"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

Conclusion

The original objective of this paper focused on contributing to the topic of women’s rhetoric by addressing the topic of conversational rhetoric. However, these letters add to the history of women’s rhetoric in more areas than anticipated. Tsumagari’s letters contain rhetoric that is not only conversational, but rhetoric that is multicultural as well. The letters are both conversational—given the correspondence, the subject topics, the approach to said topics, and the overall language used in the letters—and contrastive—given that these letters used a style of rhetoric that was developed from contrasting cultures with different traditions and ideals. Secondly, this analysis concluded in the argument that Tsumagari’s rhetorical style was intersectional in nature, and contributes to the evolving discussion of intersectionality in feminist literary theory. Intersectionality is a very prominent concept in today’s society and this analysis provides an argument that a woman in this situation and facing these obstacles communicated effectively with those around her in an intersectional rhetorical style.

Lastly, this research focuses on a lack of research/information that exists in the area of women’s rhetorics. Not only are Japanese American women an under-researched group in a general sense, but Japanese American women have not been researched thoroughly in terms of rhetorical theory. There was not an abundance of information available on rhetorical techniques and approaches of this group. Therefore, this research is valuable because it gives insight into an important time of history and how one Japanese American woman communicated. The analysis of Tsumagari’s rhetorical style provides a benchmark for additional research to be explored in the future. Although this research solely analyzed one woman, the Clara Breed Collection has letters from multiple prisoners of internment camps, and further research on the ones written by women would greatly contribute to the discussion of Japanese American and Asian American rhetorical styles. There is a distinct lack of research in this area, and more examination into the rhetorical styles of Asian Americans would be interesting and beneficial to the field.