“Doing it Herself: Cultivating a Feminist Ecological Ethos as a Female Graduate Student”

by Sarah Fischer, Laura Rosche, and Megan McCool | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

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.