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About the Author

Christopher Luis Shosted is a student at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. He will graduate in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a certification in writing arts. Since enrolling at Moravian College in 2018, Christopher has focused on understanding the drives behind rhetorics that harm marginalized groups. He plans to continue his education through a Master’s and Ph.D program where he wishes to put rhetorical theory in conversation with literary studies.

Contents

Introduction

Theories on Genre

PragerU’s Videos

Comparing PragerU to Academic Discourse

PragerU and Post-Truth

Conclusion

References

Introduction

PragerU is a website founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager. It features five-minute videos on a variety of topics such as immigration, criminal justice, and education. As demonstrated by its name, PragerU brands itself as a university but this branding is part of a larger trend of ideology-promoting discourse garbing itself in well-established genres. PragerU is a university in much the same way Fox News is news; while both use the style of the genre they are mimicking, the use of false information to reaffirm hegemonic ideologies belies the motivations that inspire these types of rhetoric.

As a system of genres, the social motivations and exigencies that propel PragerU’s rhetoric can be understood. That rhetoric may seem laughable due to how poorly it apes academic discourse, but its producers are keenly aware of the conventions they flout. Their videos less resemble the crackpot conspiracy videos of YouTube instead opting for slick visual graphics and simple, carefully chosen language. Their rhetoric is also demonstrably successful; their YouTube channel currently sits at 2.2 million subscribers and has garnered three-quarters of a billion cumulative views since 2009, yet the facts used to support the arguments in these videos are often cherry-picked, misrepresented, or wholly incorrect. It is not that PragerU succeeds despite its fallaciousness, but because of it. Their rhetoric preys upon the social anxieties endemic to modern life and lays them at the feet of a particular community: academics.

For the purposes of this article, three video from PragerU will be analyzed: Jordan Peterson’s “Dangerous People are Teaching Your Kids,” Heather Mac Donald’s “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?,” and George Will’s “The Speech Every 2015 Grad Needs to Hear.” These videos are just three in PragerU’s extensive catalogue but they demonstrate a pattern of rhetoric united in their goals. Each video discusses a different feature of college: professors, curricula, and tuition and degree marketability respectively, but each speaker addresses their topic with a layer of ridicule and disdain.

PragerU’s videos can be seen as a more palatable form of the discourse that has become common in online spaces, but there’s no denying that they attempt to garner credibility for some of the more problematic aspects of society. In short, they cloak rhetoric that promotes racism, misogyny, and social inequality under the banner of fact. There is a risk present in the wanton promotion of these videos even when the goal is to counter them. Engagement with these videos brings them into a conversation they otherwise may not have been a part of, but in the age of the internet inaction is a form of engagement as well.

The intent here is not to amplify this rhetoric; rather, the exigence is to warn. The rhetorical studies community is uniquely equipped to understand the larger implications behind problematic rhetorics such as those promoted by PragerU. Yet understanding requires engagement and unfortunately promotion of these regressive ideals. The issue is that PragerU and rhetors who will adopt PragerU’s strategies in the future will continue to see success independently of scholarly engagement with their rhetoric. That is unless that rhetoric can be understood in terms of a higher order.

What this analysis proposes is one of myriad potential lenses that might be used to understand this type of rhetoric. PragerU’s claims cannot be countered because they exist on an order beyond a true-false dichotomy. Instead, what is required is public education on the ways in which rhetors attempt to supersede truth. This analysis is one step toward that goal.

The three videos analyzed here are part of PragerU’s larger strategy to usurp the social role held by the mode of discourse it mimics: academia. By lowering the credibility of orthodox education PragerU bolsters its own authority to promote ideology that skews further and further right. PragerU operates within systems of genre, but the ways genres function and what epistemic roles they serve require definition.

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About the Author

Ross Fitzpatrick is an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas, double majoring in English and Political Science. He is also a member of the university’s policy debate team and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

Contents

Introduction

Methods: Rhetorical Analysis

Analysis/Results: Events Producing Speech

Analysis/Results: Speech Producing Action

Conclusion

References

Appendix A: Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework Graphic

Appendix B: Table of Speeches and Rhetorical Roles Identified

Introduction

Much has been said and even more written about the nature of the rhetorical situation and its connection to the “real” world. Going back as far as the late 1960s and early '70s, scholars embedded within a variety of disciplines have debated about the nature of what Lloyd Bitzer coined in his 1968 article as “the rhetorical situation” (1). Bitzer argued that certain material conditions or events necessitate a “fitting response” to the specific situation (5). Within half a decade another prominent scholar in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, Richard Vatz, responded directly with “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.” In this aptly titled piece, Vatz claimed there is never one “fitting response” to any situation and that “no situation can have a nature independent of the rhetoric with which [the rhetor] chooses to characterize it” (154). For Vatz, unlike Bitzer, “meaning is not discovered in situation, but created by rhetors” (157). The arguments forwarded by both Vatz and Bitzer have been carried through in academic circles within and beyond the field of Rhetoric and Composition.

Perhaps the greatest trend within all forums interested in dissecting and understanding the rhetorical situation has been its application to specific “real world” concepts and events. Over time, a contextual approach has overshadowed the theoretical approach established by Vatz, Bitzer, and others. For example, genre studies has incorporated the rhetorical situation as a scholarly artifact and investigated popular culture, new media, and politics through rhetorical analysis (Bazerman; Devitt; Miller). This seemingly interdisciplinary approach has, however, ignored other disciplines and theories highly embedded in the discussion of rhetoric and communication. The goal of this paper, then, is to introduce a specific theoretical lens through which one can evaluate the complexities of the rhetorical situation.

Politics in many ways operates as a sort of rhetorical game, in which policy makers, analysts, and even citizen observers manipulate rhetoric to serve their own ideologies and justify their political agendas. Although Rhetoric and Composition, as a field, has had much to say about politics, it has had little to say about political theory. This analysis aims to combine Vatz and Bitzer’s discussion of the rhetorical situation with John Kingdon’s multiple-streams framework to understand the relationship between political speech and political action, maintaining the current trend towards contextual analysis while providing a new theoretical analysis based in political science.

Ideally my analysis will not only provide some isolated response to the early debate between Vatz and Bitzer but also bridge the fields of Rhetoric and Composition and Public Policy. Each field has much to contribute to the other in order to understand both why certain policies succeed and others fail, and to comprehend the power of rhetoric as a tool for change. As alluded to previously, this paper pulls from John Kingdon’s multiple-streams framework first introduced in his 1984 book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, and a more modern analysis of this framework by Daniel Beland and Michael Howlett (Appendix A).

Kingdon argues that three separate “streams” existed within politics that intersect to open “windows of opportunity” that result in political change (222). The first stream is the problem stream which “is filled with perceptions of problems that are seen as public in the sense that government action is needed to resolve them” (222). It is important here to emphasize the “public” nature of the problem, which filters how the government chooses to prioritize certain problems over others. The second is the policy stream which contains all of the potential measures the government could take to address the problem. And the last stream is the politics stream which includes the daily political climate including public opinion, legislative turnover, and advocacy by nongovernmental interest groups. When the three streams intersect, they open a policy window that can be exploited by a policy entrepreneur—an individual or a group of individuals—to set the agenda and enact policies (222). Here’s where the interesting part comes in (and what makes this theory uniquely relevant to a discussion of the rhetorical situation). Kingdon argues that these streams intersect due to certain “focusing events” that direct the attention of actors within all three streams towards a specific issue (222). This would suggest events determine rhetorical responses, but the presence of the policy entrepreneur within the framework contradictorily seems to align more with Vatz’s theorization that rhetoric determines action. Kingdon’s public policy framework, then, seems particularly apt for combination with an analysis of the rhetorical situation.

In order to facilitate that combination, I have performed a rhetorical analysis of seventeen speeches delivered by President George W. Bush between September 11, 2001, to May 1, 2003. The text of all speeches, along with audio, is pulled from American Rhetoric, a database compiling transcriptions from many American presidencies. The goals of this analysis are twofold: to understand how Bush recognized the opening of a potential policy window and to understand the rhetorical strategies the President used to exploit those policy windows and determine the course of political action pursued during the first two years of the War on Terror. Unfortunately, the answers to the first question are not as clear as the answers to the second. There does not seem to be a clear correlation between specific military operations and international events prompting speech other than the obvious example of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. If there is no clear relationship between events and the prompting of speech, there does seem to be some relationship between speech and the development of policy and initiation of action.

Through my own analysis of Bush’s speeches, supported by others’ previous secondary analysis, I have identified three major ways in which President Bush rhetorically manipulated the policymaking process and the opening of policy windows in the broader context of the War on Terror, and specifically in the context of the 2003 War in Iraq. First, by linking Iraq to terrorist networks and Al-Qaeda, Bush framed the invasion of Iraq as an extension of the War on Terror. Second, by appealing to an American sense of identity grounded in the history of the Nation and a Christian American ideal, Bush used a perceived ideal “Americanness” to cut off democratic deliberation and limit the efficacy of opposing rhetoric. And lastly, by defining certain political speech as terrorism and by defining the response to 9/11 as a “War on Terror,” Bush determined not only what response was expected from Congresspeople and policymakers but also from the American public, which further strengthened Bush’s ability to control the decision-making process.

Perhaps one can imagine my theoretical approach, which is derived from the work of Vatz, Bitzer, and Kingdon, as existing more in line with Jenny Edbauer’s more recent conceptualization of “rhetorical ecologies.” The point is not to confirm or deny the findings of any of the three, but to understand the rhetorical and material forces that contributed to the enactment of policy in a specific era. The sheer volume of speeches delivered demonstrates that there is no single exigence or audience, and therefore no singular rhetorical situation. However, there are certain rhetorical themes and tropes that tie those plural situations together. The aim of this theoretical frame is to account “for the amalgamations and transformations – the spread – of a given rhetoric within its wider ecology,” to understand what about Bush’s interpretation of events was conducive to its spread through policy making circles and the public writ large (Edbauer 20).

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About the Author

Kelli Lycke Martin is a graduate teaching instructor and PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. She wrote this article during the last year of her master’s program in Rhetoric and Writing at The University of New Mexico. Her research interests include cultural memory sites and historical discourse rhetorics of labor, resistance & protest.

Contents

Introduction

The Shrine

The Injury of Extraction

Shrines and Memorials

Memory of Santa Rita

The Future of Santa Rita

Works Cited

Introduction

Just at the intersection of New Mexico highways 152 and 356, the Santa Rita Shrine sits tucked in a battlefield of dying mining towns, a lone structure reminiscent of one of the largest mining communities in the Southwest. This shrine marks the existence of the town of Santa Rita, the townsite for the Chino Mine. In 1910, the company began open-pit mining on the edge of town. By the 1930’s, new technologies lined the pockets of company executives, and the mine transitioned entirely into an open pit, rapidly extracting more copper and slowly eating away at the land around Santa Rita. By 1970, the town was completely gone (Huggard and Humble 1-4). Now, the Santa Rita Shrine works as both a place of memory and a place of mourning for the community that lost almost everything to the mining industry.

In this article, I hope to illuminate how local monuments like the Santa Rita Shrine are places of empowerment and stand as a way of linking communities with their history through a shared sense of home. First, I will explain how I came to know about Santa Rita and the Shrine. Then, I will explore the unique sense of loss the residents of Santa Rita experienced as they witnessed the destruction of their physical home. Finally, using the publics approach from Jenny Rice’s scholarship on urban development in combinations with Carole Blair’s work in memorial sites as material rhetorics, I will explore the negotiation between company and community that led to establishing the Santa Rita Shrine, and how the Shrine became a local monument in memory of the town.

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About the Author

Caleb González is a PhD student in the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Program at The Ohio State University. His research interests include composition histories at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and the ways in which such histories have shaped and continue to shape composition pedagogies among Latinx student communities. His work has been published in the peer-reviewed journal TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. He’s also recently contributed to a collaborative book chapter on an autoethnography graduate course that is forthcoming in Self+Culture+Writing: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies (Utah State University Press) edited by Rebecca Jackson and Jackie Grutsch McKinney.

Contents

Introduction

A CRT Counterstory in English Graduate Studies

What about This CRT Counterstory?

The Traditions of CRT Counterstory

Conclusion

References

Introduction: Critical Race Theory Counter-storytelling

Critical Race Theory (CRT) counterstory has emerged within and across education studies, educational equity, higher education studies, and Latin@ and Chican@ Studies (Delgado, 1989; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001; 2002; Yosso, 2005; Yosso, Villalpando, Bernal, & Solórzano, 2001;). Additionally, scholars within the field of Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp)(Martinez, 2013; 2014; 2016; 2018; Pimentel, 2014; 2015) have explored the intricacies of CRT counter-storytelling in the form of cuentos, testimonios, narratives (autobiographical, biographical, and composite), personal experience, and parables, among other forms, as valid research and theoretical inquiry.

Martinez (2016) frames CRT counterstory as “a method of telling stories by people whose experiences are not often told” (p. 214). Martinez (2016) explains that counterstory as methodology thus “serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help to strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (p. 214). Stock stories, as Delgado (1989) explains, are built by people who navigate dominant positions and select, among a variety of available facts, a picture that is useful to their own positionality and interests. CRT counterstories are significant in that they not only reveal the untold stories of racism, inequity, and injustice as they are mobilized upon people of color, but become increasingly exigent in documenting the stamina of such forces as they infiltrate certain spaces like graduate studies in Rhet-Comp.

Some of the articles within this very symposium contain aspects of counter-storytelling through the use of the “I” (Fischer, Rosche, & McCool, 2020; Sales, 2020). Sherwin Kawahakui Ranchez Sales (2020), for example, examines the larger context of belonging that directly connects to feeling like an imposter. Fischer, Rosche, and McCool’s (2020) article on oppressive patriarchy within graduate studies in Rhet-Comp emphasize the “I” to relay lived experiences in ways “that other kinds of research cannot” (“Introduction”). My contribution also shares this notion of institutional belonging through the narrative and the theoretical.

Additionally, CRT counter-storytelling matters for the state of graduate studies as the field continues to explore how to confront racism, white language supremacy, and the varying degrees of microaggressions that we know exist and that continue to seep through the discipline (Inoue, 2019). It also matters as the field seeks to expand its own frameworks professionally, ontologically, and pedagogically for including and supporting marginalized graduate students. It’s also important considering the discursive space of the WPA-Listserv—a digital space that erupted in a racist attack in the Spring of 2019. How can we imagine, as a field, ways to counter these forces within graduate studies, as the stories, lived experiences, and contributions from marginalized graduate students come to the forefront?

A CRT Counterstory in English Graduate Studies

One of my CRT counterstories highlights a specific writing class I took at the very beginning of my graduate school journey. There were a number of poems and essays on the syllabus, and the most notable, to me, was Morábito’s (2010) poem “Oil,” written in English. Before class, I also decided to read the same poem by Morábito, “El Aceite,” in Spanish, to find interesting points of analysis and understanding, especially within, but also between the two languages. I was relying on my linguistic heritage to help me engage with the text.

As my peers began to discuss the poem, some shared their confusion for what it could be about. When I looked it up in Spanish earlier, I learned that the poem was situated in a book of twelve poems called Caja de Herramientas. Each poem focuses on a small tool or item that is seemingly insignificant (e.g. screw, water, sponge, dishrag, hammer), which could be a nod at observing objects that reveal the details of life, including how our lives are shaped by the micro and seemingly ordinary. I read two other poems (“El Trapo” and “El Martillo”) for greater context. I shared with my peers that upon reading three of Morábito’s poems in Spanish, I found myself wondering more about the contextual situatedness of the poem within a larger work titled Toolbox. I was also wondering about the similarities and differences between the original and the translation of the book and what the poem might say to readers in both Spanish and English. After a few seconds of silence and with the sound of crickets outside, one of my white peers quickly changed the subject.

What about This CRT Counterstory?

I tell this story to connect a personal experience in graduate studies with a larger (though very subtle) force of power and privilege that is often at work within the classroom. This matters as we continue to work toward pedagogical frameworks of inclusivity and making sure that the voices and experiences of graduate students who already find themselves on the margins are supported and heard. My story is one example that could have been taken up by the teacher with a few pedagogical moves such as, Hmm, say more about that, or, Let’s linger there for a moment.

Furthermore, Yosso (2005) talks about the cultural wealth model as a framework to understand how students of color access and experience college from a strengths-based perspective. In this symposium, Sales (2020) also references Yosso’s (2005) cultural wealth model in terms of aspirational capital. Another form that Yosso (2005) mentions is linguistic capital which alludes to the language and communication skills that students bring to the college space. In terms of my specific counterstory, I also can’t help but wonder that if a white peer of mine had shared the exact same knowledge of having come across the work in another language and reading a few more poems for greater context and working across two languages for greater meaning, the response may have been quite different.

This is only speculation, of course, but this is where the workings of educational access, privilege, and belonging that Martinez (2018), Ahmed (2012), and Yosso (2005) allude to in their work become important. Whose epistemologies and cultural wealth is valued or authorized within the educational space or even the class conversation? This matters for graduate studies in Rhet-Comp if we are to seek out ways of resisting such notions by ensuring that contributions of marginalized graduate students be accounted for within spaces of learning.

The Traditions of CRT Counterstory

Solorzano and Yosso (2001) ask a similar question about understanding the state of graduate education as experienced by Chicana and Chicano students. Their answer is developed through CRT and the traditions of counterstory, since the practice of storytelling has “a rich and continuing tradition in African-American (Berkeley Art Center, 1982; Bell, 1987, 1992, 1996; Lawrence, 1992), Chicana/o (Paredes, 1977; Delgado, 1989, 1995a, 1996; Olivas, 1990), and Native American (Deloria, 1969; Williams, 1997b) communities” (p. 475). For oppressed groups, stories have often been linked to survival and resistance (Delgado, 1989).

CRT counterstory, then, is significant as it brings with it a history and practice of documenting the perpetual workings of racism within the institutional spaces of education (Delgado, 1989; Martinez, 2016; 2018; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001; Yosso, 2005; Yosso, Villalpando, Bernal, & Solórzano, 2001). While I argue that marginalized graduate students in the field can be a part of this important practice (even in the context of risk through the documentation of one’s own narrative), I also argue that because of the situatedness of CRT within storytelling traditions, counter-storytelling can function to expose and resist the persistence of racism (Yosso, 2005) as it springs up in a variety of ways within graduate studies in rhetoric and composition.

Yosso (2005) leans on Anzaldúa (1987) and Ikemoto (1997) to emphasize that counter-storytelling is not so much about reacting to the stories of racial privilege, as this can function to keep a clear focus on majoritarian stories. Nor is the key focus to prove that racism exists. We know (or should know) that it does. It is, rather, a way of documenting racism and the ways in which it endures and is significant within spaces of education, and in particular, the space of graduate studies in Rhet-Comp. This is why CRT counterstories are often organized through narrative and critical reflection with specific traditions of testimonios and witnessing. As Yosso (2005) states,

So while counterstories challenge mainstream society’s denial of the ongoing significance of race and racism, they do so by offering a critical reflection on the lived experiences and histories of People of Color. In its multiple forms, counterstorytelling can strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance. (p. 10)

This matters to graduate studies in that as students in Rhet-Comp engage in this practice, the field might not only consider what majoritarian stories have historically been, but how they are operated and mobilized by institutional entities possessing both power and privilege.

Conclusion

CRT counter-storytelling can leave room for students to witness, examine, and interrogate the ways in which their experiences in graduate studies are shaped by the larger discourses of power and privilege, and, in turn, expose and resist those discourses, including the ways in which they are mobilized and framed as majoritarian. CRT counterstory asks the reader to engage with it as a disruptive mode of storying (I’m intentional about using the word story as one of action), one that invites storytelling, testimonio, and critical reflection that stems from the self for wider cultural, social, and political connections. This kind of praxis can position the writer, in this case the graduate student scholar, in a space of storytelling and can advance crucial conversations that wish to re-center the objectives of social justice advocacy and inclusivity. Readers are also challenged to re-think their positions and stances when addressing such issues, because of a counterstory that complicates the issue personally, narratively, and analytically. “And for the person of color, it does more,” Villanueva (2004) says when writing about memoria. “The narrative of the person of color validates. It resonates. It awakens, particularly for those of us who are in institutions where our numbers are few” (p. 15).

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About the Authors

Sarah Fischer is a PhD student studying Rhetoric and Composition at Indiana University. Her research interests include race and writing studies.

Megan McCool is a PhD student in Rhetoric at Indiana University. She is interested in community-engaged writing practices and pedagogies. 

Laura Rosche is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Indiana University. She studies the rhetorical strategies survivors of sexual violation use when narrativizing their experiences, paying special attention to ethos, affect, and autobiography.

Contents

Introduction

Interruption-Interrupting: Laura's Story

Advocacy-Advocating: Sarah's Story

Relation-Relating: Megan's Story

Conclusion

References

Introduction

Doherty (2018) addresses the challenges of establishing a “suitable academic self” as a female graduate student, which is a sentiment echoed by countless women in higher education. From well before the feminist revolution of the 1970s to beyond the girl power movement of the 1990s, female graduate students have consistently felt the ways that academia was not made for them, the ways that they lacked access to the pervasive boys’ club around them. The female graduate student identity is informed by the precarity of gender in higher education, and it is vital that we continue to investigate these power dynamics that are still in play today. Though all obviously enter graduate school with different backgrounds, positionalities, and temperaments, women still have “interconnected experiences [of oppression] under patriarchy” (Ryan, Myers, & Jones, 2016, p. 13).

For us, these feelings and experiences have consisted of wondering if we belong in both the field and graduate school, negotiating how to enter into and articulate oneself in classroom discussions, and crafting our own unique teaching personas. Even though most of the people in our field of Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp) are women, the majority of scholars we are reading in our coursework and in preparation for our comprehensive exams are not. Indeed, as Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016) assert, the patriarchal traditions of the academy cause many female academics to find it difficult to cultivate a “comfortable ethos” (p. 2). We have turned to their “alternative theory of ethos” (p. 2) to account for the different discursive and agential choices that we have made, especially their three rhetorical strategies: interrupting, advocating, and relating.

While traditional scholarly conceptualizations of ethos belittle and often reject first-person ways of knowing, we believe that using our own lived experiences provides something valuable that other kinds of research cannot. Inspired by Martinez’s (2014) use of counterstory to document institutionalized issues of oppression in Rhet-Comp and joining González (2020) in his scholarly use of autoethnography, we have determined that the best way for us to illustrate the feminist practices of interrupting, advocating, and relating is to narrativize our own first-person experiences of responding to sexism as scholars in Rhet-Comp.

Interruption-Interrupting: Laura’s Story

During my final semester of coursework, I was responsible for compiling a reading list for the qualifying exam I would take the following fall. The list was to include approximately 100 texts, and it was intended to provide me with comprehensive knowledge of our field’s history and key concepts, as well as reflect my unique scholarly interests. To get started, my advisor encouraged me to reference syllabi from our program’s core classes, reading lists from previous exam takers, and the tables of contents from popular edited collections. Taking that advice, my list came together easily, and it quickly exceeded the number of texts required. However, as I looked it over, I realized only a quarter of the texts were composed by or included women, and I worried it didn’t reflect the feminist values that inform my scholarship, teaching, and daily life. I wasn’t sure what to do; I anticipated that the list would be approved because it included some of the most popular works in our field, and it looked similar to the lists my peers had compiled in years past. I wasn’t comfortable, though, studying a reading list that did not include more women’s voices.

I use this example not to suggest that previous students had purposefully left women off their lists, but instead to acknowledge one of the ways in which the rhetorical tradition itself often goes unquestioned despite its lack of female voices. There are real, material consequences for this. As a female graduate student, I have struggled to find my place in our field—to find perspectives that adequately represent my gendered experience as a speaker and writer. An uninterrogated rhetorical tradition excludes entire populations of people and their lived experiences as rhetors; it does not account for the unique rhetorical strategies disenfranchised communities must use in order to be heard. Therefore, I could not re-inscribe that tradition.

So, I decided to interrupt it. Interruption, as Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016) suggest, is a strategy that women have used “to grasp agency and shift normative discourses for some time” (p. 23). By interrupting dominant discourse practices and traditions, women can call attention to their marginalized position, and reveal “the constructed nature of what we consider normal” (p. 24)––and that’s what I tried to do. For each male voice on my list, I worked to find a woman’s that would challenge or complement it. I worked to interrupt the tradition in our field that prioritizes masculinized rhetorical discourse, and by doing so, I found a place for myself within it.

Advocacy-Advocating: Sarah’s Story

In week 12 of a 16-week course taken to fulfill my individualized “Race and Writing Studies” minor, my professor assigned a text by a female author—the first female author he had assigned all semester. As Laura illustrates, male-dominated, or even male-exclusive, canons are the norm in higher education, and as a result, they are largely left unnoticed and unquestioned. During week 12, though, Megan realized this gendered oversight; when I expressed my excitement about reading a book entitled, Landscape of a Good Woman, she expressed her excitement about finally reading a book that featured a woman’s voice altogether. And when she informed me that she did not have plans to ask our professor about his oversight, I acknowledged that the “risks of silence [were] too high” (Ryan, Myers, & Jones, 2016, p. 3) and ultimately felt I “had no choice” (p. 153) but to advocate for her, myself, and our female peers.

According to Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016), “Advocacy entail[s] rhetors advocating for their own right to speak authoritatively and negotiating the complexities of speaking for others” (p. 111). Given my limited authority at the time as a first-semester female graduate student, and the precarity of speaking on behalf of unknowing others, I decided to carry out my advocacy in a private conversation. After class one day, instead of accusing, arguing, or assuming, I asked my professor why he waited so long before introducing a female author. His response was powerful. Without hesitation, he apologized to me and immediately accepted accountability by admitting that this was an oversight that deserved to be corrected. But more, the very next course meeting, he apologized to the class and delivered handouts of photocopied tables of contents and fostered a discussion about the importance of diversity in the field and in course design.

The texts we read have material effects on the way we make meaning in and of our worlds. A syllabus containing entirely male authors provides the class with a narrow understanding of the field, which is especially troublesome in an introductory course that should function as a broad survey. But perhaps more importantly, this limited scope would be dangerously perpetuated in our final projects: individually designed syllabi of subsets of the field, which several students intended to submit as actual course proposals in our university. And most personally, while every text’s masculine pronouns and unrelatable masculinized examples served as micro-frustrations, their large-scale assumptions of a shared male-centered, logocentric pattern of thinking were a forceful reminder that I did not belong in academia. But my advocacy resisted; it showed me that I belong here. Because women belong here.

Relation-Relating: Megan’s Story

For Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016), relating emphasizes the ways that women rhetors’ ethē are “socially constructed” (p. 195). For a female rhetor, therefore, three general modes of relating with people develop: “collaboration, connection, and coalitions or alliances” (p. 195). Thankfully, I have been lucky enough to experience these different modes of relating throughout my life. But as I reflect upon my time during graduate school, I have realized that these three ways of relating have been bound up together, inextricably linked in the relationships that have helped me to cultivate a feminist ecological ethos in graduate school.

Collaborating with Sarah and Laura is a way of relating I have relied on to breathe life into the isolating moments that can often accompany academic work. I have spent countless hours speaking with both of them about the ideas we were grappling with in our coursework. They are the ones who help me see things I missed in my own readings of texts. They are the ones who continually push me to think about ideas that matter. Collaborating in these ways has allowed us to connect over shared experiences of being in the same graduate program but also our shared interests in feminism and social justice that extend beyond the work we do as graduate students.

Finally, Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016) remind us the last general mode of relating for female rhetors is through coalitions or alliances (p. 196). Due to the collaborative and connective nature of our relationships, coalitional and allied aspects of our friendship have been a natural progression. Laura’s choice to interrupt the rhetorical tradition in her qualifying exam helped pave the way for future members in our program to do the same. Additionally, when my apathy was stronger than my desire to understand if there was a pedagogical reason for our lack of female-authored texts, Sarah took the collaborative and connective mode of relating a step further into a coalitional approach that enacted feminist principles in our daily lives. While this coalitional kind of relating isn’t always met with a warm reception, these strong feminist friendships have helped me uncover some of the small ways one can rely on daily feminist actions to foster an ecological ethos. Female rhetors’ relation-relating has taken various forms I haven’t discussed due to my own limited experience, but I hold on to the hope that everyone can develop supportive, empowering relationships with the people in their lives. Because you are not alone. You belong here. 

Conclusion

When maneuvering through graduate school, it is difficult for anyone to make sense of how they fit in. We must, however, consider the ways that some women can cultivate their scholarly ethē more easily than others (Sales, 2020). For instance, our positions as white women in the academy situate us to more readily interrupt, advocate, and relate. We all felt more comfortable in our acts of resistance because of our whiteness, whether we were entirely conscious of it or not. But moreover, because of the multitude of ways in which the university inherently caters to us—to our needs and our desires—it is also our duty to help others cultivate their scholarly ethē; we must interrupt, advocate, and relate not only for ourselves, but for––and with––all persons who exist in marginalized spaces.

Ultimately, we hope these stories prompt Rhet-Comp programs, and the discipline as a whole, to consider how they can make institutional changes that better represent and support their graduate student body. And above all, we hope that they remind you, female graduate students, that there is a place for you here; that you belong here; that you are not alone. We hope they inspire and equip you to actively struggle for what is yours when you may need to. This space is yours. Interrupt it. Advocate for it. Relate in it.