"Fusa Tsumagari, a Japanese American Woman, and Her Intersectional Use of Conversational and Contrastive Rhetorical Styles"

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About the Author

Skyler Drew is an undergraduate student studying public relations at York College of Pennsylvania, with minors in professional writing and speech communication. She plans to pursue higher education in the field of rhetoric and composition upon graduation at her current institution.

Contents

Introduction

Archival Methodology

Conversational Rhetoric and Tsumagari’s Letters

Feminine Rhetorical Identity Across Cultures

Tsumagari’s Intersectional Rhetorical and Future Research Applications

Conclusion

Works Cited

Tsumagari’s Intersectional Rhetorical and Future Research Applications

All this considered, it is reasonable to claim that Tsumagari’s rhetorical approach is intersectional. Her writing choices have influences from both cultural sides of her identity—Japanese and American/Western. Her gender also shapes her rhetorical choices in the language, genres, and subject matter she chose to write about/through. Tsumagari found a way to have juxtaposing cultures coexist and pulled influence from each culture into her writing while also balancing her gender identity and using feminine rhetoric styles, feminine genres, feminine language, and discussing private-sphere subject matter commonly associated with women. There is clear evidence that Tsumagari developed an intersectional rhetorical strategy by combining conversational and contrastive rhetoric styles with respect to her cultural identity and feminine identity. In conclusion, Fusa Tsumagari had a unique rhetorical style that developed from the intersectionality of her identity. The key elements of her gender and cultural identity that combined conversational rhetoric and American and Japanese rhetorics resulted in the writing style evidenced in her letters. The intersectionality of her writing style and her rhetorical choices resulted in the effective communication and correspondence as displayed in these letters, and her writing style is unique to analyze given all the contributing factors that have shaped or influenced the overall style and effectiveness of it.

This research is valuable to the field of women’s rhetoric in that it calls into question the argument Donawerth (2011) makes, which is that conversational rhetoric died out at the turn of the twentieth century. These letters were written nearly halfway through the twentieth century and are conversational texts. Although conversational rhetoric was certainly not as prevalent as it may have been previously, it still existed in the twentieth century and was used as a reliable way of communication, perhaps especially for women who were marginalized by society. In women’s rhetoric specifically, conversational rhetoric is a major genre that women used before 1900, and as evidenced by this paper, continued to use after.