Women’s Studies in Communication (WSC) is a scholarly journal published by the Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC) with a focus on, according to ORWAC’s website (http://www.orwac.org/Home.html) promoting “dialogue, discussion, research, and scholarship concerned with women, feminism, gender, oppression, and social change.” With such a mission, WSC has a wide range of issues and topics at its disposal and, indeed, a survey of articles published in the journal over the last four years testifies to the diversity of discussions taking place within the covers of each issue. Indeed, given the variety of issues encompassed by the scholarly umbrella of WSC, it’s somewhat difficult to provide a succinct description of the typical WSC article. A given issue of WSC may include pieces about gender in The Sopranos, Laura Bush’s work with children’s rights, feminism and “the rhetoric of integrative medicine,” and how the gender dynamics of teachers and their students can affect evaluation scores. Thus, such areas of study as popular culture, politics, medicine, and social science are brought together under the umbrella of communications studies. Though the topics may be diverse and wide-ranging, WSC is concerned, first and foremost, with a feminist scholarship that is concerned not only with issues specifically relevant to women, but with an ongoing discussion about the ever-changing identities and narratives of both sexes in a postmodern world where traditional gender roles are no longer set in stone. In this respect, WSC is by no means intended or written toward a solely female intellectual community.
WSC seems aimed at both those studying and working in the academy. Though the articles are certainly of special interest to women – particularly those in the liberal arts fields in higher education – the journal’s focus on gender is one that welcomes discussions about male-oriented issues. For instance, the Spring 2006 issue included an article entitled, “The Traffic in Men and the Fatal Attraction of Postfeminine Masculinity.” The following year saw the publication of “From Hunting Magic to Shamanism: Interpretations of Native American Rock Art and the Contemporary Crisis in Masculinity.” Furthermore, discussions about issues of gender and ways in which men and women continue to negotiate inequality in the work place and society in general: gender and video game play motivation, gender and technology (by way of communications studies), gender-linked differences in argumentation (via online newspapers).
Most of the authors published in WSC are professional scholars, many of them teaching as full or associate professors of Communications (some are Speech Communication/Public Speaking, others are simply Communications) at four-year universities. Unsurprisingly, there are also a number of Women’s Studies professors among the authors, along with scholars in such fields as law, statistics, and theater. Though I may have overlooked a name in my indexing of articles, I saw no author recurrence in the four years I reviewed. A handful of pieces were co-/group-authored, though the majority of articles were the work of an individual. The majority of contributors are women, but there was at least one male authored (or co-authored) article in each issue.
Editor since 2006, Cindy L. Griffin is a professor of Speech Communication at Colorado State University and has published books and a number of articles on public speaking and feminist rhetorics, making her an ideal choice to oversee the journal. I had some difficulty locating the name of Griffins predecessor, but I saw no noticeable change in the journal’s focus between 2005 and 2006, when Griffin took over. However, while I could find no evidence to make a direct correlation, WSC began publishing special topics summer issues in 2007, a development that could be attributed to Griffin. Prior to 2007, WSC published twice a year – in the spring and fall. However, with the Summer 2007 special issue on women and technology, the journal began a tri-annual publication schedule. Most issues consist of five to eight peer-reviewed pieces, usually three to five articles/essays and at least one (usually two or three) book reviews. The Summer 2008 issue, however, featured eighteen pieces – an unusually large number of articles for the average WSC. Perhaps the focus of this volume – motherhood and the academy – had something to do with the marked increase in content. If so, this is clearly an issue of great concern to women in higher education and perhaps one that heretofore had not received proper attention.
Though WSC does not directly deal with compositional concerns, its focus on social and feminist rhetorics offers quite a bit of critical overlap with the sort of issues of interest to those in composition studies. Communications and composition are very closely related on many levels, particularly in the study of how we construct and receive texts in various aspects of our lives. WSC is a testament to the close relationship between the two fields.
