Feminist Technical Communication

I’ve sent a draft manuscript off. Fingers crossed!

Feminist Technical Communication introduces readers to feminist technical communication and argues for rhetorical feminist approaches as vital to the future of technical communication. It takes an intersectional and transcultural approach, drawing on the well-documented surge of work in feminist technical communication in the 1990s and fusing that work with the more recent social justice turn. The result is apparent feminisms, a methodological approach that can help technical communicators, technical communication and rhetoric scholars, and those interested in gender studies to more systematically interrogate systems of power that operate based on hidden misogynies. This text seeks to revitalize and intersectionalize feminist technical communication as part of a larger social justice project.

The first of its kind to situate feminisms and technical communication in relationship as the focal point of an entire book, this project begins with a review of literature, followed by an introduction to apparent feminist methodologies. It then theorizes slow crisis, a concept made readable to technical communicators by apparent feminism. Slow crisis opens up apparent feminist subjects so that technical communicators can more readily recognize and take on social justice problems. The book then applies this original theoretical framework to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, an extended crisis that has been publicly framed with a very traditional view of efficiency that has privileged economic impact. Through rich description of apparent feminist information gathering techniques and a layered analysis, readers will see how apparent feminisms and slow crisis make space for new efficiency frames to redefine the DHD. This redefinition work has applications far beyond this single disaster, making available new crisis response possibilities that take economy into account without eliding ecology and human health.