In the context of an upper-division English course, Women Writers and Writing, at Santa Clara University in fall 2020, the professor and approximately 25 student-authors examined the ways variously positioned women used writing to accomplish individual, interpersonal, and civic goals in their lives. The group worked as feminist rhetorical scholars recovering women writers and writing held within our university’s Archives & Special Collections and curating them in a born-digital book in Scalar, which we showcase in this webtext as an example to explore some of the possibilities and challenges of such feminist recovery projects. 

Building on the work of rhetorical scholars using various digital tools to engage feminist recovery projects, we used Scalar to create our own collaborative, non-linear digital “anti-anthology” or "an(ti)thology" of women writers from our university’s Archives & Special Collections, using the affordances of this platform to center visual materials, interpretive processes, and relationships that complicated the values of typical anthologies. Our goal was to enact a politics of recovery that resisted the reification or "reinscription" of our particular selections and instead sought to visually and materially represent feminist rhetoric and recovery as a networked, embodied, and unfolding process involving both our recovered authors and ourselves. 

We intended to use digital storytelling as a way to welcome public audiences — consisting of archivists, rhetoricians, feminists, and educators — to challenge their understanding of canonization.  We hoped to organize the media content in a clear and digestible way that also allows for what anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “friction” to come to the surface (p. #). This friction was a crucial part of feminist archival recovery efforts for us, highlighting the need to pause and reflect on our own positionality in the course of our research, rather than just freely "eavesdropping" on our historical subjects. As Romeo Garcia, drawing on Tsing, argues, it might be “more productive to approach listening via the definition of friction as that which gets in the way of ‘smooth’ hegemonic flows” (p. 14).  We pursued this project to create rhetorical space for writers that have never been anthologized and used the affordances of Scalar to foreground some of the friction inherent to that process.  

The image below is a screenshot of the cover page of our an(ti)thology project called Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity that we created together in Scalar.

Pedagogy

Student-authors worked on their born-digital an(ti)thology from the very first week of the course, spending the entire 10-week term studying, conceptualizing, planning, and composing the project individually and in groups. We began by reviewing several print anthologies, especially those focused on recovering women’s and other marginalized voices, and observing the ways they organized their selections and made a case for their significance. We also read scholarship that helped us to think critically about the acts of recovery and circulation of women’s texts, including the famous exchange between Barbara Biesecker (1992) and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1993) about feminist recovery and recent work such as by Wendy Sharer specifically analyzing anthologization practices. As the quarter progressed, we interrogated the meaning of being and studying “women” by incorporating queer theory (Rawson, 2010), ethnic studies (Garcia, 2019), and cultural studies (Wu, 2005) perspectives into our understanding of gender politics. In conversation with scholarship, we also read a range of uncanonized texts in the Santa Clara University archives, and engaged reflection as a regular facet of feminist intellectual practice. 

Project: Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity

The project that came out of our course – “Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity” — is the feminist recovery effort that we use as an example throughout this webtext. It crosses disciplines among literature, communication, and rhetoric in an attempt to engage in the critical examination of these disciplinary boundaries and the ways they affect the work of studying and remembering women’s writing and rhetoric. The project both includes writing by women and engages in reflection on the process of selection and representation. We call this an "an(ti)thology" because it is an active response to anthologization practices and the limits inherent to this task. Our an(ti)thology responds to these practices by subverting chronological or hierarchical ordering and making equal reference to the positionality and embodiment of the editors and cited authors, uniting the participants across space and time. In particular sections of the book, such as the reflections section, these interconnections and the role of the editors are especially visible, but they are evident throughout in the diverse modes of approaching the intertextual analysis and textual presentation employed. The presentation practices of mixing analysis and personal reflection works with the design and content to show “traces of the everyday” that Michelle Levy (2010) has advocated for in the context of book history.  

Largely focused on artifacts from the long 19th century, the purpose of each selection in this an(ti)thology was never to stand alone, but rather to illuminate conversational themes that connect historical women to one another and to readers in the present. The specific texts that student-authors researched and recovered as part of this project (in alphabetical order by author) include:

• Eliza Bradley, - An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley (1820)
• Frances Power Cobbe - The Duties of Women (1881)
• Dinah Mulock Craik - A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (1858)
• Lola Montez - The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet (1858)
• John Wheatley - “Some Account of Phillis, a Learned Negro Girl” (1778)
• Sarah Winnemucca - Life Among the Piutes (1883)
• Mary Wollstonecraft - Original Stories from Real Life (1791)
• Women's Recipe Book - (circa 1822-1866)

As you can see from this list, the texts spanned more than a century and at least two continents and were attributed to a range of authors – including one man – in a number of different forms, some more traditionally literary than others. While each text is quite rare, the authors do enjoy different levels of notoriety, with some of them being quite famous authors, while one text is completely unattributed but written in several different women’s hands. 

While the texts in this volume may occupy liminal space in cultural discourse, their collection in this volume makes an argument for their significance – not the significance of these discrete and specific texts and writers so much as for a transformed and transformative approach to thinking about literary and cultural history writ large, through the act of recovery. Our vision was not that this volume would be assigned and studied in other courses so much as replicated by and intertextually linked to innumerable multimodal scholars composing volumes of their own. 

In what follows, we discuss some of the ways this digital an(ti)thology constituted a feminist praxis. We then share our experience of and reflections on project-level planning and design. You can use the navigation below to follow a path that describes more about the project itself, or to continue on to the next path (Parts) to learn more about Scalar-specific considerations related to the Parts of this project.