Rhetoric on the Margins of the Second Wave: Feminism, Cultural Memory, and the Transformation of the Political

Abstract

The displacement of radical forms of women's political practices necessitates not the "recovery" of certain histories, but the very "creation" of histories which reconsider the meaning of "eventfulness" and change. By examining the anomalous rhetorical practices and their infectious intensities, new conceptions of feminism's pasts can be created which have implications for our understanding of historical change, eventfulness, and contemporary feminist discursive practices. Methodologically, I am concerned with what I term "minor rhetorics," following Deleuze and Guattari's work on "minor literature." "Minor rhetorics" and the anomalous practices associated with them are never accounted for in recent molar histories of feminism, even though they exerted significant force within feminism.