Nancy Small
Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms
Edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan
Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-319-1 (paperback, $29.99); 978-1-64317-320-7 (hardcover, $59.99); 978-1-64317-321-4 (PDF, $19.99); 978-1-64317-322-1 (EPUB, $19.99) © 2022 by Parlor Press, with illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. 233 pages.
Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details.
About This Book
A Rhetoric of Becoming: USAmerican Women in Qatar takes Western feminism abroad into the complexity of transnational spaces. Working at interdisciplinary intersections of rhetoric, feminist theory, narrative inquiry, and expat studies, Nancy Small interweaves conversational interviews with observations of the author's own six years living in the Middle East.
A shared lifeworld of paradoxical positionings emerges, grounded in certain uncertainty, empowerment and vulnerability, hypervisibility and invisibility, and freedom and restraint. Expat women developed nuanced rhetorical strategies grounded in feminist principles of listening, reflexivity, and adaptation through and beyond these positionings. Participants gradually recognized the scope of their white, Western privilege and consequently became highly aware of injustices surrounding them. However, amid their awakening to positionality and power, they remained sensitive to their precarity and limited agency. Rather than retreat to their expat golden ghettos, participants learned to leverage their positioning and developed strategies for resisting unjust systems. Through their storytelling, a new feminist tactic emerges as a substantive contribution to the scholarly field: micropraxis—small, purposeful acts of resistance and justice—creates potential for subverting patriarchal systems. Outcomes of this project are easily imported into a wide array of local spaces, as globalization, immigration, increasing diversity, and ongoing recognition of unjust systems bring the contemporary relevance of these conversations home.
About the Author
Nancy Small is Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Wyoming, where her work centers on a range of storytelling applications as a rhetorical process and product. Her teaching and research engage topics of rhetorical feminism, public memory, qualitative research ethics, and intercultural communication. Her scholarly projects have been published in edited collections on education in the Middle East as well as in a range of scholarly journals, including Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.
