User:Kayekoodich/sandbox

Feminist critiques of rhetoric and composition
Feminist scholars have interrogated the primacy of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition and have expanded rhetoric to not only include writing but also arguing that traditional rhetorical scholarship relies heavily on male-dominated voices as the fount of rhetorical knowledge, while marginalizing and excluding women. Rhetoric scholars, such as James Herrick, acknowledges the importance of historical female figures like Aspasia remarking how she has traditionally been seen as an enigmatic figure who nonetheless did not have her own agency as an influential speaker and rhetor due to the constraints on women during that time Many feminist scholars however have reclaimed her significance in the Greco-Roman tradition. In "Aspasia’s Purloined Letters: Historical Absence, Fictional Presence, and the Rhetoric of Silence" Melissa Ianetta writes that ”upon examination, the fault line of gender reveals that women have indeed participated in and contributed to the rhetorical tradition, and that fault line reverberates down the corridors of past scholarship to the foundations of the Greek intellectual tradition. Our first obligation, then, as rhetorical scholars is to look backwards at all the unquestioned scholarship that has come before; then, we must begin to re-map our notion of rhetorical history.”

Contemporary feminists have linked the mutual desires of social justice and composition and rhetoric into their pedagogies. Beth Godbee writes that in composition pedagogies “power underlies all relations; that systemic (and political) matters are also embodied (and personal); and that work that supports gender justice intersects with and must enact related forms of justice: racial justice, decolonization, Indigenous rights, and others.”

Even in fields of composition that have traditionally tried to dismantle the Greco-Roman bias of rhetorical studies, which include contrastive rhetoric, there is still a limited perspective that did not fully appreciate the contributions of feminist scholars on the field. These movements towards rhetorical listening and social justice issues have become influential in rhetoric and composition. Whereas traditional rhetoric has focused on the Greco-Roman rhetorical appeal and canonic authors like Cicero, listening places emphasis on cross-cultural dialogue and mutual understanding and opens possibilities for incorporating intersectional commonalities and differences.