Seminar Leaders
Annie Hill, University of Texas, Austin
Kaitlyn Patia, Whitman College
Jacqueline Rhodes, University of Texas, Austin
Invitation: There is an urgent need for feminism right now to challenge national and global efforts to regulate bodies, sexualities, identities, and mobilities. We developed this seminar call the week after the leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. When the final decision to overturn Roe was issued in late June, Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion raised concerns that rights to contraception, same-sex sexual activity, and same-sex marriage could be targeted as well. While we cannot see into the future to know what happens next, it is clear that the last several decades portended this possibility with the onslaught of attacks, both legal and extralegal, on women, people of color, trans children, migrants, disabled people, and the many others who unsettle normative citizenship and entitlement by exercising their rights to bodily autonomy. We thus step into this present moment with an immodest proposal: rhetoric is essential for feminist worldmaking, but feminism is also crucial for rhetoric as a field. We aim for this seminar to contribute to the strengths and strategies of feminism and rhetoric, and their intra-action as a disciplinary phenomenon called feminist rhetoric. To do so, we will explore the role(s) of rhetoric in recent feminist movements, campaigns, and causes, and we will likewise consider the role(s) of feminism in rhetorical genealogies, programs, and professions.
Organization: The days of this seminar will be divided into discussion of assigned texts and engagement with participants’ works-in-progress, grouped by research interest and area. The goals for our time together will be to (1) center feminism in rhetorical scholarship and create a set of questions to propel research and contributions; (2) build a shared bibliography (initiated and partially read beforehand) for use in research and teaching; and (3) engage with works-in-progress (conference paper, prospectus, chapter excerpt, book proposal, etc.), which resonate with the seminar theme.
Note: This seminar has limited space for remote participation.
Annie Hill is Assistant Professor in Rhetoric and Writing, and affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She researches state and sexual violence, sex work, and sex trafficking, primarily in the US and UK. In support of this work, she has received Fulbright and Ford fellowships, in addition to internal grants and awards. Dr. Hill’s work appears in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, First Amendment Studies, Review of Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and Women’s Studies in Communication, as well as edited volumes and public media. Additionally, she is on research teams for a Sexual Violence Prevention Collaboratory focused on college campuses and an initiative to strengthen the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) workforce.
Kaitlyn Patia is Assistant Professor in Rhetoric, Writing, & Public Discourse, and affiliate in Gender Studies at Whitman College. Her research focuses on protest rhetorics, ranging from Black educator and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’ critiques of whiteness issued in the early 20th century to contemporary national and transnational feminist discourses around labor and care work. Dr. Patia’s published research includes a chapter (with Kirt H. Wilson) in Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century on how ideas about race and gender were constructed through popular entertainment in the late 19th century and a chapter in An Encyclopedia of Communication Ethics: Goods in Contention on the works of W.E.B. Du Bois. She teaches classes on rhetorical criticism and theory; rhetoric and public culture; rhetoric and social protest; rhetoric, gender, and sexuality; rhetoric and violence; the Black freedom struggle; and rhetorics of feminism.
Jacqueline Rhodes is the Kelleher Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem (SUNY, 2005) and director/editor of the documentary Once a Fury (Morrigan House, 2020). Her work on queer and feminist rhetorics has been published in journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, PRE/TEXT, and Rhetoric Review. She is co-author or co-editor of five additional books: the award-winning On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies (NCTE, 2014), the born-digital Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self (CCDP, 2015); and the collections Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics (Routledge, 2015); the Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric (Routledge, 2018); and the Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric (Routledge, 2022).