Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist History, by Jason Barrett-Fox

Feminist rhetoricians have long worked to expand the rhetorical canon, yet many women are still missing because their historical record has been erased or their rhetoric has gone unrecognized as feminist. In Untimely Women:RadicallyRecasting Feminist Rhetorical History, Jason Barrett-Fox offers a way to redress this omission through his significant contribution to medio-materialist historiography (MMH), a mode of analysis that recognizes women's historical mediation strategies and reads them as feminist. MMH uses a feminist lens to trace rhetorical histories that have gone unseen and examine how materiality can enrich our rhetorical recoveries. Barrett-Fox suggests that, through MMH, early twentieth-century feminism can be better understood today than was possible during its own time, when feminist rhetoric of mediality often could not be communicated. Recovering women's rhetoric that has gone neglected with an MMH perspective simultaneously broadens and redefines what counts as feminist rhetoric.Untimely Women attends to the medio-material agency of women working in the silent film industry whose rhetoric has gone unappreciated by our traditional recovery orientation because they were not involved in feminist movements and did not explicitly demand women's rights. Instead of using petitions, speeches, and placards, they inscribed their feminist messages and struggles against structural sexism in the media they had available to them: films, comedies, plays, gossip columns, novels, newspapers, and autobiographies. As they negotiated the private, gendered traumas of their lives, they used their medial power to scatter evidence of their survival and disperse their critiques of patriarchal power.The case studies examine the work of Anita Loos, Mae West, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius. Anita Loos was a prolific writer of films, plays, fiction, and autobiography, perhaps best known for her 1925 novella (later a play and a film) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Mae West was a famed stage and screen icon who performed, wrote, and eventually practiced mediumship as she contacted and communicated with spirits. Marcet Haldeman-Julius acted, wrote, and co-owned with her husband the world's largest socialist publishing company. These subjects were chosen for recovery and MMH in part because they challenge many of the assumptions and practices of the feminist rhetorical canon. They also met other criteria for MMH: they had access to inscriptional technology, they had facility and skill with that technology, and they used those media to inscribe their overt, covert, and distributed feminist messages. Loos, West, and Haldeman-Julius represent only a handful of the women who "sent messages of survival unhearable in their moments of creation into the void of timespace" (136).Barret-Fox argues that West, Loos, Haldeman-Julius, and other women of their time created "cold kairos: the material ability to mediate feminist critiques, acts of consciousness-raising, or stories of survival that could—or, in many cases, had no choice but to—lay dormant for huge spans of time in information storage and transmission channels, resting in the uncertain hope that a future audience might be willing and able to receive them" (41). Drawing on Marshall McLuhan's concept of "cold" media (see McLuhan and Fiore 1967), which generally provides less sensory data and subsequently requires more participation from the audience than "hot" media, Barrett-Fox argues that "cold kairos makes plain the kinds of messages that can be recovered, revitalized, brought back to life, and highlights the types of agency inherent in the medialities that hold them" (41–42). Cold kairos allows for the possibility of a message being understood across time through its "medio-material intractability" (41).The introduction communicates a sense of excitement and promise as it explains the opportunities that MMH offers feminists for recovering and understanding women's historical rhetoric. Barrett-Fox situates MMH as part of what David Zarefsky (1998) identified as the fourth sense of rhetorical history, the rhetorical study of historical events, and as a response to Sarah Hallenbeck's (2012) call to examine the role that material mediality plays in women's rhetorical historiography. This book offers medio-materialist recovery strategies to expand our methods of feminist historiography, thus also expanding our feminist rhetorical canon. Chapter 1 introduces the subjects of the book's three case studies through short vignettes. These introductory vignettes offer a fresh and engaging way of structuring a book and provide accessible and concrete illustrations of the book's argument up front.In chapter 2, Barrett-Fox unearths the feminist messages that Anita Loos inscribed in silent film, radio, and autobiography. Loos's feminist critiques were difficult to detect as she yielded to the gendered power of her day, so they have often been missed. Barrett-Fox sheds light on how she used "a strategy of medial manipulation" (47) and multiple forms of inscriptional technologies to diffract and circulate her feminist critique by hiding it in parody and embedding it in the different media platforms available to her. In her silent films, for instance, she used intertitling, a method often overlooked at the time, to critique and mock men's power and assert women's superior intelligence and writing abilities (46). An MMH-diffracted approach to her messages reads them through one another and reveals her "sneaky feminism" (66) and agency.Chapter 3 recovers West's feminist rhetoric through a transductive historiography that identifies the stages of her medio-rhetorical development and materialization. This transductive historiography traces the phases of West's medial becoming, "following her transition from living individual to physical individual, her relinquishment of internality, her embracing of pure mediality" (99). This MMH sensibility allows us to "approach Mae West's very particular feminism: the feminism of woman as positive quality, of woman without reference to anything else, of woman as pure icon" (99). Barrett-Fox first explores her performative origins, which were inspired by and modeled after her idol, Bert Williams, the great Black performer and comedian who was able to mock White audiences while still keeping them coming back to see him perform. West appropriated Williams's strategies in order carefully to craft a public self during her early performances. Chapter 2 also attends to West's medial creativity as she negotiated her early sexual trauma and then reads her as a medium for the final phase of her rhetorical process, in which she explored spiritual mediumship and practiced automatic writing. Overall, the MMH recovery of West reveals the medial methods and unique strategies she used in her journey to iconicity.Chapter 4 illuminates the understudied story of the publisher and author Marcet Haldeman-Julius. Although she co-owned the largest socialist publishing company with her husband and, indeed, bought it for him, he unequally benefited from their success and used his gendered advantages to control, abuse, and humiliate her. She embedded her feminist resistance in the two archives she constructed of her public and her private writing. Her public archive was made up of popular and widely distributed gossip columns and novels that thinly veiled her autobiography in fiction. Her private archive included letters she sent to and received from, particularly, her mother, her aunt (Jane Addams), and her daughter. Through both archives, she recorded her disappointments, traumas, survival, and struggles against her husband's patriarchal power and cruelty. But her public inscriptions were indirect and coded with rhetorical silences so that they would go unnoticed by her husband, or at least give her plausible deniability, and are more legible to present-day audiences, who can read both her public and her private archives in conversation with each other. Whether or not her husband and her readers understood that she was deriding him in particular, her dispersed inscriptional messages offered consciousness-raising and feminist arguments to her large audience and were especially complex as they used her husband's publishing company to critique him and his power. Her archives provide "material proof of her agency, even and especially in situations when her voice was muted by masculine external forces" (152). Her written and archived feminist critique is her cold kairos, the message for today's readers that she could not communicate explicitly to her wide audience in her lifetime. The analysis of Haldeman-Julius's public and private papers is rich and empathetic and made for my favorite chapter.Overall, Untimely Women offers a mode of analysis that allows us to understand and investigate the stories and rhetorical strategies of more women, particularly women whose feminism has gone unrecognized. The analysis is creative, the insights are compelling, and the cases are interesting. The inaccessibility of the language makes this text less suited for undergraduates and better suited for those already familiar with and invested in the study of material rhetoric. Regardless, this book will intrigue graduate students and researchers interested in feminism, history, and film. It will be especially interesting to those interested in material rhetoric and women's rhetorical history and serves as a great introduction to materialist criticism in general and medio-materialist historiography in particular.