This project, for me, illustrates the perfect example of a kairotic moment. The idea to do an expansive, feminist-focused review of Kairos webtexts had been on my radar for a while, but I had gotten sidetracked as I moved across the country and transitioned into a new department. When I was assigned a new course, Feminist Rhetoric, I struggled to design content for the course that would cover everything from Aspasia and the Seneca Falls Convention to Ginsberg and Beyoncé. Yet, the kairotic moment presented itself just as Kairos prepared to celebrate 20 years of influence in our field; I realized that my students and I could look back and re-envision a decade of Kairos webtexts through a feminist lens.

What follows is a retrospective of the scholarship published in Kairos from 2002–2012, but with the added intention of revealing the unseen feminisms at work in the journal. My students and I identified implicit strains of feminism embedded in Kairos webtexts from that decade and then related them directly to a definition of feminist rhetoric that we built from our study of ancient and modern works. Though the majority of the authors of the scholarship we analyzed did not—and may not—identify as feminist scholars, it is our hope that our analysis will create new bridges between those who may be united by some of the core values and characteristics we identify here. As Kairos readers look back and celebrate two decades of work, we hope that this analysis reinvigorates and repositions not only the work in this journal but perhaps also the sometimes less-than-celebrated feminist label.

–Jen Almjeld, Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication at James Madison University

about us

This review essay evaluates a decade of scholarship from a feminist perspective and, in so doing, encourages both journal contributors and readers to recognize hidden strains of feminism in webtexts appearing in this journal. While Kairos might not specifically identify as a feminist publication, there are many instances of latent feminism in works published here. On the other hand, many of the webtexts published in Kairos overtly engage feminist topics and concerns like gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. However, we hope our work might invite more authors to specifically situate their work as a feminist rhetoric and perhaps openly claim the term feminist for themselves. This reluctance of authors we see performing feminist scholarship to avoid labeling their work as such may be an intentional avoidance of the "f-word," a word with a history.

As an ideology, the feminist movement often avoids labels and categories. But we feel that there is a real power in using the "f-word" to define and re-define scholarship taking on the work of challenging norms and structures of power—in this case, often in the classroom and workplace—and in opening up new spaces for a variety of voices to be heard via a variety of modalities. Ultimately, many pieces of scholarship published in Kairos demonstrate various feminist rhetorical elements, and in doing so they challenge existing ideas that sometimes seek to constrain teaching and research in rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy.

Since we collectively produced this feminist review of Kairos, we thought that it was only fitting that the review itself adhere to the feminist rhetorical principles we identified in our class. An important first step in developing our commentary on Kairos's position within feminism involved coming up with a definition of feminist rhetoric that we could use as a point of reference. We agreed on seven terms that we felt were essential components of other standout feminist works to create our definition.

First, our review embodies the authors by providing bios that explain who we are and our own relationships to the project and to feminism. We not only include images and text about ourselves, but also include a video—despite its ametuerish production value—in hopes of connecting with readers as with more than words on a screen. Our review also gives a voice to our participants when we highlight the feminist strengths of Kairos and its publications. Similarly, we seek to validate various experiences by highlighting both hidden and obvious aspects of feminism impacting the journal. Like Kairos itself, our review essay is multimodal, incorporating both text and video in an attempt to increase its overall reach and accessibility. In terms of positionality, we are aware that we are not all experts in the field of computers and writing. In acknowledging this limitation, we position ourselves as curious outsiders interested in joining the larger conversation about the role of feminism in the discipline of rhetoric.

Having said that, we do not intend this to be your typical scholarly review essay. Seeking to explicitly challenge systems of power and the norms of traditional scholarship allows us to approach this review in a new way. Our review empowers different ways of being by celebrating a variety of rhetorical approaches, design choices, and narrative voices found in the journal. We hope this work inspires others to consider this publication as a space where feminist rhetorical principles are enacted, celebrated, and made explicit. We see our review as an example of how online scholarly journals like Kairos can promote accessibility for all ways of being and can be used as safe spaces for feminists to claim that title.

rhetorical roots

embodied.

voiced.

positioned.

multimodal.

validating.

challenging.

empowering.

Feminist rhetorics are embodied in that they acknowledge the real person behind the scholar by honoring the personal and the political. This embodiment gives voice to participants and validates their experiences. It is also situated by recognizing positionality and potential bias of the reader. These rhetorics are more accessible to various ways of learning through a nontraditional multimodal presentation. Perhaps above all, feminist rhetorics challenge systems of power and norms set up through hegemonic principles by empowering all ways of being.

feminist rhetorics in Kairos

We spent the Spring 2014 semester immersed in feminist rhetorics and exploring a range of feminist topics spanning Aspasia in ancient Greece to multimodal composition scholars featured in Kairos. Individually each of us chose an issue of Kairos to examine that interested us personally. In our individual reviews, we focused on identifying instances, both hidden and intentional, of the seven key themes of feminist rhetorics we had agreed upon as a group. In the process, we began to see patterns of feminist strategies and values in current scholarship published in the journal. We then worked to meld these individual voices into a collective review. Our individual reviews gave us direction for our collaborative essay and provided us with a clearer idea of our underlying purpose. We placed ourselves into informal groups of writers, editors, videographers, statisticians, and designers.

Through our evaluation of Kairos we noticed feminist themes within the issues but also noticed that the word feminism was never mentioned in the webtexts we studied. As a Feminist Rhetoric class we found this omission curious, and we hope that this project encourages readers and scholars to imagine Kairos as a feminist space where issues of access, gender, socio-economic status, and other issues related to "the f-word" are frequently taken up. Additionally, we hope that our work might prompt some Kairos contributors to more overtly claim the title of feminist scholarship for their work.

We decided as a group to focus our coding efforts on webtexts featured in the primary sections of the journal: Features (which became Topoi in the 10th anniversary issue of 2006), CoverWeb (which also became part of Topoi in that issue, but then re-appeared as a separate section in the last issue we cover here, in Fall of 2013), Inventio, and Praxis. (All of these sections also happen to be the peer-reviewed sections of the journal during that decade.) The exclusion of the PraxisWiki webtexts, which can arguably be considered a featured section of the journal (particularly in more recent years, since it became peer reviewed, in 2014) happened for two reasons: the first is practical, because we felt we could not feasibly code any more than a decade's worth of webtexts from the peer-reviewed, featured sections of the journal in a 16-week semester. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we wanted to devote our time to revealing some unexpected instances of feminism in the journal. The PraxisWiki—with its focus on "narratives, assignments, and short pedagogy pieces"—would no doubt have yielded tons of feminist work as it relates so closely to the classroom, but we wanted to concentrate our efforts on "re-mapping" those spaces not so obviously feminist. We also felt the webtexts in the featured sections more closely aligned in length and scope with more traditional scholarly webtexts—not surprising, given their peer-reviewed status—and so might offer interesting insights particularly in ways Kairos authors subvert traditional academic conventions.

As a group we read and coded 143 individual webtexts, authored by 277 writers and designers in 26 issues of Kairos. While coding the issues, we focused on identifying explicit and implicit instances of webtexts enacting the seven characteristics of our definition for feminist rhetorics.

This count of feminist markers began simply as a way for class members to mark one of the seven terms identified in our definition (embodied, voiced, positioned, multimodal, validating, challenging, and empowering) and help us see patterns across issues. We felt this sort of statistical approach might inform our work and might also allow another layer of accessibility to the work as statistics empower other ways of knowing and being in regards to scholarship. Below is a description of frequency in regards to each term.

Our focus on numbers continued with special attention to statistics related to authorship. We first coded authors' names for gender, any mentions of self-identified gender, self-identified credentials or degree, what institution the author represented, and whether or not the writer identified as a feminist. We chose to only report what was reported by the author in the webtext in order to best honor the author's choice of voice and electronic embodiment.

We noted interesting findings in three main areas: gender of the author (or lack of gender identification), author credentials, and whether or not any of the Kairos authors explicitly defined themselves as feminists.

To discover these aspects, we relied only on the webtexts and did not perform background research on any writers. When identifying gender, we made gender norm assumptions based on names and authors' photographs. We recognize that this binary gender assignment is problematic, but we also felt that identification of gender was important according to precedents in the field of feminist rhetoric (Glenn, 1997; Foss, Foss & Griffin, 1999; Ritchie & Ronald, 2001).

Highlighting author gender is also a tradition rooted in the computers and writing field. "It’s true that Kairos’ use of a modified version of APA style that shows authors’ first names was a conscious feminist choice," editor Cheryl Ball (2015) explained in an email. "Kairos wasn’t the first to do this—the practice was taken from the in-house style guide we used at Computers and Composition, when I was an assistant and associate editor there in the early 2000s." For Ball and her colleagues at Kairos, this practice was adopted "primarily to stop the obfuscation of gender in research roles, as names would be listed in the References list." Erasing or ignoring gender has impact not only for authors of the online journal, but also for ways we view the field as gendered—or not. "Our new focus … is to ensure that Reference lists aren’t dominated by male researchers. I’ve stated a few places publicly that if a submission doesn’t include any women on the references list, I’ll reject it out of hand. While that’s not totally true, it’s certainly a rule of thumb that I am trying to follow when working with authors to develop their research." These types of editorial decisions reinforce our reading of Kairos as a space open to and supportive of feminist ideals of inclusion and increased visibility for women.

We found that of the 277 authors listed in the webtexts we reviewed, 97% did identify their gender, and roughly half of those authors were females. Of the authors, more than half (63%) did not provide their academic or professional credentials in their webtexts. And lastly, of the 277 authors who have contributed to Kairos in the past decade, only five identified themselves as feminists.

We felt there are interesting implications here. First, though we read Kairos as a journal that is heavily influenced by feminist scholarship, the overwhelming majority of authors claim no explicit identification as a feminist scholar or writer. This may be because authors perceive the work of feminism as different from the work done by a journal focusing on rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Others may not consider themselves feminists regardless of the context.

That the majority of authors, 63%, chose not to provide their credentials is also noteworthy. Without surveying the authors it is impossible to say why this is so, but some authors may purposely omit their credentials in an effort to even the balance of power between themselves and junior colleagues or graduate or undergraduate student co-authors or research participants. For others, this omission may be because a general assumption exists that one's credentials are easily accessible with a quick Google search.

[Editor's addendum: Although it is not part of our submission guidelines, Kairos has consistently asked authors to refrain from including their credentials in biographies, because that information changes quickly in academia, particularly in terms of rank or institutional affiliation. Indeed, in our ghost copy-editing process for this issue, Editor Ball removed several instances of rank, and also gender, from the author biographies of this webtext. This was done particularly in bios of students who self-identified as "getting ready to graduate," referring most likely to May 2014. She offers this bit of information about Kairos author ranks: During the journal's metadata project of 2011, we researched all authors' ranks and discovered that the numbers were roughly split down the middle (~50%/50%) between untenured authors (i.e., undergraduate student, graduate student, independent scholar, unaffiliated scholar, nontenure-track lecturer, academic staff, or tenure-track scholar) and tenured authors (i.e., at the associate or full levels). We did discuss whether to mine metadata for gender during that project but felt we had to draw the line at collecting too much data in order to complete the project at hand—perhaps an oversight that this review is having us reconsider.]

as a feminist space