Richard Ohmann Award for
Outstanding Article in College English
The Richard Ohmann award recognizes the outstanding articles published in the College English journal. The award is selected by a comittee recognizes the article that makes the most significant contribution to scholarship, research, theory, or pedagogy in English Studies.
Dates of Articles to be Considered: articles to be considered will be chosen from the College English volume year, September through July in the year prior to selection. The first award was given for the 2000-2001 issues of the journal.
Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World
Author, Mary Queen
In "Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World," Mary Queen presents a compelling argument that illustrates how digital discourses travel haphazardly and how such journeys give rise to new representations or re-presentations with attending consequences for relations of power. Queen situates her central argument in today's global contact zones, discussing Western appropriations of the cyber discourses of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) in which neoliberal organizations deployed RAWA's efforts in the service of other ideologies, which "often 'fix' these women within neoliberal frameworks of 'democracy' and 'women's rights,' thus erasing the multiple ways in which women across the globe use Internet technology to create and claim identities, agency, and political activism outside of the circulation of one-third world rhetorics of power" (471). Queen offers a groundbreaking feminist rhetorical analysis that contributes equally to understandings of rhetorical theory and public policy and offers clear and useful methodology for analyzing globalization of feminist rhetorics and discourse-an emergent and centrally important theme in our fields. Queen thoughtfully focuses on a substantial issue that transcends English studies and even higher education. This essay opens up, quite timely, a new space for doing feminist rhetorics.