Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life: 1866–1910 (2002), several book chapters, and reviews and articles on the history and theory of rhetoric, composition theory, and the pedagogy of writing. She teaches courses in the history of rhetoric, theory of rhetoric, and composition theory. Amy Koerber is an associate professor in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University, where she researches, teaches, and advises graduate students in the areas of medical rhetoric, women’s studies, health communication, and rhetorical theory. Most recently, Koerber’s article “Breastfeeding and Problematic Integration: Results of a Focus Group Study” has been accepted for publication in the journal Health Communication. Koerber has also published related articles in journals such as Women’s Studies in Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Medical Humanities. She is the current editor of Technical Communication Quarterly. Arabella Lyon, associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, is the author of the Ross Winterowd Award winner Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored (Penn State, 1998) and Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights (under review). She also coedited Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing (Routledge, 2012) with Lester Olson. Her most recent work on Chinese rhetoric, performative deliberation, and comparative rhetoric has appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, and Philosophy and Rhetoric. Banu Özel is a PhD candidate in the department of English at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently working on her dissertation, “From Slavery to Guantanamo: Writing Lives, Seeking Rights,” which examines human rights rhetoric and public discourse in American literature. She has taught courses in first-year composition, American literature, and world literature. Her research interests are rhetoric, human rights, diaspora studies, and mutiethnic US literature.

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Eileen E. Schell is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric and chair and director of the writing program at Syracuse University. She is the author of Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction (Heinemann, 1997) and coauthor of Rural Literacies (SIUP, 2007) with Kim Donehower and Charlotte Hogg. Her recent coedited collection is Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (Pittsburgh, 2010). Schell teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and rhetoric and leads community writing groups for military veterans and senior citizens. Frances J. Ranney is an associate professor of English, specializing in classical rhetoric, at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her book Aristotle’s Ethics and Legal Rhetoric: An Analysis of Language Beliefs and the Law examines approaches to legal education, arguing that beliefs about the ability of law to enact justice are influenced by beliefs about the nature of language. As a past director of Wayne State’s women’s studies program, she is interested in feminist approaches to language; as a teacher in her department’s technical writing program, she is also interested in feminist understandings of technologies, most especially domestic appliances. Jacqueline Rhodes is a professor of English at CSU San Bernardino.  Focusing on intersections of rhetoric, materiality, and technology, her work has appeared in  College Composition and Communication, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Computers and Composition, and Rhetoric Review, among other venues. Her book Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem  was published in 2005 by SUNY. Her article  “‘Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action:’ Women Online” was the 2003 recipient of the Elizabeth Flynn Award for the Most Outstanding Feminist Article Published in Rhetoric and Composition,  presented by the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition and JAC.  Kate Ronald is the Roger and Joyce L. Howe Professor of English at Miami University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in composition and rhetoric and directs the Howe Writing Initiative in the school of business. Her publications include Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Teaching of Writing, coauthored with Hephzibah Roskelly (SUNY, 1998), and Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s) (Pittsburgh, 2001) and Teaching Rhetorica (Boynton-Cook, 2006), both coedited with Joy Ritchie. With Hephzibah Roskelly, she is completing a new book, Certainty and Uncertainty: The Rhetoric of Women’s Pragmatism and the Hope for Peace. Shirley K. Rose is a professor of English and director of ASU Writing Programs in the English department on the Tempe campus. She has published several book chapters and articles on research in gender and composing, archival studies in rhetoric and composition, the intellectual work of writing program administration, and writing pedagogy education. Professor Rose has taught graduate seminars in feminism and composing, archival methodologies, and writing-program administration. She has been a member of the executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and is a past president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Lauren Rosenberg teaches courses in writing and directs the first-year writing program at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her coauthored essay with Jennifer DiGrazia developed from her participation in Jennifer’s research on queering first-year writing and their subsequent conversations about what it might really mean to read and teach queerly. Lauren also conducts research into the writing practices of adults who are acquiring new literacies. She is currently examining one woman’s literate acts through the lens of feminist resilience put forth in this book.

Contributors      253

Kate Vieira is an assistant professor of English and writing studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches and researches migrant and transnational literacies, qualitative research methodologies, and composition pedagogy. Her recent publications include a Written Communication article, winner of the 2011 John R. Hayes Award for Excellence in Writing Research, and an article in College English. She is writing a book about the role of immigration documents in the literacy lives of US migrants.

Index Acker, Kathy, 22, 244 Addams, Jane, 19, 174‒178 Adkins, Lisa, 116, 122‒123 Agbioworld, 48 agency, 1, 2, 6‒8, 10‒13, 20, 33, 35, 55, 58, 67, 71‒73, 99, 103, 111, 114, 115, 117, 145, 146, 148, 170‒172, 189, 194, 198, 201, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 223, 231‒ 236, 238, 248, 249 Air Force, 80n5 Alba, Richard, 63 Alexander, Jonathan, 21, 22, 214, 218, 219, 241, 243, 247 Allied Rhetoric Societies, 171 Almeida, Onésimo Teotonio, 60, 61, 65, 80n1 alternative discourses, 226, 248 American Council on Education, 116, 124, 126, 127 American Federation of Hosiery Workers, 161 American Student Union, 161 Andrade, Laurinda, 79 Anglo, 60, 71 Anna Swaraj, 40 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 2 Appadurai, Arjun, 78 assimilation, 2, 15, 60, 62, 63, 71, 76, 78, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88; multidirectional and, 2, 15, 71, 76, 78; unidirectional and, 63, 76, 85 Athena, 179, 180 Athey, Stephanie, 183, 191 Avelar, Catarina, 65 Aysel, 100 Azorean American community, 62 Azorean Americans, 15, 60, 62, 63, 65, 68, 82 Azorean immigrants, 59‒61, 63, 71, 78, 87 Azorean Refugee Acts, 83 Bacon, Francis, 22, 244 Baez, Joan, 67 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 98, 99 Ballif, Michelle, 235, 236 Bartimus et al, 6 Barton, David,16, 93, 97 Basmati, 38, 42, 44, 47

Bell, Quentin, 155, 158, 163, 167, 168 Bernal, Martin, 32 Bhophal, 13, 35, 39 Bhutani, Shulani, 40, 43 Binkley, Roberta, 32 biodiversity, 4, 32‒37, 40, 41, 45, 46, 50, 57, 58 biopiracy, 13, 33, 36, 38, 42, 43, 44, 47, 54 biotechnology, 35, 37, 44, 48, 49, 54 Bitzer, Lloyd, 187 Bizzell, Patricia, 223, 224 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 186, 200 Bloomfield Academy, 59 border crossing, 66 Brady, Ann, 213, 217, 223, 225, 231, 232, 234, 236, 248 Brah, Avtar, 59, 65 Branco, Cristina, 66 Brandt, Deborah, 80n1 Britzman, Deborah, 219 Bryson, Mary, 211 Buchanan, Lindal, 2‒3 Buddhist, 11 Burke, Kenneth, 33, 41, 54 Butler, Judith, 103, 111, 217, 234, 238, 247 Butler, Katy, 6 Buzzanell, Patrice, 3‒4,129, 132 Cahn, Steven M., 5 Cairo Women’s Conference, 36 Castle, Terry, 242 Cathcart, Robert S., 41 Catholic, 63, 73, 87, 89 Catholicism, 76, 87 Caucasoid, 83 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, 30 Central Food Technology Research Institute, 47 challenging normative conventions, 95, 101, 104, 108, 114, 212, 215, 216, 218, 222, 225, 226, 231, 232, 243, 244, 247, 248 Chatauqua, 146, 150 Chernobyl, 39 Chickasaw, 59 Chipko, 35 Chiseri-Strater, Elizabeth, 16, 110, 113, 115 Christian, 11, 20, 73, 190, 205‒207

Index      255

Christianity, 20, 189, 205 Cindoğlu, Dilek, 106 civic housekeeping, 19, 174, 175, 177‒ 179 Civil Rights Era, 41 Cixous, Hélène, 10 Clare, Eli, 220, 221, 222, 226, 229, 232, 236, 239n4 Clarke, Edward, 202n2 Clift, Montgomery, 227, 228 Cobb, Amanda, 59 colonialist, 43 Community Food Security Coalition, 49 Connal, Luisa Rodriguez, 66 Cooper, Anna Julia, 19, 181, 183, 190‒191, 194‒195, 197, 201, 205, 207, 209 Cooper, Dennis, 22, 244, 245 corporeal pedagogy, 234, 235 Coutu, Diane, 9, 23n4 Cowan, John, 186, 192 Crane, Diana, 158 D’Eaubonne, Francoise, 39 Darwin, 146, 182, 185 Darwinism, 17, 18, 122, 146, 166, 169, 180; neo-social Darwinism, 122; social Darwinism, 18, 122, 146, 166, 169, 185, 192, 209 Davis, D. Diane, 235, 236 de Castell, Suzanne, 211 de Certeau, Michel, 104 Détienne, Marcel, 10 Devi, 50n3 Devimahatmya, 50n3 DiFranco, Ani, 22, 244 DiGrazia, Jennifer, 21, 211, 241, 242, 244, 246, 247 Dingo, Rebecca, 50n2 disciplinary, 3, 30, 104, 171, 219 discourse, 2, 19, 20, 33, 58, 102‒104, 106, 114, 146, 147, 154, 155, 163, 169, 178, 182, 183, 185, 188‒192, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 206, 207, 212, 213, 216, 217, 223‒226, 231, 235, 243, 246‒248 Diverse Women for Diversity, 13, 36‒37, 48, 50, 58 Division, Pansy, 245 Dolmage, Jay, 10 Dratch, Howard, 83 Du Pont, 160 dual career couple problem, 116‒120, 123, 124, 127, 131, 136 DuBois, W. E. B., 155, 194 DWD, 36‒37 Earth Institute, 116, 126

ecofeminism, 4, 38, 50, 54, 58 Ede, Lisa, 32 Einstein, 34 Eldred, Janet Carey, 15, 80n1, 82, 89 empathy, 11, 112, 143 Ensler, 12 equity and autonomy, ideals, 18, 140, 141 Esma, 100 ethical vigilance, 17, 20, 118, 210 eugenic rhetoric, 18, 19, 181‒184, 186‒188, 194, 195, 201, 202, 205 eugenics, 2, 18, 19, 20, 146‒148, 154, 155, 169, 170, 182‒184, 187, 189, 191, 194, 195, 197‒ 202, 205‒209 Eurocentric, 109n2, exile, 15, 65, 70, 75, 83, 221 fado, 15, 59, 60, 63‒68, 70‒79, 80n6, 80n7, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89; gendered and, 15, 59, 66, 70, 71, 75; musical and, 15, 59, 78, 80n7; rhetorical and, 71‒76, 78 Fahnestock, Jeanne, 202n1 Faulkner, William, 87 Felix, Charles Reis, 85 feminism, 8, 19, 20, 22n1, 31, 32, 50, 50n1, 50n2, 54, 184, 185, 191, 194, 200, 202, 236, 242 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, 32, 50n1 feminist rhetoric, 1‒4, 8, 11, 12, 15, 22, 50n1, 56, 57, 143, 182, 210, 213; five major strands in, 3, 4; state of the art overviews of, 2, 3 feminist rhetors, 20, 181‒183, 201, 202 Fisher, Irving, 170, Fleckenstein, Kristie, 234, 235 Fleischer, Cathy, 108 flexibility, 9, 17, 54, 116‒118, 120‒128, 130, 132‒136, 140, 209, 223, 238; as cultural ideal, 17, 116, 123, 124, 135; and faculty diversity, 116, 125, 126, 128, 133, 134, 140; the (female) embodied subject, 125, 135; the flexible subject, 17, 116, 118, 120, 123, 124, 126; idealized reports (ACE and Harvard Task Force), 124‒127; institutional versus individual, 118, 123, 124, 127, 128, 135, 140; social critiques, 135 Flynn, Elizabeth, 50n2, 80n1, 213, 217, 223, 225, 231, 232, 234, 236, 248 Fraser, Nancy, 33 Freedman, Estelle, 8, 20, 22n1 Freire, Paolo, 92, 112 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 80n1 Furtado, Nellie, 66

256    feminist R hetorical resilience

Gallop, Rodney, 63 Galton, Francis, 183 gecekondu, 96‒98, 103, 105, 107, 108 Gee, Gordon, 119‒120 gender variation, 111 Ghandian, 33, 38, 40, 41, 55; Ghandian rhetoric, 33, 40, 41, 49, 55; and Swadeshi, 40; and Swaraj, 40 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 18, 155, 165‒168, 209 Glenn, Cheryl, 2, 32 Glickman, Lawrence B., 161 global Englishes, 55 globalization, 30, 36‒39, 48, 58 Godbee, Beth, 80n1 Goksel, Iklim, 16, 91, 110‒112, 113 Goldman, Ruth, 212, 219 Gorsevki, Ellen, 33 Graff, Harvey, 77 Grandin, Temple, 10 Grandma Vieira, 78 Great Depression, 144, 145 Green Belt Movement, 49 Greene, Graham, 87 Greenpeace, 36 Grewal, Inderpal, 30, 31, 55 Hamilton, Mary, 16, 93, 97 Hannan Case, 150 Hannan, Luella, 149, 151, 153, 178 Hargrove, 74 Harman, Moses, 195 Harney, Robert F., 62 Harrison, Pat, 8 Harro, Bobbie, 223, 224, 231, 239n5 Hawhee, Debra, 10 Hayden, Wendy, 18‒20, 181, 205, 207, 209 Haynes, Todd, 22, 244 Hephaestus, 10 Hesford, Wendy, 2, 30, 32, 50n2 heteronormativity, 219, 228, 229, 241, 246 Hindu, 14, 38, 40, 50n3, 54, 55, 58; Hindu epics, 14, 55, 58; Hindu nationalist rhetoric, 55 Hinduism, 50n3 Hispanic Congressional Caucus, 62 Hispanic, 15, 62, 80n5, 84 Holocaust, 5, 23n1 Hudson’s Department Store, 148, 152, 159‒161, 171, 176 Hughes, Dawn Prince, 10 Hull House, 174‒175 hymen configurations, 92‒95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104‒108, 114

hymen reconstruction(s), 16, 94, 104, 106, 110, 112 illiteracy, 4, 62, 92, 94–95, 97, 99, 101, 104‒106, 108, 110, 111 Indian Ministry of the Environment, 35 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 42 intellectual property rights, 37‒38 International Women’s Conference, 36 internet, 57 intuitive knowledge, 9 Jafri, Asfar, 40, 43 Jagose, Annamarie, 215 John Scudder Foundation for Old People, 153 Johnson, Nan, 20, 201, 205, 209 Jordan, Judith V., 1, 11‒12 Jordan, June, 245 Kaplan, Caren, 30, 31, 55 Kayrod, Ellen, 172n2 Killingsworth, Jimmie, 48 Kirsch, Gesa, 2, 3, 210 Koerber, Amy, 17, 18, 116, 139‒141, 142 Kopelson, Karen, 217, 220, 228 Kozol, Wendy, 2, 50n2 LaBruce, Bruce, 22, 244 laissez-faire economics, 18, 145, 147 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 182, 185, 202 Lamarckian, 185, 191, 192 Lamott, Ann, 11, Latino/a, 15, 62, 80n5, 84 League of Women Shoppers, 161 LeCourt, Donna, 224 Leme, Ricardo, 69, 80n1, 80n9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9 Lilliston, Ben, 42 Lipson, Carol, 32 literacy practices, 62, 63, 92‒94, 101, 105, 107 literacy, 15, 16, 59, 60, 62, 63, 67, 68, 71, 75, 77, 79, 82‒85, 88, 90, 92‒94, 97, 101, 102, 105, 107, 108, 113, 235 Lock, Ineke, 33 Logan, Adella Hunt, 19, 181, 183, 191‒195, 197, 201, 205, 209 Logan, Shirley Wilson, 206, Luella Hannan Memorial Home, 153 Luella M. Hannan Foundation, 18, 19, 144, 145, 147, 159, 171, 172n2, 174, 175 Luhmann, Suzanne, 220

Index      257

Lunsford, Andrea, 32 Luthans, Fred, 9, 23n4 Lyon, Arabella, 14, 15, 50n2, 54, 57, 58 Maathai, Wangari, 49 Macedo, Donaldo, 92, Madeiros, Caetano, 67, 69, 73, 75 Madeiros, Maria Moniz, 75, 77 Mahabharata, 55, 58 Malinowitz, Harriet, 211, 214, 217, 228, 230 Malthus, Thomas, 183 Mao, LuMing, 66, 84 Mariza, 64, 66, Martin, Emily, 116, 121‒124 Mattingly, Carol, 205 McCarthy, Mary, 87 McKay, Sandra, 77 McMillian, Vernon, 71, McNeil, Laurie, 130‒132 Medusa, 10 Mendel, Gregor, 202, 202n4 Mernissi, Fatima, 97 mestiza, 10 mêtis, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 66, 115, 171, 217, 219, 225, 226, 231, 233, 234, 236, 248; and bricolage, 9, 11; and embodied intellect, 10; and shape shifting, 9, 10, 11, 117, 118, 136, 137, 182, 183, 201, 209, 225, 226 Mêtis, 8‒11, 179, 180, 223, 226 Mies, Maria, 38, 58 Miller, Susan, 242 MLA/CCCC, 242 Mohanty, Chandra, 31, 32, 39, 108 Mongoloid, 83 Moniz, Maria, 74, 75 Moniz, Miguel, 80n3 monocultural capitalist patriarchy, 56, 57 Moors, 64, 80n3 mothers of the race rhetoric, 182, 186, 194, 197, 206, 209 Mountford, Roxanne, 235, 236 Mr. Snow, 151, 152 multicultural resilience, 245 National Women’s Council, 187 NATO, 48 Navdanya, 13, 34, 36, 37, 40, 48, 50 Nee, Victor, 63 Negroid, 83 neighbor, 114 neoliberalism, 43 New Deal, 174 New York CCCC, 241

Nichols, Mary Gove, 186, 193 Nicotra, Jodie, 172 Nobel Peace Prize, 49 Norrell, J. Elizabeth, 129, 131 Norrell, Thomas H., 129, 131 Noyes, John Humphrey, 194 Nystrom, Paul H., 163, 166, 167 One-Third World, 33, 39, 44 Oneida, 194, 198 Özel, Banu, 14, 54, 57, 58 Palmer, Jacqueline, 48 Paul, Heike, 65 Peters, Rose Emery, 83, 85 philanthropy, 19, 174, 178, 179 Pinto, Alvaro Vieira, 95 Plato, 60 Poiret, Paul, 163 Popenoe, Paul, 144, 154 Portuguese American Historical and Research Foundation, 62 Portuguese Azorean Islands, 59 Potter-Loomis, Hulda, 185, 202n3 Powers, J.F., 87 Prakash, C.S., 48 Prakriti, 50n3 Price, Margaret, 220, 238n3 Progressive Era, 18, 19, 144‒146, 154, 163, 169, 174, 178 Protestant, 87 Pullman, George, 176, 177 Queen, Mary, 50n2 queer, 4, 21, 22, 23n1, 212‒221, 225‒234, 236‒238, 238n1, 238n2, 241‒249; and classrooms, 21, 211, 213, 214, 218, 219, 234, 235, 245, 248, 249; and interpretations, 21, 215, 228, 238n1, 249; and pedagogy, 214‒217, 219, 231, 232, 237, 238n1, 241, 247; and praxis, 242; and texts, 21, 22, 212‒215, 217, 219, 220, 225, 236‒ 238, 243, 244, 248; and theory, 212‒217, 234, 238, 238n2, 242, 243, 245‒247 R., Fontia, 18, 19, 144‒45, 147‒ 157, 159‒163, 168, 170‒172, 174‒176, 178‒179, R., William, 156 Ramayana, 55, 58 Ranney, Frances, 18, 19, 134, 144, 175‒178 Ratcliffe, Krista, 2, 233, 237 Rawson, K.J., 2 Ray, Ruth, 172n2,178

258    feminist R hetorical resilience

relationality, 5, 7, 11, 12, 17, 19, 21, 65, 78, 90, 99, 132, 210, 219, 231, 233 Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty, 116, 125, 126, 127 Republican motherhood, 181, 184, 191 Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, 36 resilience, 1, 4, 7, 9, 17, 18, 21, 25n8, 58, 63, 92, 105, 114, 115, 121, 123, 124, 127, 129, 135, 143, 182, 186, 215, 216, 227, 231, 237, 245; current academic meanings, 4, 5; feminist rhetorical meanings, 1‒5, 7‒9, 11, 20, 22, 182, 183, 186, 201, 202, 213, 248; limits of conventional meanings, 5, 6; popular meanings, 5, 6, 11 Resiliency Center, 5, n2 Reynolds, Nedra, 2, 235 rhetoric of cloth, 157, 162 rhetorical advocacy, 31‒36, 38, 41, 42, 49 rhetorical identification, 32, 33, 37, 39, 46 Rhodes, Jacqueline, 21, 22, 241, 247 Rice, Suzanne, 126, 133 RiceTec (Corporation), 13, 41‒44, 47‒48, 54 Richardson, Bertha June, 169 Ritivoi, Andreea, 65 Rodrigues, Amália, 65, 66, 74 Ronald, Kate, 19, 174, 178 Rose, Shirley, 17, 139, 142, 143 Rosenberg, Lauren, 21, 211, 241, 242, 244, 246, 247 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 3, 59, 210, 224, 232, 233, 237 Ryan, Kathleen J., 2‒3 Said, Edward, 113 Salt, 40 Sanger, Margaret, 199, 209 Santos, Robert, 61 Satyagraha, 40, 44; Bija Satyagraha, 40, 44; Salt Satyagraha, 40 saudade, 59, 71, 85‒87 Schaafsma, David, 93, 108 Schell, Eileen, 2, 13, 30, 50n2, 54‒56, 57 Schmeiser, Percy, 50n4, 51 Schneider, Jeffrey L., 214, 220 Seed, 40 Sema, 101 Sen, Amartya, 55, 58 Sen, Krisha, 50n3, Severance, Juliet, 19, 183, 193, 195‒199, 201, 202n3, 205, 209 Seyhan, Azade, 66, 76 Shakti, 50n3

Sher, Marc, 130‒132 Shiva, Vandana, 4, 13, 14, 32‒35, 37‒39, 40‒50, 50n3, 51n4, 54‒58 Sierra Club, 36 Silva, Cesar, 80n5 Sino-Japanese War, 161 Smith, Esthelie, 71 Smith, Lucy Wilmot, 206 social movements, 38, 58, 182, 183, 185, 197; free love, 181‒183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202n3, 205; racial uplift, 181‒183, 190‒192, 194, 205, 206, 209; social purity, 181‒183, 187, 201, 205 Society for the Protection of Children, 91 Sotirin, Patricia, 202n1, 213, 217, 223, 225, 231, 232, 234, 236, 248 Spencer, Herbert, 146, 149, 183 spousal/partner accommodation, 128, 139, 141 spousal/partner hiring policies, 17, 116‒137, 139‒143 Spurlin, William J., 215, 216, 220, 238n2 Stepan, Nancy, 184 strategic collusion, 20, 205 Strategic Hiring Fund, 127‒128 Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, 60, 77, 79 Swadeshi, 40 Swaraj, 40 synecdoche, 32, 43, 44, 54 Taft, Donald, 62 techne, 179 Thapar, Romila, 55, 58 Third World, 39, 43, 44, 46, 54 Three Mile Island, 39 Thrift, Nigel, 116, 121‒124 Tio Tony, 72, 78 Trall, Russell, 186, transnational feminist rhetorics, 30, 41 travel, 16, 54, 87‒90, 112 Turkish Physicians Association Central Council, 106 Turkish Physicians Association Ethics Committee, 106 Two-Thirds World, 31, 33, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 58 Twombly, Susan B., 126, 133 Tyer, Brad, 48 Union Carbide, 13, 35, 39 Upanishads, 50n3 US Patent and Trademark Office, 14, 46 US Patent Law, 46 US Supreme Court, 201

Index      259

Vaz, Katherine, 64 Veblen, Thorstein, 18, 163‒165, 167‒169 Vedas, 50n3 vernacular knowledge, 97 vernacular literacy, 97 Vernant, Jean-Paul,10 Vernon, Paul, 65, 80n7 Vieira, 63 Vieira, Deolinda Medeiros, 67, 68, 71‒76, 78 Vieira, Jerry, 72 Vieira, Kate, 14, 15, 59, 67, 82‒85, 87, 88, 89 Vietnam War, 6 Virgin, 86 virginity examinations, 16, 91, 92, 94, 95, 108 W., Alma, 151‒153, 159, 160, 171, 172, 172n1, 174‒176 Waisbrooker, Lois, 19, 183, 190, 193, 199‒201, 205, 209 Wallace, David L., 214, 217‒220, 228 Walters, Shannon, 10 War Torn, 6, Waugh, Evelyn, 87 Wayne, John, 227, 228 web of relationships, 6, 7 Weisman, August, 185, 190, 193, 202n4

Wells, Ida B., 183 Wenger, Etienne, 99 whiteness studies, 83 Willard, Frances, 19, 20, 183, 186, 187‒192, 195‒198, 201, 203, 205‒207, 209 Williams, Jerry, 61, 73 Wilson, Mary, 239n6 Winterson, Jeanette, 22, 244 Wittgenstein, 212 Wolf-Wendel, Lisa, 126, 133 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 205 Woodhull Martin, Victoria, 199 Woodhull, Victoria, 181, 183, 193, 197‒199, 201, 202n3, 205 World Bank, 44, 48 World Music Central, 66 World Trade Organization, 38, 44 Worsham, Lynn, 235‒236, 238n2 WTO, 43, 45, 46 Wyatt, 63 Youssef, Carolyn, 9, 23n1 Zehra, 99, 100 Zeikowitz, Richard, E., 214, 220 Zeus, 10, 179, 226