The Rhetorics of Feminism

Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Popular Press

Lynne Pearce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135141813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

Is it possible that changes in rhetorical practice could alter not just how thought is expressed, but also how it is made? Through a close stylistic and rhetorical analysis of contemporary feminist writing - from the cultural theory of Judith Butler to the popular journalism of Naomi Wolf and Germaine Greer - Lynne Pearce demonstrates how feminist thought is created as well as communicated through the frameworks in which it is presented. By linking rhetorical innovation with feminist epistemology in such a direct way, this is a book that will be of immense methodological as well as theoretical interest to readers, providing valuable insight into the often mysterious processes of conception and composition.

Part 1
Pronouns

Preface

As I have already proposed in the Introduction, by far the most visible and talked-about innovations in contemporary feminist thought have been those associated with the use of the personal pronoun. While this is most commonly discussed in terms of an ‘autobiographical turn’, however (and, in particular, how ‘writing the self has become a legitimate mode of expression in theoretical as well as creative writings), this first section of the book aims to demonstrate that the variety of ways the personal pronoun has been deployed by feminist writers since the 1970s (a) far exceeds most definitions of ‘the autobiographical’ and (b) needs to be explored in relation to the use of other pronouns. In this last particular it is also important to acknowledge straight away the extent to which any discussion of narration and/or enunciation is necessarily bound up with issues of audience and address: few feminists (or rhetoricians) would, today, presume to think of a speaking writing/subject (personal or impersonal; singular or plural) as anything other than ‘dialogically’ defined. Moreover, as Don Bialostsoky (1984) so usefully reminded us when writing about Bakhtinian theory in relation to Wordsworth, any written or spoken utterance is necessarily ‘double-voiced’ inasmuch as it is directed both towards the interlocutor and the thing being talked about. He quotes Voloshinov (one of Bakhtin's co-authors) to make his point:

Every instance of intonation is oriented in two directions: with respect to the listener as ally or witness [or adversary], and with respect to the object of utterance [literally the thing/person/topic being under discussion] as the third, living participant whom the intonation scolds or caresses, denigrates or magnifies.

(Voloshinov 1976: 104–5)

The notion of an ‘object of utterance’ vying with the ostensible addressee of a text as the focus of a narrator's attention will recur frequently in the chapters that follow, yet so rich and fascinating are the issues associated with both ends of the Bakhtinian ‘bridge’ that, for the purposes of this book, I have been obliged to strategically impose an artificial separation between narration and reception.¹ Focusing, on this occasion, on the rhetorical power exercised by the narrator, my primary interest is in the power wielded (or not) by the ‘I’s and ‘we’s of written discourse, as well as by those who (to a greater or lesser extent) erase themselves from their texts and persist, for whatever reason, with the more traditional academic/professional mode of exposition: ‘the third person’.

In order to illustrate, as graphically as possible, the different types of narration (first person and otherwise) being deployed by today's feminist writers, Part 1 comprises three chapters. Following a brief theoretical overview of pronoun-use as part of this section introduction, the first chapter (‘Im/personal pronouns’) investigates a selection of texts in which either the use of the third person prevails and/or the use of the ‘I’/‘We’ persona is partial or occluded. This includes, most substantively, the polemical writings of popular feminism: texts by media celebrities such as Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Ros Coward and — more recently — Naomi Wolf and Natasha Walter. The way in which polemic deploys, disguises and implies the ‘I’ is a significantly under-discussed area of contemporary rhetoric and yet, for feminism, whose public face has consistently depended upon (and been represented by) such writings, it is of massive significance. As throughout this book, I subsequently attempt to link rhetorical practice to epistemology by asking what polemical feminist writing can accomplish that more conventional academic writing cannot, at the same time as exposing its philosophical (and possibly ethical) limits.

In the second chapter, ‘First person personal’, I move on to a discussion of authors and texts which have deployed a more sustained use of the personal pronoun, focusing, in particular, on the so-called ‘confessional’ dimension to feminist writing. This includes a short section on some of the early experiments in the branch of autobiographical literary criticism known as ‘Authentic Realism’, followed by acknowledgement of the ground-breaking work done by both bell hooks and Adrienne Rich in writing themselves into their texts. These early experiments in the use of the personal are then placed alongside the controversial experiments of the early, and then later, 1990s where authors like Nancy K. Miller and Eve Sedgwick have been alternately praised and lambasted for their endorsement of a mode of writing now often referred to as ‘personalist criticism’.² The chapter also deals with the vogue for confessional elements in female-authored journalism, and then moves on to a discussion of feminist memoir. With respect to the latter I will be looking, in particular, at the way in which these memoir-texts are subtly distinguished from those dealt with in the preceding sections as well as noting how their use of ‘remembrance’ (Radstone 2000a) is to be distinguished from the more strategic applications which are the subject of Chapter 3. In epistemological terms, these various incursions into autobiography will be linked to the fairly agonized debates of the 1990s concerning essentialism and the discovery of a legitimate space from which to speak. What is especially interesting in this respect is how, by the later 1990s, the feminist scholarly community was already torn on both the ‘correctness’, and usefulness, of ‘getting personal’ once again (see Veseer's Confessions of the Critics, 1996) and how eaten up with angst many of the discussions concerning this particular rhetorical innovation were.

The third chapter, ‘First person strategic’, focuses on the work of those feminist writers who, in my own opinion, have made the most significant contribution to the use of the personal pronoun for the advancement of feminist thought. Working within a cultural studies tradition influenced by Raymond Williams on the one hand, and Walter Benjamin on the other, cultural theorists like Janet Wolff, Elspeth Probyn and Annette Kuhn learnt, and developed, a newly ‘strategic’ deployment of the personal pronoun that was manifestly not confessional and which is accompanied by radically transformed relations of power with both its interlocutors and its ‘object of knowledge’.³ Through a fairly in-depth analysis of essays by Kuhn and Probyn, I attempt to elucidate what this particular rhetorical innovation means in terms of knowledge-production, and also how -1 believe — it has also been mirrored (if not pre-empted) in the work of certain female journalists like Deborah Orr, columnist with The Independent.

Theorizing pronouns

Before turning to the many and varied applications of first-person and other pronouns in contemporary feminist thought, it is first necessary that we engage with some of the theoretical and epistemological debates that are most central to their engagement: in particular (1) the linguistic and cultural connotations of moving between ‘I’ and ‘We’ and ‘They’; (2) the significance of ‘ethos’ (a figure from classical rhetoric) for pronoun-use; and, finally (3) the anxieties associated with all manner of enunciative positions (and ‘positionings’) in feminist thought today.

While the rhetorical and philosophical implications surrounding the use of pronouns was not a central concern for classical rhetoric, many twentieth-century linguists and stylisticians have perceived both the choice of pronouns, and their interaction, to be absolutely central to understanding the relays of power within a text, and between a text and its readers.

One of the linguists most fascinated by the implications of pronoun-use was Emile Benveniste who, in his Problems in General Linguistics (1971), made some astute observations on the philosophical/metaphysical differences between pronouns and, in particular, how ‘I’ and ‘You’ must be distinguished in their plenitude from the ambiguous third person: ‘the one who is absent’. Critics like Ronald Schleifer, in Rhetoric and Death (1990), have subsequently linked the power-play implicit in pronoun-choice with the existential crisis of modernity itself, seeing the ‘otherness’ of the third person (and, by extension, third-person usage) as a measure of the twentieth-century subject's feelings of paranoia and ‘unease’ rather than his/her own authority: what Roman Jakobson took as a mark of ‘transcendental knowledge’ (Schleifer 1990: 115). While I find Schleifer's claims somewhat tendentious, and would, myself, always stop short of linking a single linguistic feature to a whole historical/cultural movement, I think that any theory that draws attention to the uncertain and changing value of pronoun-use in written discourse is extremely useful. With respect to the texts and authors studied here, for example, it is, I feel, extremely important to start from a premise that neither the first person, nor the third, is inherently more powerful and/or authoritative in the exposition of an argument. Thus, although a passage of polemical text with an assertive first-person narrator might, on first reading, appear to imbue its narrator with great authority vis-a-vis its ‘object of utterance’, who is to say that this up-front ‘bravura’ is ultimately any more potent, or effective, than the third-person narration of events by an ‘absent’, implied or (as we shall see) ‘substitute’ narrator? Moreover, it is surely in the I's relation to its ‘you’s’ and ‘they’s’ that we can best grasp the limits of the speaker's authority: the extent to which (to follow Schleifer's analysis) s/he betrays a silent ‘terror’, or anxiety, over those ‘others’ of which s/he speaks.⁴

Although focusing more particularly on the gendered aspect of pronoun-use, Anna Livia's Pronoun Envy (2001) likewise makes it clear that the power and agency of pronouns is a highly complex matter. Working with a range of literary texts in both English and French, Livia's readings reveal (for example) that an authorial decision to withhold information about the sex of the narrator (as Jeanette Winterson does in Written on the Body (1992)), exploits, and combines, the authority associated with both first-person and third-person address: i.e. the speaker possesses all the presence, intimacy and agency associated with the first person at the same time as maintaining the gender-neutrality and ‘universalism’ associated with the third.

The second area of theory I wish to consider here revolves around the concept in classical rhetoric known as ‘ethos’. This is dealt with in respect to ‘the discovery of arguments’, whereby logos, ethos and pathos are recognized as ‘the three modes of persuasion’. As Corbett and Connors summarize:

Aristotle said that we persuade others by three means: (1) by the appeal to their reason (logos); (2) by the appeal to their emotions (pathos); (3) by the appeal of our personality or character (ethos). We may use one of these exclusively or predominantly, or we may use all three. Which of these means we use will be partly determined by the nature of thesis we are arguing, partly by current circumstances, partly (perhaps mainly) by the kind of audience we are addressing.

(Corbett and Connors 1999: 32)

For the modern reader of classical rhetoric, this location of what we understand by ethical in the body/personality of the speaker of a text comes as something of a surprise. This is because, for most of us today, the term ethics tends to connote an abstract set of values: a murky shadow-land where morality and politics converge. To discover that, for classical rhetoricians, ethos is effectively a projection of the narrator's character (or, more properly, how that character emerges from the text) re-opens windows on an aspect of rhetoric that now tends to be ignored. Given recent theory's complication of the significance we can, and/or should, ascribe to authors and narrators — ‘real’ and ‘implied’ — this is hardly surprising, but I would suggest that with respect to the popular feminism I deal with in this section of the book especially, it is extremely useful to explore the ethos of the texts concerned: the extent to which the authors have deployed (or not) an intra/extra-textual persona as a means of their ‘appeal’.

According to the classical rhetoricians, ethical appeal was of the utmost importance for the very reason that, despite all the efforts to build watertight arguments based on reason and logic, absolute certainty is nearly always impossible (Corbett and Connors 1999: 72). One of the most important aspects of ethos as defined by Aristotle, however, is that trust in the speaker/narrator should be achieved through his presentation of the facts in hand, not by explicit reference to his own character and actions. Hence:

The ethical appeal is exerted, according to Aristotle, when the speech itself impresses the audience that the speaker is a person of sound sense (phronesis), high moral character (arete), and benevolence (eunoia). Notice that it is the speech itself that must create this impression. Thus a person wholly unknown to an audience (and this is often the case when we listen to a speech or read an article in a magazine) could by his or her words alone inspire that kind of confidence. Some people, of course, already have a reputation familiar to an audience, and this reputation, if it is a good one, will favourably dispose an audience towards them … In the last analysis, however, it is the discourse itself that must establish or maintain the ethical appeal.

(Corbett and Connors 1999: 72)

When we enquire how these personal qualities are actually inscribed in discourse, however, the classical texts become somewhat circuitous, implying (for example) that ‘good sense’ is shown in ‘valid reasoning’ (i.e. it is an effect of logos) and that a ‘high moral character’ is similarly one that eschews ‘specious reasoning’ (Corbett and Connors 1999: 72–3). A chink of light accrues around the term ‘benevolence’, however, since this appears to be associated with ‘a sound knowledge of human psychology’ and, by inference, an awareness of one's audience (Corbett and Connors 1999: 73). In other words, and although this is nowhere explicitly stated in Aristotle's work, ethos is a dialogic effect: it is produced, and sustained, through the speaker/narrator's ability to strike a sympathetic/empathetic chord with his/her audience (in all its complexity); it is less about an arrogation of ‘the self per se than a ‘self-in-relation’; less about ‘I’ than the Bakhtinian category of ‘I-thou’ (Bakhtin 1984a: 63).

For my own purposes here, however, I have chosen to explore the ethical appeals of narrators in both this narrow Aristotelian sense (i.e. how it is marked by ‘the speech itself) and through the more explicit inscriptions of authors/narrators in their texts. This is because, even outwith autobio-graphical/‘personalist’ criticism, feminist writing has a long history of what are probably best described as ‘embodied’ personal pronouns: narrators who, for whatever reason, and however inconspicuously, choose to write themselves and their values into their texts in such a way that the reader is more persuaded (or not) than she might be otherwise. Indeed, it could be argued that it is the partial embodiment of the narrator in many feminist texts (an allusion, assertion or insinuation of that ‘self, here and there) that is intrinsic to their rhetorical appeal.

The third area of theorizing that pertains to rhetorical innovation vis-àvis narration is explicitly feminist: namely, the extensive, and agonized, debates that have taken place since the late 1980s on finding a legitimate subject position from which to speak about (other) women. The extent to which this general (we might say, ‘all encompassing’) theoretical/ methodological problem has impacted upon feminist rhetoricians can be seen in Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham's 1998 collection of essays, Feminism and Composition Studies. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Transformation: thinking through feminism
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Pronouns
• PART 2 Arguments
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index