This dissertation project, which recovers the feminist invention of 19th-century actress and author Adah Menken, proves the efficacy of conducting historigraphic recoveries of heretofore forgotten and elided female rhetors. I situate Adah’s visual and written performances within the materiality of Victorian social codes, positioning her as a feminist commentator worthy of inclusion in our remembrances of feminist discourses. I use archival sources including carte de visites (CDVs) and Adah’s letters and poetry as heuristics for gendered critique, to analyze how she resisted the master narrative of Victorian society and its accompanying codes governing public and private feminine behavior. My objectives are three-fold: to use archival recovery as a method to unearth and evaluate what feminist inquiry can accomplish; to argue for the feminist intentions of a previously unknown female writer; and to offer an opportunity to discover cross-disciplinary connections for rhetorical recoveries. Feminist inquiry is itself an exemplar of rhetorical invention, the idea of making a path. In my dissertation project, I illustrate how Adah Menken blazed a path in her personal and public rhetorics. For my principal goal of asserting Adah’s importance as a feminist rhetor, I use primary sources to demonstrate that her invention and resistance provide fertile ground for vital feminist inquiry. As a secondary means of asserting the significance of archival feminist research, I also offer my Adah Menken recovery as a case study for examining ideas of resistance and subversion to dominant master narratives. For this application, I use Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Michel Foucault’s ideas surrounding the topic of resistance. Ultimately, the convergence of theoretical and practical applications for rhetorical recoveries, both of which I describe in-depth in my dissertation, serve to re-connect fields of inquiry and make them relevant to scholars across the Academe.

This project provides rhetorical and sonic exploration of listening practices, musical song, crowded subject formations and multimodal composition pedagogy. Conceptually drawing from rhetorical studies, sound studies, queer and women of color (Q/WOC) feminisms, cultural studies, affect studies, and composition pedagogies, the project maintains commitments to multiply situated knowledge production. The project's sonic inquiries and cross-disciplinary interests offer scholarly interventions primarily aimed at improving rhetoric and composition studies analytical and affective responsiveness to sonority. Secondarily, the project is aimed at increasing sound studies rhetorical responsivity and attention to personified performance techniques. The project’s first chapter argues that disciplinary distancing between rhetorical, compositional and sonic arts can be lessened through the temporal principle of kairos. This chapter also overviews key methodological concepts, offers working definitions of key terms, and glosses the project's chapter progression. The second chapter is a multi-faceted literature review that surveys the ways listening is rhetorically emplaced and affectively confined within classical and contemporary discussions of Aristotelian epideixis. This chapter notes the limits of commonly accepted and received feminist rhetorical "recovery" projects that frequently place listening in service to logos; highlights the ways listening can act as a generative method of performative "respond-ability" through certain positions; and resonantly attunes listening to two audio-visual materials: timbral tonality and rhythmic temporality. Chapters three and four analytically train listening practices on two specific genres of musical sound: protest song and EDM-pop musical productions. The third chapter analyzes singer-songwriter-activist Nina Simone’s early 1960's protest song "Mississippi Goddam" while the fourth chapter focuses on contemporary singer-songwriter Sia's EDM-pop productions for "Chandelier." Treated as case studies, these songs and artists exemplify body-subject impressionability, political disaffection from historically dominant forms of whitened, hetero-patriarchal, liberalized ideology, and the performative possibilities of crossing and crowding subject-hood through persona crafting. Following these case studies, the project concludes by offering conceptual im/possibilities and pedagogical materials for rhetorically teaching composition as a sonic art. The fifth and final chapter conceptually intervenes in rhetoric and composition's pedagogical tendencies toward elevating and espousing notions of the minimally affected, individual, authorial, agentive rhetor/writer by developing a series of activities designed to give instructional supports for scaffolding student learning and composing specific to vocalic sound and the sorts of affects engendered in listening.