Embodying Public Feminisms: Collaborative Intersectional Models for Engagement

Abstract

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Introduction:</i></b> This article offers an approach that we call <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">critical collaboration</b> —an array of theoretical commitments drawn from the authors’ embodiments and lived experiences. In making explicit the connections between authorial embodiment and the content of theory and practice, our practical models demonstrate new and varied approaches to public feminisms. We begin with a discussion of embodiment and then offer four sections—amplification rhetorics, apparent feminisms, a techné of marginality, and memetic rhetorical environments—with key takeaways to guide readers through our related-but-different approaches. Our goal in doing so is to underscore the importance of public feminisms to enacting social justice in technical and professional communication. This means recognizing our obligation to respond to unjust technical communication. Technical communication is not a utopia of inclusion and anti-racism—although some corners of the field are dedicated to those topics, to be sure. Rather, despite the social justice turn, some parts of the field still insist on objectivity, neutrality, and practicality as the touchstones for “good” technical communication. Our work here shows some of the ways in which we might resist the cultural blinders that allow such ideas to persist unabated. Drawing especially on research in rhetoric and embodiment studies, we build interdisciplinary bridges with critical race studies (including critical race feminisms), womanism, gender studies, technical communication, Black rhetorics, queer studies, cultural studies, and rhetorical genre studies, among other fields, to provide a set of practical approaches to public feminist exigencies that resist collapsing all feminisms into a single approach. We argue that drawing on embodiment to develop a multiplicity of feminist approaches and engaging in critical collaboration as those approaches evolve is a way forward that allows for more stakeholders to engage fruitfully in public feminist projects. Our hope is that readers can then imagine public feminisms as one avenue for doing the social justice work that is vital to the growth of technical and professional communication as a field.