An Invitation to Contribute: Rethinking Feminists Rhetorics and Place

We would like to invite you to contribute Tallahassee Voices: A Feminist Archive. We see the archive as functioning as an important outlet of democratic citizenship and a re-exploration of what it means to live, work, and study in Tallahassee. In thinking about proposing a feminist archive for Tallahassee, there are two overarching ideas that guided my thinking. The first is Campbell’s notion that “efforts for social change are fundamentally rhetorical” (139) and Hart-Davidson et al.’s view that “it is possible to see the rhetorical tradition at work, either in the past or in the present historical moment, at points where institutions and technologies are in the process of being shaped” (129). It looks to account for the many ways in which actions have contributed to “changes in personal relationships as well as systemic changes” (Campbell 141). We found Tallahassee an important place to study and archive due to the many intersections of people, education, viewpoints, governance, and discourses that the city provides.

The proposed archive is rooted at the intersections of place, space, bodies, and action “offering a perspective so that those who wish to learn more about feminist scholarship or to join in the celebration of feminism may do so” (Foss and Griffin 9). I found that working with Mandy acted as a performative of this aspect invitational rhetoric, as we both were interested in constructing an archive that highlighted the roots and linkages of feminist rhetorical action in Tallahassee. We saw it as offering a space for many voices to contribute to the re-imagination of “a Sophistic tradition of situated learning, challenging, and broadening the borders of the polis” (Hart-Davidson et al. 137). We saw the work that we did within this exploratory of potentially examining a multitude of intersections and layers of local rhetoric that is able to accommodate a multiplicity of voices and perspectives.

This hetereoglosia in the archive is rooted to place so that connections in, around, and between people and their personal/political action that occurs in the everyday. We positioned the archive to contributors, as curators and managers, to show that we “care about them, understand their ideas, and allow them to contribute in significant ways to the interaction” (Foss and Griffin 12). We want the archive to represent and re-imagine democratic citizenship that is familiar, linked to the everyday, and contributes to social change, and establish it as a space “where citizens do not merely browse, but invent, discuss, and negotiate” (Hart-Davidson et al. 138). This archive could be a living resource and document that brings people together in their action.

I also saw the archive, with the deep participation of the community, as working to disrupt the notion of standpoint, and the privileging of certain perspectives and viewpoints over others. We invite the community to be involved in the collecting, solicitation, and selection of archive artifacts, where they are participatory members engaged in a meaningful and impactful social action. While, as proposed, it does have a curation and editorial team, this is intended for quality and organization, to account for how “social change is symbolic or rhetorical at its foundation” (Campbell 139-40). We see it functioning to highlight the linkages in Tallahassee to account for the action of a multiplicity of discourse, and how make connections between groups, events, and actions. To see how the personal is political, and what it looks like in the everyday.