A Rhetoric of Becoming

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

Editors: Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan

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 own 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, and increasing diversity-as well as ongoing recognition of unjust systems-bring the contemporary relevance of these conversations home.

NANCY SMALL is Assistant Professor and Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Wyoming, where her work centers on a range of applications of storytelling 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...