Rhetoric on the margins of the second wave: Feminism, cultural memory, and the transformation of the political

Popular feminisms, often under the rubrics of "Third Wave" or "Postfeminism," distance themselves from this recent past through homogenizing and essentializing narratives of the political practices of this earlier generation of women. Today, very little is remembered, regardless of political classification, about the movement of women termed "second wave" feminism. Recently, the emergence of new forms of political practice around the politics of gender and sexuality, as well as the re-articulation of certain anomalous feminist discourses (such as those surrounding the SCUM Manifesto) highlights the need for a critical examination of second wave feminist texts. I read Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto , Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation, and Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey, across the grain of both the "authorized" histories written by feminists reclaiming a recent but ephemeral past and the more popular histories and accounts of feminism which circulate within the public sphere of the United States. This examination is necessary in order to create a textured and complex understanding of the multiplicity of feminist discursive practices within the women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.;The displacement of radical forms of women's political practices necessitates not the "recovery" of certain histories, but the very "creation" of histories which reconsider the meaning of "eventfulness" and change. By examining the anomalous rhetorical practices and their infectious intensities, new conceptions of feminism's pasts can be created which have implications for our understanding of historical change, eventfulness, and contemporary feminist discursive practices. Methodologically, I am concerned with what I term "minor rhetorics," following Deleuze and Guattari's work on "minor literature." "Minor rhetorics" and the anomalous practices associated with them are never accounted for in recent molar histories of feminism, even though they exerted significant force within feminism.