A number of recent books point to the ethical dimension of feminist work in rhetoric and composition. How does the field look, and how might it further feminist aims of embodiment, critique, resilience, resistance? There’s Elizabeth Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, whose Feminist Rhetorical Resilience posits “resilience” as less a matter of individual agency and more a matter of relational and community-based action in the face of adversity. There’s Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices, in which the authors advance four strands of inquiry that define, they say, feminist rhetorical practices: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization, practices that move us beyond the ongoing rescue/recovery/reinscription of women in the rhetorical tradition and toward “an ethics of hope and care.” They write:

With an interrogation of the ethical dimensions of our work, we are suggesting that our identities, histories, and lived experiences shape who we are, how we think, and what we choose to do. . . . Rather than distancing ourselves from the complexities of this embodied-ness, we suggest instead that we attend to it, reflect on it, observe it, and critique it and that we cultivate a stance amid the chaos of it all that enables robust inquiry. (149)

Similarly, Eileen Schell and K. J. Rawson, in Rhetorica in Motion, note that the volume’s contributors explore “the roles that embodiment, emotion, and ethics play in examining and engaging one’s research methods, methodologies, and relationships with research participants” (4). In each of these, authors point to generative intersections of feminism and rhetoric, suggesting that the lay of the land is somewhat better now than it’s been. We’ve arrived. And as I confront the statistics about violence against women and am hampered in my writing by an overwhelming sense of despair, I’m heartened to hear that news. And yet, and yet, and yet. It’s not enough; our work continues.