The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication

The emergence of feminist scholarship in the field of communication follows, in many respects, a semilar historical trajectory to that of feminist visibility in the culture at large. When the second wave of feminism emerged in public conscious-ness around 1970, communication scholars began to attend more closely to the role of gender in communication practices. That attention was inflected by the concerns of the women’s movement—exposing sexism and sex-role socialization, interrogating the role of power in relations between men and women, under-standing how awareness of the influence of gender requires rethinking claims of universality based on male experience and behaviors. In rhetorical studies, these emphases produced such germinal scholarship as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s 1973 essay, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron, ” which argued that second-wave feminist rhetoric could not be adequately understood through tradi-tional rhetorical models. In interpersonal communication, they led to a question-ing of deficiency models that held that male speech was the standard against which all speech should be judged, often guaranteeing that conventionally femal