Leon Successfully Defends Dissertation

Building a Chicana Rhetoric for Rhetoric and Composition: Methodology, Practice, and Performance

Chicana rhetoric frequently begins with the assumption that Chicanas—or typically women rhetors from Mexicana origins—are altered (or alter) through employing rhetoric. Studies on Chicana rhetoric generally center on language and the use of metaphors in Chicana literary writing. While this previous research has been instrumental in building a richer history of scholarship on Chicana writing, what Rhetoric and Composition as a field has failed to do is pay attention to what Chicana rhetoric can teach us about rhetoric in general—both how it occurs in the world and how we must then study such activity. The questions then that ground this dissertation project are quite simple: If Chicana identity is self-selected, boundaried, and it has something about it that is shared—a set of practices, or beliefs—then what is it that makes it Chicana? How does “Chicana” operate in the world rhetorically? And, methodologically, how do we study such moments of rhetorical performance?
To address these questions, this dissertation project collects historical moments of Chicana rhetoric in scholarship and activism. “Chicana” operates in these spaces as it mediates scholarly activity; is itself a political act of identification; and contributes to the remembering and revisioning of histories. To collect such moments, this project turns to the poetic and philosophical writings by Chicanas, interviews with Chicana identified scholars, and the activist and archival practices of one of the first Chicana organizations. I first demonstrate that Chicana identity is rhetorical in that it is ideological. Claiming one  is a Chicana carries explicit political implications that mediate performances of what it means to be a Chicana. One of the invocations of Chicana identity is the use of shared methodologies for making meaning about experience.
The primary focus of the dissertation is based on archival research on one of the first Chicana activist organizations, Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). Utilizing theory in the flesh as a methodological heuristic to analyze documents contained in the CFMN archival collection, I examine the way Chicanas use experience to make things: like organizations, histories and practices. By looking at the organization as an instantiation of Chicana identity, I examine the way that Chicana subjectivity is evident in the emergence of the organization. Rather than focus on what are perhaps the more typical and public performances of Chicana identity, experience as shaping Chicana practice is read in the nuances and mundane details of the organization and in the act of archiving.
This dissertation demonstrates that Chicana rhetoric when read alongside Rhetoric studies demonstrates a shift in methodology that accounts for rhetoric collectively and connectively. This dissertation, then, will prove that learning about the rhetoric of Chicana is not only beneficial to Chicana scholars but can be used to complicate the field of Rhetoric and Composition and its conception of rhetoric in the world.