Feminist Circulations

Book excerpt: The scholars in FEMINIST CIRCULATIONS: RHETORICAL EXPLORATIONS ACROSS SPACE AND TIME work at the nexus of gender, power, and movement to explore the rhetorical nature of circulation, especially considering how women from varying backgrounds and their rhetorics have moved and have been constrained across both space and time. Among the central characters studied in this collection are early modern laborers, letter writers, petitioners, and embroiderers; African American elocutionists, freedom singers, and bloggers; Muslim religious leaders; Quaker suffragists; South African filmmakers; nineteenth-century conduct book writers; and twenty-first-century pop stars. To generate their claims, contributors draw from and make use of a breadth of archival and primary documents: music videos, tweets, petitions, letters, embroidery work, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and made-for-television movies. Authors read these “texts” with scrutiny and imagination, adding distinction to their chapters’ arguments about circulation by zeroing in on specific rhetorical concepts that span from rhetorical agency, cultivation of ethos, and development of rhetorical education to capacities for social networking, collective and collaborative authorship, and kairotic interventions. Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Jessica Enoch, Danielle Griffin, Nabila Hijazi, Shirley Logan, Elizabeth Ellis Miller, Karen Nelson, Michele Osherow, Ruth Osorio, Erin Sadlack, Adele Seeff, and Lisa Zimmerelli.