Introduction: Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics

Abstract

This special issue on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism challenges the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship. Such defining has tended to focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe. The result is, potentially, the reproduction of institutional hierarchies. Transnationality refers to movements of people, goods, and ideas across national borders and, like the term borderland, it is often used to highlight forms of cultural hybridity and intertextuality. To bring a transnational focus to our field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift our objects and areas of study.