“It’s part of who I am. It’s not an extra label. It’s an essence of who I am. I was not raised to be feminist, but when I look back at how I was raised and my responses to things, and decisions I made, I think I was born a feminist. No one would have known to put that name on it but, that’s where my resistance even as a child came from.”

- Vi Dutcher

“My name is Sherri Craig and I am from West Chester University in Pennsylvania. I work in the English department but teach many feminist classes there. I love being at the conference because of how female dominated the faces are. It is encouraging to see a group of women engaged to share scholarship together.”

- Sherri Craig

Highlighted Publication: Craig, Sherri. "A Story-less Generation: Emergent WPAs of Color and the Loss of Identity through Absent Narratives." Writing Program Administration, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, p. 16+. Gale Academic Onefile, Accessed 10 Dec. 2019.

“I am a feminist because I live in a patriarchal world and it’s the only way I can exist in this world without giving up hope. I think it’s that simple. I mean, I was born with a vulva. I identify as a cis-gendered woman, and I guess I would just say that when you’re born into a world where you’re told you have to behave in a certain way in order to get along and it doesn’t coincide with your lived experience then of course, you’re to speak out against it. I’m also a feminist because feminism is about the intersection of injustices of racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism--again, that has direct implications for my life and the people I love. You gotta do it!”

- Becca Richards

Highlighted Publication: Richards, Rebecca S. Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: from Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies. Lexington Books, 2015.

"I believe in equal rights for women. I believe that we contribute so much to society and we’re not equally compensated for the work we do, especially black women. I’ve always considered myself a black feminist because black women have contributed so much to this country for centuries and compared to their counterparts, they’re not compensated equally. I feel like this kind of work needs to be done in order to equalize the situation and have similar equity in how people are treated and compensated for their work. I know that there are more women doing the work to equalize the situation for black women. I think there actually should be a greater presence of black women here."

- Shantay Robinson

Director of: "Untangled: Getting to the Roots of a Hair Movement" Documentary 

“I teach gender studies courses so I have bell hooks’ definition [of feminism] in the back of my head as, “the movement of sexist-oppression exploitation.” I think of myself as an advocate of feminism and not necessarily a feminist as an identity. It’s always a movement and is always a struggle to try and dismantle all the systems of oppression. I love taking different definitions I find and adopting my own. I love rhetoric. I feel like that’s what I can do. I want to look at the systems that continue sexist oppression, intersectional racism, and how that rhetoric works to naturalize those systems, and I like to look at rhetors that resist those structors of power. That’s the only kind of research I do, which is why I love coming to this conference because it’s all people who are doing similar work. I always learn something new, and people are very friendly and have become mentors of mine. It’s just a great experience.”

- Jenna Vincent

“I’ve had so many life experiences that made me a feminist. For me, it was needing to find a place of power and power within myself. I was unhappy for so long with the way things were in the world, in terms of men having control over everything. Men had control over women, and I was sick of it. Various institutions and organizations were ruled by the patriarchy, and growing up, that’s all I knew. When I first discovered feminism, it truly changed my life. Discovering feminism gave me the courage to leave an unhappy marriage. I chose to make a new life for myself, one that I wanted and not one that was ruled by my father. For my entire he life, he dictated what I did, and all of that ended when I discovered what it really means to be a feminist. I’m happier and a better person because of it."

"I chose to study and talk about mythological witches and female monsters because I feel like there is a stereotype that surrounds it. All of these discourses are very old and very powerful, but nothing threatens male power like powerful women. That’s one of my favorite things today, mainly because it’s so true. Through time, powerful women have been demonized and showcased as monsters. They’re not. People tend to be threated when females have any sort of power, which is why they are often depicted as witches or monsters. However, there are other reasons for these women to have power, and they have other purposes. I felt like this was important to talk about because it’s something that has been going on for so long, and often, people don’t even realize it."

- Melissa Nicholas

"I don’t know because I’m kind of the black sheep of my family in terms of being a feminist. We joke that my mother had two 50s and went straight to the 70s. She totally missed all of the possible activism, and she is actually weirdly afraid of being activist- I think she associated that with punishment, you know, being arrested. She never saw ways to interrupt anything, or reasons to. I guess it’s just part of my personality but I always wanted to interrupt everything, because it never all seemed fair. But I think a large part of that was shaped by going to a women’s college, because when you go to Mount Holyoke you don’t really have a choice- when you’re at a seven sisters institution that is part of the fabric. So I think matching that with my personality is what makes me a feminist. [College for me] was influenced by the fact that I was often silenced in the classroom by math teachers and science teachers, and when I went to Mount Holyoke to visit I remember feeling like there was a place for my voice. It was a place where women were having really interesting conversations, even at dinner, talking about things they had learned in class and questioning them and interrogating them, and I wasn’t used to that. And now, with social media, I am part of a group of alumni who are very active and very vocal and so that sort of keeps me… it’s a place for me to go to, as is the Coalition, for me to have a voice."

- Lisa

“I’m a feminist in part because my grandmother, who was born in 1906, I believe was a feminist before her time but couldn’t be a feminist. Her maiden name was all of her children’s middle names, and she really wanted to be an author and a journalist, but everyone kept telling her that she couldn’t do that, but she could be the secretary. She was not an activist-style feminist. I think that’s motivated me to want to support other women; I’m good at the support. I’m not the activist type, but I think it motivates me with a lot of love and intellectual energy to try to help other people not tell similar stories. I’ve only been coming to the Fem Rhets conference since probably 2013, so I think I’ve been to three or four, and I adore this conference! What brings me here is super-fun, interesting topics, as well as generally very friendly, supportive audiences. Sometimes you go to a conference and it’s really nerve wracking, and you think ‘oh god, someone’s gonna say you’re wrong’ or ‘what about this’ or ‘didn’t you read this person.’ That’s not the spirit here, and so I love this conference because it’s smart, but it’s supportive too. What makes me passionate is hearing cool, smart stuff from people, and that’s everyone from undergrads, Master’s students, PhD students, professors, professors who aren’t at the emeritus level—I always learn cool stuff. I’m super passionate and get super nerdy about that. My most feminist story is kind of what we just witnessed, which is seeing other women you love and meeting new women that you will love, that you can hug and truly be supportive of. So it’s not like ‘oh this is great, I hope you do good’ and in my mind I’m like ‘well I wish I was doing that.’ Real feminism is authentic, elevating, and amplifying of voices that need to be heard. Not just women, but also people on the margins—other marginalized communities. So I think my best feminist story is the one that hopefully gets repeated, which is hugs and new friendships.”

- Nancy Small

Highlighted Publication: Patton, T. & Small, N. (forthcoming). Making waves: Maxine Waters and her challenge to black women’s erasure and white hegemony. Accepted for publication in B. K. Alexander, M. N. Goins, and J. Faber McAlister (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Communication and Gender. Routledge.

“My earliest feminist memory is when I remember being like 10 or 11 and I grew up in rural east Texas in a pretty conservative community and going to a conservative church. I remember my mom asking me, again I was early middle school at this point, ‘well what do you think about whether or not women should be able to preach at church?’ and I said ‘well if they should be able to, then we would let them.’ And she just said ‘I don’t know, I don’t really think there is a difference.’ And I was like huh, okay. And like that was like, I mean I don’t remember when I finally was like ‘yes, I am a feminist.’ I think I was earlier than a lot of peers who grew up in similar situations, like I definitely knew by high school, but that’s kind of the earliest memory I have of like really thinking about gender equity.”

- Megan Faver Hartline

Highlighted Publication: Chamberlain, Elizabeth, Rachel Gramer, and Megan Faver Hartline. "Mess, not mastery: Encouraging digital design dispositions in girls." Computers & Composition Online (2015).

“I think one of the reasons why I’m a feminist is because I believe in the equality of all people so ergo I am a feminist. I think it’s more the question of why you wouldn’t be a feminist if you believe in the worth and value of all people.”

- Alys Sink

"I think “what makes me a feminist” is kind of too big of a question for me to answer, but I can talk to you about my project that I brought here to FemRhet. I am interested in private writing and diaries. That came from my own kind of obsession with my own diaries, which then led me to writing studies. The pop-up museum that I organized here with my colleague, Tobi Jacobi, is of a working-class student at the University of Michigan in 1914. And I kind of made a spoofy, scrapbook, remix, from her diary because working-class students, who worked all the time like she did, did not have time to make scrapbooks. So we don’t get to hear about them and their voices can get lost to history. As many of my students are working, I think that it would benefit them to have their lives historicized. So that’s why I created this scrapbook, which is a remix, like I said, of her diary and an autobiographical piece she wrote later, and some photographs from the University of Michigan. I guess I think of this as a recovery project, and that’s why its feminist. In other ways, it shows the complications of women’s lives and is more inclusive of voices that would have otherwise been lost to history."

- Liz Rohan

Highlighted Publication: “Women’s Technologies, Women’s Literacies: Sewing and Computing Across the Years.” The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. 31 (2001): 117-134. (won 2002 NCTE Award for Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Technical or Scientific Communication)

"Part of what makes me a feminist is driven by a commitment to thinking about the relationship between literacy work and social justice. For me that’s taken me directly into jails and prisons for the last 20 years or so. Part of that work has been about setting up literacy opportunities for people who have not had the same kind of success as those of us who end up in faculty positions or even in grad school. And so part of what I have been committed to as a feminist scholar and practitioner and teacher is about how literacy can be accessible in a lot of different ways. This has taken me into some archival work like working with a girls training school in the 1920s. And some other archival work that is institutionally sanctioned. A lot of it has revealed that girls may have used literacy to counter narrate some of the institutional narratives that have been told. This feels really compelling to me because of what I see in prisons across the U.S. and their lack of even basic tools of literacy like pens and paper, as well as a commitment to wanting my own children to have access in many ways."

- Tobi Jacobi

Highlighted Publication: Hinshaw, Wendy Wolters and Tobi Jacobi. "What Words Might Do: The Challenge of Representing Women in Prison and Their Writing." Feminist Formations, vol. 27 no. 1, 2015, p. 67-90. Project MUSE.

"Acting out for the female voice has always been very important to me. Sometimes empowering women means just offering whatever support you can, which in this case means working at this table and greeting people as they browse around."

- Cooper King

“As a teacher, feminism affects everything I do. I want students to see the power their words have to enact social change. It is rewarding to do activism outside of my role as a professor. Feminism gives us the tools to connect across differences and to make societies that are safe and inclusive and diverse. I’ve never not been a feminist. I believe in the goal of liberation for all.”

- Ruth Osorio