In my presentation next week at FemRhet (Session B-1, Wednesday, October 28, 1:45-3:00 in Gila Room 224), I’ll be speaking on “Remaking Historiographic Practice on the Periphery: A Feminist Methodology.” I’ll take up in greater detail then what I term a peripheral methodology, seeking to addresses a continuing issue in feminist historiography: Our narratives offer compelling stories of women rhetoricians and teachers, but we have not consistently enacted a methodology or methodologies that provide means of investigating in systematic fashion the personal and professional relationships that inform women’s ways of coming to know and practice.
In recent years, I’ve been seeking the means by which create a space through my historiographic methodology that (1) situates women’s lives and relationships at the center of historiographic inquiry and (2) reflects the charge from Royster and Kirsch in Feminist Rhetorical Practices to create a
set of values and perspectives… that honors the particular traditions of the subjects of study, respects their communities, amplifies their voices, and clarifies their visions, thus bringing evidence of our rhetorical past more dynamically into the present and creating the potential, even with contemporary research subjects, for a more dialectical and reciprocal intellectual engagement. (14)
To address this absence, I propose a feminist historiographic peripheral methodology (insofar as peripheral means alongside, just at the seams of, at the outermost range of the line of sight) informed by four investigative principles: acknowledgment, attribution, relationship, and situatedness. More on the investigative principles themselves in a later post. (I have written previously about this methodology as a “sideshadowing” in which the peripheral played a substanative role. That piece, “‘Long I Followed Happy Guides’: Activism, Advocacy, and English Studies,” appears in Women and Rhetoric between the Wars, edited by Ann George, Liz Weister, and Janet Zepernick.)
www.fleurestelle.com
I chose the metaphor of the periphery for it doesn’t marginalize the subject within the field of vision (in the case of my historical research, that means women in the history of the discipline of composition studies are not themselves marginalized); instead it shifts the line of sight for the viewer, the researcher. As the image above and to the right suggests, privileging peripheral vision allows us to investigate what is outside the central focal 3-5 degrees, that “broad set of non-central points.”
As I investigated a bit into the science of peripheral vision, the metaphor took on even greater significance with respect to the historiographic methodology I was imagining. Take the image to the left as an illustration. The central vision (here, noted at 5 degrees) is surrounded by near, mid, and far peripheral vision. The analogy held for me: A peripheral methodology is one that–like peripheral vision–is characterized by an increasing distance from the central field of vision. Again, the subject remains at the center; it is the perspective of the viewer that shifts. The peripheral allows us to catch that glimpse, see “out of the corner of our eye.” The lack or loss of peripheral vision (tunnel vision) “occurs when your peripheral or ‘side’ vision, deterioriates, or is lost altogether. The result is that you may only be able to see things in a small circle directly in front of your eyes, as if you were looking down a tunnel” (The Eye Institute).
Let me take a quick step back before I close. Disclaimer: I do not want to suggest that feminist historiographers have viewed their subjects with tunnel vision. That’s simply not the case as our historiographic methods have enacted peripheral principles (a matter I’ll take up in a later post by illustrating how historiographers’ practices engage the peripheral), but we have not yet named and systematized those methods, those practices, those principles into a single, overarching feminist methodology.