“Fusa Tsumagari, a Japanese American Woman, and Her Intersectional Use of Conversational and Contrastive Rhetorical Styles”

by Skyler Drew | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018

Tsumagari’s Intersectional Rhetorical and Future Research Applications

All this considered, it is reasonable to claim that Tsumagari’s rhetorical approach is intersectional. Her writing choices have influences from both cultural sides of her identity—Japanese and American/Western. Her gender also shapes her rhetorical choices in the language, genres, and subject matter she chose to write about/through. Tsumagari found a way to have juxtaposing cultures coexist and pulled influence from each culture into her writing while also balancing her gender identity and using feminine rhetoric styles, feminine genres, feminine language, and discussing private-sphere subject matter commonly associated with women. There is clear evidence that Tsumagari developed an intersectional rhetorical strategy by combining conversational and contrastive rhetoric styles with respect to her cultural identity and feminine identity.

This research is valuable to the field of women’s rhetoric in that it calls into question the argument Donawerth (2011) makes, which is that conversational rhetoric died out at the turn of the twentieth century. These letters were written nearly halfway through the twentieth century and are conversational texts. Although conversational rhetoric was certainly not as prevalent as it may have been previously, it still existed in the twentieth century and was used as a reliable way of communication, perhaps especially for women who were marginalized by society. In women’s rhetoric specifically, conversational rhetoric is a major genre that women used before 1900, and as evidenced by this paper, continued to use after.