Gendered Geographies of Memory: Place, Violence, and Exigency at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Abstract Although scholars recognize the importance of recovery projects that aim to recenter womens roles in black freedom struggles, when it comes to these memory practices, the woman problem of civil rights memory is more acknowledged than understood. This essay argues that memories of civil rights movements are mapped spatially and rhetorically to depict correlations among Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationship among these spatial and rhetorical configurations is termed the rhetorical geography of memory. Through an account of the rhetorical geography of memory of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this essay posits that place, violence, and masculinity animate a relationship between exigency and response, producing a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outset the conditions and possibilities for womens emergence.

published proceedings

  • Rhetoric and Public Affairs

author list (cited authors)

  • Poirot, K.

citation count

  • 13

complete list of authors

  • Poirot, Kristan

publication date

  • January 2015