Archive Huntress

Memories bleed all over the archives; yet, to whom those memories belong, what purpose do they serve, and what role do we have in handling them become questions of investigation. The readings for this week take our work in the archives in put it in conversation with the public: Is there a democratizing element to the work we do? How might archives participate in a shared cultural memory that moves across generations? How do we construct, coopt, and perhaps craft memories to serve the purposes of history and public memory? And finally, how is the present supposed to manage, if at all, the memories of the past?

In “Between Memory and History,” Nora personifies history as the monster that tramples over and ruins memory. Memories are tied to site, while history is tied to events; memories signal a present consideration, while history abides by past representations. Nora argues that history and memory are continuously in contestation with one another: “History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (Nora 9). Further, “With the appearance of the trace, of mediation, of distance, we are not in the realm of true memory but of history” (8). Such depictions of history as a conqueror and memory as the fleeting victim trouble how we capture the ephemeral nature of memory. Memory seems to operate within a small purified space, where, perhaps, language can’t even capture it. It seems like once we’ve colonized memories for the purposes of history, we’ve done injustice to those memories altogether. After delineating three types of memory—archive-memory, duty-memory, and distance-memory—Nora calls for archival work as a way to “delegat[e] to the archive the responsibility of remembering” (13). But how is memory captured? Is it viscerally felt? Can we arrest it through language?

Ekaterina Haskins identifies a similar problem of amnesia in a much different archive in her article “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age.” Haskins argues that in the rise of digital technologies, there exists a “contemporary public obsession with memory and the acceleration of amnesia” (401). The Digital Age has put concerns of forgetting and obsolescence at the forefront of our digital practices. She sees digital users archiving everything, while posing questions concerning the function of memorializing the past and for whom and to what ends. The internet carries promises—promises of “representational diversity, collective authorship, and interactivity” (405)—that arguably exist in theory but perhaps not always in practice. Blogging practices “may breed cultural and political insularity and lead to a fragmented body politic” (407). I buy Haskins’ hesitations, and her article causes us to question if such self-archival practices participate in a historical consciousness or a memorial consciousness. In her context the lines between memories as individual and histories as communal become blurry. Digital technologies have obscured the distinctions between audience and writers, further highlighting the “frailty of memory and its dependence on the continuing, communal participation” (403).

Haskins’ piece emphasizes the constructedness of the archive and the histories that come out of it, and the two readings thus far seem to place memory in a pure, untouched or untainted space. Johnson’s chapter outlines three different strategies of remembering: 1) the evolutionary strategy; 2) the genealogical strategy; and 3) the semantic strategy. Drawing from rhetorical historian Bruce Gronbeck, Johnson’s chapter foregrounds what purposes the past mean in our present context. By locating the different memories surrounding lobotomy and psychosurgery, she argues that different contexts at different moments in time have participated in the “rhetorical management of memory” (148)—a strategy I see so present in my own archival meanderings. Johnson argues that a rhetorical engagement with the past creates an ongoing dialogue in the present, and I find this notion persuasive. With that, though, also comes the aspects of management and constructions, which seems to answer the question, do memories exist in a pure, untouched space, with a short “no.”

I’ve encountered Olson’s piece, “Places to Stand: The Practices and Politics of Writing Histories,” a few times now, and each time I read through it, I feel humbled by her reworking of the place of learning and inquiry in academic work. In Olson’s words, “we do better service to the histories we present when we position them and ourselves as parsing understanding—fully acknowledging that we will sometimes, maybe often, be wrong—than when we focus on emptying or evading the ethical morass our studies inevitably roil” (80-81). I’m both comforted and terrified by these words. Drawing on her own temporal and spatial movement for research, Olson reminds us that disorienting ourselves to new places and new times causes us to talk less from a place of privileged lecture and more from a place of curious inquire. So far, so good. But what about when we just get it wrong? On what grounds can we make claims for the advancement of rhetorical theory?

I think Olson has an answer in our very approach to rhetoric. Burke trends throughout each of the pieces for this week’s reading, and Olson uncovers the limits of Burke’s theories of constitution through a case study of Ecuadorian rhetoric. “Identification,” central to the notion of a constitution, “is a matter of conditional prompt and conditional response and is motivated by and situated within a shifting field of scenes and agents” (88). Constituting a people—identifying a national citizen in front of a national audience—are processes of belong; seeing rhetoric in its verb—doing—sense, Olson argues, might cast the field’s penchant for a spoken or written outcome in a new light. If I follow Olson correctly, then I’m persuaded by this notion of rhetoric as a communicative process, which asks rhetorical critics to consider not only (and maybe not immediately) the product of one’s communication as rhetorically worthy of study, but also (and mainly) the doing of one’s communication as the meat of what counts as rhetorical.

A question for rhetorical historians: How do we, and should we even, assess rhetorical intentionality? I like the move to place inquiry front and center along with a shift in mentality that figures rhetoric in the verb form, as opposed to only the noun, but I’m wondering how and if we weigh intentionality alongside something like effect. Let me turn to my own case study to try and illustrate my problem. I’m looking to the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, often referred to as the Meese Report, from the mid 80s. The Commission responded to a failed attempt from 1970 to censor pornography, but the second time around, strange bed fellows seem to be made between radical feminists and social conservatives. Several writers and activists, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin, all responded to the event explaining that the Commission details a misguided use of the feminist agenda to censor what these folks considered “obscene.” From what little coverage I’ve seen from Attorney General Meese, I’m gleaning that he is using discourse from radical feminists that speaks to the exploitation of the female body to censorship ends. To make matters one step messier, it seems like this commission in particular puts “sexual violence” into the public’s linguistic repertoire after the commission was released.

So, to ask my question again, how do we capture rhetorical intentionality and assess it alongside rhetorical effect? On the one hand, there is a positive effect at play here for feminists—people ostensibly start noticing (and maybe even caring) about sexual violence and its pervasiveness. On the other, sexual violence makes waves in the hands of figures who don’t actually aim to help eradicate its occurrence. In Olson’s piece co-authored with Debra Hawhee, they revive the status of diachronic scopes by looking for the “residual accumulation of topoi,” which seems to me a very compelling way to try to unravel sexual violence as a term recognized by the public. I’m also thinking about Olson’s piece co-written with Casas, where they foreground Guaman Poma’s rhetorical maneuvering. Most intriguing to me is their use of copia as a way to generate an audience. The Meese Report definitely generates an audience; this audience just so happens to form strange alliances.

At what point does one get to claim that they have hit the limits of the archive? How do we differentiate not searching in the right places from confronting the limits of an archive? When can I claim being limited by the archive?

I’m uncomfortable admitting my comfort in the readings this week. In terms of my own project, I’ve felt a bit jumbled by what I want to look at and what questions seem answerable from an archive. After working on a project for another class I’m taking, I decided to return to my earlier quest for this class to search for some sort of history or rape kits, sexual assault evidence kits, rape testing, or any other potential term branded onto the process of gathering forensic evidence for the purposes of sexual assault. I have fragments—I know rape kits came about in the late seventies and I see them popping back up in the late 80s continued in use still today. I can gather vaguely an evolution of purpose—rape kits were first intended to mine raped bodies for DNA and now they seem to claim “force” and even “consent.” But in terms of finding an actual archive that can frame the boundaries of a project and an accompanying question, frustratingly, I feel like I have nothing.

As Arondekar reminds us, in terms of archival work, “rarely is it a simple matter of revealing secrets that are waiting to be found” (Arondekar 27). Within this week and last, I’ve searched through the Wisconsin Department of Justice, police and FBI files, Department of Health and Social Services, Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Women’s Resource Office Records, and yet, I can’t seem to find a trace or reference to rape kits or even evidence. I worry I’m looking in the wrong places; I wonder if I’ve broadened my scope too wide; I’m at a loss for where to hunt next. Should I even be looking in the archive? Arondekar notes the archives “fiction-effects (the archive as a system of representation) alongside its truth-effects (the archive as material with ‘real’ consequences)” (Arondekar 12). I do wonder about what the lack of recognition rape kits hold in the archive means, but then the question becomes whether or not I should even be looking there? Archives hold weight and persuasive freight: “even though scholars have foregrounded the analytical limits of the archive, they continue to privilege the reading practices of recovery over all others” (Arondekar 12). But are the archives unfit for a project on rape kits?

I’m drawn to Morris and Rawson’s notion of ephemerality that plays out within and beyond the archive: “archives as a whole can function outside or beyond the specific materials collected within them” (Morris and Rawson 76). They argue that queer archives debunk the state’s claim to evidence with a capital “E,” and I want to find that same claim play out in the archive for my own work. Rape kits hold a similar unrefutable, beefy claim for testimony, and they’re certainly getting a lot of attention today given the congressional hearings over the rape kit backlog. So, why can’t I find anything if I know what appears to be a birth date of 1977? How can I piece together what little fragments I have? Where should I be looking?

Perhaps a legal history or even an oral history is where I need to go next. It’s frustrating to continue hunting without feeling large amounts of success. What’s even more frustrating is the fear I have if Membe’s right to suggest archives do the work of “instituting imaginary,” what does it mean that I can’t seem to find anything concerning rape evidence and/or testimony? Where are the women’s voices, their representations, their bodies in these archives? Most of what I’ve looked at so far holds an institutional veil, coming from the mouths of those connected to either government bodies or even advocacy efforts with national oversight. Knowing what we know about the small rates of reporting when it comes to sexual assault, am I wrong to be hunting for voices that speak to an experience? Should I forgo hunting for a conversation about the kit that attempts to stand in for an individual and her voice in the court of law?

Jensen’s methods of uncovering the grid in which rhetorical messages circulate, clash, and co-opt one another provides compelling theories for how scholars should consider rhetoric’s energy and movement. I appreciate her continued focus throughout this catalogue of readings on a message’s vehicle (phrase) used in the service of a larger social idea (tenor). Such micro attention towards a message’s structure, distribution, affect, circulation, and possible repurposing offers the through line to build the larger ecological networks in which Jensen finds her discourses of study, whether they be sexual education or reproductive (in)fertility. I’m persuaded by her work on metaphors, public vocabularies, and finally (and especially for my work) discursive bodies deployed for rhetorical ends.  

In “Metaphorical Invention in Early Photojournalism,” Jensen and her colleagues locate two historical events before and after the advent of photojournalism to highlight the rhetorical work of an image. Jensen and her colleagues underscore how “social change occurs in conjunction with the use of innovative metaphors to describe experiences and relationships” (Jensen, “Metaphor Invention,” 335). Because metaphor often mimics the processes of reality, the image allows readers of the NYT to see the Shirtwaist Factory Fire as a synecdoche to capitalist greed. Seeing bodies (tenor) through the frame of consumer goods (vehicle) demonstrates larger progressive era critiques of worker consciousness, which opens up opportunities for labor and social change. The body, Jensen illustrates, contains affective capacity; visualizing the metaphor of the body as consumed creates a vocabulary aimed at justice. In short, silent, and in this case dead, bodies can and should be seen as having metaphorical (and rhetorical) power.

In “Using Science to Argue for Sexual Education in U.S. Public Schools,” Jensen showcases how 1913 Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Ella Flagg Young turns inward towards circulating discourses to link sexual health to broader discourses on health. Tapping into what Celeste Condit calls a “public repertoire,” Jensen locates the discursive avenues onto which Young can distribute a message, while packaged under the guise of broader publically accepted conversation on health, striving to shake up then current textual landscapes concerning sexual education (Jensen, “Using Science,” 236). Young’s fragmented rhetorical maneuvering actually offers readers a way to assess her strategies as successful. In both of these two articles, Jensen’s focus on maneuvering—movement, distribution, cooptation—speak to a new framework or gaze I would like to take up in my own work. Highly attuned to public reception, Jensen is able to expand her focus to the macro level while still accounting for specific rhetorical events at the meso level and even rhetorical strategies deployed at the micro level. Such an attention towards rhetoric’s ecology creates an analysis that speaks to rhetoric’s liveliness—it’s energy and capacity to move—which has been a focus of our class’s conversation. It helps that much of Jensen’s work focuses on bodies in public; however, the way she articulates discursive play or manipulation offers a much more enticing way to approach a rhetorical effect.

In her 2015 QJS piece, Jensen moves these ideas of rhetorical movement one step further by bringing Jenny Rice’s work on ecologies into the frame. Rice argues that discourses don’t circulate top down; rather, rhetorical messages mingle across a “dynamic ecology of discursive and material processes, events, and enactments” (Jensen, “Improving Upon,” 331). From Rice’s concept of an extended half life, we begin to see how discourses fracture, build, and ramify to create new, modified, and even different messages. The focus of this piece considers how popular, lay audiences appropriate technical language, which creates a rhetorical encounter that blends the spheres of argumentation.

I’m on the verge of obsession with Jensen’s work, but to avoid digressing, I want to close this post by pointing towards two questions that come out of Jensen’s work in relation to my own.

1) How do messages change? In short, through discursive maneuvering by multiple audiences. Jensen’s work points to the circulation of a message, its affective response, and the potential for repurposing, and I’m thinking through how radical feminist messages often folded into larger, more moderate organizations (such as NOW). I’ve gathered quite a bit of archival data that speaks to the late 70s and early 80s; however, much of this information has already begun to gain wider spread public attention. Last week, I returned to texts that underscore how anti-rape movements had close ties with anti-pornography groups. In 1982, the New York Radical Feminism group put out the “Coalition for Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism” pamphlet, putting women’s liberation in the context of anti-pornography institutional reform. But, the New York Radical Feminism group didn’t always speak to anti-pornography concerns or the National Organization on Women more broadly. The New York Radical Feminists once debated the sexual revolution, interpersonal power of men, and leftist consciousness raising more broadly that spoke to institutional recognition of women without speaking to institutions specifically. So who were they speaking to and what were they saying? That’s where I want to go. I stumbled upon information concerning the 1968 Jeanette Rankin Brigade that targeted the Miss America pageant, as well as a 1969 Village Voice article by Vivian Gornick titled “The Next Great Moment in History is Theirs.” I’m interested in the discourse that happened before radical feminists folded into larger (and arguably more moderate) movements. What did anti-rape arguments look like before they were placed in the context of anti-pornography debates? Where do I find these radical feminists?

Without having read Campbell’s revisionist history of rhetoric, I’m tempted to say I side with Biesecker. I’ve grown up academically in the legacy of poststructuralist and postmodern interventions of the subject, and the poststructuralist in me knows to be very weary of claims concerning the ideology of individualism. Biesecker argues that Campbell, in bringing women’s voices to the conversation, has actually reaffirmed and resolidified the male patriarchy at the center of our field’s history by showing how and where individual women have performed rhetorically that can be included in this canon. By turning to Foucault and then Derrida, Biesecker calls upon scholars to read for resistance, deconstruct every context of power when entertaining the female rhetor because we know all too well that “subjects are effects of their sociopolitical, historical, economic, and cultural contexts” (154). While there are nuances to this debate that I am yet to be completely sold on (i.e. how techne can be deployed for consciousness-raising), Biesecker opens the door to consider how the lenses and frameworks we bring to the table might already be inhibiting our gaze.

So how do we read for resistance? What orientations to the field must we have in order to equip ourselves with this analytical viewpoint? What counts as a worthwhile subject or rhetorical object worthy of study? Posed by Royster, these questions echo Biesecker and remind us in a Foucauldian way how the context has always been constructed to shape our ideas about a rhetorical subject, ultimately limiting our perception of what constitutes a credible rhetorical subject. Within Biesecker’s response to Campbell, she points to Gayatri Spivak and her scholarship on contesting histories, which helps us unfold the field’s penchant for active and passive speakers that taints our capacities to challenge the authority of the center. Laden in that argumentative turn to Spivak lies a question that selfishly interests me—can and should we look and listen beyond traditional conceptions of voice when assessing rhetorical value?

In her landmark essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Spivak, also following Foucault while influenced by Derrida, traces how Western histories have failed to understand subaltern voices so much so that they escape legibility. Her critique that postcolonial studies has in effect reinscribed colonial perspectives mirrors the work at play with in this Biesecker-Campbell debate. Plagued by a logocentric, Western assumption that intellectuals must speak for the subaltern, postcolonial studies falls trap to the same critique Biesecker has for Campbell in that by shedding light on female rhetors we should include in the canon, the canon maintains its patriarchal and unchanging center as the history of rhetoric.

There’s a parallel here I want to tease apart in my own project. Confronting Maria Bevacqua’s Rape on the Public Agenda last week in the archive threw a wrench into my approach for researching second-wave feminism and a historical-rhetorical take on the national conversation of rape. While I know that finding this text doesn’t make my entire project a futile effort, it does provoke me to step back this week and consider why and how my work needs to be different. Bevacqua claims that in the 1970s atmosphere of “get tough on violence,” once second wavers gained attention from political heads, radical feminism dulled for a more institutional approach towards mitigating sexual violence. This shift towards police and legal sites of response left the argument for reclaiming women’s bodies to take a backseat in the conversation. If I’m understanding the Biesecker-Campbell debate correctly, then a parallel exists through this affirmation of power at the center—that being our legal institution and its capacity to fight crime. So what happens to reclaiming the body?

In my chaotic fury to reevaluate my question, I turned to some notes from last year’s Center for the Humanities’ conversation, “Confronting Campus Rape” that dealt with this historical comparison of rape conversations. Claudia Card, who was a professor of philosophy on this campus and also completed her undergraduate degree here at Madison, commented on how the early second-wavers made claims to violence, not institutions, whether those be campus or legal institutions. Campus responsibility, while a necessary argument, masks the public’s ability to understand the core of rape—sexual violence.  

What interests me now, if I can try to put together the threads among Biesecker, Royster, and now Spivak, is this concern over what do we look at and how do we hear when we ask a question concerning women’s voices? If women first started the conversation on rape by turning to violence inflected onto and into their bodies, what audiences chose to listen or turn away? What might a woman who used her body rhetorically to illustrate violence tell us about the limits of our gaze? Do we qualify this speaker as a failed rhetor?

Taking point from Derrida, Carolyn Steedman opens her text using Archive Fever as a springboard to interrogate the feverish quality of the archives by which subsequent scholarship has been so persuaded. The historian working in the archives holds a deep “desire to recover the moments of inception” (5)— moments that interrupt the larger narrative leaving the researcher with the choice—an opportunity—to inherit that event into our cultural memory. Feverish, anxious, and ephemeral, these moments haunt us with the recognition of authority we hold to tell a story, often pitched as the story. Tacitly flooding throughout my read of Steedman’s text are the voices of thinkers we’ve read so far in this class who remain acutely aware of the anxiety produced by this kind of work (Foucault, Vivian, Baliff, and Farge come first to mind). These opportunities of inception remind me of an innocent childhood moment when a child witnesses something they weren’t intended to see. For a brief moment, the child remains in a state of haze, both excited and distraught by that same choice the researcher holds over whether or not to share such knowledge with someone in authority—a fleeting state of undesired power.

Steedman proposes quite provocative questions about the process of history, the construction of narrative, and the role of a researcher. While theoretical in nature, these questions propose two fundamental concerns with which rhetoricians continuously grapple: what authority do we have to tell a story and what modes are available to communicate that story? To tackle the first question, I want to address the aspect of the gaze.

With what Steedman calls an erotic gaze, we hunt and sift through documents in the archives for two reasons: first, to evaluate, modify, and enhance the larger historical narratives circulating throughout society often understood as “facts”; and second, selfishly and feverishly to fulfill our own cravings to eavesdrop into the lives of others, to know the answers to our own burning questions. Yet, Steedman reminds us that “the Historian who goes to the Archive must always be an unintended reader, will always read that which was never intended for his or her eyes” (75). Enter fever symptom #1.

I’ve decided to work from the research question that asks when rape became a national problem, and in order to do that, I’ve been tracing a linear trajectory of voices from roughly the early 1960s to the mid 1980s—a time frame constructed by me based on my own perceptions, readings, and intuitions concerning the second-wave feminist agenda. So far, I’ve built a network of what I would call official voices (special interest groups, NGOs, federal statistics, publicity, etc.). The fever begins when I stumble upon these unofficial voices, where I know I am not the intended audience. The letters between friends and colleagues, the personal notes from a chapter meeting, or the journal of an unknown member of a Milwaukee subgroup of the National Organization for Women—these are the voices that haunt me. I eavesdrop on their conversations, frantically sift through their thoughts, wondering if I’ve just stumbled upon the goldmine that will drive my analysis, or, I wonder, if their words are merely an outlier in the conversation—how will I trust what they’re saying in privacy? I’m an unintended reader; with what confidence can I claim their purpose and intention?

To address the second question, we have to consider the role of narrative and how it appeases our Westernized proclivities to start from the beginning. Narratives are “modes of perception and ways of thinking,” yet narratives hold the power “to attach to the real world an order and form it does not intrinsically possess” (149). Enter fever symptom #2.

My research question essentially asks a temporal question: when does rape become a public, national problem? To ask that, I’ve charted out a chronological trajectory that assumes an “unspoken starting point” (150). My evidence is time sensitive; I’m searching for voices that speak of the problem of rape directed to a public audience. Not only am I concerned about my gaze, as well as the anxiety over whether or not I’m looking at the right archive, I now wonder if I’m building a narrative that falls trap to the narrative impulse rooted in “once upon a time.” Feverish.

History writing is a technology of memory; with writing history comes much power, power that I’m uneasy about holding. Towards the end of Steedman’s text, she recovers the problem of writing that plagued some of our earliest rhetoricians, which Derrida then recovered. While at the core of writing lies “temporariness and impermanence,” it’s public perception is often understood as permanent and authoritative (148). Narratives re-describe the world and simultaneously structure human behavior. The archives hold an ephemeral quality in all their stuff-ness made present through writing. Writing is all we have, so while we can’t abandon it, we must constantly recognize its power and the power we as writers hold to sway perception.

On September 28, 1972, Susan Brownmiller exchanged correspondence with James Aronson—a fellow colleague in the field of journalism and personal friend—detailing her then recent project on rape. “[R]ape,” she says, “is a political crime against women,” where, “the entire society suffers.” In other words, Brownmiller defines rape as a collective problem—a problem not only between two people, but also with regard to political rights and ethical recognition. Three years later, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape hit bookshelves across America making Susan Brownmiller and the “problem of rape” household names.

After tinkering around with sexual assault rape kit examinations and dabbling in anti-pornography campaigns in the past two weeks, “the problem of rape” has now become my object of analysis. Specifically, I wonder, at what point did rape become apart of the national conversation? When did rape become political? And on what communicative grounds did Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, and their colleagues sit in order to have the capacity to pitch and publicize their own feminist agendas surrounding men, rape, pornography, and women’s rights more broadly.  What rhetorical landscape fostered their calls for political attention?

Surely second-wave feminists had much to do with the advocacy efforts aimed to interrupt political and cultural conversations concerning women’s rights, but who or what introduced rape as a national concern calling for political repercussions? Much of my research thus far has been plugging terms and folks I’m familiar with from the late 60s and 70s who could be tied to conversations on violence against women, but I’m quickly learning that the “violence against women” we know today looks different in a post-second wave feminist context. So, the questions now become, who or what introduced rape as a national concern? What other discussions primed these communicative avenues to consider political responsibility? And, if consent can be considered a recent phenomenon (I would argue we’ve made that turn within the last ten years), what was the “problem” centered around in its nascent political stages? Second-wave feminists helped catapult the conversation, but there must have been existing discussion or debate over how to gain national attention—how to define the problem. This is where I want to go. 

In 1968, the New York Times released the article, “What Women Can Do to End Violence in America” placing a critical lens on cavalier violence circulating through media entertainment and plaguing our nation’s children: “It rams its way into our homes, on the television screen that brings instant brutality and savagery, introducing children in the ease casualness with which life can be humiliated, tormented, twisted. The need to respect the fragility and preciousness of life is blotted out by the thousands of good-man-bad-man deaths that make up the television-tube feeding of children.” Echoing similar arguments made by anti-pornography advocates, this journalist sees violence in terms of consumption—we champion violent action in films and television, our children glue themselves to these screens, and eventually they grow up to be rapists. Perhaps this is a crass distillation, but at its baseline, the argument fits both this journalist’s and anti-pornography campaigns I’m seeing. In a similar way that Julie London, a member of Women Against Violence Against Women recorded in her journal the problem of album covers carelessly showcasing women in subversive positions dominated by men in 1976-1978, this NYT article considers violence’s dissemination through screens to children, as well. So, to be blunt just once more, children see violence, and they grow up to be rapists—or so the story goes.

We see anti-rape campaigns in fuller force towards the end of the seventies, but I’m interested in what paved the way for this movement. How do we move from distinguishing the problem of rape proliferated by women in the work force leaving work late at night only to be met by stranger-rapists (last week’s discovery) to entertainment and pornography as the root of sexual evil that taints our children (this week’s discovery) to an eventual swing in the nineties of victim blaming and then our current conversation around consent? How has the problem been debated, defined, and pitched to the public?

I’ve stumbled on the following feminist journals and magazines that I plan to turn to in the following two weeks as sites to explore how rape is gaining national attention: Women: A Journal of Liberation, The Feminist Press, The Second Wave: A Magazine of the New Feminism, and A Journal of Female Liberation. But, after chatting with a historian friend of mind, she gave me a different idea to try first in order to gain the broad strokes landscape of this question of national attention. I plan to skim through proquest in order to find the headlines of newspapers between the time periods of 1963 (when The Feminist Mystique came out) to 1983 (when anti-rape appears to become a movement in its own right). This will hopefully allow me to glean what kinds of stories are being told about rape and what characterization it has across the nation.

I entered the archives last Wednesday wanting to know more about “rape kits”: What projected their initiation? How did society understand their purpose? Were they accepted or rejected by medical professionals/activists/mainstream America/legislatures in terms of their capacity to improve evidentiary needs for rape adjudication? In short, what were people saying about them?

Once I got into the archives and started messing around with the library’s search engines, I quickly realized that my question was both too narrow and too broad. In terms of its narrowness, I was operating off of two names—Louis Vitullo and Martha Goddard—who were criminal investigators from Chicago that may have coined the first making of a “rape kit” in 1977. (I discovered this prior to last Wednesday through some basic newspaper searching.) Yet, those names were not getting any hits in the search engines I was using. So, I backed up and tried a number of different terms surrounding sexual assault forensic exams, found those similarly narrow, and finally zoomed way out to research “rape” and “sexual assault,” leading to a number of broad potential outlets.

I decided to get my hands dirty with something, settling for a box including documents from the Wisconsin National Organization for Women’s Records (NOW). While this box didn’t lead to a concrete path, I did discover that in this time (late 1970s), activists were considering the needs of rape due to more women present in the workforce. So, I went back to searching the anti-rape movement from the 1970s and post second wave feminism, which helped me consider a new question: How has rape been defined across time?

Taking a pause with the actual archive itself, I returned to the reading for this week, which helped me think through the questions we ask ourselves at the moment of entryway to the archive. Zarefsky tells us that as rhetorical historians, our task is to decipher “how messages are created and used by people to influence and relate to one another” (30). So the question, how do people understand the problem of rape across time, remains fitting for this stage in light of Zarefsky. History can be thought of as a “series of rhetorical problems, situations that call for public persuasion to advance a cause or overcome an impasse” (30). So, if in 1977-1979, NOW pushed for exposing the prevalence of rape because more women were entering the workforce, thus leaving work late at night, rape—defined in this limited archive—suggests a stranger-imposed assault—a rape committed in the back ally, late at night, in an unlit area by a stranger. The messages by this Wisconsin chapter point to urban areas in Milwaukee and Madison as being littered by rapists who law enforcement needs to take seriously.

The rhetorical problem of calling on officials to take seriously the prevalence of sexual assault remains today. Now, in addition to considering law enforcement, we consider college campuses, politicians, and rapists themselves as sites of response and responsibility. If we believe Zarefsky, who seems to follow Foucault in that the task of the (rhetorical) historian is to trace the development of an idea—this one being “rape”—across networks of discourse and legibility throughout time, then a return to the rhetorical situation seems most useful at this moment: Who is complaining about rape and to whom? In what way do they define the problem of rape (between what parties, in what areas, etc.), to whom do they define it, and what calls of action do they make?

Tracing, tracing, tracing…

Okay, yes, I can trace these discourses, aim to expose how their classifications are bolstered by grids of power, and ultimately recover how the problem has morphed across time, but the searching…what about the searching before we even get to the reporting of an issue?

Michelle Baliff calls into question our frameworks for evaluation in her piece, “Writing the Event: The Impossible Possibilities for Historiography,” and I’m persuaded by the anxieties she delineates in this piece. Historical thinking has been plagued by temporality and the demands of chronology. Our faculties to know stem from the impulse to place an event within a larger network of legible narratives. Or, if we like Vivian’s notions of witnessing better, “Witnessing rhetorically evokes and shapes collective perceptions of time so as to commend appropriate historical, political, and moral judgments. It organizes a discursive window on the past through which audiences are given to understand historical chronology and potentially steer its trajectory toward the ends of symbolic, if not procedural, justice” (207). If I understand Baliff correctly, witnessing and coming to know are inherently problematic. Such narrative appropriation is violent; to import historical events into a series of moments that cleanly decipher the linear sequence ruptures the potential to see the unforeseeable—to know what is not yet known or understood. For the rhetorician in the archive, Baliff’s anxieties beget the question of context—how much context do we allow ourselves in the moment of touching the archive? How much recognition do I have of the anti-rape movement, second wave feminists, and even Kitty Genovese when searching for rape kits? How do I build a network of search terms that understands Baliff’s claim that histories are always hospitable when forced into legible and intelligent frameworks? How are we to receive the event in an archive as researchers? Perhaps we just keep stumbling stubbornly as Farge leads us to believe.