Feminist Rhetorical Resilience

Resilience is a powerful metaphor that, although heretofore absent from conversations within feminist rhetoric, can refocus the field in very productive ways. While similar to metaphors used previously by feminist rhetoricians, it is also distinct in that it places greater emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals. Resilience suggests attention to choices made in the face of difficult and even impossible challenges. Collectively, the contributors to Feminist Rhetorical Resilience create a robust feminist conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process. Too often resilience has been associated with psychological characteristics inherent in some individuals or cultures and absent in others. We demonstrate, however, through the seven essays, responses, and reflections included in our book, that a feminist conception of resilience is best seen not as fundamentally psychological but as rhetorical, relational, and contextual. The essays also suggest that feminist resilient communicative action can include multiple and sometimes contradictory strategies that must be worked out situationally. Our contributors, by focusing on a range of sites and issues, together construct a conception of feminist resilience that provides new directions for feminist rhetorical inquiry and new models for leading fulfilling, healthy lives.

Within the context of this book, feminist rhetorical resilience includes actions undertaken by rhetors, usually women, who, with varying degrees of success, discursively interact with others, resulting in improved situations despite contexts of significant adversity. Such rhetorical interaction, the essays suggest, can take many forms and occur within a variety of situations, including environmental activism in the form of letters, press releases, protests, and critiques of corporate documents within global contexts (Schell); performances, musical and written, that enable multidirectional assimilation of immigrant groups (Vieira); communication involved in obtaining medical procedures that enable young women who have had sex outside marriage to pass as virgins (Goksel); institutional policy statements regarding employment for dual-career couples that place responsibility on individuals rather than institutions (Koerber); archival reports regarding the interactions between a needy individual and representatives of a foundation that provided financial support to needy individuals (Ranney); writing by nineteenth-century feminists that provides evidence that they colluded with reactionary ideologies such as eugenics in order to promote their cause (Hayden); teaching that involves negotiating queered texts with students to expand their empathetic engagement and relational awareness (DiGrazia and Rosenberg).

Like the metaphors feminist rhetoricians have used recently to describe the present-day and historical situation of marginalized groups—Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands, Jacqueline Royster’s stream, Cheryl Glenn’s silence, Krista Ratcliffe’s listening, Nedra Reynolds’s geographies, Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s advocacy, Eileen Schell and K.J. Rawson’s motion, and Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan’s walking and talking—the concept of resilience connects feminist rhetoric to the rich history of feminist discourse that attends to gender as well as other factors such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Like borderlands, streams, silence, listening, geographies, advocacy, motion, and walking and talking, resilience resonates with concerns about feminist agency and rhetorical action in the face of pernicious social and material forces, such as white privilege and heterosexism, that trouble even feminist rhetorical studies.

EXTENDING FEMINIST RHETORIC

Feminist rhetoric is maturing in exciting and satisfying ways. The Selected Bibliography in Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen Ryan’s Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, published in 2010, includes forty-eight books and monographs. Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Royster’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence, the lead article in the June 2010 issue of College Composition and Communication, provides an extensive literature review of seventy-four books and essays and criteria for assessing the excellence of research in feminist rhetoric. Characterizations of the field provided by the introduction to the Buchanan and Ryan book and Kirsch and Royster’s essay are excellent indications of ways in which well-established and emergent directions have merged to create an area of inquiry that is beginning to be recognized within the larger field of rhetoric and composition.

Buchanan and Ryan identify five major strands in the work of feminist rhetorical scholars: (1) reclaiming forgotten or disparaged women’s rhetorics and rhetoricians; (2) examining the interrelationships among context, location, and rhetoric, and tracing how these shape women’s discursive options, strategies, and choices; (3) searching for gender bias and, when it is found, retheorizing (or regendering) rhetorical traditions; (4) interrogating foundational disciplinary concepts—such as rhetorical space, argument, genre, and style—in order to expand and, when necessary, redefine the realm of rhetoric; (5) challenging traditional knowledge-making paradigms and research practices (including criteria, methods, and methodologies) when they prove inadequate for investigating women rhetors and women’s rhetorics and developing inventive and robust alternatives (xviii–xix). Kirsch and Royster emphasize that work in feminist rhetoric is moving far beyond rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription (642). They identify scholars who have done pioneering work that reframes Westernized traditions, scholars who have attended to the ways in which feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition is being done and is transforming the field, sometimes in relation to pedagogical theories and practices; scholars who seek to articulate new methodological patterns; and scholars who are actively engaging in the push in the field toward better-informed perspectives on rhetoric and writing as a global enterprise (645–6). Feminist rhetoric has clearly found its voice within rhetoric and composition.

Work in our collection extends the developments mentioned by Buchanan and Ryan, Kirsch and Royster, and others, at the same time pointing toward new directions for feminist rhetoric. None of the works included in the Buchanan and Ryan or Kirsch and Royster bibliographies and discussions mentions resilience. One reason, no doubt, is that it has not been a central issue within rhetoric and composition as a whole. This is unfortunate. In other fields, such as psychology and communication studies, it has been a concern for decades and is becoming increasingly important. The 2010 presidential address of the president of the International Communication Association, Patrice Buzzanell, for instance, is titled Resilience: Talking, Resisting, and Imagining New Normalcies into Being. In the address, Buzzanell identifies five communicative processes of resilience: crafting normalcy, affirming identity anchors, maintaining and using communication networks, putting alternative logics to work, and legitimizing negative feelings while foregrounding productive action (3). In attempting to define resilience and demonstrate its usefulness for feminist rhetoric, we reach out to other fields and at the same time suggest ways in which a feminist rhetorical approach to resilience can enrich them. A feminist perspective, for instance, can demonstrate that Buzzanell’s processes always take place within hierarchies in which some enjoy considerable privilege while others suffer deprivation.

The essays in our collection contribute to feminist rhetoric and to fields exploring the theme of resilience in other ways as well. One of the essays explores the contributions of Eastern activist and rhetorician Vandana Shiva within contexts that have been underdeveloped within feminist rhetoric, such as ecofeminism and biodiversity (Schell). Our collection also extends the concept of diversity to include individuals from groups not previously emphasized within feminist rhetoric, such as young women from squatter communities in Turkey, illiterate by Western standards, who attempt to negotiate the considerable challenges of their poverty and marginality with intelligence and skill (Goksel). Another is a middle-class though impoverished elderly widow trying to live with dignity despite reliance on the charity of a foundation (Ranney). The collection also raises questions about just what it means to be Western. Are Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, the subjects of one of the essays, a colonized people? They are marginalized at least two times over and far removed from the centers of European power and authority (Vieira). Other groups considered here that have not been examined extensively by feminist rhetoricians include dualcareer couples at universities (Koerber) and feminists from other eras who have had to advance their causes by colluding with those who embrace reactionary ideologies (Hayden). Finally, we consider the situations of queered classrooms, spaces in which teachers’ efforts to expand student capacities for critical thinking have not been center stage within feminist rhetoric (Rosenberg and DiGrazia).

EXTENDING CONCEPTIONS OF RESILIENCE

In developing our approach to feminist rhetorical resilience, we were surprised to discover how frequently the term resilience is used in academic and nonacademic contexts outside feminist rhetoric and composition. It has been a central concern in numerous academic books and articles in fields such as queer studies, social work, literary studies, education, urban studies, environmental studies, business, nursing and health studies, psychology, counseling, and Holocaust studies. Steven M. Cahn concludes his chapter on graduate school in his book From Student to Scholar with the question, [W]hat is the most important ingredient for success in graduate school? His answer is not brilliance but resiliency (5).¹ The term resilience also resonates with the civic public. Evidence for the wide appeal of the term is found in the numerous popular self-help books appearing recently that have resilience as a central metaphor.² Resilience has also been a concept invoked in discussions of the present state of the economy,³ of the worlds of work,⁴ and of education.⁵ The term has been used extensively within the social sciences, especially in relation to the resilience of children who were raised in adverse circumstances, and within the field of social work.⁶

We find that many existing conceptions of resilience are limited because they (1) prioritize the heroic (self-sufficient) individual; (2) constitute resilience as a psychological or social property rather than a process; (3) fail to radically contextualize resilience as a rhetorical response; (4) overemphasize a return to a previous state of equilibrium, thereby obscuring the transformative potential of resilience; and (5) neglect relationality and mutuality as constitutive dynamics of resilience.⁷ Conceptions of resilience in therapeutic, corporate, educational, and popular contexts are often especially limited. The therapeutic model tends to focus on the individual divorced from social context. Corporate appropriation can be exploitative with its attempt to create resilient employees. Within educational contexts, resilience is sometimes defined narrowly to suggest academic success understood and measured in traditional and conservative ways. Popular conceptions often define it as a static, one-dimensional state. Feminist discussions of resilience are rarely rhetorical in emphasis.⁸

Before we explicate the features of the feminist rhetorical resilience we are developing, we want to reiterate that our conception of resilience differs from more commonsensical and popular understandings. Our conception sees resilience as communal, relational, and social. Commonsensical and popular understandings, in contrast, tend to emphasize the self-sufficient, heroic individual. Resilience becomes an inherent psychological trait rather than a rhetorical action. According to the Resiliency Center website, resilience is the power to bounce back. Popularly, resilience is taken as the ability to respond positively in the face of adverse conditions and calamities, to gain ground where others might give in to difficulties and obstacles. The ends of resilience are often limited by depictions of a simple return to balance, the happy ending of a life story, and an individual triumph over circumstances. In the popular media, stories of resilience are often goal oriented and character driven. For example, the descriptions in Bartimus et al.’s War Torn, a collection of stories by women reporters looking back on their experiences during the Vietnam War, emphasize the powerful individual agency of these women, some of whom paid their own way to report on the war, all of whom dealt with dangerous, near-impossible odds to do so. These women saw horrific battles and their consequences for soldiers and civilians alike; despite these horrors, they remained steadfast in their goal to report on the carnage and costs of war. The stories in War Torn are about their self-sufficiency and efficacy. These stories do not celebrate community but, rather, individuality and personal strength—the women are depicted as strong, brave, courageous, competent, and determined, and as triumphing over dire circumstances because they remained committed to their goals of pursuing news stories and personal careers. While they represent the resilience of the individual, we propose a conception that is more relational and community oriented.

The conception of resilience evident in professional therapy and social work literatures comes closer to our rhetorical conception in that resilience is acknowledged as systemic and interactive, but this literature also falls short in that the emphasis on the development of strengths rather than compensation for deficiencies remains centered on the heroic individual, albeit well nurtured. Over the past decade, there has been a shift from a pathology model of treatment, with its incessant focus on problems and maladjustment, stress and adversity, to a strengths perspective that concentrate[s] professional practice on coping rather than risk, on opportunity rather than on fatalism, on wellness and self-repair rather than on illness and disability (Norman 1). As Katy Butler observed, What we call resilience is turning out to be an interactive and systemic phenomenon, the product of a complex relationship of inner strengths and outer help throughout a person’s life span. Resilience is not only an individual matter. It is the outward and visible sign of a web of relationships and experiences that teach people mastery, doggedness, love, moral courage and hope (26).

Our conception of resilience is similar to representations in therapy and social work literature in that it emphasizes interaction and communicative action within complex systems. It differs, however, in that it is set within a feminist rhetorical framework and attends, especially, to concepts such as agency, mêtis, and relationality. In doing so, we draw upon feminist concepts such as social justice, equity, care, and gender, thus complicating conventional rhetorical understandings of terms such as context, engagement, audience, production, and exigency. We focus on process and context rather than individual qualities and behaviors. For us, resilience is not a state of being but a process of rhetorically engaging with material circumstances and situational exigencies. We see resilience not as a quality of the heroic individual but as always relational, not only because individuals learn moral qualities and derive social and material support through a web of relationships but because resilience is in itself a form of relationality. Resilience does not necessarily return an individual life to equilibrium but entails an ongoing responsiveness, never complete nor predetermined. Finally, resilience is transformative not necessarily through affecting a change in circumstances—which may remain bleak or oppressive—but in changing the way a life is lived. Resilient living can involve determination, perseverance, hope, and imagination. In elaborating on this feminist conception of resilience, we focus especially on three concepts—agency, mêtis, and relationality.

Agency

In proposing resilience as rhetorical agency, we defer the traditional understanding of rhetorical agency as vested in a strategic rhetor marshaling the available means of public action and responding efficaciously to the demands of immediate circumstances and larger historical-structural forces. Against the assumption that rhetorical agency is the province of those who can marshal resources and have access to forums for public action, resilience allows us to focus on those who have neither available resources nor taken-for-granted access. Clearly, resilience begins from a place of struggle and desire. Resilience is creative, animating the potential of whatever comes to hand as a suitable rhetorical resource, be it music, linen, or family narratives (see chapters in this collection). Further, a feminist conception understands resilience not as a character trait of the rhetor but as relational, hence dismissing the heroic individual rhetor in favor of an understanding of relational webs as the basis for resilient agency. Thus resilience realizes possibilities and resources by shaping and enacting relationships among selves and others, speakers and audiences, things and dreams, bodies and needs, and so on. In this way, we find resilience to be a significant feminist alternative to traditional conceptions of rhetorical agency in that the pregiven nature of rhetors, resources, exigencies, or change is replaced by a conception of dynamic creativity, reshaping possibilities, opportunities, meanings, and subjects. Resilience as feminist rhetorical agency is thus a relational dynamic, responsive in and to contexts, creating and animating capacities and possibilities.

We stress that resilience as we conceive it is not about individual psychological qualities but rhetorical engagement; resilience is rhetorical action within pernicious circumstances. This action is neither static nor goal oriented; it is pragmatic, situational, and kinetic. Rhetorical resilience is about recognizing and seizing opportunities even in the most oppressive situations. A feminist rhetoric of resilience mobilizes the power of imagination and reflexive meaning making in order to continually reinvent selves and possibilities and to precipitate change. This may not be dramatic or global change but change as small, local, fluid, provisional, and ongoing. Resilience as rhetorical agency continually recreates possibility. There is a riskiness to resilient rhetorical action: there may be little latitude for change in the material and historical circumstances. Yet feminist rhetorical resilience entails ongoing refashionings of identity and possibility, not just maintaining but recreating meaningfulness.

Feminists use the term resilience in these ways to describe feminism itself. In Estelle Freedman’s retrospective history of the feminist movement in the US, she argued for the resilience of feminism conceived of as continual self-reinvention: Feminism is a process, not an inherited dogma; only continual reinvention has allowed it to flourish (85). Less sanguinely, she also charged that white racism has been a resilient theme in feminism, a concern we will discuss later in this essay. Pat Harrison (2005) also highlighted the resilience of feminism. Reflecting on a series of lectures, Voices of Public Intellectuals: Feminisms Then and Now, featuring feminists from different generations, she observed, American feminism has always been a stop-and-go affair. No matter how often feminism has been declared dead, it has always managed to come bounding out of the coffin roaring with life. The resilience of feminism entails self-reinvention, reflexive meaning making, and an ability to respond proactively, even when the future looks bleak.

Mêtis

We draw on the Classical Greek tradition of mêtis as a contextualized intelligence. It is associated with opportunity and luck guided neither by reason nor structured rules. Mêtis entails inductive, conjectural knowledge, resisting coherence and reshaping itself to remain in motion. Mêtis combines forethought, resourcefulness, opportunism, even deceit, to create circumstances where opportunities can be seized and possibilities exploited. Scholars developing the idea of a positive organization have promoted resilience in a way that highlights what we take to be mêtis. In a heavily cited essay on workplace resilience, Diane Coutu (2002) argues that resilience offers an alternative when rational thought and action may be ineffective. At the same time, she notes that the alternative logic of resilience is realistic and pragmatic. According to Coutu, resilience theories she has encountered in her research almost always overlap in three ways: Resilient people … possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise (48). In expanding on the improvisational attribute, she advances the concept of bricolage, which she attributes to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Coutu sees bricolage as a kind of inventiveness, an ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper or obvious tools or materials (52)—in short, a mêtistic orientation. This emphasis on situational intelligence and innovative resourcefulness rather than rational planning is well illustrated in the following description of resilience by organizational scholars Carolyn Youssef and Fred Luthans: Resilience recognizes the need for flexibility, adaptation, and even improvisation in situations predominantly characterized by change and uncertainty. It goes beyond the successes and failures of the current situation. The resilience capacity uniquely searches for and finds meaning despite circumstances that do not lend themselves to planning, preparation, rationalization, or logical interpretation (780).

We incorporate a sense of mêtis in our understanding of feminist rhetorical resilience, specifically intuitive knowledge, bricolage, and shape shifting, to realize engagement without confrontation. The notion of shape shifting alludes to the goddess Mêtis in Greek mythology who changed shape to meet the exigencies of her circumstances. This is a different way of thinking about how people might confront power—not with aggression or overt confrontation but with flexible, subtle, active responsiveness to the constraints and possibilities of varying circumstances, alliances, and contingencies. We acknowledge that mêtis also entails deceit, wiliness, and cunning. For example, one of the mythological representations of mêtis is an octopus, which creates a camouflage in order to survive, to escape, or to engage the powerful without explicit confrontation.

Scholars of ancient Greek culture Marcel Détienne and Jean-Paul Vernant, in Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, describe mêtis as both mythological goddess and embodied intellect, as both Zeus’s first wife and as wily intelligence. Those who possessed this gift often prevailed in adverse circumstances, though they lacked exceptional strength or resources. They were not, however, always successful. Zeus swallowed Mêtis, his first wife and the goddess who represented such intelligence, after he realized she embodied, and would use, her cunning to undermine his authority. While Détienne and Vernant’s book remains the most extended recovery and discussion of mêtis in classical times, several scholars have recently used the concept to explain how power imbalances might be overturned in contemporary contexts. One study (Brady) focuses on how women technical communicators in the workplace, perceived and treated as subordinates by subject-area experts, use deception and metaphoric shape shifting to construct professional identities. Debra Hawhee’s case for mêtis as embodied intelligence points the way to rhetorical strategies that do not depend on positivistic reasoning but on an overlooked alternative: the ability to understand shifting contexts and the opportune moments for change or subversion that emerge through them.

The Greek myth suggests that the cunning god Hephaestus, deformed at the same time he is the embodiment of mêtis, offers ways to construct a rhetoric of disability grounded in the abject other, Medusa, a character in whom the animal and the human merge, as they often do in stories of mêtistic victory. Jay Dolmage underscores the Western vilification of such resistance by invoking Hélène Cixous’s interpretation of Medusa. Just as Medusa’s head of writhing snakes is reminiscent of the polymorphic nature of mêtis, her disfigurement and murder, Dolmage argues, offer a powerful parallel to social and institutional fears of female agency. Nonetheless, Dolmage also juxtaposes mêtis with the mestiza, the Western subaltern, thus pointing to their shared ability to subvert power imbalances; the mestiza transforms Western religious practices into her own blend of faiths.

Shannon Walters has recently examined the work of autistic women researchers and writers Temple Grandin and Dawn Prince Hughes. Noting their abilities to interact with animals—Grandin with cattle and Hughes with gorillas—Walters proposes mêtis as a basis for an interspecies rhetoric. Revised in this way, rhetoric resists the dualities of human and animal, of ability and disability, and foregrounds intersections between cognition, communication, and civilization among species (685).

Popular writer Anne Lamott exhibits the sense of mêtis we articulate here. Lamott has chronicled the ongoing but changing challenges of her life in popular essays and novels over the past three decades. Her work demonstrates the agile intelligence of mêtis; for example, she has crafted a spiritual self that shifts shape by always embracing change, incorporating diverse traditions (Buddhist, Christian, new wave spiritualist) in an ongoing process of self-invention and bricolage that is about communal relations as much as self-identity (Plan B). Lamott articulates the inductive responsiveness of mêtis as an agency undaunted by the immensity of expectations, demands, or significances. Recalling a time her brother felt overwhelmed and immobilized by the hugeness of a major grade school research report on birds long put off and due the next day, she said, Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird’ (Bird by Bird 19). The story, she explains, is about hope, the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate (19). More importantly, the story is about making do, taking small steps toward change, outwitting the powers that be, acting in the face of desperation and impossibility, and finding strength in vulnerability. This is hope not as an affective state but as practical agency. Rather than the lone cunning of the mêtistic rhetor, we emphasize the communality of mêtis as an aspect of a feminist rhetorical resilience. Mêtis in this sense is tempered by a relational ethic.

Relationality

In contrast to the popular notions of resilience that celebrate the selfsufficient individual, a feminist rhetoric of resilience emphasizes relationality, mutuality, and an ethic of connection. We draw on the feminist therapist Judith Jordan’s conception of feminist resilience. Jordan posits a model of relational resilience that moves away from a focus on individual coping to mutual empathy and empowerment. Jordan argues that a feminist conception of resilience eschews the relational dynamics of control over another and illusions of self-sufficiency and denial of vulnerability; instead, she advocates supported vulnerability or a vulnerability that admits the support of another. Rather than a one-way need for support, she advocates a mutual empathic involvement. Rather than individual self-esteem, she posits the importance of relational confidence. In addition, she encourages mutual growth and constructive conflict in order to foster a relational dynamics of mutual empowerment rather than the exercise of power over each other. Finally, her model of resilience emphasizes meaning making but not through self-centered self-consciousness; rather, she advocates an expansive relational awareness (32). For Jordan, resilience is not an individual capacity or action but relationally embedded: the goal of relational resilience is mutuality, growth-fostering relational connections, and relational and cultural