Over the past few decades, rhetorical critics and theorists have joined an interdisciplinary group of motherhood studies scholars who are exploring questions about the social, cultural, economic, and political implications of mothering.
This workshop is designed to investigate the specific ways that rhetorical scholars have contributed to this larger body of work and to consider further avenues for continued engagement.
Second, how have women some of whom are mothers, some of whom are not appealed to motherhood to effect change in the public sphere, and in turn, how have those practices from maternal rhetorical strategies to maternal activism and resistance affected understandings of motherhood?
Participants will be asked to complete a set of readings prior to the workshop and come prepared to share their own work-in-progress. This obsession with celebrity makes problematic an image of motherhood that is already teeming with anxieties. Whether or not they believe that their contributions will be read by these celebrity moms, women who fuel these online discussions are contributing to a conversation that continues to churn and thicken the rhetoric of mothering as a universally desired experience.
The comments that are posted in response to these online narratives, such as those mentioned above, continue a conversation that keeps unmothers in the margin. The website Babble. Jennifer Aniston. Source: Chesi-Fotos CC , flickr.
To her female readers, Leighmann-Haupt offers a subtext: keep looking for the love of your life, and freeze your eggs while you still can. I realize as I write that the motherhood story has many chapters.
There is, of course, the most famous one of all: that motherhood itself is not recognized for its challenges, sacrifices, and importance. We cannot neglect the very real possibility that the swarm of pro-mothering rhetoric on- and off-line is in response to centuries of oppression that have relegated women to mothering and only mothering; and when those forces have pigeon-holed women in this way, they have not celebrated the role.
As a new mother, I appreciate that Crittenden and many, many others have championed the unrecognized value in it: the raw physical challenge of pregnancy, the visceral and painful realities of feeling and watching my body birth my daughter, and the indescribable ache that is always bubbling beneath the profound love I have for her—this is difficult, fulfilling, extraordinary stuff.
But so is running a marathon, or toiling over the composition of a book, or rebuilding a neighborhood, or nursing a partner or parent. So is teaching, doctoring, serving, digging, designing. While such language used by the sites may honor the life goals of women who have chosen motherhood, its diction constitutes the unmother as one whose life will fall short, regardless of other exceptional feats she may accomplish.
Are her other choices simply second-rate and not as useful to society? This is not a new question. In her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution , Adrienne Rich examined the empowerment and the shackles of motherhood as an unexamined cultural construct and challenged the cultural parameters of mothering:. In a word: abnormal. The rhetoric of social networking sites for mothers serves to perpetuate this perception of the unmother as aberrant.
In response, communities of unmothers though much less visible to the mainstream than those of mothers have rallied around the Web in the last several years to find their own validation. Sites like childfree. Making this choice is not an easy road to travel. It means having the courage to be different from most everyone else you know. You'll have to write your own life script, since the traditional one doesn't apply to you.
You have to be strong, as you may face a lot of social stigma. Your family and friends might try to convince you to have kids—and if that doesn't work, they might try to belittle you into it. The stakes are high for the unmother. And while such social networking sites may support her, they may be no match for the face-to-face discrimination that will meet her offline. I am gravely concerned about the breeding to use an apt metaphor of oppression online and its offline consequences.
We have a complex chain of marginalization that manifests itself as a cyber war. She writes:. Popular motherhood magazines work against a feminist commitment to difference, advocating instead for a motherhood driven by fear, perfectionism, and insecurity.
We need a new rhetoric of motherhoods, one that is about diverse maternal experiences and that relies on a language of acceptance and security.
But with decades of feminism behind the mother and the value of her work, who is to defend the unmother and the value of her choices? Restaino seems to be asking unmothers to protect mothers from the culture of fear that consumes them. Can unmothers count on the same protection—indeed, the nurturing—from mothers? Letting go of the superlative, I argue, may nudge us a step closer to liberating the cultural construction of motherhood from its narrow views of women.
Storying is mothering. Mothering is storying. Both can generate possibility. Both can imagine new worlds. Both can serve activist goals by burning a fire inside us to change the material conditions of our homes and communities, to transform the world for the next generation. Believing deeply in the power of stories and mothering, I wanted to listen to the stories of mothers who came before me, especially the ones who came into motherhood in times and spaces where it was discouraged.
I set out to interview mentors of mine and true feminist leaders within our field who were not only mothers but also grandmothers, with the question, how did prior generations of mothers make space for me, for us, to be a part of rhetoric and composition?
While the impact of their scholarly contributions is well known in our field, stories of their mothering are largely absent. That is why I enthusiastically embarked on this project, approaching it as an opportunity to listen, learn from, and then share the stories of these women on how they made space for themselves and future mothers in the halls of the academy.
Jane, Shirley, and Malea are all mothers, but they also embody diverse identities and experiences. Their stories, then, overlap and diverge at critical points. Jane is a white woman who had two children after earning tenure at UMD.
Shirley is a Black woman who entered her PhD program with three children mostly already in elementary school. Both were married when they had children. During her graduate study, Malea was raising one child, at times married and other times single. She is a Native woman and mother of two children, one of whom she raised from birth and the other she connected with later in life.
Despite these differences, Jane, Shirley, and Malea all identify as women and came to motherhood through birth. Their stories do not represent all stories of mothering in rhetoric and composition.
For this reason, I want to stress that I see motherhood as an expansive and generative identity: mothering is defined by the act of nurturing the next generation—and not by gender, genitalia, pregnancy, or marital status. Though mothering is often gendered work, it is not dependent on gender. In these interviews, I learned that I was not the first, nor would I be the last, to weave motherhood into my work in various ways.
Indeed, my story is part of a constellation of hundreds, if not thousands, of mothering scholar-teachers in our field. My approach to this project, then, was largely shaped by cultural rhetorics, a methodology that pushes us to see ourselves in relation to our research and calls attention to the knowledge-making of stories.
Using story as both my method and methodology, I highlight the different ways mothers made space for themselves and for future generations of mothers. In doing so, I argue for the importance of sharing intergenerational stories of making space in rhetoric and composition.
These stories allow for emerging scholars from underrepresented communities to see themselves in our histories. Furthermore, I contend that storying can offer blueprints for transforming academia into a space that embraces the presence of mothering scholar-teachers across races, dis abilities, genders, nationalities, and ages.
Taken together, these seemingly disconnected patches create a quilt of intergenerational scholarship, activism, and mothering that continues to expand and nurture the work of making space in rhetoric and composition.
I offer the stories of three foremothers of rhetoric and composition, tracing the manifestations of major themes: inventing cultural practices, creative problem solving, and building community. I begin by explicating how a cultural rhetorics methodology can illuminate the ways mothers make space in rhetoric and composition. I follow with the stories of Jane, Shirley, and Malea, presenting profiles of these women who subverted expectations of who can be a scholar in the field.
In this section, I also include photographs that the three women shared with me. These pictures further my analysis by visualizing the many roles these women held in their departments, community, and family. Importantly, my goal in this essay is not to uncritically valorize these women or present their stories as utopias. Rather, I hope their stories shed light on the patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial foundations of academia and how mothering bodies can work together to liberate knowledge-making for all of us.
Cultural Rhetorics as a methodology provides the tools to not only analyze how scholar-teacher-activists make space for Othered people embodied in academic spaces but also to do the work of making space. Making space invites the stories, knowledges, and bodies of Othered scholars, and in doing so, rewrites the norms of academic culture. Cultural rhetorics, I believe, offers many tools for making space within the field of rhetoric and composition, and I focus on two for this article: relationality and story.
Constellating our relations allows us to break down the Western myth of individual achievement and trace how our work connects us to our elders and the next generation Powell et al. In this study, then, I aim to chart my relations to the mothering scholar-teachers who came before me, to trace a lineage of mothers broadly defined who made space for academics to openly nurture their families. Connecting with elders in particular pushes gathering, listening to, and sharing their stories and is an ethical imperative grounded in Indigenous practice.
While I am not related to Jane, Shirley, or Malea in the traditional sense, I am drawn to multigenerational knowledge-sharing and community-building for similar reasons. Blackmon, Kirklighter, and Parks remind us that fostering relations with our elders is not a passive act. Rather, listening to our elders prompts new stories of who has already been here, even if they were overlooked in the grand narratives, and thus outlines a map for making difference visible and celebrated in academia.
One way to foster relations with our elders is to listen to their stories and trace the connections among their stories, our stories, and new possible stories. Storying and carrying stories [2] allow us to make space for Othered bodies. While the written, peer-reviewed published work of Jane, Malea, and Shirley is highly celebrated in their field, their oral stories are less so. Thus, academic institutions often overlook the rich theory that can emerge from the stories we tell each other in hallways, coffee shops, over Zoom.
She asserts,. Counterstory as methodology thus serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help to strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance. Jane, Shirley, and Malea are well celebrated in our field as leading scholars, and I hope that by sharing their stories of mothering, we can continue their work of making space for all kinds of mothering mindbodies in academia.
Finally, Malea Powell is one of the foremothers of cultural rhetorics, a renowned activist and scholar who advocates for decolonial approaches to research and rhetoric, and the current editor of CCC. As the chair of the CCCC, Malea urged the field to practice decolonial methodologies and expand our understanding of rhetoric and knowledge beyond white, settler frameworks. I strove to practice relationality when conducting these interviews by making the experience accessible and following the lead of the story-tellers.
I contacted Jane, Shirley, and Malea by email, explaining my goal with the project and inviting them to tell their story. I conducted the interviews in whatever medium each woman preferred phone for Jane and Shirley, video conference for Malea. Though I emailed them each a list of questions Appendix A before the interview, our conversations often wandered from story to story—and I was happy to follow whatever path was presented to me.
I saw my role as merely the recorder of the story; I was an eager questioner and listener. To be candid, though, this positioning prevented me from critically engaging with their stories, a limitation I explore later in this essay.
After finishing the interviews, I listened and then transcribed them with the help of Ashlyn Brown, a graduate assistant. I presented their stories first at the Feminisms and Rhetoric Conference. Before each public sharing of their stories, I shared with them my writing, asking for corrections or feedback, all of which I incorporated into the essay.
With all these decisions, I attempted to honor the stories, expertise, and experiences of these women. All told, Jane, Shirley, and Malea are important to me on a personal and professional level, and I know that is the case for many other scholars in rhetoric and composition.
In this section, I aim to position their voices in the spotlight. Rather than weigh down their stories with secondary sources, I use their words to theorize the connections between their experiences and central methods of making space.
Jane Donawerth had just obtained tenure at the University of Maryland College Park when she got pregnant with her first child at 37 in When her sister, a high school teacher, was pregnant, she had an easy time securing time off for parental leave.
With the pamphlet in my hand, I was the first woman in my department who asked for paid pregnancy leave. Jane was eventually granted six weeks of paid leave by her chair, but only if Jane found replacements for her teaching and administrative responsibilities. In the interviews I conducted, I found this to be a recurring theme: the ways unofficial cultural practices in a department can subvert, affirm, or extend the affordances of official institutional policy.
Jane was entitled to and did receive her paid time off, but what initiated the process was the simple gesture of her officemate handing her this pamphlet, a moment she so clearly recalls decades later. At the end of her six weeks, Jane needed more time to recover from her caesarean delivery, so Jane had to ask her colleagues to continue to substitute for her.
0コメント