ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory » April 18th: Feminisms, Rhetorics, Herstories

April 18th: Feminisms, Rhetorics, Herstories

Plan for the Day

Your Rhetoric/al Project is due next week on Canvas by Friday, 4/26, 11:00 pm (new deadline). Then, you just have to create a 9-10 min video for you final–Due 5/02 by 11:00 pm. This is in lieu of meeting during the final exam, which we didn’t have a set date and time for earlier this semester.

Rhetoric/al Projects

I know you’ve been working on these for quite some time, so let’s figure out where we are. I’m sure some of you will have similar questions, so it will help to answer them now. Let’s take a look at the Major Assignments Page if we need to. This could be the start of a draft that’s well along for a publication venue. I hope this class has inspired you to want to analyze the rhetoric, discourse, and/or meaning making of a text, speech, etc. (purposely vague). What is persuasive about the discourse? What a priori meanings help convince audiences of something? What hidden or subtle assumptions govern an argument or presentation?

Feminist Rhetorics

This article on ThoughtCo. from Richard Nordquist was linked on March 21st’s page (4 weeks ago…), and it might be helpful in understanding the ways scholars are approaching feminisms and rhetorics (notice the plural usage). The article has an interesting point regarding the sophists and Platonists, where “sophistic rhetoric [is] a feminist rhetoric” and follows the sophists’ belief “that law and truth derived from nomoi, local habits or customs that could change from city to city, region to region”; whereas, “the Platonic tradition, of course, challenged this sort of relativism, insisting on the ideal of Truth (logos, universal laws that would be acommunal).”—cites James E. Porter, Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Ablex, 1998: 99.

  • In fact, later down the page (99—which I cite because that’s what one’s supposed to do with paginated books…), Porter defends the sophists and recognizes the following:
    “Truth is socially and culturally constituted, but that does not mean that it cannot be taken seriously. In fact, ‘what people believe’ is the basis for rhetoric.”
  • Another unpaginated quote we should discuss is this one from Anne Teresa Demo:
    “[F]eminist rhetoric frequently occurs away from the platforms and statehouses of government. Feminist scholarship in rhetorical studies, as Bonnie Dow reminds us, ‘must turn its attention to the variety of contexts in which feminist struggle occurs.'” (253–I found this page number by doing a quick Google search…it’s not difficult to accurately cite where your research comes from)
    —”The Guerrilla Girls’ Comic Politics of Subversion.” Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, ed. by Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope. Sage, 2008.
  • Lastly, citing C. Jan Swearingen,
    • “The feminine aspects of persuading that have been denigrated as seduction can be similarly rescued through an examination of the close ties among emotion, love, adhesion, and persuasion in the pre-Socratic lexicon” (128-129).
    • Earlier she notes that “the figures and traits that the Greek rhetorical theory came to assign to pistis and peitho recur among feminine qualities encoded in New Testament metaphors of the church as a bride and of the community of believers as sharing selflessly and as nurturing all nations” (128).
    • “Feminist and Marxist critiques of these Christian values emphasize faith as submission as an instrument of oppression and social control not only over women but over other underclasses as well” (128).
      —C. Jan Swearingen, “Pistis, Expression, and Belief.” A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy, ed. by Stephen P. Witte, Neil Nakadate, and Roger D. Cherry. Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

pistis: sometimes just translated as ‘faith,’ it also can mean good faith or trust.
peitho: persuasion; also, in some histories of mythology, Peitho is Aphrodite’s daughter.
Peitho is the name of the CFSHRC journal.

Although the above and our entire conversation, can’t capture the entirety of feminist rhetorics, what is your assumption of the prevailing goal of such analyses?

Biesecker’s “Towards a Transactional View of Rhetorical and Feminist Theory”

Barbara A. Biesecker is still an active scholar and now at the University of Georgia. You’ll notice she’s in the Communication Studies Department there. Rhetoric straddles Communications and English and Classics (but often with an ancient focus). Maybe if we had another entire semester, we’d dive into all the differences, but they really come down to disciplinary penchant…and gatekeeping. The three epigraphs on Biesecker’s article are from important figures:

  • Kenneth Burke: A rather important figure in contemporary rhetoric/composition theory—he even has his own society. Burke brought a focus on symbols to the study and analysis of rhetoric.
    • Our assumptions of reality are based on our indoctrination into a or several types of systems of belief: religion, Western, capitalism, Southern, etc.
  • Richard Weaver: Interestingly, this important theorist for my Master’s thesis is prominent in conservative and right-leaning intellectual circles (makes perfect sense).
  • Hélène Cixous (el-en sɪk-su): French-Algerian post-structural feminist philosopher.
    • We met another French-Algerian this semester…

Biesecker’s lament in her introduction that “there still is no scholarly journal whose specific charge is to contemplate conventional assumptions and methods of rhetorical theory and criticism by taking ‘sexual difference’ into account” (86) has been corrected, but it hasn’t been for long. The CFSHRC started its Special Interest Group at CCCC in 1994 and started its biennial conference in 1997. I’m not sure Biesecker goes to either FemRhet or CCCC.

  • p. 86 and n2: Biesecker chooses to use the term ‘sexual difference’ and explains why through Judith Butler’s point that using the term gender “implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.”
    • Some more quotes from Butler’s article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1988): pp. 519-531.
    • p. 520: “Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women’s social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology.”
    • p. 521: “the body is a historical situation…a manner of doing dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation.”
    • p. 522: “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.”
      • How so? Think of examples where women or men appear to perform roles opposite of the gender.
      • Can you think of a situation where one gender is not punished for performing the opposite gender’s prescribed role?
  • p. 87: “primarily male authored…Rhetoric is a discipline whose distinctive characteristic is its focus on public address, a realm to which women as a class have historically been denied access.”
    • “the argument on which the exclusion of women has been predicated is exposed as an alibi for sexist (cultural) politics”
  • p. 88: “it may be the case that the radical potential of the second approach is occluded by a pervasive tendency to forfeit too quickly the insights afforded by a decidedly rhetorical perspective”
  • p. 89: “Rhetoric is a discipline that dedicates itself to the particular and not to the wholly generalizable, to the contingent or provisional and not to the permanent or transhistorical, to the here and now and not to the always and already, to doxa and not to aletheia…”
    • doxa: apparent, perceived knowledge (not certainty or empirical)
    • aletheia: truth or reality
  • p. 89: “Derrida and Lacan continue to receive a less than warm reception by rhetorical theorists because both seem at best indifferent to and at worst interested in subverting the very possibility of intending consciousness.”
  • Biesecker’s thesis p. 89: “‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ can be read…as a rhetoric, as a treatise that seeks to provide women with the means by which they may, through language, actively and strategically intervene in the public sphere.”
    • Cixous argues:
      • “It is necessary that woman write herself: that woman write about woman and bring women to writing…”
      • “It is necessary that woman put herself into the text—as into the world, and into history—by her own movement.”
    • Via Ann Wilson: “the symbolic order, as is conventionally understood, only allows woman to speak in discourse which is overdetermined by The Father.”
    • Consider the discussion we had about using the language of the oppressor or simply oppression.
  • p. 91: “woman’s place is the uncanny realm of the ‘inbetween.’ She is at once both inside and outside the center and, thus, she ‘always occurs simultaneously in several places'”
  • p. 92: Care to comment on this comparison of women to birds and robbers
  • pp. 92-93: “it is precisely within and against the tyranny of the proper (what rhetoricians call the ‘appropriate’) that Cixous insists women must work. How? By doing nothing less than “stealing” or unfixing the syntax, the grammar, and the signs of the dominant discourse so as to make it possible for new meanings to circulate and ‘fly.'”
  • p. 93: “[women] can also win a rhetorical beginning by ‘stealing’ back and recoding particular signs within the phallocentric system….women can reconsolidate their sign or change its function by (re)turning to the body.
    • What does it mean to return to the body?
  • p. 93: “[Cixous] posits the move toward the body as a way into the space of the unconscious.”
    • “…a counter-hegemonic rhetoric…”
  • Well, maybe we ought to think about the features of male, phallocentric writing.

Nancy Myers’s “Cicero’s (S)Trumpet”

Nancy Myers is still active (yet I think she just retired) and just up the road at UNC Greensboro. I met her at a conference once, and a few alumni (or alumnae) of the MA program here have gone on to get PhDs at UNCG. Alison’s MILS is from UNCG, btw.

I have a story about that meeting and one about her co-edited book: Inclusive Aims: Rhetoric’s Role in Reproductive Justice. Coedited with Heather Brook Adams. Parlor P, 2024. Throwing shade and spilling tea!

Before getting into the article, let’s consider the limits of our discussion. A retelling of the post-Julius Caesar Roman Empire is beyond the scope of this class. We can use historical references to enhance our discussion, but let’s remember to bring the conversation back to rhetoric and, specifically, what might be the motives of these political figures.

  • Mark Antony: (83 BCE – 30 BCE) Roman general and admirer/follower of J. Caesar; preferred Roman empire over republican system; one of three in the Second Triumvirate.
  • (Marcus Tullius) Cicero: (106 BCE – 43 BCE) Roman senator and orator who challenged J. Caesar and any autocratic rule; he preferred the system in place: rich men ruling in an oligarchical republic…how barbaric they were back then.

By the way, the HBO series Rome (2005-2007) is a completely accurate reproduction of the historical events surrounding J. Caesar’s assassination and Octavian’s (Caesar Augustus) rise to power. Mark Antony and Cicero are prominent characters.

After reading Myers’s article on Cicero’s problems with Mark Antony’s philandering, one wonders what he would have said had he lived to see Antony and Cleopatra.

Key Points from the Article

I hope you read this article for its content, but you should also read it as a way to demystify academic publishing. You don’t need to write in a grand style with difficult-to-read prose (academese) to get published. Consider that Myers gives you a clear thesis:

The political feminine references of the Second Philippic play through society and rhetoric in at least two ways: First, they operate in the male-dominated public context by turning contemporary women into myths and by reinforcing the status quo of the public sphere through invoking the private one; and second, like the domus or private household, they become a meeting point for the different but compatible politics of both male and female Romans.

p. 39
  • p. 337: “Cicero ends the vitriolic Second Philippic against Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) by calling for a return to the republic even at the expense of his own life.”
  • pp. 337-338: “…condemn the public and private life of Mark Antony by employing the traditional and tired topoi of both the judicial and deliberative oral discourses of the public sphere.”
  • p. 338: Pamphlets for wider circulation
    • But how wide?
    • I have seen literacy rate estimates for Ancient Rome to be between 5%-15%, but does that mean the city of Rome (where I would assume a higher rate) or the entire Empire (where I would assume a lower rate in the provinces)?
    • “William Harris (1989) suggests that at no point did more than 10 to 15 percent of the population of the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean possess the ability to read, and probably far fewer could write.” (“Literacy and Education, Hellenistic and Roman Period”)
    • In the city of Rome, even vandals had to graffiti properly…
  • p. 339: “Cicero advocated a return to the republic while Antony sought sole control….Cicero used rhetoric while Antony primarily employed military force.”
  • p. 339: The Second Philippic‘s references to woman…
    • “…operate in the male-dominated public context by turning contemporary women into myths and by reinforcing the status quo of the public sphere through invoking the private one;”
    • “become a meeting point for the different but compatible politics of both male and female Romans.”
  • p. 340: Cicero shows himself to be working for the good of Rome while he portrays Antony as being self-serving and wanting power.
  • p. 341: “Women become mythic representations…pitted against suffering gentle noble wives and mothers.”
    • dignitas: “‘an aristocratic ideal of glory'”
    • auctoritas: “‘personal influence'”
  • p. 341: “Romans believed that character was an innate stable entity that was complete at birth; it did not change or develop because of experience or education ([May] 6). Therefore, dignitas reflected breeding, social position, and public achievements as well as the male’s commit ment to the state, an assumed role and code of conduct (Enos 51-52; Veyne 101-02).
  • Notice Myers’s assertion about Cicero’s rhetorical goals. Your rhetorical analyses can follow such an approach by supplying good reasons:
    • p. 341: “To create a formidable coalition against Antony, Cicero needed to under mine both a noble family background and a well-established public record…”
  • p. 342: “Antony has degraded the Antonii name…”
    • “Antony has debased his noble mother by putting her at not only the end of the procession but also behind a disreputable woman far beneath Julia’s social standing.”
    • I find it hard for one to argue being “for the people” and subscribing to such mores like social standing.
  • p. 343: “Although adultery was considered usual for males, it was less acceptable for females; women, however, could divorce as easily as men.”
  • p. 344: “A freedman was a freed slave, so his daughter was one generation removed from that social ranking.”
    • “…children of female slaves impregnated by male masters were also considered slaves…”
    • It’s good we’ve moved beyond “social ranking” in modernity…
  • p. 344: “Whether rhetoric, belief, or actuality, slavish emotion for a woman was dishonorable.”
  • p. 345: “If he cannot control his sexual desires, how can he control Rome? The emotional desire for women is considered the failing of the strong male, so Cicero weaves yet a more damning portrayal of Antony as her love slave.”
    • I guess that double standard goes back a bit.
    • Does this come up today? When and where?
  • p. 346: “Cicero emasculates Antony…”
  • p. 347: Ethos of emasculation
    • Myers never writes the word “ethos”: it only comes up in quotations and citations…
  • p. 348: Cicero as the paterfamilias of Rome.
  • p. 349: “The mingling of public and private in the birth metaphor champions patriarchal authority in both spheres.”
  • p. 349: “[the Second Phillipic] offers a somewhat unique case in Cicero’s corpus as it demonstrates the tensions of Roman culture between public and private spheres, male and female roles in politics, and oral and written rhetoric.”

Thinking about the Article as a Model for Publication

This article is different from most, nearly all, of our other readings. What do you think about it as a piece of academic writing? Beyond the topic, what is the author’s thesis, her main argument? What does this article tell us about how one picks and chooses what to present? After all, Derrida and Cixous (echoed by Biesecker above) know there is always a different place to begin (91).

In the abstract to this article, Myers claims,
This historically contextualized rhetorical analysis offers a complex understanding of Roman women as both historical entities and rhetorical representations. The article illustrates the importance of understanding not only women in the rhetorical tradition but also mythical portrayals of women as an argumentative strategy.
What did you learn about Roman women?

Next Class

Last class next week (4/25)!!! We’ll finish up with Knoblauch Ch. 6 and 7. I’m going to extend the deadline of your final paper until Friday, 4/26, so it’ll be due the day after our last class next week. Of course, it’ll be due on Canvas.