Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity

Defying Social Norms

One theme that we felt compelled to include in this anthology was "defying social norms." We first discussed this theme when reading Carol Mattingly's essay "Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric." In this essay, Mattingly argues that analyzing women’s rhetoric often exists in a world that men have never had to be aware of. For example, some oral works by women simply do not exist anymore. Rather than recording the oration, people recorded what the orator was wearing, what their body looked like, how they carried themselves, etc. History has a way of preserving works that work against the norm. Many of the works within this anthology still exist today because somewhere along the way, they were seen as "weird" and therefore worth preserving. It's important to question why certain works survived: Who created them, and what systems of oppression do their preservation uphold?

We discussed this theme again when reading Hui Wu's essay "The Paradigm of Margaret Cavendish: Reading Women's Alternative Rhetorics in a Global Context." Wu argues that applying a feminist lens formulated in the United States to a text written by a citizen of another country is dangerous. While an author may not be feminist by US standards, that doesn’t mean that a work is not feminist. It is crucial to develop a multinational worldview when doing category-based work. Not understanding a culture, but attempting to ascribe cultured meaning to it, is not only dangerous but also unfounded. This is an important global perspective to keep in mind while navigating this anthology.

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