|
Articles Conference Reviews |
Rhetorics and FeminismsSession H Featured Session - Rhetorics and Feminisms: The Remix Every once in a while there are moments within academic conferences that feel a bit like rock concerts. I’m not talking about the 4C’s Jam. No, these are the featured sessions. The big conference room is packed, the audience members can hardly contain themselves, and there is a genuine excitement in the atmosphere. I heard wonderful things about all of the featured sessions this year, but I could only make it to one—Rhetorics and Feminisms: The Remix. This was my rock concert: Cheryl Glenn, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Andrea Lunsford, and Shirley Wilson Logan, chaired by Nan Johnson (sadly, illness kept Lisa Ede at home). I could hardly sit still. The description of the panel explained that the purpose was to “demonstrate the many ways the feminist rhetorical project continues to invigorate rhetorical theory, practice, history, and pedagogy, often by moving beyond the recovery of female figures.” That’s where Cheryl Glenn began. In her talk entitled “Field of Dreams: Beyond Women,” Glenn provided a long list of scholars working within feminisms and rhetorics, drawing attention to the good work that has been done in this field. She encouraged those in the audience, though, to move beyond recovery work and to imagine new ways in which rhetorical practices can do something, enact some form of agency, even if that agency is always contingent. Jacqueline Jones Royster then asked the scholars in the room to make rhetoric visible as an embodied experience, a visible act, a form of action, and even an ethic of hope. Look again, and again, and again, she told us, and bend your mind to see differently. Andrea Lunsford urged us to reach across disciplinary borders, arguing that disciplinarity tames rhetorical studies and feminism; it silences certain ways of knowing, being, and doing (including collaboration). Finally, she called for a more robust theory of reading to deal with remix cultures. Shirley Wilson Logan ended the formal portion of the panel by playing sound bites of strong rhetorical voices from African American women, reminding the people in the audience that these women, both those on the recordings, and the ones sitting before us on the panel, made a “way out of no way.” They found a way to be heard when the majority didn’t want to listen. She urged us now to try to move away from “naming and blaming” and toward asking, telling, and, perhaps most importantly, listening. This was the formal portion of the panel, and it was moving and important. It was, if I’m being completely honest, sometimes a bit disheartening though, too. Many of these scholars urged the people in the audience to move beyond recovery work. “We’ve done that,” was the sense, and some of us later thought that, as much as we love and admire these scholars, it felt a bit hypocritical to assume that all of that recovery work was done. There is other work to do, yes, but that’s not to say that all important voices have been recovered. How would we, after all, know if that were true? Similarly, a number of younger feminist scholars, new to the profession, noted that these women have tenure, have some form of job security, and as much as they urged us to connect our research to something embodied and purposeful, we wondered how we balance those purposes with our needs to publish, to earn tenure, and to find that sense of job security that they currently possess, especially if the way that they paved is being closed off by the very people who paved it. Still, I have to say that I left this panel hopeful, based in large part on two main concepts. First, the reminder that when we feel as though we have failed, we should remind ourselves that we have simply not yet succeeded; there is a difference. Second, Glenn pointed out that it’s easy to collaborate when you’re not competing with each other. She went on to say that the people who you go to graduate school with are your friends for life. When you’re in trouble, you call up someone you went to graduate school with, knowing that they’ll come through. Sitting in the audience next to one of my best friends, a woman I went to graduate school with, a woman I now tend to only see at these conferences, solidified for me that sense of community, the importance of that community, and the bonds that can form between people who were once complete strangers. That, for me, was the joy of this panel. To look up at this group of brilliant academic rock stars and be reminded that they, too, are just people, and that they are friends who call each other by first name, who argue, who chat, who discuss ideas, who have stopped competing (if they ever competed in the first place) and have worked to collaborate. That is inspiration enough. At least for me. At least for now. I’d pay money for that show any day of the week. |