Description: Explores the question of how women craft meaningful "belonging" to national, regional, and global communities when belonging as a citizen becomes untenable. Evaluates the rhetorical practices that enable alternative belongings, such as denizenship, cosmopolitan nationalism, and transnational connectivity.
Brief description: Belinda Stillion Southard is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913-1920, winner of the 2012 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Book Award.
Review Quotes:
"How to Belong offers a powerful account of how women leaders negotiate geographical and gendered boundaries of peacemaking and belonging in a transnational world. Drawing on transnational feminist rhetorical scholarship and studies in global governance, Belinda Stillion Southard interweaves an incisive analysis of the embodied rhetorical strategies of West African and South American women leaders and their imagining of cosmopolitan citizenship and in the process opens up important new understandings of feminist rhetorical agency as a politics of relation."
--Wendy S. Hesford, author of Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms