The Issue

Why is This Issue Feminist?

When we first began noticing the make up of the creators and pieces submitted for this issue, we began thinking about what it meant that a rather general call about family ended up inviting a slew of feminist pieces with a steep majority centered upon motherhood. We began thinking about the phenomenon as a trend or perhaps a shift in our publishing landscape. From our perspective, Harlot seems to have become another of many homes for feminist topics and agendas, which has made us curious about why it has attracted such works and what it means about the relationship between feminism and digital publishing.

If you're not familiar with Harlot, it is worth noting that the digital magazine caters to a mixed audience made up of academics and lay readers. Its peer-review process also matches this arrangement: Each submission is reviewed by at least one academic and one interested individual from outside academia. This arrangement is how we try to ensure that each published piece reaches a certain level of sound reasoning for argumentative works and intellectualism for creative works while at the same time be composed and delivered in a way that invites lay readers into the mix. Harlot, however, clearly attracts more academics than not, and this trend is certainly the case with the special issue on family rhetoric.

We didn't set out to create a feminist journal issue. It was surprising to us that a general call for works on the rhetoric of family ended up speaking so substantially to feminism. The fact that nearly all submissions were written by women, however, does not necessarily give the special issue a feminist slant. But the type of data collection and analysis, writing styles and argumentation modes, and a focus on women's topics gave this publication a noticeable feminist theme. What we are considering feminist in this context is the following:

1. Most pieces draw from personal experience (auto-ethnographical or personal narrative), a data site that traditionally has been excluded from scholarly work, though also one that has become increasingly acceptable when included in small doses and with clear roles in otherwise academically sound investigations. Theresa Enos (2003) comments on how though women and men use "narration as a way of arguing, or personal narrative to create voice" (567), this is often considered a "female style" and is a non-traditional approach to scholarly work. We believe this assumption continues to exist and that authors (regardless of gender role) who contribute such personal and expressivist works are legitimizing such "female style."

2. The argumentation modes may offer nonlinear, multi-perspective views of the subject at hand rather than attempt linear, objective (or gender-neutral) analyses of topics. We also wonder if some of the work put forth in our issue is similar to what Elizabeth A. Flynn writes in her essay, "Composing as a Woman." She observes that her work does not "appear to be research because it is not clear which research tradition I am working within." It "hovers on the blurred edges of several [research] traditions [and] is not legitimate, is not research, it would seem" (Flynn, 2003, 513). Though she is clearly focused on research methods, we wonder if the same blurring can be said of writing styles -- styles that are hovering and blurring on the edge of multiple styles.

3. The subjects of the works themselves fall under the umbrella of women's issues and gender studies. They often deal with women's roles and perspectives on and within family and often implicitly critique patriarchal paradigms of these roles (e.g. six of the published articles critique how women or women and men are situated in family relationships). Whether obvious (like mother-daughter bonding) or comically motivated (like a daughter dealing with her mother in a social media context), these subjects deal specifically with the role of women within the context of family and within politically charged notions of family.

Issue Observations

We noitced a number of things about our issue and the figure below provides information about our creators, the perspectives they presented in their work, and the themes we came across in the issue.

Creators

86% of authors were women
14% of authors were men

Perspectives

64% of the submissions were about mothering and/or were written from a mother's perspective
73% of the pieces explore the topic of family rhetoric from a personal perspective

Themes

The themes that emerged from the full set of submissions include the following:
· how computers affect mother/daughter relationships
· the rhetoric of mothering/unmothering in social networking sites
· popular culture representations of family
· sexuality and mothering
· family and identity
· infertility
· definitions of family
· father/daughter communication
· rhetoric embedded in family names
· abuse/abandonment by parent
· family communication/communication about family via social networking
· cultural narratives about women's nature, including sacrifice as critical element of femininity/motherhood as sacrifice
· role of silence in family communication
· myth of unconditional love of a mother
· questions what makes a mother/when become a mother
· relationship between family, education, and race/class
· rhetoric of communication between struggling couple
· identity as single mother
· documenting family history

Examples of Feminist Texts (Harlot's Issue #6: Family Rhetoric)

To help illustrate what we learned from the submissions we received, we'd like to highlight two of the submissions that were published in this special issue. First, we present a video by Kristin Arola, titled "Rhetoric, Christmas Cards, and Infertility: A Season of Silence." Below is Kristin Arola's creator's statement that introduces her video:

When I first saw the call for the special issue on family rhetoric, I found myself feeling left out. While I am a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunt, a niece, a cousin, and a wife, in spite of many years and dollars spent trying to be a mother, I am unable to do so. I do not have my own family. As I contemplated my own rhetoric of "the family," holiday cards began to pile up. Card after card, letter after letter, all about kids—kids I do not have. Suddenly it occurred to me, I did have something to say about family rhetoric, about who gets included and excluded in our notions of family. I also realized I needed to revise my own understandings of family. This short essay is my exploration of the intersections between family, rhetoric, and infertility.

Rhetoric, Christmas Cards And Infertility: A Season Of Silence

In this video, Arola asks us to consider what constitutes family. Based on her analysis of Christmas cards, a Google search, and personal experience, Arola concludes that our notions of family are limited and she calls us "to create a family discourse so that we see family where we didn't before." She takes a multiple-perspective view of this issue by not only presenting how others appear to define family but also acknowledging that she too had left herself out of the genre of family because she does not have children. She also uses rhetoric scholarship to encourage a new perspective--a broader one.

A second piece in the special issue on family rhetoric takes on the issue of fertility and mothering.

Defense Of The Unmother: Rhetoric, Motherhood, And Social Networking.

Rebecca Ingalls describes her piece, titled "In Defense of the Unmother: Rhetoric, Motherhood, and Social Networking," as follows:

Accumulating thousands of testimonials, cycle charts, and photographs of positive pregnancy tests, fertility social networking sites offer consolation and hope to women who are trying to conceive. Despite the comfort they bring, however, the words and images of these sites help to perpetuate a divisive message about the superlative virtue of childbearing, constituting those who cannot or choose not to become parents as morally and physically inferior.

I set out to do this analysis because I wanted to illustrate the message-within-the message in the online rhetorical constructions of mothering and "unmothering." I emerged from this research with a push for a rhetorical re-conception of female achievement that hopes to imagine a new kind of feminist solidarity, a way of seeing progeny in a new light.

Interestingly, Ingalls' piece employs the term "unmothering," not as someone who cannot have children, due to infertility issues, but as someone who has chosen not to be a mother. What she shows, then, in her analysis of social networking sites is that the rhetorical construction of the mother these sites create portrays women who choose to be mothers as nurturing, selfless, compassionate, gentle, and patient. The assumptions present in this rhetorical construction of mothers, Ingalls argues, seem to suggest that women who choose not to become mothers possess the opposite traits. Ingalls concludes by proposing we revise our views (and our language) in order to disrupt the narrow views of women such rhetorical constructions perpetuate.

While Ingalls' piece is not written from the first-person perspective, it certainly tackles women's issues and takes into account multiple perspectives.

What we learned overall from the submissions--and the pieces that were published in Issue 6 exemplify this well--is that women's issues, and especially issues related to mothering, are central to considerations of family rhetoric. We also learned that a call for family rhetoric in a journal with a hybrid (academic and non-academic) audience cultivated and created a space for personal, critical reflections on family.