Standing in the Intersection

Description

Winnerof the 2013 Best Edited Book Award presented by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG)

Building on the decades of work by women of color and allied feminists, Standing in the Intersection is the first book in more than a decade to bring communication studies and feminist intersectional theories in conversation with one another. The authors in this collection take up important conversations relating to notions of style, space, and audience, and engage with the rhetoric of significant figures, including Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Jordan, Emma Goldman, and Audre Lorde, as well as crucial contemporary issues such as campus activism and political asylum. In doing so, they ask us to complicate notions of space, location, and movement; to be aware of and explicit with regard to our theorizing of intersecting and contradictory identities; and to think about the impact of multiple dimensions of power in understanding audiences and audiencing.
Acknowledgments

Foreword: Difficult Dialogues: Intersectionality as Lived Experience
Marsha Houston

Introduction: Standing at the Intersections of Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies
Cindy L. Griffin and Karma R. Chávez

PART I: ENTERING THE INTERSECTION

1. Mammies and Matriarchs: Feminine Style and Signifyin(g) in Carol Moseley Braun’s 2003–2004 Campaign for the Presidency
Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley

2. The Intersectional Style of Free Love Rhetoric
Kate Zittlow Rogness

3. (Im)mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical History
Carly S. Woods

4. Placing Sex/Gender at the Forefront: Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies
Sara Hayden and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein

PART II: AUDIENCES AND AUDIENCING

5. Intersecting Audiences: Public Commentary Concerning Audre Lorde’s Speech, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
Lester C. Olson

6. Constitutive Intersectionality and the Affect of Rhetorical Form
Leslie A. Hahner

7. Spheres of Influence: The Intersections of Feminism and Transnationalism in Betty Millard’s Woman Against Myth
Jennifer Keohane

8. Essentialism, Intersectionality and Recognition: A Feminist Rhetorical Approach to the Audience
Sara L. McKinnon

Contributors
Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438444918
• Langue: English

Extrait

Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies
Edited by Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin
Foreword by Marsha Houston

Cover art entitled Hybrid Intersectionality (Self-Portrait)
By Alana Boltwood, 2011
Acrylic and paper on canvass
This painting is part of a series of artworks combining the sociological concept of “intersectionality” with the intersection of sets in mathematics. See the full series at http://meta-geometer.com/other-geometries/intersectionality
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Standing in the intersection : feminist voices, feminist practices in communication studies / edited by Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4490-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-4489-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Feminism. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Women—Communication. 4. Rhetoric—Social aspects. I. Chávez, Karma R. II. Griffin, Cindy L.
HQ1155.S86 2012
305.42—dc23
2012003670
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
T his project emerged through our many conversations that transpired during and after coediting a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication on power feminism. Throughout that journey, we felt a need to continue to strengthen conversations in feminism and communication and build upon the excellent work that some, though not many, of our colleagues were doing from an intersectional perspective. In the midst of these conversations we realized the 20th anniversary of a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication (1988), “What Distinguishes/Ought to Distinguish Feminist Scholarship in Communication Studies?” had arrived. In that issue, feminists, including Lois Self, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Celeste Condit, Sonja Foss, Karen Foss, Marlene Fine, Jan Muto, Julia Wood, Marsha Houston, Carole Spitzack, and Kathryn Carter, offered their thoughts regarding the state of feminist scholarship and their visions for where it might be headed. We are grateful to these feminists for initiating that conversation, and we used that question, and their ideas, as our impetus for our brainstorming and thinking about how we might contribute to feminist intersectional scholarship.
We decided to reintroduce that question at two different panels in 2009, one sponsored by the Organization for Research on Women and Communication at the Western States Communication Association Conference and the other sponsored by the Feminist and Women's Studies Division, and also featured as a Five Years Out Spotlight Panel at the National Communication Association Convention. The following scholars took part in those two panels: Bernadette Calafell, Carole Spitzack Daruna, Marlene Fine, Karen Foss, Sonja Foss, Michelle Holling, Jan Muto, and Shanara Reid-Brinkley (WSCA); and Brenda J. Allen, Celeste Condit, Cerise Glenn, Radha Hegde (who was unable to attend at the last minute), Shane Moreman, Sara McKinnon, and Julia Wood (NCA). These panels, the insights and arguments the scholars offered, and our reflection on the question of the state and place of feminist scholarship helped to frame our thinking on the issues in this book, and we are grateful to all the participants for their willingness to share their ideas, question one another, and consider carefully the ways feminist scholarship is linked to intersectional ideas and practices.
At the 2009 NCA Convention, we also held a preconference seminar, and this is where most of the essays in this collection began. We are grateful to the following participants: Janell Bauer, Olga Idriss Davis, Maisha Fields Vogel, Shiv Ganesh, Cerise Glenn, Leslie Hahner, Sara Hayden, Michelle Kelsey (who was unable to attend at the last minute), Sara McKinnon, Lynn O'Brien Hallstein, Denise Oles-Acevedo, T. M. Linda Scholz, Christine Scodari, Danielle Stern, Carly Woods, and Kate Zittlow Rogness. The conversations, questions, agreements, and disagreements offered during that seminar helped us think in new ways about intersectional scholarship and feminisms. We appreciate the honesty of these scholars, their careful work, and their insistence on integrity and innovation in their feminist scholarship.
We also are very appreciative of the helpful feedback we received on our introduction from Marsha Houston, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, and Sara McKinnon. Lester Olson and Shanara Reid-Brinkley pointed us to existing scholarship we had not been aware of, and for that we are very grateful. At SUNY Press, we are thankful that Nancy Ellegate originally agreed to take on this project, and we are incredibly grateful for the amazing work of our editor, Beth Bouloukos, who assumed control of the project and efficiently moved it through this process.
We thank Belle Edson for initially introducing us. Of course, our scholarship is strengthened and nurtured by our partners, Sara McKinnon and Michael Harte, and our numerous, faithful, and entertaining animal companions; for them we are extraordinarily thankful. Finally, to Trouble and Bruiser, it's been a great ride.
Foreword
Difficult Dialogues: Intersectionality as Lived Experience 1
Marsha Houston
A t a National Communication Association (NCA) meeting during the 1990s, an Asian American woman colleague greeted me warmly and said, “Marsha, you figure in a lot of people's mythologies! I've just come from a panel where someone was discussing you.” Although the personal reference was a bit disconcerting—since I and not my work was the subject of discussion—because my colleague and I had known each other a while and her comment was accompanied by an ironic smile, I didn't need to ask who had said what. On more than one occasion, I had asked a question, presented a paper, or provided a response to a panel at the NCA or other communication association meetings that were intended to promote understanding of women's diversity, but that others (particularly white others) interpreted as accusing them of being “racist.”
For example, in the mid-1980s I attended an NCA Women's Caucus panel on “diversity” in feminist communication research. All the presenters were white women; among them were lesbian scholars who spoke as insiders about communication and lesbian identities. I wondered why there were no scholars of color speaking as insiders about our communicative lives. When the question and answer period opened, I turned to my mentor and dissertation advisor who was sitting next to me and whispered something like, “How can they truly explore diversity when all of them are white?” “Well,” she replied, “ask them.” I did; and this initiated a conversation that enmeshed me in the mythologies of certain feminist communication scholars for many years.
In the introduction to this volume, Griffin and Chávez effectively summarize a history of published feminist and related scholarship that has advanced intersectional understandings of human communication. They detail some of the ways those efforts have been impeded, reframed, expanded, and complexified. But there is a history of efforts to center ideologies of difference, diversity, and intersectionality in feminist communication research that is seldom apparent in published scholarship. That history is indicated in the encounter at the NCA panel that I described above; it is a back story of sometimes uncomfortable but often illuminating conversations among innumerable feminist scholars from diverse backgrounds that incited or inspired research that advanced intersectional perspectives. It is also a story of feminist scholars from marginalized groups, mostly women of color and lesbian women, who struggled to claim, assert, embrace, and celebrate their intersecting identities in face-to-face interactions as well as in print. Finally, the back story of efforts to make intersectional perspectives central to feminist communication research is about scholars from socially dominant groups (e.g., white, middle-class, heterosexual, and/or able-bodied), some of whom encouraged or employed such perspectives, while many others too often ignored and denied their social privilege, its influences on their scholarship, and their power to silence the work of scholars without such privilege.
In the mid-1990s, a white feminist was asked why her special issue of a communication journal focused on feminist rhetorical scholarship included no articles by or about women of color. I was told that her response was, “Let them do their own special issue!” Despite the roadblocks that she and other feminist scholars had encountered in getting feminist voices heard in communication journals, this scholar's response suggested that all researchers and research approaches were accorded easy and equal access to our journals. I once pointed out to a white feminist scholar that the question she had just asked about my work was one I often heard from white women. Thi