Theory

Women Cloud Text Art

The theoretical patterns of gendered practices in toto necessitates a feminist-informed approach to assay how women actively participate in emergent rhetorical trends across the disciplines and beyond. Feminist practices that include contexts, performances, and impacts have occurred at specific focal points and references (Royster & Kirsch, 2012) and continue to do so with implications for empowerment. As rhetoricians, we have the responsibility to preserve various tools that affect gender equity as a whole, reflexively drawing clear rhetorical shifts "from practice to theory to practice to theory" (Royster & Kirsch, 2012, p. 19).

Specifically, analytical tactics that enhance feminist mentoring, including mediated rhetorical practices for women by women, need more solid footing in order to carve out new spaces for agency reforms. The femininity of both a rhetor and her subject under the banner of (wo)mentoring embodies a fixed unity with the challenge to capture identifications and/or consubstantialities. Here we come up with multiple ways to archive women's dynamic relationships and lived experiences, bringing more attention to how women fully engage in shaping agencies for themselves and others. The digital product then becomes generative across time and must be circulated to advance not only gender equity, but also research, scholarship, and knowledge in the field of feminist rhetoric (Royster & Kirsch, 2012).

(Re)theorizing Mentoring Digital Narratives

The use of mentoring digital narratives in support of intergenerational feminist rhetoric primarily recognizes their multiple capacities across the disciplines. In general, the following nuances of digital stories are promoted in various contexts:

* stories of digital (literacies) help us understand "socially constructed narratives, as well as the complex cultural, political, ideological, and historical contexts which shape and are shaped by those practices and the values associated with them" (Selfe & the DALN Consortium, 2013)

* feminist narratives generate awareness that "provide women faculty and students an opportunity to articulate experiences that might otherwise be marginalized" (Denecker, Blair, & Tulley, 2013)

* these accounts reveal details about their particular pasts, present, and future worlds, practices, and cultures (Berry, Hawisher, & Selfe, 2012)

Toward this, questions on how women received training, who helped or mentored them, how they accessed resources, and so forth, often reveal distinct social interconnections that constitute patterns of rhetorical practices at play. Through digital narratives, these revelations ignite cultural transformations and offer unique perspectives on mentoring based on the context of difference, wherein "who we are shapes our thinking, our conversation, our relationships, and our behaviors" (Zachary, 2012, p. 37). Akin to using feminist pedagogies in composition classrooms, the function of the mentoring digital collections in this case forwards a feminist agenda by raising critical awareness and "a sense of agency, a sense of possibility" (Hawisher, 2003, p. xvii). Hence, the idea is to make overt how mentoring relationships affect women in higher education and create leverage for all.

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