On behalf of the Peitho editorial team, I am happy to announce the summer 2024 issue of Peitho! This is a special issue titled Small and Subtle Feminist Rhetorical Doings, and we thank our guest editors, Jessi Thomsen and Tammie M. Kennedy.
Alt Text: Image of Peitho 26.4 Summer Special Issue 2024 cover featuring swirling blue, orange, and yellow spiraling patterns surrounding large black circles. Image is also link to the special issue.
Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ introduction:
As we initially imagined this special issue, we didn’t fully consider the tension in the something we were asking our contributors to do. For context, we were both at the luncheon at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in 2019 when Lisa Melonçon presented on quiet feminism, and we were there for the semi-contentious discussion that followed. Melonçon’s notion of quiet feminism sparked our curiosity: Where does quiet feminism fit with radical feminism, and how are we understanding different enactments of feminism? With this special issue, we called for contributors to engage with the question: What constitutes “feminist enough,” particularly in feminist rhetorical acts that are considered small, subtle, or quiet? Co-editor Tammie Kennedy noted this phenomenon as she studied women athletes at the same 2019 conference. Although this data was collected during a workshop on feminisms and social sports and fitness at the conference, many of the participants did not identify as “feminist,” but they considered their actions within fitness spaces to denote a focus on gender equity and social change. Co-editor Jessi Thomsen has also felt the pressure of these questions while chatting with friends from grad school, turned colleagues in the field, who expressed frustration in projects that they thought were feminist but were consistently turned down from inclusion in the conference. Building from Melonçon’s talk and these subsequent interactions, we argue that feminisms that are small, quiet, subtle, implicit, and incremental are feminist enough to do transformative rhetorical work. Each article in this special issue demonstrates how, opening up spaces to enact and theorize the ways in which these subtle feminisms work alongside, with, as, and through the radical feminisms that have been so crucial to our collective survival.
Congrats to the editors and contributors on the publication of this special issue!