“Fusa Tsumagari, a Japanese American Woman, and Her Intersectional Use of Conversational and Contrastive Rhetorical Styles”
by Skyler Drew | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
Conclusion
The original objective of this paper focused on contributing to the topic of women’s rhetoric by addressing the topic of conversational rhetoric. However, these letters add to the history of women’s rhetoric in more areas than anticipated. Tsumagari’s letters contain rhetoric that is not only conversational, but rhetoric that is multicultural as well. The letters are both conversational—given the correspondence, the subject topics, the approach to said topics, and the overall language used in the letters—and contrastive—given that these letters used a style of rhetoric that was developed from contrasting cultures with different traditions and ideals. Secondly, this analysis concluded in the argument that Tsumagari’s rhetorical style was intersectional in nature, and contributes to the evolving discussion of intersectionality in feminist literary theory.
Lastly, this research focuses on a lack of research/information that exists in the area of women’s rhetorics. Not only are Japanese American women an under-researched group in a general sense, but Japanese American women have not been researched thoroughly in terms of rhetorical theory. Therefore, this research is valuable because it gives insight into an important time of history and how one Japanese American woman communicated. The analysis of Tsumagari’s rhetorical style provides a benchmark for additional research to be explored in the future. Although this research solely analyzed one woman, the Clara Breed Collection has letters from multiple prisoners of internment camps, and further research on the ones written by women would greatly contribute to the discussion of Japanese American and Asian American rhetorical styles. There is a distinct lack of research in this area, and more examination into the rhetorical styles of Asian Americans would be interesting and beneficial to the field.