Charlotte Hogg – författare

Innovative and engaging, From the Garden Club explores how older women in a rural town use literacy to shape their lives and community. Deftly weaving elements of memoir with scholarly theory, Charlotte Hogg describes the lives of her grandmother and other women in her hometown of Paxton, Nebraska. The literacy practices of these women—writing news articles and memoirs, working at the library, and participating in extension clubs and the Garden Club—exemplify the complexities within rural communities often unseen or dismissed by locals and outsiders as "only" women's work. Combining conversations with these women with their writing, Hogg describes and analyzes the ways they both embrace and challenge traditional notions of place and identity. Drawing on ethnographic research, composition theory, literacy studies, and regionalism, Hogg demonstrates how these women use literacy to evoke and sustain a sense of place and heritage for members of the community, to educate the citizens of Paxton, and to nourish themselves as learners, readers, and writers. Hogg relies as much on the older women, whom she richly portrays, as on interdisciplinary sources in considering how rural culture is created and sustained.

In June 2015, Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole in front of South Carolina’s state capitol and removed the Confederate flag. The following month, the Confederate flag was permanently removed from the state capitol. Newsome is a compelling example of a twenty-first-century woman rhetor, along with bloggers, writers, politicians, activists, artists, and everyday social media users, who give new meaning to Aristotle’s ubiquitous definition of rhetoric as the discovery of the “available means of persuasion.” Women’s persuasive acts from the first two decades of the twenty-first century include new technologies and repurposed old ones, engaged not only to persuade, but also to tell their stories, to sponsor change, and to challenge cultural forces that repress and oppress.Persuasive Acts: Women’s Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century gathers an expansive array of voices and texts from well-known figures including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama, Lindy West, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so that readers may converse with them, and build rhetorics of their own. Editors Shari J. Stenberg and Charlotte Hogg have complied timely and provocative rhetorics that represent critical issues and rhetorical affordances of the twenty-first century.

Charlotte Hogg takes a close look, through the example of White university sororities, at how we create and cling to subcultures through the notion of belonging, and how spoken and unspoken rhetorics contribute to this notion.Renewed calls to end Greek-letter organizations for racism and sexism, including increased scrutiny on White women’s social justice failings, have intensified. But as Hogg shows, rhetorics of belonging have always occurred amid and even in response to anti-GLO sentiment. She shows how rhetorical efforts by members for members foster belonging for insiders while also seeking to appease those on the outside. In her analysis, Hogg positions the study of rhetoric beyond traditional methods of persuasion to show how we communicate and participate in communities as citizens in subtle ways beyond speaking and writing. Through engaging narrative drawing on her experiences as a member of a White sorority, archival research, and interviews with collegians and alumni, she shows how efforts toward belonging can influence particular beliefs about womanhood in complex ways.This thought-provoking volume will interest scholars and students from a range of disciplines, including rhetoric and communication studies, gender studies, feminism, sociology, cultural anthropology, and history.