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 and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell 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 a “woman” as defined by mainstream feminist studies by incorporating queer theory (Rawson), ethnic studies (Garcia), and cultural studies (Wu) into our understanding of gender politics. In conversation with scholarship, we also read a range of uncanonized works of literature in the Santa Clara University archives, and engaged reflection as a regular facet of feminist intellectual practice. 

Through such readings and reflections, we encountered the stakes of feminist recovery work to revaluate what feminism should look like within literature and rhetorical studies, exploring concepts like female tokenism that comes along with canonization, and found value in analyzing included and excluded works to place in our anthology.  As a result of these perspectives, we came to the conclusion that studying gender politics within the relative context of the author’s life experiences, time, and geographical location makes a difference in literary and rhetorical analysis, connecting the authors' contexts to our own in our analytical and theoretical work. 

Opening Up Space

The resulting project — “Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity” — is a feminist recovery effort. Crossing disciplines among literature, communication, and rhetoric and others to refigure women into a remembered history, the project centers varied textual selections along the continuum of women’s print history to render women’s historical experience and voice apparent. We call this an “an(ti)thology” because of the ways 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 through space and across 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 intertextual analysis and textual presentation employed throughout. The presentation practices of mixing analysis and personal reflection works with the design and content to also show the “traces of the everyday” that Michelle Levy, drawing on Franco Moretti, has observed within book history.  

Largely focused around 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 students researched and recovered as part of this project (in alphabetical order by author) included:

• Eliza Bradley, An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley (1820)
• Frances Power Cobbe- The Duties of Women (1881)
• Lola Montez- The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet (1858)
• Dinah Mulock Craik -A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (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. 

The texts in this volume may occupy liminal space in cultural discourse, but their collection in this volume makes an argument not 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. 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. 

Building this project in Scalar allowed each contributor to make their own decisions about how to approach analysis and design, disrupting the expectation of a single authorial voice in favor of a chaotic polyvocality, while also highlighting themes that emerged for us across these texts, informed by the scholarship we read.

Click on the project image below to view the actual project we created in Scalar, which has been copied here and included in its entirety. Or, simply click through to In Our Experience below the project view to continue with our discussion of the composing process.