Predicting Futures, Performing Feminisms

This article emphasizes time’s effects on student resistance. Drawing on kairos and chronos, the authors argue that when teachers perform ideological neutrality is at least as significant as whether or how they do so. They explore their own temporal approaches to two pedagogical ecologies: first-year composition and an upper-level feminist rhetorics course.

Feminist Digital Research Methodology for Rhetoricians of Health and Medicine

This article argues that rhetoricians of health and medicine can benefit from new methodological orientations that more fully account for conducting digital research within vulnerable online communities. More specifically, this article introduces a feminist digital research methodology, an intersectional methodology that helps rhetoricians of health and medicine contend with the overlapping rhetorical, technological, and ethical frameworks affecting how we understand and collect health information, particularly within vulnerable online communities. The author considers methodological shifts in Internet research ethics, rhetorics of health and medicine, and feminist rhetorics as well as definitions and conceptions of online communities and vulnerability. The author next draws from a 5-year case study of an online childbirth community to demonstrate how a feminist digital research methodology offers an alternative methodological orientation that helps researchers navigate ethical decision-making practices that arise from conducting health research within vulnerable online communities. Finally, the author outlines the broader implications of this methodology by suggesting three ways that scholars can use it within and beyond the field.

Neither Bitch Nor Mother: Queering Safety in the Classroom

Reciprocity between teachers and students has been central to transformative pedagogies since the early work of Paulo Freire. However, realizing students as knowledge-producers is much more difficult. This article argues that typically it is the critical educator who “troubles” students’ ideological assumptions, often with the aim of culturally reproducing ourselves through what Michael Warner describes as reprosexuality. This places teachers at the center of the power/knowledge nexus and can foreclose the possibility of a dialogic relation with students in which the power of knowledge-making is a shared endeavor. Using a case study of a graduate course focused on feminist rhetorics and pedagogies in which maternal nurturance and safety in the classroom were central issues, this article explores how Judith Butler’s politics of recognition and vulnerability can serve to build truly reciprocal student-teacher relations and a renewed vision of the role of safety in the classroom.