Guest Blogger Lisa Stockton on feminist rhetorics

Feminism as a “movement” in America is largely played out. The work here is mostly done. Jonah Goldberg Los Angeles Times March 29, 2011

            When I read the opening lines to Jonah Goldberg’s column a few weeks ago, I was incensed by his careless proclamation. Many readers, I am sure, nodded in agreement, as they read his challenge to those who wanted to continue the fight that they should go to Afghanistan where “real” injustices abound. Two things, Mr. Goldberg: many feminists, both men and women, are fighting for the rights of women in Afghanistan already; and no, the feminist work is hardly done here as long as human beings are discriminated against, abused, objectified, colonized and exploited. Mr. Goldberg seems to be buying in to the Second Wave feminist myth--now that some women represented in the workforce are highly educated and earn a decent wage, we can close the chapter on the past decades of spotty progress and focus on more pressing matters for the women in the countries in which the United States has started wars.

            Recently, at the 4C’s in Atlanta, I had the opportunity to expose the “feminist project” I have been

immersed in since last spring to some light and air. Culminating a challenge posed by J. Ann Tickner in 2002, a feminist international relations theorist, to examine “where all the women went” after 9/11 in the mainstream media with an assignment to rhetorically analyze a text, my digging around in Lexis Nexis led me to a relatively obscure book: The Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and Compassion by Mary Hagen and Susan Carouba.

            In brief, the book is an ethnographic study comprised of the 30 stories of women first responders to the World Trade Towers in New York City after the terrorists’ attacks on 9/11. Their stories are simply the transcribed testimonies of firefighters, police officers, emergency technicians, and port authority officers, among others, recounting their experiences that day not long after the events. At the time, the authors lived in California; Hagen is a freelance writer and a volunteer firefighter, and Carouba is a freelance investigative social worker. They explain in their introduction how they watched the television reports focus on only male heroes and used language reverting back to the 1960’s, as “the brave guys” and “the brotherhood” worked around the clock in the recovery of bodies. They knew from their own work experiences women had to have also been there, and they thought it only just acknowledge the risks, losses and sacrifices of the women who were there. So, they pooled their resources and flew to New York City only weeks after the attacks in order to write a book based on the personal accounts to commemorate these women.

            I base the premise of the article on the authors’ successful use of a “feminine style” as defined by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, in her seminal 1989 two-volume set Man Cannot Speak For Her. Campbell, by the way, taught at the University of Kansas and was the director of the Women’s Studies program. Carouba and Hagen strategy advances their goals to not only commemorate the women of 9/11, but to illustrate for young girls and women that not only men are employees in protective services and can act as courageous heroes.

            Feminine style, according to Campbell, was instantiated by the nineteenth-century suffragettes as they also maneuvered in the male-dominated public arenas. There’s an element in the authors’ writing that conjures the quilting and patching metaphor that symbolizes feminine rhetoric as Carouba and Hagen piece together the information they gathered through the intense and intimate interviews with theses women. Campbell posits that this inductive process, indicative of feminine style, which when shared with an audience, oftentimes outside the mainstream narrative, lends itself to a less authoritarian tone.

            On a personal note, I am jazzed about this particular project because I like the idea of how relatively “rhetorically untrained” average persons adapt their rhetoric to a potentially hostile audience, which results in adding new voices and stories to historical events. [If you are wondering about the climate toward any feminist cause that could threaten the prevailing hegemonic masculine narrative post 9/11, consider the absolute silencing and punishment of any discourse of dissent during the Bush administration, especially during its lead up to the Iraq War.] I also like the fact that each time I have explained to friends and family what I am working on at school they not only say “Wow, I never thought of that!” But they also say, “Finally, I know what you are talking about and that sounds like something that could make a difference.”

            It is my intention to continue to study feminine style because more theoretical work of the rhetorical strategy is needed; my research offered pitiable amounts of scholarly discourse on the topic. I seek to understand more about when it’s used, how it’s used, its overall effectiveness, and to expand inquiry beyond women’s discourse. Examination of feminine style, that is by no means only used by women as former President Bill Clinton adroitly applies it to his everyday language and speeches, could equalize the significance of its contributions to “male” rhetorical traditions, more scholarship can legitimate both deductive and inductive reasoning, attesting that the eloquence of a traditional politician’s rhetoric used for argumentative persuasion is as necessary a human act as it is to actualize a language that empowers an audience to become agents for social change. As Campbell rationalizes in her introduction to Man Cannot Speak For Her:

In addition to making texts available and correcting rhetorical history, still another goal of this project is to make it clear that the rhetoric of women must be studied if we are to understand human symbolization in all its variety and to identify touchstones that illustrate peaks of human symbolic activity (9).

            I often see a car parked around the Lawrence campus with a bumper sticker that always makes me smile. It reads: “I’ll be post feminist in the post patriarchy.” I couldn’t agree more.

Submitted by Lisa Stockton on April 18, 2011