Small Strokes Big Oaks

This is the beginning of a series of posts about rhetoric and feminism.  I’ll be writing these responses every week as part of my graduate class about Topics in Rhetoric this semester, and I welcome any and all responses!

This week’s reading was an excellent introduction to rhetoric.  I found the definitions of terms and, particularly, the examples provided in the Covino and Jolliffe article extremely helpful as I began my journey into this class.  I was also pleasantly surprised by how much of this introductory reading related to my thesis project.  Tina had told me that I would see a lot of connections between this class and my project, but this thesis project has been sort of a culmination of a few courses, so I expected there would be a few connections, but not necessarily big ones.  I was wrong!

I am writing my thesis project about literacy in the feminist blogging community.  There is a “community” of feminist bloggers on the internet who use blogging as a form of activism or, at least, to spread information about feminist issues.  I use the term “community” loosely because there isn’t necessarily one site to which we subscribe, like a forum.  Rather, we all have our own personal blogs and we read and comment on each other’s posts.  In this case, then, the rhetor would be the blogger and

In fact, in my research, I’ve found several people who discuss blogging as “…a new rhetorical opportunity, made possible by technology that is becoming more available and easier to use, but it was adopted so quickly and widely that it must be serving well established rhetorical needs” (Miller and Shepherd 1451).  These rhetorical needs may include a voyeuristic need to share and read personal information, as Miller and Shepherd posit (1454), but it may also include a need to distribute political information quickly and effectively, as I’ve seen with the feminist bloggers.  In this sense, the exigence or kairos as Covino and Jolliffe discuss is the need to disseminate information about women’s issues.  The specific urgency might change depending on the author and the situation about which the author is writing, but everyone in the community experiences the same general kairos – the need to make the public aware of feminist issues.

I found the sections about audience particularly interesting in light of my project, as well.  Bloggers are always concerned about their audience; this is mostly because, like any author (or rhetor!), bloggers want their posts to be read, so they try to write things that will catch people’s attention and get linked or shared by other bloggers.  As I stated before, there is no one forum for the sharing of information, but each blogger uses his or her own site to post information.  This information is always different depending on where the blogger senses kairos, but if one is a feminist blogger or has read even a few posts by feminist bloggers, he or she will have a sense of how to share and respond to this information.  In other words, the audience will have a sense of the feminist blogging discourse, thus creating a discourse community.  “A discourse community, according to Nystrand, comprises people who ‘may very well never speak or write to each other,’ but who ‘could effectively so interact if required since they know the ways-of-speaking of the group” (Nystrand 15 qtd. in Covino and Jolliffe 13; emphasis in original).  The feminist blogging community that I so loosely defined earlier is actually a discourse community, which then “allows rhetorical theorists to analyze interactions among rhetors and both primary and subsidiary audiences, and to illustrate how audiences and speakers and writers influence each other’s texts” (Covino and Jolliffe 14).  This is, inadvertently, what I have been dancing around with my thesis project.  I have been studying how literacy events – the experience of reading and writing for an audience – has shaped the bloggers’ sense of community and the writing itself by only considering these blog posts and responses as literacy events, not necessarily rhetorical situations.  Exploring these blog posts as rhetorical situations and the bloggers as rhetors may add a new dimension to my project.

Works Cited

Covino, William A. and David A. Jolliffe.  “What is Rhetoric?”  Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries.  Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995.

Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd.  “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.”  The Norton Book of Composition.  Susan Miller, ed.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.  1450-1473.