Adrienne Rich

In this lucid and innovative work, Krista Ratcliffe successfully extrapolates rhetorical theories from three feminist writers not generally thought of as rhetoricians. Ratcliffe's skillful use of her methodology demonstrates a new model for examining women's texts. Her work situates Woolf's, Daly's, and Rich's feminist theories of rhetoric within current conversations about feminist pedagogies, particularly the interweavings of critical thinking, reading, and writing. Ratcliffe concludes with an application to teaching. This well-reasoned and convincing study will appeal to a widely varied audience: women in rhetoric and composition who feel that traditional theories do not speak to them; teachers of rhetorical history who want to explore gender concepts; composition teachers who want to become more aware of gender differences and pedagogical strategies to accommodate these differences; literary theorists and speech communication scholars who wish to track new methodologies for examining gender concerns; women's studies scholars who want to continue the examination of how language constructs and reflects patriarchy; and other students and scholars who simply are interested in theories of rhetoric, feminism, and pedagogy.

"Queer theory," asserts Linda Garber, "alternately buries and vilifies lesbian feminism, missing its valuable insights and ignoring its rich contributions." Rejecting the either/or choice between lesbianism and queer theory, she favors an inclusive approach that defies current factionalism. In an eloquent challenge to the privileging of queer theory in the academy, Garber calls for recognition of the historical -- and intellectually significant -- role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism. The connections, Garber shows, are most clearly seen when looking at the pivotal work of working-class lesbians/lesbians of color whose articulations of multiple, simultaneous identity positions and activist politics both belong to lesbian feminism and presage queer theory. Identity Poetics includes a critical overview of recent historical writing about the women's and lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s; discussions of the works of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and, finally, a chapter on the rise and hegemony of queer theory within lesbigay studies.

Every woman autobiographer is a daughter who writes and establishes her identity through her autobiographical narrative. In The Voice of the Mother, Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughter's mother.

Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers' stories: Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Kim Chernin, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Nestle, Carolyn Steedman, Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mother's story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition.

Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. The textual relationship between the two narratives is unique among texts in the auto/biographical canon. This alternative practice -- in which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about her -- is equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a "self" that is more plural than singular, yet neither.

In addition to being a theoretical and textual analysis, Malin's book is also a mother-daughter autobiography and biography itself. She shares her own story and her mother's story as a way to connect directlywith readers and as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice.