Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse: Locations, Scholarship, Discourse [1 ed.] 9781443857758, 9781443855013

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Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse

Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse

Edited by

Kirsti Cole

Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse, Edited by Kirsti Cole This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Kirsti Cole and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5501-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5501-3

TO MY PARENTS, SCOTT AND NANCY COLE, FOR THEIR SUPPORT TO MELISSA PURDUE, FOR HELPING ME PUT ON THE CONFERENCE AND TO MY HUSBAND, JOSHUA PREISS, FOR STANDING IN THE DOORWAY, LISTENING

"SHE DIDN’T WRITE IT. (BUT IF IT’S CLEAR SHE DID THE DEED. . .) SHE WROTE IT, BUT SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE. (IT’S POLITICAL, SEXUAL, MASCULINE, FEMINIST.) SHE WROTE IT, BUT LOOK WHAT SHE WROTE ABOUT. (THE BEDROOM, THE KITCHEN, HER FAMILY. OTHER WOMEN!) SHE WROTE IT, BUT SHE WROTE ONLY ONE OF IT. (“JANE EYRE. POOR DEAR, THAT’S ALL SHE EVER. . .”) SHE WROTE IT, BUT SHE ISN’T REALLY AN ARTIST, AND IT ISN’T REALLY ART. (IT’S A THRILLER, A ROMANCE, A CHILDREN’S BOOK. IT’S SCI FI!) SHE WROTE IT, BUT SHE HAD HELP. (ROBERT BROWNING. BRANWELL BRONTE. HER OWN “MASCULINE SIDE.”) SHE WROTE IT, BUT SHE’S AN ANOMALY. (WOOLF. WITH LEONARD’S HELP....) SHE WROTE IT BUT. . ." —JOANNA RUSS, HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN’S WRITING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Challenges, Rhetorics, and Feminisms: Where We Speak, Where We Write, Where We Live Kirsti K. Cole Part I: Historic Writing Landscapes: Sites of Resistance, Sites of Normativity Catherine Livingston Garrettson and Integrated Male-Female Spheres in the Early American Republic .................................................................. 2 Heather Blain Vorhies Sites of Writing: Fanny Fern and the Space of Normativity in 19th Century Publishing ......................................................................... 10 Jennifer Dorsey “Come Sit at the Table with Us”: Traces of Racial History and Women’s Agency in Place ................................................................. 24 Suellynn Duffey Making Space for Writing: High School Girls’ Newspapers, Writing Clubs, and Literary Magazines 1897-1930 ................................................ 39 Lori Ostergaard, Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger, and Henrietta Rix Wood “Madness” as a Rhetorical Tool: Examining the Rhetorical Techniques of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton .............. 57 Sarah B. Franco

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Part II: Contemporary Rhetorics: Resistance, Vulnerability and Riots When Free Speech Courts Compassion: Civic Housekeeping and the Hope of Public Deliberation ......................................................... 68 William Duffy When Women Kill Newborns: The Rhetoric of Vulnerability .................. 83 Susan Ayres Politics of Care and Affect at Camp Casey ............................................... 98 Amy Pason Rhetoric of Riot: Creating Alternative Feminist Sites of Resistance....... 114 Rebekah Buchanan If not a Mother and not a Maid, Then What?: How Feminist Pedagogy Fits (or Doesn’t) in the 21st Century ........................................................ 127 Kristin Winet That’s a Blonde Remark”: Gendered Communication in the Workplace... 145 Margaret Weaver Interspaces Feminism and Zines: An Origin Story (And the Accidents that Reveal Them) ...................................................................................................... 158 Alison Piepmeier Part III: Language, Voice, and Folksonomy: Rhetorical Perspectives on Feminism Reworking Landscapes: Creating Identity in Body, Space, and Language........................................................................................... 178 Janella D. Moy Echo as Ventriloquist: Disembodied Vocal Performance and Feminist Rhetorical Agency ................................................................................... 193 Lydia McDermott

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Distributed (Un)Certainty: Folksonomy as a Feminist Enterprise........... 208 Aurora Matzke Recontextualizing Feminist Rhetoric: Exploring the Progression and Future of Feminist Rhetoric as a Field of Study ............................... 228 Jessica L. Furgerson Part IV: Global Rhetoric: Survivance, Authority, and Dress Unveiling the Violence of Harmony: Challenging and Renewing the Politics of Intellectual Property Rights through (Dis)Harmony ........ 240 Jennifer H. Maher and Catherine Fox Feminist Indigenous Rhetoric of Survivance and Discursive Spaces in S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest............................ 264 Kelly Sassi Survivance as Resistance to Authoritative Discourse: An American Indian Student Uses Her Words, Her Way .............................................. 283 Rebecca Gardner Toward a Chicana Feminist Body Politic ................................................ 301 Marissa M. Juarez The Cultural Rhetoric of the Sari............................................................. 309 Moushumi Biswas Bibliography ............................................................................................ 326 Contributors ............................................................................................. 354 Index ........................................................................................................ 360

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

2.7-1 Danielle Bustian’s 1993 zine War 2.7-2 Sister Stand. 1971 2.7-3 Riot Grrrl. 1993 2.7-4 Women: Motherhood to Militancy. 1971 2.7-5 Bust. 1994 2.7-6 The Future Generation. 1996 2.7-7 The North Dixien. 1984 2.7-8 9½ News. 2.7-9 A trailer for “Barbie: A Fairy Secret” 2.7-10 The Adventures of Mon. Edouard de Crack. 1830 2.7-11 Seen by Cate 4.5-1 Maharani Chimnabai and Indira Raje of Baroda wearing the Nauvari, or traditional Maharashtrian sari, in 1924. 4.5-2 Conforming to the dress code, 1912.The disrobing of Draupadi by Dushyashan in full view of the royal court. 4.5-3 A miniature of the Basohli School, attributed to Nainsukh, c.1765. 4.5-4 North Indian lady draped in the Nivi style. Painting by Raja Ravi Varma. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original twodimensional work of art, which is in the public domain in the United States. 4.5-5 Miss Universe 1994 Sushmita Sen has been the role model for subsequent generations of girls in India. 4.5-6 Watercolor illustrations of different sari drapes (1928) by Rao Bahadur M. V. Dhurandhar. According to The Indian Copyright Act of 1957, this work is in the public domain in India since its term of copyright has expired. 4.5-7 Kama Sutra-style drape combined with contemporary design sensibilities as evident in the halter neck blouse. Model: Bollywood actress Nandana Dev Sen.

PREFACE

In October 2011, 250 scholars and students attended the International Conference on Feminisms and Rhetorics at Minnesota State University, Mankato. The theme of the conference also serves as the title for this book: Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics?: Locations, Scholarship, Discourse. Improvising from Joanna Russ’s 1983 guidebook, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, I wrote the call to pose an important set of questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

What are feminist rhetorics? What are feminist challenges? Where are these rhetorics and challenges located? Where do they appear and/or become suppressed in scholarship? What are discourses that are feminist? Rhetorical? How do these discourses pose or create challenges?

The conference committee was strongly interdisciplinary, reflecting disciplines not only in the Humanities, but in the Social Sciences as well. Because of our broad interdisciplinarity, we developed a theme seeking to recognize the spaces between disciplines and communities. The conference was meant to acknowledge the academic and socio-discursive spaces that feminisms, and rhetorics on or about feminisms, inhabit. At the time that the conference call was developed in late 2009, major political figures, as well as religious and social leaders had discussed feminism, including the Dalai Lama. The discussion, however, seemed to revolve (as it often does) around cultural or essentialized discourses of feminism. Our committee sought proposals for the conference, and for this collection that speak to the challenges and diversities of feminist rhetoric and discourse, in public and private life, in the academy, and in the media. We issued a challenge to participants: can your paper significantly engage disciplines other than Rhetoric and Composition? Does your work have consequences for communities located outside of the academy? The goal of the conference was to explore space, location, and to challenge frequently problematic conceptions of what feminist rhetoric looks like, how it is located, and when and how it might appear in scholarship, or be

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ignored. A challenge of feminist rhetoric, it seems, is paying attention and disseminating work with an eye not only towards the named, the famous, and the easily recognizable, but towards to young, the underprivileged, the other. This collection addresses that gap. The chapters collected in this book generate discussion about the intersections not only of feminisms and rhetorics, and the ways in which those intersections are productive, but also the locations of feminist rhetorics, the various discourses that invoke "feminism" or "feminist," and the scholarship that provokes, challenges, and deliberates issues of key concern. In focusing on challenge, on location, this collection acknowledges the academic and socioȬdiscursive spaces that feminisms, and rhetorics on or about feminisms, inhabit. Feminism, but also women and what it means to be a woman, is a signifier under siege in public discourse currently. The chapters included here speak to the challenges and diversities of feminist rhetoric and discourse, in public and private life, in the academy, and in the media. The authors represented in this collection, who were selected and vetted by blind-review from a call for research papers based on their conference participation, present potential consequences for communities in the academy and beyond, spanning international, geopolitical, racial, and religious contexts. This volume provides a unique lens into feminist rhetorics because in presenting the challenges thereof, it covers a broad but cohesive set of issues. The intersections between them have been catalogued by a variety of scholars in Communication, English, History and Women’s Studies, but the authors included in this collection approach feminist challenges from a broad variety of perspectives. Authors included here approach feminist challenges in several categories such as women's history, genre, material culture, and political discourse. As editor, I chose to include such a diverse range of authors and perspectives not only to most thoroughly address the theme, but also to meet the needs of women represented in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Kirsti K. Cole Minnesota State University, Mankato September 2013

INTRODUCTION

In her 1995 article “Remapping Rhetorical Territory” Cheryl Glenn argues that “as we write our histories of rhetoric, especially as we write women into the tradition, we, like historians in other fields, must continue to resist received notions both of history and of writing history, what Michel de Certeau calls ‘scriptural construction’” (290). She goes on to say that the text of history writing “initiates a play between the object under study and the discourse performing the analysis” (290) and cites Fredric Jameson who defines history as an “’ideologeme,’ a construct that is susceptible to both a conceptual description and a narrative manifestation all at once” (290). Glenn’s work has informed many of the scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition committed to the inclusion of women’s voices in the body of work representing scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition. Some of the texts that have sought to include women in the history and theory of rhetoric include Andrea A. Lunsford who in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition provides a collected series of essays in which women’s role in the rhetorical tradition, women’s use of rhetoric and women’s use of language to understand themselves and their experiences are explored. In Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn explores how and why women have been historically excluded from the rhetorical tradition. She locates a variety of women’s work, analyzing and contextualizing women’s rhetoric within the Western tradition from antiquity to the Renaissance. In her book, Rereading the Sophists: Classic Rhetoric Refigured, Jarratt analyzes and compares the exclusion of women from the rhetorical tradition to the exclusion of sophists within the rhetorical tradition as similar discursive constructs. Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History explores the importance of gender in historical analysis and urges for a reevaluation of received history in terms of recent feminist theories. In Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, Nan Johnson builds on Scott’s work by treating rhetorical theories and practices as sites that provide for observing the interaction between rhetorical performance and cultural identity constructions, particularly gender. However, in the field of rhetoric there has been no book-length discussion that compiles the various challenges that the

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locations of rhetorics, particularly feminist rhetorics, may entail. As illustrated by this brief review of literature, we recognize the need for a collection demonstrating that a rhetorical focus can benefit several disciplines. As such, this volume brings into focus these amorphous and sometime nebulous analyses of terms such as feminism, women, and gender when connected with the various locations of rhetoric. We intend to explore the intersections that result from a study of rhetorics and the challenges of connecting feminism and rhetorics, focused on theoretical and political relationships. This collection of essays builds on current scholarship in women’s rhetoric, which either tends to be religious, academic, or anthologizes the work of women rhetors. Examples of this work includes Roxanne Mountford’s The Gendered Pulpit, Michelle Ballif, Diane Davis and Roxanne Mountford’s collection Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition, Eileen Schell’s Rhetorica in Motion, and most recently Rebecca Dingo's Networking Arguments. Dingo's argument in her text is important in framing this collection, because though Glenn's discussion above about reclamation is important work for scholars in the field, Dingo says that we have been focused on historical recovery work but have not “examined the pretexts of recovery work” (32), and that these pretexts allow rhetoricians to “understand networked power and how the process of moving texts from one scale to another can have the effect of further silencing women” (32). In other words, the current trend in scholarship focused on women’s rhetoric tends to be an assessment of our past with no indication as to whether or not feminism, particularly the challenges of feminist rhetorics, where they take place, who they involve, what types of discourse they encompass, is taken into account. In this collection, we begin in the past, looking at the historic landscapes of women’s writing, and then move toward contemporary rhetorics, theories of rhetoric, and ends with a focus on the global, and a discussion of future sites of inquiry for feminist rhetorics.

An Overview of the Collection Part 1, Historic Writing Landscapes: Sites of Resistance, Sites of Normativity, provides a historical grounding for the work done in this collection. In the five chapters included in this section, the authors locate the spheres, spaces, sites, and tools of writing, and writing as a woman or girl prior to the 1940s.

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In Heather Blain Vorhies’ chapter, she argues that fully imagining women's historical lives, lives that are often so different and yet so much the same as our own, with accuracy and with care is incredibly difficult. In research on women, where there is often a much smaller amount of archival material than in research on men, we need to use this critical imagination to flesh out history of our sources, placing the materials into the contexts of women's lives and the communities that surrounded them. In order to address this issue, she turns to Catherine Livingston Garrett, the wife of an itinerant preacher who, as a woman from a wealthy family, was fortunate enough to be literate in both reading and writing. She argues that by simply regarding context, and not the individual woman’s writing, we risk conventionalizing the work of the rhetors active at the time. Jennifer Dorsey’s work on 19th Century author, Fanny Fern allows an important interrogation of the publishing practices of the time. She argues that the standard gender roles of the mid-nineteenth century fulfilled a normative pattern in which men lived their lives in the exterior world conducting business in a competitive, market-driven environment while women cloistered themselves within the confines of home and family, only venturing out of bounds to act in a supporting role to their husbands, fathers, or brothers. For Dorsey, Fanny Fern did not wish to ascribe to this model of antebellum gendered normativity, nor did the circumstances of her own real-life drama allow her to do so. She wrote about the grittiness of marriage, death, relationships, and competition in the literary marketplace in order to stay employed, but perhaps more importantly to evangelize a progressive worldview about the state of gender normativity in nineteenth-century America to her largely female readership. Suellyn Duffey argues in her chapter that place-specific memories locate the author in Southwestern Ohio, a place rich in conflict over slavery during the nineteenth century. Long into the twentieth century, racial mixing at dining tables seems to have been almost as powerfully laden as sexual mixing across races (Du Pre Lumpkin). But a multi-generational line of the author’s relatives embodied a resistance to this dominant prejudice with their invocation: “come sit at the table with us,” an invitation they spoke to neighborhood African Americans. Geographical places in this county function as both a rhetorical and geophysical space, rekindled the speaker’s memories, and led her on a journey through farm houses, dining rooms, and kitchens, domestic spaces in which she discovered family stories about how her female ancestors had exercised significant agency in them.

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In Lori Ostergaard, Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger, and Henrietta Rix Wood’s chapter, they focus on High School girls’ newspapers, writing clubs, and literary magazines from 1897-1930. They argue that locating early twentieth-century women’s experiences as writers in the curriculum and extracurricular activities of high schools may afford a more comprehensive blueprint of the sites of women’s authorship during this time. Because women represented only a small percentage of the college population, high school histories may help us to account for the experiences of the majority of women who never set foot on a college campus and whose written works have, therefore, been excluded from many of our histories of early twentieth-century rhetorical education and empowerment. Histories of high-school publications and writing clubs may also provide us with insights into the Progressive-Era pedagogies— practical and vocational—employed more often by high school teachers than by faculty teaching writing at elite universities, demonstrating how some early feminist pedagogues may have fostered independence, entrepreneurship, and authorship among girls and young women during this time. Sarah B. Franco’s chapter on madness as a rhetorical tool ends the first section of the collections. She focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton who, she argues, faced similar challenges as they worked toward entering a realm constructed around patriarchal ideals and dominated by patriarchal discourse. Not only did they have to first clear a space for themselves in a literary sphere rife with white, male voices, they also suffered from the effects of mental illness and the stigma associated with “madness.” Franco reframes madness in order to demonstrate how these writers used the male-enforced stigma identifying them by their illness as a rhetorical strategy to comment on their experiences of oppression as women and as writers in a maledominated society. Contemporary Rhetorics: Resistance, Vulnerability, and Riots comprise Part 2 of the collection. In this section, authors provide a broad and diverse overview of contemporary rhetorics. These chapters focus on not only where we might find women's and feminist rhetorics, but also the ways in which these rhetorics can become sites of resistance. In his chapter on free speech and the Supreme Court, William Duffy argues that the Snyder v. Phelps ruling is a provocative site of inquiry because it hinges not just on the question of when outrageous acts like hate

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speech fall outside the boundaries of constitutional protection, but it also speaks to the idea of the public sphere as a site for deliberation, and by extension, the function of civil discourse in maintaining the public sphere itself. His work on regulated discourse and free speech is significant because he argues that without free speech we would be unable to identify issues of public concern because there would be no workable public space where such matters could be deliberated. Susan Ayres explores neonaticide, the act of killing a newborn, as a global problem. This chapter presents two pairs of vignettes as a way to explore jurisprudence regarding women who commit acts of violence and to argue for the application of a rhetoric of vulnerability as informed by the preSocratic concept of kairos, or right-timing and due measure. She reexamines neonaticide through the kairic rhetoric of vulnerability, arguing for changes in state assets to provide options for unwanted pregnancy (right-timing), and in the criminal justice system’s laws and defenses regarding neonaticide (due measure). Amy Pason’s chapter also focuses on a politic of care, but for her it is Camp Casey that provides an important site for inquiry. She argues that Camp Casey exemplifies how emotion can be utilized by activists, and more importantly, how emotion works to interpellate audiences towards action, and that emotional response can translate into an ethic of care—an ethic that mobilized the peace movement as it asserted our obligation to care and cooperate with others for a more peaceful world. Rebekah Buchanan introduces zines to this collection, a topic that will be explored in further detail by Alison Piepmeier. She argues that in the Riot Grrrl Movement zines became widely used as a way to communicate personal experiences with sexism, racism, abuse, and other issues within the scene. When the Riot Grrrl Movement chose to use zines as a form of communication, they became a more personal way to present self and feminism as well as re-envision the role of women in the punk scene. They subverted traditional uses of the medium for their own use as feminists and activists. The role of the Riot Grrrl Movement in the recreation of punk and the infusion of feminism and activism into a music scene is an important site for exploration. Kristin Winet’s work moves us from punk rock to the classroom, providing a critical inquiry into feminist pedagogical models and exploring how traditional mother/maid roles for women may serve to undermine teaching

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assistants. She argues that as more and more graduate students teach firstyear composition classes, it is critical for us to gain a better understanding of how inexperienced teachers view, understand, and enact feminist pedagogy in their classrooms and with their students if we are to prepare them to confidently enter and sustain interest in the field of feminist rhetorics. Building community features in Margaret Weaver’s chapter, in which she argues that faculty can be seduced into ignoring how our bodies complicate community interaction because so much of the work faculty do with colleagues is disembodied through emails, phone calls, and written texts. Face-to-face committee work, however, serves as a powerful reminder that our bodies do matter. She believes it is important to address the fact that while feminists have attempted to write women’s bodies back into where they have been erased, our focus has been on our written texts and classroom interactions, but that committee level interactions are a crucial site of study. At the center of this book, is Alison Piepmeier's work on girl zines, after her book was published. Dr. Piepmeier was the one of the keynotes from the conference, and has adapted her talk to fit this collection. Her chapter offers an origin story about grrrl zines, and makes an argument about why these stories matter—the stories we tell, and the readings and misreadings we do. She argues that origin stories are important because they tell us where to look and what patterns to watch for. The “wrong” stories can give us a distorted or diminished understanding of the past and, by extension, the present moment. In the case of grrrl zines, if we think of them as originating from the male-dominated spaces of zines and punk culture, then grrrl zines appear as aberrations at best; as one author suggests, they seem “a side note to women’s history.” Her chapter serves as a significant interspace for this collection because it moves us from history, and origin, to ways of reading. In Part 3, Language, Voice, and Folksonomy: Rhetorical Perspectives on Feminism, Rhetorical Theories, the intersections with feminism, and sites for future study are explored by the authors included. Janella D. Moy’s chapter on landscape demonstrates the ways in which body, space, and language intersect to create identity. She uses Audre Lorde’s Zami to claim that for non-heterosexuals, secretive identity production is necessary for defining one’s identity through safe modes and

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spaces, making one’s identity visible for self-acknowledgment, and looking outside of traditional political spaces/spheres (school, work, family) to find sources for identification. In a world that identifies the dominant culture as positive and anything in opposition to that culture as negative, looking outside of expected spaces to form a positive identity helps promote one’s independence, especially for minorities facing continual ostracism. For Moy, writing and language, areas in which identity can be manipulated, are major focuses in Lorde’s work and a crucial place to begin. Lydia McDermott extends Moy’s inquiry by moving into a discussion of feminist rhetorical agency. Her focus is on Echo, the mythical nymph, who was cursed by Juno to be confined forever to repeating the words of others. For McDermott, Echo represents a gendered aspect of writing, rhetoric, and form. Extending our understanding of rhetorical agency, Aurora Matzke argues that it is useful to reposition folksonomy as feminist praxis, with careful attention to the etymological roots of both folk and nomos embedded within the term. She argues that socially networked classroom environments take fuller advantage of the wisdom of the crowd to develop and sustain curricula that requires students and teachers to critique their own educational assumptions, if these communities engage feminist methodologies of disruption and lack. In the final chapter in Part 3, Jessica L. Furgerson builds on Matzke’s discussion of the classroom environment by reviewing feminist additions to our understanding of rhetoric primarily in the form of methodological choices. She traces this framework and argues that feminist method directly lends itself to the consideration of key areas of future inquiry in studying and theorizing feminist rhetoric. The collection concludes with a focus on the global, the transnational, and the intercultural. In Global Rhetoric: Survivance, Authority, and Dress, authors pose questions about the ways in which we might think about feminisms and rhetorics extending beyond traditional sites of scholarship. Catherine Fox and Jennifer Maher discuss the ways in which harmony, as a trope, plays a problematic role in the on-going colonization of indigenous peoples. They argue that in locating indigenous resistance to the numerous effects of a Western epistemology, many researchers

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essentialize indigenous peoples by problematically representing them through the stereotype of stewardship and living in harmony with the land. Fox and Maher attempt to complicate what they understand as a binary approach by analyzing indigenous peoples’ use of complex rhetorical strategies to assert their sovereignty in the realm of intellectual property, specifically through a reinvention of harmony that is premised in (dis)harmony. Kelly Sassi focuses on feminist-indigenous rhetorics by providing a reading of the treatments of Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema. She argues that we ought to look at Callahan’s multiple identities holistically and acknowledge that she is part of a larger movement of American Indian writers identified by Malea Powell, who are using writing tactically by employing rhetorics of survivance. Survivance is a term created from survival and resistance. Sassi uses Wynema, a work of fiction, to argue that like nonfiction works, Callahan makes the same rhetorical moves of survivance. Rebecca Gardner’s chapter also focuses on American Indian rhetoric, but in her chapter she discusses an essay that one student wrote for a personal writing class at a Midwestern public university. The assignment was for students to write an essay explaining one of their beliefs, including the source of the belief and how it is apparent in their lives. Gardner argues that the assimilation policies of the United States government, partially enacted through English education, did not silence all Natives. Though the damage inflicted by the policies is real, Indians are adapting and creating a future for themselves, as individuals and as nations. She focuses on the possibilities of literacy not only as a weapon, but also as a tool. In Marissa M. Juarez’s chapter, she poses a Chicana feminist body politics. She argues that Chicana feminists’ reclamation work is central to understanding how body politics can disarticulate a Western, Eurocentric tradition. To understand Chicana feminists’ work first requires an understanding of the role the body plays in reclamation scholarship. She follow’s Cindy Crus claiming that a Chicana body politics needs to “embody our theory,” and to do so she suggests incorporating narratives about the body in the classroom and working to ensure that the theories we develop remain informed by our communities, connected to the material world.

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Moushumi Biswas ends the collections by providing a reading of the cultural rhetoric of the Sari. This chapter examines the role drag plays in the act of wearing the sari, the cultural performance, and how it concerns 21st century feminist critique. She argues that over the centuries, Indian women have learned to accept wearing five meters of cloth every day and even turned the restrictive apparel into a powerful tool to negotiate challenges in a male-dominated society. This is a large and very diverse collections of scholarship focused on finding, analyzing, and forging new space for feminist(s) and rhetoric(s), and represents a significant entry into further discussion on what we value as scholarship in the critical discourses to which we subscribe as feminist researchers.

PART I: HISTORIC WRITING LANDSCAPES: SITES OF RESISTANCE, SITES OF NORMATIVITY

CATHERINE LIVINGSTON GARRETTSON AND INTEGRATED MALE-FEMALE SPHERES IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC HEATHER BLAIN VORHIES

When it comes to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America, we have a lot of assumptions. Travel was impossible. Women stayed home. Women were subjugated. There was little intellectual discussion, never mind a real intellectual community of any sort. Literacy was nonexistent. Everyone was repressed. Yet the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America were very much a time of transition. Between the Revolution and the ante-bellum period, in what we call the early American Republic, we have what Diane Lobody, the Catherine Garrettson scholar, calls “women in transition, experiencing vast changes in values, in possibilities, in hopes, and in rhetoric.”1 What was life like in the early nineteenth century for women? There's much we don't know, but what we do know challenges ideologies of gendered behavior and spheres in the early American Republic: namely, that “what is most striking is not the degree to which women and men were separate in early American Methodism, but the extent to which they worked together.”2 For many Methodist women in the early American Republic, the separate spheres and expectations of Christian women's behavior outlined most famously in Barbara Welter's 1966 “The Cult of True Womanhood,” were more an ideal and less an actuality. There's no doubt that as Welter describes, periodicals and writings of the time urged “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”3 Yet, these ideals were part and parcel of a larger Methodist tradition that encouraged intellectual engagement and personal experience among women, a tradition that held 1

Diane Helen Lobody, “Lost in an Ocean of Love: The Mystical Writings of Catherine Livingston Garrettson,” (PhD diss. Drew University, 1990): 2. 2 John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 152. 3 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 152.

Heather Blain Vorhies

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these activities in both mixed and single gendered company, calling women and men to act, first and foremost, in evangelical service to God. Fully imagining women's historical lives, lives that are often so different and yet so much the same as our own, with accuracy and with care is incredibly difficult. However, in the June 2011 issue of College Composition and Communication, Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster proposed critical imagination and an ethos of care as part of a larger methodology toward excellence in feminist historical research. Kirsch and Royster ask “When we study women of the past, especially those whose voices have rarely been heard or studies by rhetoricians, how do we render their work and lives meaningfully? How do we honor their traditions? How do we transport ourselves back to the time and context in which they lived, knowing full well that it is not possible to see things from their vantage point?”4 Their answer to this problem is a methodological one: Kirsch and Royster propose critical imagination, “interrogating the contexts, conditions, lives, and practices of women who are no longer alive to speak directly on their behalf" in looking "for what is likely or possible, given the facts on hand.”5 In research on women, where there is often a much smaller amount of archival material than in research on men, we need to use this critical imagination to flesh out history of our sources, placing the materials into the contexts of women's lives and the communities that surrounded them. Catherine Livingston Garrettson is an excellent example of a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century woman whose work was deeply intellectual and persuasive. The intellectual and persuasive nature of her work becomes apparent through critical imagination. Garrettson was a rhetorical practitioner, not a rhetorical theorist, and my interest in her writings comes from the ways her work challenges the privileging of rhetorical theory over rhetorical practice, “formal” over informal education, and written over spoken composition. Garrettson, like her fellow Methodist women and men, existed in a community that avidly practiced persuasion and considered it the best way to pass on God’s message, read religious and certain secular texts while striving for greater literacy among all Methodists, and in towns up and down America’s East Coast, spoke for God while on the road or across the kitchen table, and wrote for God when stopping.

4

Gesa E. Kirsch and Jacqueline J. Royster, “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence,” College Composition and Communication 61, no. 4 (June 2011): 648. 5 Ibid., 650.

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Catherine Livingston Garrettson and Integrated Male-Female Spheres

At a glance, Catherine Garrettson isn't much more than the wife of an itinerant preacher who, as a woman from a wealthy family, was fortunate enough to be literate in both reading and writing. But as Diane Lobody writes, “To sketch a picture of her [Catherine Garrettson’s] religious contribution that sees her primarily in terms of her identity as minister’s wife does her a disservice. In a curious way, it perpetuates the nineteenthcentury stereotype of the model of holy womanhood.”6 Garrettson spent her days in correspondence with her traveling husband, family, friends, and fellow Methodists, advising, discussing, and sometimes cajoling them in the service of God. And, as Methodist historian John H. Wigger reminds us, “While few Methodist women preached, a far greater number participated in the movement's early development as class leaders, unofficial counselors to young circuit riders, network builders, extra-legal activists, and financial patrons.”7 Wigger argues “these activities were as integral to the life of the movement as was the preaching of circuit riders.”8 Catherine Garrettson was just such a woman. When Catherine Livingston Garrettson was young, her well-to-do parents most likely would have never guessed her future life as the wife of an itinerant Methodist preacher. Indeed, Garrettson’s young life had more in common with our contemporary Paris Hilton than with a pious Christian gentlewoman: as a young society woman, Garrettson attended lavish parties and flirted with men.9 Yet something would change: Garrettson would become a Methodist, eschewing society for class meetings. And when Garrettson decided to settle down in her early forties, to a man of few means who struggled with the demands marriage would place on his itinerant preaching, her parents were less than thrilled. In fact, Garrettson’s mother, Margaret Beekman Livingston, refused to give permission for her daughter to marry for several years. Love won out, and in 1793, Catherine Livingston married American Methodist preacher Freeborn Garrettson.10 Catherine Garrettson, and her daughter Mary Garrettson, are emblematic of religious life and women’s rhetorical practice in the transitional early American Republic. While Catherine Garrettson was foremost the wife of an itinerant preacher, her first duty always, was service to God. In short, before anything else, before purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity, Catherine Garrettson was an evangelist. Over her rather large collection of writings, which include dream journals, vast correspondence with friends 6

Lobody, Lost in An Ocean of Love, 25. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 157. 8 Ibid. 9 Lobody, Lost in An Ocean of Love, 44. 10 Ibid., 65. 7

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and family, spiritual journals, assorted writings and musings, and diary, Catherine Garrettson sought to save her fellow Americans’ souls. Her Friday, February 22, 1811 entry from her spiritual journals hints at Garrettson’s fervid evangelism. Was a day of affliction of body, and humiliation of soul. In the evening I was greatly drawn out in prayer. 1. For the perfection of my own soul in deep know n with God, and universal holiness. 2. For those immediately under my charge, especially for the salvation of my dear Daughter, who I fear is not in a state of union with God whom her parents adore. 3. For relatives, especially for an old sister, the first child of my mother, who is in a state of second child-hood. 4. For the general church, and the spread of the gospel. My heart was tender, and tears of joy flowed, while on my knees in secret.11

This evangelical calling was not something Garrettson accepted easily. Lobody notes that Garrettson “was reluctant to fling herself into public activities; nevertheless, her desire for service, her unremitting evangelical endeavors, and her ministry of hospitality evidenced the translation of evangelical feminine virtues into evangelic women’s power.”12 From the seat of her and Freeborn’s farmhouse in Rhinebeck, New York, or “Traveler’s Rest,” according to itinerant preacher and American Methodist bishop Francis Asbury,13 Catherine Garrettson ministered, comforted, and evangelized. She argued and advised the best way for Methodists to proceed in their conversion. Thus, she writes on December 16, 1817 to her husband: The school you speak of I am rejoiced at, would to heaven there were on established in every conference. Should the M-- keep their zeal and acquire the pursuit of knowledge I have always said they will be the first ministry in the world. But in the pursuit of knowledge is danger of losing Gospel simplicity. This should never be lost sight of, or every other attainment will be like the surrender of the substance for the shadow. Let us ever keep in

11

Catherine Garrettson, Journal, February 22-June 14, 1811, 1080-5-2:10, Garrettson Family Papers, Methodist Collection—Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. 12 Lobody, Lost in An Ocean of Love, 24. 13 Ibid., 67.

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Catherine Livingston Garrettson and Integrated Male-Female Spheres view that crowning doctrine holiness. This alone can save us, and make us finally triumphant over every foe.14

A little later in that same letter, she advises Freeborn that “Our preachers complain of the closeness of the Christians. The reason is obvious. Religion is at such a low ebb they have no love to them who minister to them in holy things. Let the preacher get his soul purified, and all alive to God, and then see if there will not be openings of the heart towards him.” She adds a sentence later, however, in a moment of wifely humility that “I will not attempt to give my advice respecting your movements.”15 Garrettson's correspondence mostly deals with domestic things: illness, death, groceries for the household, the growth and education of children. Yet, her correspondence, as well as her many other written texts, seeks first to persuade all of those around her to a Christian life. You have now my dearest Mary entered the church militant and enrolled your name among the followers of Jesus. This is an important step and I doubt not you have maturedly weighed the nature of the engagements you have entered into. The next step as you have entered a seeker, is to be looking earnestly for an application of the blood of Christ to your soul, that your spirit may be united to that God, who has crowned your life with mercies. Do my dear girl endeavor to live by rule and have your stated hours for prayer, and do not give your suit over till you feel that you love Jesus with your whole hearth. You must my dear Mary guard against selfindulgence, be regular in going to bed and in rising. This I know will be a great cross but remember nature must be before we can become spiritual. By method there is time for every duty and one need not infringe upon the other. Oh that your dear father on his return may salute you a child of God, an heir of glory.16

Garrettson's correspondence in itself does not mark a mixed-gender persuasion: Garrettson's letters, besides those to her husband, are mostly addressed to female friends and family. At face value, her letters confirm our ideology of separate, gendered spheres. After all, Garrettson's audience for her letters was overwhelmingly female, with the exception of her 14

Catherine Livingston Garrettson to Freeborn Garrettson, Correspondence to Freeborn Garrettson 1804-1837, 1080-5-2:20, Garrettson Family Papers, Methodist Collection—Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. 15 Ibid. 16 Catherine Livingston Garrettson to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, Correspondence to Mary Garrettson, 1080-5-2:21, Garrettson Family Papers, Methodist Collection—Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.

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husband. Yet, this is only one part of Garrettson's writing, and, as with all archival material, we have to remember that we only have access to what material has been saved and sent to the archive. It is in relation to her other writings and her daughter, Mary Rutherford Garrettson's, that a fuller picture of Catherine Garrettson's rhetorical practice emerges. Much of Garrettson’s rhetorical practice is something for which we need to use our critical imagination; while Garrettson did write a diary recording her many spiritual conversations with both women and men, much of Garrettson's rhetorical work and intellectual life would have been oral. In class meetings, at love feasts, in conversation with her fellow Methodists or Methodists-to-be, Garrettson would have prayed publicly (Garrettson sometimes noted others' reactions to their own prayers in her spiritual journal), discussed sermons, Biblical passages, and texts, counseled new members publicly and privately, and conversed in order to convert. What Mary Rutherford Garrettson, Catherine Livingston Garrettson's daughter, reminds us so well, is that so much of the integral nature of male-female spheres simply wasn't important enough to be noted. After her father's (Freeborn Garrettson) death, Mary Garrettson keeps correspondence with Richard Reece, a British friend of her father's active in the Methodist movement in England. Mary Garrettson and Reece trade texts across the Atlantic, while Mary Garrettson sends the British Methodists a painting of her father, and Reece praises her work with infant Sunday schools. “A mind well disciplined is an instrument which may be applied to any useful and important purpose in after life,” he writes. “Very little has been printed for the aid of these [infant Sunday school] teachers. I will endeavor to procure everything and send it to you with the Tracts by the next Packet which will sail in a few days. The last part of Mr. Watson's Institutes is coming out of the press. You shall have a copy of them very soon.”17 Reece was an old friend of the Garrettsons, “friends so beloved and esteemed.”18 What Reese shows us is the integrated nature of the Methodist world when it comes to gender. Reese writes in the 1840s, but his relationship with the Garrettson family began well before then; Reese was also at the end of a long line of visitors to the Garrettson household, those visitors who would have been entertained by Catherine Garrettson. For while women after John Wesley's death were effectively barred from preaching 17

Richard Reese to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, Correspondence from Richard Reese, 1080-5-3:14, Garrettson Family Papers, Methodist Collection—Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. 18 Ibid.

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Catherine Livingston Garrettson and Integrated Male-Female Spheres

in an official capacity,19 Methodists felt that studying and discussing theology along with personal experiences of God—these things were the domain of both genders. Like a long tradition of women before her,20 Catherine Garrettson would feed her mixed-gendered rhetorical practice into conversation. Why is the transitional nature of the early American Republic so important to note? In short, because in our discussions of nineteenth century rhetoric and women, we have often assumed the gender separation which applies for the larger part of the nineteenth century (the ante-bellum period onward) also applies for the early American Republic. By the 1820s, women's public exhorting was less accepted than it had once been.21 By ascribing later nineteenth century values to the early American Republic, we fail to recognize the ways in which women, most often informally educated in rhetoric, actively participated in the spread of Methodism and actively added to its theology, working along with men at written, but mostly at oral rhetorical practice. Critical imagination is crucial for research in women’s rhetorical history. By gathering together the artifacts we do have from both women and men, by locating these artifacts in historical contexts, and by resisting the placement our own gendered assumptions on past eras, we can strive to break down the male/female, theory/practice, formal/informal, and the inherent active/passive binary that we have created for rhetoric in the early American Republic. For, as Barbara Biesecker writes in “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” “If feminists working in the history of Rhetoric could deconstruct the all-too-easy bipolarization of the active and the passive, we would go a long way toward dismantling the ideology of individualism that monumentalizes some acts and trivializes others.”22 Indeed, intrinsic in our hierarchies of theory/practice, formal/informal, and written/spoken is the ideology (at least when it comes to women) is that theory, formal education, and written composition, rather than extemporaneous conversation is “active” rather than passive. 19

Wigger notes that Catherine Van Wyck, Benjamin Bishop's wife, Fanny Butterfield Newell, Hannah Herrington, and Jarena Lee all exhorted publicly (15455). 20 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 181-99. 21 Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 156. 22 Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 146-47.

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Individualizing women’s writings rather than locating these writings in their contexts and communities denies the importance and intentional actions of women; it turns Catherine Garrettson’s evangelization from rhetorical practice to mere conversation, her support of itinerant preachers from persuasion to mere hospitality, just as it turns the integrated nature of the intellectual worlds of Methodist women and men into mere occasional meetings. Such a vision of the early American Republic dishonors the contributions of Methodist women and men, those who were perhaps informally educated, who were perhaps practitioners, and not theorists, those who perhaps spoke more than they wrote, and those who perhaps operated in “passive” rather than “active” roles, those contributions these women and men made to the centuries of rhetoric, education, and Christian theology to come.

SITES OF WRITING: FANNY FERN AND THE SPACE OF NORMATIVITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY PUBLISHING JENNIFER DORSEY

Nathaniel Hawthorne was no feminist. The author of such classics as The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) widely criticized the commercial and popular success of his female contemporaries in the world of antebellum publishing because the domestic subject matter of their novels and essays was winning the hearts and wallets of the reading public. These women writers of the mid-nineteenth century focused largely on matters of domesticity and sentimentality, and took a “divergence in the path of literary production” while their male counterparts penned what was considered to be “elite or ‘literary’ literature” in terms of thematic approach and depth of message or meaning.1 Elitism aside, the women who produced what we would today refer to as mass-market fiction sapped a significant amount of influence and profit from some of the leading male writers of the day, including the likes of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville. Though Nathaniel Hawthorne famously groused about the success of this “damned mob of scribbling women” to his publisher in 1855, he later conferred a backhanded compliment on one female author who operated differently from her sentimental counterparts. He praised Fanny Fern, author of Ruth Hall, for her ability to “throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked.”2 By doing so, he implied, she was able to elevate her novel (and her reputation in general) 1 Dana D. Nelson, “Women in Public,” The Cambridge Companion to NineteenthCentury American Women’s Writing, ed. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould (Cambridge, UK: The Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40. 2 Susan Belasco Smith, “Introduction,” in Ruth Hall (New York: Penguin, 1997), xxxv.

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to rise above the antebellum bourgeois notions of what made a woman (and her writing) successful, which at the time was marriage. Instead, her work seems, for Hawthorne, to conjure a new image of the self-made woman, something few other women writers were doing at the time. Hawthorne’s statement was revolutionary, not because he praised a woman writer, but because he acknowledged something in Fern’s writing that was “daringly true to her fundamental experience as a woman, while her critics accused her of betraying and lowering her feminine nature, and hence of being unfeminine, unwomanly.”3 What some critics viewed as vulgar and off-putting in Fern’s frank descriptions of real-life women’s situations was, said Hawthorne, what made her writing accessible to the masses of women who were not satisfied with living their lives in the sitting parlor. The standard gender roles of the mid-nineteenth century fulfilled a normative pattern in which men lived their lives in the exterior world conducting business in a competitive, market-driven environment. Women cloistered themselves within the confines of home and family, only venturing out of bounds to act in a supporting role to their husbands, fathers, or brothers. In spite of the very American emphasis on the importance of the individual, women were “not regarded as persons in American society” and were “to be available to be used by the achiever for his advancement.”4 In her work, however, Fanny Fern did not wish to ascribe to this model of antebellum gendered normativity, nor did the circumstances of her own real-life drama allow her to do so. She wrote about the grittiness of marriage, death, relationships, and competition in the literary marketplace in order to stay employed, but perhaps more importantly to evangelize a progressive worldview about the state of gender normativity in nineteenth-century America to her largely female readership. Several scholars have investigated Fanny Fern, her writing, and her gender politics. Joyce Warren is, without question, the leading expert on Fern and the world of nineteenth-century writing, and focuses many of her comments about Fern and normativity on the role of the male and female spheres of existence and the influence of American individualism on women’s lives. Melissa Homestead steers toward discussions of Fern’s 3

Ann D. Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” American Quarterly 23, no. 1(1971): 4. 4 Joyce Warren, “Performativity and the Repositioning of American Literary Realism,” in Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, ed. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 36.

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authorial intentions, contending that Fern wrote Ruth Hall to create a more stable authorial persona that she felt was “fractured and unstable in the periodical context.”5 Focusing largely on the economics of authorship is David Dowling, who explores the concept of capital sentiment between author and gentleman publisher. According to Dowling, Fern transforms the marketplace “from a site of labor only into a place that also offers emotional support and moral encouragement. Her public self actively creates and casts the publisher in his supporting role; her seeming dependence on him veils her true power to define and assign his role in the first place…She manipulates sentimentality to validate her heroine’s uncommon power.”6 In other words, Dowling implies that women are the true masters of this relationship, allowing the men to think they are in charge of female livelihood and life itself. Though much of the scholarship about Fanny Fern is somewhat dated, it deserves a second look in order to refresh and renew our relationship with this forward-thinking feminist author. I place my comments in the context of these scholars and discuss Fern’s creation of a new version of the female author. I argue that Fanny Fern provided women with a new model of female normativity that focused on a relationship between financial independence and unabashed self-expression, something the men who ruled the empire of the publishing marketplace considered a danger to their own ideas of gendered normativity. Before Fern helped women writers see what a new normal could look like, the climate of the American publishing world remained largely patriarchal. Women writers were left with little room for growth, especially in the arena of book publishing, which was considered a more elite medium than newspaper writing. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collection, Essays (1841), the mid-century heralded the literary reign of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), all of which dominated the cultural landscape of authorship. The possible public space for dialogue about the realities of women’s lives, working women in particular was ostensibly left out. Interestingly, the sales of these canonical works belied their influence on the American literary landscape, as they took years to catch up to the sales numbers of leading sentimental women 5

Melissa J. Homestead, “‘Everybody See the Theft’: Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in Antebellum America,” The New England Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2001): 224. 6 David Dowling, “Capital Sentiment: Fanny Fern’s Transformation of the Gentleman Publisher’s Code,” American Transcendental Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2002): 357.

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writers of the time. What they lacked in initial monetary recompense, though, they made up for in perception of literary relevance and longevity of publication. On the other hand, women writers, if they were able to break the glass ceiling of novel publishing at all, had to break in by first writing periodical serializations of novels or individual articles in the papers that were meant for mass consumption. Periodicals and articles held little sway over literary critics and historians. American periodicals were booming in the 1850s and 1860s, publishing light reading for the many Americans who had recently learned to read in the common schools.7 The medium of the periodical was considered an appropriate outlet for women writers due to the fact that women made up a large portion of this readership, and because writing smaller pieces for a magazine (which took less time) would not overshadow the prioritized tasks of home management and child rearing. It was the perfect forum for dabblers in the trade, Hawthorne’s “scribbling women” who weren’t taken seriously as writers because of their focus on issues of domestic sentimentality. Many female writers were complicit in the normative schema, fearing they could upset the apple cart and lose out on positive reviews and hefty profits if they wrote about subjects other than filial duty and melodramatic relationships within the home. So, in order to maintain the image of femininity that garnered them a polite (if not glowing) reception by male reviewers, the majority of women writers kept their printed commentary in the confines of the interior world of domesticity. Women were to maintain this interiority not only in the subject matter of their writing, but also in the methods by which they wrote. Thus, much women’s writing of the early to mid-nineteenth century avoided portrayals of violence, degradation, or cruelties; refrained from using language unbefitting a lady; and conformed to the “passive, dependent, obedient image of the ‘true woman.’”8 However, this action also proved their “ambivalent guilt that they were not leaving the field to the ‘lords of creation,’ but taking it over, and enjoying the conquest.”9 By sweeping the literal, sometimes unpleasant, nature of women’s lives under the literary carpet, authors like Grace Greenwood helped create a complex identity for the mid-nineteenth century female authorship as a whole that “subscribed to a rationale, heartily supported by their male reviewers that attempted to 7

Marion Marzolf, “Sara Payson Willis Parton (Fanny Fern),” in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander (New York: Gale Group, 1985), 360. 8 Warren, “Performativity,” 6. 9 Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women,’” 6.

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prove how justifiable, innocuous and even elevating their work was.”10 This belies the notion that other authors like Fern existed, authors who wanted to examine the realities of women’s lives in lieu of merely portraying the niceties that seemingly accompanied the dance of courtship and marriage. Such authors, Fern among the most popular, did exist, though, and they had quite an effect on the publishing marketplace. Of course, female writers had to have male counterparts in this dysfunctional game of publication, and they came in the form of the gentleman publisher. Deeply romanticized, the gentleman publisher is not unlike the commonplace image of the gentleman farmer in that he is wealthy (or at least a man of independent means) and performs his work not out of duty or requirement, but because he has an affinity for and working knowledge of his craft. However, he is often portrayed in literature as a bit of a dandy, foppish figure who spends little time consumed with actual work and more time cultivating the social aspects of his trade than the talents of his authors. Fern’s portrayal of the character of Hyacinth in Ruth Hall (based on Fern’s real-life brother, Nathaniel Willis) serves as the author’s critique of this binary nature of the gentleman publisher, a man who is seemingly refined and aware of genteel gendered norms while scandalously ripping off his female writers. He is nothing more than a “pseudo gentleman.”11 The relationship between this gentleman publisher and the female writer in the 1850s was not one of mutual respect and shared professional ambition. Very few writers considered their relationships with publishers to be ones of collegiality, much less ones of corporate equality. Prior to Fern’s success later in the decade, male publishers and female writers “patterned their interactions—with key modifications—after separate spheres' domestic ideology, the most accessible code of gender conduct available in their culture.”12 The writer-publisher relationship, in other words, was based on the model provided by romantic relationships in which the suitor (the gentleman publisher) pursued a love object (the female writer). This model of publisher/author relationship reinforced the concept of woman as less than, and shifted the overwhelming weight of power into the hands of the male publisher. The imbalance in this relationship relegates women writers to the commoditized products of this inequitable liaison. Because she served as more of an object than subject, the woman 10

Ibid. Dowling, “Capital Sentiment,” 355. 12 Ibid., 347. 11

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writer functioned as if she were anesthetized, answering only to her domestic and religious duties. Women writers were not to act as if they were writing for profit, even though there was no mistaking this as a motive for writing. They were not to act as if they gained any sort of personal fulfillment from the act of writing. If they did either, they were considered to be publicly slighting the men in their lives for a lack of attention to their needs, and implying that they “might now actively take from them what they [men] refused to give.”13 Writing was, for these women, viewed as a blatant act of rebellion if they did not ascribe to the normative roles available. These roles included that of the grateful, hysterical, dependent servant to the gentleman publisher master. Creating overarching confusion within the publishing industry, this convoluted hierarchy of relationships trickled down to affect some male writers as well. Publishing laws, in theory, governed male and female writers in a similar manner. However, women writers suffered from a sort of schizophrenic professional existence due to the constant need to perform different roles of authorship. Their relationships to their own rights and public personae were constantly at risk of being undermined by their own employers. Authors, men included, were often treated similarly to women during this period because of their delicate relationship with those who could threaten their livelihoods, namely publishers and the reading public. Once the “disease” of objectified authorship spread to the legions of male authors waiting in the wings to be the next Hawthorne or Melville, there had to be little doubt that the relationship between publisher and writer should become divorced from the domestic model it was following, if not for the sake of female writers’ profitability and commercial reputations, then for the sake of their male counterparts. Enter Fanny Fern, a writer who had lived through, among other trials, the death of a spouse as well as an abusive marriage and divorce. Fern’s authorship (in Ruth Hall, in particular) showcased “an awareness of the anomalies of gender relations” and proved there could be a contemporary notion of normal for women in publishing that focused on models of capitalistic gender interaction in which women and men worked as colleagues instead of operating as suitor and love object or patriarchal spouse and matriarchal subject.14 Fern’s new model of normativity persuaded women to forge new paths as writers by creating a writing-forprofit exemplar, replacing the patriarchal power of the publisher-author 13

Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women,’” 10. Carol Moses, “The Domestic Transcendentalism of Fanny Fern,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 50, no. 1 (2008): 106.

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relationship to one that was based on author-centric competition. This model encouraged women to pursue writing as a purposeful vocation in which they could attach meaning to their lives. The rise of Fern’s authorship opened a new avenue for women wishing to engage in the increasingly industrial economy of the mid-nineteenth century because she didn’t hesitate to engage in market-driven negotiations with her publishers. For example, while Fern was in the midst of writing for periodicals and marketing Ruth Hall, she accepted the offer of the same pay for writing one article a week for publisher Oliver Dyer’s New York Musical World and Times that she was earning by writing two articles a week for periodicals The Olive Branch and The True Flag. Until that point, Fern had been diluting her effectiveness as an author in spite of her commercial success, as her messages of women’s rights and female suffrage were spread across several varieties of media with conflicting objectives and audience. But by accepting Dyer’s offer to focus her efforts on one readership, she was complicit with the new norm of “unrestricted free trade much like that of other industries in the 1850s.”15 She now had the power to entertain competitive offers from multiple publishers and accept the ones that best afforded her both the opportunity to earn maximum profit and the choice of the media for which she wrote. This small deal between a publisher and an author proved that male publishers were capable of putting their author’s interests if not first, at least in the same sphere as their own interest in profitability. Perhaps it is because of Dyer that Fern didn’t find the figure of the gentleman publisher to be completely negative. In fact, she makes a case for what a healthier version of the gentleman publisher/female author relationship could look like in Ruth Hall with the character of Mr. Walter. This characterization shows that a free trade relationship is acceptable so long as some level of emotional care/support is at play in the relationship as well. This was a dangerous notion to male publishers who remained loyal to the former model of publisher as ruling patriarch. They were going to have to adopt new ways of relating to their female writers; the very fact that would have to relate to their female scribes at all (as Walter did) was a threat to their daily existence. Though Fern, in Mr. Walter, crafted a character who operates as an equal colleague with his writer, Walter’s paternalistic charity seems to work as a mask to cover the reality of his position within the publisher/author relationship. In fact, Walter’s success is intact due to Ruth’s benevolence as a writer and colleague. She produces work for him, 15

Dowling, “Capital Sentiment,” 351.

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he publishes it, and both receive some level of credit. However, Walter likely knows that if a rival publisher poaches Ruth, he will either have to find a new ingénue or allow his company to fold. It would seem, then, that Ruth is operating in the traditional male sphere, as she holds all of the power. If Ruth stops writing, Walter stops getting paid. He is unwittingly dependent on her professional survival. This example of such a professional relationship transformed the modern identity of the gentleman publisher in the real world, “whose success paradoxically depended on his adherence to certain gender codes of behavior and moral virtue, particularly altruism” almost as much as it did that of the woman writer.16 In Mr. Walter, the publisher-writer binary has been inverted. Conversely, the villain publishers in Ruth Hall, like Lescom and Tibbetts, knowingly hang onto Ruth’s authorial rights not out of respect to their publisher colleagues, but to rob Ruth of what she has rightfully earned. Ruth’s ultimate success and independence is hard won in this case because she knows the professional choices she makes will not only affect her in the short-term, but for her entire life and the lives of her children. Fern’s created an obvious choice for the character of Ruth: either remarry and live a life of domestic servitude, or work as a professional writer to retain “economic independence and absolute self-possession.”17 Ruth chooses to forge her own destiny as a writer and as a woman, elevating her own professional agenda above those of her “gentleman” publishers for good. Creating a character like Ruth Hall wasn’t the only way Fanny Fern changed the domestic landscape for women of the nineteenth century. The way she conducted her own literary business matters proved to other women writers that they, too, were capable of writing for profit and not merely as a hobby. The notion of economic independence for women was not necessarily revolutionary, but the fact that Fern trumpeted her theories to a mass readership instead of a limited scholarly audience was tantamount to a full-blown scandal. And because Fern required and was granted handsome monetary compensation in exchange for sharing those ideas with a wide audience, she was thought by many of her critics to have dangerously “defiled the ‘sacredness’ of the home.”18 Regardless, though, of whether her naysayers gained any political ground by painting her as a devilish temptress, luring women out of their homes and into the newsroom, the wave of new female writers was already surging to every shore of the country, especially women writers who focused on social 16

Dowling, “Capital Sentiment,” 348. Homestead, “‘Everybody See the Theft,’” 222. 18 Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women,’” 4. 17

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Sites of Writing

justice issues for women. Some of the notable works that followed on the heels of the publication of Ruth Hall included Mary Bryant’s “How Should Women Write?” (1860), Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), Gail Hamilton’s “A Call to My Country-Women” (1863), and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ “The Woman’s Pulpit” (1870). While this is only a short sampling of the writers who used their skills to address the economic needs and impact of women in the industrialized society, their longevity proves that Fern’s own activism was more than trendy—it set the stage for a tradition of feminist activism in print that continues today. Suddenly, the writer had something that her detractors did not—a legion of disciples, armed with pens in hand. Fern’s desire for and evangelization of financial independence may have been viewed as vulgar and unbecoming of a woman of her class, but that did not stop her from changing the terms of how writers were compensated for their work. The gentleman publishers of the era were firmly engrained in what Dowling calls a “trade courtesy” model of author marketing and commoditization. In this model, competitive publishers held firmly to and respected the first rights of publication for both books and periodical pieces. No author was poached from another publisher without the publisher’s prior consent and without proper reparation (to the publisher, not to the author). Though many publishers respected the boundaries provided by first rights, which kept author wages reasonable in the eyes of the publisher and reduced the effects of piracy, this adherence ultimately drove down profits due to a discouragement of open bidding. An open bidding market, on the other hand, increased both risk (due to poaching of authors by rival publishing houses) and profit potential.19 The liabilities of the open market system mattered little once the demand for Fern and her contemporaries grew, and Fern’s success encouraged publishers to start bidding for the right to publish an author’s work in lieu of adhering to the normative trade courtesy of the time. This open bidding paradigm all but replaced the archetypical standard of the gentleman publisher with a more competitive, author-centric model focused on individual competition that remains the norm today. Aside from benefiting from the economic changes that resulted from Fern’s meteoric rise as an author, women writers also experienced a renaissance of purpose in their writing. Warren writes that Fern helped women to see that they did, indeed, have a purpose for writing other than whiling away the hours at home while their husbands were leading their lives in the public spheres of business and politics. Instead of spending 19

Dowling, “Capital Sentiment,” 350.

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their time attending to the niceties of social functions and fashion, women had the unique opportunity to not only earn a living, but also to explore the implications of what it meant to be a woman wrestling with issues of patriarchal influence and entitlement that so often colored their everyday lives. If women, Fern said, could have a purpose in life other than “darning socks,” then it was not only their right to pursue it but their duty to do so for both themselves and the advancement of women in general.20 This sentiment (not to be confused with the domestic sentiment in Fern’s writing that so often dominates criticism about her) was part of Fern’s message about economic independence. She considered the pursuit of talent as important as the ability to earn a living wage. Women had to write for their own emotional and physical survival in order reclaim ownership of their own lives and cultivate an existence designed to ensure that no husband, father, or even gentleman publisher could stake a claim on what they themselves had created. There is no denying that women’s life stories had the potential to be their most profitable creations, both personally and professionally. If Fanny Fern’s updated spin on feminine normativity filled her critics with an uneasy sense of dread, the way she went about creating the new prototype of the mid-nineteenth century feminine writer must have left them positively dumbstruck with confusion. Her methods of doing so, considered at the time to be rather scandalous, were actually quite innovative, particularly when it came to how she created her own image. It was not Fern’s style to enter into new endeavors quietly either personally or professionally, so it comes as no surprise that she approached her own authorship and persona with a sense of playfulness and creativity. She was, after all, a writer; so, why not “write” herself a new personality to go along with her success? Fern knew that she had to reach mass appeal in order to garner the financial and critical success necessary to maintain her own self-reliance. Thus, Sara Payson Willis Parton became Fanny Fern, creating “a persona that is so distinctive that she can exploit it.”21 In order to exploit that image, Fern used the tools available to her, including the public’s fascination with sentimental literature. It is no surprise that her new pen name appealed to both people who held an appreciation for sentimentality, as well as those who felt they were in on the joke: poking fun at such writing and its precious readership. Her pen name garners the attention of both audiences. In using it, Fern takes the chance that both

20 21

Warren, “Performativity,” 82. Moses, “The Domestic Transcendentalism,” 106.

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Sites of Writing

audiences will play along, if only long enough to mention her writing to friends or family, opening a new circle of readers with every remark. To mirror this experience, Fern created a similar situation of multiple identities for Ruth Hall, who wrote as “Floy.” The difference between real life and Fern’s fiction, though, was the fact that Ruth could control how and when to reveal her real identity. Ruth Hall could “write, and hence claw her way back out of the ditch and fight men on their own terms, and Fanny Fern, far from masking her heroine’s effort, glories in it.”22 Fern herself had to manage several personae and voices: sentimental, satiric, third person narration, “soliloquized” by another character, unidentified first person, and Fanny herself. Fern even mentioned the challenge of maintaining these multiple personae in one of her articles in the March 1852 edition of the Olive Branch in which she stated, “Sometimes I’m an old maid, sometimes a wife, then a widow, now a Jack, then a Gill, at present a ‘Fanny.’”23 If Fern ever felt that she could not control the circumstances of authorship in her own life, at least she knew she could rely on Ruth always to serve as the most stable version of herself. Another method Fern used to craft an updated version of female normativity was to blur the lines between the male-dominated exterior world and the interiority that characterized the antebellum feminine existence. For example, she didn’t just create stories about women who represented her ideas about marriage and domesticity; she served as the model for those stories herself. She brought the inner workings of her own domestic and financial worlds to the forefront for the world to read and by doing so, proved that the two gendered spheres overlapped instead of existing on opposite planes of reality. Ruth Hall itself is an exquisite and literal example of this binary reversal because Fern allowed her readers a voyeuristic glimpse into the drama of her own life. Though exact, direct parallels can’t necessarily be drawn between every single incident of Fern’s adult life and the plot points of the book, Ruth Hall is widely regarded as an autobiographical work that laid out some of the details of Fern’s real life in bold relief. True, there is a purpose of social justice behind the book, and it should no doubt be read as an unapologetic commentary that women should be treated as singular individuals, not as supporting players in the lives of the men with whom they associate. But Fern’s willingness to showcase her own struggles in both the home and publishing marketplace held just as much power as the words she wrote on the page. The act of writing about her own challenges as a woman (in spite 22 23

Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women,’” 21. Homestead, “‘Everybody See the Theft,’” 225.

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of the veiled, fictionalized account) was, for Fern, its own kind of activism. Once Fern’s two worlds collided both on the page and in real life, there was no going back to the safe, yet repressive, model of feminine normativity. Not only did her career model financial independence for women writers, it also created an environment in which Fern and her fellow writers could achieve an unprecedented level of freedom in the subject matter of their works. Fern had flung open the windows to the interior world of female existence and had allowed the fresh air of selfexpression to wash away the stale odor of subjugation and domestic servitude. Not surprisingly, one of the primary targets of that expression was the cadre of men who had repressed Fern for so long. The parade of men whom Fern satirized in Ruth Hall included her father, who pressured her to remarry in order to alleviate his financial responsibility to her; an abusive second husband who sexually abused her and withheld her funding in order to maintain control over her; a father-in-law who vowed to disinherit her children if she did not give them up; and Nathaniel Willis, her publisher brother who assured her she did not have the talent to write professionally. Fern obviously had few men upon whom she could rely for both monetary and emotional support in her own life, and she was able to use her craft as an outlet for her frustrations about her personal abandonment by the men in her life. While the realization that the “ideal” association between men and women was not going to happen for Fern in her own life might have seemed disheartening, it only sparked a fire within her to spread the news to her female readership that women had a moral obligation to themselves to be self-sufficient and provide their own financial sanctuary. The “protection” of financial security could be removed in an instant and “the money that came with it could be used as leverage to force compliance” with the desires of the men who considered themselves generous benefactors to their subordinate wives and daughters.24 Not only did Fern, by example, encourage women to earn their own money by marketing their own talents and wares (whether those wares be the products of intellectualism or a labored trade), she also gave women permission to write “to compensate themselves for male cruelty and to reproach the men who exercise it.”25 Fern addressed her feelings about the duplicity of men’s intentions in several essays and articles, as well as in Ruth Hall. 24 25

Warren, “Performativity,” 12. Wood, “‘Everybody See the Theft,’” 24.

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Sites of Writing

One example of Fern’s use of storytelling appears in Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio (1853) in which she uses the allegory of story as a vehicle, while other times directly addressing her female audience. Her message was broadcast to the literate masses, men included, in most major forms of media, which justified her reputation as a dangerous game changer. If Fern could reach both the educated woman and the newly literate woman, she could influence both the leisure and working classes to rise up against the stifling reach of the domestic and capitalistic patriarchy. Fern’s lesson to the men who ruled, both in the home and in the publishing house was that “they deserve what they get, for it is what they themselves have forced into being: a smart business woman capable of outwitting them in their sphere.”26 The result of Fern’s efforts to fashion a new version of the female writer equal in merit and recognition paid handsome dividends both in terms of popularity and financial compensation. The successful new female writer served as Fern’s ultimate version of gender normativity in the publishing marketplace. This updated norm was one in which women’s writing was proven to be relevant to its audience and authors were able to market and brand themselves with just as much potential for profit as their male equivalents. Forging this innovative version of the new antebellum woman did not come without personal cost to Fern, who began to lose control of the multiple authorial personalities she had created for herself in spite of her financial prosperity. Fern had given the reading public just enough of a glance into her life with the publication of Ruth Hall to make them clamor for more. This, in turn, drove up her stock among her publisher’s competitors and allowed her the luxury of cashing in on the highest bidder. Instead of participating in a courtly dance of “feminine authorial self-effacement” meant to woo potential publishers (as in the antebellum norm of a love relationship), Fern claimed her writing as her own property and often publicly exposed how other writers and publishers poached her artistic creations so as to prove the marketability of her work.27 Other publishers, and some of her fellow authors, reprinted her essays and articles without her permission. These copies were often published under different bylines or listed as “Anonymous,” which was a particular slight. While such practices were confounding to Fern, they were also like a litmus test of her popularity. Fern was in demand, especially with literary pirates who wanted to sell papers. As Fern’s popularity rose after the publication of 26 27

Ibid., 23. Homestead, “‘Everybody See the Theft,’” 211.

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Ruth Hall, she and her editors “increasingly condemned encroachments on her name as well as her style.”28 One such encroachment was The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern, allegedly written by William Moulton, editor of The True Flag, which criticized Fern as a raging opportunist. If the author thought that publishing a book openly criticizing a female writer who had as much, if not more, influence than her male colleagues would hurt sales of Fern’s real works, he was sadly mistaken. Sales of Ruth Hall “multiplied as readers made a game of unlocking the roman a clef.”29 It seems that though Fern got the personal financial success she had worked hard to achieve, she also opened herself up to attacks on her intellectual property and her character. While Fern’s life and work proved the success of the new model of normativity, she did not hold on to her newfound status as novelist in earnest. Sales of Ruth Hall were strong, but reviews of the book were not overwhelmingly positive, Hawthorne’s recommendation notwithstanding. Fern reverted to writing for periodicals “by which she could effectively send her frank and intelligent messages of social critique” to the masses.30 She had reached the heights of literary achievement so often for men and their intellectual contemporaries, and proved that women’s issues mattered not just to the women themselves, but to the men who shared their lives. Fern effectively shifted the image of the interior, dependent female into a representation of the authentic lived experiences of the industrialized modern woman.

28

Ibid., 212 and 218. Ibid., 230. 30 Smith, “Introduction,” xiv. 29

“COME SIT AT THE TABLE WITH US”: TRACES OF RACIAL HISTORY AND WOMEN’S AGENCY IN PLACE SUELLYNN DUFFEY

In this essay, I remember stories from my own family, reawakened in human memory by a very specific geophysical location, a rural southwestern Ohio county that borders the Ohio River and has been, since the first settlement of white immigrants, filled with racial tensions. It shares a close history with the region where Toni Morrison located her novel, Beloved, in which a character kills her infant to prevent the child from the certain enslavement that the approach of slave-catchers promises. Prompted by a return to this county after my mother’s death and after conversations with relatives that arose there, I found memories unfolding piecemeal, and I realized that one snippet of a story from my mother about race and women’s agency was embedded in at least four generations of similar stories traceable to my great-grandmother, Sophronia Jane Dunn. Brown County, Ohio, the place to which the Dunn’s and my ancestors immigrated in 1816, was part of the Northwest Territory that promised freedom from slavery. Brown County shared a river border with Kentucky and significant economic ties to and commerce with southern territories all along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers as far south as New Orleans. This border gave the southwestern part of Ohio an economy that depended on the sale of Northern goods to the South. Important also were settlement patterns in this part of Ohio that brought many former Southerners to the region (my ancestors included). It was home to a wide spectrum of attitudes toward white supremacy and slavery exemplified, for example, by slave catchers who returned fugitive slaves to their owners in the South, abolitionists who ran Underground Railroad stations, and others whose views fell at various points along the continuum between these two extremes. Such diversity fostered, in this part of Ohio, significant conflict up to and including the Civil War. This history of racial conflict is one that my family lived through. Thus, even though I cannot trace a direct link via any family stories to abolitionists or slave catchers in the early and mid-

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nineteenth century, I consider place, a concept I will say more about below, to be a constituent of the stories I tell. My stories from ordinary people demonstrate a white, rural southern Ohio family’s racial attitudes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and demonstrate certain aspects of gendered agency exerted in domestic spaces. The import of the family stories is enhanced by a sense of place through which I show how the stories both reflect and inflect southern Ohio’s earlier racial history. The stories and my telling of them against this earlier history transforms geographical location into a rhetorical and interpretive concept, and gives them greater significance than they might have if viewed simply as one family’s memories. It sees place as both material and geophysical, both temporal and socio-culturally abstracted from historical time. Nedra Reynolds, in Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference writes, “What do bodies, city walls, pathways, streams, or…trees have to with rhetoric, writing or an intellectual discussion?”1 Reynolds goes on to answer the question: “Geographical locations,” she writes, “influence our habits, speech patterns, style, and values—all of which make it a rhetorical concept or important to rhetoric.”2 She explains, “While race, class, and gender have long been viewed as the most significant markers of identity, geographic identity is often ignored or taken for granted. However, identities take root from particular sociogeographical intersections, reflecting where a person comes from.”3 Place, as I am using it, is a rhetorical construct based in physical location, a construct in which geography, memory, family identity, social connections, historical events, and cultural interpretations intersect. As I said above, the stories I tell and the identity of my family members that they reveal gain more power when seen in the racial history of Brown County. To some extent, my emphasis on place and region also aligns with Kristie Fleckenstien’s goals to invent a “biorhetoric,” one which “position[s] us within the ambiguous interplay of materiality and semiosis. Biorhetoric, Fleckenstein argues, “emphasizes the inextricability of materiality and semiosis.…[and their] entanglement in a nonlinear weave.”4 She goes on to

1

Nedra Reynolds, Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 11. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, “Bodysigns: A Biorhetoric for Change,” JAC (2001): 762.

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Traces of Racial History and Women’s Agency in Place

say that “we cannot escape place, although we can deny it and redefine it.”5 Located in this geographic location, in this place, the stories from my female ancestors reveal how women can and have used their constrained power. This is a power that can be loosed in domestic spaces, one of the only spaces in which women throughout history have often been able to construct and enact agency. I stress this agency because, as Glenda Riley says in the foreword to Midwestern Women, historians have become more encompassing “[in their treatment of women’s history; Rather] than simply discussing victimization, exploitation, and cultural dissolution…they pursue an understanding of the ways in which women exercised agency…[an agency] no less forceful for its subtlety.”6 and, I would add, even more significant for its location in this particular geographic and rhetorical place, a place where racial conflict continued long after the nineteenth century ended.

A Farm Place Quiet, sprawling hardwoods shade the soft yard, a yard edged on one side by a driveway that borders both the yard and the barnyard opposite it. The trees were all there and mature even then, over half a century ago when I was a schoolchild and our tires crunched into the gravel as we eased into a family reunion, the first at my great Aunt Mary’s farmhouse. They are there still, the trees, the yards, and the gravel drive. I saw them again just a few years ago. They prompted remembrances of my family’s women—a great-grandmother, great aunts, and grandmothers who cooked farm dinners at mid-day to stoke the field hands’ energy, whose dinners at family get-togethers always were feasts of home-grown vegetables, home-raised fowl and hogs, and homemade pies and cakes. These women’s culinary offerings were shaped by the rural, and somewhat southern, traditions of growing, cooking and preserving food, for example, pork, cured and uncured, predominated over beef, which was rare; cornmeal turned into bread and mush; iced tea was always sweetened.

5

Ibid., 766 Glenda Riley, in foreword to Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads, eds. Lucy Elderveld Murphy & Wendy Hamand Venet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1997), x. 6

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This essay had its beginnings in the last months of my mother’s life. At a Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference in 1999, a young presenter told place-based stories of her grandmother who had lived in Springfield, Ohio, just a few counties away from Brown. She sketched visual images of fences, pathways, and trellised vines that called up intimately familiar images: Mottled green-and-red homegrown tomatoes ripening on a kitchen window sill like ones I had seen at home every summer of my childhood, vivid images from the spaces my mother lived in. She was ill and would die within weeks, and so these images took on a potency they might not otherwise have had. Afterwards, my mother’s affairs took me back to Brown County and Aunt Mary’s farm where the quiet, sprawling hardwoods shaded the soft yard. As I re-encountered the trees and talked to an elderly cousin who lived across the road, I discovered (and partly re-discovered) an oral tradition of stories about race, stories told mother to daughter, cousin to cousin, woman to woman over four generations, traceable back to Jane Dunn and the late nineteenth century. The stories included in this oral tradition have been told by women who lived in the twentieth century, some of whom I’ve known well and others, only barely. As an academic, these cross-generational and woman-to-woman stories interest me because the reoccurrence of similar incidents through several generations intensifies the significance of the stories in family lore, “triangulates” their truth value, and suggests the ways in which women—and family stories—often teach and pass on moral values the family deems important. The women in my family were in many ways just the same as most other Midwestern rural women, but beginning as far back as the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as far back as I have records of their beliefs and actions, they were unlike many of their neighbors. They taught their white daughters and sons to respect African Americans through actions and words. The women in my family carried out their teachings and acts with a significance their geographic location enhances. Bordering the Ohio River which separated the South from the North, Brown County is known, as I indicated above, for its often violent racial history during the very early and mid-nineteenth century as well as afterwards. Keith P. Griffler explains, “The deep connection of the port cities of the Ohio and their hinterlands to the economy of slavery resulted in a deeply divided region, with strong antislavery sentiment animating many, and others just as fervently supporting the institution.”7 Griffler points to economic 7

Keith P. Griffler, Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 114.

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Traces of Racial History and Women’s Agency in Place

reasons that motivated some views. Religious and Enlightenment notions of equality also played significant roles in early nineteenth century attitudes toward slavery and race relations. In addition to abolitionists and white supremacists, the section of Brown County where my great-grandmother and our ancestors lived included several settlements of former slaves, freed by Samuel Gist in the early 1800s.8 Gist, a wealthy Englishman who had owned land and slaves in Virginia, freed them at his death, but Virginia would not allow them to remain in the state. Even though Gist freed his slaves, his “intention [as often happened] was thwarted by his white relations who succeeded in defrauding the newly free persons of the greater part of Gist’s wealth and very nearly of their freedom.”9 After long wrangling, it was in the Northwest Territory and Brown County, in a township very near Aunt Mary’s farmhouse, where land was eventually purchased for some of these freed women and men to live. So my mother’s family, for all its time in Brown County, lived near communities of freed slaves and their descendants, and interacted with them. In my mother’s lifetime (1914– 1999), residents from both communities visited; they took excursions together; they bought and sold items to each other. For example, a family from the Gist settlement first owned my baby bed. The family Jane Dunn was born into was almost certainly among the many, many people whose lives were touched in some ways by those who opposed as well as supported slavery. Abolitionists, conductors on the Underground Railroad, and circuit-riders who led Chautauqua-like lecture series filled the churches and meeting places of Brown County in the nineteenth century. They and their activities wove threads into the fabric of history and of daily life there. A road that intersected Dunn’s small township was named for Isaac Beck, a noted abolitionist who lived on it very near some of my relatives. One set of my relatives was married in the Methodist church by William Mahan, a relative of John Mahan, another noted abolitionist.10 Even though I have no storied connection to my preCivil war family, these tangential connections to Ohio’s abolitionist history suggest the racial context in which my mother’s family lived for several generations. As Jane Dunn, the first ancestor whose racial attitudes I have a record of, came of age and matured into an adult during the two decades immediately after the Civil War, the local conflicts around race would not have centered on the issue of slavery but would have 8

Carl N. Thompson, Historical Collections of Brown County, Ohio (Piqua, Ohio: Hamer Graphics, Inc., 1969, 1971). 9 Griffler, Front Line of Freedom, 13. 10 Ruth Yochum, in discussion with the author (Brown County, Ohio May 2003).

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nonetheless continued in different forms and been present in her life and consciousness. We can infer the conflicts from the heritage of racial attitudes that she passed on to her daughters, her granddaughters, and her greatgranddaughters. The stories that survive about Jane’s and her descendants’ acts and teachings matter in my family’s history, and they matter when set against Ohio’s older racial history. They can be seen to embellish and reflect and refract it partly because of their grounding in geographical as well as rhetorical spaces. The stories also demonstrate resistance to racial hatred in domestic spaces, like dining tables, where women could exert an agency, one that shaped their children’s and family’s behavior at home and ultimately, as it happened, outside of home.

Sophronia Jane Dunn in Place Hot, Midwestern, baked-still July lay on the surrounding cornfields and the bare rail bed we crossed before we turned into the drive those many years ago. The hardwoods spread their shade over all the house and yard, but beyond their leaves, the shimmering heat threatened anyone who ventured beyond their canopy. My elderly great-uncles or distant relatives, many of whom were men I hardly knew, sat there under the leafy-green awning, chewed tobacco, and talked intermittently as they waited for dinner. July was the time Great Aunt Mary and my mother, Helen celebrated their birthdays. In the trees’ respite we celebrated doubly, reunion and births. Our arms full of contributions to the country feast, my nuclear family and I crowded through the back door that great Aunt Mary held open. Mom, Dad, and my brother Jerry must have been intent on pushing into the house to lay their food on the already burgeoning tables. But my child’s eye noticed what they had missed. Enormous dark blue granite roasters in an out-of-the-way place filled deep with pan-fried, home-grown chicken—drumsticks and pulley-bones and thighs and breasts in deep layers, more than I had ever seen before. Aunt Mary saw me take notice and paused, chuckled that my eye had caught the centerpiece of our soon-to-come feast. The house was cool inside, even in mid-summer, and as Aunt Mary welcomed us into its space beyond the porch, the space prompted an almost imperceptible memory of this same porch and adjoining rooms that made me, in that long-ago July, think I had been in them even earlier. Could I have been? In my child’s memory, the room was sunny, not shaded, and someone was in a high bed. Had I been in Aunt Mary’s house

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before, I asked my mother in that July. As she pieced together the memory of a farewell visit to Jane Dunn, my hazy recollection of a sunny space became believable. When I was four years old, Sophronia Jane Dunn had lain in the dining room next to Aunt Mary’s porch, and entering that room in summer several years later had indeed cued accurate memories within me—hazy images of sunlight and a quiet woman lying in a make-shift bedroom with her white, white hair mussed up from illness. It was in February when Jane Dunn breathed her last breath and passed out of this life, so in the weeks before her death, the trees in Ohio would have had no leaves. The room would not have been shaded, as it was on that July day. I had seen my great-grandmother then and rediscovered now, several years later but still a child, a visual image of her. When I returned recently, as an adult past mid-life, to the tree-shaded slope and talked to one of Jane’s granddaughters, Ruth Yochum, who lives across the road, other memories returned.

A Child’s Naming Power “Grandma Great-Dunn” I had called her as a preschooler, inverting the order of kinship terms. As a child learning language, I spoke my name for Jane Dunn through a common kind of linguistic error, the kind that approximates the language of adults but fails at complete accuracy. As often happens, my childhood linguistic error stuck in the name my family used for Jane ever after. We all called her Grandma Great Dunn, and so within that family, I had named her, just as I had named my mother’s sister “Uncle Mabe” through another common learner’s error. I used the kinship title I knew, “uncle,” before I had applied a gendered distinction between “uncle,” and “aunt.” My invented names gave me, through my family’s adoption of them, the right to name, a naming power that in very subtle ways created a space and identity for me in the family through the agency the acts exhibited. While both of my invented names, “Grandma GreatDunn” and “Uncle” Mabe certainly produced laughter in my relatives, I was never laughed at for my inventions. There’s a huge difference between being the butt of a joke and the cherished originator of humor. Cherished. That was the space I lived in among all my mother’s blood relatives. I think it is not mere coincidence that the space in which I felt treasured was also a space in which African Americans were shown measures of respect and affection. It is a space that is also, in my memory, very much female and very different from the spaces my father’s family allowed children to hold.

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Brown County, Ohio Let me move backward to tell you some of the very early history of Brown County in order to invoke a further geographical and historical sense of place. When I was a schoolchild in Ohio and learned Ohio and American history and the Northwest Territory, I was befuddled that the term “Northwest” applied to the place where I lived as well as to the nearby and familiar states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Nothing seemed western or frontier-like about any of them. Texas was west to me; the frontier was the southwest; and land rushes had taken place in Oklahoma and California, not in my backyard. None of my early years of living in Ohio prepared for what I’ve learned about it in recent years, learned through place-generated, family memories and stories fleshed out by published scholarship. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Ohio was the west, and became a prosperous crossroads, its treasure of natural resources peddled by land speculators.11 It was not the impoverished, isolated, provincial place of my childhood. It was a frontier and yet relatively well-traveled. As early as 1810, there were at least two main overland roads from New England to Ohio. While settlers to southern Ohio and Brown County entered the state most typically on river boats, the existence of well-marked roads, with way stations and inns as well as documented commerce of significant proportions, gives testimony to deeply webbed networks of travel in the “west” during this early part of our nation’s westward expansion.12 11

Martha Boice, Dale Covington, and Richard Spence, Maps of the Shaker West: A Journey of Discovery (Dayton, Ohio: Knot Garden Press); Harold J. Dudley, Trans-Allegheney Pioneers: Historical Sketches of the First White Settlements West of the Alleghenies, 1748 and After, 2nd ed., ed. John P. Hale (Raleigh, North Carolina: Derreth Printing Company, 1971); Margaret Van Horn Dwight, A Journey to Ohio in 1810 as Recorded in the Journal of Margaret Van Horn Dwight, ed. Max Farrand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Emily Foster, The Ohio frontier: An Anthology of Early Writings (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996); Ann Hagedorn, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); History of Brown County Ohio: A History of the County; Its Townships, towns, Churches, Schools, Etc, (sic); General and Local Statistics; Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men; History of the Northwest Territory; History of Ohio; Map of Brown County; Constitution of the United States, Miscellanous Matters, Etc., Etc. (Chicago: W. H. Beers & Co., 1883); Carl N. Thompson, Historical Collections of Brown County, Ohio (Piqua, Ohio: Hamer Graphics, Inc., 1969 & 1971). 12 Dudley, Trans-Allegheney Pioneers; Dwight, A Journey to Ohio in 1810.

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I find this wide travel stunning, when contextualized within the landscape of Ohio at that time, a landscape of virgin-timbered forest, deeply canopied so that the sun never reached the ground, as we read in Ann Hagedorn’s description: The town of Ripley [in Brown County] lies on land wedged between the Ohio River and a steep, sprawling ridge in a region once known among frontiersmen as the Imperial Forest. Long ago, this vast expanse of green, fifty miles east of Cincinnati, 250 miles south of the Canadian border, and roughly a thousand feet from the Kentucky banks of the Ohio, was rich in hickory and elm, beech and oak, ash and walnut. Sycamores grew to fortyfive around, so wide, it was said, that a horse and a rider could stand in the hollow of a trunk.13

High hills bordered the Ohio River in many places, and creeks and tributaries led away from the river into the hunting lands, salt licks, and villages of Native Americans. The amount of commerce into and out of Ohio, from earlier fur traders and surveyors, Native Americans and then Europeans who stayed and settled as clergymen and farmers, was extensive in this “west” so that it was, when my ancestors arrived there in the early 1800s, a paradoxically wild as well as known region. The networks of travel, interlaced over space and time, formed a thick web and enabled commerce and complex societies almost unimaginable to me in the twenty-first century. This part of Ohio was also a place of diverse ethnicities, unlike it had been in my childhood. While a small number of African Americans had attended my (predominantly white) high school and one boy from Germany had entered my elementary school shortly after World War II, I had grown to adulthood in Ohio before I heard anyone speak a language besides English. Early census records from the time when my distant relatives moved to Brown County, however, give a somewhat different picture; they note the places of origin for immigrants as Ireland, Germany, and, surprisingly, Asia, given Ohio’s European population during my childhood. By the twentieth century, my Scots-Irishness had been assimilated in southern Ohio and was invisible, a folklore professor told me in graduate school. What else gave this part of Ohio its character? Certain (Indian) wars and federal land acts in the late 1700s and early 1800s had conspired to engender a rapid influx of white settlers and even though Brown County was not necessarily easy land to inhabit when my family arrived, it was, as 13

Hagedorn, Beyond the River, 7.

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I said above, a multicultural and multi-ethnic place and emerged quickly as a prosperous cross-roads. It had busy river ports, established churches or religious settlements, and much commerce in the early and midnineteenth century. In addition, since slavery was banned in this Territory, many of the Kentuckians and Virginians, the Shakers and Quakers, Methodists and Presbyterians, North Carolinians and Georgians who poured into southern Ohio were people who had left slave-holding states out of crises of consciousness. This new land of the free had particular appeal among those ex-soldiers of the Continental Army who had fought with the cause of liberty in their hearts and after the Revolution saw only hypocrisy in the slavery sanctioned by their home states. So, by the early years of the nineteenth century, droves of Virginia’s veteran soldiers, as well as speculators who had purchased the warrants from soldiers choosing not to move, were hastening to the land beyond the Ohio River, to this El Dorado of the West, a land where no man could be enslaved as the property of another.14

Slaves were also drawn to Ohio. “After the war of 1812,” according to E. Delores Preston, a historian of the Underground Railroad, “soldiers from Virginia and Kentucky, returning home, carried back the news that there was freedom beyond the [Great L]akes. Many of the slaves, catching at the vague items of information, made them the basis of plans of escape,”15 plans that would take them through Brown County as well as many other parts of Ohio. While slaves heard news about the promise of freedom in the Northwest Territory and beyond and ex-soldiers and their relatives were drawn by “the cause of liberty,” my ancestors capitalized on offers of land, journeyed to Brown County and stayed. Having obtained land in the Northwest Territory through payment for military service in the Revolutionary War, one of my great, great, great, great-grandfathers, Absalom Clarkson Dunn, moved his family from Virginia in 1816 to Brown County where over a century and a half later I returned to the place of my family reunion and my childhood visits to Aunt Mary’s.

14

Ibid., 9. Charles L. Blockson, The Underground Railroad: First-person Narratives of Escapes to Freedom in the North (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), 205.

15

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Come Sit at the Table with Us In my youth, my mother had told me that her mother, Zelma Dunn Mullen, insisted that Mrs. Mills, an African American woman who helped Grandma with ironing, always be called by her title, “Mrs.” Jane Dunn and her descendants knew, either explicitly or implicitly, both the general role of names to inscribe power relationships and the particular denial to African Americans of a title plus a last name during slavery and even after, a denial which enacted and maintained African Americans’ subordinate place in social hierarchies. In addition, a title that reflected a woman’s married status would have been doubly denied slaves who themselves were usually not allowed to marry. Insisting that my white family use Mrs. Mills’ title, my grandmother acted to inscribe not only respect but also equality. This kind of respect was not uniform throughout the county. Edna Toler Mills, a black friend of my mother in the 1930s, had never experienced overt racism in the area near Aunt Mary’s but did when she went to another Brown County town to participate in a high school scholarship contest.16 At mid-day, when the contest paused for lunch break, Miss Toler and six others headed for a restaurant, where “they told me to eat in the kitchen,” in the back, away from her friends.17 Back in that place after my mother’s death, I visited with Ruth Yochum, Mary’s daughter and one of Jane’s granddaughters, who told me stories of them both. Sometimes, Ruth said, Mrs. Johnson, a descendent from the Gist settlement in the Fincastle area, worked for Mary. “She came one day a week to help. [At dinner] the first time she came, she started to take her plate outside, but [Mary] said, ‘No, you sit right here [at the table with us].”18 Mrs. Johnson countered that when she worked at other folks’ houses, she ate out back, not at the table. Mary replied: “You’re working for me,” not other people, and here you eat with us.19 Mary exerted a dining table equality and in doing so followed a pattern her mother, Jane Dunn, had set with Earl Johnson, another Gist area resident. Ruth said that “When Earl was a boy and Grandma [Jane Dunn] would see him, she’d tell him to come in, [to have bread and butter and jelly.] But she never just gave him food; she had a little job for him to do—to bring in wood or something. Earl would help mother, too, in the 16 Edna Toler Mills, in discussion with the author (Georgetown, Brown County, Ohio, May 2003). 17 Ibid. 18 Yochum, discussion, May 2003. 19 Ibid.

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yard or garden.”20 Why did the food Jane offered entail work from the boy? Ruth reported that Earl’s father was “no good” and probably contributed little to the family’s support. The boy’s family needed money. Jane’s acts offered racial respect and avoided the stigma of charity. I don’t, however, want to ignore the fact that Jane’s acts at the same time inscribe her position of power just as Mary’s acts did not disrupt the racial hierarchy because Aunt Mary, the white person and employer in the dinner table exchange, had the power to decide where Mrs. Johnson ate. But my relatives’ acts take on much different significance when contextualized within, first, subsequent family acts (Earl’s story, below) and second, within social history about whether or not one “comes to sit with” another at the table (Mary’s acts). As a grown man, Earl “would sometimes visit [as he walked down the road from work] and [he’d] reminisce with me the about fresh bread and jelly at Jane’s house as one of the high points of his childhood. [He said it was] as good as an ice cream cone to him!”21 Ruth said, further, that Earl was “like a brother to me. He mowed our yard after Edwin [my son] went to college. He ate at my table. [During these visits, as we two adults talked,] Missy, my daughter, would sit on his lap. He loved Missy and she loved him.”22 From Jane’s bread and jelly gestures through Mary’s dining table equality, clear cross-race friendships developed. Racial mixing at dining tables seems to have been almost as powerfully laden as sexual mixing across races. Consider, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s remarks about her white, Georgian, slave-owning family. Roughly contemporaneous with Jane Dunn, Lumpkin looks back at her family’s teachings about race: “Often we spoke of the sin it would be to eat with a Negro. Next to ‘intermarriage’ this was a most appalling thought. It was an unthinkable act of ‘social equality.’ To say the words ‘eat with a Negro,’ stirred us disagreeably” (italics mine).23 Clearly, for whites to share a table with blacks was for many an act laden with fear, disgust, and reprehension and as evil as sin. In later decades and into the twentieth century, this taboo had not abated. Diane McWhorter writes in Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, “the culture’s strict injunction against social equality

20

Ibid. Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner, excerpted in Selves: From Mark Twain and Eudora Welty: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing Southern, ed. James H. Watkins (New York: Random House, 1998), 154. 21

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had somehow centered on the symbolism of [whites] ‘sitting at a table’ with a Negro, whether over a meal or a discussion.”24 This same symbol, ‘sitting at a table’ with a Negro, is one that John Brown (and perhaps my relatives) used subversively. Brown was a radical abolitionist who turned his ethical principles about racial equality into violent and lethal action. He led a massacre of slavery-supporting whites in Kansas and a raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, through which he hoped to grow his “army” with slaves who would desert plantations to join his war-like efforts. He was captured, convicted, and executed for his actions. Sometimes characterized as a wild man, a terrorist, and an enemy of other abolitionists because of his violence, Brown takes on a different character in David S. Reynolds’ cultural biography.25 Through this cultural analysis, we see Brown live out and enact his racial principles and beliefs. A significant, non-violent example occurs when Brown deliberately chooses to live in North Ella, a New York community of fugitive slaves. Throughout the biography, we see Brown as a man who trusted and sought out the intelligence of African Americans, so much so that he wanted to live among them and engage their participation in his efforts, not as subordinates, but as equals. In this, Reynolds argues, Brown was almost alone among his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, it was a matter of ethics that Brown ate at the table with his community members and addressed them with titles, Mr., Mrs., Miss. “Come sit at the table with me” has been, indeed, a very heavily weighted cultural symbol. While I could not and would not want to argue that my greatgrandmother, my great-aunt, my mother, and my grandmother understood all the complexities of race relations in their county and the nation or that they understood white privilege as we do today, and while I wouldn’t want to use a few small stories as evidence of my family’s total absence of racial prejudice or lack of complicity in white privilege, I do want to argue that interpreting these family stories as instances of white privilege misses something significant: these women’s stance toward racial equality as well as their role as ordinary women in enacting social change in the domestic spaces where they could exert their agency. Seen in the context of dialogic interaction between public and well-known acts of social change (like the abolitionists work on the Underground Railroad) and the private, familial 24

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 223. 25 David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 2005).

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acts of ordinary women, the family stories I tell give us a more complicated way to understand that social change does not happen only through public acts and that women’s agency in domestic spaces affect social change. My family members were ordinary folk, not the ones whose names enter history books, though several of its female members passed down stories of actions that attempted to address racial inequalities, mother to daughter to granddaughter to cousin. My great-grandmother in the late 1800s and early 1900s insisted on a sort of “dining table” equality, however momentary that was. In the next generation, her two daughters also enacted this same “dining table” equality, and these stories were deemed worthy of telling and retelling across generations, and the acts of racial respect and affection continued. Theorists of autobiography also help conceive of the importance of such work as mine. For example, in “Rethinking the Personal Narrative: Life-Writing and Composition Pedagogy,” Deborah Mutnick (quoting Michael M. J. Fischer) explains that “autobiographies, carefully interrogated, can provide one important data base for reconstructing social theory ‘from the bottom up’; they provide fine-grained experiential loci of the interaction of changing social forces.”26 In recent years, I’ve come to understand that the efforts of people like James Meredith and Rosa Parks were made possible by significant human networks of support.27 Our cultural myths portray such people as heroes or heroines, icons of individual action who by themselves became agents of change and who alone bore the consequences of their acts. While such portrayals are to some extent accurate, they are also skewed. What they ignore are the huge networks of people, organizations, plans, and social and legal efforts over long periods of time and place that lay the groundwork in which Parks, Meredith, and others acted, in other words, the systematic and complex forces at work to create change. Rosa Parks’s refusal to sit in the back of a bus was not merely a spurof-the-moment decision. Funds from philanthropists Virginia Durr and her husband had sent Parks to a civil rights workshop the summer before she kept her seat on that bus. She had also participated in considerable 26 Deborah Mutnick, “Rethinking the Personal Narrative: Life-Writing and Composition Pedagogy,” Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice, eds. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson (Logan, Utah: Utah University Press, 1998), 91. 27 McWhorter, Carry Me Home; Robert A. Pratt, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegration of the University of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).

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organization work on behalf of civil rights beforehand.28 Thus Meredith, Parks and others did not operate as rugged individualists, the American mythic icons that history books record and social values support. To say so is not to diminish their stature but instead to illustrate that significant social change involves a complex, dialogic, intermingling of the individual and the social that advocates and plans for, instigates, supports, and enacts social change. In the public arena of history, we sometimes record such intermingling, through, for example, David Reynolds’ cultural biographical techniques. The private arena of family is another matter. And so I tell my family’s stories in order that we see examples of the intertwining of private and public, of past and present, and of the geophysical and the rhetorically geographic. The racial attitudes my stories reveal stand alongside more public efforts, from the abolitionists onward, to rectify racial inequality. My female ancestors’ efforts were no doubt just as deliberate as the NAACP’s; they were equally sustained over long periods; they spread out threads of racial practice that enmeshed many people in many places beyond Brown County. These women’s lives and stories and habits are as strong as the hardwoods that shaded Aunt Mary’s home and their branches as sprawling. Perhaps even more so. Their stories stand, much like the trees, sending out wide root and canopy systems, growing in girth and height, living through generations. The trees, constants in my life and by some appearances unchanging, offered me, the young child, respite from the heat. My Aunt Mary’s house offered respite from racial hatred. In her daughter Ruth’s house a generation later, Earl Johnson and Melissa enacted a deeper antidote to our nation’s racial hatred. If I listen to my family stories, I learn one reason why I, too, wish for respite from hatred and denigration, why the places I have lived in have shaped me deeply, in ways I am sometimes hardly aware of. The trees and stories were theirs and mine, ours and yours, then and now.

28

Ibid.

MAKING SPACE FOR WRITING: HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS’ NEWSPAPERS, WRITING CLUBS, AND LITERARY MAGAZINES, 1897-1930 LORI OSTERGAARD, AMY MECKLENBURG-FAENGER AND HENRIETTA RIX WOOD

In A Group of Their Own, Katherine H. Adams examines the college-level writing clubs and courses that supported women writers in the early twentieth century. Adams reveals how post-secondary curricular and extracurricular activities permitted women to enter “the previously closed circle of Writer” and imagine their written works as “existing within the sphere of the professional.”1 Adams’s archival study contributes to the work begun by scholars such as Ann Ruggles Gere, Karen J. Blair, and Jacqueline Jones Royster to recover the ways that clubs and social groups promoted women’s engagement in American civic, creative, and professional life.2 For the college women whom Adams discusses and for those women whose stories populate the pages of Gere’s Writing Groups and Intimate Practices, Blair’s The Torchbearers, and Royster’s Traces of a Stream, however, their engagement with public and professional 1

Katherine H. Adams, A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880-1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), xvii, 47. 2 Ann Ruggles Gere, Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).; Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).; Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).; and Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

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identities may well have begun in high school. As feminist scholars investigating the history of women writers and rhetors continue to chart the sites where adult women found and developed their voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we should also research and recover the curricular and extracurricular secondary school spaces that nurtured young women writers during this time. Early feminists may have recognized a direct connection between women’s engagement in the act of writing and their emergence into the public sphere. As Gere observes in Intimate Practices, turn of the twentieth century clubwomen used writing to “understand and negotiate with conflicting ideologies of womanhood,” and the newspapers these women published provided them with “a means of bringing their concerns and accomplishments into public view.”3 The significance these women ascribed to their identification as authors is evident in a speech that June Rose Colby, a Peoria High School teacher and later professor of literature and rhetoric at the Illinois State Normal University, delivered to the Peoria Women’s Club in 1891. Colby argued that “the enlarged conception of womanhood” that characterized much late nineteenth century literature was no more remarkable “than the change in woman’s own relation to the literature itself. This relation has ceased to be passive and has become active. Women have ceased to be merely occasional readers of books and have become writers of them.” While Colby noted that “women were occasionally authors before the nineteenth century,” she contends in this speech that it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that woman really began “to speak for herself” through literature.4 Despite the remarkable transformation of early twentieth century women’s relationship with text that is documented in both Colby’s speech and in contemporary histories by Adams, Gere, Blair, Royster, and others, we still know remarkably little about how secondary educators, like Colby, encouraged “enlarged conceptions[s] of womanhood”—and how high school girls engaged with their world—through writing in high school clubs and publications during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Locating early twentieth century women’s experiences as writers in the curriculum and extracurricular activities of high schools may afford a more comprehensive blueprint of the sites of women’s authorship during this time. Because women represented only a small percentage of the college population, high school histories may help us to account for the 3

Gere, Intimate Practices, 5, 9. June Rose Colby, “A Nineteenth Century Problem: Woman,” Peoria Women’s Club, March 9, 1891, 36-37, Illinois State University, Colby Archive, Box 1. 4

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experiences of the majority of women who never set foot on a college campus and whose written works have, therefore, been excluded from many of our histories of early twentieth century rhetorical education and empowerment. Histories of high-school publications and writing clubs may also provide us with insights into the Progressive-Era pedagogies— practical and vocational—employed more often by high school teachers than by faculty teaching writing at elite universities, demonstrating how some early feminist pedagogues may have fostered independence, entrepreneurship, and authorship among girls and young women during this time. Using archival materials from a boarding school for Native American children, an affluent Chicago high school, and a Southern girls’ school, this chapter provides three case histories examining the extracurricular spaces where female students developed as engaged public writers and rhetors. Henri opens our chapter with a consideration of Helen W. Ball’s influence on the writing, editing, and publication practices of girls contributing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a newspaper published by the Haskell Institute in Kansas, the second largest Native American boarding school in the country. Next, Lori examines the collaborative and competitive work of Mignon Wright’s Story Club for girls at the Oak Park and River Forest Township High School in Illinois. Wright’s club fostered a strong sense of professionalism among these young women that may have prepared them for careers as writers after high school. In the final section of this chapter, Amy examines Cerberus, a literary magazine started in 1912 by three students at the Ashley Hall School for Girls, the first college preparatory program for girls in South Carolina. This magazine supported and developed the writing of many of the talented writers the school produced, especially one of Cerberus’ founders, Josephine Pinckney, a Southern poet, novelist, and civic activist, who was a well-known writer in the United States in the 1940s. In each of these archives, we discovered teachers and students creating a space for the kinds of mentorship, collaborative work, private critique, and public display essential to developing these young writers’ sense of craft, understanding of professionalism, and identification as author.

The Indian Leader of the Haskell Institute for Native Americans, 1897-1913 In 1897, the Haskell Institute for Native Americans in Lawrence, Kansas, began to publish a newspaper. Featuring the writing of Haskell students, The Indian Leader was distributed to as many as 800 pupils at the school

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as well as Native and white readers nationwide.5 In the early days, the editor of the newspaper was Helen W. Ball, a white teacher at Haskell. Ball reportedly relinquished her role as editor in 1908, and the newspaper subsequently listed the names of the white male superintendents as editor, but we believe that she continued to influence the content of the publication until her death in 1924.6 As editor, Ball had dual and sometimes dueling rhetorical agendas: an employee of the Indian Service, she supported the aim of Haskell and other government-sponsored Indian schools to assimilate young Natives into white society through education. Consequently, she ensured that The Indian Leader presented a positive portrait of Haskell. Yet Ball was a “New Woman” who attended college, never married, pursued a career as a professional journalist, and worked at Haskell for 35 years.7 Her personal perspective may have inspired her both to publish commentary that privileged young Native women as important and accomplished members of society and to assure that the voices of Native American girls who constituted a minority of Haskell students were heard in The Indian Leader. Offering young Native women the opportunity to represent themselves publicly in print to a diverse audience, Ball enabled them to defy derogatory assumptions that indigenous peoples were inferior to whites. While Ball and Haskell girls disrupted discourse about Native Americans in their own day, they also productively complicate historical narratives that cast white women as villains and young Native American women as their victims during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, Robert A. Trennert suggests that white women teachers and matrons at Indian schools tended to be dictatorial and unsympathetic to Native girls, and administered physical discipline or recommended humiliating punishment, such as cutting grass with scissors in the school yard. Myriam Vuþkoviü characterizes Estelle Reed, who was white and the first woman to serve as United States superintendent of Indian schools, as a social evolutionist who sought to acculturate rather than assimilate Native Americans. Jacqueline Fear-Segal analyzes the patronizingly didactic role that white teacher Marianna Burgess played in the publications of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School for Native 5

Haskell Indian Nations University, “Haskell Indian Nations University, Cultural Center, and Museum,” http://www.haskell.edu/archive/haskell_archive.htm (accessed August 13, 2007). 6 Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., and James W. Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals, 1826-1924 (Westport: Greenwood, 1984), 179. 7 “Helen W. Ball,” The Indian Leader, September 12, 1924, 2-3.

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Americans.8 As we illustrate below, the archives at Haskell may challenge this villain-victim binary. The Haskell Institute was founded in 1884 and accepted applications from Native American students throughout the United States. By the mid1890s, students from thirty-five tribes attended Haskell, with most pupils coming from reservations in the Midwest. At the turn of the twentieth century, Haskell provided elementary education for students from ages five to twenty-five as well as business and teacher training. As was the case at other Indian schools, girls accounted for a minority of Haskell students. For example, Haskell counted 300 to 350 boys and 241 to 191 girls in 1899; the enrollment fluctuation presumably reflected the coming and going of students. Haskell required students to attend school half a day and, if they were old enough, to do industrial or domestic work that supported the school the other half of each day.9 Haskell boys working in the print shop produced The Indian Leader, initially a monthly publication, which became a weekly in October 1899. The newspaper published announcements by administrators; excerpts from professional periodicals; notices about current and former students, teachers, and supervisors; and the writing of pupils. Ball made space for the girls to write for the paper despite the fact that they were in the minority at the school, and the school’s newspaper provided these girls with professional experiences they might not otherwise have encountered in the school’s half-day curriculum. Because of her influence, The Indian Leader featured roughly equal numbers of female and male student writers throughout the course of several issues, but given Ball’s background, this is hardly surprising. Before coming to Haskell in September 1889, Ball earned a degree from the University of Kansas, and after college, she worked for newspapers in Indiana, Kansas, and Kansas City, where she was the society and literary editor for The Kansas City Times, and was reportedly the best-paid newspaper woman west of New York City. 8

Robert A. Trennert, “Educating Indian Girls at Nonreservation Boarding Schools, 1878-1920,” Western Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (July 1982): 285; Myriam Vuþkoviü, Voices from Haskell: Indian Students between Two Worlds, 1884-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008): 92-93; Jacqueline Fear-Segal, “Eyes in the Text: Marianna Burgess and The Indian Helper in Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830-1910, ed. Sharon H. Harris with Ellen Gruber Garvey (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). 9 Vuþkoviü, Voices from Haskell, 34; “Haskell Institute,” The Indian Leader, 6 March 6, 1897, 2; Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Part I for Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1899 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899): 10, 394.

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Leaving professional journalism for health reasons, Ball accepted a position at Haskell, where she served as a teacher, historian, librarian, and student recruiter.10 During her time as editor of The Indian Leader, Ball consistently privileged Native girls, as an item in the June 1898 issue confirms: “We quote the following wise utterances of the Commissioner: ‘The only way we can solve the Indian problem is to educate the girls. We have no objection to your educating the boys; make college graduates out of every Indian boy in the land, but unless you educate the girls, the solution of the Indian question is as far away as it ever was. The superiority, so-called, of the white race today is owing entirely to the condition of our mothers and sisters.”11 The fact that Ball selected this quote as the final editorial in that issue of The Indian Leader suggests that she meant to have the last word: Native girls, like white girls, could be educated and could become leaders of their “race.” To prove that Native American girls could assume leadership roles, Ball regularly included reports about the achievements of Native American girls in the newspaper. In September 1898, she positioned a story about a Winnebago girl on the front page of the Haskell newspaper. The excerpt from Indian’s Friend reported that the artwork of Angel DeCora would be published in Harper’s Monthly. DeCora was a well-known artist and a student at the Drexel Institute of Illustration, who was reported to be “for a long time . . . one of the most promising members of the class.”12 Ten years later, Ball published another article about DeCora on the front page of The Indian Leader. An excerpt from the Des Moines Tribune quoted DeCora as saying: “I believe that the Indian is the quickest and most willing to learn of any nation of people . . . They grasp the meaning of things in a decisive manner and when one thing is demonstrated to them they hold it in their memory forever. In the study of the English tongue they are progressing with wonderful strides and the next generation will be an indispensable part of this cosmopolitan nation.”13 And in August 1900, Ball countered conventional wisdom about Native American women by publishing an article, “Indian Woman’s Rights,” on the front page of The Indian Leader. Drawing on the observations of a white man who was familiar with Native Americans in the Southwest, Ball catalogs the

10

“Helen W. Ball,” 2-3. The Indian Leader, June 1898, 4. 12 The Indian Leader, September 15, 1898, 1. 13 “An Educated Indian’s Views,” The Indian Leader, September 4, 1908, 1,4. 11

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advantages of Native women in relation to property and matrilineal organization.14 To counter the dominant discourse about the inferiority and degraded status of Native girls and women, Ball also amplified the voices of Haskell girls in the pages of The Indian Leader. In July 1897, she placed sixthgrade student Ada Breuninger’s essay, “My First Experience in Housekeeping,” on the front page of the newspaper. The title of the essay suggested that Breuninger would write about how she applied her Haskell lessons in cooking, cleaning, sewing, and laundry. In fact, she wrote about her experience as an eight-year-old girl trying to keep house for her family, most likely before she attended Haskell. Contradicting the common belief of whites that Native Americans did not practice housekeeping, Breuninger recounted her efforts to attend to domestic duties at the home that she shared with her father and brothers. She writes: “The first thing was to wash the breakfast dishes, a thing that I always have hated and always will hate, and will never do if there is any way of getting out of it.” Breuninger’s defiant denunciation also signaled resistance to a task that girls were assigned at Haskell. She then went on to describe her failed attempts to prepare lunch and dinner one day. Concluding her comical account, Breuninger reports that she cried when her father came home that night, but “he soon comforted me by giving me some candy and telling me that I was his good little girl, even if I couldn’t cook.”15 In effect, Breuninger delivered oppositional rhetoric, contrasting a Native American authority figure who was lenient about her domestic inadequacies with the white authority figures at Haskell who insisted that girls learn to cook. The articles Ball published in the early years of the twentieth century may reflect her resistance to the gendered vocational work of the school and to the school’s shift away from academics. In 1905, two years after Haskell closed its normal school department in response to the shift from academic to vocational training in government schools for Native Americans, Ball seems to have protested this measure by publishing Nellie Toombs’ essay, “A Thorough Academic Training.” Positioned on the front page of the annual edition of The Indian Leader, Toombs’ commentary refuted the theory that Native Americans did not need academic education. Toombs observes: “However well the Indian youth may be trained to work, merely it will all be in vain if his mind is slow and he has not the 14

“Indian Woman’s Rights,” The Indian Leader, August 10, 1900, 1. Ada Breuninger, “My First Experience in Housekeeping,” The Indian Leader, July 1897, 1. 15

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right use of it. He must rise, by means of a more thorough education, above the ordinary unthinking laborer and must take his place among the thinking class of workers.” Toombs credentials her comments by citing the observation of the new commissioner of Indian Affairs, who supported citizenship for all Natives. Education prepared Native Americans for their future duties as citizens, she reasons: “I, therefore, make the plea for a more extended academic training for the Indian. Without an extended education, there can be no advancement and without advancement, there must follow retrogression.”16 Capitalizing on the concerns of whites who feared that without education, Native Americans would revert to their indigenous ways, Toombs makes a compelling argument for increasing the educational options at schools such as Haskell. Toward the end of the first decade of publication, The Indian Leader began to run a column called “The Societies,” which provided an opportunity for Haskell girls to write about the activities of their literary societies. Those activities included more than recitations and songs, as Claudia McDonald, the secretary of the Sarah A. Brown Society suggested in February 1910. McDonald writes that officers in the society regularly reviewed foreign and local news, and that at the most recent meeting, six girls debated the question: “That Women Should Vote.”17 In January 1912, this society also challenged the single-sex rule of Haskell literary societies by debating whether or not boys should be admitted to the group, and according to the society’s reporter, E. Woodburn, the affirmative side won.18 While the Sarah A. Brown Society occasionally debated questions related to gender equality at their meetings, the newspaper’s account of the Montezumas’ December 1910 meeting notes that members had read aloud a publication that they had produced themselves.19 Through these published accounts of society activities, the newspaper illustrated that young Native women were capable of electing and acting as officers, performing publicly, commenting on local and national issues, and employing their literacy skills to work on projects of their own choosing. Haskell girls were astute rhetors whose newspaper articles and reports delivered persuasive discourse that often challenged negative assumptions about Native Americans and their place in American society. Under Ball’s guidance, the newspaper also enabled girls to confront the gendered 16

Nellie Toombs, “A Thorough Academic Training,” The Indian Leader, July 7, 1905, 1. 17 Claudia McDonald, “Sarah A. Brown Society,” The Indian Leader, February 25, 1910, 3. 18 E. Woodburn, “Sarah A. Brown Society,” The Indian Leader, January 12, 1912, 2. 19 Sarah Jordan, “The Montezumas,” The Indian Leader, December 9, 1910, 2.

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stereotypes advanced by their own school, illustrating that young women were capable of much more than the vocational domestic duties they were assigned at the school. Through their contributions to The Indian Leader, these young Native American women exercised their strengths as writers, demonstrated their skills as leaders, asserted controversial ideas about women’s roles in society, and addressed an audience composed of their peers, families, and tribes, as well as white administrators and readers nationwide.

The Story Club of the Oak Park and River Forest Township High School in Chicago, 1906-1928 Like Helen W. Ball, Mignon Wright, an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest Township High School (OPRFHS), provided a space where her female students could develop and employ their rhetorical and creative skills. Wright’s Story Club for girls, the earliest and longest-lived of this high school’s writing organizations, was established in 1906 to provide a space where "prospective writers [could] exhibit their wares and obtain skill through practice and helpful criticism" by their peers.20 Wright’s competitive and collaborative design of the club was so successful that Story Club continued to thrive at this affluent suburban Illinois high school throughout the 1910s and 1920s, and it served as a model for the boys’ fiction club, the Scribblers, which was established nearly twenty years later. The OPRFHS Story Club was an exclusive club with a membership process that may have helped to foster feelings of exceptionalism among club members. While Story Club meetings were typically characterized by constructive peer review, collaboration, and support, the club also promoted a spirit of intense competition among these high school girls that may have prepared them for professional writing careers after high school. The club’s competitions began with the membership story contest, extended into the blind peer reviews that determined whose works would receive the honor of being read at the meetings every week, and culminated both in an annual fiction contest sponsored by the school’s literary journal, The Tabula, and, eventually, in the Story Club’s annual competition with the Scribblers. Membership was open to only juniors and seniors, although for the club’s first decade, OPRFHS girls had only one chance of achieving membership, in May of their sophomore year when the annual story 20

Lura Blackburn, Our High School Clubs (New York: MacMillan, 1928): 57.

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competition was announced. In order to enter the competition to become a member of the club, girls had to first acquire recommendations from two faculty members. Once they were recommended for membership, each girl could then submit only one story to the competition, and their stories had to be original works composed outside of any class. Stories were rated in blind reviews by club members or by English faculty, and membership was held to 28 girls every year, 14 juniors and 14 seniors in a school that, in 1913 had 98 junior and 85 seniors girls. Between 31 and 37 girls would typically submit works to the competition, or just a little under one third of the sophomore girls attempted to join the group every year. However, in 1916 the club was overwhelmed by having to judge 57 stories submitted for the membership contest, and the number of submissions continued to rise throughout the late 1910s and ‘20s, perhaps in response to a similar rise in the number of professional women writers during this time. Adams observes that by 1929, “more than 40 percent of American literary authors and 25 percent of the journalists and editors were women.”21 As more women gained entry to creative and journalistic writing jobs, OPRFHS girls may have recognized the importance of the professional training Story Club offered. Competition did not end when the new members were initiated to the club: contest and blind peer review were integral parts of club life, fostered by Wright and club officers, and supported by the club’s constitution. The girls met every other Tuesday after school in the English clubroom, in classrooms, or at Wright’s home. Story Club writers prepared stories and submitted them to a select group of club members or officers for review every week. If a story was rated low, it would be rejected for reading and the writer would remain anonymous, but receive an open critique of her work at the beginning of the next meeting. According to one student, “Before the papers are read, one of the committee that chose them tells why the other papers were not read. She uses no names, and so can explain fully the faults that made the papers ineligible.”22 And the reviews were apparently well received, as this student explains, “It should not be thought for a minute that authors of the rejected papers are offended or discouraged. They are just as ready and willing to try next time, and usually it is found that their writing has improved enough” to be accepted for reading at a later meeting.23

21

Adams, A Group of Their Own, xvi. Blackburn, Our Clubs, 103. 23 Ibid. 22

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Even those girls whose stories were considered the best of the week received a critique after reading their works out loud to the group. And these critiques were taken seriously by club members, so seriously, in fact, that the March 1914 edition of the school’s literary magazine, The Tabula, recounts a change to the typical procedure for the critiques. The magazine reports on a change in story-response procedures from a club-wide critique about the “most striking merits” of a story that often left little time for the listeners to remark on “the salient faults” of the work, to a single readerled critique that would address specific problems in each story.24 Rather than leave the critique open to the group, club members agreed to have their works assigned to a single reader so that each story could be “carefully and thoroughly gone over” by at least one critic who would identify “those errors which sometimes escape us in the excitement aroused by the theme of a tale. After it has been read by the author, the critic who has had the paper beforehand, expresses her opinion, and, in this manner, careful attention is given to technique and form as well as to heart-interest and action.”25 In other words, when an on-the-spot critique of a work by the whole group failed to produce much by way of constructive criticism for the writers, the group elected to change the system to put the main critique into the hands of one member who would take the lead criticizing the story. Stories were composed in a number of genres and about a wide variety of topics, so that a single meeting might address works of humor, romance, or adventure, and members regularly tried their hands at morality tales, character sketches, nature stories, and historical fictions as well. Comedies were a favorite genre. At a meeting on December 8, 1916, Winifred Barton “varied the usual [club] program by giving a parody of Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To Wed, or Not to Wed.’”26 In 1918, the club elected to require that every girl prepare “something short and entertaining at each meeting except those at which her stories are due.”27 Sentimentalism was also very much in vogue: Story Club member Elizabeth Pickett’s first-place story in the 1913 Tabula contest told the story of a lake captain whose ship sank while he and his crew were transporting Christmas trees across Lake Michigan. Pickett’s was a heartwarming story that ended, predictably, with the captain arriving on his own doorstep on Christmas morning to the delight of his young daughter. Romances were also welcome additions to the 24

“Story Club,” The Tabula 20, no. 3 (1914): 40. Ibid. 26 “Story Club Hears Parody and Several Stories,” The Trapeze, December 8, 1916, 1. 27 “Story Club Contest,” The Trapeze, April 26, 1918, 2. 25

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weekly programs: Gertrude Bradshaw’s (1916) short romantic comedy “Personal Ads” told the story of two college men who make mischief with a stranger’s love life using the newspaper’s personal ads. And a Story Club party at Wright’s house in February 1919 included a session where the girls made “a fruitful search for ‘futurist ideas’” for their stories, which resulted in Story Club senior, Virginia Conover, publishing “A Futurist Folly,” in the March 1919 issue of The Tabula.28 Closed club meetings permitted members a safe environment in which to receive the critical feedback they needed to develop their works, but Story Club members also frequently abandoned their isolation to engage in public competition. For example, after the 1924 founding of the boys’ fiction club, the Scribblers, Story Club members met in competition with Scribblers every year. Story Club generally won the story contests, while Scribblers, who were required to record their meeting minutes in verse, frequently took honors for poetry. Recognition for their best works was not uncommon for Story Club members who regularly contributed stories to the school’s literary magazine and yearbook. In fact, Story Club members often won prizes in The Tabula’s annual literary competition: in 1913, for example, members received five out of the seventeen awards offered, including first and third place. Despite the publicity that the club and its stories regularly attracted, Wright’s Story Club was designed to provide very little benefit to the school or local community. Indeed, the club’s lack of social contribution was celebrated by members; thus, in a published history of the school’s clubs, one student reported that Story Club was designed entirely to support the individual whose desire to write would be nurtured by the club’s environment: the “only way in which the school as a whole is benefited by the work of Story Club” was through the publication of club members’ stories in The Tabula, but “as for the individual—that is a different matter.”29 Story Club members did not have to pursue the kind of charitable work expected of Girls’ Club members, and they did not have to produce skits and stunts to entertain the entire school like the girls’ Drama Club. While their annual membership party was a much-anticipated event, no one at the school expected these writers to plan dances, teas, or charity drives. In their isolation from these gendered school activities, Story Club members nurtured collaboration, competition, and an enduring sense of their own exceptionalism as writers. And these young women carried this 28

Claire Foy, “Miss Wright Has Party for Story Club,” The Trapeze, February 7, 1919, 1. 29 Blackburn, Our Clubs, 104.

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sense of exceptionalism with them into a new century where every year more high school women matriculated to college or pursued successful careers as writers.30

Cerberus, the Literary Magazine of the Ashley Hall School for Girls 1912-1915 In a 1934 pamphlet, Call Back Yesterday, Southern novelist and poet Josephine Pinckney reports on the first twenty-five years of history of the Ashley Hall School for Girls in Charleston, South Carolina. She opens with the school’s founding in 1909 by Mary Vardrine McBee, a Smith College graduate, of whom Pinckney observes “being southern born she could see that the South had something to offer the young people of America” and that the “South needed more good schools.” 31 Like Helen W. Ball at Haskell, McBee was a “new woman,” active in many local cultural and civic organizations. As Ashley Hall’s centennial celebration video explains, McBee was deeply attached to the community and regarded one of the missions of Ashley Hall as the improvement of Charleston, a mission she inculcated in the girls through their education.32 At the time, Ashley Hall was the only college preparatory school for girls in the state; ads from the time published in the nearby all-male College of Charleston’s magazine advertised Ashley Hall’s college preparatory program that earned graduates admission “to northern colleges without examinations.”33 It is perhaps no surprise that one of Ashley Hall’s esteemed writers, only one of several famous writers that the school produced (including Madeline L’Engle, Alexandra Ripley, and Josephine Humphrey) should praise the school, as it was instrumental in her early education as a writer.34 To the school’s credit, Pinckney reports in 1934 that “a number of the undergraduates have successively won the Gorgas Medal (awarded for an essay on the control of Malaria) and the State medal for the best paper on Chemistry,” which gives a tantalizing glimpse of the way writing was valued at Ashley Hall.35 30

Adams, A Group of Their Own, xv-xvi. Josephine Pinckney, Call Back Yesterday (Charleston: Quinn, 1934): 1. 32 Ashley Hall Centennial Video, 2009, http://www.ashleyhall.org/ashley-hall history.php (accessed June 23, 2013). 33 Ashley Hall Advertisement. College of Charleston Magazine. September 1919. 34 Ileana Strauch, Ashley Hall (Charleston: Arcadia, 2003): 65. 35 Pinckney, Call Back Yesterday, 3. 31

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Interestingly, Pinckney herself contributed to the value that the girls at her Alma Mater placed on writing. While still a student at the school, she helped establish a literary magazine named Cerberus with two of her friends, a magazine that continues to publish the writing of Ashley Hall’s girls to this day. A look at Cerberus’ early years reveals the ways that it supported the writing and editing talents of Pinckney herself, as well as all the other girls who edited, published in, and read the magazine. Student literary magazines have received very little scholarly attention from scholars in composition, especially those published by high school girls. Such publications warrant our attention as they illustrate the ways that quasi-institutional spaces functioned as writing instruction just after the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, Cerberus fulfilled several rhetorical functions for the girls of Ashley Hall that are similar in many ways to those of the OPRFHS Story Club. First, it provided a forum for the girls to build a sense of camaraderie; the first few editorial teams made it a special purpose of the magazine to try to construct an association of active, able, forwardthinking girls who had high aspirations for their futures and a desire to act in their own communities. The magazine also gave the girls a site to practice writing skills, to experiment and play with language outside the confines of classwork. Cerberus was a space where girls practiced in many different writing styles and genres ranging from literary pieces, such as poems and short stories, to essays, journalistic reportage on national, local, and school events, as well as letters and reviews. Perhaps most importantly, contributing to Cerberus gave the girls of Ashley Hall the experience of writing for real audiences. Although we today think of a school’s literary magazine as having an audience of mainly students of one particular institution, in the early twentieth century, literary magazines like Cerberus were circulated to other schools in a system of exchange, which gave the girls of Ashley Hall experience with addressing readers who would critique their work and suggest improvements to their writing. Cerberus was started in 1912 by three enterprising young women, Anne Guerry, Elsa Woolsey, and Josephine Pinckney. Apparently, they struggled in the first year to get the girls to submit pieces for publication, as Pinckney notes that “it took some drumming to get contributions to that first number.” However, after Herbert Ravenel Sass reviewed Cerberus in the local News and Courier, Pinckney reports that it began to be taken more seriously. The work of starting the magazine was apparently stressful; Pinckney describes the “turbulent times” and “clash[es] of temperaments in the ardent cause of literature” that were smoothed over by

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Augusta Dunbar, a beloved teacher in the lower school who acted as advisor for the Cerberus staff in the early years.36 The founding editors initially used the magazine to call the Ashley Hall girls to action, urging them several times in the first year to be active and daring individuals who would be more likely to make an impact on the world as adults. In the inaugural issue, the editors report: “A Teacher of this school once said, ‘The Ashley Hall girls are sheep. Oh, very nice sheep, but sheep nevertheless.’ This is a fair criticism girls. You have shown yourselves to be humble followers . . . Why not stop this game of ‘Follow the Leader’? Have your own ideas about things in this school, and express them, not someone else’s. Be independent.”37 In this instance, of course, being independent and expressing oneself also served Cerberus by encouraging reluctant girls to submit pieces for consideration. In February 1913, the connection between their high school education and their future lives is made even more clear: “I beg of you, be not perfectly happy either to graduate, or to ‘quitiate’ from this school and be ‘Thumb Twirlers’ ad infinitum. Surely some of you are desirous of being Shining Lights in the world . . . if so, now is the time to light your match.”38 Although the call to action was partially about participating more in school activities, especially contributing to Cerberus, it also implied that readers should concern themselves with preparations for their future lives. More importantly, it is clear from this call that the lives these young women were preparing for were not the conventional lives of the Southern belle, which may reflect the agenda of the school’s founder, or may be a reaction against negative stereotypes about the “inferiority” of Southern education or the romanticized, but reductive, ideal of the Southern belle.39 The magazine itself included a wide variety of writing, some of which seem to reflect work that girls were doing in the classroom, such as essays on “The Phases of Patriotic Work in South Carolina” or descriptive pieces, such as “The Egyptian Princess,” describing a mummy housed in the Charleston Museum.40 As well, we can see the girls appropriating literary 36

Ibid., 8-9. “Editorial Department,” Cerberus 1, no. 1 (1912): 18. 38 “Editorial Department,” Cerberus 2, no. 2 (1913): 44. 39 Amy McCandless, The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth Century South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebelllum South (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 40 Helen Von Kolnitz, “The Phases of Patriotic Work in South Carolina,” Cerberus 2, no. 1 (1913): 9.; “The Egyptian Princess,” Cerberus 3, no. 1 (1914): 7. 37

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forms to reflect their experiences as students, such as poems that critique the effect of exams on the girls, who were left “broken wrecks,” according to two somewhat hyperbolic poets.41 The magazine also offered the girls a chance to play with language and experiment with literary forms; perhaps one of the most interesting examples comes in the form of a short story, “Ravelings,” that attempts to incorporate the last name of every upper school student into the story, often as objects or verbs. Luckily for the anonymous author, many of her schoolmates had last names that could be easily used for this purpose, such as Hill, Marks, or Fuller.42 Stories about soldiers were popular with the girls (not surprising, given the age of the girls and the fact that Charleston was a military port), as were tales about local myths, ghost stories, and legends. The magazine also included a fair amount of journalistic-style reporting on local history, politics, and events, including functions at the school or in the community. Josephine Pinckney even practiced being a sports reporter in the first year of the magazine. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Cerberus was the Exchange department, added in December 1913, the purpose of which was to review student magazines from other institutions and to have Cerberus reviewed in return. Cerberus was not alone in this: the practice of circulating, reviewing, and critiquing was one of the common features of student magazines in this period, which likely reflected skills students were learning through their formal literature classes. Unlike their classwork, however, critiques published in the exchange departments had real audiences. Rather than being judged by a red-pen-wielding teacher, the Ashley Hall girls’ writing was being judged by other writers, many of whom were also students interested in writing, revising, publishing, and circulating their work. The founders of Cerberus were already exchanging their magazine with other schools even before their own Exchange department was established. The editors note the value of Exchange in April 1913: “We are given a great deal of information by our Exchanges. We find out what other schools are accomplishing. From their stories and poems we discover what their literary standards are . . . We like to read other people’s criticisms of other people—and even of ourselves. Even if we were overwhelmed by adverse criticism, we should appreciate its frankness, interest and good spirit.”43 Pinckney and her fellow editors sought out and embraced critiques of their work, expanding their circle of readers to 41

Phyllis Irwin and Mary Von Kolnitz, “Exams,” Cerberus 2, no. 1 (1913): 33. “Ravelings,” Cerberus 2, no. 1 (1913): 34. 43 “Exchange,” Cerberus 2, no. 1 (1913): 67-68. 42

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include critics who could help them improve both their individual written works and the literary magazine they used to publicize their texts. Clearly, the Exchange allowed the girls of Ashley Hall to judge the relative merits of their own writing against the writing of other students, which is especially significant since some of their initial exchanges were with colleges, such as the College of Charleston and University of the South, who denied women admission. It is perhaps, then, understandable that the Ashley Hall girls seemed to take some delight in critiquing the magazines produced by these all-male institutions. For example, Margeurite Miller, the Exchange editor in 1914, writes in a review of The Carolinian that the “poetry is of a higher standard than that usually found in men’s college journals,” implying heavily that men usually write poor poetry.44 Ashley Hall writers also exchanged with women’s institutions such as State Normal College in North Carolina (now UNC Greensboro) or Greenville Women’s College, institutions that some of the Ashley Hall girls may have aspired to attend. The exchanges demonstrate attention to formal elements like plot, theme, character development, and dialogue in short stories; meter, rhyming, and stylistic choices in poetry; and the development and support of arguments in essays. Additionally, reviews of other schools’ magazines published in Cerberus often focused on the layout and design of a magazine as a whole, and commented regularly on the challenge of preparing a magazine for publication—a challenge that the Cerberus editors were newly facing. In these exchanges, the magazine’s Exchange editor learned to use a valuable critical register, but the criticisms also functioned as educational tools for readers: Ashley Hall girls learned through the exchanges what standards they would have to meet should they go on to college and should they hope to publish their creative works after high school, as Pinckney did when she later attended the College of Charleston. The magazine gave Ashley Hall girls a place to practice the literacy skills that would make them more successful in the colleges many of them would attend; those same skills might have improved the teaching that many graduates later offered to students at both Ashley Hall and other area schools where they were hired to teach. The skills they gained working for the magazine may have also supported the efforts of students who eventually landed careers or entered public life. As Pinckney proudly notes in her history of Ashley Hall School, even those who were married and had children were producing the next batch of Ashley Hall girls “to carry on the traditions their mothers started”; they would become the next 44

Marguerite Miller, “Exchange Department,” Cerberus 3, no. 1 (1914): 45.

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generation of Southern women to use their superior schooling, and potentially the literacy skills gleaned from working on and reading Cerberus, to influence their communities.45

From Student Writer to Author Like the college women Adams investigated, whose college writing groups and publications provided a “model for professional endeavor, a working routine and support mechanism that these women carried with them from college into careers,” publications and extracurricular writing clubs at the Haskell Institute, the Oak Park and River Forest Township High School, and Ashley Hall provided high school girls with the kinds of collaboration, competition, and publication opportunities they needed to imagine themselves as authors.46 While separated by both geographical and cultural distances, the archives of these three schools reveal what we may learn by studying the extracurricular writing practices of secondary educators and students in the early twentieth century. High school curricula, newspapers, clubs, and magazines opened up new spaces where progressive teachers like Ball and Wright affected students’ future lives and careers, and where young women like Pinckney and her co-editors practiced valuable rhetorical skills, while learning to write for authentic audiences, adapt to a critical register, and revise their work in response to criticism. Feminist historians and academics working in the field of writing studies would do well to learn more about the extracurricular practices that transformed early twentieth century student writers into authors.

45 46

Pinckney, Call Back Yesterday, 3. Adams, A Group of Their Own, xvii.



“MADNESS” AS A RHETORICAL TOOL: EXAMINING THE RHETORICAL TECHNIQUES OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, VIRGINIA WOOLF, AND ANNE SEXTON AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON PATRIARCHAL DISCOURSE SARAH B. FRANCO

Though writing eras apart, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton faced similar challenges as they worked toward entering a realm constructed around patriarchal ideals and dominated by patriarchal discourse. Not only did they have to first clear a space for themselves in a literary sphere rife with white, male voices, they also suffered from the effects of mental illness and the stigma associated with “madness.” As Elaine Showalter’s research in The Female Malady illustrates, “madness” and mental illness have historically been connected to women: “As early as the seventeenth century, the files of the doctor Richard Napier showed nearly twice as many cases of mental disorder among his women patients as among his men.”1 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the majority of patients in lunatic asylums were women, and even in the latter half of the twentieth century, mental illness has shown itself to be more prevalent (more often diagnosed) in women than in men.2 The relationship between women and “madness,” as Showalter explains, has often been understood by feminist philosophers, social theorists, and literary critics as the opposition to “scientific male rationality”; where men’s perspectives are rooted in science, intellect, and “truth,” women are governed by emotions, sexuality, and irrationality.3 While Showalter’s text emphasizes the socially constructed connection between women and “madness,” this

 1

Elaine Showalter. The Female Malady (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1985), 3. Ibid. 3 Ibid. 2



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paper will examine the ways in which this stigma has been used to control or prevent women writers’ entrance into the patriarchal discourse of the literary sphere. Furthermore, by drawing on the work of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton, all of whom lived with mental illness, this paper will show how these writers used the male-enforced stigma indentifying them by their illness as a rhetorical strategy to comment on their experiences of oppression as women and as writers in a male-dominated society. In the introduction to Available Means, Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald identify the loss of Sappho’s work partially as “a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices and prevent women’s speaking and writing.”4 Although applied to the first woman writer in the West, this remark can be pluralized to reflect the oppression of women and of women as writers throughout literary history. Ritchie and Ronald argue that, in entering an ongoing discourse that is historically patriarchal, women are denied immediate access to the literary sphere, which includes “literacy, education, and the power of language.”5 Consequently, women writers must repeatedly “claim the right to name themselves rather than to be named” – in other words, assert their ethos – and, according to the authors, “this is doubly true for poor women and women of color.”6 Not only must these women break through a discourse constructed and upheld by men, they must additionally confront the barriers presented by class and race. Showalter’s text indicates that this double-layered emergence can also be applied to women suffering from mental illness, since “madness” is as socially constructed a concept as race or class and is used to prevent women from speaking and control them when they do, thus, in theory, preventing an upset to the preexisting power structure, of which white, educated men remain at the center. It is important to consider that, although Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton notably suffered from and were treated for their mental illness or its symptoms, several women were stigmatized as “mad” and some even committed to lunatic asylums because “[t]heir perceptions of the world had been denied and disallowed not only by medical and legal professionals but by their own families and friends.”7 In her text The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum, Mary Ellen



4 Joy S. Ritchie and Kate Ronald, “Introduction: A Gathering of Rhetorics,” in Available Means: an Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s), eds. Joy S. Ritchie and Kate Ronald (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001), xv. 5 Ibid., xvii. 6 Ibid. 7 Mary Elene Wood. The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 1.



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Wood suggests that the mere act of writing coherent pieces documenting their experiences as society’s insane, challenges the presumption that committed women were mentally ill simply because they experienced life in an asylum. The narratives of women in asylums, Wood describes, are dependent upon a certain application of logic that draws on the discourse already in place and embraces similar categories of “sane and insane that had meant their own ostracism and incarceration.”8 Through the very act of telling their stories, these autobiographers rupture a prescribed narrative, a narrative that says they are insane, that they have no place from which to write, that writing will make them sicker, that they should live in institutions, and that they should give over control of their lives to husbands, fathers, and doctors.9

As Wood emphasizes how the simple act of writing is powerful enough to destroy pre-constructed narratives “written” by the male-dominated society in which these women lived, the link between women and “madness” and the implication of how that connection was used to “silence women’s voices” and discredit their ethos becomes evident.10 In addressing the writings of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton, it is essential to consider this method of social control because, even though these writers experienced real effects of “madness,” allegedly unlike some of the female autobiographers discussed in Wood’s text, the fact that they were mentally ill at all is often used to discredit their ethos. As ethos is frequently tied to a narrative voice, often represented by the rhetorical “I,” female writers, particularly those associated with “madness,” must pay particular attention to how they present themselves in the literary sphere. Wood addresses this very obstacle by referencing Zelda Fitzgerald’s experience with writing after having suffered several documented breakdowns: Before she can create an autobiographical “I,” even if that “I” will only be deconstructed, she must appropriate it from where it is scattered out in the world . . . For her a false step in the manipulation of the “I” – given the history of women’s writing and of the regulation of women’s sense of identity through ideologies of “mental health” – could mean the dismissal of her work and the further questioning of her sanity.11

 8

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. 10 Ritchie and Ronald, “Introduction,” xv. 9

11



Wood, The Writing on the Wall, 20.

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In other words, as females attempting to enter a patriarchal discourse, women writers had to consider not just what they were writing, but how their position as a woman, or, in the cases of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton, as a woman with a mental illness, would influence the male-dominated audience’s perception of them and their work. Logically, and (because of logic’s association with the male gender) perhaps influenced by maledominated expectations, it makes sense that women writers would pay particularly close attention to making their literary personas appear rational and objective, in order to be taken seriously as writers and as individuals. On the contrary, whereas some women did use more traditional logical and ethical appeals, others began consciously experimenting with new means of persuasion.12 These include “appeals to experience, to irony, and on the constant assertion of their own ethos, since ethical appeal, by definition, has been historically denied to women.”13 Such experimentation with rhetorical strategies and methods evolved into a female rhetoric, which is, in many ways, indicative of the thought processes, perspectives, and abstraction associated with women accused of “madness.” Some of these rhetorical moves, born of an oppressive situation and used to elicit feelings of ownership within the oppressed, will now be discussed in detail, using the work of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton as specific cases. As Wood suggests of Zelda Fitzgerald, Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton also had to “appropriate [an autobiographical ‘I’] from where it [was] scattered out in the world.”14 Gilman, who suffered from post-partum depression and who later committed suicide after discovering she had incurable cancer,15 was well aware of her social position in late nineteenth century society. At the same time, she was equally aware that the limitations associated with her social position as domestic wife and mother with a “nervous” condition were taking a severe toll on her mental health, more so, in fact, than the condition itself. Although a social activist and feminist spokesperson later in her life, some of Gilman’s writing takes on a less direct approach in providing social commentary on her contradicting position. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, Gilman’s main character embodies both the awareness of women’s social status and their presumed inferior intellect, and the experience of oppression that is so rampant in this short story. The main character, who remains unnamed,

 12

Ritchie and Ronald, “Introduction,” xxii. Ibid. 14 Wood, The Writing on the Wall, 20. 15 R. S. Gwynn, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman” in Literature: A Pocket Anthology (3rd ed.), ed. R. S. Gwynn (Boston: Penguin Academics, 2007), 77. 13



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and so could represent any white, middle to upper class woman, slowly slips into madness as she attempts to follow her doctor’s orders to rest and avoid work and most social interaction. Both her husband, John, and her brother are also physicians, and they are in agreement with the male doctor that her condition is nothing that cannot be cured by a little rest. The control the men in her family hold over her is evident through the woman’s mimicking of John’s words: “John is away . . . nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious!”16 At the same time, the woman, within the privacy of her journal, admits to “disagree[ing] with [John and her brother’s] ideas” regarding her mental state.17 Furthermore, she believes that “congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good.”18 Although the contradiction between what she believes and what she is being told is apparent from the beginning, the more pronounced it becomes, the further the woman moves toward losing her mind. Gilman very easily could have written this story in third person, yet she chooses first person. Since the story is technically fictional (although it integrates several autobiographical events), the “I” literally represents the woman struggling to come to terms with the discord between what she is being told is true – that her condition is not at all serious and can be resolved with rest – and what she is experiencing as true – that the lack of intellectual stimulation and human interaction is deepening her depression and increasing her delusions. Rhetorically, however, the “I” is being used to demonstrate the destructive nature of patriarchal discourse on the embodied female experience. The main character never for a moment believes that rest will cure her depression, yet she repeats the words of the men in her life, almost as if trying to convince herself of their truth. “I” in this instance becomes a construction of social expectations. Without aggressively rebelling against John’s plan for treatment, the woman, cautiously at first and then desperately, tries to convince John of an alternate truth – that his faith in medical knowledge is wrong, and he needs to trust her actual experience of the situation to gauge its true severity. In this instance “I” is used to address the disconnect between rational male language and embodied female experience and its effect on the female psyche. As John continues his refusal to even consider his wife’s pleas and ignores her progressive symptoms of mental illness, “I” comes to represent the defragmented female psyche that confuses John’s

 16

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper” in Literature: A Pocket Anthology (3rd ed.), ed. R. S. Gwynn (Boston: Penguin Academics, 2007), 80. 17 Ibid., 78. 18 Ibid.



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reality (truth) with her own reality (delusion). By ignoring the woman’s words and actions, John’s destruction of “I” results in the woman’s own disregard for his physical presence, as we see in the final sentences: “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”19 Without direct commentary, Gilman uses patriarchal discourse to affirm the stigma linking women and madness. At the same time, her rhetorical use of “I” and its various representations throughout the story challenges men’s role in the onset, severity, and duration of what Showalter terms “the female malady.” Nearly forty years after Gilman publishes “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Virginia Woolf employs the rhetorical “I” in A Room of One’s Own. Written in response to a request that she speak on the topic of women and fiction, Woolf, like Gilman, creates a fictional narrator whose situation parallels that of her author. While Woolf states that her application of a fictional literary persona is to employ “all the liberties and licenses of a novelist,”20 this technique has the effect of distancing the experiences of the reader from the writer. As a female writer who experienced bouts of mania, followed by weeks of depression, and who ultimately took her own life, Woolf’s choice to employ a fictional literary persona allowed her readers space to determine their own truth by distancing them from her personal experience, thus minimizing challenges to her own ethos. She writes: when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.21

As the speaker in this case is not Woolf but a fictional writer, Woolf manipulates her audience into hearing her by entertaining them with a story. In this way, she continues, “[f]iction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”22 By describing how the narrator “came to hold” her opinions that women require money and a room of their own to produce good writing, Woolf demonstrates a logical progression of her own

 19 20

Ibid., 19.

Virginia Woolf. Company, 1957), 4. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.



A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace &

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thought process, a technique that has been traditionally employed, particularly by male writers, in the literary sphere. At the same time, this logical thought progression occurs within a fictionalized character who is removed from Woolf’s immediate experience, thus seeming less attached to a mind plagued by symptoms indicative of bipolar disorder. Woolf’s understanding that “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners”23 reinforces her conscious decision to employ the rhetorical “I”; thus, readers will be exposed to Woolf’s perspective through fictional devices. Additionally, the purpose of the “I” in Woolf’s text is not necessarily to speak out against the intellectual limitations and economic injustices women experience. While Woolf’s text does address the discrepancies in the academic and economic resources available to male versus female writers, Woolf, through her narrator, simultaneously and persistently maintains that the goal, always, is to avoid flawed writing. Here, Woolf’s purpose is in line with the male-associated perspective that intellect and knowledge reign supreme over self-indulgence and emotional release. While Gilman’s writing draws attention to the unbalanced power dynamic between the sexes, Woolf’s position consistently reflects her passion and respect for literature. Despite their differences in purpose, both women choose to employ a literary persona that draws from the social expectations put in place by a male-dominated society. By presenting their fictional selves through a patriarchal lens, Gilman and Woolf are able to speak to what is most important to them as women and as individuals. In other words, the rhetorical “I” allows them an entrance into the literary sphere, appeals to a gendered audience, and then enables them to recreate their experience as women through their own voices. Writing ten to thirty years after Woolf, Sexton’s mental anguish drove her toward writing as a means of release and plunged her dangerously close to committing the literary sin Woolf so adamantly speaks out against: using writing as a means of cathartic release or sentimental expression. An alcoholic suffering from depression and anxiety, Sexton attempted suicide twice before succeeding in 1974. For Sexton, writing balanced the “madness” of addiction and depression that plagued her life, much as it appeared to in Gilman’s character who could not resist writing in secret though it was forbidden by her physician husband. Although Sexton did not employ fictional devices in her writing, she did draw from her personal experiences as she crafted a literary persona. Addressing socially unacceptable subjects such as madness, suicide, abortion, sex, and

 23



Ibid., 41.

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the female condition – all of which are linked to “the female malady” – Sexton insisted that the “I” in her writing always suggested a plural condition.24 In fact, Sexton used the rhetorical “I” not only in her writing, but also in her teaching pedagogy. She would tell her students, “I am often being personal . . . but I’m not being personal about myself.”25 In her book Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance, Paula M. Salvio suggests that in “often being personal” but not about herself, Sexton does two things: first, she insists that, through the very act of writing, “the personal is already a plural condition”;26 second, she, in a sense, challenges the assumption that “I” is a reflection of the self at all, since it is “derived from the dissonance between the I who speaks and the I that is not a person but a function of language.”27 In other words, Sexton used “I” as a literary device that allowed herself and her students to try on different masks, thus permitting access to arenas otherwise deemed unfit for the classroom. This challenges the patriarchal discourse prominent in public spheres, including the classroom, since it suggests that each individual is capable of experiencing states of mind associated with either gender by adopting seemingly uncharacteristic personas. Many times, for Sexton, this involved introducing unspeakable social and personal situations in the classroom. Salvio remarks that education, as a public sphere, is filled with topics that are unspeakable, therefore demonstrating Sexton’s boldness in challenging the silence. Salvio asks: What is most distasteful about education? Most shameful? What disgusts us as teachers? As students? As parents? Disgust finds its way to the margins of education all too easily, right alongside error, the grotesque, and the excesses we cannot bear such as big, noisy, contaminating or aging bodies, a “strong femininity,” and other disorderly figures that exceed the conventional standards we hold for beauty, success, and intelligence. As educators, we tend to approach disgust by avoidance and, in doing so, we avoid confronting what we find most intimate but most opaque about ourselves as teachers. How conscious are we of our need for control, our fears of failure, and intellectual inadequacies?28

These questions are, as Salvio states, often avoided by educators, not perhaps by how widespread these concerns can go, but by how deeply

 24

Paula M. Salvio. Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 4. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 11.



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internal they are and how upsetting they are to societal labels. Sexton’s pedagogy, on the other hand, confronts these complexities head on by inviting students to explore the internal depths of such unspeakable fears, anxieties, shame, and anger. In doing so, Sexton encourages her students to be sensitive to “the aspects of their identities that they may be inclined to disavow.”29 In this way, she teaches her students to become aware of and sensitive to how capricious the boundaries between Self and Other actually are. This includes the boundaries between the sexes. In addition to her use of the rhetorical “I,” Sexton’s pedagogy encouraged attention to physical bodies. In requiring her students to don various personas in their writing through the use of the rhetorical “I,” Sexton wanders into grotesque materialism, a term coined by Bakhtin that refers to the use of “flesh conceptualized as corpulent excess to represent the social, topographical, and linguistic elements of the world.”30 Salvio suggests that, as teacher, Sexton also took on “the status of a grotesque figure whose body continually outgrew the socially sanctioned limits prescribed for women in the postwar era.”31 As an anxious, tormented individual, Sexton’s very figure became “tied to feelings of profound displacement, in the academy, at home and among her family.”32 This displacement, rather than drawing on traditional forms of pedagogy that encourage educational and social conformity, manifested itself through Sexton’s writing assignments. Often, Sexton required students to imitate others’ points of view. These “others” varied from rapists to herself, and Salvio questions the extent to which such assignments allow for “anything but fusion and merging.”33 In other words, in approaching writing in such an intimate way, Sexton perpetuated her students’ awareness of Other, by encouraging them to become Other.34 As a confessional poet who was also a woman, Sexton received a lot of criticism from the writing community, particularly her male colleagues, about her work. In her chapter entitled “Something Worth Learning: A Reading of the Student Teacher Relationship Between Anne Sexton and John Holmes,” Salvio takes a close look at John Holmes’ criticism of Sexton and her writing. Confessional poets such as Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, and George Starbuck paved the way for personalized writing, yet there remained a double standard when it came to female writers. Salvio notes that Holmes was not the first person to criticize Sexton for

 29

Ibid., 21. Ibid., 57. 31 Ibid., 56. 32 Ibid., 40. 33 Ibid., 45. 34 Ibid., 9. 30



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“getting too close to that specifically feminine danger of exposure” that, in Sexton’s case, seemed to redefine or eliminate boundaries.35 Holmes warned Sexton that “her poetry was not sufficiently composed for a public audience,” and he encouraged her to give up her “childish preoccupations, for she would surely outgrow them.”36 Not only does Salvio illustrate the prejudice against women writers specifically during an era when confessional writing was evolving, she indirectly draws parallels between Holmes’ criticism of Sexton as a writer and a general wariness of using “feminine” practices in the writing classroom. As Salvio identifies questions raised about the ethics of Sexton’s pedagogy, she also draws attention to “education’s anxieties about bodies that deviate from the norm.”37 These fears are reflected in John Holmes’ response to Sexton’s confessional poetry, especially when he condoned the work of other male confessional poets. What was acceptable for Robert Lowell to confess in his poems, was “childish,” overly sensitive, and potentially harmful to family when it came to Sexton’s work.38 Similarly, these educational anxieties can be understood in today’s debate about the place of personal writing in the composition classroom. If personal writing has the potential to tease the boundaries between self and other, norm and excess, even male and female, it poses a threat to the very “norm” imposed on female writers by a patriarchal discourse. Ultimately, the effect of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton’s experimentation with rhetorical strategies contributes to and advances a rhetoric that is simultaneously tied to and distinct from the patriarchal discourse that has dominated the literary sphere throughout history. It is evident through their rhetorical approaches that Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton are cognizant that the space they are entering is not designed to accept female commentary on social, political, or cultural situations. Consequently, these authors cleverly provide their commentary after first entering the conversation by drawing on the social stigma associated with women writers. Perhaps, contrary to the associations Showalter outlines between women and “madness,” these authors’ personal experiences with mental illness allow them to take rhetorical risks toward establishing their place in a feminist discourse. In doing so, Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton challenge the discourse that has historically excluded women and assert their right to name themselves.

 35

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. 37 Ibid., 62. 38 Ibid., 38. 36



PART II: CONTEMPORARY RHETORICS: RESISTANCE, VULNERABILITY AND RIOTS

WHEN FREE SPEECH COURTS COMPASSION: CIVIC HOUSEKEEPING AND THE HOPE OF PUBLIC DELIBERATION WILLIAM DUFFY

Ever since Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously asserted that the remedy to disagreeable speech is more speech, accounting for the place of discourse ethics in First Amendment jurisprudence has been a murky enterprise at best.1 To adjudicate the parameters of the free speech clause in any given case obviously demands careful consideration of context alongside precedent. The latter requires a default predisposition for existing law while the former requires a sensitivity for nuance, including the willingness to recognize exceptions when they are discovered. The role of discourse as an object of value is ambiguous within First Amendment jurisprudence because even though America’s founding documents are permeated with the language of individual rights, these rights appear to serve wider democratic purposes, such as the maintenance of a public sphere that promotes what another Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., asserted is a marketplace for competing ideas.2 But what happens when speech is invoked that prevents such exchange? What happens to the efficacy of deliberative debate, in other words, when certain iterations of speech enter the proverbial marketplace of ideas that seemingly do violence to the marketplace itself? These are thorny questions without clear answers; but the United State Supreme Court called attention to them recently in Snyder v. Phelps, a tort case pinning Westboro Baptist Church [WBC], the fringe group famous for picketing the funerals of soldiers, against the grieving family of a Marine killed in Iraq. The facts of the case are relatively straightforward. U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder was killed on 3 March, 2006 in the line of duty. One week later the Snyder family held a funeral for their son at a Catholic church in the family’s hometown of Westminster, Maryland. WBC picketed the funeral on public land adjacent 1 2

See Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927). See Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).

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to the church with signs reading “God Hates Fags,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “Pope in Hell,” “God Hates You,” and other similar messages. WBC also posted derogatory statements on their website about Matthew and his parents. Albert Snyder, Matthew’s father, sued WBC and its leader, Fred Phelps, for the intentional infliction of mental and emotional distress, intrusion upon seclusion, and civil conspiracy. In October 2007 a jury awarded Snyder nearly $11 million in damages. WBC challenged the ruling and in September 2009 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the original decision on First Amendment grounds. The United States Supreme Court heard the case in October 2010 and in March 2011 it upheld WBC’s appeal in an 8-1 vote. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the Opinion of the Court, and as he explains, “Westboro’s statements were entitled to First Amendment protection because those statements were on matters of public concern, were not provably false, and were expressed solely through hyperbolic rhetoric.”3 Much of the Chief Justice’s discussion focuses on the first of these reasons, that the messages depicted on WBC’s signs address matters of public concern. “While these messages may fall short of refined social or political commentary,” he writes, “the issues they highlight—the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of our Nation, homosexuality in the military, and scandals involving the Catholic clergy—are matters of public interest.”4 Notice the implicit connection Roberts makes between so-called matters of public interest and what is unequivocally hate speech. In a New York Times column, Stanley Fish criticizes the Snyder decision on the grounds that WBC’s speech “pollutes the community’s conversational space”; as well, it invokes a logic that admits “you can be as abusive and scurrilous as you like as long as the terms of your abuse can be ‘related’ to matters of public concern; and given that the number of public concerns is infinitely large, it is almost impossible not to find such a relation if you are looking for it.”5 If Fish is correct, the Snyder decision relies primarily on rationalization and the fallacy of division because it fails to adequately account for what types of

3

See Snyder v. Phelps, No. 09-751, 562 U.S., *4. As of this writing, the case has not been officially published in the United States Code. For reference purposes, I will only cite the page number (prefaced with an asterisk) of the case’s Opinion of the Court (written by Justice Roberts) as prepared by the Reporter of Decisions, and publicly available as a PDF file on the Supreme Court website. 4 Snyder v. Phelps, *8. 5 Stanley Fish, “Sticks and Stones,” Opinionator, The New York Times, 7 March 2011.

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issues—as well as what kinds of articulations—do not constitute matters of public interest. Even though the Supreme Court regularly hears First Amendment cases, I suggest the Snyder ruling is particularly provocative because it hinges not just on the question of when outrageous acts like hate speech fall outside the boundaries of constitutional protection, but it also speaks to the idea of the public sphere as a site for deliberation, and by extension, the function of civil discourse in maintaining the public sphere itself.6 Even though Roberts does not say so directly, his emphasis in Snyder on protecting free expression about matters of public concern relies on the belief that there is a public in which such matters can be deliberated. From this perspective, free speech gets couched as an individual good and personal right that warrants constitutional protection. But it also serves as a democratic value, one that we embrace because without it the basic workings of democracy itself will fail to function. Put differently, without free speech we would be unable to identify issues of public concern because there would be no workable public space where such matters could be deliberated. These ideas are ripe for feminist intervention because they provide an exigency to critically consider a case like Snyder and its consequences. Feminism, of course, has a complicated and complex history with First Amendment jurisprudence. The pornography debates of the late twentieth century, for example, evidenced discord among feminists insofar as some groups forwarded claims that censorship is not a feminist value while others claimed the opposite. A similar concern is raised by the Snyder case because it presumably gives license to hate speech in matters of civic debate. If we assume a principled utilitarian stance, the Supreme Court arguably made the right decision in Snyder because it upheld a long tradition of liberally defining the conditions of free expression.7 But the 6

Legal scholar Jeffrey Shulman has been writing about Synder since the original lawsuit was filed against WBC, and he makes a strong claim for why the “outrageousness” standard in First Amendment jurisprudence should be applied to WBC’s speech; see “When Is Free Speech Outrageous?: Synder v. Phelps and the Limits of Religious Advocacy,” Penn Statim 114 (2010): 13-18.; and “The Outrageous God: Emotional Distress, Tort Liability, and the Limits of Religious Advocacy,” Penn State Law Review 113 (2008): 381-415. 7 This is a common position for strong free speech advocates. For example, Eugene Volokh says WBC’s speech is contemptible, “But many more ideas than just the Phelpsians’ would be endangered if the Court allowed the intentional infliction of emotional distress tort to cover the expression of offensive ideas” (“Freedom of Speech and the Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Tort,” Cordoza Law

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decision nevertheless feels wrong. For one, it is difficult to believe that Phelps and his congregation did not intend their statements to be directed at the Snyder family, underscoring what might constitute WBC’s tort liability. But moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the Supreme Court’s justification for its decision presumes the only way to respond to harmful speech is to invoke counterspeech, to engage in a proverbial shoving match with words. But what if we don’t want to shove back? Is there an alternative kind of response that doesn’t require using counterspeech and reciprocating antagonism? This is a feminist concern, one that shines a light on how we imagine the public sphere while participating peaceably within it. In the remainder of this essay, I consider what might be an unprincipled method for promoting feminist ethics in public deliberation. To do so I turn to Jane Addams, the pragmatist and feminist who co-founded Hull House and became internationally renowned for her public pacifism and social work. In particular I turn to what she calls “civic housekeeping,” her own social philosophy that encourages amelioration and promotes compassion as a civic virtue. My argument is that we can study Addams and her articulation of civic housekeeping to anticipate a more hopeful, enriching, and compassionate kind of public response when it comes to deliberating about matters of public interest, especially when incivility threatens the integrity of such debate.

Free Speech and Feminism’s Challenges To imagine a feminist response to Snyder that does not capitulate to the utilitarian logic that pits individual rights against civic responsibilities first requires an understanding of why a principled mindset like the utilitarian one is insufficient for promoting civil discourse. The first of these reasons concerns the supposedly neutral value utilitarianism places on free speech as a constitutional right. The second reason concerns what is sometimes assumed as a distinction between speech and action. Together these concepts inform the “liberal” ethics at work in most of America’s First Amendment jurisprudence. As I will explain below, however, over the past Review De Nova, 2010: 300). For overviews of the standard utilitarian theory of free speech, see John Stewart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Abigail Levin, The Cost of Free Speech: Pornography, Hate Speech, and Their Challenge to Liberalism (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).; Daniel Jacobson, “The Academic Betrayal of Free Speech,” Freedom of Speech, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48-80.

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two decades some philosophers have forwarded pragmatism and its emphasis on contingency to strengthen the way feminists negotiate this principled utilitarianism, especially when it gets utilized to hamper feminist rhetoric and limit its viability in the public sphere. A liberal justification posits the freedom of speech is content-neutral and functions apolitically as a legal mechanism that allows discourse to circulate in the community unimpaired. Indeed it is this liberal, utilitarian mindset that gives the marketplace metaphor its logic. As David BraddonMitchell and Caroline West explain, “The classic marketplace of ideas justification says that freedom of speech is essentially a condition of free flow of information. It allows for ideas to be tested in a market, and for truth to out.”8 Perhaps the term “truth” does not quite align with the marketplace metaphor, so it might be more accurate to say that a principled utilitarian approach to free speech “promotes key values such as individual autonomy and democracy (in that people should be able to decide for themselves which political and societal views should prevail).”9 A central tenant to emerge within feminist philosophy, however, is the notion that ethics are never apolitical, which is to say that the embodied experience of a human being informs how she or he defines and ascribes value conditions. In short, values exist in the world and not above it, and thus the standard liberal justification about the neutrality of the free speech clause falls flat. Stanley Fish has outlined what is perhaps the bluntest criticism of this utilitarian ethic. There can be no such thing as free expression, he says, because speech “is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict.”10 Fish’s deflationary interpretation of free speech aims to debunk principled defenses of it with the same gusto one might presumably strip off the emperor’s new clothes. Consider the following: You assert, in short, because you give a damn, not about assertion—as if it were a value in and of itself—but about what your assertion is about. It might seem paradoxical, but free expression could only be a primary value if what you are valuing is the right to make noise; but if you are engaged in 8

David Braddon-Mitchell and Caroline West, “What is Free Speech?” The Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (2004): 441. 9 Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, “Psychoanalysis, Speech Acts, and the Language of ‘Free Speech.’” Res Publica 4 (1998): 29. 10 Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 104.

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some purposive activity in the course of which speech happens to be produced, sooner or later you decide that some forms of speech do not further but endanger that purpose.11

Critics of Fish have called his analysis of free speech a “cynical dictum” and challenge its practical value for First Amendment jurisprudence.12 But even if Fish’s deflationary rendering of free speech is untenable in the courts, his insistence that speech and action are pragmatically indistinguishable is not. The fact that speech is a form of action is the second reason why principled utilitarianism is insufficient for promoting a feminist response to free speech debate. More often than not, standard free speech defenses “substitute ideology for argument and provide little in the way of a real understanding of speech.”13 Feminists acknowledge that speech is not only powerful but also forceful; its effects are real and sometimes no different than the effects of physical action. When it comes to free speech law, then, it is prudent to recognize with Fish that “a jurisprudence strongly invested in some form, however qualified, of the distinction between speech and action—will be fatally confused and engaged in activities it is incapable of acknowledging or even recognizing.”14 Keep in mind Fish’s deflationary assertion that free speech does not exist, so to distinguish between speech that acts and speech that does not act is to confuse altogether the functionality of discourse. I do not wish to conflate Fish with feminism, but I reference his work because it aligns with speech act theory, that school of discourse studies that feminists have utilized to understand the relationship between speech and action. Judith Butler, for example, uses speech act theory to uncover the performative function of speech within offensive conduct.15 It therefore makes sense to consider how speech act theory challenges free speech jurisprudence that does distinguish speech from action. We can turn to John Searle, one of the originators of speech act theory, to understand why standard political theories “do not see the essential role

11

Ibid., 107. Jacobson, “The Academic Betrayal of Free Speech,” 48. 13 Samuel P. Nelson, Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 2. 14 Stanley Fish, The Trouble With Principles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 94. 15 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 12

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of language in the constitution of social reality.”16 We use language because it has illocutionary force that allows us to act with speech, so to pretend that language functions otherwise is absurd. When it comes to free expression, Searle notes the performative function of free speech as a right that actually creates its own conditions. The logic might feel circular, but what we call the right to free expression—the name itself—is what actualizes its own reality, which is to say freedom of expression is a right because we have discursive space, imagined in articulations of a democratic public sphere, that gives “free speech” its democratic aura. The abstraction of this idea is not lost on Searle; he admits such discussion makes us “like fish trying to look at the water,” but the aim of his argument is clear enough.17 To invoke the language of rights is often a shortcut to bypass taking responsibility for whatever actions we intend certain rights to protect. As he notes, “If the only justification for free speech is that it is advantageous to the public then it would not be justified in cases in which it certainly would not be advantageous to the public.”18 But this is the very problem courts have to evaluate when they hear free speech cases: how to assess what is most advantageous to the public. This is why we hold the freedom of speech in such high regard, because we want it to function infallibly when matters of expression are questioned; so it would be irresponsible to challenge this freedom in ways that might undermine its ability to be cast as infallible from the start. But what if there was a different kind of accountability to which free speech could be tethered? If the protection of rights was viewed as secondary to the promotion of social justice, for example, would that undermine the utility of free speech to be utilized as an excuse for discursive violence? Here is where feminism locates a point of leverage in the debate. Feminist have long embraced the strategy of challenging vocabulary to further their political causes, so perhaps a new language is required for talking about our inalienable rights. Consider what Searle says on this matter: Because speech is constitutive and not merely descriptive of the reality, it is essential to the functioning of democracy that there should be a continuing possibility of the expression of ideas and even of revolutionary thoughts and revolutionary proposals, and this is particularly important because the existing vocabulary is always functioning to reinforce the status quo. This is why the movements that want to make a change in the system of status 16

John R. Searle, “Social Ontology and Free Speech,” The Hedgehog Review 6 (2004): 55-66, 16. 17 Ibid., 58. 18 Ibid., 55.

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functions, like the feminist movement, for example, are always obsessed about the vocabulary. Rightly so: if the existing vocabulary involves a system of status functions that is restrictive, then any effective challenge must include a challenge to the vocabulary.19

So political movements that challenge the status quo, like feminism, must first change the language of the status quo itself. If this is true, then how do such movements decide what language to use? In other words, Searle’s explanation does not account for the function of prophetic vision, the imagination of future consequences, as an integral component to the work of influencing mainstream language practices in ways that progress a revolutionary political movement. This is Richard Rorty’s argument in “Pragmatism and Feminism,” his attempt to offer the philosophical method of pragmatism as a resource for working out the political goals of feminism. Feminism is unproductive, according to Rorty, in its attempts to invoke language that relies on renaming historical moments of oppression as a strategy for remedying oppression in the present. Rorty calls the class of feminist thinkers who seek to uncover oppression “universalists,” and as he explains, “The typical universalist is a moral realist, someone who thinks that true moral judgments are made true by something out there in the world.”20 A universalist mindset, much like a utilitarian one, locates a fixed conception of the good and assumes it is recognizable from one context to another. Rorty suggests feminists would be more productive trying to enact feminism rather than looking for places to describe its absence. To this end, he suggests “pragmatist philosophy might be useful to feminist politics…[because] pragmatism redescribes both intellectual and moral progress by substituting metaphors of evolutionary development for metaphors of progressively less distorted perception.”21 The prophetic work of pragmatism should therefore be utilized by feminists not to uncover some preexisting reality of justice and equality but to create that reality by guiding present discussion toward a vision of how that reality appears, even if that vision is incomplete. In his critique of this theory, rhetorician Stephen Yarbrough cautions feminists to understand that people change their minds not because new language is available, but because they make ethical shifts that allow them

19

Ibid., 61. Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (1991): 233. 21 Ibid., 234. 20

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to see the world in ways that were previously not recognizable.22 What Yarbrough calls an ethical stance or ethical apperception is akin to the idea of a gestalt; it is the pattern through which we recognize connections between and among objects in the world, including ourselves. Yarbrough is in basic agreement with Rorty’s interpretation of feminism, but he clarifies pragmatism’s method for feminists and explains that rather than just talk a certain way, feminists should embody the ethical stances they want to promote, which is to say they should enact whatever prophetic visions of feminism guide their philosophy. As a result, Yarbrough explains, “ethical stances necessarily condition discursive meanings, not the other way around.”23 This interactionist explanation of pragmatism’s value for feminism is important because often we must shift ethical stances to make possible rhetorical invention when novel arguments are required to further deliberation. That is, those who are able to imagine different perspectives, “those who can willingly assume new ethical stances, are those who are better situated to respond to the exigencies that stymie our interactions.”24 Critical to the work of feminism, then, is for us to recognize that language by itself does not define our interactions with the world. Our wholefelt engagement with the world plays just as important a role, if not more of one. This focus on the way practice informs ethical stances generates a warrant for analyzing the role of emotion in the meaning making that occurs within our interactions. For this reason, feminism is at its best when it proclaims the centrality of drawing on people’s lived experience to shape philosophy. When it comes to deliberation in the public sphere, feminists should thus be attuned to the fact that debate will eventually degenerate into antagonism if shared ethical stances, manifested through mutual experience, are not engendered.

Civic Housekeeping In Rorty’s revision of feminism, he explains contingency as a pragmatist ethic that warrants feminists to craft a political future that can only be partially defined in the present, one motivated by a vision not rooted in 22 Stephen R. Yarbrough, “Richard Rorty, Feminism, and the Annoyances of Pragmatism,” Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, ed. Marianne Jack (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 173-97. 23 Ibid., 193. 24 William Duffy, “Rhetoric, Virtue, and the Necessity of Invention,” The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick (Long Grove, Il: Waveland Press, 2010), 40.

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“the removal of social constructs and the restoration of the way things were always meant to be…[but in] the production of a better set of social constructs than the ones presently available, and thus as the creation of a new and better sort of human being.”25 Rorty values feminism and wants it to succeed, but his presentation of pragmatism’s prophetic method as one that can supplement feminism’s own methodology of renaming assumes language is what directs our imagination of reality. However, language is not what changes our apperceptions; it simply follows from the identifications our ethical stances allow us to perceive at any given time. And since our emotional responses to objects in the world are what inform the ethical stances we assume, Rorty’s pragmatist feminism fails to account for the function of affect in the work of attempting to change the minds, that is, the ethical stances, of others. To return to the question that motivates this essay, namely what might constitute an unprincipled method for promoting feminist ethics in public deliberation, the pragmatist feminism suggested by Rorty basically gets us back to Brandeis and his assertion that the only way to engage disagreeable speech is with counterspeech. Emphasis remains on language itself while the discursive space needed for deliberation gets taken for granted. So I wish to forward Jane Addams and her conception of civic housekeeping, the metaphor she adopted to describe the work of maintaining public utilities in the service of a better-functioning democracy. Even though Addams never identified as a feminist, what she calls “civic” or “public housekeeping” is a social philosophy that draws on the virtues associated with what traditionally was considered women’s work and applies them to the realm of political activism.26 Civic housekeeping “stresses the importance of women’s ties to the well-springs of tradition,” and even though Addams herself neither married nor had children, her conception of civic housekeeping is built on the belief that drawing on maternal instincts

25

Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 250. Addams explicates civic housekeeping (and names it such) as a social philosophy in “Women and Public Housekeeping,” Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism: Volume II, 1900-1960, ed. Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew (Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002), 116-17; and in “The Modern City and the Municipal Franchise for Women,” Woman’s Journal 37 (7 April 1906): 53-55. Also, civic housekeeping is similar to what see describes as “bread labor”; see Chapter 8 in Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1906). 26

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to advocate for social justice promotes the consequential application of democratic values.27 When Addams entered public deliberations she was not naive, for she sought to persuade her challengers to take up the work of whatever it was she was advocating at the time, be it better working conditions for immigrants, reformed child labor laws, improved garbage collection practices in Chicago, pacifism, or women’s suffrage. But rather than rely on the logic of antagonism and counterspeech, she utilized the tools of civic housekeeping, namely the work of fostering sympathetic knowledge, to invite others to share her own ethical stances. “Sympathetic knowledge” is knowledge founded on shared compassion, the mutual relation of sympathy between individuals who are able to share a common concern despite political, religious, ethnic, and other differences. As Maurice Hamington explains, it is knowledge that “emphasizes actively knowing other people for the purpose of understanding them with some degree of depth”; it requires “openness to the possibility of caring for others and a willingness to act when new knowledge warrants it.”28 To illustrate the practical application of civic housekeeping, I want to draw on two methods practiced by Addams in the service of promoting sympathetic knowledge. The first of these methods is to position matters of debate not in terms of something one wins or loses, but as social problems that need remedying. Here the goal is to direct attention toward an issue itself and frame it as a problem of mutual concern, which serves to divert attention away from the people debating it. The second method is related to the first, and it is to foster nurture between and among individuals where antagonism exists or is likely to arise. Sympathetic knowledge requires individuals who might think differently to locate and then converge upon points of common concern as a method for fostering ethical stances that promote deliberation. This ethic is based on Addams’s belief that social problems can only be remedied by social action, and social action requires cooperative interaction among the various stakeholders who are affected. In Addams’s idiom, this means abandoning the “war virtues” in public debate. As she explains, “we must act upon the assumption that spontaneous and fraternal action as virile and widespread as war itself is the only method by which substitutes for the war virtues may be discovered.”29 In today’s political discourse, like in 27

Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Jane Addams and the Social Claim,” Public Interest 145 (2001): 88. 28 Maurice Hamington, The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 71. 29 Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, 213.

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Addams’s day, the “war virtues” too often guide public debate, and as a result social concerns (those very real, material problems that affect communities) get neglected because attention is fixated on the debate itself. Addams wants us to understand that war amounts to “plain destruction”; it ruins the bread of labor, “the output of brain and muscle” that we use to harvest the goods upon which a community sustains itself.30 For this reason, the opposite of war is not peace; it is nurture, the work of compassion as a substitute for antagonism. To promote civic housekeeping, sympathetic knowledge must therefore be fostered in and among the diverse groups of individuals that comprise a public. In fact, Addams understands democracy as “the practice of a social ethic founded on sympathetic knowledge.”31 It follows that identification with others is a necessary component of democracy’s viability, for if diverse bodies of citizens cannot relate to one another they cannot foster sympathetic knowledge, which means democracy only functions as an abstract collection of individual rights without any social purpose. Ever the dilettante, we see Addams promote the suspension of antagonism in public affairs in her book Newer Ideals of Peace, where she pulls from metaphors in biology, economics, psychology, and theology to emphasize the connectedness of human experience: He who makes the study of society a mere corollary of biology, speaks of the “theory of the unspecialized,” that the simple cell develops much more rapidly when new tissue is needed than the more highly developed one; he who views society from the economic standpoint and finds hope in changed industrial order, talks of “the man at the bottom of society,” of the proletarian who shall eventually come into his own; he who believes that a wiser and a saner education will cure our social ill, speaks ever and again of “the wisdom of the little child” and the necessity to reveal and explore his capacity; while he who keeps close to the historic deductions upon which the study of society is chiefly founded, uses the old religious phrase “the counsel of imperfection,” and bids us concern ourselves with “the least of these.”32

Notice how Addams appropriates the catchphrases of different vocations to further her promotion of sympathetic knowledge. But she is not crafting a prophetic vision so much as she is using the available means to foster immediate identifications. That is, she is not promoting a certain way of talking so much as she is promoting a certain way of seeing the world, and 30

Ibid., 234. Hamington, The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, 74. 32 Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, 20-21. 31

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she is doing so through the establishment of common ground. In short, she is trying to push her audience into sharing a similar ethical stance.33 Tellingly, Addams asserts that to foster identifications among diverse groups of citizens within a democracy, it “requires at the very outset a definite abandonment of the eighteenth century philosophy upon which so much of our present democratic and philanthropic activity depends.”34 Here Addams references utilitarianism and its emphasis on private rights; and while she does not advocate for its outright dismissal as irrelevant or unnecessary for understanding our constitutional rights, she does explain this philosophy is insufficient for a social democracy. That is, a social democracy builds on the experiences of its citizens, so when abstract rights are elevated over lived experience, social democracy buckles. Civic housekeeping provides us with a blueprint to model new ethical stances that promote socially oriented democratic practices. Not surprisingly, Addams found rights-based ethics insufficient for this purpose, so she forwards civic housekeeping to “move beyond static notions of isolated individuals who are endowed with rights to considerations of citizens’ responsibilities for others as part of an active and rich notion of public interest.”35 Unlike the pragmatist feminism advocated by Rorty, civic housekeeping relies on compassion to be the vehicle for constructing a deliberative commons, a place where public interests are debated from positions of mutual concern.

The Hope of Public Deliberation To court compassion in the marketplace of ideas, we must encourage ways to suspend the antagonism which motivates much of today’s political discourse on matters of public debate. Moreover we must cultivate rhetorical practices that allow us to converge on points of shared interest in deliberation about matters of public debate, which means, in part, that we must cultivate ethical stances that allow us to identify such matters as social ills that require remedying and not political battles that celebrate winning. Such is the work of civic housekeeping, maintaining the conditions necessary for the emergence of sympathy and compassion in public deliberation. In her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams 33 I build on this point in “Remembering is the Remedy: Jane Addams’s Response to Conflicted Discourse,” Rhetoric Review 30.2 (2011): 135-52. 34 Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, 28. 35 Maurice Hamington, “Addams’s Radical Democracy: Moving Beyond Rights,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (2004): 216.

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observes that a standard of democratic social ethics is attained “by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burdens.”36 Identifying with the burdens of our neighbors enriches us, implies Addams, because this is how we cultivate compassion, that critical ingredient for civic housekeeping. It is difficult to assess how exactly Addams might respond to the Snyder ruling, but I imagine she would probably instruct us to tend to our own local publics, to the spaces of deliberation that surround us and to sweep them of antagonism. These spaces exist in our classrooms and in our departments, in our neighborhoods and in our newspapers; they exist virtually in our social networks and on our professional listservs. To counter any potential misinterpretations of my argument, I want to be clear that my discussion has not served as a commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision in Snyder v. Phelps. Nor do I necessarily want to be viewed as one who harbors resentment for what is WBC’s thoroughly unsympathetic discourse. In fact, enough antagonism and vitriol has already and continues to be directed towards WBC. Immediately after the Snyder ruling, for example, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly declared on national television that WBC is comprised of “loons,” “animals,” and “sociopaths,” and he proclaimed, “these vile idiots are happy that our soldiers are coming home dead.”37 Many people share O’Reilly’s sentiments, and this is why we need to promote the virtues of civic housekeeping in matters of public deliberation. That is, while I can identify with the anger from which O’Reilly condemns WBC, what good does it do to call them “sociopaths” and other names? Moreover, do we actually believe this is a group who rejoices in the death of American soldiers? Publicly this might be the message WBC promotes, but like any group they are a collection of individuals who must, to echo Addams, “see the sizes of one another’s burdens.” For this reason I find it hard to believe that during this time of prolonged war in Iraq and Afghanistan that there are still people who have not had to cope with the death or injury of a loved one, or have not yet had to wish a soldier safekeeping upon deployment, or bear witness to the effects of PTSD, or simply mourn the violence that has for so long afflicted the Middle East. So are we prepared to declare that people who spew hate on sidewalks with signs that read “Thank God For Dead Soldiers” are incapable of feeling sympathy? In this way my argument is not directed at the Westboros 36

Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 7. 37 Bill O’Reilly, “The Bad Guys Win,” The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, (2 March 2011).

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of the world as much as it is directed to individuals like myself who occasionally assert passionate beliefs in ways that limit their—our—ability to foster sympathetic knowledge with those who believe differently. To channel Robert Ivie, I consider one of our primary challenges “in an imperfect world of democratic give and take is to prevent where possible, and repair as necessary, agonistic exchanges that degenerate in antagonistic relations of social disaffections, cultural alienation, and political estrangement.”38 This was a concern for Addams as well, but as Hamington notes, “Addams asks that we not hide behind moral platitudes but seek out the fundamental connection between one another.”39 I admit to the disappointment and anger I felt after hearing the outcome of the Snyder case. I still do not understand how the Court can rule for WBC without sufficiently showing how homophobic epithets actually constitute assertions that warrant deliberation in the public sphere. But what matters now is my felt response, the one imbued with sadness for people I don’t know like the Snyder family, as well as the innumerable other families who have had to cope with groups like WBC and the hatred they shout. It is also sadness for a democratic system I want to hold in higher esteem when I do not understand its logic. But others feel the same sadness, and this is what we should tend to as feminists, these points of emotional congruence where new ethical stances can be developed to promote the sympathetic knowledge necessary to wrest from the discord inherent in so much public debate a common cause and a shared vision for remedying the very thing that allows us to share sympathy with strangers in the first place, what Addams recognized as the democratic spirit itself.

38 Robert Ivie, “Toward a Humanizing Style of Democratic Dissent,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 454. 39 Hamington, The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, 79.

WHEN WOMEN KILL NEWBORNS: THE RHETORIC OF VULNERABILITY SUSAN AYRES

Neonaticide, the act of killing a newborn, is a global problem. This chapter presents two pairs of vignettes as a way to explore jurisprudence regarding women who commit acts of violence and to argue for the application of a rhetoric of vulnerability as informed by the pre-Socratic concept of kairos, or right-timing and due measure. The case study approach illustrates the debate about whether women and men should be viewed with equality (sameness) or difference (specificity). In the context of neonaticide, some theorists urge that women who kill must be viewed the same as men (as having agency and responsibility) in order for women to claim their humanity and citizenship.1 Other theorists urge that women who kill newborns should be viewed different from men (as victims lacking agency) in order to qualify for a lesser offense such as manslaughter, which is the approach taken by England and over twenty other countries that have enacted Infanticide Acts (providing for the lesser offense of manslaughter when a woman is charged with killing her child).2 This theoretical debate about sameness versus difference spans various disciplines from law to psychology to sociology, but has practical legal implications not only in criminal law, but in family law and the workplace. The first part of this chapter presents vignettes that illustrate the different approaches taken by the United States and England in cases of neonaticide. The first pair of vignettes contrasts teenagers accused of killing newborns; the second pair contrasts adult women accused of killing newborns. In addition to illustrating two broad socio-legal approaches to 1

Candace Kruttschnitt and Kristin Carbone-Lopez, “Moving Beyond the Stereotypes: Women’s Subjective Accounts of Their Violent Crime,” Criminology 44 (2006): 326; Belinda Morrissey, When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2003), 24, 28-29. 2 Michelle Oberman, “A Brief History of Infanticide and the Law,” Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers Who Kill, ed. Margaret G. Spinelli (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.), 2003, 9.

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infanticide, both pairs of vignettes illustrate the sameness versus difference treatment of women, and both implicate the paradox inherent in these two different approaches. Zillah Eisenstein articulates the paradox as follows: “When woman is treated the same as man, she challenges man’s representation of specificity and is also denied her own specificity; when she is treated as ‘different,’ she is made the ‘other.’”3 The second part of this chapter describes the rhetoric of vulnerability as articulated by feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman.4 Vulnerability provides an alternative to skirt the paradox of the sameness-difference debate made in arguments for women’s equality. The rhetoric of vulnerability, which emphasizes the universal aspects of dependence, implicates the responsibility of the state to remedy vulnerability. This chapter argues that the rhetoric of vulnerability may be considered as an example of the practical wisdom of kairos, the Sophist concept that builds on the concepts of right-timing and due measure. The third part of this chapter re-examines neonaticide through the kairic rhetoric of vulnerability, arguing for changes in state assets to provide options for unwanted pregnancy (right-timing), and in the criminal justice system’s laws and defenses regarding neonaticide (due measure).

Vignettes of Mothers Who Kill Newborns When the media reports stories of abandoned or killed newborns, society typically assumes the mother was a teenager who experienced an unwanted pregnancy. However, studies report that the median age of women accused of neonaticide is around nineteen, so the mother may well be an adult woman, possibly the mother of older children. The following vignettes illustrate these two broad categories of teenagers and adult women accused of killing newborns.

Teenaged Girls Who Kill Newborns Nicole Beecroft, from Minnesota, was seventeen years old the summer before her senior year in high school when she learned she was pregnant. She concealed her pregnancy from her family and was turned away from a pregnancy clinic when she sought an abortion because the clinic 3

Zillah Eisenstein, The Female Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 199. 4 Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20 (2008): 1-23.

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considered abortion a sin. She briefly considered dropping her baby off at a hospital, but did not understand the provisions for legalized abandonment under the state’s Safe Haven law. Instead, she continued to conceal her pregnancy and gave birth alone. She went into a panic when the baby was born and stabbed the baby about one hundred times. When her friend told an adult that Nicole had given birth, it was too late. The baby was found in a trash bin during a search of the house. After a bench trial, Beecroft was found guilty of first degree murder and given a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Her case was reversed and remanded by the Minnesota Supreme Court, which found that state actors had interfered with Beecroft’s expert testimony.5 Compare Nicole Beecroft’s case to a similar case in England. Whereas in the United States, women who conceal pregnancy and kill their newborns are charged with murder (they are treated the same as other defendants who kill), in England and over twenty other countries, women who conceal pregnancy and kill their newborns are charged with a lesser form of murder, a manslaughter offense called infanticide.6 Generally women convicted of infanticide do not serve prison sentences at all, but rather, receive counseling and supervision. In fact, in the past ten years, none of the fifty-nine women convicted of infanticide in England have served any prison time.7 In a case factually similar to Beecroft’s, an unnamed sixteen-year-old in Hampshire, England stabbed her newborn to death. After the baby was found in a trash bin at a railway station, the teenager pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of infanticide and received a twelve-month community supervision and youth rehabilitation order. In presenting her case, the prosecutor said that the teenager had no criminal intent, but that her actions were driven by panic and emotional and physical shock because she was unaware of pregnancy. The judge who sentenced her commented, “The law recognizes it is important for the court to act in a constructive way and mercifully rather than concentrate on the punishment.”8 These two vignettes illustrate the paradox of the sameness/difference approaches. In the American case, Beecroft was treated the same as men 5

Transcript of Record, State of Minnesota v. Nicole Marie Beecroft, File No. 82K1-07-2492 (Washington County District Court, Tenth Judicial District, April 27, 2007-December 1, 2008), Beecroft v. Minnesota, 813 N.W.2d 814 (2012). 6 Oberman, “Brief History,” 3, 9. 7 Andrew Robinson, “Mother Who Hid Stillborn Baby’s Body Walks Free,” Yorkshire Post, December 17, 2010. 2010 WLNR 25020433. 8 Press Association News, “Girl, 16, Stabbed Newborn to Death,” October 12, 2010, 10/12/10 PAWIRE 16:28:32.

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who kill, and received a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. However, the sentence designated and subordinated her gender and her ability to exercise agency. The question Beecroft’s case presents is whether we should view a minor who attempted to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, but who was turned away by a pregnancy agency, as a responsible agent deserving life without the possibility of parole? While the United States Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of sentences of life without parole for minors who commit murder, the rhetoric that most American neonaticide cases focus on, however, is not the specificity of the mother, but the death of an innocent newborn. In comparison, the English case of the unnamed sixteen-year-old accused of abandoning her newborn in the trash at the railway station applies a difference approach. The teenager was treated differently than a man in being found guilty of infanticide. Theorists such as Belinda Morrissey might argue that the prosecutor’s statements designated her as an “other,” a victim lacking in agency. The question her case presents is whether we should view all women accused of killing newborns as lacking any intent or agency. Do sentences under the Infanticide Act hold women accountable or responsible for their actions? Indeed, the English Infanticide Act is based on a presumption that a woman is guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter because she is acting as a result of a postpartum mental imbalance.9 She does not have to show that the mental imbalance caused her to kill the newborn, just that she suffered from the postpartum mental imbalance. The rhetoric in England focuses on compassion for a woman who has “labored alone or in a frightening environment with no access to proper medical care.”10 Although the public commonly expects mothers who have committed neonaticide to be teens or young women, this is not always the case, as the next set of vignettes demonstrates.

Adult Women Who Kill Their Newborns Dana Deegan was a twenty-five-year-old Native American woman, living on a reservation in North Dakota with her common-law husband and three children aged five and under. She had been brutally physically and 9

Oberman, “Brief History,” 8-9. Judith Duffy, “A Newborn Baby Is Found Dead in a Pond. Another Was Dumped in a Park. So Who Are the Mothers and Why Are They Abandoning Their Own Children?” Sunday Herald (Glasgow), September 11, 2005. 2005 WLNR 14345860. 10

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sexually abused as a child and as an adult by both her father and husband. She lived in poverty, and her husband spent money on drugs. When Deegan became pregnant a fourth time, she denied the reality of her pregnancy and sought no prenatal care. Because she was depressed and overwhelmed, she did not believe she was pregnant. Instead, she denied the pregnancy, or “put the pregnancy out of her mind,” according to the psychiatrist who examined her. When she went into labor, she gave birth alone in a dissociative state, an out-of-body sensation she had experienced before as a girl when she had been sexually abused. After giving birth, she abandoned the baby in her home. She returned several weeks later and put the dead body in a suitcase out in a field, where a worker discovered the suitcase. Eight years later, DNA evidence implicated Deegan, who confessed and accepted a plea bargain for second degree murder. She was sentenced under federal guidelines for 121 months—or about ten years. The judgment was affirmed on appeal by the eighth circuit in an opinion containing a fifty-nine page dissent.11 Dana Deegan’s case may be contrasted with a factually similar case of Allison Johnson in South York, England. Allison Johnson was a thirtythree-year-old woman who had five other children. In June of 2000, authorities discovered that she had abandoned two newborn babies by putting them in laundry baskets in her garage. (She was turned in to authorities by her sister who suspected that Johnson might be secretly disposing of newborns.) Johnson pleaded guilty to infanticide and was given a three year community rehabilitation order with psychiatric counseling. In sentencing her, the judge considered that “she had been a good and caring mother to her other children.” He also observed that she was divorced at the time and under stresses of her mother’s illness and had her own financial problems. Moreover, the judge stated that she was not “wicked . . . [and that she did not] offer any obvious risk of reoffending and [could] be safely managed in the community.” The judge concluded, “Some psychological condition must have caused you to act as you did.”12 Similar to the first set of vignettes about teen mothers, this second set demonstrates the paradox inherent in the sameness/difference approach to treating women who kill their newborns. While American law treated Deegan the same as a man (as a responsible agent who killed her newborn), her specificity as a woman who had been repeatedly abused 11

United States v. Deegan, 605 F.3d 625 (2010). Judge’s comments taken from two articles by Emma Dunlop published in the Yorkshire Post on June 13, 2002, “Sister Had to Tell Police of Suspicions over Babies’ Fate” and “Baby Killer Who Hid Body is Spared Jail,” wppw WLNR 3497189, 2002 WLNR 3481030. 12

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since the time she was a child, and who suffered denial and dissociation, was not emphasized. Instead, the rhetoric surrounding the case focused on the death of an innocent victim. For instance, in a flurry of postings on a Law Prof Blog on Sentencing Law and Policy after Deegan’s judgment was affirmed on appeal, one professor posted the following on May 26, 2010: “The obligation of a mother to care for her young children is the most basic obligation known to the human race. If the law cannot enforce that, there is nothing it CAN enforce”; “if society [sic] cannot set its face against infanticide, it has just flat-out lost its moral bearings. It is impossible to imagine a victim more innocent or defenseless than a baby.” Thus, these vignettes illustrate that in the United States, the mother is treated like other defendants accused of murder—or maybe worse because she has killed a defenseless baby. Indeed, feminists note that American women who commit crimes, especially crimes that intersect with family law, receive disproportionately harsher treatment than men.13 For instance, Deegan’s punishment of ten years’ imprisonment seems excessive, but was based on federal sentencing guidelines. In contrast, in the English case, Johnson was treated differently than a man; however, the presumption that she acted because of hormonal imbalance after giving birth constructed her as a victim and denied the possibility that she exercised agency in abandoning not one, but two newborns in subsequent pregnancies. Johnson’s punishment of three years’ community rehabilitation and counseling seems inadequate to insure that she was held accountable and responsible for her actions. As these vignettes demonstrate, the criminal justice systems in United States and England have very different ways of charging and punishing neonaticide. In the United States, judges and jurors continue to convict women who kill newborns of murder and impose harsh sentences, as shown by the legal treatment of Beecroft and Deegan. In contrast, by the nineteenth century, English juries became unwilling to convict women who killed newborns under the concealment statutes and later murder statutes.14 The creation of the English Infanticide Act in 1922 (amended in 1938) can thus be viewed as a practical response to juries’ and judges’ reluctance to hold women responsible for murder.15 So, even though the 13 Naomi Cahn, “Moral Arguments and the Dilemmas of Criminalization,” DePaul Law Review 49 (2000): 822. 14 Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy, and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 113-18. 15 The same legal development may be traced in Canada, as Kramar and Watson demonstrate in their historical analysis of the 1948 Canadian Infanticide Act

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United States has not followed suit by enacting infanticide laws that would mitigate the killing of newborns from murder to manslaughter, the next section of this chapter argues that the rhetoric of vulnerability provides an alternative to the paradox of the sameness/different debate. Moreover, the rhetoric of vulnerability is kairic in its pragmatic wisdom that emphasizes the unequal circumstances and disparities of power for women who suffer unwanted pregnancy that must be taken into account by the state in responding to such vulnerabilities.

The Rhetoric of Vulnerability Vulnerability has been touted lately as a promising theoretical framework to examine various socio-legal problems such as humanitarian emergencies, animal law, and workplace discrimination. In her 2008 article on the vulnerable subject, Martha Fineman applies Peadar Kirby’s concept of vulnerability in order to fashion a more responsive state and egalitarian society. She uses the term “vulnerable” not in a negative sense of disability, but in the positive sense “for its potential in describing a universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition that must be at the heart of our concept of social and state responsibility.”16 We are all vulnerable to change, to “harm, injury, and misfortune from internal and external forces,” consequently, vulnerability is a “post-identity” analysis because vulnerability is inherent in the human condition.17 Moreover, although Fineman does not analyze the rhetoric of vulnerability through the lens of kairos, her project shares many characteristics with the rhetorical concept of kairos. This parallel highlights the pragmatic wisdom of Fineman’s project. Although Fineman’s previous scholarship argued for a notion of substantive equality, her recent project rejects the concept of individuals as liberal autonomous subjects. She now claims that “notions of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency…are empirically unrealistic and unrealizable,”18 especially in the regime of the family where (Kirsten Johnson Kramar and William D. Watson, “Canadian Infanticide Legislation, 1948 and 1955: Reflections on the Medicalization/Autopoiesis Debate,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 33 (2008): 23. Available at 2008 WLNR 25855007). 16 Fineman, “Vulnerable Subject,” 8. Fineman refers to the work of Peadar Kirby, Vulnerability and Violence: The Impact of Globalisation (London: Pluto Press, 2006). 17 Ibid., 9. 18 Ibid., 11.

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“structural family disadvantages associated with caretaking still typically burden women more than men, even after decades of feminist equality reform.”19 Thus, Fineman has made a pragmatic shift from the rhetoric of substantive equality to the rhetoric of vulnerability because she finds it “more theoretically promising.”20 Instead of describing individuals as liberal autonomous subjects, Fineman draws upon the work of Kirby and others who “have offered a model of interdependence in which the liberal subject is enmeshed in a web of relationships and perceived as dependent upon them.”21 One important aspect of the vulnerability analysis is that it avoids the paradox inherent in the sameness-difference debate. Fineman emphasizes dependence and vulnerability as a universal condition and thus side-steps the problem of whether women should be viewed as autonomous agents and treated the same as men, or as victims and treated differently than men. The theoretical framework of vulnerability rejects the question about whether women can be viewed as autonomous citizens because “the benefits of citizenship are unevenly distributed through existing social and cultural structures . . . [T]here is no level playing field.”22 Thus, Fineman shifts the frame to decenter autonomy and replace it with vulnerability.23 Another important aspect of the vulnerability analysis is its implications for social institutions. Fineman argues that assets conferred by the state to provide individuals with resilience should be regulated to ensure that they are equitable; indeed, the state should be held accountable in responding to vulnerability.24 State assets include physical assets (physical or material goods), human assets (health, education, employment), and social assets (family, social groups, unions). Additionally, the criminal justice system may also be considered a state asset.25 In making her argument that the state must be held responsible for ensuring access and equal opportunity, Fineman points to Canada and other Western countries that have accepted the obligation of government “to guarantee fundamental social goods.”26

19 Martha Fineman, “Equality: Still Illusive After All These Years,” Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship, eds. Linda C. McClain and Joanna L. Grossman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 254. 20 Ibid., 255. 21 Fineman, “Vulnerable Subject,” 11. 22 Fineman, “Equality,” 257. 23 Ibid., 261. 24 Fineman, “Vulnerable Subject,” 14-15. 25 Ibid., 15. 26 Fineman, “Equality,” 261.

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Rhetorically, Fineman’s project has much in common with the preSocratic concept of kairos, as discussed below.

The Rhetoric of Vulnerability as Kairos The rhetoric of vulnerability may be examined for aspects of kairos, a preSocratic concept having many different meanings and components. Contemporary rhetoricians have revived an interest in kairos and its rich and complex dimensions. For example, Phillip Sipiora lists various meanings of kairos in ancient Greece to include “‘symmetry,’ ‘propriety,’ ‘occasion,’ ‘due measure,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘tact,’ ‘decorum,’ ‘convenience,’ ‘proportion,’ ‘fruit,’ ‘profit,’ and ‘wise moderation.’”27 Likewise, James Kinneavy describes the complex concept of kairos as “not easily reduced to a simple formula,” but having various dimensions, such as ethical, epistemological, rhetorical, aesthetic, and civic educational dimensions.28 Despite these various dimensions, kairos may be reduced to the two concepts of right-timing and proper measure.29 Right-timing means the “right time” to do something, not the linear or absolute time of chronos, but a qualitative time, such as the right time to harvest grapes,30 or to culture pearls.31 Kairos implicates timing in general, especially the three features of a right time, a time of crisis, and a time of opportunity.32 The second aspect of kairos, proper measure, relates to justice and ethics. As Kinneavy explains, “One of the most significant ethical components of kairos had to do with its close relation to justice, particularly in the Pythagoreans. Justice was defined as giving to each

27

Phillip Sipiora, “Introduction: The Ancient Concept of Kairos,” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, eds. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1. 28 James Kinneavy, “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning, ed. Jean Dietz Moss (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 85-92. 29 Ibid., 85. 30 John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, eds. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 52. 31 Amélie Frost Benedikt, “On Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time: Toward an Ethics of Kairos,” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, eds. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 227. 32 Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” 52.

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according to merit.…Justice, therefore, was determined by circumstances.”33 The justice of kairos may also be illustrated by Plato’s emphasis on “virtue as the mean between two extremes.”34 Timing and proper measure are often inseparable, as Amélie Frost Benedikt comments about the ethical dimension of kairos: “the right action at the wrong time is not kairic. Neither is the wrong action at the right time kairic.”35 Instead, Benedikt believes that the ethical component of kairos requires that we “take stock of the entire situational context” in order to determine “the right moment for an action.”36 The rhetoric of vulnerability, which imposes social responsibility on the state, shares common features with the ethical dimension of kairos. According to Sipiora, Isocrates was the first to incorporate “the theoretical and pragmatic importance of kairos to rhetoric and social responsibility— the ultimate goal of Isocratean paidei, or school.37 This pragmatic ethics incorporated the concept of right timing in the sense that a citizen must anticipate and respond to exigencies, and respond with practical wisdom in a given situation.38 Thus, rather than applying “universals or ideals,” the socially responsible citizen responded with flexibility to a contingent universe.39 This same principal applies to the rhetoric of vulnerability, which requires practical wisdom to respond to the exigency of vulnerability, often a time of crisis. The rhetoric of vulnerability is kairic in its emphasis on the responsibility of the state to fashion a more responsive and egalitarian society by providing vulnerable citizens with assets for resilience and by conferring state assets in a timely and equitable manner. Like kairos, vulnerability is a rhetoric of possibility.40 .

Reconsidering Neonaticide through a Rhetoric of Vulnerability Neonticide’s primary cause is unwanted pregnancy, and the act of neonaticide occurs in a moment of vulnerability or crisis, such as the panic Beecroft faced, or the dissociation Deegan experienced, at the moment of 33

Kinneavy, “Kairos,” 87. Ibid., 88. 35 Benedikt, “On Doing the Right Thing,” 227. 36 Ibid., 229. 37 Sipiora, “Introduction,” 5. 38 Ibid., 9-10. 39 Ibid., 11, 13. 40 John Poulakos, “Rhetoric, the Sophists, and the Possible,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 221, 223-24. 34

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childbirth. In previous work I have described the kairos of unwanted pregnancies, which are “like other psychological crises” because they “contain a continuum of kairic points of possible decision” in which a mother may acknowledge the pregnancy and select a plan, or may deny the existence of the pregnancy.41 In this chapter, I extend that analysis to argue that society’s response to the vulnerability of unwanted pregnancy and neonaticide may also be analyzed through the lens of kairos. A rhetoric of vulnerability would examine Beecroft’s vulnerability as a teenager (and not an adult),42 and her vulnerability in maneuvering through social institutions in seeking an abortion. Likewise, the rhetoric of vulnerability would focus on Deegan’s vulnerability as an abused wife living in poverty with three young children, and living in a community lacking important social resources, such as a battered women’s shelter. These vulnerabilities demonstrate the need to “imagine responsive structures whereby state involvement actually empowers a vulnerable subject.”43 The following analysis considers social responses based on the dual aspects of kairos: first, “right-timing” to provide human and social assets for the vulnerability of unwanted pregnancy; and second, “proper measure” to ensure that the criminal justice system provides equitable and fair treatment of mothers accused of neonaticide.

Right-Timing: Social Assets Providing Options for Unwanted Pregnancy One practical implication of the rhetoric of vulnerability is the state’s responsibility to provide assets for resilience. In terms of unwanted pregnancy, a kairic response would include providing options discussed below, such as anonymous birth, legalized abandonment, adoption, and abortion. This would offer women and teens such as Nicole Beecroft, who unsuccessfully sought an abortion and briefly considered abandonment, a legal alternative to avoid the tragic outcome of neonaticide and a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

41

Susan Ayres, “Kairos and Safe Havens: The Timing and Calamity of Unwanted Birth,” William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 15 (2009): 279. 42 Fineman, “Vulnerable Subject,” 11. Fineman notes that the liberal subject must be presented as an adult, whereas the vulnerable subject can be in any developmental stage. 43 Ibid., 19.

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Anonymous birth remains a foreign concept to most Americans, yet France has had anonymous birth for many years and Austria recently instituted it. In these countries which allow anonymous birth, a pregnant woman about to give birth may register at the hospital without using her own name, but instead as “Mother X,” and she may give birth safely with attendants. The newborn is considered legally abandoned, and may be placed for adoption.44 Anonymous birth provides a safer alternative to giving birth unattended, as did the women in the vignettes, and many other women facing unwanted pregnancy. A related option found in the United States and a handful of other countries, such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, is the use of baby flaps or the legalized abandonment of infants. This option allows a parent to anonymously abandon a newborn in a special incubator-like receptacle or at a recognized agency, such as a hospital or fire department.45 Unfortunately, a primary obstacle to legalized abandonment is a lack of social awareness. Although anonymous abandonment is legal in all fifty states, many of these laws were enacted without funding provisions, and as a result, most states provide no public awareness or education about legal abandonment of newborns.46 For example, although Beecroft considered legalized abandonment, she did not understand that she could anonymously drop off her newborn at the hospital; rather, she believed she needed to fill out paperwork required for adoption. Since she was concealing her pregnancy, she did not believe filling out paperwork was a viable option for her. Likewise, another option for unwanted pregnancy is access to abortions for teens and women who desire to terminate unwanted pregnancy. A kairic rhetoric of vulnerability encourages states to put assets into access to abortion and adoption, public awareness of existing safe haven laws, and to enact other options such as anonymous birth. Such a kairic response would give women facing unwanted pregnancy the option “do the right thing at the right time.”47 Finally, a spectrum of other state assets could provide more resilience for emotional and physical trauma related to unwanted pregnancy. This might include battered women’s shelters for women, like Dana Deegan, who was abused while pregnant, yet had no shelter at the reservation where she lived. It might also include therapy and counseling for women

44

Ayres, “Kairos and Safe Havens,” 244-47. Ibid., 239-40, 250. 46 Ibid., 252. 47 Benedikt, “On Doing the Right Thing,” 233. 45

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who abandon or kill newborns, which is the norm in countries such as England. As one clinical psychologist indicated, “when we talk about abandoned babies, there are abandoned mothers, too.”48 Finally, a kairic rhetoric of vulnerability would encourage the reallocation of resources in order to provide more funding to women stricken by poverty, such as Dana Deegan, who felt overwhelmed by a fourth pregnancy.

Proper Measure: The Criminal Justice System as a State Asset Criminal laws are an expression of moral outrage, and society generally punishes more harshly the offenders it views as more culpable, and punishes less harshly the offenders it views as more sympathetic. The rhetoric of vulnerability emphasizes the unequal circumstances and disparities of power for many women who have unwanted pregnancies. For instance, Beecroft was a minor who was turned away when she sought an abortion, and Deegan was an abused spouse who lived in poverty on a reservation without a battered women’s shelter. Nonetheless, under current American law, these vulnerabilities carried little weight in determining sentences for murder of a newborn. In contrast, English law and culture gives more weight to the vulnerabilities of unwanted pregnancy and neonaticide. In sentencing both the unnamed sixteen-year-old Hampshire girl and Allison Johnson, the English courts took into account the vulnerabilities that caused their acts, and recognized the need for a more therapeutic justice. The mother of another English woman, Caroline Beale, who was charged for murder and detained in the United States after allegedly committing neonaticide, commented negatively about American system. Mrs. Beale stated, “‘I pity any American girl that comes into this situation because the American laws are medieval and they should be changed.’”49 As discussed above, England’s infanticide laws were enacted when juries refused to convict women of murder because society viewed these women more sympathetically, or as more vulnerable. On the other hand, American society does not share this sentiment, so state legislatures will be unlikely to enact infanticide laws until there is social impetus to do so. The moment is not kairic, but perhaps the rhetoric of vulnerability can effect change. 48

Duffy, “A Newborn Baby Is Found Dead in a Pond,” Quoting Dr. Lorraine Sherr. 49 Mrs. Beale was quoted in an article by Jo Butler, “Woman Who Hid Dead Body Spared Prison Term,” Scotsman, March 5, 1996, 1996 WLNR 2324395.

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Aside from enacting a new offense, such as an infanticide statute, another possible response by the criminal justice system is to allow new or re-tooled defenses to murder when a woman kills a newborn. Some theorists, such as Michael Perlin, have argued for the availability of a neonaticide syndrome.50 Neonaticide syndrome evidence would support a defense, similar to the battered woman’s defense, that a woman such as Deegan, who killed her newborn did not do so intentionally, but as a result of psychological denial of her pregnancy and psychological dissociation during the child’s delivery. This would provide a defense to intentional murder charges. Another possibility is the defense found in the Model Penal Code of “extreme mental or emotional distress,” which mitigates murder to manslaughter when the defendant acts under extreme mental or emotional distress that would have caused a reasonable person standing in the defendant’s shoes to commit the act.51 Arguably, a woman such as Deegan, who gives birth alone after suffering an unwanted pregnancy that she has denied, and who has been so abused in her life that she experiences dissociation during the birth, may be a prime candidate for this mitigating defense. Likewise, a teenager such as Beecroft, who lacks maturity to navigate social services such as abortion providers, but who has tried to cope with an unwanted pregnancy, might also be a candidate for the mitigating defense of extreme mental or emotional distress, especially if she endures childbirth alone and panics once the baby is delivered. Of course, the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision regarding sentences of life without parole for minors who commit murder would also impact cases such as Beecroft’s. A kairic rhetoric of vulnerability would encourage the criminal justice system to respond to the vulnerability of neonaticide with justice and due measure. For example, one practical implication involves the revision of American criminal statutes to provide for an Infanticide Act or legally recognized defenses when a woman is charged with murdering her newborn. Another implication concerns a more therapeutic jurisprudence to offer counseling and therapy for these vulnerable defendants. An example of a kairic response to the vulnerability of unwanted pregnancy and neonaticide occurred in Cyprus several years ago when a twenty-year-old domestic worker, who had left Romania because she was 50 Michael L. Perlin, “‘She Breaks Just Like a Little Girl’: Neonaticide, the Insanity Defense, and the Irrelevance of ‘Ordinary Common Sense,” William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 10 (2003): 24. 51 Russell L. Weaver, John M. Burkoff, and Catherine Hancock, Criminal Law: A Contemporary Approach (St. Paul: West, 2011), 34.

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in the socially untenable position of being pregnant and unmarried, killed her newborn in Cyprus. Both the father of the child and Romanian society had rejected her. So, she arrived in Cyprus a few days before her due date. Then, she “gave birth alone to a baby boy and strangled him with her own hands, placed the body in a bag, and threw it out of window of a house where she lived and worked.”52 Like other women suffering unwanted pregnancy, she lacked resources to cope with her vulnerabilities. She was criminally charged with infanticide, an offense carrying up to life imprisonment, but hers was the first infanticide case ever heard by courts in Cyprus. It was a test case for the application of kairic righttiming and due measure. Ultimately, the Cyprus court gave her a probated sentence of two years’ hospital supervision. In crafting the sentence, the Cyprus court specifically turned to English law, not American law, to reject the maximum sentence of life imprisonment. An important question is why Cyprus chose the English approach, which a news article described as providing “[c]ompassion, rather than extended jail time.”53 The answer must lie in a constellation of legal and social factors; however, it demonstrates the practical wisdom of vulnerability. Instead of analyzing whether a woman who kills a newborn should be treated the same as or different than a man who commits murder, this approach focuses on the universal condition of the vulnerable subject-object binary. The rhetoric of vulnerability side-steps the paradox inherent in the sameness-difference debate about the treatment of women. It allows for a case-by-case approach that provides a compassionate response to vulnerability. The result in this Cyprus case of neonaticide exemplifies the advice the Sophist philosopher Isocrates gave centuries before to the King of Cyprus in To Nicocles. Isocrates advised: “‘Do nothing in anger, but simulate anger when the occasion [kairos] demands it. Show yourself stern by overlooking nothing which men do, but kind by making the punishment less than the offense.”54

52

Marianna Pissa, “Infanticide Mother Placed Under Supervision,” Cyprus Mail, August 2, 2008, 2008 WLNR 15446623. 53 Ibid. 54 Sipiora, “Introduction,” 11.

POLITICS OF CARE AND EMOTION AT CAMP CASEY1 AMY PASON

The peace movement, devastated by the 2004 re-election of President Bush, had new life breathed into it—from a grieving mother, with a simple question, who inspired a 26 day peace camp outside of Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch in August 2005.2 “Peace Mom” Cindy Sheehan’s son Casey died in Iraq in April 2004; Cindy turned grief into activism by camping in Crawford until Bush answered for “What noble cause” Casey died.3 Bush declined to meet with Cindy, but in his place, over 15,000 responded by visiting “Camp Casey” with many more participating by sending supplies, well wishes, or starting local vigils. Camp Casey exemplifies how emotion can be utilized by activists, and more importantly, how emotion works to interpellate audiences towards action. Given the response to Cindy’s grief through Camp Casey, I argue this emotional response was translated into an ethic of care—an ethic that mobilized the peace movement as it asserted our obligation to care and cooperate with others for a more peaceful world.4 Emotion is often characterized as the antithesis of the rational, deliberative argument of public discourse, and has been used as a marker of what gets (and who is) excluded from democratic decision-making. 1

The author would like to thank Cathy Chaput for feedback on an earlier version of this article. 2 Tom Hayden, Ending the War in Iraq (New York: Akashic Book, 2007) chronicles anti-war efforts post 9/11, and argues the peace movement was energized and more interconnected due to Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey. 3 On August 3, 2005, Bush made a press statement about 14 Ohio Marines killed in Iraq, stating that families can be assured their “loved ones died for a noble cause” (see Cindy Sheehan, Peace Mom: A Mother’s Journey through Heartache to Activism (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 135). Peace Mom is Cindy’s autobiography, and I refer to this work when giving examples from Cindy. 4 I am working from Joan Tronto’s conception of an Ethics of Care (see Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), where the values associated with care become the foundation for a “good society” that recognizes moral obligation to others.

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Emotion is often coupled with female bodies, where demonstration of emotion is more appropriate in the private sphere and is indecorous in public. Similarly, emotion has been coupled with activist bodies, where dissent can be written off or feared as an irrational breakdown of social order. However, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites advocate building more sophisticated understandings of emotion in civic life, stating “public reason has to be underwritten by emotion” if “the public” is to have any effect at influencing those in power.5 Billie Murray, in analyzing Cindy’s grief, argues personal emotion can open up spaces for public deliberation as emotion calls forth accountability for, and response to, the emotionladen discourse.6 Rather than understand emotion as an individualized, private experience to be “managed,” these authors orient emotion towards collective experiences where emotion has social and civic functions, helping us comprehend complex situations and cuing us towards appropriate actions and responses.7 Collective emotion also helps explain the lack of dissent post-9/11, which underscores how public deliberation was largely replaced by a hegemonic emotional climate, where fear appeals were directed both at terrorists and dissidents.8 Rational appeals for not invading Iraq were unintelligible against “you’re with us or against us” logics, thus it was also through tapping into the public emotional climate Cindy was able to “breakthrough” and bring people together through grief to combat the isolating effects of fear. This project analyzes the emotional climate during Cindy’s anti-war efforts to understand the ways we collectively respond to and act through interpreting emotional states. After tracing the emotion hegemony constructed post-9/11, I show how Cindy’s grief worked to shift public debate about the war. Ultimately, the reaction to grief allowed a care ethic to emerge, creating a different emotional climate. At the same time, emotions are slippery and are constructed through individual experiences as well as collective norms, thus not all will react or interpret 5

Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2001), 15. 6 Billie Murray, “For What Noble Cause: Cindy Sheehan and the Politics of Grief in Public Spheres of Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 49 (2012), 1-15. 7 Hariman and Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management,” 16. I use “appropriate” here recognizing each side of a social conflict will define appropriate differently. 8 See Gregory M. Maney, Lynne M. Worhrle, and Patrick G. Coy, “Ideological Consistency and Contextual Adaptation: US Peace Movement Emotional Work Before and After 9/11,” American Behavioral Scientist 53, no. 1 (2009), 114-132.

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emotional appeals in the same manner. Camp Casey offers activists insight into the emotional work of movements in changing society, delinking emotion from solely female bodies, but also demonstrates the limits to emotional strategies.

Emotional Strategies Post 9/11 The “war against terror” has been emotionally driven. Absent clearly defined enemies or evidence of weapons of mass destruction, emotion solicited a nation to go to war and to look for terrorists around every corner. Emotion framed every step of the war from 9/11 leading to the Iraq invasion: mourning of the fallen heroes of 9/11 gave way to fear for another terrorist attack, as America’s vulnerability was exposed. Love of country and patriotism coincided with hatred for those “not with us”— whether it was suspected terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay or peace activists who questioned the Bush Administration’s motives for invading Iraq. The election of President Obama brought yet another emotion, hope, which included the hope we would really, finally, bring the troops home. The complex sequence of events post-9/11 can and was simplified through a series of emotional labels. Just as the above description indicates, emotions are not internal states experienced by an individual, but rather there is a sociality of emotion where emotion circulates and defines boundaries between bodies or actions. Sara Ahmed describes how application of a specific emotional label changes the ways we interact with, assess, or protect ourselves from the source objects of that emotion.9 Hatred prepares us to defend ourselves, while fear propels us to keep fear objects away or justifies harming others to preserve ourselves. Grief orients us to ethical duties of keeping memories alive, but more importantly forces us to negotiate and renegotiate the meaning of loss. Differently, Ahmed argues hope and wonder are essential elements to social change as these emotional states allow us to “see the world as something it does not have to be,” moving and opening up our bodies to new possibilities.10 Symbolically defining and framing an affective state through a specific emotion has material consequences for how we behave towards or evaluate others. 9

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). Similarly, Hariman and Lucaites underscore that in order for emotions to perform social functions, they must be objectified by a concrete symbol such as a person, iconic image, or physical object. 10 Ibid., 180.

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A fear climate existed before 9/11 and was leveraged by the Bush Administration post-9/11 to support and justify war efforts. This is not to say our collective feelings of being attacked or fearful were not genuine, but highlighting emotional work in this project underscores how reactions and decisions made after the attacks were driven by responses to vulnerability, fear, and anxiety instead of rational calculations to catch the evil doers. Tapping into the “right” public emotion is what allows some perspectives to be heard in public and others to be silenced.11 Discourses supporting the Bush Administration—included those utilizing a limited understanding of patriotism and stoically honored fallen soldiers or certain 9/11 heroes—were allowed, and other voices were literally removed from public discussion. The voices removed from public discussion were often those that pointed out the 9/11 attacks were an attempt to expose US vulnerability— the Pentagon and Twin Towers representing national security and economic prosperity in particular. Whereas Judith Butler argued that vulnerability offered opportunity to rearticulate our international and democratic political culture through a process of mourning, President Bush used his address to the nation after the attacks to replace feelings of vulnerability with patriotic pride because, in his assessment, we were attacked because of our freedoms and opportunities.12 Dissenting voices were made objects to be feared as they were “with the terrorists,” because any acknowledgment of our nation’s vulnerability seemingly aided another attack. Thus, dissenting voices are framed as something to be feared as vulnerability exposes us to the world—an openness that is “read as a site of potential danger, and as demanding evasive action.”13 Further, vulnerability/fear was applied to female bodies and to feminism itself. In analyzing post-9/11 mass media discourses, Susan Faludi describes public opinion blaming women’s liberation for feminizing men, leaving the nation open to attack.14 Further, conservative pundits 11

Maney, Woehrle, and Coy highlight people don’t like to be told what they are feeling is the “wrong” feeling, so in order to counter emotional hegemony, activists have to be careful to mirror dominant public emotion while shifting the direction that emotion takes us. 12 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). Ahmed’s analysis supports discourse post-9/11 focused on national strength (freedoms, opportunities, etc.) instead of blaming internal weaknesses (of American policy, character, etc.) to move beyond the attack (78). 13 Ahmed, Politics of Emotion, 69. 14 Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2007).

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feared our “soft” or therapeutic feminine culture could not defeat other (Islamic) countries where masculine values prevailed, while other editorials suggested women should stay out of the military lest our defense become feminized as well. More problematically, voices of dissent, especially women’s voices, were contained through media censorship. The Bush Administration teamed up with media to ensure a bias of patriotic, masculinist, pro-government, and pro-military messages to construct our “new” post 9/11 world.15 Editorials in major newspapers were dominated by male voices, Sunday morning political news programs insisted upon male “newsmakers” over female guests citing time constraints as why they could not put everyone on air, and even progressive magazine The Nation chose only male voices as part of a “responses to 9/11” special issue.16 Female voices were deemed dangerous, exposing a nation to more injury, and thus were contained and expelled from the public sphere. Following Ahmed’s fear thesis, we keep objects of fear away and create borders to protect ourselves from loss or pain. In response to this fear, we contained ourselves in manifestations of domesticity whether in the character of a “security mom,” in reinforcing gender norms where men save women, or in the increase of women looking to marry or have children in an attempt to build secure lives.17 Further, in the name of protecting ourselves, flags became a potent symbol of national unity to the point where flags could not stand for anything other than national unity. For example, Katha Pollitt’s column in The Nation about how flags have also symbolized vengeance and war was responded to readers and an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times reminding Pollitt to “Shut Up” because “We’re at war, sweetheart.”18 Ahmed underscores the repetition of flags symbolizing patriotism transformed fear into declarations of love, giving us the impression of a nation together, even though many were divided on what being patriotic meant in relation to the war.

15 Ibid. See also Carolyn M. Byerly, “After September 11: The Formation of Oppositional Discourse,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 281-296. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. Faludi traces discourses where single women were targeted as being distraught and needing to remedy their mistake of focusing on career ambitions, and more problematically, even stories of women heroes (firefighters, etc.) at Ground Zero were left out of news reporting or documentaries in favor of creating the mythic, male firefighter hero. 18 Ibid. Pollitt was also called ignorant and a bad mother for having the flag conversation with her daughter at all.

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Perhaps curiously, fear was also attached to grief and mourning, where grief should be avoided or contained. President Bush addressed Congress on September 20, 2011 stating, “Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.” Butler reads this as an explicit call to stop grieving, and close ourselves off from recognizing our own vulnerability and the vulnerability of other bodies. Grief becomes something to be feared, and we work to resolve this fear quickly, “to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly.”19 Grief was also feminized in editorials post 9/11, where Faludi found authors arguing against grief counselors or “healing” rhetoric because a “soft” America couldn’t rise to the occasion of defending our nation. Grief as a public offense and forbidden feeling further justified violence and retributive death as we cannot mourn the deaths of those who are not “real” or who we cannot see as humans like ourselves.20 Grief/mourning allows us to remember violent past in order to prevent its reoccurrence,21 and that feeling would have opened the possibility to deal with the fear of 9/11 through other means than war. The complexities of a post-9/11 world and the “rationale” for engaging in war were framed in explicitly emotional terms. The “wrong” emotions were linked to female bodies and “feminine” emotions (such as grief) at the same time masculine values were promoted through different emotional registers. The lines between the standard irrational/private emotion side and the rational/public dichotomy are blurred here, as emotional overall worked as the hegemonic force making sense of a world where “everything changed.” However, reliance on emotional discourse is not just an effect of 9/11; Catherine Chaput argues neoliberalism has blurred distinctions between public and private, thus she turns her attention to affect theory to explain how affective energy becomes a resource for rhetoric and communicative practices where affect “exerts pressure on our decision making and does not crumble under the deliberative weight of better arguments or more information.”22 Affect is a taken for granted gut feeling, a visceral force beyond conscious knowing—it is the energy 19

Butler, Precarious Life, 29-30. Ibid. 21 Barbara Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 147-169. 22 Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 7-8. 20

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conditioning and habituating behaviors through the circulation of signs carrying affective energy.23 We are “energized” by the use of US flags; we apply an emotional label to “understand” what that “feeling” means and how we are supposed to act framed through other dominant discourses. One sees the flag as “patriotic love,” while another is grieved through the loss of life in the name of that patriotism—but only one of these emotions is “correct” under dominant emotion discourse. Thus the conditions for dissent post-9/11 were limited by fear discourses and having to work within the affective energies directed towards unquestioned patriotism even as many grieved lost lives. Movements, then, must work within a discursive environment defined by those in power, and have to challenge this discourse through affirming public emotion, but translating the emotion towards alternative conclusions.24 Just as Butler argued we can utilize grief and mourning to assess our relations with Others, peace activists such as Cindy tapped into grief (stoically buried) to counter Bush’s fearful rush to war.

Politics of a Mother’s Grief Cindy Sheehan became an activist through her process of mourning and grief. After Casey was killed, Cindy describes how her subsequent depression, anxiety, and panic attacks left her unable to work, and a “meet and greet” with President Bush to console families of fallen soldiers was less than comforting to her, especially when Bush asked, “So who are we honorin’ [sic] here?”25 Grief led her to connect with other families whose sons and daughters died in the same ambush as Casey, and she took to the internet to seek out more information about the war to attempt to understand why Casey died. In this process, she found a group called Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), and as Cindy describes in her autobiography, it was this sequence of events leading to her first act of 23

Ibid. See also Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Readers, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1-25. 24 Maney, Woehrle, and Coy, “Ideological Consistency.” 25 Sheehan, Peace Mom, 81. Bush routinely met with families of fallen soldiers in his role as “consoler-in-chief,” which Cindy describes as a “Close-Encounter of the Bush Kind.” Her family was flown to Seattle with other families to meet Bush at Fort Lewis. She recounts how Bush said this wasn’t a political stunt, while at the same time moving families along impersonally—not taking time to remember names of soldiers or look at pictures she brought of Casey to humanize the experience.

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activism: posting a poem by her daughter about Casey to the MFSO site. After making these connections, she began speaking about Casey at MFSO and other anti-war events, becoming the literal face of the peace movement through a RealVoices.org/Moveon.org commercial (aired in swing states during the 2004 election) where Cindy’s words were overwhelmed by her tears. Her grief, made public through speaking and commercials, became an affective resource for anti-Bush/anti-war movements. Mothers grieving for children lost in war or using their role as mother to advocate for peace is not a new trope, and mothers who “sacrificed” their own children for war, are given the “right” to mourn publicly. Abby Dubisar suggests Cindy embodied the icon of the mater dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows), where the mother grieves yet holds lives together despite the pain.26 Similarly, activist Tom Hayden supported Cindy’s public grief, stating Cindy, unlike Bush, had the moral authority to speak on behalf of dead soldiers.27 As Cindy made appearances on cable news shows and was written about in online and mainstream media outlets, she was often described in emotional terms, thus we understand and act towards Cindy as we would any parent after a funeral for their child.28 Differently than an ordinary funeral, Cindy’s public grief was tied to a demand for political accountability for the war (and she directly blamed Bush for her son’s death), complicating the public’s response to console Cindy by forcing a deliberative move to question or account for the reasons for her (and others’) child’s deaths.29 In this way, Cindy tapped into the “energy” felt by many who lost loved ones (or who felt for others who had loss), but redirected that energy as grief caused by the Bush Administration that needed to be collectively redressed. Instead of fearing grief and holding it at bay, Cindy’s displays of grief pushed bodies together. Cindy sought out others to grieve with, and others turned towards her to comfort and express grief together. Ahmed underscores grief works by keeping alive the impressions of the deceased, where the process of grief opens the possibility for conversation and sharing memories, and allows the deceased’s memory to continue to 26

Abby Dubisar, “Motherhood and Activism in the Dis/Enabling Context of War: The Case of Cindy Sheehan,” in Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge, eds. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 222-239. 27 Tom Hayden “Cindy Sheehan’s War,” Huffington Post, August 14, 2005, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/cindy-sheehans-war_b_5633.html. 28 Murray, “For What Noble Cause.” 29 Murray develops this argument further, arguing that Cindy’s grief disrupted the taken-for-granted legitimacy of soldiers’ deaths.

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impress upon us how to act in that memory. Butler further argues we are constituted by those we grieve or who are deemed appropriately grieveable in a given social context (such as being allowed to mourn soldiers, but not “insurgents”). Moreover, Butler states, “I think it [grief] furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”30 We had to comfort Cindy and find out the reasons why she had to grieve for Casey because we were called to an ethical duty. At the same time, grief, in the affective milieu post-9/11, was still a divisive emotion: although we all had reason to grieve lost lives, it was unclear whether grief should be public, whether it should be feared, or what was the appropriate to grief response. Cindy recounts how she would wear shirts memorializing Casey, and although barely a year after the US invaded Iraq, people would ask her what war Casey died in as if they did not remember the US was still at war. Her tear filled Moveon.org commercial was deemed “scary” by a New York Times editorial lumping Cindy’s ad amongst other “scary” candidate campaign ads.31 Others questioned whether Cindy’s grief was appropriate or whether it dishonored the memory of her son, and other mothers of soldiers directly stated that Cindy did not “speak for them” or their understanding/grief for their lost loved ones.32 Right-wing media directly attacked Cindy as a bad mother, that she was bullying Bush, and took her grief and turned “it into something ugly.”33As Ahmed argues, emotion is not contagious: emotions circulate and are not necessarily read or responded to in the same way. At the same time, because we all “feel” something, we have to debate the significance and response to that feeling. As the mother of a soldier, Cindy was given more allowance to open up debate on grief, however divisive. 30

Butler, Precarious Life, 22. See Jim Rutenberg, “Scary Ads take Campaign to Grim New Level,” New York Times, October 17, 2004. 32 Laura Knudson, “Cindy Sheehan and the Rhetorical Analysis of Motherhood: A Textual Analysis,” Peace & Change 34, no. 2 (2009): 164-183. Knudson analyzes American Mourning, which directly attacks Cindy for incorrectly grieving Casey while also pointing out how “bad” of a mother Cindy was—undermining the very character underpinning her support and support for the peace movement. See also Murray on the conflict of how soldier’s mothers debated appropriate grief as well as discourse from psychologists commenting on Cindy’s management of grief. Similarly, Sheehan chronicles the various “Cindy Does not Speak for Me” groups and counter-protests who also discounted her activism and whether her grief was genuine. 33 Sheehan, Peace Mom, 142. 31

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Cindy’s insertion into the public sphere demonstrates how dominant discourses of fear were negotiated against discourses of grief, where the affective energy was available for both. Fear drove citizens to an uncritical, patriotic isolation, but grief forced people to connect—if only to understand whether grieving and who we grieved for was in an appropriate manner. Even as Bush used consolation of grieving families for his own political capital, activists like Cindy were able to appropriate and harness “grief” discourses, changing the implications for grief from something to put aside to something that can motivate civic engagement. As Ahmed contends, grief is only productive if we do not allow ourselves to dwell in an eternal state of devotion to the dead. For those that chose to be affected by Cindy’s grief, collective mourning turned into political action through caring for others at Camp Casey.

Politics of Hope and Care Ethics at Camp Casey Once affective energy is read as grief and we associate grief with the body of the grieving individual, we are reminded of an ethical responsibility to others—to care, to console, and to find remedy for grief. In part, Cindy’s rhetoric constituted audiences towards care. Cindy’s way of expressing her grief was to constantly describe Casey and tell his life story: his favorite songs, his involvement with church youth groups and Boy Scouts, his love of animals, and his favorite TV shows. Connecting with Casey’s story allowed others to empathize in particular ways as audiences are allowed to recall similar children they know, and by extension, want to act to prevent others from experiencing the same pain.34 Similarly, people felt familiarity with Cindy, and once she proclaimed she was going to Crawford, support from all over the country poured in from people inspired by her “going to sleep in a ditch in 100-degree weather” demanding to be heard— symbolically speaking for other citizens who wanted answers for the war.35 Cindy’s initial question of “what noble cause” turned into response of care—not from Bush—from countless supporters who traveled to Camp Casey to be with one another and recognize their interconnectedness. The disposition and practice of care—thinking about other’s needs as a starting point for understanding what actions to take—was made possible 34

Sara Hayden, “Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 196-215. 35 One Cindy supporter was quoted stating that Cindy needed support in this quest for answers (see Rodney Thrash, “She Got No Answer; Instead a Raging Debate,” St. Petersburg Times, August 31, 2005, 3A).

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by individuals being affected by Cindy’s grief at Camp Casey. Joan Tronto argues we have lost an ability to care for others; rather caring for others is contrary to neoliberal values of individual responsibility and preserving oneself over a sense of duty to preserve all of society.36 In her description of care ethics, care is a process by which judgments to care arise from concrete, lived experiences. In order to enact care, we must see ourselves as constantly enmeshed in relationships with others; recognize all are in need of care and have an obligation to be caregivers; have to understand the needs of those in need of care to know what kind of care to administer; and must see if our care indeed met needs.37 Care, then, is a moral ideal for society as it orients us to the public good of caring for others, and privileges cooperation and interdependence. Camp Casey provided a concrete situation in which cooperation was essential sustaining and directing the numerous volunteers and activists taking actions essential for the camp without any centralized authority telling them how the camp should be. Affective politics relies on the right emotion being attached to the right object in the right way to be read and acted upon with the intended response. Even though we can never be certain how some individuals will “feel” and respond, Camp Casey exemplifies how affective energy understood as grief created a norm to care for others in the form of sustaining the camp. Care, via anti-war efforts, had a role in bringing the camp together in the first place. Bush’s comment about the Ohio Marines dying for a noble cause was right before she was preparing to speak at a Veterans Against the War (VAW) convention near Crawford. Activists were already going to be in the area, but even those on her virtual network (connected via listserves and her Daily Kos blog) responded to her initial statement to ask Bush what noble cause Casey died for with offers to forward her message to media contacts, general messages of support, and then to more strategic 36

Tronto, Moral Boundaries. This is a broad summary of Tronto’s more complex development of the principles and enactment of a care ethic. See Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries; “Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments,” Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995): 141149; Joan Tronto “Beyond Gender Differences to a Theory of Care,” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 644-663. Julie White and Joan Tronto (“Political Practices of Care: Needs and Rights,” Ratio Juris 17, no. 4 (2004): 425-453) develop further how there is a “privileged irresponsibility” (especially among “bread winners” or those in power) who excuse themselves from caregiving and do not recognize the care they receive without having to ask. President Bush was often asked about those, like Cindy, protesting the war, and he continually said he did not have the obligation to listen to people like Cindy. 37

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discussion when the possibility of camping as long as it took for Bush to respond came about.38 Cindy was oriented to care for those Ohio parents through confronting Bush, and others were there to help Cindy in this mission. Thus, on August 6, 2005, Cindy, along with a coalition of VAW, CODEPINK organizers, and members of Crawford Peace House caravanned up the road towards Bush’s ranch. Cindy’s group of 75 met with about 75 members of the press before the group marched further towards the ranch until they were blocked by police from proceeding further. In an otherwise slow news period, seeing if Bush responded to Cindy’s direct demand was the news story of the month. With no sign of Bush actually going to meet the group, Cindy set up camp. The initial place “Cindy sat down” developed into a larger scale operation complete with a large event tent, chapel, medic tent, and orientation tent. Caterers (mostly volunteers) fed nearly 1000 visitors three meals a day, CODEPINK members helped coordinate Cindy’s media appearances, Crawford Peace House was taking in money donations each day, and various organizations such as Moveon.org organized candlelight vigils or similar peace camps across the country.39 Products of care (“Miracles” according to Cindy) built Camp Casey: whether it was the “need” for a large tent that procured tents leftover from a Bush fundraiser or supplies from nearby Fort Hood (where Casey was stationed) brought over by soldiers who also called Cindy “mom.” When a neighbor claimed campers were trespassing and shot his guns to “shoo doves” from the camp, a relative of that neighbor donated land for the camp.40 Other than material supplies, others offered care by being with one another or through their specific talents. For example, Joan Baez sang, Reverend Al Sharpton offered prayer services, and actor Martin Sheen recited the rosary. Others drove cross country just to give Cindy a hug, some decided to vacation there, some got married at the camp because of the love they felt among the campers, and others traveled without really 38

Cindy’s Daily Kos announcement (“We are Going to Crawford to Stop the Killing,” August 4, 2005, http://dailykos.com/story/2005/8/4/94551/60876/401/135871) garnered 243 comments, and her email about the action to a list-serve of 300 garnered double the responses. Her daily blog posts from the camp included in Not One More Mother’s Child (Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2005) and her autobiography, Peace Mom. The examples about the camp are taken from these sources. 39 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush and the Protester: Tale of 2 Summer Camps,” New York Times, August 22, 2005, A9. 40 Fred Mattlage, who donated the land, received numerous thank you letters from all over acknowledging his care response to continue the camp.

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knowing why they had to be at the camp—just that they needed to be with Cindy and others.41 Camp Casey was sustained through people caring for others and providing what was needed in a variety of ways. For anti-war and even pro-war supporters who staged (smaller) counter camps across from Camp Casey, the space of the camp became a place for collective mourning. An “Arlington West” with crosses bearing the names of fallen was where all gathered to pray, cry, or join in on a group hug. The memorial allowed visitors negotiate the meaning of those who died, and where some who initially came to protest against Cindy would end up sharing memories over a beer instead. Even though Cindy didn’t convert these Bush supporters, everyone agreed to allow everyone to honor and grieve in their own ways. Arlington West became another space to show care: when the display was run over or destroyed, participants would dutifully resurrect the crosses to keep the memorial alive. At the end of the camp, a candlelight vigil was held where counter-protesters joined in to honor all fallen soldiers. Cindy remarked Camp Casey had the ability to turn bitterness into love and heal souls; when the Camp disbanded (due to Bush leaving Crawford to deal with Hurricane Katrina), care continued on in the form of supplies and aid reaching Katrina victims before any Federal aid arrived. Camp Casey symbolized Cindy’s grief as well as the needs of a nation grieving from war, promoting ethical obligation to attend to the needs of others. The one person who didn’t feel the need to respond or care was President Bush. As days continued on, mainstream news outlets as well as bloggers called for Bush to meet with Cindy, doubtful he would consent to an unscripted meeting with an ordinary mother. The Boston Globe signaled how Bush’s inability to respond correlated to the decline of his approval ratings: “Bush, who often is stubborn in his Iraq policies, is once again locking the door and making things far worse.”42 Although Bush sent his advisors to talk with Cindy, he spent his time entertaining campaign contributors or cycling with Lance Armstrong past the camp. His only response to the press was that he was sensitive to those speaking their minds, Cindy did not represent many of the military families he talked with, and it was important for him to “go on with my life, to keep a 41 Cindy talks about an Iraq veteran who spent his honeymoon at Camp Casey, and a number of weddings that took place. One couple took up a collection at their wedding to donate to a “tour bus” for Cindy to continue a speaking tour after the Camp (leading up to an anti-war rally in Washington DC in September)—all exemplifying the ways individuals gave to the collective good even on their own individual “special” days. 42 “Talk to Cindy,” The Boston Globe, August 17, 2005, A12.

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balanced life.”43 Bush’s inability to respond to Cindy was translated as Bush’s inability to respond to US citizens—he failed to recognize their need for care while isolating himself at his ranch. Instead of being affected by the Camp to come together with citizens, Bush chose to avoid vulnerable Others, justifying more war and aggression by fearing those who killed those soldiers. President Bush’s inability to care is perhaps not surprising, as anyone can translate affective energy through different emotional lenses. More so, this demonstrates Tronto’s concern care is not understood at institutional, societal, or global levels, with “States” being the worst at enacting care. State logics operate under norms of “obligation” and only “caring” for citizens as little as legislation requires of them.44 Care is not inherent or universally learned, and Tronto is less clear on how we promote a disposition to and enactment of care. Affective energy translated to emotion, then, provides a mechanism enabling individuals to orient themselves to care and moving their bodies towards others instead of away. Perhaps thinking “rationally” through arguing rights and laws limits our ability to “irrationally” feel and act to care for others—suggesting care has to come from collective citizen efforts and not from the State. When the State justifies lack of care for others through emotional hegemony, then we must also assert care through emotional politics. Although not everyone is affected by or constituted into subject positions similarly, affect, is universally circulating and has the potential to inspire instinctual behavior. Project like Camp Casey show the potential for affective energy understood through specific emotional contexts to be put into cooperative, care behavior.

Lessons for Activists on Using Care and Emotion As with other activist efforts, Camp Casey makes us question how strangers can coordinate their efforts for a particular cause, or why people would open themselves up to ridicule and public scrutiny for these efforts. As a nation, how can people support a war where “facts” tell us there are no weapons of mass destruction or even re-elect a President that took us to war in the first place? One possible explanation is through understanding affective energies and dominant emotional hegemonies that move us (as individuals or as a society) to act in particular ways, which also suggests strategies for activists come through rhetorical choices derived from 43 44

Bumiller, “Bush and the Protester.” Tronto, Moral Boundaries.

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affective resources. As Chaput asserts, political and social crises emerge from an interruption in the rhetoric energies that sustain our structures of feeling, knowing, and experience in the world,”45and perhaps the new goal of advocacy is to “simply increase communicative exchanges that circulate positive affect—to deliberate in such a way that we can all become more open to the world’s creative potential.”46 The lessons from Camp Casey, then, are in understanding how to advocate within emotional discursive contexts as well as how emotion provides mechanisms for orienting and habitualizing ethical behaviors. Camp Casey and the post-9/11 context allow us to understand emotion as a collective experience, and one influencing our public/civic life. Although emotion tends to be feminized, affect is circulating universally and is a resource for all rhetors to frame issues through emotions. The limit or possibility for social change is in how we interpret affective energy through emotional labels, and how these labels tap into norms and habits of engaging with others. Although affect and emotion cannot work the same as an advocacy campaign, they are the mechanisms by which those campaigns can be grounded and given momentum. Emotion compelled the peace movement to gather in Crawford, and from there spurred anti-war advocacy anew. However, activists should also be careful of (and critical of) the dominance of emotion as a driving force in public life. As with the post9/11 context, the same affective energy was translated into either fear or grief, with those emotions defining who was “with us or against us,” with the losing side being the one with the fewest daring to feel and understand grief. Unlike those defined as us or them based on a position on an issue, emotions “live” within bodies. In order to undermine the “rupture” caused by people coming together at Camp Casey, it was Cindy’s personal character and role as mother attacked. Perhaps the strategy, then, is to create and circulate positive affective rhetoric to open spaces for discussion and debate, but not as the only rhetorical strategy. Finally, more theorization of affect and emotion should be developed as it relates to orienting our interactions with others and building the social infrastructure for a just world. Care ethics as one model for a just society is counter to dominant, individualized orientations, but through emotion, we have the ability to break from dominant norms and be drawn to relations of care. Thus, we saw care develop through reacting to Cindy’s grief at Camp Casey. The challenge is to sustain these relations through circulating the 45 46

Chaput, 14. Ibid., 21.

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right affective energies through the right rhetorically constructed emotions. As Camp Casey demonstrates, the new terrain for social change is through the circulation of affect and emotional politics; the ability to build new worlds also comes through understanding the power of emotion.

RHETORIC OF RIOT: CREATING ALTERNATIVE FEMINIST SITES OF RESISTANCE REBEKAH BUCHANAN The birth of the punk rock scene in the 1970s brought about a change not only in music, but the role of media production and consumption by members of music scenes. The punk tradition of an anti-establishment, anti-consumerism, “do it yourself” (DIY) philosophy fostered a culture of youth who engaged in the varying forms of cultural production which worked to fight against the traditional social and consumer norms. Punk became a site of cultural resistance where participants formed their own bands, made their own music, produced their own media, and formed a strong DIY scene. Although clearly defined as a male-dominated culture by most music historians, feminist scholars argue the importance of the role of female youth as not only musicians but also active participants in the scene.1 During the peak of the 1970s British punk scene, female musicians and artists gained recognition for their roles of not only pushing the scene to the forefront, but foregrounding feminist politics in their music. Female punk participants embraced the spirit of punk, creating and producing their own media. The scene attracted young women interested in nontraditional sites of cultural production which allowed them the freedom to rebel against gendered norms in not only music sites, but in the textual producer culture of the self-published fanzines.2 Yet it was not until the Riot Grrrl Movement of the early 1990s that young women came to the forefront of the punk scene. Within the punk scene, zines—self-published works created for little or no profit—were an integral form of communication among participants 1

For examples see Mary Celeste Kearney, Girls Make Media (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 24; and Maria Raha, Cinderella's Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2005), xi-xii. 2 David James, "Poetry/Punk/Production: Some Recent Wrtitings in L.A.,” in Postmoderism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices (New York, New York: Verso, 1988), 163-86.

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where they discussed bands, shows, musician interviews and music reviews. During the Riot Grrrl Movement, zines became widely used as a way to communicate personal experiences with sexism, racism, abuse, and other issues within the scene.3 When the Riot Grrrl Movement chose to use zines as a form of communication, they became a more personal way to present self and feminism as well as re-envision the role of women in the punk scene. They subverted traditional uses of the medium for their own use as feminists and activists. The role of the Riot Grrrl Movement in the recreation of punk and the infusion of feminism and activism into a music scene is an important site for exploration. Like feminists before them, Riot Grrrls created a strong community using their personal experiences to examine larger systematic problems within society and the punk scene. Riot Grrrls’ creation of small consciousness-raising groups permitted young women to form safe spaces to discuss their lives. Through political and social activism, the movement pushed those involved to re-examine their experiences with sexism, body image, mental illness, abuse, domestic violence, rape, and other traditionally personal issues. Through DIY mediums sexist practices in the punk scene were transformed and young women wrote themselves into existence in the center of a movement. In this chapter I explore how the Riot Grrrl Movement used zines and the Riot Grrrl ideologies to examine rape and abuse within their communities and scene as a way to protest issues of social injustice. Using both pro-girl rhetoric as well as language of action and revolution, I argue that Riot Grrrls created a rhetoric of riot paired with a girlish rhetoric that enabled them to construct both individual and group identities which allowed participants to deal with social injustice using pro-violence and pro-feminist language and ideology while disrupting traditional girlish narratives. In doing so, the Riot Grrrl Movement created a space that reenvisioned punk ideologies of anarchy and anti-establishmentarianism. In order to explore Riot Grrrls’ creation of rhetoric of riot, I start with a brief history of Riot Grrrl as a way to situate the Movement, and then move to a discussion of the ideologies of riot and Riot Grrrl zines as they are used to communicate a dismantling of patriarchy in the punk scene as well as larger social contexts.

3

Kristen Schilt, “‘Riot Grrrl Is…’: The Contestation over Meaning in a Music Scene,” in Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, ed. Andy Bennett and Richard Peterson (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt Press, 2004), 116.

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The Birth of a Movement Throughout the 1980s as punk turned more hardcore and moved to underground venues, the dominant patriarchic and sexist overtones of the scene began to be more apparent. As Lauraine Leblanc argues, the popularity of hardcore caused women to be pushed to the side, where the “decidedly male emphasis…discouraged girls from entering the pit.”4 Women previously in punk bands now formed groups labeled as New Wave while hardcore bands took over the punk scene. Yet, it was also during this time that females who remained in the scene had access to materials of cultural production in ways that women participating in other music scenes did not. The struggle between the sexist overtones of the scene and the DIY ideologies of punk that allowed women the opportunity to form their own bands and find ways to create their own scenes came to a head in the late 1980s as women were repeatedly shoved out of the scene. As punk and feminist youth scholars such as Lablanc and Kearney argue, the women who did attempt to stay in the scene struggled with its blatant sexist and patriarchal acts.5 The women who remained as active musicians (and not as girlfriends of scene members) began to educate themselves in feminist theory and gender politics, working to create a site of feminist political and social activism within the heavily male dominated hardcore scene. It was during this time that the Riot Grrrl Movement of the early 1990s formed. During the summer of 1991, women in Olympia, WA and Washington D.C. were witnessing males at the forefront of the punk scene, leaving women at the margins. In reflecting on the Riot Grrrl movement, musician Kathleen Hanna recalls being part of a scene where the art shows at galleries were geared towards women, but the bands that played at them and were used to promote the feminist art were all-male.6 It was occurrences such as these that had young women involved in punk longing to find a way to move out of the margins, and to find ways for themselves and other young women to safely discuss issues such as rape, abuse, racism, sexism, and other issues considered taboo by the male dominated society and scene of which they were a part; they found this in the creation of the Riot Grrrl Movement.

4

Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 51. 5 Leblanc, Pretty in Punk; Kearney, Girls Make Media. 6 Raha, Cinderella’s Big Score.

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Unofficially, the movement formed in the summer of 1991 in Washington, DC while members of the predominantly female bands Bikini Kill and The Bratmobile were there on break from college in Olympia, Washington. A race riot occurred in the neighborhood in which they were staying, prompting Bratmobile members Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe to start the zine Riot Grrrl in an attempt to create a community with other young women from the neighborhood.7 Neuman recalls the choice of the term Grrrl; “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also kind of an expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.”8 It was during August of the same year that the members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, along with a number of other female punk bands, participated in the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, WA as part of sponsor K Records’ designated Girls’ Night. Although these two incidences were defining moments for young feminist punks, it was the DC-based weekly meeting of these young women that truly created a lasting movement. The band members of Bratmobile and Bikini Kill started weekly group meetings for young women involved in the DC area’s punk scene. Like the women before them involved in feminist movements, these young women were able to create a strong community where they could use their personal experiences to examine larger systematic problems within society and the punk scene. These consciousness-raising groups permitted young women to form safe spaces to discuss their lives. They took control of the means of cultural production of punk and started a feminist political, music and artistic scene that engaged in active involvement in third wave feminism.9

7

The history of Riot Grrrl is most often traced back to the Mount Pleasant Race Riots that occurred in Washington, DC after a black female police officer shot and wounded a Salvadorean man who was resisting arrest during a Cinco de Mayo celebration on May 5, 1991 in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Teens rioted for two nights, and a curfew was put into place until May 9, 1991. (For more detailed information on the riots see The Washington Post between May 6-12, 1991.) 8 Mark Anderson and Mark Jenkins, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capitol (Washington, DC: Akashic Books, 2003), 315. 9 See Hillary Belzer, Words + Guitar: The Riot Grrrl Movement and Third-Wave Feminism (Unpublished Thesis, 2003); Jessica Rosenberg and Gitana Garofalo, “Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from Within,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 3 (1998): 809-842; and Mimi Schippers, “Rocking the Gender Order,” in Catching a Wave: Feminism in the 21st Century, eds. Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (Illinois: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 279-293.

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Inciting a Riot As part of punk, many young women assumed that the scene they were involved in, one that prided itself in being counter-culture and flipping the status quo, was working against major social issues such as sexism. Yet, this turned out not to be the case. Although the punk scene fought against power dynamics, the positions of power they rebelled against were usually only those afforded to men. Women’s voices in the scene were not counted in the discussion of social change. Julia Allen and Lester Faigley examine how dominant discourses have been challenged for social change, which they argue is “shifting in power arrangements to benefit those previously lacking in either formal or informal prerogatives or influence.”10 The Riot Grrrl Movement became a site for girls to do just this. They used the language of the scene, full of anti-mainstream messages, and added their own pro-girl, pro-feminist twist. As Raha discusses in her work on women in the punk scene, Riot Grrrl aimed not only to support female self-expression through homemade art and music, but to encourage girls to explore ways in which being an American woman can damage individual spirit, all while utilizing the inflammatory language and sounds of punk and personal, diary-form ‘zines.’11

Participants took the dominant language of the punk scene and co-opted it for their own uses. In addition, young women were not only encouraged to put their anger and feelings into music, but also to put pen to paper and create a space for revising the history of the punk movement and making permanent their everyday lives through the creation of zines. In doing so, Riot Grrrls created sites of third wave feminist cultural production. There is little dispute over the impact of the Riot Grrrl Movement on the punk scene and the emerging feminist third wave. Scholarship on Riot Grrrl addresses the movement as one of feminist activists who created their space in a sexist music scene through political and social activism, feminist organizing, and creating active DIY music, art, and writing scenes.12 In order for Riot Grrrls to fully shift the dynamics of power, they 10

Julia Allen and Lester Faigley, “Discursive Strategies for Social Change: An Alternative Rhetoric of Argument,” Rhetoric Review 14, no. 1 (Autumn, 1995): 143. 11 Raha, Cinderella’s Big Score, 161. 12 See Kearney, Girls Make Media; Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010); and Schilt, “Riot Grrrl Is….”

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needed to change the dominant discussion of punk from that of men and music to that of girls and violence. They needed to interrupt the dominant narratives and infuse their rhetoric of riot. This shift in rhetoric, the move from the presumably girlish silence and compliance, to the violent and action-oriented rhetoric of riot appears throughout the zines of the Riot Grrrl Movement. In her work on girl zines, Allison Piepmeier discusses the terrain of grrrl zines, “calling for the creation of female community, interrupting mainstream gender norms, identifying intersectional identities, and moving seamlessly between tongue-in-cheek irony and hope.”13 Piepmeier moves beyond the binaries created in much feminist work and examines the different kinds of possible resistance found in grrrl zines. She examines “what agency looks like in a social and cultural context defined by dislocation and selfcreation, along with many persistent and innovative versions of the sexism, racism, and homophobia that feminists have been critiquing throughout the twentieth century.”14 Using Piepmeier’s work as a starting point, I want to examine how discussions of violence and instigating virtual (and actual) riots allowed the participants agency in ways that just participating in an alternative (and what some might label counter-culture) scene did not. I also want to challenge Piepmeier’s work in this volume.15 I agree with her argument that we must move away from the undo emphasis on the differences between third wave feminism and early generations, focusing on the strength of feminism and “its ability to alter, to expand, in order to respond to internal critiques and changing culture experiences.”16 And I also agree that zines have an origin story beyond the world of punk and punk scenes and subcultures. Yet, it is also important to acknowledge the roles zines play in punk subcultures and the strong role zines play as part of Riot Grrrls’ position in punk. If we do not situate zines, specifically Riot Grrrl zines, within the punk community, we take away from Riot Grrrl Movement’s origins as punk and remove them from the punk scene, as many scholars do. Although I agree with scholars such as Piepmeier and Kearney that feminist zines have a much richer history than solely punk, Riot Grrrl zinesters created and positioned zines within the punk scene as a way to address issues they saw as impacting themselves as punks. By 13

Allison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 7. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 See Piepmeier, Feminism and Zines: An Origin Story (And the Accidents That Reveal Them). 16 Ibid.

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taking away the elements of punk from Riot Grrrls we run the risk of continuing the argument that Riot Grrrls are not really punk and adding to the disconnect between women and punk.17 Instead, I would like to embrace Piepmeier’s idea of “embodied communities” as a way for Riot Grrrls to remain part of the punk scene through the use of material artifacts valued by the scene.18

Riot Grrrl Zines For this particular chapter I have chosen to focus on zines compiled by various Riot Grrrl chapters across the country. Once young women found out about the Riot Grrrl movement, which occurred primarily though the distribution of zines, they began to form Riot Grrrl chapters. Both Washington D.C. and Olympia, Washington—the cities now labeled as home to the Riot Grrrl Movement—had chapters. There were groups in major cities such as New York and Chicago, but smaller cities such as Omaha, Nebraska; St. Paul, Minnesota; Richmond, Virginia, and Hadley, Massachusetts also had active chapters. The members of these chapters met, talked about issues that were important to them and their communities, and were actively involved in feminist activism. Although there are a number of zines written by individual participants in the movement, I am interested in examining the similarities and differences in how different chapters presented issues of rape and abuse using their interpretations of Riot Grrrl rhetorics and narratives. I chose to address zines from both the Olympia and D.C. chapters, as well as zines from the Omaha and New York City groups. Each of the zines I discuss were originally printed between late fall of 1992 and the summer of 1993. This means they were compiled and released after the Riot Grrrl Conference19 and during what Riot Grrrl scholars date as the heyday of the Movement. The time period when a large number of Riot Grrrl chapters were active across the country and also during the time of the “media blackout.” As Marcus discusses in her recent book on Riot Grrrls, once the Riot Grrrl Movement was in full swing, a number of popular newspapers and magazines attempted interview members of the Movement and learn more about these young feminists. Although there was some individuals who did 17

I would argue this is similar to the move to label bands such as Blonde and Siouxsie and the Banshees New Wave as a way to distance women from punk. 18 Piepmeier, Girl Zines. 19 Held July 31-August 2, 1992 in Washington, DC.

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participate in media interviews and photo shoots, after the ways in which the media presented Riot Grrrl, as a larger group participants collectively decided not to participate in interviews or cooperate with mainstream media.20 As a movement, Riot Grrrls successfully created a media blackout. At the height of popularity they were able to control the means of media production and distribution through the use of their own zines, record labels, radio stations, and other alternative media distribution. In doing so, Riot Grrrls created their own rhetoric around the topics and social issues they chose to take on. In looking at zines from this time period, I hope to capture a time when many participants had learned about Riot Grrrl and had actively become involved in making changes in their communities. The rhetoric and ideologies of the movement were something they were familiar with and the issues particular groups chose to address were those they believed important to the ideologies of the larger Riot Grrrl Movement. In choosing to examine the zines from the Riot Grrrl chapters, I intend to show how as a collective there was an underlying rhetoric of riot through the topics the girls chose to collectively address. One of the first Riot Grrrl chapters, Riot Grrrl Olympia, put out a zine, “What is riot grrrl, anyway???” in which they chose to answer some of the questions individuals had about the movement. Each grrrl who came to the meeting the night the zine was compiled wrote about what Riot Grrrl means to them. One of the strongest themes that plays out in the zine is that of abuse and power. For example, Wendi A. writes a handwritten note about Riot Grrrl and how it relates to her father With riot grrl my father has no say in what I do. He can not silence me, He can not make me feel ashamed of my femininity. He can not deny my sexual abuse. In riot grrl my anger and tears are understood and valid, & my opinions are worthy. riot grrl is where I reclaim myself.

20

For further discussion see Marcus, Girls to the Front.

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Rhetoric of Riot: Creating Alternative Feminist Sites of Resistance Riot grrl is a hand to hold & a fist in his face.21

For Wendi A., Riot Grrrl affords her agency when normally she has none. At home, she feels silenced, alone, and not able to talk about her sexuality or femininity. Her identity as daughter does not allow her the chance to incite a riot or be rebellious. Yet, this changes once she enters the space of Riot Grrrl. There she is allowed to be angry. She is able to show emotion and “reclaim” herself. And the rhetoric of riot’s duality of both girlish handholding and the violent “fist in his face” gives Wendi the opportunity to be in a position of power. Interestingly, she continues the connection between girlish rhetoric and riot as she signs her name with a heart with an arrow through it. Another girl writes that, “Riot Grrrl is a girl gang with secret plans to destroy Olympia.”22 Her piece moves quickly from a discussion about what people think Riot Grrrls look like (white girls with cool shoes and glasses) to her own “tuffness” and how she might approach you if you came to a meeting and ask you to walk home with her because she is afraid to walk home by herself. She discusses why a girl gang is needed to make girls feel safe as they walk home at night, how the media ignored all the rapes happening at a local college and how Riot Grrrls made a secret plan that night and carried it out. “we laughed and held hands and ran around in the dark and we were the ones you should be looking out for. in a girl gang i am the nite and i feel i can’t be raped and i feel so fuckin’ free.”23 In her presentation of Riot Grrrl, like Wendi A., the unknown author critiques mainstream discussions of what it means to be a Riot Grrrl and creates a call to action. She uses the notion of creating a riot and a call for rebellion and violence—destroying the city—as a way to engage the reader in the movement. Yet what makes her piece unique is that she complicates the images of violence and revolution with very girlish imagery. Her idea of riot is to run hand in hand in the dark, not one where she attacks the town. Her “destruction” of Olympia is one that urges readers to reevaluate how a riot is created and played out. Although Riot Grrrl New York City’s Issue #5 (March 1993) also has similar themes, the zine presents much stronger images of violence and rebellion. The first two pages are all quotes from members answering “WHAT RIOT GRRRL MEANS TO ME” S.W. states, “Don’t fool yourself—it was Riot Grrrl who bombed the World Trade Center—we’re 21

Ibid. Ibid. 23 Ibid. 22

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starting our revolution now!”24 This reference is to the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The zine, which originally came in March of 1993, was distributed less than a month after the incident, making the reference fresh in the minds of readers. The image of violence against a large group of individuals presents a stark contrast to the idea that Riot Grrrl is calling for a girl love movement. Instead, S.W. is using the Riot Grrrl platform to instill fear and call for a riot mentality. An even stronger call for violence and action comes from Ananda. In her piece Ananda first draws a comic where she tells the story of her mother’s abuse at the hands of a man who seems to be Ananda’s stepfather. She then goes on urge readers to contact her mother’s abuser— John Foster Woods. She writes: Feel free to call John. His number is 301-365-8347. Leave a message and make sure you say you’re a riot grrrl cuz he’s scared of it (gee I wonder why?) Once he practically BRIBED me to be silent about him by offering to DONATE money to riot grrrl.25

She urges readers to be active participants in her riot, one that calls for violence. She wants to start a personal riot. Unlike some of the Olympia Riot Grrrls who couched their rebellion in girlish rhetoric, Ananda’s piece, like S.W.’s, is full of anger and calls for violent riots. Both choose to address situations close to them—danger of actual terrorism and violence near them and years of abuse suffered by a loved one. Ananda uses the zine to recruit participants in her riot in a way that she would not be able to do with other mediums. The discussion of rape and sexual violence is one that comes through in the Riot Grrrl Omaha chapters’ zine as well. They put out a rape awareness zine. The cover states RAPE, RAPE, RAPE with a stop sign stating “STOP RAPE NOW” and “Rapes are being committed and attempted in Omaha at a rate far higher than the previous five year, according to crime statistics kept by police.”26 They use their zine to actively present rebellion, make readers aware of the issue, and force anyone who picks up the zine to become engaged in their dialogue about rape and abuse. Like Riot Grrrl Olympia’s zine, the first page of Riot Grrrl Omaha’s zine states that the zine discusses some of their “fears, thoughts, hopes, and more” and calls for people who have questions or want to talk to write 24

Riot Grrrl, New York, Riot Grrrl, (March 1993). Ibid. 26 Riot Grrrl Omaha, Rape, Rape, Rape. 25

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them. They work to create a dialogue addressing rape and abuse. The girls who wrote pieces for this zine combine their fear and anger with rage and riot. In one writer’s piece about why she fears date rape, she states that it is, in part, because a boy can be nice to you all night and “you think he might even respect you as a human being and then he sticks it in without even asking or listening to you.” She then addresses what she and her friends are going to do about it: Well fuck that brother because there is something going on in Omaha called revolution girl style. And what that means is that you’re going to have to think twice before you touch my girlfriends. because we’re a kickass girl gang and we watch out for each other and not only that we’re watching out for you so Get Lost!”27

Again, the girls move away from the girlish rhetoric that is assumed from the Riot Grrrl Movement, to a more rebellious and violent rhetoric where they form a “kickass girl gang.” The writer takes the traditional dialogue about rape and challenges that her group will protect each other. The girls not only address the issue of rape, they have a call to action. Like the writers in Olympia, the Omaha writer chooses the image of a girl gang, one where girls are strong and invisible, to take on perpetrators and defend other girls. The back cover of the zine has a paragraph about Take Back the Night as well as nine Chants, such as: Whatever we wear Wherever we go Yes means Yes and No means No!

And No more denial, nor more silence No more fear and nor more violence!28

What I find interesting about this zine is that although the back cover is full of anti-violence rhetoric, it is paired throughout the zine with discussion of fighting back against abusers. Authors discuss wanting women to hurt men and have the media report on women standing up to abusers through violence. They call for a rhetoric of riot, which is in stark 27 28

Ibid. Ibid.

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contrast to the chants from the Take Back the Night events which originated in the 1970s. Riot Grrrl D.C.’s zine, Riot Grrrl viii, was first issued during the call for a media blackout. The zine is much more diverse in the variety of topics than zines from the other chapters mentioned here. Yet, even with their diverse discussions there are still a number of girls who choose to address abuse in their pieces. The authors call for action, but not in the explicitly violent way some of the other chapters do. One of the longer pieces in the zine uses the discussion of violence against women as the focus of a larger argument about how women’s rights are being taken away and women are being ignored. Jessica Kirchner starts the piece by asking, “This year has been dubbed ‘The year of the woman.’ In this year of the woman, why is violence against women out of control making date rape more common than alcoholism, heart attacks, and left handedness?”29 Throughout the piece she discusses the domestication of women and the return to family values, but she continually returns to a discussion of issues of abuse. She presents statistics on rape and abuse and finds it ironic that in the year of women “one in four women have had an experience that meets the American legal definition of rape or attempted rape.”30 Unlike some of the other Riot Grrrl pieces, the goal of Kirchner’s piece seems to be more informative. She has a number of statistics and addresses events and social issues from 1992. Throughout the Riot Grrrl D.C. zine the pieces are more introspective. They focus more on the writers reflecting on experiences and how those experiences are impacting their day-to-day life. One grrrl tells what seems to be a recollection of events from her childhood combined with her commentary on how it influences her thinking today. “Woman have as many rights as men.” His voice echoes in my mind. I can always so no. “No”, I cant! “get it off your chest honey.” I CAN.T can talk and scream and rave, getting all of it off my chest. But the hand still weigh heavy there, and the scars from the sizzors are stretched tight across my flesh. I was a three or four or five year old who couldnt say no to a bunch of cock strutting bastards. My puny voice would come out in broken sobs. “You have to put your foot down dearie!” I dont have to do anyting. Its time I do. Being reared by neighborhood molesters is a perfect start.31

29

Riot Grrrl D.C., Riot Grrrl viii. Ibid. 31 Ibid. 30

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Her piece fluctuates between past and present as she recalls childhood trauma. Yet, instead of inciting an instant call to action like many of the other grrrls do, she uses her piece to really think about what she should start to do. She realizes that it is time for her to start to put her foot down and deal with the experiences in her past, and use them to inform how she deals with future experiences. But this piece stands alone. There is no follow-up, at least not in this zine. As readers we are left with questions about what the author chooses to do, or if she actually does anything to “put her foot down” or deal with the violence in her past. The call for action from the other Riot Grrrls is not heard.

Understanding the Riot Narrative Riot Grrrls used zines in a number of ways. One important usage was to communicate with other grrrls and to share their stories and connections to the Riot Grrrl Movement. The rhetoric of “Riot Grrrl is…” where the young women explain, both to individuals outside the movement as well as themselves, what Riot Grrrl means becomes important to their work and understanding of self. As grrrls become part of specific Riot Grrrl chapters and begin to engage in the rhetoric of the Movement, there is a sharp move to discussions of violence, riot, and revolution. The Riot Grrrls discussed above use language that both embraces (“we laughed and held hands and ran around in the dark and we were the ones you should be looking out for”) and disrupts (“it was Riot Grrrl who bombed the World Trade Center—we’re starting our revolution now!”), traditional girlish narratives as a way to reinvent what it means to be a grrrl and reexamine feminist activism. Although the Riot Grrrls are pro-girl, they choose to make these claims in very real revolutionary and violent language. They call for girl gangs and violence, urging individuals to take to the streets and revolt against traditional ways of dealing with rape and abuse. Their calls for revolt and revolution seek to move rape and abuse narratives into the public sphere where individuals are not silent. Although these young women embrace girl power and at times use girlish language, the activism and calls to action they invoke are in no way traditional girlish rhetoric. They create riot narratives that engage participants in very real and very antiestablishment actions. They call on traditional punk rhetoric, such as the “fuck you” to society and turn it into pro-feminist, pro-grrrl rhetoric. By creating a rhetoric of riot, these grrrl take the vernacular of their scene and co-opt it in ways that re-envision what it means to be punk, a feminist, and a girl (one without the growling rrrs).

IF NOT A MOTHER AND NOT A MAID, THEN WHAT? HOW FEMINIST PEDAGOGY WORKS (OR DOESN’T) FOR FIRST-YEAR TEACHING ASSISTANTS KRISTIN WINET

She’s young, she’s idealistic, and she’s as prepared as she can possibly be after two weeks of training. She has been through orientation, met her teaching supervisor, and meticulously prepared a thoughtful syllabus that reflects a deep and thoughtful commitment to teaching her students to listen, respond, and engage with both the world and themselves. As a feminist, she has read about feminist pedagogy, but she isn’t sure how she is going to incorporate it into her lessons quite yet—she is still trying to figure out how to plan a sustained one-hour lesson. She arrives at the door to her classroom on that first day of graduate school, smiles awkwardly at students in the hallway, slightly trips on the way in, accidentally introduces herself with her first name instead of her last (which she has rehearsed too many times to count), fumbles through the syllabus, and smiles far too much throughout the whole process. By the end of the first session, she realizes she has made all the mistakes she promised herself she wouldn’t make—and she has the rest of the semester to figure out how to regain her authority as a composition teacher. It is not a problem of discipline, per se: on the contrary, her female students come to her with boyfriend problems and sorority woes and the boys use their proximity in age to her to try and weasel their way out of homework deadlines and poor essay grades. Many of her students try to persuade her to raise their scores because students have spread the word that it is difficult for her to say no. At the end of the semester, she is exhausted and feels very much unlike a feminist. In her Teaching Course Evaluations, she will read—a bit disheartened—that students ranked her as inexperienced, timid, and not strict enough.

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As she prepares for the next semester, she decides she will have to compromise if she wants a successful class. She does worry, of course, that she will never be able to practice the pedagogy she most believes in because, now that she has taught, she cannot understand how a young female instructor can share her authority, de-center her classroom, and promote a space for multiple perspectives and voices to be heard while also learning how to put together lesson plans, write assignment sheets, handle multiple student issues, and be a graduate student herself. Setting aside her feminist philosophy in lieu of a more current-traditional teaching approach, she is shocked at the difference by the end of her second semester: her students craft more respectful emails to her, they raise their hands before speaking in class, they do not argue with her over assignment deadlines, and her evaluations have gone up substantially. So: is the problem here a simple case of an inexperienced instructor? Or it is a lack of understanding of feminist pedagogy? Is it that the instructor’s body is young, female, and hence viewed as less-threatening? (Race has not even been factored in yet). Or is the problem in the evaluations themselves, constructed to praise traditional and patriarchal models of teaching? Unfortunately, these questions are not easily answered and the anecdote above is not uncommon. It reflects many of the narratives that young instructors who self-identify as female recount about their first-year teaching experiences. At the University of Arizona where I teach, for instance, many female instructors—race, ethnicity, and socio-economic background notwithstanding—find themselves lost in a sea of pedagogical approaches as they attempt to assert themselves in classrooms that have not typically been run in a feminist manner. For the first-time female graduate assistant, what are the potentials for practicing feminist pedagogy, and how can she negotiate the boundaries of the classroom space in an effective way while relinquishing a certain amount of authority that feminist pedagogy calls for? These are the questions this chapter seeks to consider. Of course, defining and understanding feminist pedagogy has been a primary concern of rhetoric and composition scholars at least since Elizabeth Flynn’s 1988 article, “Composing as a Woman.” In her seminal essay, she argues that composition instructors need to be aware of the way men’s composing practices might be privileged in the classroom at the expense of women’s practices, and advocates for clearer understandings of the ways in which men and women compose differently. While the poststructuralist turn of the 1990s most certainly added considerable nuances to the simplified binary Flynn presented in her early analysis

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(even she responded to herself in a later article in the early 2000s), her attention to the classroom and to feminist pedagogy is certainly relevant today. Having moved away from embracing the high-gendered ethics of care model as gender binaries have become dismantled and questioned, disciplinary concerns continue to inform our pedagogical debates and conversations regarding the potentials and efficacies of enacting this theoretical approach on a day-to-day basis in the classrooms. As more and more graduate students teach first-year composition classes, it is critical for us to gain a better understanding of how inexperienced teachers view, understand, and enact feminist pedagogy in their classrooms and with their students if we are to prepare them to confidently enter and sustain interest in the field of feminist rhetorics. For one, it is not uncommon knowledge that structured, currenttraditional teachers are likely to be regarded by students as more organized, more professional, and more effective at transmitting knowledge. Feminist teachers who reject this banking model and use collaborative teaching methods are often seen as less competent or even too easy. As Michelle Payne painfully recounts in her essay on teacher authority during her first year as a Master’s student, “decentering [her] authority was not creating the situations [she] read about in the journals” and she “was about ready to give up on teaching.”1 Alison Bartlett, too, shares similar laments: in her study on student comments, she demonstrates how qualitative comments from students about female teachers are overwhelmingly gender-biased: “niceness,” for instance, becomes the overwhelming catch-all adjective for women teachers who are cited as “calm,” “friendly,” and having a “pleasant voice.”2 These same teachers, she claims, are also the ones who are cited by students as needing improvement in the areas of confidence, authority, and strictness. The same statistics do not hold true for males or subjects who perform male identities, as they are often viewed as approachable and exciting in the same circumstances or dismissed entirely as being unable to practice feminist politics. While the implications of these studies (and the fact that evaluations often favor patriarchal teaching practices) run far deeper than the scope of this paper, they are certainly worth considering in this larger debate: for graduate students whose teacher course evaluations are used to help them gain scholarships, summer teaching opportunities, and other professional development positions, it does not appear to be in 1

Michelle Payne, “Rend(er)ing Women’s Authority in the Writing Classroom,” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 406. 2 Alison Bartlett, “‘She Seems Nice’: Teaching Evaluations and Gender Trouble,” Feminist Teacher 15, no. 3 (2005): 196.

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any female student’s best interest to de-center her authority in the classroom. Therefore, can feminist pedagogy be introduced to inexperienced female teachers, and if so, how can it be effectively utilized in an already-hostile classroom space? Or is it something that only teachers who have already cut their teeth in the profession safely embody? In what follows, I will examine the ways in which feminist pedagogy has been applied to classroom practices over the past 30 years and consider how various key theorists have appropriated the philosophy of feminism to discussion, assignments, and assessment. From there, I will consider newer definitions of the pedagogy as influenced by poststructuralism and the ways in which this turn might help new female teachers practice feminism in the classroom while learning how to be teachers themselves. By historicizing this pedagogical approach in a teaching context, my goal is to respond to feminist advocates from a critical perspective, considering both the advantageous and negative implications this practice can have on the professionalization of inexperienced female composition instructors.

A Brief History of Feminist Practice in the Academy Feminist pedagogy developed as a complement to the entrance of more women both attending and teaching in the space of the university. By the 1960s, women were attending university in equal numbers to men due to open admission policies, such as that instituted by CUNY.3 By the 1970s, on the tail of the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War efforts, the fight for women’s equality in the workplace grew substantially, its ideology rooted in a critique not unfamiliar to that of feminists’ radical counterparts. Just as many of these anti-misogynist and anti-oppression groups based their personal ideologies on the deconstruction of dominant ways of thinking and being, so too did these earlier feminists base their own ideologies on a critique of class and race oppression, “recognizing the unequal treatment of women worldwide as a parallel phenomenon” and critically examining the infiltration of women into traditional male fields.4 Naturally, this early presupposition that the unequal treatment of women worldwide was a parallel phenomenon has been challenged by third-world feminists and feminists of color, it is an important ideology for understanding

3

Susan Jarrett, “Feminist Pedagogy,” in A Guide to Composition Studies, eds. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114. 4 Ibid., 113.

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early material practices of feminist pedagogues, and therefore critical to this discussion. By the 1980s, academic circles began publicly validating the work of early feminist teachers, opening up new forums for discussion through professional journals such as The Feminist Teacher and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Early issues in these journals debated topics such as the role of the woman teacher, how to properly care for students, how to teach issues of gender as opposed to socioeconomic class, and how to subvert a maledominated curriculum.5 Although by 1972 College English did acknowledge that women were doing something different from their male counterparts, it was not until 1982 when Susan Miller defined feminist pedagogy as “an innovative way to approach curriculum design integrating voices and texts by Traditionally Marginalized People (TMP), subverting teacher authority, and opening up curriculum development to student choices.”6 While naming the practice was certainly a step in the right direction, the focus on subverting authority and allowing students a voice in the curriculum seems to be what has remained largely problematic for many inexperienced female instructors. Certainly, as feminists began incorporating the work of Paolo Friere into their ideological frameworks in the late 1980s, these conversations did open up the possibility of considering levels of power across gender, race, ethnicity, class, and other identity markers, but at the same time, the first text on feminist writing pedagogy, Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity, was published, leading to increased discussion regarding the value of women teachers and their roles in the classroom.7 In the field of rhetoric and composition, earlier adaptations of feminist pedagogy echoed the material suggestions of these early publications, placing an emphasis on some of these gendered practices. As Kathryn Flannery notes, doing subversive activities in the classroom was primarily physical: putting the chairs in a circle, sitting with the students as an equal, making sure each student had a turn to speak, asking them to purposefully color outside of the lines, getting their input on curriculum design and assessment practices. In this way, early feminist compositionists hoped to physically eliminate gender distinctions and eradicate obedience to 5 Kay Siebler, Composing Feminism(s): How Feminists Have Shaped Composition Theories and Practices (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2008), 16. 6 Ibid., 8. 7 Eileen Schell, “The Costs of Caring: ‘Femininism’ and Contingent Women Workers in Composition Studies,” in Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words, ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1998), 75.

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hierarchy and dominant power structures. While this led to some critics claiming that feminist pedagogy was a kind of teaching practice not unlike “elementary teaching that is service tied to pedagogy rather than theory,” the practice became part of composition’s makeup.8 The idea was that a certain “social text” existed around the field of writing studies: the idea that women’s work was to raise good, moral citizens who were capable of listening to others, having democratic debates, and recognizing gender inequalities across the globe. These conversations, in turn, led to a blossoming of publications which aimed to theorize and complicate feminist notions and offer a renewed sense of credibility to the field and its radical practices. Some of these early publications echoed the practices described above, relating the notion of a competent composition instructor to one who is nurturing and mothering. In Caywood and Overing’s text, Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity, they highlighted a kind of practice called the “ethics of care,” a model concentrated on accommodating and nurturing differences. This model also emphasized process over product and focused on revision, collaboration, and discussion—all mainstays of contemporary composition theory. However, as Janet Emig has suggested, the female compositionist was rhetorically aligned with a mother teaching her young to speak: “As writing teachers we also seek to preserve our students’ new ideas; to foster growth in thinking; to nurture fragile, emerging voices; to encourage active participation in dialogue; and to help students become accepted members of their social and academic communities.”9 The effective female teacher would work against the traditional binary of male/female and lightly push her students to engage in the world in a safe, helpful environment, acting more as a facilitator and cheerleader rather than a lecturer. It was even suggested, in some circles, that women should “nurture [their] own maternal instincts to become better writing teachers.”10 This belief all but dictated the pedagogical framework in the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading to assumptions that only women could be feminists because only women could bear children and therefore be proper nurturers.

8

Susan Miller, “The Feminization of Composition,” in Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2003), 522. 9 Donnalee Rubin, “Gender and Writing Teachers: The Maternal Paradigm,” in Gender Influences: Reading Student Texts, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 62. 10 Ibid., 85.

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At the same time, renewed interest in Freudian psychoanalysis brought the notion of “maid” into the conversation as another possible metaphor for the composition teacher who practiced this pedagogy. As Susan Miller notes, Freud’s infamous recurring dream—in which a fuzzy Mother/Maid figure initiated him into sexual practice—heavily contributed to the reconstructed ideology of the woman teacher as a combination of temptress and disciplinarian. In other words, according to Freud and applications of his theory, “the bourgeois mother and maid…each represent comfort and power, the contradictory endowments required of the service-oriented teacher of students who are, despite their actual maturity, sentimentalized as preeconomic, presexual, prepolitical children.”11 Clearly, this inherent contradiction is tied to some modern conceptions of feminist teachers, especially in composition. Even Schell admits that when females serve as facilitators or midwives catering to their students, patriarchal values can actually be reinscribed, leading to the idea that “woman as caretaker” is biologically contingent on gender. However, for early advocates, composition instructors were constructed around metaphors of cleanliness and service work: they were often the “hired help” (usually a product of a contingent labor force), they served no other aim than to “clean up comma splices” for their students, “attend to the necessary chores that will free the guests for conversing,” and leave the real business of writing up to the men in other parts of the house.12 This model of the “parlor maid” reinforces both gender stereotypes and long-standing misogynist beliefs about the capacities and capabilities of women, devaluing both the work of composition and the “mother-maid” caring for and cleaning up after her students.

Identity Crises: Theory or Practice? Nevertheless, while this approach became somewhat less popular at the influence of consciousness-raising groups outside of the academy, the development of critical or democratic pedagogy a la Mike Rose, and the introduction of the expressivist and reader-response theories, the stereotype has prevailed. Even with the influence of critical theory and feminist philosophy into the classroom, some scholars believe that the initial integration of theory simply complemented the practice already at work: as Siebler notes, by blending theory with praxis, teachers could then decide whether or not they wanted to try “coming out from behind the 11 12

Miller, “The Feminization of Composition,” 527. Schell, “The Costs of Caring,” 86-87.

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podium, sitting in a circle, charging students with the responsibility of discussion topics, or creating other strategies that shift the focus away from the teacher.”13 However, here is where the dissonance seems to occur: What is the new teacher practicing feminism supposed to do in her classroom? Should practice be deemphasized? Or should theory? These disputes are what have caused a general lack of understanding regarding how to teach feminist pedagogy to new or inexperienced graduate assistants. The reason for this uncertainty over how to teach feminist pedagogy to first-time or inexperienced teachers is, I believe, primarily a disciplinary one. In her essay “Critical Pedagogies and Feminist Pedagogies: Adversaries, Allies, Other?” Jennifer Gore discusses the fact that feminist pedagogy is not well articulated across disciplinary boundaries and that it is conceptualized differently across education and women’s studies departments. In her study, she argues that the various discourses of critical and feminist pedagogy are fragmented across the lines of education and women’s studies (two of the major areas that have informed the study of feminism in rhetoric and composition). As she writes, literature from the field since the 1970s reveals that radical pedagogy consists of separate strands of discourse, all developing on their own and not in conversation.14 She details four threads: feminist pedagogy in women’s studies (which emphasizes articulating what pedagogy is and how we should enact it in the classroom, thereby ahistoricizing it), feminist pedagogy in education (which centers on pedagogy within context of women’s oppression and looks at gendered knowledge/experience—a poststructuralist influence, attending to differences and not similarities), and the two threads of critical pedagogy. It is this number of varying threads, she believes, that has caused confusion for teachers learning to practice the feminist ethos. As an example of this, in “Forwarding a Feminist Agenda in Writing Studies,” Gail E. Hawisher writes that Sometimes [feminist] pedagogy has taken the form of displacing authoritarian teaching while creating supportive, nurturing classroom contexts. At other times that pedagogy seeks ways of establishing authority as a feminist writing teacher. And at still other times, feminist pedagogy takes an oppositional turn, in the best sense of that phrase, with the aim of

13

Siebler, Composing Feminism(s), 29-30. Jennifer M. Gore, “Critical Pedagogies and Feminist Pedagogies: Adversaries, Allies, Other?” in The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth (New York: Routledge, 1993), 45.

14

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providing opportunities for dissent, or, in Susan Jarratt’s words, for the engagement of “productive conflict.15

From this description, it would seem that the feminist practitioner can choose from any number of models to emulate, depending on the circumstance and her whimsy. Citing Jarratt, Hawisher is also paying lip service to her 2001 chapter on feminist pedagogy in A Guide to Composition Studies, a reader that is utilized by many graduate teaching seminars. In it, she explains her revised theory of feminism as being a pedagogical innovation of writing instruction, focusing on “the decentering or sharing of authority, the recognition of students as sources of knowledge, a focus on processes (of writing and teaching) over products.”16 What makes feminist pedagogy a feasible form, in Jarratt’s perspective, is not entirely far removed from the earlier ethics of care “mother/maid” model; and not only that, but its emphasis on deconstructing sexist ideals and breaking down authority pays it direct homage. Of course, more contemporary definitions have significantly moved away from the ethics of care model and instead embrace a more holistic, less-gendered and more critical understanding. As Crabtree and Licona present in the introduction to their 2009 edited collection Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward, feminist pedagogy should be conceived as “an approach to countering hegemonic educational practices that tacitly accept or forcefully reproduce an oppressively gendered, classed, racialized, or androcentric social order.”17 They look forward to the future, hoping that there is continued movement toward critical race theory and a truly pluralistic analysis of intersecting identities. Others, such as Chris Beasley, maintain its gendered focus by claiming that first and foremost all feminist pedagogy aims to counteract “the centrality of Man;” and yet others, like bell hooks, have focused on its liberatory potential, stating that feminist pedagogy is a kind of transformative pedagogy that works to liberate all oppressed people. As feminist pedagogy is no longer a specifically gendered pedagogical goal, but rather a more inclusive goal that includes a number of discursive identity markers, this definition reflects a distinct shift away from essentializing 15 Gail E. Hawisher, “Forwarding a Feminist Agenda in Writing Studies,” in Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2003), xviii. 16 Jarrett, “Feminist Pedagogy,” 115. 17 Robbin Crabtree, Robbin, David A. Sapp, and Adela C. Licona, Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 15.

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both students and instructors based on their gender performances and instead embraces identities as multiple, fluid, changing, and contingent. And with this fundamental philosophical shift away from the mother/maid framework, we can start to see its potential.

Challenges for the First-Time Teacher: An Objective Critique Eileen Schell presented the question back in 1998: “Will the maternal stance,” she asked, “work for all women teachers and students, including those who are white and working-class, African American, Latina, or Asian?”18 In a climate where composition remains largely marginalized in the more “masculine” enterprise of teaching literature and advanced writing, women of all backgrounds entering the department must heed this warning—especially ones who are new to the profession. If by engaging in feminist practices actually continues to relegate women to the sidelines of their classrooms, it is important to question the ways in which it is understood by new teachers who are introduced to these techniques early in their careers. First, there is the problem of perpetuating stereotypes, something that cannot by overlooked in a critique. For one, as Gesa Kirsch writes, by essentializing women’s place in the classroom, scholars have unfairly stereotyped the female gender without regard to her abilities, demeanor, personality, or history(ies): there is a critical need to “start questioning the idea that gender is a difference that makes a difference.”19 The notion of essentializing the differences between men and women actually weakens the position of women as equals, asking them instead to act as prey to the “cultural maintenance of linguistic dispositions of power and enfranchisement.”20 This notion leads to unfair assumptions about the nature of teaching, gendered performances, and implicitly-defined and unfair social roles within the outdated male/female binary. It can also lead to lumping entire groups of women teachers into one category, thus erasing their individuality and unique histories as participants in the world. It can—if used to promote the idea that women are simply caretakers preparing students for harder work later on—even lead to the perpetuation of women as contingent labor workers who simply fill in the gaps for the 18

Schell, “The Costs of Caring,” 77. Gesa E. Kirsch, et al., Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2003), 1. 20 Miller, “The Feminization of Composition,” 521. 19

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tenured male professors and leave much to be desired by instructors considering adopting a more “maternal” pedagogical approach to composition for fear of being labeled inferior. Furthermore, attempting to enact a maternal persona before becoming fully confident in the classroom can actually inhibit a new or inexperienced female teacher’s ability to perform her role. As Rebecca Ropers-Huilman suggests, when instructors fail to establish him or herself as an authority figure in the space of the classroom because they fear wielding too much power, both students and the teacher can find themselves in an identity crisis. If neither student nor teacher takes into consideration the notion that power and knowledge are fluid and shifting, Ropers-Huilman believes that the instructor can lose her sense of self and that students will not understand what is being asked of them. She, like many other scholars, believe that if the teacher is too nurturing, too absent, or too focused on the well-being of all students, her classroom will become a decentered republic and not a place of learning with a figure who has earned her place at the front of the classroom. Power, according to these theorists, needs to be recast, not as something negative but as an asset that can help instructors learn to care for their students while also maintaining discipline and authority. On the other hand, there is the concern that constructing the self as a “mother” can lead to the mistaken belief that the teacher is there to be the savior of her students. In her article on rendering authority in the classroom, Michelle Payne admits that “we have created a pedagogy that we believe, on some level, will reach every student and bring out his or her latent powers of language.”21 This romanticizing of the role of an educator—that of the “savior”—has been both suggested in the media as well as in popular renderings of women teachers. As in Payne’s example, in which she confesses that her students “took advantage of her openness and willingness to create friction by doing as little work as possible,” many new graduate assistants mistakenly exchange power and authority for comfort and affection in an attempt to bring their students to emancipation and enlightenment. Lynn Bloom, in a similar situation, recounts the fact that in her first years of teaching, she “could do no right” because she was too nice to her students and discovered in her evaluations that the students felt she “was merely flattering the students by encouraging them.”22 In both anecdotes, each scholar felt her attempts at 21

Payne, “Rend(er)ing Women’s Authority,” 401. Lynn Z. Bloom, “Teaching College English as a Woman,” in Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003), 537. 22

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practicing feminism led to having no real influence, no real decisionmaking power, and no real handle on the dynamics of frustrated students. In this way, failing to acknowledge the shortcomings that completely decentering a classroom can have often results in classrooms that accidentally uphold the status quo that women are the “weaker sex” and will not be able to fully or thoughtfully engage in the work on contemporary feminism. Along these same lines, there are also difficulties with inexperienced teachers adopting feminist curriculums without having a robust understanding of contemporary feminism. Some critics, for instance, fear that enacting feminist pedagogy without experience can result in an unmoored classroom with little critical discourse and too much emphasis on the students’ feelings. Villaverde, for instance, warns about the “danger of open dialogue as a strategy” because it can breed an “over-reliance on the confessional moment and the slippage into narrative without critical reflexivity,” leading to more of a therapy session than an educational place for learning.23 If done poorly, this can lead to a fossilization of students’ stories and personal experiences as being wholly and completely finite, static representations of generalized difference and not as areas to be interrogated and explored. Without proper examination, students end up simply authenticating their own experiences while interpreting them as valid, individual, and steadfast, instead of fluid, changing, and evolving. Too much emphasis on “emotional labor,” can lead to the assumption that experience by itself is sufficient analysis. This lack of experience with feminism can also lead to an inability to successfully teach literary texts, which are often an important component to many composition courses. According to critical theorist Chris Weeden, many first-time or inexperienced teachers teach literature as being “universal” and a reflection of human nature rather than a discoursespecific, historically-contingent piece of writing composed at a particular moment. As she says, many “undergraduate literature courses take a politically neutralizing reading strategy of liberal-humanist criticism” which sees characters as “expressions of human nature and fate rather than socially produced social evils.”24 When teachers teach literature or other critical texts in this way, they inevitably lead students to believe that characters are only to be examined as gendered actors in a plot rather than as social constructions of socially perpetuated males and females. 23

Leila Villaverde, Feminist Theories and Education (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 122. 24 Chris Weeden, “Feminist Critical Practice,” in Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 2nd Ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 138.

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According to Weeden, because so many teachers are not experienced enough to promote meta-awareness of language, gender, and inequality through the texts they teach, they might mistakenly continue to uphold the idea that language is a static representation of reality.

Re-Considering Feminist Practice: Potentials for Change Considering practical re-visionings of feminist practice in the classroom could offer a useful starting point for female graduate students who are struggling to move past gendered stereotypes about their bodies and minds and academic stereotypes about their roles as teachers. As Sciachitano et al. admit in their narrative accounts as feminists struggling with teacher authority, though they acknowledge the liberatory potential of calling institutional authority into question, many feminists still question “whether a pedagogy which fails to examine multiple power relations can create the best conditions for female teachers who have yet to experience the all ‘authorizing voice’ in the classroom.”25 Similarly, MacDonald and Sánchez-Casal lament that there is a critical need to establish a “new paradigm for feminist educators by reevaluating the significance and application of identity theory in feminist pedagogy” because the model that is being transmitted to teachers is not working.26 These admittances all but eschew the model of “mother/maid” so often taught alongside feminist pedagogy and take into consideration the fact that modern feminists who are learning to teach should not privilege an atmosphere of maternal comfort or safety. Where, then, can they enter?

Perform Gender, Perform with Confidence One of the most important transitions from feminist practice to contemporary feminist practice is the notion that power and caring can be reciprocal—and not necessarily at odds with each other—in a teaching environment. In a supportive and caring environment, a feminist does not need to necessarily surrender all of her authority (this can certainly compromise her role as both the facilitator and grader), but instead, as 25 Marian M. Sciachitano, et al., “A Symposium on Feminist Experiences in the Composition Classroom,” in Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2003), 365. 26 Susan Sánchez-Casal, Susan and Amie A. MacDonald, “Feminist Reflections on the Pedagogical Relevance of Identity,” in Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference, ed. Amie A. MacDonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 1.

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Ropers-Huilman and others have suggested, can consider the complex relationship between multiply-situated subject positions and the reciprocal nature of power and caring. In this way, power and caring become not dichotomous concepts but instead part of a feminist poststructuralist approach to enacting feminist pedagogy in the classroom. Feminist poststructuralism, while perhaps an unwieldy word to new graduate assistants and inexperienced teachers, is a theoretical approach that recognizes fluctuating power relations and situational meanings while also acknowledging our space as gendered actors in those relations. By openly acknowledging these realities, instructors can begin breaking down the teacher/student binary in more productive ways. As an example of this recognition, Michelle Payne poses the following conundrum in her essay “Rend(er)ing Women’s Authority in the Writing Classroom,” a conundrum that has no doubt faced many female-bodied instructors: I have certainly embraced [the values of feminism] or I wouldn’t have created such a class. But from the perspective of a woman who was socialized to have what post-structuralists call a “split subjectivity,” who already commands from students less authority and power than a man, yet who has embraced pedagogies and post-structuralist theories that decenter authority and who also sees the values of “apprenticing” students into the academy, asking students to question my authority was overwhelming at best, debilitating at worst.27

To work through her insecurity, Payne wonders how her background in poststructuralist theory—a theory arguing for multiplicity and tolerance— might actually look “on Monday morning.”28 Her conclusion, that female instructors should openly accept the fluidity of their authority but also strive to invoke “a unitary self, a set of values that [they] can live by” in the classrooms, is a vital turn away from the “mother/maid” model, one that in some ways accepts the fact that not every semester can be revolutionary and that not all students want to be radically challenged. Instead of sounding defeated, though, her advice is sound: as she says, “I would like to be comfortable walking into class with a plan I will stick by no matter how many students grumble.”29 Her feminist praxis, then, is concerned, first and foremost, with her well-being, a notion that is certainly relatable to first-year teaching assistants. 27

Payne, “Rend(er)ing Women’s Authority,” 403. Ibid., 408. 29 Ibid., 409. 28

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Do Not Fear Conversations About Difference One of the most difficult areas for new and even veteran teachers is the first (and even subsequent) conversation about difference with students. The idea of inciting students to “furrowed brows and impassioned speech” is not always welcomed, especially for teachers who are still feeling vulnerable and unprepared to deal with authority issues and their role as a facilitator.30 While it is understandable that many first-time or inexperienced teachers skirt past issues of difference and inequality due to a fear that they are incapable of handling such a heated discussion, many students come to composition classes with either an indifferent attitude, claiming that the effects of racism and discrimination are over, or an angry one, citing “reverse discrimination” or discrimination against white males. As Hayes recounts in her discussion on teaching difference, the answer to this is not to fear the discussion, but to embrace the discomfort: though she came to teaching with the idea of the classroom “as a polite, somewhat reserved place, where scholars exchanged insights and ideas, sometimes disagreeing, but always with an understanding that common ground underlay their work,” she quickly realized that this democratic ideal was not practical31 After a particularly disagreeable conversation, she began implementing new methods: inviting guest speakers who shared different political views, introducing readings by both masculine and feminine writers, and asking students to articulate their positions, rather than change them. Additionally, Ronald and Ritchie’s recent collection about the effects that feminism has had on composition teaching offers excellent ideas for incorporating discussions of difference. For one, Beth Daniell suggests invoking Gorgias’ method of dissoi logoi as a way for students to engage in healthy debate. Eileen Schell discusses how she uses issues of global relevance to help students consider debates from a “global-citizen” standpoint, helping them encounter issues of difference and inequality across the globe. In these ways, feminist pedagogy can be thought of as a dynamic, flexible practice that encourages the confrontation of discomfort—something that will hopefully result in productive, and sometimes difficult, dialogue. Of course, if public discomfort is still entirely too unpalatable, instructors can also encourage this kind of critical thought through private, dialogic journals in which they encourage students to reflect on themes and topics discussed in readings. 30 31

Sciachitano, “A Symposium,” 379. Ibid., 366.

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Encourage Reflective Praxis If collaborating with students on curriculum design, assessment, and other official documents seems like relinquishing too much authority (as it often does, especially for first-time or inexperienced instructors who are still learning to design curriculum themselves), engaging in reflective praxis with students is still possible through reflections, mid-semester feedback, and anonymous surveys. For one, many feminist instructors create free surveys online where students can reflect, give feedback, and offer additional ideas for classroom development and direction. Other instructors use semester feedback to inform upcoming semesters. As an example of this, in their collaborative chapter, Karen Powers-Stubbs considers how, as a feminist, she uses semester comments to help her talk with students— and openly articulate—the ways in which she designs her courses, evaluates their work, and chooses the topics and themes they cover. While she admits that her students often lament the heavy emphasis on feminism, she takes encouragement from their impassioned responses, realizing that “[d]espite their heartfelt objections, those students were, nonetheless, persuaded to weigh, measure, and consider the social environment and the place of writing and language within that environment.”32 She uses these comments to foreground early discussions in subsequent semesters, always keeping her students’ voices in mind as she composes new units and courses.

Remember “Situatedness” The introduction of poststructural thought on feminist pedagogy have provided unique opportunities for composition instructors to consider the ways in which they teach texts, conceive of student writing, and introduce concepts of analysis. For one, it helped dismantle Flynn’s original argument that the composing process is inherently different across lines of sexual difference, instead suggesting that individual voices are learned within discourse communities. For some scholars, such as Elizabeth Ellsworth, adopting this stance can help teachers promote better dialogue and teach texts more effectively because it addresses the multiplicity of perspectives and partial knowledges that all students bring to class. By teaching students that they are not simply “sexed” male or female, but are instead taught to perform their gender, can help students disentangle themselves from assumptions about people, cultures, and languages. While 32

Ibid., 380.

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Ellsworth coins this practice a “pedagogy of the unknowable,” it is innately feminist, as it understands that knowledges and identities are not static but rather are partial and contingent on various factors. In discussions about texts, these realities can play an important role: As Weeden suggests, when teaching literary or other historically-situated texts, instead of focusing on how women react to patriarchy as authors/as a whole sex (like Sandra Gilbert’s Mad Woman in the Attic), ask students to consider how “women’s writing” is determined by the constraints and possibilities of the class- and race-specific patriarchal societies within which writers and discourses are located.33

Consider Cross-Genre Texts In her text Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, Julie Jung considers the ways in which composition instructors can engage in feminist practice in alternative and experimental ways through non-traditional texts. She considers the potential, for instance, in having students create mash-ups of their work throughout the semester to creatively tell a story about their evolution as writers; by forcing students to critically re-engage a genre, these assignments ask students to step outside of the univocal and predictable form of the scholarly essay and require them to reflect on narrative coherence, diverse voices, and multivocality. According to Jung, experimenting with forms like these requires “new and better kinds of listening,” skills that are critical to feminist practice, and will lead to what she calls “revisionary consciousness.”34 This consciousness, which Gloria Anzaldúa labels a mestiza consciousness, can be achieved in the classroom in much the same way as she does in Borderlands/La Frontera: by disrupting perceived notions about argumentation, scholarly writing, and academic discourse. Of course, other scholars have suggested ways to incorporate multivocal or multigenre texts as feminist praxis as well. For instance, Hawisher ensures that students push beyond the monologic argument form by introducing less-dominant forms of writing, such as online portfolios, visual renderings, personal essays, and hybrid forms. Villaverde exposes her students to “other ways of knowing” through photoessays, zines, political posters, postcards, texts from around the world, and other selfdirected creative projects. In this way, she hopes that students can form 33

Weeden, “Feminist Critical Practice,” 152. Julie Jung, Revisionary Rhetorics, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts (Cardondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 30. 34

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communities and begin to deconstruct their notions about “acceptable” texts (such as the five-paragraph essay), and instead engage with real arguments in real rhetorical situations.

“THAT’S A BLONDE REMARK”: SEXIST HUMOR AND BUILDING COMMUNITY MARGARET WEAVER

“I can use the ‘personal’ to make sense of the world.” —William P. Banks1 “We do not have bodies, we are our bodies, and we are ourselves while being in the world.” —Minh-ha T. Trinh2

If there is anything absolutely certain about academia, it is that faculty are committed to shared governance. This has led to a proliferation of university committees on everything from health care to general education to technology purchases. Through such committee work, faculty attempt to share responsibility for the decisions made on our local campuses. Committee membership is often constructed deliberately and thoughtfully to reflect the various constituencies on campus. We can be seduced into ignoring how our bodies complicate this interaction because so much of our work with colleagues is disembodied through emails, phone calls, and written texts. Face-to-face committee work, however, serves as a powerful reminder that our bodies do matter. Committee work becomes what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as a contact zone where embodied individuals “meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”3

1

William P. Banks, “Written through the Body: Disruptions and ‘Personal’ Writing,” College English 66, no. 1 (2003): 23. 2 Minh-ha T. Trinh, Woman, Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 37. 3 Mary Louis Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 34.

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“Guns Drawn” During 2009-10, I served as Chair of the Faculty Senate. Our Faculty Senate is the representational body for the over 700 full-time faculty at Missouri State University. The Senate provides faculty perspectives and recommendations related to curricular issues, university policies, and other matters of concern. The voting membership includes an elected representative from every department on campus (50+). The Chair is elected by the Senate and represents the faculty body. In addition to preparing the monthly agenda and presiding over meetings, the Chair is responsible for appointing committees and representing the faculty to the administration and the Board of Governors. On one of the committees I had appointed, I served as a member the following year (2010-11). The committee included several other past Faculty Senate Chairs, the incoming Chair-Elect, and a few highly visible faculty members. I had a positive working relationship with all of the members of the committee and I consciously constructed the committee so that it included a diverse array of perspectives. The committee consisted of me, two female faculty members, and five male faculty members; we represented all six of the university colleges and the university library; we also represented several different ethnicities. With the exception of two faculty, we all represented different academic departments. During one of our meetings, a discussion ensued about how to approach the new University President regarding a particular issue. One of the committee members suggested that our committee go in “with our guns drawn” ready to fight.4 There were several nods of agreement. In contrast, I offered that such an approach had the potential of alienating our new president. Instead, I suggested that our committee take a different approach and ask clarifying questions rather than make ill-founded assumptions about his position on the issue of possible unionization. One member of the committee blurted out, “That’s a blonde remark.”5 No one said anything at first, then a few of the other male members chuckled, including one of the co-chairs. I shut down and remained silent for the rest of the meeting. I pulled myself out of the conversation much in the same way that William Banks describes his pulling away from an uncomfortable situation with a student: “I stayed away from temptation, pretended the flesh and the blood were not me, were someone/somewhere 4

The Freudian connotations are difficult to ignore. While my hair color is blond, his comment was clearly not meant as a simple observation of fact. The connotations were quite clear. In this context, “blonde” was a public evaluation of my suggestion. 5

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else…No bodies here: we don’t want the great emotion, great passion.”6 But I was not the only one to shut down. The other female committee member in attendance shut down, too. I was not aware that I was angry until a week later when I was discussing instances of gender inequity with one of my freshman-level composition classes and found myself using what had happened as a hypothetical illustration. As I began to reflect on my anger, I was not sure at whom it was directed. The male faculty member who made the comment? The committee co-chairs who didn’t address it? Me for not saying anything? The other female faculty member who did not come to my defense? What made me so angry?

Identity Theft Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America, according to the Social Security Administration. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, approximately 7 million people are victims of identity theft each year. Indeed, one of the first things that transpired upon being elected as Faculty Senate Chair was my identity theft. My name was forged on university checks. Over the span of one month, an individual or group of individuals attempted to buy dozens of products on Craigslist using checks that included a legitimate university routing number (a routing number for an account that international students use to deposit tuition and fees to the university). Fortunately, the account was “for deposit only” and the bank did not clear the checks signed with my name. I received more than a dozen phone calls from concerned individuals across the United States who had received checks with my name for an amount over the purchase, asking to refund the overage in a certified check. I spent hours and hours requesting document photos online to share with our university security, financial officers, and federal law enforcement organizations. When I expressed my sense of frustration to one of the officers, he commented that this type of crime was fairly common. Because my photo and name were in such a visible place (on the Faculty Senate website), such visibility allowed these criminals to find the name of

6 Although Banks’s use of the word “temptation” refers to resisting the physical attraction felt toward a student (28), his words aptly describe my situation. In my case, however, I stayed away from the “temptation” of allowing “great emotion/passion” (namely anger) to consume my body. Instead, I shut down and pretended I was someone else somewhere else.

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someone legitimately associated with the university to make their scam look authentic.7 When I began reflecting on the committee meeting in which the “blonde” remark was made, I realized that I was angry because I felt as if my identity as a knowledgeable, competent, respected faculty leader had been stolen yet again (albeit in a different way and by someone I trusted).8 Kenneth Burke defines language as a form of symbolic action because how we choose to name objects, feelings, events, and people affects our orientation towards and perspectives of these things and/or individuals. “The act of naming…decrees that it [the individual] is to be singled out as such-and-such rather than as something-other.”9 As a result, naming can reduce an individual’s possibilities for action in much the same way that stealing someone’s financial identity can destroy an individual’s credit and ability to purchase goods. Judith Butler expands upon this idea and suggests that “subjects are constituted through exclusion, that is, through the creation of a domain of deauthorized subjects.”10 I had been labeled “blonde” (a term associated with women who are less serious or less intelligent),11 and this naming deauthorized me as a subject and reduced my possibilities for action. I had experienced first-hand what Jody Norton calls “the violence inherent in the use of hegemonic [linguistic] constructions to manipulate people into being what one wants them to be.”12 While feminists have attempted to write our bodies back into where they have been erased, our focus has been on our written texts and classroom interactions. With committee work, though, we tend to ignore 7

Ironically, this visibility is also what enabled some of the would-be victims to contact me directly and expose the fraud. 8 Obviously, there are very real differences between the criminal theft of identity and the identity theft I experienced in the committee meeting, particularly in terms of economic loss. However, the sense of loss I experienced was no less damaging to my identity in the second case. In some ways, the damage in the second case was more devastating because it involved my own perception of self. 9 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 3. 10 Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13, my emphasis. 11 Victoria Sherrow, Encylopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 149. 12 Jody Norton, “(Trans)Gendering English Studies,” Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics, ed. William J. Spurlin (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000), 95.

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the role that bodies play in the interaction because so much of the work is performed through emails, phone calls, and written texts. Even in face-toface committee interactions, we often try to erase the distraction of our bodies13 so we can “pass” as knowledgeable, competent faculty members. “‘Passing’ is generally regarded as the ability of a member of a disenfranchised group to render ‘invisible’ those traits used to oppress them culturally and institutionally.”14 As a female faculty member, I carefully choose my attire each morning based on the particular committee meetings I have that day: slacks vs. skirt, jacket vs. blouse, flats vs. heels, studs vs. dangle earrings, straight vs. curly hair. I consciously decide whether to deemphasize or emphasize my female body. In Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Elaine Ginsberg notes that “passing” is inherently performative as it is “neither constituted by nor indicating the existence of a ‘true self’ or core identity.”15 Rather, “passing” is a rhetorical tactic designed to enact social change. Like every other morning, I had dressed to “pass during the fateful committee meeting. Yet as Faith Kurtyka discovered, “the physicality of the body is an unavoidable.”16 My colleague was quick to remind me that despite my attempts at passing as a knowledgeable, competent faculty member, I am a blonde female.

A Norm of Tolerance Unlike sexual harassment that is clearly defined by law, sexist humor is more difficult to define and may not be considered grounds for a lawsuit. Sexual harassment includes behaviors such as sexual remarks, sexual coercion, and intimidation that create a hostile work environment. Sexist humor, on the other hand, may not be of an overtly sexual nature. Instead, it may be directed at fostering stereotypes of social roles based on sex. And unlike sexual harassment, sexist humor usually does not have clearly identifiable effects, such as lower salaries, coercive assignments, and missed promotions. The effects, though, are still real and quite detrimental. 13

Faith Kurtyka, “‘Hello Beautiful’: Institutional Discourses of Sexual Harassment, Eros, and the Embodied Instructor,” Peitho 11, no. 1 (2009): 9, http://www.cwshrc.org, visited Oct. 10, 2011. 14 Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation,” Readings on Rhetoric and Perfromance, eds. Stephen Olbrys Gencarella and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2010), 346. 15 Elaine Ginsberg, “Introduction,” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 2. 16 Kurtyka, “‘Hello Beautiful,’” 9.

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Such humor can produce inequitable collaborations in which women’s contributions are ignored, dismissed, or co-opted by others. Such collaborations not only discourage women from making future contributions, but they also prevent employers and employees from gaining valuable diverse perspectives. My colleague’s statement, “That’s a blonde remark,” was clearly intended to discourage committee members from considering my suggestion, while at the same time encouraging them to interpret (and so accept) his statement as a form of humor, not harassment.17 In “Sexist Humor in the Workplace: A Case Study of Subtle Harassment,” Christie Fitzgerald Boxer and Thomas E. Ford summarize the findings of multiple studies that confirm sexist humor is not simply benign amusement.18 Disparaging jokes negatively affect the joke teller’s attitudes toward the group directed at in the joke. For example, Karen Hobden and James M. Olson found that joke tellers who recited jokes disparaging lawyers reported a more negative attitude toward lawyers.19 Looking specifically at sexist jokes, Thomas E. Ford et al. found that men who told disparaging jokes about women became more comfortable with expressions of sexism. More importantly, such humor also fostered an organizational culture of tolerance of sexism, depending upon how others reacted to the humor.20 Ford and Mark A. Ferguson’s prejudiced norm theory offers insight into this phenomenon. Sexist humor changes the rules in a given situation that determine what is and is not an appropriate reaction to discrimination against women. If unchallenged, the humor creates a perceived norm of tolerance for sex discrimination under the guise of tacit consent.21 I would add that in addition to creating a norm of tolerance,

17

His statement could simply be added to the long list of “blonde” jokes readily found in our culture. Multiple websites are even devoted to such jokes. 18 This chapter is part of a larger work entitled Insidious Workplace Behavior, ed. Jerald Greenberg (New York: Routledge, 2010), 175-206. The title of the larger work seems particularly appropriate. 19 Karen Hobden and James M. Olson, “From Jest to Antipathy: Disparagement Humor as a Source of Dissonance-motivated Attitude Change,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 15 no. 3 (1994): 239-249. 20 Thomas E. Ford, Christie F. Boxer, Jacob Armstrong, and Jessica R. Edel, “More than ‘Just a Joke’: The Prejudice-releasing Function of Sexist Humor,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 159-170. 21 Thomas E. Ford and Mark A. Ferguson, “Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 no. 1: 79-94.

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sexist humor creates a norm that, as Butler says, “materializes a body”— the female body.22 By not calling my colleague on his comment, I (as well as everyone in attendance) had inadvertently suggested that his comment was the norm and, thus, socially acceptable. No doubt, had my colleague phrased his comment as “that’s a dumb remark,” someone would have called him on the inappropriateness of his comment. His choice of blonde though, created ambiguity regarding the intent. This is not surprising according to Beth Montemurro. She contends that “by communicating denigration through levity, it can make ambiguous how one should interpret the message—and thus, whether it, indeed, is an objectionable form of harassment.”23 Despite such publicized law suits as the 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings and the Chevron Corporation suit that established sexist jokes can constitute sexual harassment, humor is still often accepted as fairly benign—an innocuous “just kidding.” But my colleague’s kidding was anything but “just” or innocent. An important piece of our interaction was his political position. He had just been elected as Faculty Senate Chair-elect, my successor. William A. Kahn investigated the sexist humor recorded by a consultant to a bank. The bank employees included tellers who were predominately women and the supervisors who were predominately men. Sexist jokes increased when a woman was promoted to manager. The consultant noted that the male supervisors engaged in such joking (consciously or unconsciously) to communicate their resistance to the promotion of this woman to a position of power.24 “Because of its levity and consequent interpretative ambiguity, humor provided a less blatantly hostile, more ‘socially acceptable’ way for male supervisors to communicate sexist sentiments and resistance to women in positions of control and authority.”25 Clearly, the incoming Chair-elect was resisting my authority. His response was to construct my identity for me in a way that I did not choose. Alas, I chose to remain silent in response. I could have offered 22

Judith Butler quoted in Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler,” Readings on Rhetoric and Performance, eds. Stephen Olbrys Gencarella and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2010), 202. 23 Referenced in Ford et al., “‘Just a Joke,’” 176. 24 William A. Kahn, “Toward a Sense of Organizational Humor: Implications for Organizational Diagnosis and Change,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 25 no. 1 (1989): 45-63. 25 Ford et al., “‘Just a Joke’” 185.

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further support for my position (opening myself up for further potential chastising) or I could have calmly expressed how offended I was by his remark (prompting him to in all likelihood to respond by offering a coerced apology). Instead, I remained silent. My colleague had singlehandedly dismissed my contribution and immobilized me. Not only had his remark immobilized me, it had immobilized the other female faculty member as well. By making me an example of what could happen when an alternative perspective is voiced by a woman, this male faculty member had silenced her, too. As Michel Foucault so astutely observed, “the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators.”26 Such “punishment” almost guaranteed that the other female faculty member would not voice her disagreement either in future meetings. What bothered me about my reaction was my inclination to label the situation as isolated, personal against me. Yet this is exactly what has allowed sexist humor to continue to thrive in our workplaces. Roxana Ng is absolutely correct in her article “‘A Woman Out of Control’: Deconstructing Sexism and Racism in the University”: in localized experiences we need to “move away from treating these incidents as idiosyncratic, isolated ‘wrong doing’ perpetrated by a few individuals with attitudinal problems,’ looking instead at a fundamental re-examination of the structures and relations of universities, which have marginalized and excluded certain groups of people historically.”27 We need to look at how our committee work in academia can serve as an important medium through which normative structure may be changed.

Embodied Response Earlier I indicated that I had not responded to my colleague’s “blonde” remark. This is not entirely accurate. My body responded and the other committee members “heard” it.28 Marianne LaFrance and Julie A. Woodzicka investigated women’s emotional responses to sexist jokes. As 26

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 111. 27 Roxana Ng, “‘A Woman Out of Control’: Deconstructing Sexism and Racism in the University,” Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’education 18 no. 3 (2009): 191. 28 Whether my nonverbal response was voluntary or involuntary is difficult to determine. I recall my eyebrows raised in surprise and I leaned back in my chair. Several months after the incident, one of the co-chairs of the committee also shared with me that my hand had covered my mouth and I stopped all eye contact with members during the meeting.

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might be expected, self-reported reactions indicated that the women felt disgusted, angry, and surprised, just as I had. Even more telling, LaFrance and Woodzicka also recorded the women’s nonverbal facial expressions while hearing the sexist jokes. The women rolled their eyes, covered their mouths with their hands, and showed signs of embarrassment and/or contempt.29 While none of the committee members verbally responded to the “blonde” remark during the meeting in which it was said, they clearly had been watching my nonverbals and how the other female faculty member reacted. In a committee meeting two weeks later,30 I tentatively offered another suggestion about toning down the strident rhetoric in a written document that we were preparing. Immediately, before any other committee member could respond, the other female committee member adamantly agreed (and I should add that this was the first time she had spoken during any of the previous committee meetings), as did two other male committee members. The other committee members immediately validated my contribution and conveyed the message that sexist remarks would no longer be tolerated.31 Although I never spoke about the remark with any of the committee members or faculty members, some of them had spoken about it to other people, so much so that I learned the offending individual was required by the Provost to attend a Diversity Conference later in the semester (something that no Faculty Senate Chair-elect has ever been required to do). Granted, his “blonde” remark may not have been the only catalyst for this requirement, but I suspect that it certainly contributed to it. Psychologist Daniel Goleman proposes that emotionally intelligent individuals have an ethical responsibility to take an active stance against any acts of discrimination. Goleman maintains that “everything we know 29

Marianne LaFrance and Julie A. Woodzicka, “No Laughing Matter: Women’s Verbal and Nonverbal Reactions to Sexist Humor,” Prejudice: The Target’s Perspective, ed. Janet K. Swim (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998), 61-80. 30 Though the committee met weekly, I found myself making an excuse and not attending the committee meeting during the following week. The experience reduced my productivity in the same way as has been documented by A. G. Schaefer and M.A. Finegold in their study, “Creating a Harassment-free Workplace,” Risk Management (1995): 53-56. 31 Contrary to the widespread interpretation of sexist humor as “just joking,” Patricia Frazier, Caroline Cochran and Andrea Olson surveyed 4000 university students, faculty and staff. Of this population, 71% viewed sexist jokes as sexual harassment. Refer to their article for more details: “Social Science Research on Lay Definitions of Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Social Issues 51 no. 1 (1995): 21-37.

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about the roots of prejudice and how to fight it effectively suggests that…turning a blind eye to acts of bias—allows discrimination to thrive.”32 My fellow committee members chose not to turn a blind eye; they stopped a single joke from escalating into a pattern of harassment. One of the key factors in cases of sexual harassment is whether there are multiple incidents—a pattern of behavior. By making a concerted effort to acknowledge all contributions, particularly those from individuals embodied within marginalized bodies, the committee members changed the structure of our social interactions.

Community Building In my composition classes, I actively discuss sexist language and how it can be detrimental to a community. I would also like to think that I, too, am an emotionally intelligent individual. Why then did I not speak up during the meeting in which the remark was made? Teaching in higher education is heavily influenced by gendered expectations of faculty behavior. These expectations can constrain our responses to sexist humor. For instance, after observing numerous college writing classes, composition practitioner Gail Griffin concluded that both male and female students expect female faculty members to be "mothering" and "nurturing" but expect male faculty members to be "harsh" and "direct."33 As a result, "young female…faculty members," according to University of Michigan Provost Nancy E. Cantor, "…feel pressured to spend more time than male colleagues on…work that builds community."34 As female faculty members, we feel as if we are given the responsibility for building community within the predominately male academy. This sense of obligation influences not only our interactions with students, but also our interactions with colleagues. We often assume that this sense of community is created by resisting conflict. Feminist Susan Jarratt explains, Certain advocates of feminism and some composition teachers decline to contend with words. Some feminists vigorously reject argument on the grounds that it is a kind of violence, an instrument specific to patriarchal

32

Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1994), 158. Gail Griffin, Calling Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue (Pasadena, CA: Triology Books, 1992). 34 Quoted in Kit Lively’s “Women in Charge,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, (16 June 2000): A33. 33

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discourse and unsuitable for women trying to reshape thought and experience by changing forms of language use.35

This stance, unfortunately, leaves those who adopt it insufficiently prepared to negotiate sexist communication, at least verbally. I am a prime example. But I am not alone. I found myself vigorously nodding as a read Faith Kurtyka’s delightful rendition of “The Lady”: “The Lady, not wanting to cause trouble, stays silent and reports nothing…[she] avoid[s] trouble by sidestepping direct confrontation.”36 Jarrett encourages women to rethink conflict as a productive tool to combat such things as sexist humor. Kathleen Weiler takes this a step further and suggests that conflict is not just a productive tool, it is also inevitable. That is, even though I chose to remain silent, it was inevitable that my body would introduce conflict when confronted with such an inequitable situation. Weiler emphasizes, too, that “recognizing the inevitability of conflict is not grounds for despair but the starting point for creating a consciousness… through which the inequalities generating those conflicts can be acknowledged and transformed.”37 Boxer and Ford acknowledge that humor can serve a very positive function in a workplace, building cohesion and solidarity among work groups. It can also, however, diminish cohesiveness among coworkers, especially if it is humor directed at belittling particular individuals of the work group. Milan Kundera refers to this as “serious laughter, laughter beyond joking.”38 As my fellow committee members helped me see, community was not something I could create by avoiding conflict or, conversely, something my colleague could create through “serious” laughter. “[C]ommunity…cannot be built or produced. One experiences community”39 in fleeting moments when the structure of the social interaction changes unexpectedly.

35

Susan Jarratt, “Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict,” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, eds. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb (New York: Modern Language Association, 1991), 106. 36 Kurtyka, “‘Hello Beautiful,’” 9. 37 Kathleen Weiler, “The Personal and the Political: Second-Wave Feminism and Educational Research,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29 no. 4 (2008): 445. 38 Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 58. 39 Diane D. Davis, Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 195-196.

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I suspect that my colleague would be surprised to discover that I am not blond. My “passing” is performative—a rhetorical tactic designed to enact social change.

INTERSPACES

FEMINISM AND ZINES: AN ORIGIN STORY (AND THE ACCIDENTS THAT REVEAL THEM) ALISON PIEPMEIER

One of the things that’s been a fun surprise since my book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism was published is how interested readers have been in the historical legacy of zines that I map out in the first chapter of Girl Zines. This came up again and again in reviews and interviews. I think one reason for this is interest is that the stories we tell about certain kinds of work, and where that work comes from, shape what we’re able to recognize and what disappears. This essay, then, offers an origin story about grrrl zines, and makes an argument about why these stories matter—the stories we tell, and the readings and misreadings we do. Zines are quirky, informal, individualized booklets. They’re selfproduced and anti-corporate. They’re often messy, and sometimes filled with glitter, stickers, or lipstick kisses. In the 1990s they were a huge underground phenomenon, but even today they’re quite prevalent. Most studies of zines identify them as resistant media originating in maledominated spaces. They are positioned as descendants of the pamphlets of the American Revolution and Dadaist and Samizdat publishing, emerging from the fanzines of the 1930s and the punk community of the 1970s.1 1

Trade books about zines routinely identify their origins with the Founding Fathers. For instance, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack is cited as a zine precursor in The Factsheet Five Zine Reader (R. Seth Friedman (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 10), Make a Zine! (Bill Brent (San Francisco: Black Books, 1997), 15), and Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? (Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson (Boston: Graphia, 2006), 20). The Factsheet Five Reader also identifies Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Dadaist publications as zine precursors, and Whatcha Mean discusses Samizdat publications. Scholarly studies replicate this genealogy, as well. Fred Wright’s “The History and Characteristics of Zines” discusses Revolutionary War broadsides along with Dadaist and Samizdat publishing as part of the history of zines (The Zine and E-Zine Resource Guide, 1997, http://www.zinebook.com/resource/wright2.html). Duncombe, as well,

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According to this narrative, the zine proliferation was triggered by the convergence of punk culture and technology. Punk culture provided the “zine” terminology along with a non-elitist, do-it-yourself (DIY) structure and aesthetic, and these ideologies were channeled into the production of zines because of technological innovations such as desktop publishing and inexpensive, widely available photocopying. This explanation is insufficient on a number of counts when it comes to grrrl zines. Although zines are often described as though they and their predecessors have always been male-dominated media, what hasn’t been discussed is the fact that these publications also have predecessors in the informal publications, documents, and artifacts produced by women during the first and second waves of feminism.2 One reason for this omission is that zines are resistant media, and women are, even today, rarely identified with resistance. While researching Girl Zines, I had a long conversation with Sarah Dyer, who made the zine Action Girl Newsletter, a zine that reviewed other zines by girls and women and helped to create a grrrl zine community. Her story of why she started her zine shows how our culture’s gender ideology often makes women’s efforts at cultural change invisible. Dyer’s experience was that even if women are clearly speaking identifies zines with “a tradition stretching back to Thomas Paine and other radical pamphleteers, up through the underground press of the 1960s, and on toward the internet” (Notes from Underground, 15). He also links zines with Dadaist writings (34). 22 Mary Celeste Kearney identifies second wave feminist predecessors to Riot Grrrl bands, and she contends that scholars have inaccurately implied that the fanzine precursors were male-dominated media, when in fact women have always been an active presence—if not the predominant population—producing fan publications (Mary Celeste Kearney, “The Missing Links: Riot grrrl – feminism – lesbian culture,” Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), 207-229). Similarly, Anna Feigenbaum insists that the informal publications associated with such social movements as the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp be understood as part of the history of zines: “I argue that Greenham’s camp-based media should be considered as part of the genealogy of zine-making, rather than exclusively as ‘movement ephemera’ or ‘social movement publications.’ Placing this kind of media production alongside that of zines and their histories helps to bridge gaps in chronological histories of women’s grassroots publication and intervenes in narratives of zine-making as an individualist or ‘underground’ exercise,’” (Feigenbaum, “Tactics and technology: cultural resistance at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp,” Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2008). Dawn Bates and Maureen C. McHugh make a brief reference to feminist predecessors to zines (“Zines: Voices of Third Wave Feminists,” in Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement, ed. Jo Reger (New York: Routledge, 2005), 181).

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out, then they may still be erased from the story altogether, identified as someone’s girlfriend rather than as legitimate agents. Her story also shows that she longed for female predecessors, for a female community. She sought out other zines by girls and women and then created the Action Girl Newsletter as a resource that could help solidify and expand that community of women. Her story is not unusual; many of the grrrl zinesters I interviewed explained that they began making zines either as a response to sexism or because they were inspired by another grrrl zine. That gender specificity is exactly what is missing from the general origin story that’s told about zines. Origin stories are important because they tell us where to look and what patterns to watch for. The “wrong” stories can give us a distorted or diminished understanding of the past and, by extension, the present moment. In the case of grrrl zines, if we think of them as originating from the male-dominated spaces of zines and punk culture, then grrrl zines appear as aberrations at best; as one author suggests, they seem “a side note to women’s history.”3 They’re not quite the same as the zines produced by men, but this difference isn’t taken seriously. This commonly-told origin story marks grrrl zines as a rupture and the girls and women who produce them either as trying—often unsuccessfully—to be like the boys, or as rebels against the male punk community. This story of rupture provides a limited context for understanding grrrl zines, and in that view they are aberrant, unconnected, a fun but odd blip. The story is significant because it shapes our interpretations of grrrl zines. Further, because grrrl zines are places where third wave feminism is developed, this incomplete story also has consequences for our understanding of feminism. Third wave feminism, like grrrl zines, is often positioned as a rupture, as a kind of feminism drastically different than the first and second waves—indeed, in some cases with no evident connection to previous generations of feminism at all. This narrative came up fairly recently in a piece by Susan Faludi in Harper’s Magazine in October 2010. In the article, “American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide,” Faludi argues—in ways I find really troubling and not convincing—that there are significant, fairly nasty differences between generations of feminism that emerge as a desire metaphorically to “kill off” the other generation.

3 Jennifer Bleyer, “Cut-and-Paste Revolution: Notes from the Girl Zine Explosion,” The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (New York, Anchor: 2004), 47.

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While there are certainly relevant differences between third wave feminism and earlier generations, I argue that an undue emphasis on—or exaggeration of—those differences masks the far more prevalent similarities between all incarnations of feminism. This is not to suggest that feminism is a monolithic, unified movement; far from it. Feminist thought and activism have been and are multifarious, changing, unagreed upon, diverse. The dissent within feminist discourse hasn’t been merely generational but has emerged from fractures of race, class, sexuality, and gender identity, and the dissent is often generative. Indeed, one of the great strengths of feminism has been its ability to alter, to expand, in order to respond to internal critiques and changing cultural experiences. For example, my current research in feminist disability studies shows disability as a point of expansion for feminism.4 Focusing solely on the differences, then, perpetuates a distorted understanding of earlier feminist moments, particularly the second wave, and prevents young feminists and others from recognizing feminism as a larger historical change movement. For despite the variations—the notable differences, for instance, in the understanding of women’s rights espoused by Angela Davis and by Sarah Dyer—I contend that it is meaningful to keep the umbrella term “feminism.” It designates movements and discourses that have at their core a belief in the full personhood of women and an agenda of eradicating all forms of oppression that keep people from achieving their full humanity. In Girl Zines I offer an alternate origin story that recognizes a U.S. feminist continuum starting with the informal publications of the suffragists and women’s clubs of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In my origin story grrrl zines are actually part of a significant trend in women’s history. There are a number of characteristics that connect grrrl zines to their feminist predecessors. The zine is a form of what’s called participatory media, media made by individuals rather than by the consumer culture industries, and participatory media have been part of women’s and feminist history since the 1850s. Participatory media represent a way of engaging with unfriendly mass culture and transforming it—if not always on a broad scale, at least at the level of the local. Historically, feminist participatory media productions have engaged with some of the themes central to grrrl zines—such as gender, identity, community, and resistance—and have offered a snapshot of their own cultural moment’s 4

Feminist authors from Gloria Steinem and bell hooks to Emi Koyama have made note of this ability to alter in response to criticism as one of feminism’s great strengths.

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take on these issues. Participatory media of the first and second waves of feminism—such as scrapbooks and mimeographed pamphlets—share significant similarities with grrrl zines, in some cases similarities of material culture and construction, in other cases ideological similarities. Like zines, they have rarely been studied—or if they have, not in terms of their publication practices and the effects these had on their function and meaning.

Feminist History of Zines: The First Wave Scrapbooking was a widespread practice in the nineteenth century, a way that girls and women could document their lives and the culture in which they lived. Although some men did engage in scrapbooking, it was widely understood as an activity for women. Scrapbooks have been understood as artifacts of personal identity, “a material manifestation of memory,” as a recent scholarly collection describes them.5 The girls and women who made these books would gather together collections of personally significant memorabilia such as calling cards, newspaper clippings, photographs, and letters as a record of their lives, or they would assemble the books as reference volumes on various subjects in which they were interested. Scrapbooks did more than offer personal commemoration, however. Like zines, scrapbooks offered a space for girls and women to comment on mainstream culture and also to construct community and solidarity. Scrapbook scholar Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger explains, “These scrapbook collections of ‘rare gems’ were meant to be shared with other people, and scrapbooking often, although not always, was constructed as a communal activity. That is, scrapbooks were not understood as private documents, but as artifacts meant to be shared with others.”6 Individual women used scrapbooks, according to Mecklenburg-Faenger, “to critically engage the social roles prescribed for them and to construct new possibilities for 5

Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, “An Introduction to the History of Scrapbooks.” The Scrapbook in American Life, eds. Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 3. 6 Amy L. Mecklenburg-Faenger, “Scissors, Paste and Social Change: The Rhetoric of Scrapbooks of Women’s Organizations, 1875-1930” (Ohio State University, 2007), 60-61. Mecklenburg-Faenger notes that scrapbooks, like zines, have not been taken seriously by historians, art theorists, or others who might be presumed to have an interest in this medium, because they are seen as unimportant (because produced nonprofessionally by women).

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women’s work, and women’s identities.”7 For instance, women’s organizations in the Progressive era often used scrapbooks to document their own work and challenge mainstream newspaper coverage. Scrapbooks were interventions, spaces where clubwomen and suffragists —both black and white—could construct their own legacy and public identity. The scrapbooks created by women’s clubs and individual women share a family resemblance to many zines from a century later. And let me explain how I made this connection: by accident. Amy MecklenburgFaenger, the scholar I’m citing, came to the College of Charleston on a job interview. In a talk she presented during her time on campus, she popped up a Powerpoint slide, and I thought, “Wait a second—that looks like a zine!” Her slide showed a page from a scrapbook by journalist and suffragist Ida Harper. What Harper pasted in her scrapbook is a newspaper page, which includes an article she wrote about suffrage, and right in the middle of that article the editors of the paper have inserted a piece called “An Oklahoma Town Who Is in Need of Cats.” She includes her own commentary on why they cut her article to include a fluff piece like this. This scrapbook from 1912 resembles a page from Danielle Bustian’s 1993 zine War. Like Harper, Bustian engages with newspaper clippings, using her zine as a space to critique media coverage of particular political figures. Both authors remove the clipping from its original context and, by placing it in their own publication, take control over it. Both write marginal notes in their own handwriting to correct what they see as misrepresentations or disrespect and, in so doing, put their voices into conversation with the mainstream media. Indeed, within their publications, their voices supplant the mainstream media. The visual difference of the handwriting of both women in contrast to the typeset newsprint pages gives a kind of authenticity to Harper and Bustian’s side of the story. These women are creating what I call embodied communities through their use of material artifacts. Although the scrapbook and the zine may seem to document two women alone with their clippings, in fact each woman uses her artifacts to communicate and connect with a broader community of women. For me as a scholar, this story is evidence of how important accident can be: it can be a way to see something that you weren’t looking for, and a way to break out of familiar narratives. Accident is what allowed me to see this origin story.

7

Ibid., 72.

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Fig. 1. Danielle Bustian’s 1993 zine War.

The Second Wave Informal publications of a different kind were integral to the second wave of the women’s movement. Women who were involved in the women’s movement of the mid-twentieth century took advantage of the inexpensive technology of the mimeograph machine. Mimeograph machines allowed second wave feminists inexpensively to make multiple copies for public distribution. Although second wave feminists also created informal publications using photocopying and offset printing, mimeography has taken on a kind of iconic significance in histories of the movement, coming to stand for all informal feminist publishing. For instance, an advertisement for Feminist Expo 1996 said, “the current wave of the feminist movement began with mimeograph machines.”8 In the memoir of noted second wave feminist 8

“Expo 96 for Women’s Empowerment,”

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Susan Brownmiller, she recounts the importance of mimeographed pamphlets, leaflets, and broadsides: “In an era of technological leaps, Women’s Liberation is the last major American movement to spread the word via a mimeo machine.”9 Another activist recalls that “Ti-Grace [Atkinson] said every revolution needs a mimeo machine.”10 Because there were no books or magazines that addressed the issues they were taking on, these activists had to create and distribute their own work. Indeed, many of the key second wave texts began as pamphlets or fliers not unlike zines, including Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Third World Women’s Alliance’s Triple Jeopardy, Bread and Roses’ “Outreach Leaflet,” and even Mary King and Casey Hayden’s “A Kind of Memo.”11 These sorts of print media were crucial for the political work of the second wave, functioning not only to spread information but to create what historians Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon call “a shared culture, theory, and practice.”12 They note, “it was in these homespun rags that you could find the most creative and cutting-edge theory and commentary.”13 The look and feel of these second wave publications remind me of grrrl zines. For instance, the family resemblance between a Sisters Stand cover from 1971 and a Riot Grrrl cover from 1993 is immediately evident. Both feature pencil drawings of a naked woman’s body which has been altered—defaced or dismembered—in some way. The Sisters Stand cover shows a woman with no left breast, standing in the middle of a woman symbol with her fist raised defiantly. The Riot Grrrl cover shows an armless, legless, headless torso. In both images the dismemberment is making a broader point. The Sisters Stand image alludes to the Amazon women who removed their left breasts to enable them to be better archers; the image is clearly meant to be empowering. The dismemberment is much more dramatic on the Riot Grrrl cover, and the body morphs into something else: the spot where the woman’s legs should be has been drawn as the cross-section of an apple, with the core as her vagina. The apple imagery is obviously a visual pun on the New York City home of http://www.now.org/nnt/01-96/expo.html, visited August 11, 2007. 9 Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Delta, 1999), 44. 10 Brownmiller, In Our Time, 67. 11 Many of these documents have been collected in Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon’s excellent Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 12 Ibid.,15. 13 Ibid.,15-16.

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this particular Riot Grrrl group, but the image is more than a joke and seems more ambiguous than the Sisters Stand cover. The torso makes reference to archaic/classical art images of women, but the extreme alteration and sexualization of this body gives evidence of the fact that the grrrl zinesters are in a culture saturated with a different kind of advertising imagery than the Sisters Stand authors faced. The lettering of the titles also registers this difference: Riot Grrrl is written in cursive, both girly (with extra curls on the “r” and “t”) and sharp. Sisters Stand, on the other hand, is in block print shadowed to seem as if it’s emerging from the page and rising upward, along with the face of the woman on the cover. It is not at all playful or girly.

Fig. 2. Sister Stand. 1971 Fig. 3. Riot Grrrl. 1993

Yet both covers are hand drawn, and both are reimagining women’s bodies, doing something different with the naked female body than mainstream culture, claiming ownership of that iconography by printing it on the cover of the publication. Despite the differences, these covers share a family resemblance. There’s no evidence that the girls who made the Riot

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Grrrl zine had seen Sisters Stand or were intentionally emulating second wave publications; indeed, direct lines of influence can be difficult to trace, and the propagation of social movements is often a bit haphazard. The similarities in these publications are significant, however, even if they are unintentional. Both groups of women were dealing with a culture permeated with sexist imagery and ideology, and they responded by creating their own media that resisted that sexism and envisioned womanhood differently. What’s even more striking than the similar look and feel of these documents are the similarities between second wave publications and zines in distribution. Mimeograph technology allowed second wave feminists to distribute their publications widely. This was both a benefit and a challenge: activist and author Robin Morgan explains, “We were becoming bursitis-ridden, literally, from carrying around all these goddamned mimeographed papers in shopping bags when we’d go to some college for a weekend of organizing.”14 Yet this technology meant that every attendant at a consciousness-raising group could receive a copy of “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Similarly, every woman who came to a Riot Grrrl NYC meeting could receive one of the Riot Grrrl zines. They were distributed informally, person to person rather than through official publishing channels. They were often free, or offered for a minimal payment (Baxandall and Gordon note that prices for Women’s Liberation pamphlets ranged “from a nickel to a quarter,” while grrrl zines were often $1.00).15 Zines and second wave publications created community in similar ways. These documents, created by hand, reproduced on a small scale, and shared in intimate settings helped to bring women together. In addition, second wave publications and grrrl zines share ideological similarities. In Girl Zines I discuss how Riot Grrrl zinesters, among others, made conscious connections between their zines and second wave feminist work—often reprinting second wave essays and utilizing a kind of enthusiastic second wave rhetoric. What I want to point out here, though, is a connection I didn’t make in the book: rethinking motherhood is a theme that connects second wave ideology and third wave ideology (and first wave, too), and we can see that in the publications. For instance, a second wave publication called “Women: Motherhood to Militancy” visually challenges the familiar cultural myth of motherhood as being inherently peaceful, as a phenomenon that defines women as needing protection and needing to stay within the home. They’ve 14 15

Brownmiller, In Our Time, 69. Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters,15.

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combined the loving, motherly body with the powerful weapon-carrying body—and they’re suggesting that the two can go together. This publication for me is another “accident,” because someone gave it to me after reading Girl Zines. It’s not something I discovered through my own research.

Fig. 4. Women: Motherhood to Militancy. 1971

Motherhood has a significant presence in the world of zines. Mama zines are a big subgroup of zines by girls and women, and in many of these zines, creators are reimagining motherhood—not necessarily by connecting it to militancy, but often by connecting it to sexuality. The cover of Bust makes this point particularly clearly, and China Martens’ The Future Generation is deliberately toying with the stereotype of the “welfare mother,” suggesting that “welfare mothers make better lovers.” Representations of motherhood are powerful and often treacherous.

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Representing mothers in resistant ways can be dangerous, but these informal publications of the second and third waves of feminism are spaces where this resistance can happen.

Fig. 5. Bust. 1994 Fig. 6 Future Generation. 1996

To switch back to the second wave: the early grrrl zinesters didn’t share ideological perspectives only with the feminists of the 1960s and ’70s. The second wave stretched over several decades, expanded, and became more complicated as U.S. third world feminists began offering critiques and reframings of feminism in the 1970s and ‘80s. Grrrl zines show clear ideological links to the work of U.S. third world feminists. One key component of this ideology is voiced by poet and activist Audre Lorde, who argues, Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.16

16

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe

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Some of the central theoretical approaches characteristic of this new paradigm were articulated in the groundbreaking 1981 collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. The editors Gloria Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga called for “a theory in the flesh…one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here, we attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience.”17 Grrrl zines were deeply influenced by these ideas. In part the “irreverent cadre of feminists of color” are articulating an experience that has come to be emblematic of late capitalist culture: fragmented identities, lack of a solid moral center, and decollectivization. Further, the celebration of difference—not as a problem to be solved but as a source of energy and creativity—resonated with young women of color and white women who had come to see some kinds of second wave feminism as too restrictive. Grrrl zines provided a space for girls and women to explore what This Bridge Called My Back calls “the contradictions in our experience.” The lines of transmission varied. In some cases grrrl zinesters are in fact reading these scholars, hungry for the ideas they present on how to make sense of the world: many early grrrl zinesters were Women’s Studies students, and bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh Minh Ha, and other popular U.S. third world feminist scholars appear in a number of zines, including Free to Fight, Slant, Shotgun Seamstress, and Doris. In other cases, the ideas seem to have become part of the grrrl zine culture, so that zine creators could pick them up indirectly. Regardless, a comparison of these texts suggests that grrrl zines are emerging from a history of both feminist participatory media and U.S. third world feminist theory, and where they emerge from matters because of the trajectory this origin story makes visible: a trajectory of continued feminist ideology and activism that has links to the past but also changes as it develops. These informal publications—the scrapbooks, brochures, and mimeographed documents—allowed girls and women to say things that weren’t being said elsewhere, often because they were considered too trivial, too personal, or too controversial. Tobi Vail, who was a founding Riot Grrrl and wrote the zine Jigsaw, identifies the silencing of women’s stories as a crucial part of her inspiration for producing her zine. In emphatic capitals she announces, “I AM MAKING A FANZINE NOT TO

Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 99. 17 Ibid., 23.

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ENTERTAIN OR DISTRACT OR EXCLUDE OR BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO BUT BECAUSE IF I DIDN’T WRITE THESE THINGS NO ONE ELSE WOULD EITHER.” She frames her own zine in contrast to the “hundreds of boy fanzine writers” who presumably have the luxury of writing for entertainment, while she has “a legitimate need and a desperate desire” to publicize the stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told. Vail, like her feminist predecessors, turned to participatory media because it allowed her to skirt around mainstream publishing practices, a consumer culture industry, and even a counterculture that would have denied the validity of her voice—either by seeing her words as mere entertainment or, as with Dyer, not seeing her words at all. Grrrl zines are, of course, not identical to the scrapbooks, pamphlets, and other feminist participatory media of the past. As part of a larger origin story, though, grrrl zines are revealed as the newest incarnations of longstanding feminist publishing practices. They—and the third wave they helped to initiate—exhibit ties to the past and also offer useful revisions to make feminism more relevant for young women in the late twentieth century. One of the larger questions is, why does it matter to see these historical connections? Seeing them not only challenges the myth of the divisions between feminists, but makes visible the continual lack of recognition of girls’ and women’s work. A colleague from another campus was recently sharing with me about a faculty member on her campus who’s done some fairly successful work on what he’s calling “art journals”—which are creative, expressive artifacts, like zines. When she asked him about the connection between zines and his projects, he was reluctant to acknowledge any similarity—and she read this as at least in part a gendered phenomenon. It’s easy to dismiss zines as trashy, trivial, personal, and irrelevant—and it’s just as easy to dismiss other feminist participatory media the exact same way. What I want to end with is my own recent recognition of the work of girls. Recently I wrote the preface to the book, Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century, edited by Kelly Wooten and Elizabeth Bly. In doing the work for my book Girl Zines I had the recognition that the publication I produced in high school, Naked, was a zine, and that was an exciting recognition. What the essays from Wooten and Bly’s book helped me to remember is that Naked wasn’t my first publication. Years earlier, when I was only ten years old, my best friend and I created a neighborhood newspaper that we called The North Dixien.

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Fig. 7. The North Dixien. 1984

We took turns at the typewriter and worked hard to make sure we shared every job. We included news about neighborhood accidents and construction, we surveyed our readers, and we decorated the pages with stickers. It’s fascinating to revisit this publication and to see what we—as girls—thought was significant in the world around us. We were interested in having our voices heard, and the document we created is a meaningful text, rich and ready for scholarly attention. As I was assembling these thoughts, it occurred to me that the ten-yearold daughter of one of my friends also makes a newsletter, hers more focused on the household than the neighborhood, called 9½ News.

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Fig. 8. 9½ News.

This girl’s publication gives her a space to observe and assess the world she lives in (although she primarily uses a computer rather than a typewriter and her publication is adorned with clip art rather than the stickers we used in The North Dixien). She writes about family practices and even runs contests, like her recent “Who has the most embarrassing story?” or “Make a monster!” contests. And when I started asking about productions like this, I got the chance to read a book made by the fiveyear-old daughter of another friend. This document is perhaps even more significant and provocative, because I don’t think that scholars ever examine the cultural productions of five-year-old girls: what does the world look like from the perspective of a preschool child? A child who expresses herself with crayons and pencils rather than a typewriter or computer, a child who dictates to her mother the captions that should be written in the book.

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Fig. 9. A trailer for “Barbie: A Fairy Secret.”

Often when scholars discuss “girls,” they’re discussing people in their teens. Teens are the “girls” I was examining in Girl Zines. And while this population is, of course, important, we need to expand our studies and consider media produced by actual girls. These productions aren’t a new phenomenon: a friend recently introduced me to the little books produced by Charlotte Brontë as a thirteen year old girl.

Fig. 10. The Adventures of Mon. Edouard de Crack. 1830

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Interestingly, the blogger who featured this work remarks, in a dismissive tone, “It’s hard to imagine tweens today making these books.” And yet they are! They do! And our attention needs to be on the books not only of tweens but of those younger. Taking this sort of work seriously would be meaningful scholarship as well as activism: it would draw our attention to this material that is often seen as disposable, “cute” at best and insignificant except for in a personal realm. Again, these origin stories can come to us by accident: I’m a feminist scholar, and yet even I had forgotten about my own girlhood cultural productions until I was invited to read Make Your Own History. What if we started acknowledging this work and asking of it, “What can this tell us? What do these little books and newspapers tell us about girls’ lives, about their view of the world, their priorities, the available outlets for self-expression? What do we find if we look outside the standard cultural productions that the corporate world and the academic world deem worthwhile?” I’d like to end with the five year old girl’s proclamation of her world “seen by [her name],” and with my own recognition of how important this girl’s perspective is.

Fig. 11. Seen by Cate

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Returning to the notion of the stories we tell: our scholarly and pop cultural narratives can make girls’ work invisible to us, but they can also reveal it. And by being open to scholarly accidents of various kinds, we can create new origin stories that allow us to make room for new and important perspectives.

PART III: LANGUAGE, VOICE, AND FOLKSONOMY: RHETORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FEMINISM

REWORKING LANDSCAPES: CREATING IDENTITY IN BODY, SPACE, AND LANGUAGE JANELLA D. MOY

A common theme in much of the writing by African Americans during the 1940s and ’50s focuses on invisibility, the lack of identity, or a search for a more powerful identity that is almost unattainable for many Blacks in the anti-Communist, homophobic, racially prejudiced atmosphere enveloping the United States. Books such as Invisible Man (1952) and Native Son (1940) published at this time address these identity issues.1 For Black males and females alike, the presence of negative stereotypes bred by a prejudiced white majority make ordinary tasks such as seeking housing, placing children in schools, eating at restaurants, and even riding in buses difficult and humiliating as skin color is used as a determinant for emphasizing difference and denying any semblance of equal treatment. As a result of this oppressive, demeaning atmosphere, the potential for members of any minority group such as Blacks or homosexuals finding ways of forming a positive identity are difficult at best, if not impossible. Growing up at this time in American history, a young Audre Lorde, although closely sheltered by her parents from some of the harsher realities of prejudice, is aware of her racial difference, which later is compounded by her female gender and chosen sexual identification: lesbian. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982),2 Lorde recalls the difficult years of the 1

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952); Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1940). In these two books, written by African American authors, are themes of racism in America, oppression, invisibility of Blacks, identity crises, anti-communism (in Native Son), and many more. The publication of these books changed the way people looked at racism and the treatment of African Americans. The books also changed the way many African Americans viewed themselves and their treatment at the hands of the dominant white culture. 2 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, The Crossing Press, 1982).

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’50s and ’60s and her identity crisis which is further complicated by her clear understanding of the lack of power she holds as a Black female and lover of women. This text, like much of Lorde’s writing, places a heavy emphasis on physical bodies and the significance of one’s body when comprising a healthy identity. Whether she is creating text about growing up in Harlem or battling breast cancer, Lorde notes the permanent markings that these events leave on her body. Throughout the text of Zami, Lorde seeks an identity that defines her and encompasses all parts of her life: “woman, Black, lesbian, lover, mother, poet, warrior.”3 In the following pages, I will examine the ways Lorde erodes, builds, and restructures her identity through the landscaping4 (eroding and building up) of her body, the places she lives, the language she speaks, and the text she writes. The significance of forming one’s own identity is in the harnessing of power from that inception and taking claim of one’s identifications. The terms mapping and landscaping in relation to queer or feminine identity are certainly not new concepts. In the early ’80s and ’90s, Judith Butler’s work on performativity along with much of the writing and research by many other academics and theorists seeking out explanations for how homosexuals carve out a legitimate space for themselves in a heterosexual, homophobic society come to be categorized under the heading of “geographies of sexualities.”5 These early studies6 focus on how gender is established, whether it is inherent or learned, the ways that heterosexuals and homosexuals use and define spaces as sexual, as well as 3

Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet (New York: Norton, 2004), 367. Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown, “Introduction,” Geographies of Sexualities: Theories, Practices and Politics (Hampshire, England, Ashgate, 2007), 1-18. Landscaping of sexual spaces as well as geographies of sexualities came into being in the 1980s. The early work, predominantly geography studies, constituted mapping of gay men in “residential and commercial clusters” (6-8). In the ’90s, studies were being performed in urban America on lesbians and gay men while in England, bars and clubs for homosexuals were being observed. Queer Theory gained momentum in the ’90s. In 2002, a new study examined the diversities between those who are gay. 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Ibid., 225-257. The multiple studies, articles, and books that appear in the bibliography of Geographies of Sexualities focus on landscaping and geography of bodies include: David Bell and Gil Valentine, Mapping Desire (London, Routledge, 1995); Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994); Judith Butler Gender Trouble (New York, Routledge,1990) and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York, Routledge, 1993). 4

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the varied ways that homosexuals knowingly and unknowingly accustom their lives, routines, language, and much more to “fit into” or survive within the dominant social atmosphere. Likewise, “geographical studies of sexuality as well as the relationships between sexualities, space, and place” become dominant themes in this era of theoretical studies that continue to this day.7 My own examination of landscaping, eroding, and rebuilding of identity, as described in Zami, looks at Lorde’s manipulation of text, mobility through spaces and borders, mapping of her own body, and her development and maintenance of relationships in this process. In addition to looking at these very physical manifestations of self-development (identification), I also claim that for non-heterosexuals, this type of secretive identity production is necessary for defining one’s identity through safe modes and spaces, making one’s identity visible for selfacknowledgment, and looking outside of traditional political spaces/spheres (school, work, family) to find sources for identification. In a world that identifies the dominant culture as positive and anything in opposition to that culture as negative, looking outside of expected spaces to form a positive identity helps promote one’s independence, especially for minorities facing continual ostracism. Writing and language, areas in which identity can be manipulated, are major focuses in Lorde’s work and a crucial place to begin my examination of Zami. From the title of the text—Zami: A New Spelling of My Name—the reader is immediately aware that Lorde is embracing change, and that words will serve as one mode, the primary mode, of creating a new identity—“name alterations suggest new identity.”8 Certainly, the names one uses for identification are the primary means that others have for “knowing” who or what we claim to be and to what associations we claim connections. “The need to name oneself, rather than leave it to a hostile dominant culture,” becomes a means of accessing a safe place.”9 Lorde, using the language of her mother, of the place connected with ideas of “home” throughout her childhood, Cariaccou, chooses zami, the compounding and eroding of the French noun phrase les amies, as her namesake and social marker. However, the implications of assuming such a label are numerous. After all, zami is a pejorative Jamaican term for lesbian, a woman who loves other women. More importantly, the use of 7

Browne, Lim, and Brown, Geographies of Sexualities, 5. Suzanne Bailey, “Woman/Body/landscape: Imaginary Geographies in the Writing of Karen Connelly,” Canadian Literature 181 (2004): 64. 9 Elizabeth Alexander, ‘“Coming Out Blackened and Whole’: Fragmentation and Reintegration in Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals,” American Literary History 6, no. 4 (1994): 700. 8

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this term along with the emphasis on producing a new spelling of one’s name “point[s] to both a wearing down (breaking from) and building up of landscapes, some personal and some political, some literal and some metaphorical, in the text.”10 It becomes clear that language serves as a bridge for much of the change that occurs in Lorde’s life, and these restructurings begin quite early. In the first chapter, the reader sees language as mystical and powerful; Lorde’s mother, chanting her prayer to the Mother Mary and singing Grenadian store jingles, bridges the gap between this “cold and raucous country called America”11 and “home, a sweet place” where “women . . . survived the absence of their sea-faring men easily, because they came to love each other, past the men’s returning.”12 Understanding the deep significance that names have in relation to one’s self, a young Lorde changes the spelling of her own name, removing the “Y” to achieve symmetry—“I used to love the evenness of AUDRE LORDE at four years of age.”13 A year later, the kindergarten teacher’s response to Lorde writing her full name instead the single letter “A” amounts to a social castigation for breaking unwritten rules of societal norms. Lorde’s mother responds by removing her from the school. These early lessons in the power of language and the price of exhibiting difference are ones Lorde integrates into her very being and does not forget. The shortening or eroding of her own name as a child parallels her assuming the new name Zami as an adult; both can be seen as acts of defiance, intentional acts of destruction, which seek to negate accepted norms. Defying one’s teacher, changing one’s name in deference to parents’ wishes can be seen as equivalent to intentionally renaming oneself a derogatory name. Erosion of words in both of these instances leads to the creation of a new term or name—one that Lorde can identify with and that aides her in reaching beyond her current borders. Borders and boundaries, the constraints placed upon oneself by the individual and/or society, are key elements to consider in examinations of body landscaping. During the mid-twentieth century in America, a Black female would have had substantively fewer rights than a white woman as Lorde depicts in her text. Her family is not allowed to eat in the restaurant for whites in Washington D.C.; her mother, Linda, is fired after her employer discovers she has a Black husband. And as a Black lesbian, Lorde faces multiple limitations; even in gay bars she is sometimes not 10

Christopher Giroux, “Eroding and Eliding, Breaking and Building: Reworking the Landscape in Audre Lorde’s Zami,” The Explicator 67 (2009): 285. 11 Lorde, Zami, 11. 12 Ibid., 13-14. 13 Ibid., 24.

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served as a result of her color, and she is not openly accepted by the “straight” or gay societies or the dominant white culture. However, Lorde has no desire to be trapped within the limiting political, social, or sexual bounds of her era even though, as Christopher Giroux points out, “she is keenly aware of her minority status and the difficulty of effecting real change” for herself or others.14 Nevertheless, as Lorde admits in Zami, “I had never been too good at keeping within straight lines, no matter what their width.”15And writing becomes one method Lorde employs to challenge the invisible but very real borders she is expected to remain within. Her text, Zami, pushes against the bounds of accepted genres as a literary permutation: part fiction, part myth, part biography. Biomythography, the label she has invented for her construct, “names a new genre, creating a larger space for her myriad selves,”16 and, according to Elizabeth Alexander, this text also serves to “make a physical space for herself in a hybrid language, a composite, a creation of new language to make space for the ‘new’ of the self-invented body.”17 Using language to defy mainstream society, likewise, can be seen in Lorde’s poetry and essays. In fact, Lorde’s use of language, particularly her writing, often serves as a primary mode of her identity formation. However, this paper will focus on Lorde’s friendships, her choice of lovers, her breaking of laws, and almost every aspect of her life which challenges the limitations placed in her path, the borders she must push against. Lorde’s high school years are replete with accounts of numerous attempts to restructure her forming identity. Borders were readily crossed and constructed in these formative years through establishment of friendships and clicks. Choosing friends based on her differing identities, Lorde effectively journeys across multiple boundaries on a daily basis. In talking about her friends Lorde states: None of the other people involved would have anything to do with each other. Maxine thought The Branded were too dangerous, and Genie too flamboyant. The Branded thought Maxine was a mama’s baby, and Gennie a snob. Gennie thought they were all bores, and said so loudly at any provocation.18

14

Giroux, “Eroding and Eliding, Breaking and Building,” 285. Lorde, Zami, 25. 16 Alexander, ‘“Coming Out Blackened and Whole,’” 696. 17 Ibid. 18 Lorde, Zami, 86. 15

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The Branded, a group of student outcasts, forms a long-term collective with whom Lorde maintains contact throughout much of her young adult life. “This group of girls never discussed being Black and white . . . they deplored racial discrimination . . . and felt they could conquer it by ignoring it.”19 Instead, this cluster of outcasts, focuses on what they have in common—boys, poetry, classes. But their real power comes with their name, which yields a negative connotation the girls “learned how to make a virtue out of.”20 One could argue that the use of this moniker helped the girls practice their own form of political border patrol, understanding on a very personal level the power associated with naming oneself and protecting one’s identity. According to Elizabeth Grosz, “naming [through being] ‘branded’ or tagged. . . creates a particular depth body . . .a psychic layer the subject identifies as [part of her] core.”21 Since the girls in “The Branded” have named themselves by the process of negation, they are literally interiorizing the power associated with naming. By “sophomore year in high school, [Lorde is] in open battle on every other front in [her] life except school.”22 Relationships in the family were warlike…conversations with parents were battles . . . a closed door was still considered an insult.”23 In an attempt to exert and gain some semblance of control over her home-life, Lorde refuses to wash her pillowcase with the family’s other bleached linens. Instead, she rinses it out in the sink leaving the blood and sweat stains as a symbol of her existence, her very being, and her need for independence and resistance. “That pillow-covering became a heavy unbleached muslin record of all the nightly blitzes of my emotional war. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the rank, yeasty yellow stains that were, the stains, like the smells, were evidence of something living, and I so often felt I had died and wakened up in a hell called home.”24 The build-up of stains and smells on the pillowcase create a physical map of Lorde’s journey to independence from her family, from her mother’s “home” to what will eventually become the home of herself. Here Lorde is creating identity through her senses—the smells of her own body on the darkly stained pillowcase differ from the odor of the parent’s bleached pillowcases which reflect a disinfected white society and its 19

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 82. 21 Elizabeth Grosz, “Inscriptions and Body Maps: Representations of the Corporeal,” Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, ed. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (London: Arnold Press, 1997), 289. 22 Lorde, Zami, 82. 23 Ibid., 83. 24 Ibid. 20

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sanitizing effects on Black people, on her own family. Lorde’s rebellion against family washday is essentially a rebellion against rules and codes of white society that have altered how her people think about themselves, their smells, and their dark color. The only people with whom Lorde is not at war at this time are her school friends. Lorde’s close relationship with one school friend, Gennie, feeds her creativity while prompting actions without thought of consequences— Lorde becomes a risk taker. She crisscrosses political and social borders in her juvenile acts against established power structures.25 “I learned how to feel first and ask questions afterward. I learned how to cherish first the façade and the fact of being an outlaw.”26 Acts of lawlessness, against the school, their parents, and society, bring these two girls closer together. To act out their anti-establishment roles, Lorde and Gennie smoke in the school bathrooms, steal nickels from their mother’s purses, play sexy games with Latino boys, and talk about the state of Israel.27 But it is in the role playing, spending hours dressing up as “Bandits, Gypsies, Foreigners of all degree, Witches, Whores, and Mexican Princesses,” that the desire to be other than oneself can be transacted.28 The girls’ imitation of other negated minority groups like themselves suggests a desire to experience and develop an awareness of prejudice in its multifarious forms. Nevertheless, the dressing-up and acting as Other, performance in both language and bodily actions, expands Lorde’s borders of experience and identity while allowing her to test the waters of resistance and the effects rendered by such when practiced in open social spaces. The most potent change comes with Gennie’s suicide at age sixteen, a prominent marker in Lorde’s life. Along with the immense pain of loss comes an end to the play acting—change becomes a necessity to Lorde’s survival. The erosion of the girl’s relationship prior to Gennie’s death, the erosion of Lorde’s relationship with her parents over the next two years following Gennie’s death, and her own desire to seek a “more fruitful return than simple bitterness” become Lorde’s foundations for forming a new self. Peter, a white Jewish boy, is Lorde’s first lover. When her parents denounce him for being white and refuse to let him in their home, the young Lorde assumes Peter’s plight as a personal battle. Here Lorde’s personal and political beliefs about the injustice of prejudice are being 25

“Power structures” discussed here refer to such structures as family, religion, the education system, government, and laws. Lorde actually fights against many of these social structures to form and satisfy her own set of values and preferences. 26 Lorde, Zami, 86. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 88.

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tested, and her own identity threatened. To the young protagonist, this is just another example of how her own parents have been inundated by the dominant white identity—one of which she wants no part. The battles with her parents over Peter escalate until Lorde leaves home. This move prompts Lorde’s feelings of independence and loneliness, which pushes the relationship with Peter from friends to lovers. However, Lorde expresses ambivalence about having sex with a man, and she finds it “dismal and frightening and a little demeaning.”29 When time for college approaches, Peter breaks up with her, only returning a few months later for a week of sexual relations. Following this final break, Lorde discovers she is pregnant. In an effort to break free from this non-productive and potentially destructive relationship, Lorde does not tell Peter she is pregnant but, instead, decides to have an illegal abortion. The unwanted pregnancy becomes a part of her body landscape over which she must take control. Although the relationship has ended with Peter and the abortion will mean the end of another life, erosion and erasure becoming prominent in the protagonist’s life, Lorde’s “abortion via a Foley catheter offers [an] example . . . of erosion’s positive potential . . . . The uterus is literally subject to erosion, the landscape of the individual becom[es] the site of a political power struggle.”30 Surviving the abortion, Lorde finds emotional strength in having endured this painful experience, even as she comes to realize the overwhelming long term physical effect it has had on her body. The move into an apartment on Spring Street two weeks after her abortion and eighteenth birthday signals another means for Lorde’s identity mapping. Not only is she molding her fragile identity through language and relationships that arise and dissolve, but she is now adding geographical spaces into the mix of items that she can tear down and restructure in her need to gain control. The apartment is minutely described in the narrative as a “floor-through”: a front room with fireplace, center room with no windows, and back room kitchen containing a sink, stove, refrigerator, bathtub. The first attempt Lorde makes at creating a space of her own is to scrub the front two rooms and move in a bed and bookcase. She scours the kitchen then tears down the plaster over the fireplace to expose the naked bricks, which serve as the backdrop for Gennie’s guitar. The destruction of the plaster to expose the beauty of the bare bricks is symbolic of Lorde herself—the past self eroding away leaving the new, stronger, more beautiful person, even if scarred from her experiences. The apartment is further adorned by the addition of two song 29 30

Ibid., 104. Giroux, “Eroding and Eliding, Breaking and Building,” 288.

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birds in a cage donated by friends from The Branded. This is place in constant transition, from change of inhabitants to changes in décor. Lorde’s apartment is also a place where her freedom of identity will be attained gradually through a process of self-mining, self-constructing, and openness to change. Lorde’s next intimate friend provides a crucial link for her identity development. Seeking a new means of income, Lorde moves to Stamford, Connecticut and finds a job at Keystone Electronics running an x-ray machine. She is befriended by Ginger, who asks if she is gay. Lorde admits aloud that she is a lesbian, and it becomes the first time she makes love to a woman. She sees herself as a swain, a young lover of Ginger.31 “Ginger and I met as two young Black women in need of each other’s warmth and blood-assurance, able to share the passions. . . we were both invested in the denial of our importance to each other. . . we both needed to pretend we didn’t care.”32 This close loving friendship builds Lorde’s confidence in herself as a lesbian and lover of women; nevertheless, this positive process is complicated by the erosive qualities of Lorde’s job at Keystone. The physical degradation of women’s bodies at Keystone, darkening of fingers from excess radiation, the result of not using the protection hood in an effort to work faster, and Lorde’s own grinding of the x-ray crystals with her teeth and flushing the pieces down the toilet, present a clear picture of the dangers these women, in general, and the protagonist, in particular, are willing to risk for economic advancement.33 The McCarthy Era, with its spies in everyone’s living room, fills Lorde with dread and a yearning to escape, cross new borders. The move to Mexico, a refuge for many Americans hiding from the anti-Communist probes and potential incarceration, seems like a paradise. In Mexico, Lorde stands out from the Mexican locals, who openly welcome her and often mistakenly identify her as Cuban due to her dark skin and natural afro. She too begins to see herself as “different,” as acceptable due to the friendly responses from the Mexicans, which is very different from her treatment in the United States. “I found myself unfolding like some large flower . . .I felt the light and beauty of the park shinning out of me, and the woman lighting her coals. . . smiled back at it in my face.”34 Embracing the distinction and positive self-esteem that difference affords her, Lorde recognizes this as a source of power. She promptly begins to incorporate these positive experiences and responses from others into herself, making 31

Lorde, Zami, 142. Ibid. 33 Giroux, “Eroding and Eliding, Breaking and Building,” 288. 34 Lorde, Zami, 155. 32

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them part of her growing identity; the result of seeing her Black self from a positive, hopeful perspective prompts small changes in her daily routine that have positive psychological effects: “I started to break my life-long habit of looking down at my feet as I walked along the street. . . everywhere I went there were brown faces of every hue meeting mine . . . . I had never felt visible before, nor even known I lacked it.”35 Lorde’s sudden sense of being visible is little short of an epiphany or miracle for a Black woman, who is likewise a lesbian. The veil of invisibility has been lifted and Lorde will spend the remainder of her life fighting to remain in a blinding light of visibility. Lorde’s sexual awakening is also achieved in Mexico where a dominant culture of heterosexual white society is either weak or intentionally downplayed by the protagonist in her tale. Instead, one is led to believe that, although Cuernavaca is not completely free from the long reaching arm of the United States’ McCarthy Terrorists, here it appears that one is free to express sexual preference without fear of retribution, and that all races are equally accepted. It is in this small Mexican village that Lorde meets and makes love to Eudora, a fortyish, white lesbian journalist, and for the first time allows a woman to make love to her. The passion and understanding which build this relationship and help Lorde better define her lesbian and political identities do not endure, and the relationship is ended by Eudora. Nevertheless, this has been a critical relationship in terms of Lorde’s identity building. Not only does her lovemaking with this woman move her beyond mere giver of sex to become an equal participant in this exchange, which richens and broadens her lesbian identification. Moreover, the focus on Eudora’s mastectomy scar prior to and during their lovemaking, places an emphasis on mapping of injured women’s bodies, which references not only the survivor of breast cancer but, likewise, the lesbian out in society enduring the social criticism and political abuses which leave deeper, but no less enduring, scars on one’s identity. Returning to her Greenwich Village apartment on Seventh Street, Lorde takes what she has learned from her lesbian lovers, Eudora and Ginger, and attempts to openly embrace her homosexuality; going out to gay bars, she actively seeks other lesbians for camaraderie. However, as she soon discovers, the politics of being out and gay is not as straightforward as one would think, even when surrounded by other homosexuals. “Downtown in the gay bars I was a closet student and an invisible Black. Uptown at Hunter, I was a closet dyke and a general intruder.”36 Breaking into the 35 36

Ibid., 156. Ibid., 179.

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lesbian society and being accepted proves almost as difficult as being Black and finding acceptance in a white society. Identification with gay women, Black women, or Black lesbians is complicated by the boundaries erected by these individual smaller sects within the larger lesbian or feminine communities. These individual groups, as a means of safeguarding themselves against outsiders, and maintaining power within these groups, establish unwritten rules which must be observed. Lorde, although connecting with women as a lover and/ or as a Black woman, still does not fit into these cliques. The close, caring community of lesbians in which Lorde seeks identification does not seem to exist, and “sisterhood” is not offered to her as a result of her differences. In Zami she writes, I was “part of the “freaky” bunch of lesbians who weren’t into role-playing, and who butches and femmes, Black and white, disparaged with the term Ky-Ky,37 or AC/DC.”38 Once again, like during her high school years, Lorde chooses friends of “difference” taking refuge from the heterosexual and homosexual societies which disparage and shun her. Instead, she is drawn to “a loose group of young lesbians, white except for Flee and I, who hung out together, apart from whatever piece of the straight world we each had a separate place in.”39 Even with a group of women who accept her, Lorde continues to try and understand the lack of community in the lesbian society, and she seeks answers as a way of nurturing her developing lesbian identity. Identification with lesbians proves to be unpredictably complicated for Lorde. When she attempts to fit into the dominant lesbian community, she meets with resistance or outright denial as is the case when her ID is repeatedly, questioningly examined by the same bouncer at the Bag (a gay bar).40 The questioning of Lorde’s age, even when the bouncer knows she is over the age of twenty-one, is meant to point out her difference and unacceptability as a “Colored” lesbian. It seems impossible for Lorde to integrate smoothly into any single group identity. No matter what group she seeks to integrate with, lesbian, Blacks, and combinations of these groups, Lorde is confronted with her differences, which frequently leads to rejection. But rather than face these acts of negating with aggression, 37

Ibid., 178. In Zami, Lorde explains that “Ky-Ky” is a term for lesbian prostitutes” who sleep with johns for money” (178). This is a derogatory term, and these women are looked down on for sleeping with the opposite sex out of necessity rather than by choice. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 179. 40 Ibid., 180. “The Bagatelle was the most popular gay-girl’s bar in [Greenwich] Village…”

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Lorde decides that “for some of us there is no one particular place.”41 The differences which set her apart define all of these groups she wishes to identify with: Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black Women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different.42

Lorde’s experiences of denied membership teach her that any one of these identities will not be enough for her universe. She is more than any single identity: “self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford or settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self.”43 Unlike the erosion or building processes that form her identity up to this point, landscaping of identity now comprises division and parceling up of one’s self. But even in her acknowledgement that she must be a conglomeration of many varied identifications and identities, Lorde cannot help but long to forge a more intimate connection with her own “people”: Black women and Black lesbians. Amongst these women who share her same skin color, plight for equality, and love of women there are still major separations—a lack of communication. “Sometimes we’d pass Black women on Eighth Street—the invisible but visible sisters—and our glances might cross, but we never looked into each other’s eyes. We acknowledged kinship by passing in silence, looking the other way.”44 This mutual silence between Black lesbians is performed out of necessity, because “to be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment . . . was considered by most to be simply suicidal.”45 Avoiding all obvious markers or boundaries is crucial in the mapping of these bordered (marked) and yet invisible bodies. In addition to restructuring her body and language, the protagonist also maps key spaces in relation to their ability to aid or retard her identity growth. Mexico is certainly a location that affords Lorde many occasions for self-growth and contemplation. Likewise, her Spring Street and Seventh Street apartments are routinely “re-landscaped” to express 41

Ibid., 226. Ibid. 43 Ibid., 224. 44 Ibid., 180. 45 Ibid., 224. 42

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characteristics of her varied selves and changing relationships. But Hunter High School, Hunter College, and especially the Bagatelle, among other places, prove dangerous to Lorde’s self-expression, her individuality, and her difference. These places promote the sense of invisibleness in the protagonist and other Black lesbians. However, Lorde discovers that bearing an identity that is not immediately recognizable or acceptable to any subset/ social group in society, although dangerous, can be freeing and provide power to the individual. It could be argued that in this recognition, she strives less for acceptance as a lesbian or even as a Black among her peers, but rather moves forward with her identity formation as an individual, more comfortable in her difference. Lorde takes a major step toward restructuring her identity by entering into a committed lesbian relationship with Muriel. Although she is still not openly gay at college, she makes no attempts to hide her relationship with Muriel. The next few months the women are happy as they work to make a life together; however, after Lorde awakens one night to discover Muriel making love to another woman, she feels betrayed. She intentionally scalds her hand and arm in retaliation, leaving a permanent marker of the relationship and its erosive end. Before leaving the couple’s apartment, Muriel burns her poetry and journals in a galvanized tin bucket in the middle of the living room. “The bottom of the pail left a permanent burn in the shape of a ring upon the old flowered linoleum.”46 As time passes, Lorde wishes to remap her personal space to no longer reflect the scars left by her relationship with Muriel; she begins by following her mother’s instructions of rubbing cocoa butter into her burned hand to decrease the visible scarring, and then she renovates her apartment. “Felicia and I cut out the old [burned] square and pieced in a remnant of the same pattern which we found on Delancey Street the following spring.”47 The switching out of the floor tile for another piece that is identical shows Lorde’s desire to maintain consistency of the old foundation and physical structure of the apartment, maintain the same flooring, while effectively removing the marred section and the constant reminder of the destroyed relationship. Therefore, the landscaping of the apartment is equivalent and necessary to the renovation of Lorde. In the final chapter, Lorde meets Afrekete in a gay bar; they are both wearing matching belts—broad and black with brass buckles.48 They immediately identify one another as Black lesbians through bodily 46

Ibid., 240. Ibid. 48 Ibid., 245. 47

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mapping, their dress and mannerisms, and they become lovers. The description of Kitty’s apartment is filled with much landscaping imagery as Lorde describes the city and street location of the apartment, then, the details of the one and a half room kitchenette apartment with its lush decor of plants, a fish tank, and the light streaming in on the lovers through the windows. The scenes of lovemaking are sensuous, tropical scenes replete with fruit—green plantains and ripe red finger bananas—and beautifully graphic descriptions of planting these fruits deep within each others bodies to mark their erotic zones for sexual pleasure. In July, Kitty leaves town telling Lorde goodbye in a note: “We parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange.”49 “I never saw Afrekete again, but her print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo.”50 Kitty’s imprint that she leaves on Lorde’s identity is potent and magical just as the physical love they share is the final bodily landscaping marker of this text. Zami concludes with Lorde leaving her apartment on Seventh Street that has been her home for seven years. The apartment is described as marked with Lorde’s text: “there were four half-finished poems scribbled on the bathroom wall . . . others on the window jambs and the floorboards under the flowered linoleum. . . .”51 The “casing” of the apartment, which has provided a safe location for the protagonist’s human body to “renew itself,” serves as both a written record as well as a symbol of Lorde’s growing and changing identity. Many of the relationships that have forwarded Lorde’s understanding of herself as a Black woman and lesbian are lived out in this space. Walls are painted and floors replaced in an effort to cover old battle scars from ending relationships while allowing for new identities to emerge, new relationships to form. In these relationships Lorde notes, “Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me—so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting.”52 Both the women Lorde loves as well as the changing woman in herself come and go, but with each new love, each new identity of her own, the protagonist becomes a more powerful individual. The place of this growth is her apartment and, like Lorde, it is inscribed and changed with the language of landscaping. An outsider literally ‘reading the writing on Lorde’s walls’ will discover a woman who pushes against 49

Ibid., 253. Ibid. 51 Ibid., 255. 52 Ibid. 50

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the norms of society, seeks out new ways of expression, new ways of writing her identity into being; hence, the half-finished poems are written, not in a chapbook or journal, but between the toilet and tub, places of release and renewal of the body. And rather than create borders that others cannot cross, Lorde leaves the front door of her apartment unlocked in her final departure, welcoming all others in who need shelter.53

53

Ibid.

ECHO AS VENTRILOQUIST: DISEMBODIED VOCAL PERFORMANCE AND FEMINIST RHETORICAL AGENCY LYDIA MCDERMOTT

Echo, the mythical nymph, who was cursed by Juno to be confined forever to repeating the words of others, and whose form decayed, only to be survived by her ever-repeating voice, represents a gendered aspect of writing, rhetoric, and form—an aspect she performs in the dialogue following this introduction—repeating the ends of phrases uttered by the men around her. Echo's voice loses access to her body. She becomes literally a displaced voice without a form. Steven Connor, in his book Dumbstruck, traces the history of ventriloquism, characterizing it as "disembodied voices,"1 which is of course exactly what Echo is: a voice without her own form. Echo is sound overlapping sound. Echo is resonance. In the realm of classical rhetoric, women's voices have historically been reduced to echoes. Like the mythical nymph, women, lacking definitive form and logic, are doomed to performing the male voice back to the males who originate the rhetoric over and over again. But this echo can be subversive and resistant in its performance. Adrianna Cavarero writes of Echo's performative function in her monograph, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression: Repetition—the very repetition that is the famous mechanism of the "performative," through which meaning is stabilized and destabilized— here turns out to be a mechanism that produces the reverse effect. Echo's repetition is a babble that dissolves the semantic register entirely, leading the voice back to an infantile state that is not yet speech. 2

1

Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2 Adrianna Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 168.

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Echo as Ventriloquist

In unraveling Cavarero's statement, we encounter Judith Butler's3 conception of interpellation, whereby a process of repeating and performing bodily imperatives solidifies one's gendered meaning/being. Cavarero suggests here that the act of repetition has resistant potential in the figure of Echo.

Interruption: A Cacophonious Dialogue beyond the Time/Space Continuum4 Vitruvius:5 "Voice is a flowing breath of air, perceptible to the hearing by contact. It moves in an endless number of circular rounds, like the 3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Ed. (NY: Routledge, 1999). 4 The Greek kakos can be translated as bad, evil, trouble, harsh (all bad connotations) and phone is sound; cacophony is a multitude of bad/harsh sounds (Preston T. Massey, The Veil and the Voice: A Study of Female Beauty and Male Attraction in Ancient Greece (PhD diss., Indiana University, Ann Arbor, 2006).) Maud Gleason (Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome, (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1995.) points out the connection between cacophony, effeminacy, vulgarity, excess and theater, noting that rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic period avoided giving detailed accounts of vocal training, so as not to be associated with the vocal trainers of theater (103-4). She paraphrases and quotes the Ad Herennium: "In deportment and gesture, we should show the same reserve, avoiding extremes both of elegance and vulgarity, 'lest we give the impression that we are either actors or manual laborers'" (105). See Peter Elbow's "The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing" in CCC 57.4 (2006) on the relation of time and space to text and voice. 5 The characters in this dialogue existed through a broad range of ancient and classical Greek and Roman periods. When their words are in quotations, these are exact quotes from their writings. If not, they are paraphrases, but the idea and sentiment are present in the character's writing. The only character whose words are entirely fictional is Echo. None of the words I am attributing to Echo have ever been recorded by any writer of mythology. Rather, I am allowing her to perform her function here: only being able to repeat the words and ends of phrases of other people. I am, however, attempting to give her some agency by constructing and choosing her repetition to complicate the meanings of the words she is repeating. In effect, I imagine her using her confinement to resist this dominant discourse. Here is a list of the characters actual time periods: Vitruvius probably wrote De Architectura between 33 and 14 BCE. Aristotle lived between 384-322 BCE. Echo is a mythological nymph featured in the story of "Echo and Narcissus" in Ovid's Metamorphoses, (CE 8) though she existed in oral mythology previously. In the myth, Echo (a too-talkative nymph) is punished by Hera (for distracting her while the other nymphs Zeus was cavorting with got away) by dooming her to always

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innumerably increasing circular waves which appear when a stone is thrown into smooth water, and which keep on spreading indefinitely from the centre unless interrupted by narrow limits, or by some obstruction which prevents such waves from reaching their end in due formation. When they are interrupted by obstructions, the first waves, flowing back, break up the formation of those which follow."6 Quintilian: "Yet the living voice, as it is called, feeds the mind more nutritiously."7 Aristotle: "We must hold that all of these persons have their appropriate virtues, as the poet [Sophocles] said of woman: “Silence gives grace to woman—" though that is not the case likewise with a man."8 Echo: Silence . . . with a man. Sophocles: (tilts head toward Echo) "The girl with no door on her mouth."9 Echo: Doormouth.

repeat the last words that someone has said. Because of this curse, Echo was unable to communicate her love to Narcissus, who died in love with himself. She pined away in the woods until she died, but her voice remained there, still echoing. Sophocles the poet wrote between 496-406 BCE. Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century CE. Hippocrates lived between 460-377 BCE. Socrates lived 469399 BCE, however these are Plato's words attributed to Socrates in his dialogueform of writing. Plato lived between 427-347 BCE and was Socrates' student. Dio Chrysostom was a Greek rhetorician associated with the Second Sophistic of First Century CE Roman Empire. St. Paul lived between 10 CE and 67 CE. Many of the books of the New Testament are attributed to Paul. 6 Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, ed. and trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 5.3.6, Perseus Collection: Greek and Roman Materials, 15 Apr. 2011, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0073 7 Quintilian, Institutia Oratoria, Book I, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 2.2, Perseus Collection: Greek and Roman Materials, 15 Apr. 2011, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2007.01.0060. 8 Aristotle, Politics, in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944), 1, 1260a, Perseus Collection: Greek and Roman Materials, 5 Jul 2013, http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg035.perseus-eng1. 9 Qtd. in Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound: Description, Definition and Mistrust of the Female Voice in Western Culture,” Resources for Feminist Research 23, no. 4 (1994).

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Echo as Ventriloquist Isidore: Female Singers must not menstruate, and are thus infertile. For if they sing with a clear throat, their other throat must also be clear. One mouth must not detract from the other.10 Quintilian: "It is necessary for the throat to be in good condition, that is, soft and flexible, for any defect in it may render the voice broken, husky, rough, or squeaking."11 Echo: Broken squeak squeaking. Hippocrates: I have treated girls whose "blood backed up and accumulated all around their hearts and mid-sections, making them delirious. Some don't get so desperate, of course; they just ramble and utter obscenities."12 Echo: Ramble and utter obscenities. Quintilian: "Yet the living voice, as it is called, feeds the mind more nutritiously."13 Socrates: "But I do think you will agree to this, that every discourse must be organized, like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless or footless, but to have a middle and members, composed in fitting relation to each other and to the whole."14 Aristotle: "But how is each part formed? We must answer this by starting in the first instance from the principle that, in all products of Nature or art, a thing is made by something actually existing out of that which is potentially such as the finished product. Now the semen is of such a nature and has in it such a principle of motion.”15 Echo: Feed the mind, the hole, of motion, of motion, of motion. Quintilian: "But to me, who looks to nature, any man with the full appearance of virility will be more pleasing than a eunuch, […] Regardless

10

Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 36. 11 Quintilian, Institutia Oratoria, 11.3.20. 12 Bonnie MacLachlan, “Voices from the Underworld: The Female Body Discussed in Two Dialogues,” Classical World 99, no. 4, 425. 13 Quintilian, Institutia Oratoria, 2.2. 14 Plato, Phaedrus, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 159. 15 Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione Animalium I, trans. D. M. Balme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 2.2.

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of how much audiences, overcome with pleasure, may applaud it, such effeminate eloquence (for I shall speak what I think) will never be worthy of the name of eloquence, for it is language which bears in it not the least indication of manliness or purity, to say nothing of gravity or sanctity, in the speaker."16 Socrates: "A person with such a body, in war and in all important crises, gives courage to his enemies, and fills his friends, and even his lovers themselves, with fear."17 Sophocles: “Silence gives grace to woman—"18 Echo: Fear . . . Woman. St. Paul: "Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head […] the head of every woman is man […] For man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man."19… "Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church."20 Echo: Fear . . . women to speak. Dio Chrysostom: "Suppose an entire community were struck by the following peculiar affliction: all the males suddenly acquired women's voices and no one, whether boy or adult, was able to say anything in manly fashion. Would that not seem unbearable—worse, indeed, than any plague?"21 Echo: Manly . . . unbearable . . . plague, plague, ague, age.

We can hear a legacy of fear of woman’s voice and body in this dialogue. And the voice and body are entwined. As Anne Carson notes: "Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category [of the feminine]. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable."22 16

Quintilian, Institutia Oratoria, 5.12.19-20. Plato, Phaedrus, 145. 18 Aristotle, Politics, 1. 1260a. 19 I Cor. 11: 5 and 3 and 7, NKJV. 20 I Cor. 14: 34-35, NKJV. 21 Dio Chrysostom, qtd. in Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and SelfPresentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 82. 22 Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” 17

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Here, Echo is a source of important disturbance, like the obstructions described in Vitruvius' opening monologue above, which "break up the formation" of sound waves. We can also imagine this disturbance in terms of genre, a word whose etymology whether traced through the noun "class" or through the verb "to generate," always leads back to gender.23 According to Anis Bawarshi, genres both shape and generate knowledge through a socio-rhetorical exchange, and even acts of resistance are shaped by their "antecedent genres."24 Echo was cursed by Juno to repeat the final words of her interlocutors, thus deforming their original intent and context and using these words to mean differently, resisting the antecedent genre of her babbling punishment. The voice of rhetoric may belong to man, but the echoes behind him emanate from a feminine realm.

Wise Up, Dummies Perhaps the earliest cases of "ventriloquism" were the Delphic Oracles in the Archaic Period of Greece.25 The Pythia were the women who delivered these oracles, and delivered is the apt word, since they were commonly thought literally to be impregnated with the voice/idea of Apollo, which they then delivered through their mouths. They received this message through vapors coming from the ground in the woman's quarters of Apollo's Temple in Delphi, over which they would sit on an open tripod/stool, so that the vapors could enter their vaginas and interact with their splancha (innards or womb) to create the oracle.26 To further the birthing imagery, "the woman's quarters [were] understood as a dark recess—the appropriate place from which prophetic knowledge as well as poetic production arise in terms of Greek notions about inner recesses, whether of bodies, earth, or temples."27 This is a birth story. This is a theory of rhetorical reproduction. (We hear echoes of this story in the story of the Holy Spirit impregnating the Virgin Mary, and the subsequent association of Jesus Christ with logos, the Word made flesh). Birth as 23 Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2010), 3-4, 5 Jul 2013, http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bawarshi_reiff/genre.pdf. 24 Anis Bawarshi, “The Genre Function,” College English 62, no. 3, 341. 25 Connor, Dumbstruck. 26 Lisa Maurizio, “The Voice at the Center of the World: The Pythias’ Ambiguity and Authority,” Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, eds. Andre Lardinois and Laura McClure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 47. 27 Ibid., 46-7.

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ventriloquism: Apollo's voice/idea thrown through the Pythia's body and mouth. But the ventriloquism is more complicated if we re-construct the Pythias as agents in this story, exercising power, and not as mere dummies being used by a god. Maurizio argues as much when she writes, "Simply put, the Pythias did compose and deliver Delphic oracles. The Pythias did speak. There is no evidence to the contrary."28 Unless we accept that Apollo's spirit spoke through the Pythias, we must accept that they composed these oracles themselves. Their ventriloquism is complicated then because they throw their own voices, seemingly disembodied, through their own bodies, seemingly passive receptacles. Furthermore, Maurizio establishes that the Pythias cleverly constructed their oracles to be ambiguous in order to grant them authority.29 Their language reflects their own bodily ambiguity as well as their ambiguity of social stature, being women and thus lower in a hierarchical power structure, but also divine messengers with absolute authority over their ambiguous words. Voice at this point, and specifically female voice, is associated with divine wisdom, with ambiguity and with birth. Wisdom, and specifically philosophical wisdom in the classical era, became separated from the female, from voice, and from ambiguity, and came to rely more and more on logos as evidenced in rational and clear discourse. Logos, the preeminent rhetorical appeal in Aristotle's system, was also once connected to the voice, however. Sharon Crowley notes that at the time of Gorgias's (487-376 BCE) use of the term logos, its meaning was ambiguous and could include "speech," "the word,” "the law," and "the voice."30

Performing Femininity in Silence and in Wailing In Ancient Greece and Rome, voice served to delineate the men from all that was feminized. I say "feminized" rather than "feminine" because from the androcentric position of privileged male-citizen, many varieties of gendered lives are lumped into one "non-male" and thus "feminine" category. Recall Anne Carson's statement quoted earlier: "Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are

28

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. 30 Sharon Crowley, “Of Gorgias and Grammatology,” College Composition and Communication 30, no. 3, 280, my emphasis. 29

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bad to hear and make men uncomfortable."31 Cheryl Glenn notes this understanding of gendered experience in her discussion of the figure of Aspasia. She explains that "woman" was "a category that included any person who did not meet the prestigious requirements of Athenian citizenship; such a person was automatically feminized, gendered 'nonmale.'"32 So in Classical Athens, woman means "nonmale." In general, women were expected to remain silent. However, they were required to perform a certain kind of vocality within a limited and prescribed sphere. Anne Carson describes this ritualized vocalization, the "ololyga," as: [A] ritual shout peculiar to females. It is a high-pitched piercing cry uttered at certain climactic moments in ritual practice (e. g., at the moment when a victim's throat is slashed during sacrifice) or at climactic moments in real life (e. g., at the birth of a child) and is also a common feature of women's festivals…The sound represents a cry of either intense pleasure or intense pain.33

So, women in classical Greece were quite literally called upon to be the emotion-bearers, to wail ritualistically for the entire community. It is important to note here the absence of words. This is a ritual voicing of emotion, sound without words, so it still rests outside the realm of rhetoric, and within the same realm as animal sounds. Carson discusses this realm of existence for women at length: Women, in the ancient view, share this territory [that of the outcast wolf, apeiron, "the unbounded"] spiritually and metaphorically in virtue of a "natural" female affinity for all that is raw, formless and in need of the civilizing hand of man. So, for example, in the document cited by Aristotle that goes by the name of "The Pythagorean Table of Opposites," we find the attributes curving, dark, secret, evil, ever-moving, not self-contained and lacking boundaries aligned with Female and set over against straight, light, honest, good, stable, self-contained and firmly bounded on the Male side.34

Women, by nature, are closer to animals, to the wild, because they, like Echo, are formless. This oppositional logic pervades Greek classical 31

Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Indiana University Press, 1997), 14. 33 Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” 34 Ibid. 32

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thought and culture, which is characteristically agonistic,35 and decidedly male. Furthermore, we can hear echoes of our current gender practices in this table of opposites where "straight," "Male," "honest" and "good" (etc.) are the norm in our current society and "queerness" and "femaleness" become associated with "bad" and "dishonest."

Subversive Feminine Performance The feminine, "nonmale," category of voice is extremely suspect based on these associations. Anne Carson remarks: "Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder, and death."36 This may sound extreme, but a quick reminder of some female figures from Greek mythology reveals the connection: Echo, Helen, the Sirens, Kassandra, the Furies, Pandora and Medusa, to name a few. Additionally, Maurizio cites these same figures as illustration of a connection of vocal/language ambiguity with femaleness.37 Furthermore, Carson continues: "Female sound was judged to arise in craziness and to generate craziness."38 But this reasoning is circular and self-perpetuating, as Carson points out: If women's public utterance is perpetually enclosed within cultural institutions like the ritual lament, if women are regularly reassigned to the expression of non-rational sounds like the ololyga and raw emotion in general, then the so-called "natural" tendency of the female to shrieking, wailing, weeping, emotional display and oral disorder cannot help but become a self-fulfilling prophecy.39

So women are sanctified, ritualized emotion bearers and sharers, defined by their high-pitched, irrational, emotional voices, and yet this is the only space in which they are permitted to have a voice, and so this is the voice they continue to develop. The community throws their collective emotional voice through women's mouths, causing them to wail when the community says it is time to wail; ventriloquizing the emotion they themselves cannot

35

Gleason, Making Men. Also see Debra Hawhee, “Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists’ Three Rs,” College English 65, no. 2, 2002: 142-62. 36 Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” 37 Maurizio, “The Voice at the Center of the World,” 40. 38 Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” 39 Ibid.

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bear, they turn women into ritual dummies. Can dummies ever control their invading voices? Anne Carson also describes the ritual of the aischrologia, meaning "saying ugly things," in which at certain women's festivals, women "shouted abusive remarks or obscenities or dirty jokes at one another."40 So her sounds are bad not just because of their emotion-laden high pitch, but also because the words themselves are obscene. D.M. O'Higgins suggests that this sanctioned space was not necessarily just a controlled space for "venting," but could serve subversive purposes. She uncovers the male fear of women's verbal and sexual power and their connection to one another in her examination of the Demeter cultic festival of Thesmophoria, practiced widely throughout Greece, which featured aischrologia in the form of dirty joking. O'Higgins remarks that: Beginning with Pandora, women were portrayed as unwholesomely verbal. Yet their worrisome proclivities meant that their use of obscenity was believed to have power denied to men. Sexual and transgressive natures gave them an affinity with sexual and transgressive speech. At the same time, since the rules governing speech were more stringent in the case of women, the power released by women breaking those rules was proportionally greater.41

What O'Higgins describes is another circular process. Though the restrictions on women's speech made their speech potentially more powerful because it is therefore more transgressive, equally, we could assume that the restrictions are in place because of a fear of an inherent power men are trying to suppress. And this power is linked directly to the mysterious process of human generation. O'Higgins explains: Women also held within them potentially explosive secrets, knowing—as no one else could—the paternity of the children they brought to birth. 'Speaking the unspeakable' (aporrheta or arrheta), the repressed or concealed thing, mirrored their ability to unlock the womb and its secrets: the power to give birth, and to affirm or deny paternity.42

In a highly patriarchal culture, the issue of paternity is crucial. Women's bodies, formless and uncontrollable against the norm of the male body, 40

Ibid. D. M. O’Higgins, “Women’s Cultic Joking and Mockery: Some Perspectives,” Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, eds. Andre Lardinois and Laura McClure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 145. 42 Ibid. 41

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carry physical secrets in the womb, and women's voices are the only voices that can communicate these powerful secrets.

Pleasurable Performance A woman's voice is also an exposure, a confession of sexuality in and of itself. It reveals too much, not just because women have been coded as having emotional voices, but also because their throats are analogous to their vaginas. There is an analogous relationship in ancient thought between a woman's throat and her vagina, between her mouth and her genitalia, and even between her uvula and her clitoris. So her voice is dangerous, not just because of its potential to emasculate the hearer, but also because it is anatomically related to her sexuality, and is therefore sexually alluring. Hence, Soranus asserts in various places that too much vocal exercise in a woman can cause her to stop menstruating, much like the modern day gymnast whose vigorous exercise and lack of fat leads to amenorrhea.43 We see in this interdiction the emphasis of the woman's reproductive role rather than her productive role: she must not participate in too much discourse (or vocal training), lest she lose her ability to reproduce children. The myth of Echo illustrates this same kind of reasoning. Recall that Echo used her voice too much: "in fact, she is positively verbose, capable of entertaining people with long-winded discourses … She is not just any conversationalist, therefore, but a young girl who has total command of the language, possessed of a typically feminine rhetorical talent."44 Her punishment is literally to be reduced to reproduction, though she reproduces voices rather than children. Echo as purely voice is purely sexual and dangerous. Furthermore, the bodily analogy between a woman's upper and lower mouths can be seen as a way to keep her silent. Echo is meant to be a victim in this parable: doomed to inhabit the sexuality of voice, but only ever reproducing more voice, and therefore according to the logic of Plato in the Timaeus, becoming more and more irrational as she is unable to reproduce children. She is voice as women were sanctioned to perform it in the ololyga and the aischrologia: lacking reason and form, emotional and obscene, desperately needing to be confined and controlled. Cheryl Glenn writes, "For the past twenty-five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life 43 44

Gleason, Making Men, 96-7. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 165.

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(domestic confinement)."45 Closing doors on women is a longstanding patriarchal tradition. To elaborate on the analogical relationship of closed bodily-doors, consider: "Galen explains the anatomical role of the nymphë (clitoris), which protects the womb by comparing it to the uvula which protects the pharynx: women's reproductive organs are analogous to the organs of (men's) speech."46 Carson also notes that Soranus made the same sort of analogy specifically in regards to a woman's conceiving a child: "At the moment of conception […] the woman has a shivering sensation and the perception that the mouth of her uterus closes upon the seed."47 So, according to both Galen and Soranus, we mustn't mistake the clitoris as an organ made for pleasure, nor the orgasm as pleasure with no purpose aside from pleasure itself. We now know, I hope, that the clitoris is actually an organ of pleasure, as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues reminds us: "The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers.”48 Interestingly, the etymology of nymph relates to minor divine beings, like Echo, as well as to the clitoris or labia minora, and has been used colloquially to reference prostitutes, as the use of the word "nymphomaniac" might suggest.49 Cavarero points out that Echo, the nymph that she is, like the clitoris represents pleasure for pleasure's sake: "For as Ovid himself no doubt knew, Echo is not so much a tragic figure of interdicted speech as she is a figure of a certain pleasure."50 When we walk into a cave and discover our own echo, we are not thrilled by our own words, but by the playful resonance of our own voice bouncing back and over our own voice. We repeat ourselves in order to hear ourselves repeated. Cavarero argues here and throughout her book that voice, in and of itself, is powerful and relational. We respond to an infant's voice despite the lack of words. I get teary-eyed listening to Rossini's Stabat Mater though I do not know Italian. The voices matter. Echo represents the lost pleasure of pure vocalizing, though I suggest she can also engage the semantic level within the pleasure of vocalizing. When Echo repeats her interlocutor's words, because they come back fragmented, they mean differently. They do not 45

Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, 1. Gleason, Making Men, 97. 47 Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” 48 Natalie Angier, quoted in Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues, Tenth Anniversary Ed. (NY: Villard, 2007), 51. 49 Oxford English Dictionary. 50 Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 169. 46

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necessarily cease to mean, though they could. They can emphasize. They can interrogate. They can deconstruct. Echo is potentially powerful on two levels, fittingly: on the level of pleasurable play with sound, and on the level of subversive rhetorical communication. Whenever a man has spoken, an echo has been created. A woman is always there, standing at the door, mocking him, often with his own words. Knock mock knock mock.

Destroying and Creating Bodies Ventriloquism is a complex theatrics of voice, in which a voice "appears" to come from a source other than its actual source. It is a common metaphor for the practice of speaking another's words, or even channeling the intent or style of another. So it is not strange that I see ventriloquism as a handy term for the ways in which women have channeled the "voices" of men, silencing themselves, as well as the ways in which men have appropriated women's thoughts, words, voices and made them come out of their own mouths. Echo is the mythical character I am drawn to keep coming back to (not surprisingly). And one figure in classical rhetoric to whom I must listen carefully is Diotima, as Plato ventriloquizes her. [T]here are persons […] who in their souls still more than in their bodies conceive those things [prudence and virtue] which are proper for soul to conceive and bring forth […] So when a man's soul is so far divine that it is made pregnant with these from his youth, and on attaining manhood immediately desires to bring forth and beget, he too, I imagine, goes about seeking the beautiful object whereon he may do his begetting […] if he chances also on a soul that is fair and noble and well-endowed […] [B]y contact with the fair one and by consorting with him he bears and brings forth his long-felt conception […] Equally too with him he shares the nurturing of what is begotten, so that men in this condition enjoy a far fuller community with each other than that which comes with children. 51

We could read the birth metaphors Diotima uses as a revaluing of the reproductive function of women, as C. Jan Swearingen has argued, except that there is such a clear hierarchy of male-to-male love over male-tofemale love in this passage.52 Men who love the souls of other men are able to "bring forth" what is already within them. These men felt pregnant before they ever met each other. They do not need someone to conceive 51

Plato, Symposium 208.e-209, qtd. in Glenn, 46. C. Jan Swearingen, “Plato’s Feminine: Appropriation, Impersonation and Metaphorical Polemic,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22, no. 1, 109-123. 52

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within them; they need a partner to bring forth and nurture what is already there. And in so doing, they "enjoy a far fuller community with each other than that which comes with children." Clearly this is meant to be superior to mere childbirth, which is messy and bodily and feminine, and marked by the ololyga: the emotion-filled cry of not only the woman giving birth but also all women of the community. Plato characterizes Diotima as Socrates' teacher, and as a stranger. According to Glenn, this foreignness would have given her more leniency in her femininity being able to discourse in public with men.53 Since Socrates is attributing this speech to her, she is certainly receiving respect and voice in the public where women could not. Her speech also sounds different than the male characters' speech. Where Plato has Socrates, through dialectical conversation and questions, continually divide and classify, Diotima supports a position of more ambiguity: "'Then do not compel what is not beautiful to be ugly,' she said, 'or what is not good to be bad. Likewise of Love, when you find yourself admitting that he is not good nor beautiful, do not therefore suppose he must be ugly and bad, but something betwixt the two.'"54 In Plato's performance of writing, in his characterization of Diotima, he created her voice to sound distinct and more feminine through use of ambiguity and birth metaphors. We have seen how feminine voice was related to ambiguity, but also to divine wisdom. Perhaps Plato is drawing on the legacy of the Pythia and the Delphic Oracles in his (re)writing of Diotima's speech, thereby appropriating more than just a birthing metaphor, but also the power once given to women within the ritual of the Delphic Oracles. He is controlling and appropriating both of women's powerful mouths: the power of discourse and knowledge as well as the power of generation (and pleasure). Diotima is the antithesis to the Pythia. She is Echo trapped within her babbling punishment. I would like to reclaim a subversive Echo. Steven Connor traces disembodied voices from the Delphic Oracle to technological advances such as the gramophone and shows the power of the ventriloquized voice to invoke fear and awe as well as humor. He writes of the "vocalic body" created by such voices: Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies. The vocalic body is the idea—which can take the form of dream, fantasy, ideal, theological doctrine, or hallucination—of a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and 53 54

Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, 36. Plato, Symposium, 202b, qtd. in Glenn, 46.

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sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice. […] [H]uman beings in many different cultural settings find the experience of a sourceless sound uncomfortable, and the experience of a sourceless voice intolerable.55

Echo, in this sense, is intolerable. We hear her voice repeating our own words, but we cannot find her form, except in our own imaginations. Connor explains how voices create bodies in the example of a dummy or a puppet seeming to take on life and gesture once we have located a voice inside it: "Our assumption that the object is speaking allows its voice to assume that body, in the theatrical or even theological sense, as an actor assumes a role, or as a divinity assumes incarnate form; not just to enter or suffuse it, but to produce it."56 I am reminded of the Pythia in this description. Apollo seemed to assume the form of the Pythias when they delivered their oracles. But, critically, the Pythia actually produced the god rather than the god's voice producing their bodies. Their performance, eerily seeming disconnected from their own bodies, created the possibility of the ventriloquist Apollo. If a dummy speaks, we assume a ventriloquist. The Pythia can create this illusion through ambiguity. In the Ancient Western world, voice was experienced differently for those in the "nonmale" gendered category than for those who were clearly male, and it continues to be experienced differently by those currently on the margins of the polis. We who are located in the apeiron territory of the outcast wolf have had limited access to our voices.57 We have been used as dummies to perform multiple voices not our own. We have shouted obscenities for others; we have cried for them. We have been shut up, shut out and pathologized. And when we have grasped what little power we've had, often we have thrown our voices elsewhere or used the voices we were given to subvert the message we were told to tell. I want to reclaim the power of the intolerable feminine voice of ambiguity. Voice need not be tied to essentialism or naive conceptions of authenticity if we can disembody it; release it to echo and disturb, and to generate its own vocalic bodies. Echo is powerful, even as she is disembodied. She cannot be silenced without the men she echoes silencing themselves.

55

Connor, Dumbstruck, 35. Ibid., 35-6. 57 Carson, “The Gender of Sound.” 56

OPEN UP THE NET(WORK): HOW FEMINIST DISCOURSE COMPLICATES WISE CROWDS AURORA MATZKE

Many socially networked spaces used in online communications have become predicated on the wisdom of the crowd—a Web 2.0 organizational model that spawned folksonomic theory, where members of a community decide what is and is not included, highlighted, or dismissed (for example, Wikipedia). James E. Porter asks within Rhetoric in(as) a Digital Economy, “What motivates people to create, search, and circulate knowledge?” He believes “A focus on stylistics misses some of the issue: Rhetoric requires a productive and pragmatic knowledge about how to create information that will matter to people.”1 Porter, here, spotlights why individuals participate in the collective, and how individuals know how to participate. He asks, how do they learn to be relevant to, to be rhetorically savvy in, their communities? The productive and pragmatic knowledge Porter references is inextricably tied to the communities out of which this knowledge is born. Yet, this wisdom, if unchecked, can reproduce the tyranny of the majority over the minority through information cascades and bandwagon movements. Consequently, I would extend his argument to include the question: what about information that does not matter to the majority? By asking what “will matter” or “matters most” in discussions of folksonomy and crowd activities in the semantic web, without considering what may be excluded or deemed unimportant, we may perpetuate a hierarchy of participation predicated on “good” performance. We may focus too much on what the majority already knows—the nomoi already put in place by the collective. As feminist rhetorical teachers, we might instead focus on the minority spaces characterized as lack, characterized as 1 James E. Porter, “Rhetoric in(as) a Digital Economy,” Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, ed. Stuart A. Selber (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 173-197, 177.

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“does not matter,” and consider how these neglected spaces might contribute to communities and the framework of socially networked places. By reminding ourselves, as teachers, researchers, practitioners, to look toward past examples of resistance—such as that documented by bell hooks in her discussions of how feminism and race studies came into the American academy—we can then frame our discussions of folksonomy with an eye cast toward valuing and reclaiming what is forgotten, lost, or ignored. This essay will reposition folksonomy as feminist praxis, with careful attention to the etymological roots of both folk and nomos embedded within the term. Ultimately, I will argue socially networked classroom environments take fuller advantage of the wisdom of the crowd to develop and sustain curricula that requires students and teachers to critique their own educational assumptions, if these communities engage feminist methodologies of disruption and lack. To close the essay, in participation with the theoretical crowd working with and on folksonomic environments, I offer a new definition of folksonomy through the inclusion of feminist theories of disruption and an etymological recovery that allows for the emergence of a critically feminist, folksonomic (or CFF) perspective.

Social Networking and Wise Crowds The study of social networks and the turn toward user created and/or maintained organization posits that individuals who may or may not know one another, share the same goals or ideas, have any particular leadership training, or even understand much beyond the basic precepts of the available information, can still make decisions that will mutually benefit the entire group more efficiently than an expert.2 James Surowiecki rejuvenated the discussion of crowd wisdom on the pop-cultural market through his text The Wisdom of Crowds, in 2004. Since then, crowd wisdom continues to gain press and academic ground as everyone from Netflix to MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence seeks to understand what makes a crowd wise. Of course, healthy social networks, defined by James Surowiecki as “wise crowds”—those that can quickly solve complex problems, generate new materials for, and make decisions that benefit the whole—generally don’t happen by accident. There are four ways humans must be organized so that wisdom can take shape: “diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation 2

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor: New York, 2004), 23-107.

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of the known facts), independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them), decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision).”3 Wise crowds must be shaped; individuals must be chosen through “carefully designed,” “open innovation models,” where, “incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators.”4 In other words, a random group of people can provide highly accurate answers to fairly simple and unsophisticated problems (how many beans are in a jar). But for more complex problems (how to build a car), the working environments and those asked to solve the problem must be carefully chosen by individuals well-versed in the issue. Consequently, most social networks rely on some form of Surowiecki’s four principles in order to maintain growth and high user interaction.5

The Rise of Folksonomy as a Theory of Practice In 2004, both Eric Scheid and Thomas Vanderal, members of the Asylomar Institute for Information Architecture listserv, named the userbased classification process supported by social networking applications like Flickr and Del.icio.us “folksonomy.”6 Vanderwal, in particular, defined folksonomy as “the user-created bottom-up categorical structure development with an emergent thesaurus.”7 In the following years, folksonomy was rapidly adopted by many digital theorists in the academic community to refer to any and all web-based applications that allow users any organizational or creative license of any and all displayed and created materials—including sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us, as well as different wiki spaces. And while information architects, digital teachers, and those 3

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 23-107. 5 Of course, information cascades can develop—as users vote up videos because they have been voted up by a high majority of watchers before them; add popular tags to pictures because they’ve seen the tags used elsewhere and want the same types of views; or join and participate in the same groups because their “friends” have joined before them. Yet, the overwhelming number of users, materials, ever increasing network availabilities, and the illusion of independence (users have their own YouTube channels, Facebook walls, etc.) have the ability to reinforce Suroweicki’s wise crowd principles. 6 Thomas Vander Wal, “Folksonomy,” Vanderwal (February 2007, http://www.vanderwal.net), Visited 8 October 2009. 7 Ibid. 4

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that follow online trends continue to debate what exactly folksonomy is, suffice to say the subtle but important difference emerging between Vander Wal’s initial definition of folksonomy and the crowd’s is like that between Del.icio.us and Flickr: Are users simply tagging and organizing information made available to them, as with Del.icio.us? Or, are they significantly building and changing the landscape, the networks, through the integration of their own knowledge, their own materials, as with Flickr? These questions rest at the crux of the issue for experts across fields: can crowds, organized around social networks, be trusted to know what is best? If we argue that the crowd might know what’s best, how does that change or shape discussions of student-centering and classroom organization? In sum, for digital pedagogues engaged in folksonomic work, folksonomy is: 1.

A theory and practice of teaching writ broad that gives the primary control of information as it is displayed, organized, revised, and used, to the community of students, so they might be the primary shapers of the digital landscape of the classroom based on their own knowledge and interests as a social network.

2.

Where the teacher utilizes open-innovation models to encourage diversity of opinion, working as the primary digital coordinator for the learning group.

And

I would argue a truly folksonomic space, a space intent on following wise crowd theory to its most profound conclusions, must allow community members to not only add or delete whatever content they wish the network to be organized around, but must also hand over primary control of the writing, distribution, and revision of the networked materials. In a writing classroom, this means the information students engage with in order to write must be decided and constructed by their information networks, their communities—not the teacher’s. Yet to only agree with Surowiecki’s claims about wise crowds, or to disagree with Vander Wal’s definition of folksonomy, or to limit folksonomy to the Internet-based applications where it is applied, one ignores the “rhetorical genealogy” of both folk and nomos as they have

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moved through time and space.8 Consequently, I would further argue that an understanding of the historical definition of folksonomy highlights the critical complexity enacted through the word’s roots.

Folk and Nomos: Or, Folksonomy Historically Defined Folk is Germanic in origin (volk), with roots older than Beowulf.9 The vulgarity attributed to “folk,” as demonstrated by Dillon Bustin, a folklorist who specializes in museum services, can be linked to a protoIndo-European strain of discourse that places individuals in the same category as dough. Bustin states, “My goal here is to recover the derivation from proto-Indo-European root *pel- (flour) and its metathesized stem*plëgo- (people) to Greek poltos (porridge) and polis (settlement) to Late Latin ladô (pancake or flapjack) and vulgus (common people) to Gothic folkam, Old English folc, and High German Volk.”10 Here, the reader can see connections between the common people and common foodstuffs—flour, porridge, and flapjack. These commonalities then create communities: “settlements” of “commoners” working together for survival. The roots Bustin shares suggest that folk is cultural code for the commoner—a connection educators would do well to remember, especially if they then move to argue that folksonomies are all inclusive. Clearly, by invoking “common,” folk does not include everyone. The Oxford English Dictionary highlights folk as a word used to describe “a people, nation, race, [or] tribe,” that can also designate “the great mass,” or “the vulgar,” in “aggregation [or] relation to a superior.”11 The OED definition moves beyond translation and into practice to imply two main folk traits:

8

For a rich description of rhetorical genealogy, see Mary Queen’s “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World,” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 471489. 9 “Folk.” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); And while it would be irresponsible to ignore volk’s associations with Nazi-ruled Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I wish to reclaim folk by appealing to a nearly one thousand year living history of the term— highlighted by the many uses of folk within American Standardized English: folk music, folktales, folk art, folk hero, to name just a few (“Folk” OED; “Folk” Wikimedia). 10 Dillon Bustin, “Essay on a Flapjack: Philology and the Urvolk,” Journal of Folklore Research 46.2 (May-August 2009), 117-140, 118. 11 “Folk,” OED.

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1.

It designates groups of people united by common understandings and/or belief systems as they interact with one another, produce and purchase artifacts, and build or breakdown social networks.

2.

It exists in negotiation with a hierarchical structure (One which may be understood explicitly, as designated by “a superior,” or implicitly, through words like “vulgar,” and “mass.”) perceived as functioning outside of the “folk” group.

And

In other words, one person’s flapjack is another’s porridge, and both are heavily affected by the forces of power they move, learn, and interact with, around, under, and over. Yet, more so than the artifacts produced by any group of individuals, “folk” is inherently lifestyle and place oriented. The many contributors to Wikipedia created the following definition: “Folk culture refers to the lifestyle of a culture…. [I]t demonstrates the ‘old ways’ over novelty and relates to a sense of community. Folk culture is quite often imbued with a sense of place. If elements of a folk culture are copied by, or moved to, a foreign locale, they will still carry strong connotations of their original place of creation.”12 Lifestyle, community, place: all central to an understanding of folk. Consequently, the outsider can only shift, explain, or use so much of an incoming group’s cultural commonplaces—their nomoi—to “build” a community of practice. This would also seem to suggest that folk designation loses the traction it has in a place when deployed outside of that place; primary control must be maintained by the group. In other words, outsiders must make use of folk reliance on the give and take of communities, must labor to produce these moments of inquiry and interest, using the resources inherent to the spaces that they have learned of through participation in their own educationally driven discourse communities. Joseph Harris, in his work on “community” and the problems he sees inherent in the use of the term, falls in line with folk ideas, especially in his conversation of “public,” “material,” and “circulation.”13 Harris discards community in favor of public, material, and circulation because they “can help us imagine our work as teachers as taking place not within the 12

“Folk,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (Wikimedia, August 2009), Visited 8 October 2009. 13 Joseph Harris, "Beyond Community: From the Social to the Material," Journal of Basic Writing 20.2 (2001), 3-15.

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bounded and familiar space of a disciplinary community but in more open, contested, and heteroglot spheres of discourse.”14 Harris’ argument falls in line with a folk understanding of a social network—one interested in difference and uncertainty, more than sameness, completion, or clear ideas. Instead of arguing how “we” can help students join a discourse controlled by a community of educators, Harris urges educators to consider “a mode of teaching that resists the fusing of social values with the acquiring of critical skills.”15 Harris does not do this to suggest that communities are divorced or separate from knowledge. Rather, taking up initiation or imitation as a goal of education forces a closed loop model, shutting off invention driven by convergence. By shifting the goal of education away from “induction,” Harris and a focus on folk asks teachers to acknowledge difference, not sameness, as the backbone of rhetorical learning, to consider use with learning bodies, instead of for them.16 The “folk” of folksonomy, then, is both community-based and is individual invention. It is an (inter)vention. Folk includes the history of a community, but also a careful attention to its present in order to affect its future. Folk implies both the plebian and the highest forms of art. It is interactive, malleable, and ever-changing. Mary Louise Pratt, in her oftcited Arts of the Contact Zone, argues that, “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” are all present in the “contact zone.”17 Contact zones, like the ways in which folk interact with communities outside of its own, are spaces where people come together and invest, intervene, explore and make changes to the arts in and alongside their lives. And while Pratt argues “miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning” are “some of the perils of writing in the contact zone,” she sees these perils as progress.18 Understanding the ways in which uncertainty might rest in the contact zone also brings to light ways in which folk members might make, interact, work, and play in ways not valued by the entire community. Convergence, even if it lacks a large audience, is still movement.

14

Ibid., 4. Ibid. 16 Harris, “Community,” 5. 17 Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Profession (New York: MLA 91, 1991, 33-40), 37. 18 Ibid. 15

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For educators to work with the folk in their classrooms—to listen to the local communities that they are not a part of but are asked to educate, they must, in very concrete and real ways, embrace the contact zones. As Pratt contends, and I would extend to folk, “When linguistic (or literate) interaction is described in terms of orderliness, games, moves, or scripts, usually only legitimate moves are actually named as part of the system, where legitimacy is defined from the point of view of the party in authority—regardless of what other parties might see themselves as doing.”19 One of the greatest lessons from a historical perspective of folk is that total homogeneity—community defined and controlled by “experts”— is death to invention. This attention toward community use in relation to hierarchical structure is only further encouraged through a historical perspective of nomos. Roughly six hundred years before folk would arrive on the literacy landscape, at the beginning of the sixth century in Athens, Cleisthenes would rewrite the Athenian constitution, taking the power of the law from the thesmothetes (judges, or “law-givers,” who located the “external source of law” as the “will of the gods”) and placing it in the hands of the nomos.20 There are two different definitions and forms of nomos: one denoting “the marking out and distribution of land,” and the other signifying an identification of “human norms as binding.”21 Both derive from the Greek verb nemo, and acknowledge “human agency” as a concept bound by rhetoric and enacted through a “process of articulating codes, consciously designed by groups of people, opposed both to the monarchical tradition of handing down decrees and to the supposedly nonhuman force of divinely controlled ‘natural law.’”22 Interestingly, Cleisthenes’ revision is credited as the birth of democracy, as Athens transitioned from law as external, god-given, Platonic Truth, or thesmos, to an understanding of law as “consciously designed” by “groups of people.”23 “Groups of people” as the designers and implementers of law speaks to, at least Cleisthenes’ belief that working in concert with other community members creates an opportunity for the individual to enter into

19

Ibid., 38. “Cleisthenes,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (Wikimedia, September 2009), Visited 8 October 2009; Susan Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); “Thesmothetes,” Oxford English Dictionary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 41. 21 Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 41. 22 Ibid., 41-42. 23 Ibid.; “Cleisthenes.” 20

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moments of power negotiation—where rules and laws are created that benefit all—including oneself. Consequently, if the group is now responsible for the law, where does that leave those outside the group? Susan Jarratt argues that sophists “understood that any discourse seeking to effect action or shape knowledge must take into account differences. Not only was it essential to judge the circumstances at the moment of an oration, its kairos, but even more essential was the orator/alien’s understanding of the local nomoi: community-specific customs and laws.”24 Here, she positions the orator as the alien: as one outside looking in to the community. The orator is not folk and may only observe the nomoi for use. So while this outside perspective allows the rhetor a unique point of view regarding community desires, needs, wants, and abilities, the rhetor’s perspective is still of difference: A difference that may be harnessed for observation, negotiation, but not necessarily full participation in the nomoi—much like students “listen” to teachers, as teachers are representatives of the overarching collegiate community (as experts). Yet, these interactions between students and teachers are often seen as a game—highlighted by testing, grading, and the rest of the hoops student communities are forced to jump through by administration and teachers in the collegiate system. These systems, then, highlight that there are folk not of the academy but rather alongside it. Of course despite heavy critiques from educators at all levels, rote learning divorced from purpose has been nothing but reinforced from the time of a student’s entrance into preschool through national standards legislation, such as the No Child Left Behind Act. Consequently, the game of “Can you pass?” has eclipsed most educatory environments’ true purpose—which, I would argue, is to move toward inclusivity through experiential learning: 1. In order to allow community members who do not represent the majority greater access to power; and 2. To remind members with the most access to power their responsibilities regarding their fellow community members. In other words, education should challenge the nomoi in ways that move toward opportunities for convergence that benefit the folk inhabiting these communities. Students may wish to truly learn, to operate differently from the folk, to disrupt the nomoi in new and challenging ways for the community they are a part of in order that the community might become more complex. Yet, negative transfer from a hierarchized system of testing, ranking, and sorting—not to mention that teachers are not members of the communities they teach—has strongly limited any 24

Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 11.

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opportunity teachers have to enact change from the top, down. Teachers cannot create “student-centered” learning opportunities that are then introduced to the community, without it seeming patronizing, assistencializing, and ultimately sliding in to the “Can you pass?” game. Perhaps, instead of focusing on how the educator might enable kairotic, or timely, shifting of the nomoi of the community to be educated, the educator should focus on allowing the community to find these moments themselves. Where might students want to enter into the university sanctioned curricula? Through the inclusion of social networks based on folksonomy in the classroom, the student community takes on the work toward change or understanding of a given subject, and the educator might focus on how disruption might be more openly included to foster invention that complicates the nomoi—for both the present students and instructor and those in the future (inviting the present students to do the same). The educator would move beyond using her understanding of folk, nomos, and the nomoi of a community (teacher-driven, student-centering) to provoke difference, toward acknowledging difference, acknowledging disruption, conflation, confusion, and the interstitiality—the interinanimation—of all communities. In other words, if the educator calls attention to places within the curricula that students do not place value (by deleting or omitting assignments that deal with it), or pieces of the curricula that they allow to rest unchallenged in their revisioning (by accepting departmental assignments, invention tools, or purposes without recasting), the community members, the folk, might be encouraged to shift the nomoi from within.

Feminist Disruption and Folksonomy While many digital scholars have spoken about how social networking can be integrated into the classroom in order to foster communication between students and teachers, expand classroom audiences, and heighten students’ awareness of the arguments made and received moment by moment in online settings, few have argued how these spaces can be used to foster disruption and uncertainty through feminist pedagogy.25 For example, one 25 Michelle Navarre Cleary et al, “Working with Wikis in Writing-Intensive Classes,” Kairos 41.1 (2009); Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, with Yi-Huey Guo and Lu Liu, “Globalization and Agency: Designing and Redesigning the Literacies of Cyberspace,” College English 68.6 (July 2006), 619-636; Melissa Fore et al, “Is N E 1 There? Designing and Building Community Within/Across Classrooms and Institutions,” eds. Kristine L. Blair et al, Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action (Hampton Press: 2008).

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recent articles in Computers and Composition details how two researchers —Chris Anson and Susan K. Miller Cochran—used a wikispace to encourage a “vertical knowledge-building model” in a graduate course.26 The authors argue, and highlight through their abstract, that “emerging technologies can help to create constructivist learning environments that challenge students to participate more actively in their own education.”27 Active participation was sought by the researchers in order to “engage students in knowledge-building,” and to provide links to “subsequent sections of the course” in an “ongoing, purposeful activity that functions both within and beyond the classroom.”28 They argue that by creating and maintaining a wikispace that moves beyond the confines of a singular classroom, “the diverse voices of graduate students” are encouraged “to be heard and to be a part of shaping the curriculum and their own knowledge.”29 And while I agree that wikis can be used to help students take more control over the content of a course, Anson and MillerCochran’s continued emphases on “care,” “structure,” and “seamlessness” throughout the piece may undermine moments of ownership that might have happened through an acknowledgement of lack or significant disruption of the materials. Instead of turning toward disruption, the delay of clarity, or the embracing of lack in the wikispace as a way to modify the course toward more successful collaboration, they instead turn toward “seamlessness” and hierarchical control—as the educator must assume more power in order to assign the right materials and assignments. Anson and Miller Cochran assert that the instructor must include “carefully structured activities” in order for “the greatest possibility for successful collaboration between participants in the class, including both students and the instructor.”30 Consequently, while the researchers made sure to convey to students that the “nascent wiki was designed to be built,” and desired that students would participate in more than “marginally engaged ways,” by “restructure[ing] the foundational space of the wiki,” they are ultimately disappointed when, “traditional, hierarchical patterns of teaching and learning persisted in spite of the inclusion of the wiki.”31 Here, I read a 26

Chris M. Anson and Susan K. Miller-Cochran, "Contrails of Learning: Using New Technologies for Vertical Knowledge-building," Computers and Composition 26.1 (2009), 38-46. 27 Ibid., 38. 28 Anson and Miller-Cochran, “Contrails,” 38. 29 Ibid., 40. 30 Ibid., 43. 31 Ibid., 44-45.

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paradox: while “success” for student participation would require major restructuring (a process that rarely if ever comes without disruption, uncertainty, and/or lack), in most respects the authors focus on the students as builders and the instructors as designers, because they believe the wiki must be used “seamlessly” (a word they place in conjunction with “effectively”).32 For the authors, it seems disruption is considered as a method of changing the power structure graduate students may view in education— not as a method of engaging with the wiki. The authors contend that there are two options, “we either must convince students that the wiki is truly a collaborative space (complicated by the process of assessing individual achievement), or we must accept the role of leader-facilitator and structure the space in a way that facilitates the kinds of learning to which we are committed.”33 So, while the authors move toward “ask[ing] students to reflect on this experience…by involving them in various kinds of selfassessment activities,” the nature of collaboration in a wiki—moving toward clarity and complexity—is not fully challenged. In the end, they conclude, “the instructor has to carefully design activities that will help students interact with each other (and with the instructor as a collaborator in the process).”34 Through feminist pedagogy, I would imagine a thirdspace—one that makes the object of the wiki not to build toward an everincreasingly complex network of information where users attempt to bring further clarity to the contributions of others, but a place where students enter in order to disrupt the discourse, highlight the lack, and rest in uncertainty. Why not ask students to contribute questions to the wikispace? This practice would then disrupt the “building” of knowledge characterized by the student contributions of further clarity. Students could also be asked to trouble contributions by playing Peter Elbow’s “Doubting Game” as readers to provide counter-arguments to statements, in order to highlight lack. Finally, students could be encouraged to state what they don’t know, understand, or take-away from a text or texts in the wiki, placing uncertainty at center-stage encouraging disruption. Yet these options were not discussed within the article and further highlight why I read Anson and Miller Cochran as moving toward, but not yet embracing, a feminist, folksonomic pedagogy. This is not to suggest that all wiki projects are inherently flawed. Rather, different goals for the wikispace may have 32

Ibid., 46. Ibid. 34 Ibid. 33

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resulted in findings more in line with the desires of Anson and Miller Cochran. By feminist pedagogy, I mean pedagogy that, through bell hooks’ definition of disruption, enacts practices that call for the educator to come alongside the educated. Where reflexivity for both teacher and student becomes one of the primary goals for instruction, and where the learning environment is shaped by the desire to pay attention to, and work against, domination, with an attention toward lack and the delay of clarification, as defined by Nancy Welch and Julie Jung. In other words, the pedagogue uses her institutional knowledge and understanding of best practices to negotiate and highlight information and/or practices the community is either resisting or encouraging. A call to use feminist practices when engaged with folksonomic pedagogy is supported by the work of Kristine Blair, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley in the 2009 edited collection Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice. Blair, Gajjala, and Tulley see best cyberfeminist practices as those that offer “personal support and friendship, trust, a genuine interest and care for other members, combined with solid professional advice and mentoring.”35 And while communal care and interest mark the best practices for the authors, so too does a commitment to diversity. As the authors note, “cyberfeminist technological practices are about trying to make technology work for diverse members of the community…with varying material, linguistic, and cultural access to computer-based literacies.”36 Thus, a folksonomic space focused on cyberfeminist practices can then highlight diversity—or the lack thereof—in socially networked spaces. Ultimately, feminist folksonomic pedagogy works as a method of rhetorical study through which both students and teachers enter into debates and uses of social networks, and as Mary Hocks notes in “Cyberfeminist Meets Digital Rhetoric,” “offers researchers and students opportunities to develop activist rhetorics about techno-science, gender and other identities, and cultural practices.”37 This essay provides one answer to Hocks’ call regarding college level cyberfeminist practice, where educators “develop classes that engender the kinds of creativity and spontaneity that give students something to say, but also tools to critique

35

Kristine L. Blair et al, Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action (Hampton Press: 2008), 7. 36 Ibid., 14. 37 Mary Hocks, “Cyberfeminism Intersects Writing Research: Studies in Digital Rhetoric,” eds. Kristine L. Blair et al, Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action (Hampton Press: 2008), 235.

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and subvert dominant cultural discourses.”38 Disruption, the delay of clarification, and the embracing of lack are three ways educators might further complicate cyberfeminist practices in folksonomic spaces in ways that call on a history of feminist practices that has already been present through the academy since the 1960’s. And while feminist work is much older and varied than what was happening in the 1960’s in the colleges of America, I take much of my definition of feminist disruption from bell hooks’ historical perspectives in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. hooks uses Teaching Community to trace the American academic focus on critical pedagogy back to feminist presence in the academy which was spawned from “the success of militant black anti-racist work” in the 1960s to the 1980s.39 Consequently, critical pedagogy enacted in American universities, in hooks’ perspective, is intimately linked to feminist, anti-racist work. Yet, this is not only work completed by militant, black anti-racists. hooks explains, “While every citizen of this nation, white or colored, is born into a racist society that attempts to socialize us from the moment of our birth to accept the tenets of white supremacy, we can choose to resist this socialization. We must accept that people of color are as socialized as our white counterparts. If we can resist, so can they.”40 As a result, the responsibility to move against community practices that repress and segregate in the name of order and education is the responsibility of all teachers, especially those invested in the support of critical, reflective thinking. hooks suggests that feminists more often promote “forms of critique” because they work toward trust, of self and other, that enables them to cope in ways other community groups do not. Feminists, then, have worked, through disruptive measures, alongside academic community discourse in order to question norming predicated on race and sex. Through choices that underscore the ways in which gender functions in the academy, female scholars then began to change the face of scholarship at the university. Consequently, a system of generative conflict and growth can be applied to the classroom if that system is encouraged to focus on disruption as a main way of making meaning. Disruption, as a major component of a living social network, can encourage new ways of knowing and learning in a system (the academy) that can seem largely closed to students—especially if those self-same students find themselves 38

Ibid., 239. bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3. 40 Ibid., 56. 39

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representing minority races, ages, sexes, sexual orientations, or bodies. As hooks warns, “If we are not able to find and enter the open spaces in closed systems, we doom ourselves by reinforcing the belief that educational systems can’t be changed.”41 Therefore, if we do not allow folk opportunities to challenge their own nomoi by fostering experiential education that co-exists both within and without the academy (experiences largely shaped in on and offline spaces that ask for active participation in the construction and use of knowledge as it is both created and organized by communities in folksonomic ways), we calcify learning experiences and contradict our own ideas about the possibility of education to invoke change in positive and productive ways for communities. This calcification of learning, hooks asserts, enforces the “notion of service” as inextricably tied to work completed “on behalf of the institution, not on behalf of students and colleagues”—undercutting the very purposes most participants in folksonomic projects have when they contribute and critique contributions made by other members of the community.42 Like hooks’ feminist call to re-envision the purposes of education for students and teachers by acknowledging that educational moments are intimately linked to the lived experiences of learners both within and without the academy throughout their educational history, Nancy Welch’s Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction argues that writing, especially through revision, is a feminist project focused on “lifework”—work that creates life, moments of disruption that lead to discovery and growth. Welch insists that real revision of any idea does not necessarily connote a movement toward clarity, concision, or even “getting it right.” Instead, she asks educators to, “[C]onsider revision not only as a process of increasing orientation toward a particular thesis, position, or discourse community, but also as a process of increasing disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and prefigured disciplinary boundaries, a process of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one’s texts and one’s life.”43 Consequently, by encouraging restlessness, educators enact a process of re-visioning, not only for clarity and concision, but ultimately for complexity—opening space, ideas, creating an opportunity for lifework, where the folk may investigate the nomoi making up their lives both within and without the academy.

41

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 83. 43 Nancy Welch, Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997), 7. 42

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Julie Jung, as a feminist working through Welch and Ann E. Berthoff, argues that for re-vision to truly be revisionary, instructors must be willing to give more space to chaos by postponing clarity.44 Revision is intimately connected to disruption. Predicated on active reflection, revision requires a writer, artist, speaker, actor, creator, to disrupt, to interrupt, an artifact, an idea, a project in motion, in order to more accurately negotiate meaning with the intended or experiential audience. There is no revision without disruption, just as there is no disruption without reflection. Consequently, an observed artifact that has undergone any purposeful change, at any given time, by the author or by those engaged in fair use, represents the rhyzomatic relationship amongst revision, reflection, and disruption. Instead of viewing these three processes as hierarchical, or arranged in a linear time model, a folk view focused on disruption through convergence would instead argue that an author’s piece blends change, memory, and difference during the writing process as the writer comes into contact with differing options, systems, and beliefs. Change to an online wiki (disruption of a current text), embodies a revisionary process that takes into account what has come before (reflecting) and what is not present (lack) concurrently, before, during, and after the contribution. A folksonomic pedagogy concerned with uncertainty would push revisionary boundaries past the individual into the community’s social network—an intertextuality predicated on the wisdom of the crowd. Think back to Anson and Miller Cochran, as they argue for more carefully constructed control in an effort to have a successful course wiki. Instead of giving in to binary thinking, Jung calls for a re-imagining of the rhetor as “revisionary.” As she argues, “Revisionary rhetors demonstrate their commitment to hearing difference by privileging the centrifugal forces in a given discourse—voices that disrupt unifying tendencies to blur the binaries of reading/writing, theory/practice, content/form, and public/private.”45 The revisionary rhetor described by Jung is one committed to the feminist practices outlined by hooks. By pursuing difference, by giving space and time to the voices that question the majority voice of the folksonomic community, the revisionary rhetor then enacts feminist disruption through the blurring of binary thinking. The revisionary rhetor is one needed in classrooms working with and in the semantic web, especially those that claim folksonomic roots.

44 Julie Jung, Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy and Multigenre Text (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). 45 Ibid., 10.

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Communities operating on folksonomic systems continuously seek through innovation, in order to implement the newly internalized “best” practices, ways of knowing, understanding, thinking, hearing, and learning. Yet, if one accepts the premise that folksonomic spaces are in danger of reproducing the tyranny of the majority over the minority, then it is only necessary that the rhetor, as a feminist practitioner working to problematize hierarchical, repressive patriarchal learning structures, then shift her role to be one of problematizer, disrupter, and ultimately, listener. Listening, most aptly described by Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, frames the community discourses of understanding and (ex)(in)clusivity.46 The revisionary rhetor, as she joins the community in seeking both what is and is not, must deploy rhetorical listening in order to agitate the folksonomic space—in order to push for difference, complication.

The Complication of Critical Folksonomy Feminism’s critique of white patriarchal hegemony, through disruption and an attention toward lack, defined through bell hooks, Nancy Welch, and Julie Jung, must complicate an understanding of nomos and the practices of a folksonomic pedagogue. After all nomos, even with its resistance to monarchic and divinely controlled law, was still only used to recognize how elite, ruling class males might enact “democracy” in sixth century Athens.47 Consequently, feminism reminds scholars that disruption of hegemony with an eye cast toward both gender and race is a key component to the growth and continued value of any community. Feminist disruption can also be used to argue for the value of folksonomic spaces within the academy—as it interrupts “business as usual” within learning spaces. If Anson and Miller Cochran integrate questioning, instead of answering, as the primary purpose of the wiki, if teachers that work with crowds employ rhetorical listening to bring moments of community silence to the fore of course discussions, “business as usual” in each of these situations would be disrupted. A delay of clarification would be encouraged. Lack, as a concept predicated on what is not would be utilized as a productive, emerging interstitial space of 46

Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006). 47 For an in-depth critique of the uses of nomos and democracy in fifth and sixth century Athens, see Susan Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists Classical Rhetoric Refigured and Jasper Neel’s Aristotle’s Voice.

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value. And while individuals might not engage in the construction of certain types of texts (like a wiki) outside of academia, they will certainly experience community and will need a critical understanding of both the “delay of clarification” and “lack” in order to navigate these constructs. If pedagogues hope to challenge students in ways that critically transfer out of the individual classroom and into the community (a goal of critical and feminist pedagogies), we must be willing to rest in lack, to delay clarification, and to allow these things to happen in concert with community decisions and assemblages. Accordingly, this conscious opposition to both monarchic and divinely decreed control inherent in the concept of nomos calls attention to the critical consciousness necessary on the part of the individual in concert with the group to fully enact a theory of folksonomy. The folk must not only be a community of individuals organized by common ideals and practices as they interact with one another, produce and purchase artifacts, and build or breakdown social networks with critical understanding of the hierarchical organization at work. They must understand, and participate in, an active resistance (a true return to the historical conception of nomos) to the laws and distributions of power enforced by hegemonic forces outside any group’s ken—forces still largely controlled by white men.48 The collaborator must help the community highlight how individuals might add, or not, compelling difference to a composing which moves beyond singular student entities: ultimately providing a schema for how learners might “delay clarification” or experience “lack” as they work within, outside, and alongside critical folk experiences both in and out of the academy, both on and off the internet. In sum, for critical feminist pedagogues, folksonomy is: 1.

2.

48

A theory and practice of teaching writ broad, situated so that the explicit responsibility and primary control over information—as it is displayed, organized, revised, and used—rests with the community of students, so that they might significantly shape the landscape of the classroom as a social network embedded in lived experience. The role of the folksonomic pedagogue, then, would be to physically and mentally organize the crowd in such ways as to encourage diversity of opinion, through independence and

I draw attention to white men, here, to demonstrate how these power structures might operate in American hegemonic systems.

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3.

4.

decentralization, eventually becoming the primary collator for materials generated through, with, and by the learning group. As primary collator, the instructor must enact a feminist attention toward disruption, through encouraging the delay of clarification and the exploration of lack, so that others might be encouraged toward an understanding of how gender, race, hegemony, and hierarchy might complicate the community’s use of information. The use of uncertainty to educate the teacher, break down assumptions of knowledge in the classroom, and allow collaboration to cross the binary of teacher and learner in classroom spaces.

Individually, feminist and critical theories do give attention toward race, gender, local democracy, and power sharing, yet both can be pushed toward a greater understanding of how wise crowds might work to build critically thinking individuals by a repositioning of the expert most readily seen in the scholarship on social networking. Consequently, critical feminist folksonomic pedagogy argues for a repositioning of power through an interrogation of the role of the teacher within learning spaces. Resources such as historical knowledge, foresight, critical thinking skills, in-depth understanding of the subject base, are all home to the academic and are needed in the classroom. The role of collator and problematizer is filled by the expert/teacher/academic that pursues information in a given field and studies critical theories that highlight different ways social interaction based on dynamic community construction might be aggregated for group use. Yet, this does not position the expert as the controlling force in relation to how information will be negotiated in the classroom. Folksonomy asks experts to reposition and invest themselves in the belief that the community can be trusted to educate itself. Simple acts, like journaling, might be seen anew by both the students and the educator through an approach that asks for a combining and explicit negotiation of writing and learning. And while the move toward trusting the wise crowd has begun in digital environments that have encouraged folksonomic participation, scholarship on folksonomy focused on uneven power structures, gender, and race, and the impact these issues might have on participation or construction of folksonomic environments in online or face-to-face spaces is sparse. Ultimately, I agree with Jung, when she claims, “The inclusion of metadiscursive commentary and intertextuality helps to breakdown the binary between process and product.”49 With 49

Jung, Revisionary Rhetoric, 175.

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“breakdown” comes the possibility for moments which may lead to change in the nomoi of the folk—it may lead to magic.

RECONTEXTUALIZING FEMINIST RHETORIC: EXPLORING THE PROGRESSION AND FUTURE OF FEMINIST RHETORIC AS A FIELD OF STUDY JESSICA L. FURGERSON

In her essay Re/Dressing Histories; Or, on Re/Covering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze, Michele Ballif implements the stunning metaphor of the counterfeit coin as an illustration of women’s treatment in the traditional study of rhetoric.1 She posits that like Phaedra, all women have been viewed as counterfeit, as not legitimate in comparison to their male counterparts who embody truth and legitimacy. Over the past fifty years, feminist analysis has sought to reverse this view of women rhetors largely spearheaded by Campbell’s 1973 piece, which “draws attention to women as communicators within rhetorical frames.”2 Like most burgeoning scholarship, initial attempts to reverse the view of women as inferior rhetoricians were fraught with complications; however, through these tensions scholars developed both methodological and theoretical mechanisms for studying feminist rhetoric that persist today. In order to further the work of Meyer who examines four decades of feminist work in the field of rhetoric, the purpose of this essay is to explore the existing tensions within previous scholarship surrounding feminist rhetoric. The importance of this endeavor is twofold. Initially, I provide a review of feminist additions to our understanding of rhetoric primarily in the form of methodological choices. Such an exploration is important as “feminist rhetoric has now reached a point where we have a discernible canon—a group of texts, including feminist rhetors and

1 Michelle Ballif, “ReDressing Histories: Or, on Re/covering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by our Gaze,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992): 91. 2 Michaela Meyer, “Women Speak(ing): Forty Years of Feminist Contributions to Rhetoric and an Agenda for Feminist Rhetorical Studies,” Communication Quarterly 55 (1997): 1.

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feminist scholarship, that we engage with regularly.”3 Feminist contributions largely implement of one two distinct methodologies: the “adding women to the canon” approach and the “challenging traditional rhetorical standards” approach. While these categories are by no means exhaustive, they do represent a major corpus of the work that has been done in the last five decades, and thus serve as a framework for understanding the foundations of feminist rhetorical efforts. The tracing of this framework directly lends itself to the second purpose of this essay: considering key areas of future inquiry in studying and theorizing feminist rhetoric. As such, this essay heeds the call for future scholarship issued by Rawson in so far as it seeks to address her articulated “need to develop ways of accounting for all of our voices.”4 I agree with Rawson that while the field of feminist rhetoric has made great strides in establishing itself and its subjects as a legitimate field of inquiry, it has yet to make such acts inclusive of everyone. By providing a crystallization of the key advancements in rhetoric, made by feminist scholars, I aim to reveal new opportunities for research that break free from the tensions experienced in the first fifty years of the field.

Tensions within Feminist Rhetorical Studies The emergence of feminist rhetorical studies can be characterized in terms of tension. Two primary sources of tension exist: traditional conceptions of rhetoric and proposed methods for dealing with these traditional views. Initially, the root assumption of scholars engaged in exploring rhetoric from a feminist perspective is that the traditional view of rhetoric is flawed and thus must be made problematic. While the word “traditional” may be relatively ambiguous, Patricia Bizzell, co-editor of The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical to Contemporary Times, contextualizes what is meant by the word traditional in reference to rhetorical studies. Bizzell notes: One of the most interesting things we discovered during more than five years of work on this book was the large degree to which then-existing research on rhetoric represented a single, very traditional "rhetorical

3

Kelly J. Rawson, “Queering Feminist Rhetorical Canonization,” in Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods & Methodologies, ed. Eileen Schell and Kelly J. Rawson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press), 39. 4 Ibid., 52.

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Recontextualizing Feminist Rhetoric tradition," which pretty much excluded women, people of color, and anyone without an elite education.5

Bizzell's commentary appropriately frames the following discussion of the flawed nature of traditional rhetorical studies as it points to the exclusion of marginalized voices within the canon of rhetoric. In deconstructing Bizzell's commentary we begin with the notion that traditional views of rhetoric present a “single” tradition. Foss, Griffin, and Foss contend that “traditional conceptualizations of rhetoric do not take into account perspectives outside of the privileged perspective of the white heterosexual male.”6 There are two primary ways in which marginalized voices are excluded from the rhetorical tradition. First, the voices of oppressed groups are silenced by a denial of access to the public realm. Building on the work of Campbell, Meyer explains that since women have historically been prevented from speaking in public the emphasis on rhetoric as oration structurally silences women within the discipline.7 Second, Michele Ballif argues that traditional narrative structures which define rhetoric are phallogocentric and exclusionary. She explains that both Aristotelian and Freudian definitions of rhetoric and narrative influence the field's understanding of truth and legitimacy; however the rigid conceptions of truth contained within these paradigms make it possible to exclude the voices of marginalized groups from the study of rhetoric. Accordingly, only the experiences of the rational, unemotional, educated, white, heterosexual male were conducive to rhetorical acts that meet both Aristotle and Freud’s standards. Numerous other charges have been leveled against the traditional canon of rhetoric; however, because these charges are intimately tied to the methodological choices made by scholars in an attempt to counteract the patriarchal nature of the cannon, they will be addressed within their respective contexts. The second major tension which arose during the emergence of feminist rhetoric exists between scholars on a methodological level. In their 1992-1993 exchange in the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Barbara Biesecker, highlight the key tension which 5

Patricia Bizzell, “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 11 (1997): 50. 6 Sonja Foss, Cindy Griffin, and Karen Foss, “Transforming Rhetoric through Feminist Reconstruction: A Response to the Gender Diversity Perspective,” Women's Studies in Communication 20 (1997): 122. 7 This is not exclusively Campbell’s argument as other scholars including, but not limited, to Celeste Condit and Patricia Bizzell advance a similar view of traditional rhetoric.

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existed in early feminist rhetorical scholarship. Campbell, who sought to reclaim the role of woman as rhetor by adding notable rhetorical acts of women to the canon, argues that unlike the rich history of rhetoric for men “women have no parallel rhetorical history.”8 However, this endeavor was met with criticism by fellow feminist communications scholar Barbara Biesecker who contends that such acts of “revisionist history” face the “potentially debilitating consequence” of “female tokenism.”9 As such, Biesecker advocates for a challenging of traditional rhetorical standards by which the canon is configured rather than the insertion of women into the canon. Although it is unlikely that this exchange is the sole cause of the formation of the two distinct methodologies explored within this essay, Biesecker and Campbell’s exchange does highlight the tension between scholars that continues throughout the following discussion.

Adding Women to the Canon One of the most common methodological tactics for addressing the silencing of women in the rhetorical tradition has been to write women into the history of rhetoric. This approach was largely pioneered by scholars who wished to rectify the systematic exclusion of women who argue that despite societal structures which prevented many women from speaking, examples of women's rhetoric can be found and repositioned within the study of rhetoric. Campbell argues, “Indeed, the anthologies that excluded women for so many years never pretended that all men were rhetorically gifted. Hence, to include the works of rhetorically gifted women merely gives their voices equal weight with those of men.”10 Campbell's argument rests on the premise that women have produced equally admirable rhetorical works and thus should be considered as part of the existing rhetorical canon. Numerous studies have been conducted to establish the importance of great female rhetoricians and “each of these studies examines the ways in which women communicate particular

8

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1989), 1. In 1989, Campbell published a two volume set featuring speeches and other texts from the early women’s rights movement. 9 Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 141. 10 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 154-155.

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rhetorical messages and repositions women as rhetors on their own terms.”11 While there is debate over the validity of this approach, “looking for women to include in the established tradition, has at least the merit of offering pointers to future scholarship to find their writings, and to find arguments for reading them as rhetoric.”12 For scholars who seek to write women into history, the goal is not to eschew the differences between male and female rhetoricians, but rather to assess the two simultaneously. This process, also known as the feminist-reconstructionist perspective, seeks to “see the differences between women and men's communication as attributable primarily to socialization practices—which construct women and men differently—and to the different power position that sexes are accorded in this society.”13 Thus for scholars who embrace the adding women to the canon approach, seeing differences between men and women as a reason to separate their contributions to the field of rhetoric is problematic. Additionally, by viewing the rhetorical acts of men and women in tandem, it became possible for scholars to advance theoretical positions which praised the tactics implemented by female rhetoricians. These scholars suggest that “Repositioning women as rhetors allowed scholars to begin formulating arguments for ‘‘feminine style,’’ or a distinct kind of women’s rhetoric with identifiable patterns and forms.”14 In her review of scholarly works in the field of speech communication, Campbell remarks “Equally important has been the development of critical perspectives and theory that enlarge our understanding of women's rhetoric.”15 She furthers, “From my perspective the most promising source of theory is the practices of women.”16 For Campbell and others, the methodological choice of adding women to the canon produces two desirable outcomes. First, adding women allows the rhetorical acts of women to be considered alongside their male counterparts as legitimate representations of rhetoric. Second, restoring women to the history of rhetoric allows new directions in the field of rhetoric to be explored.

11

Meyer, “Women Speak(ing),” 4. Patricia Bizzell, “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 11 (1992): 54. 13 Foss, Griffin, and Foss, “Transforming Rhetoric,” 120. 14 Meyer, “Women Speak(ing),” 4. 15 Ibid. 16 Karlyn Khors Campbell, “Rhetorical Feminism,” Rhetoric Review 26 (2001): 12. 12

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Challenging Traditional Rhetorical Standards Unlike scholars who wish to add women to the canon of rhetoric, scholars, such as Biesecker argue that the standards by which we evaluate rhetoric must be challenged; scholars approaching feminist rhetoric from this perspective seek to overcome the silencing of women at the paradigmatic level. It is important to note that those who oppose the adding of women to the canon do so not on the ground that such work is of no importance or is unproductive. Instead they contend, the “accumulation of texts does not guarantee our ways of knowing will change when the grounds for their inclusion and, likewise, our ways of deciphering them, remain the same.’’17 Essentially posing the question to scholars engaged in revisionist history: does adding women into the study of rhetoric change its historically oppressive nature or simply entrench problematic standards by adding women to the canon who meet the existing standards of legitimacy? As such, attempts to add women to the canon are rejected on the grounds that “our attempts to (re)read women, to (re)cover women, to (re)present women, and to therefore (re)cast history, are insidious acts of (re)appropriation.”18 Accordingly, instead of adding women to the canon of rhetoric, the traditional standards for which we evaluate rhetoric must be challenged. There are multiple ways in which the traditional standards can and should be challenged. Biesecker argues for a shift in focus away from the individual; She asserts “Rhetoric resolidifies rather than undoes the ideology of individualism,” a practice which results in “the rhetorical contributions of collective women” to be ignored.19 The act of challenging traditional rhetorical standards opens the possibility for acts that were not originally deemed worthy of inquiry, such as collective rhetoric, material rhetoric, and private rhetorical acts, to be constituted as legitimate. Additionally, this methodological approach “generate[s] genuinely new and feminist terms by which to define and evaluate work in rhetoric.”20 The challenging of the traditional rhetorical standards is vital to removing the objects/subjects of our rhetorical inquiry from the oppressive confines of the traditional canon. For “women cannot be oppressed as women if they are not recognized as such within traditional/dominant sex relations.”21 Thus, by refusing to “tokenize” women, and instead challenging the 17

Biesecker, “Coming to Terms,” 145. Ballif, “ReDressing Histories,” 91. 19 Biesecker, “Coming to Terms,” 144. 20 Bizzell, “Opportunities for Feminist,” 54. 21 Celeste M. Condit, “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion,” Women’s Studies in Communication 20 (1997): 97. 18

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foundation of the canon, women’s rhetoric is seen as legitimate without being subservient to traditional and problematic standards of legitimacy. In a similar vein, it is possible to redefine existing terms by which rhetoric is assessed to suit a feminist agenda. This is possible because “rhetoric offers a rich conceptual framework and terminology that could prove heuristic as feminists attempt to probe and articulate these and other concerns.”22 Finally, the act of challenging traditional rhetorical standards may be accomplished by focusing on issues rather than individuals. Bizzell explicates this focus when she notes, “If women are not represented in the traditional history of rhetoric, we might look for the issues that throw into relief the social practices that resulted in this exclusion, thus also highlighting where women are, as well as where they are not.”23 While the ways in which traditional rhetorical standards may be challenged vary widely, the focus of these scholars remains consistent in so far as they seek to reconceptualize the way rhetorical acts are defined, situated, and analyzed. These tensions continue to play a role in current discussion of feminist rhetoric.24 Whether one chooses to adopt the adding women to the canon approach or the challenging traditional rhetorical standards approach, the result is increased scholarship on the rhetorical acts of women. Given the pivotal role that these tensions play in feminist rhetorical scholarship, it is necessary to consider the possibility of a happy medium between the two, often divisive, schools of thought.

Easing the Tension: Finding Common Ground While the approaches to feminist rhetorical scholarship discussed above are often discussed in mutually exclusive terms, I contend that common ground does exist between the two. While there is the obvious commonality of establishing the legitimacy of woman as rhetorician, there are ways in which the goals of each approach can be incorporated into one scholarly pursuit. One such way is advanced by Cheryl Glenn through the use of feminist historiographic methods. In her book Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Glenn argues that women should not simply be added to the canon but instead 22

Lisa Ede, Cherly Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford, “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” Rhetorica 13 (1995): 440. 23 Bizzell, “Opportunities for Feminist,” 54. 24 The recently published reader, Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, highlights the continued existence of the tension between adding women to the canon and challenging the standards of its formation (Buchanan and Ryan 2011).

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“any remapping must locate female rhetorical accomplishments within and without the male-dominate and male-documented rhetorical tradition that it interrogates.”25 Additionally, the use of historiographic methods makes inroads to the argument that rhetoric exists in forms other than individual orations. Historiography allows us “to hear women” in “other but equally valuable kinds of rhetorical performances” such as diaries, drama, autobiographies, and household accounts.26 For Glenn, the act of adding women to the canon must be accompanied with a critical interrogation of their initial exclusion—a process which, by its very definition, requires the challenging of traditional rhetorical standards. It is my argument that the two approaches can and should coexist in so far as their combination yields a repositioning of women rhetors within a canon that accounts for, and is shaped by, their addition.

Feminist Rhetorical Studies in the 21st Century: Challenges and Possibilities Given both the problems and the promise within existing feminist rhetorical scholarship, I hope to offer suggestions for future scholarship seeking to bridge the still looming gap between feminism and rhetoric. Bridging this gap is of utmost importance as “feminist arguments are frequently labeled as ‘new’ material and thus placed after ‘traditional’ material in most textbooks for rhetorical studies.”27 Although, as Rawson pointed out earlier, feminist rhetorical scholars have made great strides in establishing feminist rhetoric as a valid field of inquiry, our practices must keep up with progress made in both the field of rhetoric and feminism. In order to advance the field of feminist rhetoric in a manner that is consistent with current progress made in feminist scholarship, we must reject the use of terms such as “masculine” and “feminine” as this practice entrenches the gender binaries it wishes to escape. Although scholars are becoming more cognizant of conflating sex and gender, they continue to equate “male” and “female” with “masculine” and “feminine.”28 Unfortunately, current scholarship often classifies a speaker’s rhetorical 25

Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 10. 26 Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, 175. 27 Meyer, “Women Speak(ing),” 9. 28 Meyer issues an explicit call to scholars to avoid conflating sex and gender as one is biological and the other is socially constructed.

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acts as either masculine or feminine based on the gender of the speaker. The gender diversity perspective within feminist rhetoric gets us closer to an understanding of the complexities of gender and communication; this perspectives denies “that all women can be sufficiently characterized as speaking in a ‘feminine style.’”29 However, even this does not quite get us where we need to be as a field as it still adheres to the notion that some elements of communication are masculine and others feminine. While Condit contends that within this perspective “we would begin to ask what kind of feminine style she uses” instead of simply labeling a rhetor as feminine, the continued use of the word feminine as a descriptor for communicative acts is problematic. Casting communication tactics such as aggressiveness, ambiguity, or delivery in gendered terms makes it impossible to escape the potential for these acts, and their corresponding genders, to be labeled as bad or good. In her advocacy for the queering of feminist rhetorical practices Rawson warns that “femininity and masculinity are not stable cultural descriptors. Rather, gender oppression happens at the axis of (perceived) sex and (perceived) gender, irrespective of (perceived) masculinity or (perceived) femininity.”30 The decoupling of masculinity and femininity from gender is a crucial step in developing an approach to feminist rhetorical scholarship that unearths the complex way in which gender functions to inhibit or promote our rhetorical acts. Such a decoupling requires that we as scholars resist the labeling of communicative acts as either masculine or feminine and instead discuss what rhetorical choices were made and their effectiveness before viewing such acts in a gendered context. Second, we as scholars must make a conscious effort to pay greater attention to the cultural context in which these events occur. As made problematic by previous scholars, focusing solely on the rhetorical situation of an act is not enough because within feminist rhetoric “there are dual and conflicting exigencies.”31 Accordingly, our interest as scholars should be in the way “that rhetors strategically promote saliences and meanings for chosen audiences, and, when successful, these pass for real situations to which it seems we must pay attention.”32 Vatz’s view of

29

Condit, “In Praise of,” 103. Rawson, “Queering Feminist,” 51. 31 Campbell, Man Cannot Speak, 207. 32 Richard E. Vatz, “The Mythic Status of Situational Rhetoric: Implications for Rhetorical Critics’ Relevance in the Public Arena,” The Review of Communication 9 (2009): 2. Both Campbell and Vatz are responding to the establishment of “the rhetorical situation” as a lens through which to conduct rhetorical criticism as 30

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rhetoric not only allows us to understand how successful rhetorical acts function to shape reality, but may also illuminate the reasons why similarly successful acts did not. Thus by viewing rhetoric as Vatz does, it becomes possible to construct a picture of the cultural climate surrounding a rhetorical act and subsequently to understand why certain acts were pushed to the margins of history. In committing to an exploration of the cultural context, we must not stop at simply establishing it; instead, future research should consider by what means the rhetorical acts of women have been ignored. One potential reason for the subjugation of women’s rhetorical acts may lie in the tension between reason and emotion. Although traditional views of rhetoric are strictly grounded in the pursuit of reason, a feminist approach to rhetoric is grounded within a critical framework which “recast the nature of rhetoric from one grounded on Platonic, universalist conceptions of reason to one that recaptured the sense of rhetoric as contingent.”33 Given this orientation to rhetoric implicit within not only feminist scholarship but the rhetorical acts of women, we must explore the preference of reason over emotion as a potential ground for the exclusion of women’s rhetorical acts. Marilyn Frye’s work on anger may serve as a useful template for understanding the rejection of rhetorical acts based on the tension between reason and emotion. She argues that Anger implies a claim to a domain—a claim that one is a being whose purposes and activities require and create a web of objects, spaces, attitudes, and interests that is worthy of respect, and that the topic of this anger is a matter rightly within that web.34

Frye contends that if an expression of anger is deemed by the audience as outside the domain of the speaker, then there will be no uptake of the anger.35 Extrapolating Frye’s analysis of anger to be applicable to all emotions makes an analysis of the exclusion of women’s rhetorical acts on

explained in Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 1-14. 33 Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 92. 34 Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1983), 87. 35 Frye’s notion of uptake is adapted from the speech acts literature via philosopher J.L. Austin (1962) in J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1962).

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the basis of their emotional elements feasible as these acts would be construed as outside of the speaker’s domain. By labeling a rhetorical act as outside the domain of the speaker the act itself can be dismissed, especially in the context of rhetoric as a pursuit of reason. The casting of reason and emotion as dichotomous has had a profound impact on the way rhetorical acts have historically been deemed legitimate or illegitimate. Historically, “those judged to be overly emotional or unstable—those people stood outside of the rhetorical situation, for they were considered neither capable of nor in need of remembering and inventing arguments.”36 Accounting for this fact in our future research is critical in advancing the field of feminist rhetoric.

Conclusion As a woman and a scholar, I understand that these summations and suggestions will not be without limitations given the highly subjective and individualized nature of both rhetoric and feminism. I realize that, while thorough, such a review of contributions to the field of feminist rhetoric is never quite complete. I also realize that, as is true with the field’s very founding, tensions will arise over the suggestions made herein for future scholarship. However, such an exploratory endeavor of both our past and our future as a field is pivotal to the continued development of our field. Perhaps as we continue to develop and demarcate the intersections of feminism and rhetoric, with greater attention to gender and context, we will create a field of study that can finally reverse the view of women as mere counterfeit coins.

36

Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford, “Border Crossings,” 412.

PART IV: GLOBAL RHETORIC: SURVIVANCE, AUTHORITY, AND DRESS

UNVEILING THE VIOLENCE OF HARMONY: CHALLENGING AND RENEWING THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS THROUGH (DIS)HARMONY JENNIFER H. MAHER AND CATHERINE O. FOX

In Imperial Leather, Jessica McClintock traces the central role of mapmaking in nineteenth century British colonialism. In a first step to claim an “unowned” and “uncivilized” land, the map was used most obviously to demarcate and claim geographical territory and all resources within those boundaries. Through this drawing and labeling, McClintock argues a second form of mapping occurred, one in which the “[k]nowledge of the unknown world was mapped as a metaphysics of gender violence—not as the expanded recognition of cultural difference—and was validated by the new Enlightenment logic of private property and possessive individualism.”1 Mapping thus became a means of enacting the violence of ownership, and the map itself functioned as a “technology of conversion” through which occurred “the male penetration and exposure of an veiled, female interior; and the aggressive conversion of it’s ‘secrets’ into a visible, male science of the surface.”2 In short, by mapping an epistemology of Enlightenment logic, colonizers sought to render familiar those unknown lands and ways of being so that the experience and power dynamics of the “new” world would reproduce those of the “old” world. In many ways, globalization disrupts the physical boundaries demarcated by a map. With the boundaries of the nation-state more fluid and the world “flattened,”3 it may be tempting to believe that the power of the map to dominate and control is also disrupted and that, as a consequence, the means of participation in a global economy are also leveled. While the 1

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 23. 2 Ibid. 3 Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth-First Century (New York: Farr, Straus, and Giroux, 2005).

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mapping of physical boundaries was first and foremost in early colonization projects, McClintock’s discussion of the metaphysical mapping of gender reveals the larger goal behind the Western impulse to map: epistemological colonization. As such, mapping remains a significant tool of imperialism; however, the literal drawing of maps in a globalized world is no longer as necessary to accomplish this goal. As scholarship by colonized “others” argues, we need to shift our attention to how epistemological colonization continues through the metaphorical mapping of knowledge in an era of globalization.4 More specifically, we need to map how newer “technologies of conversion” further the process and aims of colonization through international trade agreements and intellectual property laws; these technologies have become the preeminent tool of naming, controlling, subjugating, and colonizing “the other” in a world where geography is problematically treated as a matter of little consequence. Take, for example, the case of quinoa, a South American grain that has been, by some estimates, a part of indigenous cultures for at least 5,000 years. On April 19, 1994, the United States Trademark and Patent Office granted patent 5,304,718 to Colorado State University agronomists Sarah Ward and Duane Johnson, with “certain rights in the invention awarded to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for its monetary support of the research, for “use of a Apelawa variety of quinoa in the production of cytoplasmic male sterile quinoa plants and seeds useful in breeding programs for high-yield quinoa hybrids.”5 Named for the region in Bolivia where it is cultivated, Apelawa has a long tradition of sustenance-use in Andean culture. Nevertheless, an exclusive monopoly was granted to its “inventors” for use in the cultivation of hybrid varieties for the expanding quinoa markets in North America and Europe where the product was valued for its complex protein structure. The patent covered a particular method by which to create hybrids, and 43 other Andean quinoa varieties, including those in Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, were also claimed and 4

Wendy Rose, “The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism,” The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997); Madhavi Sunder, “Intellectual Property and Development as Freedom,” The Development Agenda: Global Intellectual Property and Developing Countries, ed. Neil Weinstock Netanel (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2009); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999). 5 Sarah M. Ward and Duane L. Johnson, “Cystoplasmic Male Sterile Quinoa” (U.S. Patent 5,304,718, filed April 3, 1992, and issued April 19,1994).

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protected legally. Although this patent was granted in the United States, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS,6 demanded recognition of Ward and Johnson’s rights by participating nations around the world, including countries with Andean indigenous people for whom this quinoa variety was part of a cultural heritage that had long existed and functioned without any sort of legal protection, in what is more commonly referred to in intellectual-property talk as the “public domain.” Once the existence of the patent award was discovered over two years later by Rural Advancement Foundational International (RAFI), various Andean organizations, as well as Bolivia’s National Association of Quinoa Producers, RAFI, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Biodiversity Network, began an anti-patent campaign. As a result of this resistance, Ward and Johnson, by failing to pay the maintenance fee, essentially abandoned their patent on May 1, 1998.7 Though this example offers a clean resolution to the Apelawa patent controversy, such a resolution is rare and the mapping of indigenous knowledges continues through many more nefarious projects such as The Human Genome Diversity Project, known by many indigenous peoples as the “vampire” project,8 which, according to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, attempts to “map the genetic diversity of isolated and threatened indigenous

6

World Trade Organization, Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (1994), http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_01_e.htm. 7 United States Patent and Trademark Office, “Notice of Expiration of Patents,” (1998), http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/og/1998/week37/patexp1.htm. 8 José Martínez Cabo, Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, (1987), http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/spdaip.html. Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing, explains that the term “indigenous peoples” grew out of the American Indian Movement and the Canadian Indian Brotherhood and simultaneously speaks to the collective experiences and struggles of the world’s indigenous peoples while the “s” in peoples represents real differences among indigenous peoples. Furthermore, our use of “indigenous knowledges” reflects a definition of “indigenous peoples” commonly used and agreed upon by indigenous peoples in their interaction with global organizations such as the United Nations and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Cabo defines indigenous peoples as “those which, having a historical continuity with “pre-invasion” and precolonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those countries, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identities, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural pattern, social institutions and legal systems.”

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communities.”9 To reveal the ongoing mapping of knowledge in the era of globalization, we offer an analysis of the rhetoric of harmony that undergirds intellectual property law in international trade agreements. Arguments for the regulation of international trade can be traced back to the rhetorical deployment of harmony as described by the “International Congress for the Consideration of the Question of Patent Protection” at the 1873 Universal Exhibition in Vienna. The aim of international trade agreements was to create a unified system in which development and regulatory procedures were unhindered by geographical borders. The rhetoric of unity and harmony in intellectual property regulation continues today and is a primary trope utilized in forwarding a capitalist hegemony that privileges profit, individualism, and commodification. Harmony, as a trope, plays a second problematic role in the on-going colonization of indigenous peoples. In locating indigenous resistance to the numerous effects of a Western epistemology, many researchers essentialize indigenous peoples by problematically representing them through the stereotype of stewardship and living in harmony with the land.10 As Tuhiwai Smith points out in her discussion of decolonizing methodologies, stereotypes and notions of “essence” are not employed in the same way by first-world academics and indigenous peoples. That is, often these terms are used in oppositional ways by indigenous peoples as strategic essentialism in political struggles; but when Western researchers employ similar stereotypical representations they often serve to silence and fragment indigenous peoples.11 Similarly, by identifying the cultures of indigenous peoples as “gift-giving,” as opposed to Western cultures of commodification,12 9

Ibid., 100. Robert James Berry, ed., Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present (New York: Continuum, 2006); Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Deborah Bird Rose, “Decolonizing the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies,” Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Anne Ross et al., Indigenous Peoples and the Collaborative Nature of Stewardship: Knowledge Binds and Institutional Conflicts (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2011); Christopher Southgate, “Stewardship and Its Competitors: A Spectrum of Relations between Humans and the Non-Human Creation,” Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, ed. Robert James Berry (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006). 11 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing, 72-73. 12 Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Tzen Wong and Claudia Fernandini, “Traditional Cultural Expression: Preservation and Innovation,” Intellectual 10

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studies of indigenous peoples’ relationship to intellectual property stand to reify stereotypical essentialism and erase the variations by which different groups position themselves in relation to the regulation of ideas. We aim to complicate this binary approach by analyzing indigenous peoples’ use of complex rhetorical strategies to assert their sovereignty in the realm of intellectual property, specifically through a reinvention of harmony that is premised in (dis)harmony. (Dis)harmony represents the non-unified, non-universal, non-singular ways in which indigenous peoples relate to intellectual property and allows for an “expanded recognition of cultural difference” that McClintock suggests is foreclosed through the colonial tool of mapping. Specifically, we use Chela Sandoval’s theory of differential consciousness13 and Donna Haraway’s cyborg writing14 to analyze the “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the WTO Agreement”15 to illustrate the complex rhetorical enactment of (dis)harmony. Given the amount of attention that rhetorical studies of intellectual property,16 as well as indigenous cultures and knowledges,17 have received, we aim to contribute Property and Human Development: Current Trends and Future Scenarios, ed. Tzen Wong and Graham Dutfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Papa Yalae, Neo-Africanism: The New Ideology for a New Africa (Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2008). 13 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 14 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 15 “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the WTO Agreement” (http://www.iatp.org/files/Indigenous_ Peoples_Statement_on_TRIPS_of_the_W.htm). 16 Charles Bazerman, The Languages of Edison’s Light (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); John Logie, Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates (West Lafayette: Parlor Press LLC, 2006); Andrea Lunsford and Susan West, “Intellectual Property and Composition Studies,” College Composition and Communication 47, no. 3 (1996): 383-411; Jessica Reyman, The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010); Steve Westbrook, ed. Composition and Copyright: Perspectives on Teaching and Fair Use (Albany: State University of New York, 2009). 17 Alanna Frost, “Literacy Stewardship: Dakelh Women Composing Culture,” College Composition and Communication 63, no. 1 (2011): 54-74; Malae Powell, “Down by the River, or How Susan La Flesche Picotte Can Teach Us about Alliance as a Practice of Survivance,” College English 67, no. 1 (2004): 38-60; John D. Romney, “Guaman Poma’s Contact with the Rhetorical Tradition,” College Composition and Communication 63, no. 1 (2011): 12-34; Morris Young,

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a feminist rhetorical approach to a much-needed examination of the intersection between the two. It is our argument that such a (dis)harmonious relationship to knowledge and the patenting of life-forms interrupts the violence of harmony that circulates in discourses about intellectual property and indigenous peoples and enacts the rhetorical sovereignty needed for self-determination and survival.

Disruptions of Harmony in Feminism via Differential Consciousness Feminist critiques of harmony offer a useful entry point that reveals the violence embedded in theories and systems based in unity as well as alternatives to the rhetoric of harmony. The rhetoric of harmony has a complicated history in the context of U.S.-based feminism, particularly as it relates to Adrienne Rich’s notion of a “common language,” a notion which she would later complicate with “the politics of location” and the kind of epistemological questioning that would counter the elision of differences upon which the “dream of a common language” is premised.18 Chela Sandoval coins the term “hegemonic feminism” to describe a form of feminism typically built around white feminists making calls for unity and harmony, which serves an underlying need for homogeneity that secures whiteness as a central organizing feature for feminist politics. Audre Lorde also notes that the call for sisterhood occludes differences: "By and large within the women's movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.”19 The call for unity in the name of "common oppression against women" elides both differences among women and different manifestations of oppression against women. Sandoval argues that hegemonic feminism plays itself out in four different phases: liberal, Marxist, radical/cultural, and socialist. These phases can be understood as “‘women are the same as men,’ ‘women are different from men,’ ‘women are superior,’ and the

“Native Claims; Cultural Citizenship: Ethnic Expressions, and the Rhetorics of ‘Hawaiianness,’” College English 67, no. 1 (2004): 83-101. 18 Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (New York: Norton, 1978); Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” Blood, Bread, and Poetry, ed. Adrienne Rich (New York: Norton, 1985). 19 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

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fourth catch-all category, ‘women are a racially divided class.’”20 The problem with hegemonic feminism lies in how it is organized around a logic of exclusion and progress. That is, each phase is understood as selfcontained, in opposition or contradiction to the other phases, and each phase is considered superior to the previous phases. For Sandoval, this hierarchy and compartmentalization reifies a feminist norm in such a way that it reproduces hegemony and "rigidly circumscribes what is possible for social activists who want to work across their boundaries."21 Hegemonic feminism is particularly problematic when looking for theories that engage difference because feminists who exist on the margins understand that no one form of political action or ideological phase is suited for all contexts and circumstances. Sandoval’s critique of the concept of harmony undergirding hegemonic feminism leads her to develop a theory of differential consciousness, which she draws from the experiences and practices of oppressed and resisting peoples. Such a consciousness allows for transformative potential of marginalized subjects to intervene in processes of domination as “[t]he differential mode of social movement and consciousness depends on the practitioner's ability to read the current situation of power and self-consciously choosing and adopting the ideological stand best suited to push against its configurations.”22 To this end, Sandoval argues for a multi-dimensional conceptualization of power, one that focuses both on semiotic positioning and movement, understanding that oppressed peoples have been constructed through material structures of domination and subordination at the same time that they have the ability to reconstruct social positions through any "media at their disposal—whether it is narrative as weapon, riot as speech, looting as revolution."23 Drawing on the semiotic theories of Jameson and Barthes, Sandoval’s theory is premised upon the understanding that subject positions are not “real,” in the positivist understanding of the word, yet they are potentially meaningful in the process of calling up identity markers and critically interrogating them to create differential consciousness. This is not a consciousness that stands at a critical distance outside of the social totality, but a consciousness that travels and is marked by a "mobile, flexible, diasporic force that migrates between contending ideological systems."24 Sandoval argues that differential

20

Sandoval, Methodology, 51. Ibid., 53. 22 Ibid., 60. 23 Ibid., 77. 24 Ibid., 30. 21

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consciousness is a means of addressing the reductionism that often results from such dichotomous thinking that polarizes gift-giving culture from commodity culture or the individual from the communal. In a parallel critique of unity and harmony, Donna Haraway (drawing in part on the work of Sandoval) argues, “The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one.”25 Instead, she calls for a cyborg feminism, which insists that: the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now…and…taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.26

Writing is the preeminent technology of cyborgs because it is infused with a "struggle for language and [a] struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism."27 Haraway explains, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”28 Sandoval’s and Haraway’s theories provide frameworks for moving away from the violence embedded in calls for unity, harmony, and commonality as well as attention to how struggle must be central to a feminist understanding of language practices and strategies. Sandoval’s theory of differential consciousness and Haraway’s cyborg writing provide an alternative to perhaps one of the most recurrent questions in feminist debates, “Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?” When Lorde asked this question over 30 years ago she was speaking to the ways in which a feminist movement could neither be built upon elision nor fear and loathing of differences (homophobia, racism, classism, etc.). However, this statement has often been de-contextualized

25

Haraway, Simians, 173. Ibid., 181. 27 Ibid., 176. 28 Ibid., 175. 26

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and posed as a question within the field of feminist rhetorics in an effort to interrogate whether or not the rhetorical strategies and approaches constructed by and for privileged, white males is suited to emerging theories of feminist rhetoric. Predictably, answers to this question have been mixed. Sandoval’s differential consciousness reveals how arguing for a kind of “purity” of feminist rhetorical strategies demands a static, dualistic approach and serves to erase the complexity of rhetorical survival tactics enacted by oppressed peoples.

The Rhetoric of Harmony in Intellectual Property Regulation One of the most common devices by which to regulate and protect ideas comes in the form of nationally- or regionally-issued patents. The expensive process of applying for and receiving a patent often entails establishing the usefulness, novelty, and non-obviousness of an idea. If the idea meets these criteria, a patent grants, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a “property right to the inventor.”29 This private, monopolistic right protects the application of the idea and precludes others from practicing the invention whether in a machine or process. As stated in Title 35 of the U.S. Code, a patent grants: The right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States, and, if the invention is a process, of the right to exclude others from using, offering for sale or selling throughout the United States, or importing into the United States, products made by that process.30

Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution guarantees this right of protection so as “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Bound up in the progress narrative, the right of exclusion propels the dominant rhetoric of science and technology. Significantly, the benefits of these exclusionary rights to a temporary monopoly extend to the “nation-state” in which these inventions

29 United States Patent and Trademark Office, “General Information Concerning Patents” (http://www.uspto.gov/patents/resources/general_info_concerning_ patents.jsp, 2100). 30 U.S. Code, “Title 35-Patents” (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode /usc_ sup_ 01_35.html, 2006).

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are produced, for the state benefits from this creativity through the catalyzing of economic growth. Though, in the scheme of things, this exclusive right is quite short— only 20 years as compared to copyright—patent protection has nevertheless functioned as a clever means to reward and spur innovation. As intellectual property experts William Landes and Richard Posner explain: The conventional rationale for granting legal protection to inventions […] is the difficulty that a producer may encounter in trying to recover his fixed costs of research and development when the product or process that embodies a new invention is readily copiable. A new product, for example, may require the developer to incur heavy costs before any commercial application can be implemented, so that a competitor able to copy the product without incurring those costs will have a cost advantage that may lead to a fall in the market price to a point at which the developer cannot recover his fixed costs.31

Furthermore, without patent protection, the inventor would likely “try to keep the invention secret, thus reducing the stock of knowledge available to society as a whole.”32 In this framework, patent protection, specifically, and intellectual property regulation, generally, appears, in the end, to benefit the community, facilitate the sharing of knowledge, and build a rich public commons. Nonetheless, we must be cognizant of how intellectual property regulation and patents depend upon the assumption that ideas can be constituted as property, which, by the very nature of property, means that ideas must be owned and the rights of the owner safeguarded from those who would benefit from the theft of the idea. At stake here is a particular epistemology reifying ways of being and knowing that, contrary to the dominant narrative, privilege the individual over community, owning over sharing, and the private over the commons. And because this epistemological orientation is often not understood as one among many epistemologies, it works hegemonically to naturalize itself. Because of the national and regional variations that have always existed in intellectual property law, the need to protect new ideas has necessitated the generation and adoption of agreements that extend the exclusionary rights of patents beyond those parameters outlined by any one country or region so that contradictory systems do not impede international trade. In an effort to harmonize, the naturalness of intellectual 31 William Landes and Richard Posner, “Trademark Law: An Economic Perspective,” Journal of Law and Economics 30, no. 2 (1987): 294. 32 Ibid.

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property protection is solidified as the project of epistemological colonization continues to be mapped across the now more fluid borders of the nationstate. Historically, the quest to extend patents beyond country-specific regulations can be traced back to the 1873 Universal Exhibition in Vienna, where, in a precursor to the World’s Fair, countries showcased their scientific and technological innovations. Of concern was the potential “theft” of ideas that would occur during the exhibition, both in terms of ideas as products as well as the processes behind the products. The “International Congress for the Consideration of the Question of Patent Protection” sought to address these immediate concerns, while also developing pathways of protection to address the economic inequity that had arisen because of either differences in competing country’s patent laws or, in many cases, the absence of patent regulation entirely. As the report of the Congress’ convention explains, “We live no longer in the day of industrial action, which is strictly confined and is removed from foreign competition, and where slow communication prevents or delays the utilization of inventions.”33 But the increased ease of communication and foreign trade also brought a new problem, one that threatened the uniting of industries across geographical boundaries: Under such altered relations, the patent granted for an invention in one country becomes in fact a restriction unprofitable and obstructive, if the same invention, without limitation or increase in price, becomes in an adjoining country common property. The artisan who, in the one country, must work with the auxiliary material there patented and therefore dearer in price, will suffer an essential injury as soon as the same material is produced in the other country, not only without restriction, but with a damaging competition. Moreover, a continuance of the hitherto antagonistic views and measures would scarcely conduce to the preservation of general harmony.34

Thus Congress aimed to create “a uniform transformation of the existing law of patents” that would cultivate a “peaceful rivalry” among competing nations with the ultimate goal of “harmony.” But this harmony is dependent, first and foremost, upon the protection of the rights of the individual inventor. Like the conception of the

33

International Congress for the Consideration of the Question of PatentProtection, “Programme,” Congressional Edition 1580 by the United States Congress (1873): 259. 34 Ibid., 259.

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romanticized author in copyright law,35 the inventor is conceived as toiling on his own, his invention the fruits of his own singular labor and thus his own property. The address by J.M. Thacher, Assistant Commissioner of Patents of the United States, to the International Congress makes this point clear: I believe that patent-protection is founded in justice to the individual […] that comparing the completeness of possession which the inventor has of his inventions with that which one has of the product of his physical powers, there can be found no higher right to the complete control of anything coming into the possession of man than that which he has to this product of his intellect. He has made it himself. If he keeps it to himself it is entirely and solely in his possession. No man can take it away; no process of law can extort it from him. He has a stronger and more valid right to it, based on possession, than even to his landed estates […] I can see no obligation on his part to impart it to others, unless it be for his own interest. I can see no obligation on his part to disclose to others unless he is permitted to control and use it as he would other property.36

This framing of trade is very much rooted in a rhetoric of harmony that aims to unify the practices and approaches to inventions. But, at the same time, in order for this unity to occur, the natural, “God-given” harmony between the inventor and his idea, must be privileged. In addition to the harmony between nations and the harmony between the inventor and his idea, the harmony between the individual and society is also insured through intellectual property protection. The labor and idea of the individual benefits society. However, in order for the inventor to share his discovery with the world, she must be induced to do so, as Thacher states, “But I believe that patent-protection is founded not alone upon individual right of property, but that it is based, secondly, on expediency, or a proper regard for the public good; in other words, that it is not only the right of the individual inventor to receive some protection, some legal recognition of his right to property in his invention, but also 35

James Boyle, Shamans, Software, & Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Andrea Abernathy Lunsford, “Rhetoric, Feminism, and Textual Ownership,” College Composition and Communication 61, no. 5 (1999): 529-45; Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi eds., The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 36 J.M. Thacher, “Address of Hon. J.M. Thacher before the International PatentCongress,” Congressional Edition, Volume 1580 by the United States Congress (1873): 11.

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that the public welfare is advanced, and demands that he should thus be recognized.”37 Intellectual property protection is the most fundamental type of property protection. Recognizing an inventor’s inalienable right to own and benefit through “renumeration”38 from her own idea is not merely proper, but more importantly, just, because it simultaneously catalyzes the evolution of society. Consequently, it is the duty of all “civilized governments” to impart this protection.39 Just as changes in industry and means of communication transformed the nature of trade in the 1800s, so too have more recent postindustrial changes. Today, the bureaucratic push to harmonize international trade relations through intellectual property law continues, most notably through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Founded in 1967, WIPO “is dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest.”40 To this end, WIPO has forwarded “upward harmonization” as a primary outcome of a cohesive intellectual property system. In his study of the harmonization of the nation-states of Europe, Stefano Giubboni explains, “[H]armonization was conceived as the typical remedy for distortions of competition potentially arising from differences in national regulatory regimes.”41 But the benefits of economic harmonization are also social as the “[c]onvergence towards higher social standards was seen as axiomatically resulting from the progressive leveling-up of productivity that would be spontaneously induced by the creation of the common market.”42 Because the common market is a free market and the free market is often, if mistakenly, assumed to lead to democratic politics, economic harmonization implicitly promises the spread of freedom and the rights of free speech, private ownership, and human equality.43 It is of little wonder then that the WIPO 37

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 World Intellectual Property Organization “What is WIPO” (http://www.wipo. int/about-wipo/en/what_is_wipo.html). 41 Stefano Giubboni, Social Rights and Market Freedom in the European Constitution: A Labour Law Perspective, trans. Rita Inston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 233. 42 Ibid. 43 Jim Mann, The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China (New York: Penguin, 2008); Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Asserting Copyright’s Democratic Principles in the Global Arena,” Vanderbilt Law Review 38

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takes, what Neil Netanel calls, a “maximalist approach” to intellectual property.44 Though more broadly implicated in the harmonization of trade than WIPO, the WTO is necessarily also involved with issues of intellectual property. Having evolved from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a set of rules that informed international trade since 1948, the WTO’s primary function “is to ensure that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible.”45 Given the differences that exist among the national laws of its 153 member states, the WTO is dedicated to “reducing obstacles to international trade and ensuring a level playing field for all, thus contributing to economic growth and development.”46 According to its mission statement: The WTO’s founding and guiding principles remain the pursuit of open borders, the guarantee of most-favoured-nation principle and nondiscriminatory treatment by and among members, and a commitment to transparency in the conduct of its activities. The opening of national markets to international trade, with justifiable exceptions or with adequate flexibilities, will encourage and contribute to sustainable development, raise people’s welfare, reduce poverty, and foster peace and stability. At the same time, such market opening must be accompanied by sound domestic and international policies that contribute to economic growth and development according to each member’s needs and aspirations.47

Like WIPO, the WTO’s emphasis on economic harmonization can also be read as affecting social harmonization. Regulated pathways to unfettered trade stand to benefit not only countries already proficient in science and industry but also those still developing countries where poverty and instability are most pronounced. The push to harmonize intellectual property regulation reached its nexus in 1994 with the “Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights” (hereafter referred to as TRIPS), which 51, no. 2 (1998): 217-349; Kellee S. Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (New York: Penguin, 2007); Suisheng Zhao, China Democracy: Reconsidering the Prospects for a Democratic China (New York: Routledge, 2000). 44 Neil Netanel, The Development Agenda: Global Intellectual Property and Developing Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 1. 45 World Trade Organization, “About the WTO—A Statement by the DirectorGeneral” (http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/wto_dg_stat_e.htm). 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

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established “a mutually supportive relationship between the WTO and the World Intellectual Property Organization.”48 Unlike the 1873 International Congress, which centered on manufactured products and the processes behind them, TRIPS reflects the change from a manufacturing-economy to a knowledge-economy. According to its preamble, the aim of TRIPS is “to reduce distortions and impediments to international trade, and taking into account the need to promote effective and adequate protection of intellectual property rights, and to ensure that measures and procedures to enforce intellectual property rights do not themselves become barriers to legitimate trade.”49 Through TRIPS, the parameters for the implementation and enforcement of a harmonious, unifying, global-level intellectual property system are stipulated. In TRIPS’s Article 27, entitled “Patentable Subject Matter,” the applicability of patents is explained to WTO nation-state members: Subject to the provisions of paragraphs 2 and 3, patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application […] patents shall be available and patent rights enjoyable without discrimination as to the place of invention, the field of technology and whether products are imported or locally produced.50

With this, we can see that TRIPS obviously makes the reach of patents extensive. Any idea discovered or invented within the boundaries of WTO nation-state members is subject to the harmonious realm of patentability, except, as Article 27.2 explains, for the following reason: “the prevention within their territory of the commercial exploitation of which is necessary to protect ordre public or morality […] provided that such exclusion is not made merely because the exploitation is prohibited by their law.”51 Paragraph 2, though vaguely worded, offers the possibility of limiting the international reach of ideas-as-private-property to preserve harmony within Member nation-states.52 But, in the quest to harmonize patent law, TRIPS ushered in a significant controversy with Article 27.3(b), which stipulated, for the first time

48

World Trade Organization, Trade Related Aspects. Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Bruce M. Harper, “TRIPS Article 27.2: An Argument for Caution,” William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy 21, no. 2 (1997): 381-420. 49

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internationally, that life forms must be afforded patent protection. Like Article 27.2, Article 27.3(b) allows for patentability exclusion. Specifically, Article 27.3(b) states that Members may exclude from patentability “[p]lants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and microbiological processes.”53 What, exactly, constitutes “essentially biological process” raises serious questions about the constitution of life and creates a quagmire that, in the era of biotechnology, allows for slippage of life into property. The effect of this slippage poses serious consequences for agriculture, medicine, and conservation, in part, because Article 27.3(b) offers a caveat to this exclusion that actually demands patent protection for plant varieties: “However, Members shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by an combination thereof.”54 Thus, what TRIPS details as a limitation to patentability is not necessarily a limitation at all, as the patentability of micro-organisms renders the patenting of life forms a matter of degree rather than kind and, in essence, reproduces colonization, erasing any hint of epistemological diversity within and across WTO nation-state members.

Indigenous Resistance and a Differential Consciousness of (Dis)Harmony On July 25, 1999, a meeting of indigenous peoples from the Philippines, Bolivia, Kenya, the United States, and India, just to name a few, gathered in a collective effort to counter TRIPS patenting of life. The result of this meeting was the “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the WTO Agreement” (hereafter referred to as the “Statement”), which sought to amend TRIPS at the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle. The “Statement” reads as a manifesto, first acknowledging how TRIPS is founded in a knowledge system at odds with indigenous traditional knowledges and offering a critique of how intellectual property rights defined in TRIPS leads to “appropriation of communal values and practices.”55 The “Statement” concludes with a list of demands to amend Article 27.3(b) so that “the WTO […] become[s] an instrument in promoting [Indigenous] rights instead of enacting and imposing Agreements which are violative or 53

World Trade Organization, Trade Related Aspects. Ibid. 55 “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement.” 54

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undermining [of Indigenous] rights as distinct peoples.”56 The complex rhetorical negotiation and intervention embodied by the “Statement” brings, we argue, the rhetorical strategies of oppressed and resisting peoples to the forefront of conversations in the field of rhetoric. Significant to understanding the rhetorical strategies embedded in the “Statement” is Sandoval’s insistence that the oppressed operate through coalitional politics in which identities are neither construed as “essence” nor so fluid and mobile as to become meaningless: “Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power’s formation require it.”57 Tasha Dubriwny, in her analysis of collective rhetoric, argues, “collective rhetoric emerges […] through strategies that enable the collaborative creation and validation of worldviews through the articulation, or the strategic linking, of individual experiences.”58 The titular phrase, “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement,” as well as the signatories from 87 indigenous peoples’ organizations, NGOs, and networks, represent shared experiences of colonization and imperialism leading to an epistemic stance that is not defined by borders or identities per se, but by a collective alignment against biocolonial appropriation and violence. The “Statement” engages in a counter-epistemological rhetoric to TRIPS, one that allows for the kind of “rhetorical sovereignty” that Scott Lyons suggests is what American Indians desire from the contested technology of writing: “The people want sovereignty, and in the context of the colonized scene of writing, rhetorical sovereignty. As the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in the pursuit of self-determination, rhetorical sovereignty requires above all the presence of an Indian voice, speaking or writing in an ongoing context of colonization and setting at least some of the terms of the debate.”59 We might extend this notion of rhetorical sovereignty to a global context in which indigenous peoples are engaging in coalitional politics. The WTO remains a long-standing context of colonization and the 56

Ibid. Sandoval, Methodology, 60. 58 Tasha Dubriwny, “Consciousness-Raising as Collective Rhetoric: The Articulation of Experience in the Redstockings’ Abortion Speak-Out of 1969,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 4 (2005): 396. 59 Scott Lyons, “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” College Composition and Communication 51, no. 3 (2000): 462. 57

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“Statement” offers the presence of a global, collective indigenous voice in which they are setting the terms of the debate by strategically negotiating discourses of intellectual property rights with their own beliefs about indigenous sovereign rights. Lyons argues that sovereignty has been largely misunderstood in the U.S. as mere self-governance informed by the model of a "nation-state." In place of this, he suggests that American Indian sovereignty focuses on "nation-people" and emphasizes their survival and flourishing. Such a notion of sovereignty is not ruled by an ideology of individualism, nor is it intent upon protecting such things as privacy and property rights. Lyons contends, "The sovereignty of individuals and the privileging of procedure are less important in the logic of a nation-people, which takes as its supreme charge the sovereignty of the groups through a privileging of its traditions and culture and continuity.”60 Echoing Sandoval’s coalition politics and differential consciousness, Morris Young suggests that we are witnessing an important rhetorical shift in indigenous rhetorics: “rhetorics that once were generated around expressions of cultural identities and resistance have now shifted to organizing around a belief in self-determination as a fundamental human right, new imagined nations in a variety of forms as materially and politically viable, and the metaphorical and/or literal return of ‘homelands.’”61 The “Statement” is organized around a belief in self-determination, coalition, and continuity and serves to interrupt the mapping of indigenous knowledges via the totalizing entities of WTO and WIPO that claim a “balanced” approach to harmonizing what constitutes knowledge. Understanding the relation of practices to knowledge is crucial in understanding how the “Statement” interrupts a Western epistemology. Robert Johnson suggests, “[I]n Western culture we have constructed a philosophy of knowledge that not only devalues the practices of the everyday, but also devalues the knowledge of those who function in those contexts [...] Users are producers of knowledge, but their modes of production have been rendered invisible by those modern cultural proclivities that subordinate the user to being a mere practitioner.”62 The "Statement" resists such a Western epistemology by refusing the dichotomy between knowledge and practice. For example, the “Statement” asserts that "the knowledge and innovations and practices in farming, agriculture, health and medical care, and conservation of biodiversity of

60

Ibid., 455. Young, “Native Claims,” 84. 62 Robert Johnson, User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1998), 56. 61

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indigenous peoples and farmers" be protected and further, that this protection specifically build upon "indigenous methods and customary laws."63 Though Article 27.3(b) allows for the implementation of “an effective sui generis system,” what constitutes efficacy is ultimately the decision of the WTO and subjects those regulatory measures customary to indigenous peoples to the scrutiny of an organization that embodies a Western epistemology at odds with those methods and laws. Additionally, the “Statement” demands the visibility of indigenous users as producers of knowledge in their quotidian practices that are based in traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. We can see further demands for selfdetermination in the assertion that the patenting of life "undermine[s] our rights to our cultural and intellectual heritage" and the insistence of the "right of indigenous peoples and farmers to continue their traditional practices of saving, sharing, and exchanging seeds; and harvesting, cultivating, and using medicinal plants,”64 all of which constitute practices that enable the survival of traditions and cultures, rather than privileging, as the colonizing rhetoric of TRIPS does, these things as "objects" that are "owned" for the benefit of individuals and nation-states. As mentioned above, differential consciousness moves fluidly and flexibly between and among competing ideologies. Thus, we can read a certain kind of identity politics in claims to indigenous knowledges that act as strategic essentialism;65 claims to identity and knowledge operate as survival tactics in the context of epistemological colonization and the struggle over life, social practices, science, technology, and international regulation. One reading of the “Statement” might suggest that the resistance to Article 27.3(b) arises from a dichotomy between indigenous peoples possessing a “harmonious” relation to nature and life that positions them as “stewards” and a Western imperialist perception of life and nature as property to be owned. However, we believe this is a false binary. Similar to Haraway’s cyborg writing, Ernest Stromberg argues, “Native rhetoricians [often] appropriate the language, styles, and beliefs of their white

63

“Indigenous Peoples’ Statement.” Ibid. 65 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990); Emma Pérez, "Irigaray's Female Symbolic in the Making of Chicana Lesbian Sitios Y Lenguas (Sites and Discourses)," Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998). 64

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audiences in order to establish a degree of consubstantiality.”66 It is our argument that the authors of the “Statement” recognize that, given the scene of continued colonization, the discourse of rights to intellectual property cannot be escaped nor ignored. Consequently, the authors engage in the “grace, flexibility, and strength” of differential consciousness67 and appropriate the language of intellectual property rights as a trope in which they literally “turn” notions of property and harmony away from a monopolistic, exclusive right of the individual towards the protection of nation-peoples because “no single person can claim invention or discovery of medicinal plants, seeds or other living things” and it is the right of indigenous peoples to “sustain [their] struggle to have [their] rights to [their] intellectual and cultural heritage and [their] lands and resources promoted and protected.”68 Given the common identification of indigenous peoples with stewardship or gift-giving culture, we might expect to see the “Statement” invoke something akin to the public domain, which Malla Pollack identifies as “inherently feminist” because it resists commodification, advocates creativity as a communal process, encourages nurturing, and provides lifegiving nourishment.69 Here the ideas and practices of cultural heritage are freely shared. Indigenous knowledge as knowledge of the public domain reflects what Gurdial Nijar suggests is one of two options for the protection of traditional knowledges. The first option demands that traditional knowledge be afforded no protection for “to bring any kind of protection of rights is to bring indigenous communities and their resources into the fold of the market economy.”70 The second option demands that a “rights regime” be created, one that “reflects the culture and value systems of these communities” and would function “to prevent their knowledge from being usurped, commoditized, privatized and to ward off any threats to the integrity of these societies.” Given Pollack’s description, the public domain might seem to be, as of now, the kind of rights regime that most 66

Ernest Stromberg, “Rhetoric and American Indians,” American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, ed. Ernest Stromberg (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006): 6. 67 Sandoval, Methodology, 60. 68 “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement.” 69 Malla Pollack, “Towards a Feminist Theory of the Public Domain, or Rejecting the Gendered Scope of United States Copyrightable and Patentable Subject Matter,” William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 12 (2006): 603-626. 70 Gurdial Singh Nijar, In Defence of Local Community Knowledge and Biodiversity: A Conceptual Framework and the Essential Elements of a Rights Regime (Penang: Third World Network, 1996), 24.

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closely mirrors those values that Nijar attributes to traditional cultures and their knowledge. In the public domain, traditional and indigenous knowledge are rooted in non-ownership. But a closer examination of the “Statement” reveals strategies that move among and between these ideologies put forth by Nijar and, consequently, a much more complicated relationship of indigenous peoples to intellectual property. In fact, it is an argument that foregrounds the power of nation-peoples in what might be understood as rhetorical sovereignty. In locating the interventionist strategies used on the part of the oppressed, it is important to engage in neither reductionist frameworks nor “totalizing” frameworks that suggest one strategy will be effective for all occasions. While there are moments in the “Statement” that might enforce a common understanding that indigenous peoples live in “harmony” with the earth and do not believe that life can be owned or patented, certainly, there are other moments in the “Statement” where the authors cast indigenous knowledges and practices as property in need of protection. For example, in the provisions they offer to amend Article 27, the “Statement” calls for TRIPS to “prevent the appropriation, theft, and piracy of Indigenous seeds, medicinal plants, and the knowledge around the use of these by researchers, academic institutions, corporations, etc.” The “Statement” also insists, “[T]he TRIPS Agreement will substantially weaken our access to and control over genetic and biological resources” (emphasis added).71 Here we see a complex rhetorical negotiation. Privileging the “survival and flourishing” of “nation-peoples” necessitates engagement with and negotiation of imperialistic discourses of property as framed by the WIPO and the WTO. As Sandoval’s theory of differential consciousness suggests, we do a disservice when we reproduce binary analyses that belie the flexible and mobile strategies invoked by oppressed peoples. Therefore, reading the “Statement” through the binary of ownership/non-ownership would be a mistake. Instead we need to recognize and celebrate the sophisticated rhetorical strategies used in the “Statement” as efforts to negotiate the “maze of dualisms”72 inherent in a Western epistemology and intervene in processes of colonization and exploitation. These strategies are effectively erased if we fall back on a Western, stereotypical notion of indigenous peoples operating under an epistemology of steward as opposed to a colonizing epistemology of commodification. The “Statement” goes on to frame indigenous peoples not as individuals, but "as communities and collectives." One interpretation of 71 72

“Indigenous Peoples’ Statement.” Haraway, Simians, 181.

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the “Statement” might, again, reproduce a dichotomy that positions the individualism so important to a Western epistemology against the collectivism so often represented as inherent to an indigenous epistemology. But the rhetorical maneuvers are more complicated than this because the “Statement” goes on to demand several amendments to Article 27 that strategically co-opt the ideology of property rights. For instance, the “Statement” insists that Article 27.3(b): “Integrate the principle and practice of prior informed consent, which means that the consent of indigenous peoples’ as communities or as collectivities should be obtained before any research or collection of plants will be undertaken. The right of indigenous peoples to veto any bioprospecting activity should be guaranteed. Mechanisms to enforce prior informed consent should be installed.”73 Informed consent and the veto might simply be understood as Western rhetorical mechanisms of power, that is, as the “master’s tools,” the utilization of which might not “dismantle the master’s house” (continued imperialism via the mapping of knowledge). However, following Sandoval’s theory of differential consciousness, we see this call for amendment as a strategic use of Western bureaucratic mechanisms to interrupt ultimately a colonizing rhetoric and privilege indigenous knowledges and rights to sovereignty. In other words, they are “seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”74 Furthermore, a dichotomous reading of the “Statement” would allow the seductive rhetoric of harmony embedded within discourses of intellectual property to remain unexamined when, in fact, the “Statement” implicitly calls into question the dominant conceptualization of “harmony” that was first put forth as the goal of “Patent Protection” at the 1873 Universal Exhibition in Vienna. By explicitly stating how TRIPS attempts to forcibly replace indigenous knowledges with Western knowledges, the “Statement” reveals how that foundational goal of “harmony” and the supposed “inherent goodness” of intellectual property law is disharmony: destruction, theft, and appropriation masquerading as harmony. The “Statement” compels us to understand how the law is, itself, a form of violence. After all, what could be more disharmonious than the subjection of a people and their knowledge systems to another group of people and their knowledge systems, attempting to wipe out cultures with rich histories that pre-date the very idea of these laws? The “Statement” does not answer this question by offering a “real” sense of harmony in place of a “false” notion of harmony. Instead, what is foregrounded are strategic 73 74

“Indigenous Peoples’ Statement.” Haraway, Simians, 175.

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rhetorical moves situated in (dis)harmony: a moving among and between ideologies to suit indigenous peoples’ communicative needs to ensure their survival, rather than a limiting and unified or totalizing strategy that reinscribes a binary logic enforcing its own kind of violence through division and devaluation. In doing so, the “Statement” not only resists the quest to harmonize through intellectual property laws, but also asserts a collective rhetorical sovereignty of indigenous peoples around the globe in such a way that it allows for a dynamic and flexible identification of indigenous peoples that can respond to the shifting power dynamics as the project of imperialism continues in the less tangible arena of mapping knowledge. Not insignificantly, the complex rhetorics of resistance by indigenous peoples have brought about important changes that serve the kind of sovereignty founded in a nation-people rather than a nation-state that Lyons advocates. Additionally, the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, adopted in November 2001, allows for greater flexibility in the circumvention of patent rights in order to provide greater access to essential medicines produced so often from the patenting of life at the cellular level, a move that harbors the potential of an increased, though by no means exhaustive, criticality toward the application of patents in the field of biotechnology. We cannot think of indigenous resistance as simply or always about resisting intellectual property rights. This would reproduce the binary logic that opposes indigenous knowledge to Western knowledge and result in the process of demarcation through which we continue to inscribe clear boundaries in the metaphorical mapping of knowledge. We have to resist the stereotypical notion of indigenous peoples operating under a sense of authentic harmony or stewardship of the environment, otherwise we succumb to the violence of binary thinking. In the case of intellectual property, a parallel apparatus of violence lies in the seductive rhetoric of harmony. Like McClintock’s discussion of literal maps as a “technology of conversion” in the process of early colonization, dominant notions of harmony erase cultural differences under the banner of unity and occlude how indigenous knowledges are, themselves inventive, rather than merely essential. A Western epistemology that essentializes in this way does not allow for indigenous knowledge to be knowledge; hence, as in the case of quinoa, this knowledge that is not “knowledge,” can be pirated via intellectual property rights and regulations. Because we live in a time of what James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins describe as intellectual property

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“hypertrophy,”75 we have to see indigenous responses to this excess in the commodification and regulation of ideas as flexible, dynamic, and fluid. A recognition of the range of cultural differences must be translated to a recognition of the range of differences in how intellectual property is conceived and strategically negotiated. Thus, when we see notions of ownership and control in such documents as the “Statement,” or when indigenous peoples actually use intellectual property rights to protect indigenous knowledges, we must recognize such acts not as false consciousness or the workings of hegemony, but instead as the workings of differential consciousness that enables rhetorical sovereignty.

75

James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, “The Genius of Intellectual Property and the Need for the Public Domain,” The Role of Scientific and Technical Date and Information in the Public Domain, ed. National Research Council (Washington D.C.: The National Academic Press, 2003).

FEMINIST-INDIGENOUS RHETORICS OF SURVIVANCE AND DISCURSIVE SPACES IN S. ALICE CALLAHAN’S WYNEMA: A CHILD OF THE FOREST KELLY SASSI

She wrote it, but I don’t have time to read it.1 She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it, and we can’t find it.2 She wrote it, but she’s only interesting because she was the first Native American woman to publish a novel.3 She wrote it, but it’s not really art, it’s “generically and artistically awkward.”4 She wrote it, but it’s “assimilationist dogma.”5

The treatment of Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891) exemplifies Joanna’s Russ’s “sketch of an analytic tool: patterns in the suppression of women’s writing.”6 Ironically, it is primarily women and Native American scholars who have written the “buts” about Callahan. 1

Editor, Our Brother in Red (1891) who writes: “[Callahan] is an intelligent Christian lady and we look forward with pleasure to a time when our other duties will permit us to read the book. It is certainly cheap at 25 cents per copy.” 2 There is no mention of the book from 1891 to 1955, when Carolyn Foreman discovers a copy in the Library Congress and writes an article about it in the Chronicles of Oklahoma. The book then goes missing again until LaVonne Brown Ruoff finds it in the US Archives in the 1990s. 3 Annette Van Dyke, “An Introduction to Wynema, A Child of the Forest,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4, no. 2/3, 123. 4 Melissa Ryan, “The Indian Problem as a Woman’s Question: S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest,” The American Transcendental Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2007): 23. 5 Craig Womack, Red on Red (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 107. 6 Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 5.

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Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek and Cherokee) states: “She is a bad Creek writer who has written a marginally Creek novel”7 that amounts to little more than “assimilationist dogma.”8 Callahan, who is of Muscogee Creek and Irish descent, was a product of assimilation, having attended boarding school—the Wesleyan Female Institute—and then having become a teacher of Indian children at Muskogee’s Harrell International Institute. Her identity is complex. She is not only a Creek writer; she is also a mixed-blood writer. And she is a woman writer (though not only a woman writer). I argue that we ought to look at her multiple identities holistically and acknowledge that she is part of a larger movement of American Indian writers identified by Malea Powell, who are using writing tactically by employing rhetorics of survivance. Survivance is a term created from survival and resistance. Survival is an important part of this equation, a fact that was particularly poignant when this paper was first presented at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference in Mankato, the site of the largest mass hanging in United States history. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged there in 1862, a few years before Callahan was born. She died a few years after the massacre at Wounded Knee. In her brief life of twenty-six years, bookended by this kind of violence against Native Americans, Wynema was the sole novel she wrote. It is a novel of resistance, resistance that is hard to see from the space of whitestreamٝ America. Malea Powell’s goal is to make visible that “some of us read and listen from a different space, and to suggest that, as a discipline, it is time we all learned to hear that difference.”9 Focusing less on suppressing Wynema and more on listening to the work is an enterprise made challenging when influenced by language and conventions that grew out of a Eurocentric, male-stream literary tradition. One of the ways we can avoid traveling the well-worn pathway of this tradition is by rejecting its modes of suppression. The “one of,” “first,” and “only” categorizations of Wynema are tools of an “additive” approach that Powell rejects in favor of a focus on how writers like Callahan use writing. American Indian authors use rhetorics of survivance “consciously or unconsciously […] in order to reimagine and literally refigure “the Indian.”10 Powell shows how Sarah 7

Womack, Red on Red, 120. Ibid., 107. ٝ Claude Denis, We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 9 Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” CCC 53, no. 3 (2002): 398 10 Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance,” 400. 8

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Winnemucca and Charles Eastman transform their status from objects within a colonial discourse to subjects, bringing their readers’ attention to their presence, rather than their absence.11 One of the ways American Indian authors do this, Powell argues, is by creating ironic representations of themselves; this “translates simulations of dominance into liberation.”12 When Powell engages with these ironic representations in her scholarship, she is practicing “trickster hermeneutics,” a tactic of what another Native American scholar, Gerald Vizenor, calls “manifest manners.” The use of dual- (or multiple-) voiced narratives is another rhetorical move Powell illustrates, as is using an understanding of one’s white audience and their desires to build equivalencies with them that will serve the purpose of their narratives. Although Wynema is a work of fiction, unlike the texts Powell works with in “Rhetorics of Survivance,” I argue that she makes many of the same rhetorical moves. When readers listen for rhetorics of survivance while looking at the use of space in the novel—drawing on the theories of Foucault, de Certeau and Massey—Callahan’s Native American feminist rhetorical moves emerge. Callahan makes meaning through various representations of space: an imitation of whites’ stereotypical concept of Native American cultural practices and space, resistance to the disciplining spatial practice of allotment, and the creation of new spatial practices where schooling is concerned. The title character of the novel, Wynema, is a precocious Indian girl who begs her father to let her attend school. He refuses to send her to the mission school, run by Gerald Keithly, and instead requests that a school be built in their village. Keithly sends a teacher to this school, Genevieve Weir. Wynema is a model student, eventually becoming a co-teacher and traveling to Genevieve’s home where she meets and falls in love with Robin Weir, Genevieve’s brother. Disagreement between Genevieve and her fiancé, Maurice Mauran over allotment (The Dawes Act) leads to Genevieve ending the engagement and returning to Wynema’s village where she accepts a proposal by Keithly. A double marriage ensues: Wynema marries Robin, and Genevieve marries Gerard Keithly, a mission teacher. But this double marriage, usually a device for ending a comic novel, occurs early, with nearly one-third of the novel still to come. The final portion of the book concerns Indian land rights, an issue dealt with

11 12

Ibid. Ibid., 401.

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not only through discussion of allotment, but also through the first fictional re-telling of the Wounded Knee massacre.13 Wynema is a novel, a story. De Certeau talks about stories providing a foundation for future action, going “‘in a procession’ ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them.”14 That Callahan intended her story to change social practice is made clear in the dedication: To the Indian tribes of North America who have felt the wrongs and oppression of their pale-faced brothers, I lovingly dedicate this work, praying that it may serve to open the eyes and heart of the world to our afflictions, and thus speedily issue into existence an era of good feeling and just dealing toward us and our more oppressed brothers.15

This dedication is one of the clearest examples of the dual-voiced narrative; it is dedicated to Indians, but addressed to a white audience. Juxtaposed with this dedication, is the opening to the novel, which does similar rhetorical work. To draw her white audience into the novel so that she can engage them in these issues of Indian oppression, Callahan employs stereotypes, romanticized language, and white concepts of Indian space. White stereotypes of Muscogee Creek Indians in particular, and Native Americans in general, both from the time the novel was published and continuing today, include the “noble savage,” the “Indian Princess,” and the idyllic, yet primitive Indian teepee village. Callahan imitates these stereotypes in the opening of Wynema. As the novel begins, Callahan sets the scene thus: In an obscure place, miles from the nearest trading point, in a teepee, dwelt the parents of our heroine when she first saw the light. All around and about them stood the teepees of their people, and surrounding the village of tents was the great, dark, cool forest in which the men, the “bucks,” spent many hours of the day in hunting, or fishing in the river that flowed peacefully along in the midst of the wood.16

13

Lisa Tatonetti points out that the massacre took place just six months before Callahan published Wynema. “Behind the Shadows of Wounded Knee: The Slippage of Imagination in Wynema: A Child of the Forest,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 16.1 (Spring 2004): 1. 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 125. 15 Sara Alice Callahan, Wynema: A Child of the Forest, ed. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), Dedication. 16 Ibid., 1.

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Callahan’s choice to house her heroine in a teepee is clearly an imitation of white misconceptions of Indian village space and is a simulation of dominance. The teepee is a powerful image in the white imagination, and the mobility of the teepee is key to seeing Indian villages as moveable. In fact, Muscogee people, unlike the Plains Indians, did not live in teepees, but in huts roofed with grass and wood.17 Callahan, who lived in Indian territory and had a father who was “very active” in tribal issues, would surely have been aware of the dwellings of Muscogee Creek Indians, so we can assume that this description of the setting is a deliberate move on her part to draw white readers into her novel, a move Ruoff calls “double-voiced discourse,”18 and, perhaps more significantly, a rhetorical move that is part of a larger American Indian tradition called “rhetorics of survivance.”19 It is worth asking why the dominant image of Indian dwellings in the white imagination is a moveable dwelling. What’s at stake for the colonizer when the dwellings of the colonized are permanent? The situation of the village in a “great dark, cool” forest and next to a river that flows “peacefully” provides a pastoral and benign view of nature. Callahan’s romanticization of the location of Wynema’s home both appeals to her whitestream audience and engenders sympathy for the allotment protest which comes later in the novel. Other examples of Native American stereotypes from the first two pages of the novel include reference to Wynema as a “little savage” and those of her tribe as “happy peaceable Indians” who dream of the “happy hunting-grounds beyond.” Callahan describes the space of the village and its relation to Indian cultural practices: Here are no churches and school-houses, for the “heathen is a law unto himself,” and “ignorance is bliss” to the savage; but the “medicine man” tells them of the Indian’s heaven/ behind the great mountain, and points them to the circuitous trail over its side which he tells them has been made by the great warriors of their tribe as they went to the “happy hunting ground.”20

While such descriptions imitate the dominant discourse about Native Americans of the day, there is also a foreshadowing of resistance in 17

Kyle Ramaker, “Creek Indians,” Official Website of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, 28 November 2004. 18 A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures (New York: MLA, 1990), xix. 19 Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance.” 20 Callahan, Wynema, 1-2.

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Callahan’s use of quotation marks around the most stereotypical terms. Furthermore, when reading through the lens of Powell’s rhetorics of survivance and Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics, it appears that Callahan is building an ironic representation of Wynema’s community. Doing so opens up a space for her feminist and indigenous voice. Callahan writes models of resistance to the dominant culture that are sometimes subtle (as in the example above) and sometimes overt and often linked to space. In the first third of the novel, Callahan’s resistance is subtle. Wynema’s teacher, Genevieve Weir, is new to the village and— like the reader Callahan is writing for—has a lot to learn about Muscogee culture. Genevieve’s first two cultural experiences, with Indian food and with the medicine man, result in her rejecting both, but her interpretation of Indian dancing—held in open space in contrast to white dances—is mediated by (white male) Gerard Keithly. Callahan is drawing on a long feminist tradition of women putting their voices into male characters, a tradition that goes back to the first phase of women’s writing that Elaine Showalter calls the “imitation” phase, when women writers even published as men. Perhaps Callahan is invoking this tradition by publishing as “S.” Callahan, rather than using her full name, “Sophia.” Regardless, Callahan represents Keithly as a teacher of Indian culture who is “determined to enlighten” Genevieve about the busk. He explains, “The Indians eat no green corn until after they have had a busk, when they have cleansed their system and prepare themselves for a bountiful feast of it. The dance which they will hold to-night is a thank-offering to the bountiful Supplier who has made their corn crop to flourish.”21 Despite Keithly’s efforts, Genevieve’s uneducated attitude remains entrenched. As the dance continues the following day, Genevieve states: “Oh that the Indians would quit these barbaric customs!” This time Keithly tries to enlighten Miss Weir through a comparison of the spaces in which Indians and whites hold their dances. Keithly claims, the Indian is “more sensible in the place he chooses. The Indians “select an open space, in the fresh, pure air” in comparison to the whites from the south (where Genevieve is from) who dance in “a tight, heated room.”22 Keithly tries to make her question the dichotomy of savage/civilized when he asks, “Do you think, Miss Weir, that if our Indian brother yonder […] could step into a ballroom, say in Mobile, with its lights and flowers, its gaudily, and if you will allow it, indecently dressed dancers—do you think he would consider us more civilized than he?” At the end of this exchange, Genevieve admits 21 22

Ibid., 17-18. Ibid., 21.

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she is “convinced of the superiority of our red brothers” and says, “it is truly a pity the Indian has not more champions such as you Mr. Keithly; for then they would not be so grossly misrepresented as they now are.”23 Callahan’s technique for portraying resistance to white misconceptions of Indians is to put the words of resistance in the mouth of the main, white, male character in the novel. Using a white male to teach a white female about the correct interpretation of Muscogee spatial-cultural practice is consistent with the dominant social hierarchy of the audience Callahan sought to enlighten, an oblique method of resistance indeed. Callahan uses the voice of the oppressor (the white male missionary) to critique white people’s dancing spaces in “tight, heated rooms” as opposed to the Muscogee’s use of “an open space in the fresh, pure air,” highlighting the superiority of the Muscogee space. Interestingly, in this passage where Callahan is striving to change the reader’s mind about so-called Indian savagery, she uses historically accurate information rather than stereotyped images as she does in the opening. Creek towns, or italwa “were centered around plazas (pascova) used for dancing, religious ceremonies and games. It was here that the Sacred Fire was rekindled annually at the Green Corn Festival (Busk).”24 This is in contrast to the historically inaccurate and stereotypical parts at the beginning, which, I argue, are written to draw her reader into the text. Perhaps having invited the white reader into her space, she can now reveal a more accurate representation of Creek culture. Callahan uses such indirect methods of resistance to white attitudes throughout the gradual building of tension in the relationship between Genevieve and Gerald. At the moment of peak tension, just prior to the couple confessing their love for each other, Callahan addresses another spatial issue: allotment. In the chapter titled “Shall We Allot?” Callahan again employs the technique of using social hierarchy to reinforce her message, though in this case it is a white woman (Genevieve) educating a Native woman (Wynema). I would agree with Senier, who characterizes the relationship between Wynema and Genevieve as “a voluntary feminist affiliation across cultures that begins to move toward mutual cultural recognition and toward the breakdown of many hierarchies—racial, sexual, and national.”25 Genevieve explains to Wynema: “Some United States Senators are very much in favor of allotting in severalty the whole 23

Ibid., 22. Larry Worthy, “An Introduction to the Creek Nation,” About North Georgia, 10 October 2011, http://ngeorgia.com/history/creek.html. 25 Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 201. 24

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of the Indian Territory, and, of course, that would take in your country also…”26 Genevieve is referring to The Dawes Act, also called the Indian General Allotment Act of 1887. On the topic of allotment, Callahan’s tenor of writing changes, becoming much more explicitly resistant. Callahan assumes—and rightly so—that her audience knows what The Dawes Act is. Prior to allotment, Federal Indian policy consisted of removal, treaties, reservations, and even war. According to the education staff at the US Archives Web site, The Dawes Act worked like this: [T]he law allowed for the president to break up reservation land, which was held in common by the members of a tribe, into small allotments to be parceled out to individuals. Thus, Native Americans registering on a tribal "roll" were granted allotments of reservation land. Each head of family would receive one-quarter of a section (120 acres); […] In order to receive the allotted land, members were to enroll with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Once enrolled, the individual's name went on the "Dawes rolls." This process assisted the BIA and the secretary of the interior in determining the eligibility of individual members for land distribution.27

The distribution of Native Americans onto lots is the grandest disciplining movement by the US government, but the placing of Native American names on the “Dawes Rolls” serves as a preliminary step to disciplining Native Americans and redistributing them in space, much like the labeling of hospital beds with patient names was an initial step in disciplining that space, according to Foucault.28 The goal of the disciplining of Native Americans was assimilation. Senier points out the connections between allotment and assimilation: “The legislation purported to give Indians something—fee patents, citizenship, and attendant civil rights—and yet it clearly aimed to make Indians something —agrarian, Christian, possessive individuals, homogenized “American” subjects.”29 The US Archives education staff states, “Very sincere individuals reasoned that if a person adopted white clothing and ways, and was responsible for his own farm, he would gradually drop his Indianess and 26

Callahan, Wynema, 50. Education staff, “Teaching with Documents Lesson Plan: Maps of Indian Territory, the Dawes Act, and Will Rogers’ Enrollment Case File,” US Archives Website, 8 April 2005, http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/federal_indian_policy/federal_i ndian_policy.html. 28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 144. 29 Siobhan Senier, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse: Reading Wynema’s Success and Shortcomings,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no 3 (2000): 421. 27

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be assimilated into the population,” an attitude that we see reflected in Wynema’s reply to Genevieve: “I don’t see how dividing our lands can materially damage us.” Strangely, Wynema expresses one of the main white arguments in favor of allotment: There are so many idle, shiftless Indians, who do nothing but hunt and fish; then there are others who are industrious and enterprising; so long as our land remains whole, in common, these lazy Indians will never make a move toward cultivating it; and the industrious Indians and ‘squaw men’ will inclose as much as they can for their own use. Thus the land will be unequally divided, the lazy Indians getting nothing because they will not exert themselves to do so; while, if the land were allotted, do you not think that these idle Indians, knowing the land to be their own, would have pride enough to cultivate their land and build up their homes?30

Wynema’s views are surprising in that they are in contradiction to the message about the superiority of open space expressed earlier by Keithly. Callahan does not seem to trust that her Indian message will be heard if delivered by an Indian. Instead, it is Genevieve who counters the white argument with two points: if Indian lands were allotted, Indian territory would become a state, and therefore, a subject of the United States government, and if Indians, without the means of supporting themselves were given land, they would likely sell it and then end up landless and homeless. In fact, something very similar, in reality, did come to pass: The purpose of the Dawes Act and the subsequent acts that extended its initial provisions was purportedly to protect Indian property rights, particularly during the land rushes of the 1890s, but in many instances the results were vastly different. The land allotted to the Indians included desert or near-desert lands unsuitable for farming. In addition, the techniques of self-sufficient farming were much different from their tribal way of life. Many Indians did not want to take up agriculture, and those who did want to farm could not afford the tools, animals, seed, and other supplies necessary to get started. There were also problems with inheritance. Often young children inherited allotments that they could not farm because they had been sent away to boarding schools. Multiple heirs also caused a problem; when several people inherited an allotment, the size of the holdings became too small for efficient farming.31

The real reasons for the Dawes Act were to “obtain land for white settlement, to reduce the costs of treaty obligations to tribes, and to 30 31

Callahan, Wynema, 51. Education staff, “Teaching with Documents Lesson Plan.”

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reconcile the sentiment of influential social reformers who wanted native peoples to be included in American society.”32 The US government was obscenely successful in its first aim: Indian land holdings were reduced from 147,000,000 acres in 1887 to 55,000,000 in 1934. In Wynema, Genevieve takes up the allotment issue with her fiancé, Maurice Mauran. After expressing his unconditional favor for allotment (and claiming Indians have less intelligence than his dog), he uses his answer to the question to criticize Genevieve for being unwomanly for reading and talking about political issues, and she angrily breaks off their engagement. In contrast, Gerard Keithly writes her a letter in which he says, “No, we will never agree to this measure; I will fight it with my last breath.”33 This letter wins Genevieve’s heart, and she decides to return to Indian country, where she declares her love for Keithly and they are married. Choosing a marriage partner based on his political stance about the American Indian lands issue is a definite feminist act on Genevieve’s part and testament to the change in her character since her first prejudiced comments in the novel. Allotment is also significant because with it comes a way of representing Native Americans in space using a map, and one of the features of a map is a scale marker so that one can determine the distance between points. The way Wynema’s tribe operates prior to allotment is not measurable. Genevieve describes the place of the busk in vague terms: “At sundown they started for the camping-ground, which was some miles distant—how many could not be exactly told, for an Indian never measures distance.”34 Maps, which do measure distance, are a tool of the colonizer and a precursor to the disciplining described by Foucault. De Certeau, who takes an interdisciplinary approach to the theme of resistance in The Practice of Everyday Life, is useful in analyzing allotment. According to de Certeau, a map “colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it.”35 Spatial change is integral to social change,36 and this is especially true of a spatial change like allotment, which requires the drawing of boundaries. The drawing of this kind of boundary creates an “inside and an outside” and 32

Michael R. McLaughlin, “The Dawes Act, of Indian General Allotment Act of 1881: The Continuing Burden of Allotment,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20, no. 2 (1996): 64. 33 Callahan, Wynema, 57. 34 Ibid., 14-15. 35 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 121. 36 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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can even construct a counterposition between an “us” and a “them.”37 In other words, the spatial changes brought about by allotment separated Native Americans from each other and eroded their communal identity. The Dawes Act also formalized a gender hierarchy that was not present in all Indian tribes at the time—lots were assigned to male heads of households. Senier celebrates Wynema for providing a “rare and radical critique of allotment,” but argues that it fails to “supply a tribal discourse as an alternative to assimilation,” a critique echoed by Craig Womack.38 Although I agree that Callahan does not provide an alternative to assimilation, there are two moves she makes that resist assimilation, both relating to space: the space of Wynema’s school and the narrative space of the novel. The definition of space I wish to use here is that described by Massey: space is “conceptualized as created out of social relations, […] full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.”39 The space of the school is significant because schooling is such a powerful tool of assimilation. By separating young Indian children from their homes and families, it was easier to dominate them. Wynema, as a very young girl, on her first visit to a mission school sixteen miles from her village, is reluctant to return home. She exhorts her father to let her stay at the school and learn: “let me stay here and listen always; I want to know all this that the pupils are talking about.”40 Wynema’s desire to be educated sets her apart, for the narrator has informed the reader: “the Indians long left to follow after pleasure are loth to quit her shrine for the nobler one of Education. It was hard to impress upon them, young or old, the necessity of becoming educated.”41 Wynema’s father, Choe Harjo, in refusing her request, does not take issue with education per se, but with Wynema leaving her home in order to be educated. This is where it is helpful to read Callahan’s work in conjunction with the writing of other Native American women publishing at around the same time, such as Sara Winnemucca, who writes about schooling and Zitkala-Sa, whose chapter, “The School Days of a Young Girl” is a moving portrayal of the upheaval brought about by being forced to go to boarding school. When one resists reading Callahan as an anomaly, Wynema’s father’s resistance is powerful indeed. He proposes an alternative: “we can build 37

Ibid., 152. Senier, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse,” 423. 39 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 265. 40 Callahan, Wynema, 3. 41 Ibid., 2. 38

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you a school at home, and you may stay there and listen.”42 Thus begins the theme of education in the novel and also the first operationalization of the interplay between space and place in the novel. In “Spatial Stories,” de Certeau defines place (lieu) as, “The order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in coexistence” and space (espace) as what “exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.”43 The mission school where Wynema wants to be educated is a place. That mission school is assigned a missionary (Gerald Keithly) and probably appears on a map back at Keithly’s home church. The mission school is located a certain number of miles from the next village (sixteen) and from other missions. By contrast, Wynema’s village is a space, an intersection of mobile elements. The fictional busk in the novel, for example, does not occur at a particular place; the people gather at an unmapped outdoor space—but at a particular time (though not a time that is synchronized with a clock or calendar)—when the first corn comes in. The school Wynema envisions in the “space” of her village comes into being not with a physical foundation being laid in a particular place, but through her imagination: Every day she thought with delight of the school her father would build, and every day planned it all for the benefit of her little friends and playmates, who had become anxious also, from hearing Wynema’s description of school life, to enter “learning’s hall.” When Gerald Keithly finally came, he found a small school organized under Wynema, waiting for a house and teacher.44

Although the physical school does not yet exist as a place, it is “waiting for a house and teacher” and it can be “found” by the white missionary (and by Wynema and her friends). The mobile elements of Wynema’s desire, her father’s assent, and the willingness of her friends have created the space of a school prior to it actually being recognized as a place. Wynema’s planning, facilitated by her father’s wish to keep the family unit intact, can be read as quite a subversive act, for separating a generation of Indians from their parents and punishing them for speaking their Native language were powerful tools of assimilation. Wynema’s 42

Ibid., 3. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 44 Callahan, Wynema, 3. Italics mine. 43

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father, Choe Harjo, emerges as a subject, not an object when he makes this move. To understand the significance of Wynema and her father negotiating to have a school in their home village, it is useful to consider the alternative: the act of going away for school. Zitkala-Sa’s nonfiction account in American Indian Stories of leaving her home for boarding school demonstrates the disciplining practices that take place in this environment. On her first day at boarding school, “A large bell rang for breakfast, its loud metallic voice crashing through the belfry overheard and into our sensitive ears.” The sound of the bell is a signal of how time will be compartmentalized for the students at the school, and the sound itself, combined with other sounds, is restrictive: “The annoying clatter of shoes on bare floors gave us no peace. The constant clash of harsh noises, with an undercurrent of many voices murmuring an unknown tongue, made a bedlam within which I was securely tied. And though my spirit tore itself in struggling its lost freedom, all was useless.”45 Zitkala-Sa’s account also speaks to the disciplining of bodies through the repetition of bells: We were placed in a line of girls who were marching into the dining room.... A small bell was tapped and each of the pupils drew a chair from under the table. Supposing the act meant they were to be seated, I pulled out mine and at once slipped into it from one side. But when I turned my head, I saw that I was the only one seated, and all the rest at our table remained standing. Just as I began to rise, looking shyly around to see how chairs were to be used, a second bell was sounded. All were seated at last, and I had to crawl back into my chair again. I heard a man’s voice at one end of the hall, and I looked around to see him. But all the others hung their heads over their plates. As I glanced at the long chain of tables, I caught the eyes of a paleface woman upon me. Immediately I dropped my eyes, wondering why I was so keenly watched by the strange woman. The man ceased his mutterings, and then a third bell was tapped. Every one picked up his knife and fork and began eating. I began crying instead, for by this time I was afraid to venture anything more.46

The strictly timed movements of the students with each part of the movement signaled by a bell is representative of the highly compartmentalized schedules at Indian boarding schools, and, like allotment, a powerful tool of disciplining Indians. Zitkala-Sa’s experiences are by no means unique. In the US archives one can find many examples of such boarding school 45

Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 89. 46 Ibid., 89-90.

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schedules. This one, from the Oglala Sioux Boarding School (the only other tribe besides the Muskogee depicted in the novel is the Sioux), is representative of the kinds of schedules to which Native American students had to adhere: Daily Program Monday a.m. Rising Bell and Reveille First Call Assembly Breakfast Work Call Industrial Details Report Industrial Session School Call Academic Session Recall Dinner

6:00 6:50 6:55 7:00 7:45 7:45 7:45-9:15 First 8:15 8:30-11:40 11:45 11:55

School Call Academic Session Industrial Detail Report Athletic Teams practice Recall Retreat Supper Religious instruction by missionaries Call to quarters Tattoo Taps and Lights out

First 12:45 12:50-4:00 3:00 4:00-5:00 5:00 5:20 5:30 6:15-7:15 8:45 8:50 9:00

Second 8:20

Second 12:50

This schedule shows the disciplining effects of schooling to be akin to the distribution of bodies in eighteenth century European factories that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish. Besides allotment, the passage of the Dawes Act also signaled a shift in Native American education: from missionary schools and manual day labor schools to boarding schools.47 The use of enclosure can be seen as a disciplining technique, which Foucault states, “proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.”48 Enclosure also functions to create an us and them, as Massey argues, and, indeed, many children who 47 Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth Century Nationalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 147. 48 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141.

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returned home from boarding schools found they no longer belonged in their home communities. Although Foucault was writing mainly about the change in prisons in the nineteenth century, he does cite boarding schools as one example of this technique for disciplining the body.49 Two other techniques Foucault outlines that are relevant to the change in American Indian Education are the “need to distribute and partition off space in a rigorous manner” and the control of activity through a timetable.50 The disciplining effect of such a schedule was meant to speed along the process of assimilation, but it seems to have also prepared students for life in a factory or prison. Considering the power of this kind of schooling to acculturate and subordinate Native Americans, Wynema’s father’s rejection of boarding school for Wynema is indeed a significant act of resistance. The hyperscheduling of boarding schools according to bells is the antithesis of a life scheduled by, for example, the ripening of green corn, which served as the signal to hold the busk. Wynema’s father’s prescience in resisting sending Wynema away to school saves her from this kind of disciplining process. Wynema’s school is a subversive space that allows her to acquire English and read great literature and even to fit in seamlessly with life in Genevieve’s bourgeois home, yet not make her a stranger to her own village and culture, as was Zitkala-Sa’s experience (and that of many other Native American children) upon returning home from boarding school. That Callahan wishes to promote this alternative model of schooling is evident when we learn near the end of the novel that the school has grown to include over two hundred students and Wynema is asking for the building to be expanded. As a writer, Callahan is using the rhetorics of survivance to model an alternative to the acculturation of Indian boarding schools. Another example of Wynema’s utilization of her own space for education occurs later in the book when she is grown and traveling with her teacher, Genevieve Weir, to the latter’s home in the south. Wynema’s love interest, Robin Weir (Genevieve’s brother), “found her high up in the old cherry-tree poring over a volume of Tennyson’s poems, totally absorbed and oblivious of her surroundings.”51 Wynema’s position in the tree is both a subversive act, to resist the spatial and disciplining demand that study be conducted indoors, and a creative one, to construct a space in nature as a school. 49

Ibid. Ibid., 149. 51 Callahan, Wynema, 60-61. 50

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Callahan is doing interesting work with narrative space as well. The careful attention to making the story appealing to her white audience is not maintained throughout the novel. Siobhan Senier points out the movement from “white characters’ explications of indigenous culture […] to Indians speaking for themselves.”52 The first voice we hear is Wynema’s, which makes sense as she acquires English in the first part of the novel and so has less need for mediation by the white characters as the novel progresses. In the end, when the story of Wounded Knee is told, there are voices of other Indians as well. “Wildfire,” the chief leading the resistance, explains how US land policy has affected his people: We were once a large and powerful nation, ruling over a vast portion of this country of yours. By the white man’s cruelty, we have been driven farther and farther away until we now occupy this Government reservation, in a climate so cold and exposed to such hardships that our numbers have diminished until we are but a handful—a mere speck of what we were. In the old days we were free; we hunted and fished as we pleased, while our squaws tilled the soil. Now we are driven to a small spot, chosen by the pale-faces, where we are watched over and controlled by agents who can starve us to death at their will.53

Wildfire’s objection to being “watched over” on a reservation is similar to Zitkala-Sa’s discomfiture at being watched in the boarding school. Increased surveillance is characteristic of both of these spaces. Surveillance—symbolized by Foucault’s panoptican54—is a disciplining technique, and one which Wildfire is well aware of as he uses the image of a caged bird to justify going into a battle which means certain death: “What is life to a caged bird, threatened with death on all sides? The cat springs to catch it and hangs to the cage looking with greedy eyes at the victim. Strange, free birds gather round its prison and peck at its eyes, taunting it with its captivity until it beats its wings against the cage and longs for freedom, yea even the freedom of death.”55 Wildfire’s point is that it is not just confinement, but being watched while in confinement that is unbearable. Carl Peterson’s efforts to convince the warriors to go back to the reservation are in vain and when Peterson returns from the battlefield to tell the story of the massacre, it is clear that Callahan has finished with white mediation of Indian issues. 52

Senier, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse,” 432. Callahan, Wynema, 80-81. 54 A circular prison with a center with windows for guards to look out on the prison cells at all times. 55 Callahan, Wynema, 81. 53

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Peterson brings along an elder, Chikena, the only survivor of the massacre, and Wynema translates the tragic story. Chikena makes clear that the battle is about land: “There was a time when my people had plenty of land […] but after awhile the pale-faces came along, and by partly buying, partly seizing our lands by force, drove us very far away from our fertile country, until the Government placed us on a reservation in the Northwest.”56 Chikena also ends the story on the topic of land, asking her audience to remember “that for ever acre of the land the United States government holds today, which it acquired from the Indians of any tribe, from the landing of Columbus, it has not paid five cents on average.”57 This does not sound like “assimilationist dogma” at all. Callahan goes even further, breaking in with an almost meta-level comment about her overall project: “Search history and you will find that these are facts and figures and not mere sentimentalism.”58 Callahan signals overtly that the text has moved beyond using the conventions of sentimental fiction to carry her message. Moving back away from the text, to the place of the novel in the American literary tradition, one can argue that the novel is significant merely for it being a first—the first novel that we know of by a Native American woman, but to avoid suppressing the work, we need also recognize that Wynema is not only a first. It is also significant for the way it creates representations of, and resistance against, white (male) spatial practices that have a Foucauldian disciplining effect on the Native American body. In a reference to the oppressive spatializing practices of the discipline itself—one that allots the “margin” of the canon to texts by Native American women, Kenneth Roemer argues, [U]nless teachers can present Native American texts in ways that place them in meaningful and imaginative relationships with mainstream and other non-mainstream American literatures, there is the distinct possibility that Indian literatures will be exiled to new forms of (academic) reservations: special topics courses and segregated “ethnic” or “minority” units. Once thus removed, it will be all too easy to isolate and then ignore Indian texts.59

56

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 98. 58 Ibid. Italics mine. 59 Kenneth M. Roemer, “Making Indian Literatures Fit,” Heath Anthology of American Literature, 3rd edition, ed. Paul Lauter (New York: Houghton, 2006), http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/tamlit/newsletter/2/Roemer.htm. 57

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I hope to have avoided placing the novel on an academic reservation as well as limiting it to a marginalized/disciplinized allotment. And, although I began this analysis focusing on a Muscogee Creek author and on elements specific to the Muscogee Creek Indians, like their dwellings, the spatializing practice of The Dawes Act affected more than just the Muscogee Creek Indians. If we can talk of any generalizable characteristics of Native Americans, we can talk about responses to the Dawes Act. Callahan was undoubtedly aware of this possibility, as the dedication to the novel signals. The issue of allotment is far from dead: The primary significance of this 1887 legislation is its continuing impact on all persons—native and nonnative, individuals and corporations, tribal nations, state and federal governments—on Indian controlled lands, and on all activities on those lands. The end result for Native peoples is the burden of attempting to meet the cultural, social, economic, and political challenges of the twenty-first century in a land-based legal structure founded on the paternalistic philosophy and legal practices of nineteenth century America.60

Because these issues are still a part of our lives today, it is imperative that we read Wynema not as an “additive” to our literature and composition courses, but as a rich, complex text with sophisticated rhetorical moves of survivance that invoke Callahan’s identity as an American Indian, as a woman, and as a writer who uses space imaginatively in the novel. Wynema’s village is a space that changes over the course of the novel. The village of teepees in the forest becomes, by novel’s end, the town of Wynema, “which is rapidly becoming a city” and “[r]ailroads and telegraphs were also welcomed, as the Indians are always pleased with progress in the right direction.”61 Callahan works to change the space of the teepee in the white imagination to a more accurate envisioning of the space inhabited by Muskogee people. In this way, Callahan is a true teacher, she works within the “zone of proximal development”62 of her white audience—accepting where they are and moving them along to a new understanding. In this 60

McLaughlin “The Dawes Act,” 66. Callahan, Wynema, 103. 62 Vygotsky maintained the child follows the adult's example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. He called the difference between what a child can do with help and what he or she can do without guidance the "zone of proximal development" (ZPD). L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 61

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S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest

way, the story of Wynema does the spatial work that de Certeau describes stories doing when he talks about stories providing a foundation for future action. Callahan’s efforts, when understood in the context of the work it is doing with space on many levels, and in light of Ruoff’s 1997 edition of her book and increased attention to it in academia, is opening a field for future study. This process of moving Wynema, and Native American women’s writing in general, from the margin to the mainstream parallels what Callahan is doing in her text by bringing Native American issues, subtly, to be accepted by the white world. “[L]iterature is usually full of conflict and contradiction, and so a reading that locates indigenous resistance to assimilation will sometimes actively foreground apparently muted traces of that resistance against a text’s or storyteller’s evident concessions to Euro-American values.”63 That we see these concessions in Wynema should not lead us to condemn it as “assimilationist dogma.” Listening to the novel for tactical moves that signal rhetorics of survivance leads one to see that it is much more than that. Changing the “buts” to “ands” makes for a much more productive reading of this complicated, feminist indigenous novel: She wrote it and it helps us think about Native issues that are a part of our unpleasant history. She wrote it and she does interesting and original work with space. She wrote it and she is part of an American Indian rhetorical tradition in her use of dual-voiced narrative and other tactics known as rhetorics of survivance. She wrote it and it’s interesting for many reasons—such as its radical interrogation of racism, sexism, and nationalism. She wrote it and reading it leads to complex discussions in classrooms.64

63 Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 194. 64 An empirical study of the teaching of this novel in a 9th grade classroom demonstrated how the discussions of Wynema can be troubling, challenging, and, ultimately, transformative. Ebony Thomas, “Walking the Talk: Privilege and Race in a 9th Grade Classroom During a Native American Unit,” English Journal 97, no. 6 (July 2008): 25-31.

RESISTING AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSE: AN AMERICAN INDIAN STUDENT USES HER WORDS, HER WAY REBECCA GARDNER

For contemporary American Indians,1 tribally controlled schools can be sites for strengthening tribal identity and preserving tribal culture, specifically through language. Indian language classes are now offered at many of these schools, supported by federal funding. In a dramatic reversal of earlier US policy, The Native American Languages Act of 1990 was established to “preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages.”2 But why did we need an act of Congress to support Indian languages? We needed an act of Congress because the United States government used English literacy as a weapon in the colonization of this country. Documentation is abundant, but one particularly clear piece of evidence comes from Thomas J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. In his 1889 Annual Report, Morgan insisted that Indigenous Americans surrender their language and culture. He explains in his Annual Report that he has “…a few simple, well-defined, and strongly-cherished convictions,” including the following: The Indian must conform to ‘the white man’s ways,’ peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They can not escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by 1

Terms used to refer to Indigenous peoples of the United States are all problematic in various ways, as many have noted. Modeling my usage after that of American Indians in Rhetoric and Composition, I will use interchangeably the terms Native Americans, Indians, and American Indians. 2 Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, A History of Indian Education (Billings: Montana State University-Billings and Council for Indian Education, 1989), 167.

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While some might hope that Morgan’s report is merely history, Scott Lyons explains that US policies of English for assimilation continue to shape reality for many Indian students today. Writing in 2000, Lyons says, “The effects of this history have created identity crises, feelings of inadequacy, bitterness towards schooling, marginalization, disempowerment, and…negative attitudes about the technology of alphabetic writing in English.”4 Many of these effects are apparent in a case study of American Indian students enrolled in a personal writing class at a Midwestern public university. This paper discusses an essay that one student wrote for the class. The assignment was for students to write an essay explaining one of their beliefs, including the source of the belief and how it is apparent in their lives. Renee Fast Horse wrote about her belief that words are both “overrated” and dangerous.5 Renee’s essay provides us with a way to evaluate the usefulness of two literacy theories as they relate to contemporary American Indian college students. J. Elspeth Stuckey theorizes that there is a rupture between literacy and culture that is both violent and permanent. Deborah Brandt, however, describes a theory of literacy in which the oppressed can use literacy to extend their power. Stuckey argues that literacy is always used to separate the powerful from the powerless. In The Violence of Literacy (1991), Stuckey explains how English education is used to mark and enforce boundaries of race and especially class.6 She says that people with economic power decide who gets access to literacy, as well as how much. In addition, the dominant class determines which subjects, styles, and forms are acceptable uses of literacy, as well as how much deviation from these standards will be 3 Thomas J. Morgan, “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,” Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1889), 177. 4 Scott Lyons, Rhetorical Sovereignty: American Indian Writing as SelfDetermination, diss. (Miami University, 2000), 255. 5 This name is a pseudonym. The use of an adjective plus a noun for the last name makes the pseudonym similar to many surnames associated with the tribe in which the student is an enrolled member. To protect her privacy, I do not identify her specific tribe or home state. 6 J. Elspeth Stuckey, The Violence of Literacy (Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1991).

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allowed. When people become literate, they at least have to act as if they accept this determination of what is and is not acceptable. In Stuckey’s theory of literacy, language is a weapon used to create and control access to power, especially economic power. Morgan’s language in his Annual Report reveals the violence he intends: Indians must conform or be crushed; they cannot escape; tribes will be broken up and destroyed; “and the universal adoption of the English language [is one of the] means to this end.”7 Stuckey’s theory of literacy as violence must be taken seriously. However, many Americans would prefer to ignore the destructive potential of literacy, because we like to think that education is the means by which people cross boundaries and improve the conditions of their lives. In the American Dream, young people of each generation develop knowledge and resources beyond those of their parents. They get more education, work at better jobs, and experience greater financial stability and security. Thus, as the daydream goes (as Stuckey might say), both individuals and society benefit when people conform to the literacy standards imposed by the dominant class. This dream of progress disappears when we examine the real conditions of people’s lives, Stuckey argues. Literacy standards imposed by the dominant class do not create opportunities for oppressed groups; they reinforce the separation of power. In the case of Native Americans, the real conditions of life on reservations suggest that conforming to literacy standards has not helped. For example, the poverty rate on Standing Rock Sioux Reservation is 33.6% for families and 39.2% for individuals.8 In comparison, the poverty rate in North Dakota overall is 8.3% for families and 11.9% for individuals. On White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, 15.9% of families and 20% of individuals lived below the poverty level in 1999. In comparison, 5.1% of families and 7.9% of individuals in Minnesota lived below the poverty level. These statistics suggest that Stuckey is right: literacy is not a bridge from the land of Less to the land of More. Instead, literacy is the means by which territories are defined and defended. In Stuckey’s view, English teachers are active oppressors rather than innocent, powerless bystanders. "What we have to see…is how literacy is a weapon, the knife that severs the society and slices the opportunities and rights of its poorest people.”9 If Stuckey is right, then we are criminals and colonizers all. 7

Morgan, “Annual Report,” 177. U.S. Census Bureau, “North Dakota—American Indian Area, Gct-Ph1. Population, Housing Units, Area, and Density: 2000, Data Set: Census 2000 Summary File 1 (Sf 1) 100-Percent Data.” 9 Stuckey, Violence, 118. 8

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Yet I question how little allowance Stuckey makes for the power of oppressed people. It seems to me that Stuckey offers an excellent analysis of literacy as violent, but neglects the possibility that the receivers of that violence can learn how to use the weapon themselves, for their own purposes. Deborah Brandt offers an alternate framework for considering the power dynamics of literacy. In “Sponsors of Literacy,” Brandt outlines how literacy has been used and transformed as a consequence of economic activity.10 Initially, Brandt’s notion of sponsorship seems compatible with Stuckey’s ideas about the violence of literacy, in that literacy access is motivated by economic gain for those who are already powerful. Although the interests of the sponsor and the sponsored do not have to converge (and, in fact, may conflict) sponsors nevertheless set the terms for access to literacy and wield powerful incentives for compliance and loyalty. Sponsors are a tangible reminder that literacy learning throughout history has always required permission, sanction, assistance, coercion, or, at minimum, contact with existing trade routes.11

However, while sponsors’ economic needs are the primary motivator for literacy control, Brandt argues that they are not the only factor involved in literacy changes. Brandt argues that literacy is far too complex to be controlled completely by the dominant class, and that the complexity of literacy creates opportunities for appropriation. “The uses and networks of literacy crisscross through many domains, exposing people to multiple, often amalgamated sources of sponsoring powers, secular, religious, bureaucratic, commercial, technological. In other words, what is so destabilized about contemporary literacy today also makes it so available and potentially innovative.…”12 In this theory of literacy, oppressed groups retain the possibility of using literacy for their own purposes. If Brandt’s theory about the power dynamics inherent in literacy is more complete than Stuckey’s theory, then Compositionists need not abandon hope. Renee wrote an essay that appears at first to illustrate Stuckey’s ideas about the violence of literacy. Most of the time, Renee describes words as having destructive power, and suggests that she feels powerless. In her explanation of what she believes about words, Renee even uses terms related to violence, seeming to affirm Stuckey’s pessimism. As I will 10

Deborah Brandt, “Sponsors of Literacy,” College Composition and Communication 49.2 (1998): 165-85. 11 Ibid., 167. 12 Ibid., 179.

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show, however, Renee’s essay is ultimately a survivance narrative. Survivance is a complex term fulfilling many functions, but it is a term of action. Gerald Vizenor explains, “The nature of survivance is unmistakable in native stories, natural reason, remembrance, traditions, and customs and is clearly observable in narrative resistance and personal attributes, such as the native humanistic tease, vital irony, spirit, cast of mind, and moral courage. The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry.”13 Survivance narratives may reveal a history of pain and struggle, but they are written from strength, for purposes of recovery, power and transformation for both the individual and for the community. Renee’s essay is also a dialogue, both internal and external, within which she uses words to “come to consciousness.” These terms are specific to Mikhail Bakhtin and the theory he describes in “Discourse of the Novel” and other essays.14 Bakhtin’s theoretical discussion of language has much to offer to the present study, and I will apply some of his ideas to that writing, including heteroglossia, dialogism, authoritative voice, and internally persuasive discourse. Briefly, Bakhtin uses the term heteroglossia to discuss the multiple voices or languages within an individual or within a text. In an individual, the multiple languages arise from multiple identities, shaped by memberships in social groups and our roles within authoritative (or the dominant) discourse. When those multiple voices in one individual engage with the multiple voices in another individual, the individuals are engaged in dialogue on many levels, which may include literal dialogue but always includes interaction between the unspoken and perhaps unseen influences on the individual’s language. Internally persuasive discourse is the partial assimilation of words from authoritative discourse, so that the words we use become partially our own. In part, Renee’s essay was her dialogic response to some writing of my own that I shared with her class. I bring my own writing into class on occasion with the goal of demonstrating to students that, first of all, often writing doesn’t look very good at the beginning, although just as often it can be crafted into something worthwhile by revising. I also think it is important to be present as a writer in my writing class, not merely as an authority figure telling students how to write. The previous summer, I had done some writing while on vacation. The writing was simple musing, 13

Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1. 14 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422.

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thinking on paper about personal writing while planning this study. In my musing about personal writing, I explicitly identified my belief that writing can be powerful. Because my writing was informal and unfinished, I brought it into class and offered it as a draft that could be revised into a belief essay. I asked students to suggest ways that I could revise the paper. While I did not intend to initiate a dialogue with Renee about the power of words, we are not in control of what happens when we make our utterances. As Bakhtin explains, people perceive and respond to our words in ways that are shaped by the heteroglossia of their own language systems; the meaning of my utterance depends upon my reader’s age, profession, ethnicity, class, and religion, among other influences. Part of the exigency for this study is that Indian students and non-Indian teachers in a writing classroom are communicating with a lack of awareness, let alone understanding, about the complexity of the communication in which they are engaging. We engage in dialogue with students, both spoken and written, without understanding the culturally inflected heterogeneity of our language. As Renee makes abundantly clear in her essay, her understanding about words is quite different from mine. In addition, all our conversations are embedded in the context of other conversations. Bakhtin describes the way in which one person’s words become part of a larger, social dialogue. He explains, “…[T]he prose writer witnesses…the unfolding of social heteroglossia surrounding the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages…; the dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it.”15 My words, then, merged with dialogues already in progress for Renee. Within Renee’s own “Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages,” one sentence of mine may have been louder than the others. I wrote, “The power of writing that I know least about as a writer, anyway, is the power to affect other people.” Renee’s essay is, in part, a dialogic response in which she informs me about the power that writing has to affect her. Although I can’t know what her intentions were, conscious or otherwise, I certainly can learn about the power that writing, and words more generally, have had to affect Renee. More important yet, I can also learn about ways that Renee exerts power using her own words. In the first paragraph of her paper, Renee accomplishes several things rhetorically. First, she establishes immediately that words can hurt, even unintentionally. She begins, “Sometimes different people take offense to words that others say and mean in a totally different way. Some people do not mean to sound derogatory or demeaning in any way but others could 15

Ibid., 278.

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easily mistake it for those terms.”16 In these first two sentences, Renee implies that words are powerful and cannot be completely controlled by the person who uses them. Brandt would agree with Renee on this point, because she argues that literacies are enacted within a complex network of other literacies, and one cannot always (or even often) foresee how they will be used. Renee continues with a definition of her terms. She explains, “When I say Derogatory I mean people using words to lower others below them and when I say Demeaning I mean degrade a person verbally.” Words create inequality of status; they are the vehicle of power, the means of changing one person’s position in relation to another. Thus, right at the beginning of her essay, Renee indicates that words are a tool for harming other people. In fact, words can be something like a weapon. In her next sentence, Renee reveals a sensitivity to the contextual nature of language. “In actuality, it all comes down to how you use them and whom you say them to.” In my experience, many people act as if words have fixed and literal meanings. However, Renee already understands that communication is rhetorical. The meaning of words will change, depending on who is using them, who is interpreting them, and the context in which the words are used. Renee’s awareness of the rhetorical nature of words is what allows her to write a survivance narrative, rather than a victim’s tragedy. She writes knowing that an English teacher will be reading her statement of resistance to language. Her awareness of audience and context are what distinguish Renee’s text from mere complaint or catharsis. Renee’s next sentence is probably the thesis for her essay, though I didn’t ask for a thesis in the assignment. Her use of the thesis demonstrates how well she has already learned the “rules” that she refers to later on. She writes, “I, personally, do not like using much words but its how I have to get by in society.” The ideas in this sentence are fundamental to the whole essay. Renee does not like using words, but she needs to use them to get enough of whatever it is that she does want. In a later essay for class, Renee describes her desire for a career, a family, and a home in a large city. Her goals in that essay seem to reveal optimism about the future, as a result of sustained and self-directed effort. In this essay, though, in the context of her beliefs about words, I notice that Renee uses the phrase “get by.” Those words imply a marginal kind of success, one that is achieved in 16 I omitted the customary use of sic in all quotations from the student’s writing, because using it would create awkward or, in some cases, nearly unreadable text because of frequent surface errors.

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spite of something else, and perhaps a success that is achieved by “going around” some obstacle. When she writes that she needs words “to get by in society,” even though she doesn’t want to use words, Renee conveys a sense of limited power or agency. In fact, Renee writes that she has no real choice about the matter at all. Renee explains, “By this I mean that if I did not use words in today’s everyday life, things would get complicated and I more than likely wouldn’t get anywhere because of the ‘non-usage’ of words and if that’s the way to go then I guess I have no other choice.” In this statement, Renee seems to feel powerless in regard to society’s demand that she use words. She can either have a complicated reality in which she doesn’t get anywhere, or she can use words to get what she wants and needs. Lisa Delpit offers an important discussion of the real power available to women and students of color when they learn how to use the dominant discourse.17 In this part of her essay, Renee seems to be in full agreement with Delpit’s insistence that there is power in learning to use “the master’s tools” (see Lorde).18 In Stuckey’s terms, Renee recognizes the price of defying conventions for literacy that have been established by the dominant group. The last sentence of Renee’s first paragraph is also important. “Everyone thinks differently and this is how I think, to myself, my own words, my own thoughts.” There is confidence in this statement, an assertion of self and agency that Stuckey would not have predicted. Renee asserts that she has her own words—she owns them—and they are integral to her experience of self and thinking. In Vizenor’s terms, Renee is asserting her own presence. Brandt might say that Renee is revealing here an awareness of the potential for appropriation. In Bakhtin’s terms, Renee is demonstrating some degree of internally persuasive discourse. In this discourse, utterances that began as part of authoritative discourse, or the language of hegemony, are transformed. Internally persuasive discourse is comprised of words that are partially one’s own. Though half-belonging to someone else, the word “becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention."19 In other words, when she thinks to herself, with her own words and her own thoughts, Renee is using 17 Lisa D. Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children,” Harvard Educational Review 58.3 (1988): 280-98. 18 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom: Crossing Feminist Press, 1984). 19 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 293.

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internally persuasive discourse. This is significant to our discussion of survivance because it suggests that Renee has successfully used literacy for her own purposes. This is no mean feat. As Bakhtin explains, we must struggle with words before they can become our own. [M]any words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.20

Renee’s entire essay can be read as exactly this struggle. Words are “not a neutral medium,” but are instead fraught with “the intentions of others.” In her essay, Renee is wresting words from what she has assimilated and forcing them to work for her own intentions. The struggle is a sign of survivance, and as we can see, she has been engaged in that struggle for a lifetime. In the second paragraph of the essay, Renee describes her early experiences with words. “Ever since I was a child, I only talked to people I knew really well and did not like talking to anyone else. I usually kept to myself unless asked a question or was just in one of those situations where I was not given a choice but to talk. One of those situations contained a speech class in 2nd grade when I was only 8 years old and people thought I did not know how to use many words because I was so quiet.” We can see the continuing thread of a sense of powerlessness when Renee says she was not given a choice. People thought her silence indicated ignorance. Yet she tells us that she was quiet because she did not want to talk, not because she couldn’t. Renee acknowledges the ways in which other people use words, and contrasts those ways with her own use. She says that “People use words to describe how they feel or what they’re meaning is to a story. I just use them because I’m bored.” The word “bored” implies that words do not matter. The title of the essay, “Overrated,” also implies that words are not worth their supposed value, and are not worth her attention. This is a contradiction to other statements Renee makes about how she feels about words, and as such, her statements about boredom are evidence of the multivocality or heteroglossia of Renee’s essay. There are multiple voices 20

Ibid., 293-294.

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in dialogue with each other within Renee’s own utterances. Later in the essay, Renee again juxtaposes boredom with strong emotion: “I know my words and I know how to use them but I rarely like using them because I tend to think they sometimes waste my time. Words are not complicated but I hate the fact that I have to use them every single day.” Renee’s claims of casual judgment are undermined, or at least complicated, by some of her other statements about the power of words. Renee’s next words, in fact, reveal actual fear. After stating she only uses words when bored, Renee writes, “Its letting words ruin and control my life that scares me.” Now, words are dangerous, with the power to “ruin and control” her life. Yet, Renee does not explain this statement immediately. Instead, she moves to another “language” within her heteroglossia, and describes her lack of need for words. She writes, “I know communication can deal with using a lot of words but sometimes the communication I go through daily does not involve words at all.” She says that she doesn’t need language like other people seem to need it. “I guess I am just one of ‘those’ people who do not need you to explain because I already understand what I should know and understand already. I am not saying I know exactly what you would mean but sometimes I usually just get it most of the part.” The tone here is casual, as if words are simply disposable, yet Renee preceded these claims with a statement of significant fear. The only other mention of fear comes slightly earlier in the essay, when Renee explains that she is most comfortable when she is alone, because she knows she is “not being judged at any moment.” So, when Renee is alone, she is safe from other people’s uses of words. Renee is afraid of words because they have the power to “ruin and control” her life, and to emotionally wound her. In these sentences in Renee’s essay, Stuckey’s concept of literacy as violence begins to seem less conceptual and more concrete. In spite of these dangers, Renee uses words in part because other people need her to. “I am sure it is pretty much useless to me at this point in my life but I put it all into consideration for others.” Renee suggests that she is only using words in a particular way because other people are relying on her, and not because she gets any value from them. “Learning how to use words appropriately is meaningless to me.” The adverb “appropriately” is significant because it establishes one of Renee’s beliefs about writing, which is that there is a right and a wrong way to use language. Predictably, that belief is directly related to education. “Sometimes I do feel like I am wasting my time writing papers because it’s all just words to me but I have to do it no matter what or else I’d fail a class or get bad grades on certain things and my mom would be very

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disappointed in all of it but she’d understand for the most part.” Renee’s use of words is externally motivated and reactive. Renee is clear in saying, however, that her general rejection of words is not a rejection of communication. She describes her ideal communication situation as that which exists in her family. With her family members, Renee sometimes uses words, although they are not her favorite means of communication. She writes, “My family is the ones who understand me the most. They say I am very open-minded and loud but that’s only when I want to be. I guess when I do talk I do not care what I say but it’s usually not too often I have these moments.” The implication is that Renee feels safe from judgment when with her family, and therefore words are fine at home. In this scenario, she is choosing to use words. But even when she is in control of the words, they are not her favorite means of communication. Instead, Renee prefers something that she calls “agreements of emotion.” My mom and I have this understanding that we do not need words to show our meaning. We just know. It’s like knowing without any explanation. I can tell when she’s mad and she can tell when I’m sad. These examples are what I call agreements of emotions. The people closest to me also have this connection with me. They know how I am feeling or what I am thinking without saying anything. It is just the comfort level I am with certain people who make me feel relaxed and free when I do not have to say anything at all.

She prefers this wordless communication in which there is recognition and understanding, but not discussion or elaboration. Words seem to detract from communication and meaning for Renee. She says that other people’s words are meaningless to her. She writes, “I usually do not listen to other people talk unless it has meaning to me, which is rarely.” It is as if she prefers to experience reality directly, without the interference of language. Just as she is not rejecting communication per se, Renee is also clear that she is not rejecting thinking. It’s just that she would prefer to think without words. “I always wondered what life would be like without the usage of words and their meanings. I would definitely make my life a lot easier than it is now. A wordless mind that could say anything without actually saying anything is how I would put it.” She specifies further, “I am not saying I want my life to be thoughtless, I just want it to be speechless. Being speechless would be perfect for me.” Bakhtin would say that a wordless life is impossible; “…[W]e must deal with the life and

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behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-languaged world.”21 Being speechless is the opposite of heteroglossia, which Bakhtin says is a fundamental condition of human communication. Perhaps, in her desire for a wordless life, Renee is revealing that she does not yet know how to manage all of the contradictions and languages that she perceives in discourse. Her own contradictions are evident in her desire for the power of thought, and simultaneous rejection of words. Renee explains, “I would not mind life without words. Life would be a lot easier because it’d allow me to be me but that is just me thinking selfishly.” I find it interesting that Renee says life without words means she would be allowed to be herself. She cannot be who she is as long as words interrupt and disrupt her life. I wonder, then: Who would Renee be, or who does she think she would be, if words did not get in her way? Renee abandons her fantasy of a Self without words because she thinks that other people need them. She doesn’t even think it would be possible for others to live without words. She writes, “I honestly think the world would shut down if it did not have words. Words come from everywhere and probably date back all the way to where I cannot count anymore. They sometimes stress me out and they just make life a little more complicated than it should be.” One of Renee’s frustrations with words is that they are inadequate for expressing what she might want to say. There is a lack of correspondence between her experience and the words that are available to her. Words just can’t do what she wants them to. It is hard putting my thoughts and feelings into words because sometimes my thoughts don’t make sense and my feelings are unexplainable. My ideas aren’t always the greatest and my choices of words aren’t always the brightest but like I said, it doesn’t affect me the way it does in everyone else.

She seems to be saying that although she may not be the most skillful user of words, she doesn’t think that is especially important. Still, Renee indicates that she feels like her lack of words might make her appear inadequate to other people at times. “I can be so boring compared to people who speak their mind but I am fine with it.” So, she accepts her own lack of need when it comes to words, even if others don’t. One of the reasons Renee does not like words is because they are sometimes misunderstood. “Sometimes people just don’t get what I mean and that’s one of the reasons I dislike words.” Frequently, Renee writes as if she has no use for language. “Some people cannot live without their 21

Ibid., 275.

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words but me, I don’t like to categorize what I need and what I want so I just go with it.” Renee appears dismissive of words, as if she could wave them off like a fly and simply walk away. However, Renee also reveals that she is deeply affected by words. When she reveals the intensity of words’ effect on her, Renee’s sentences imply a physical, corporal experience of language. Renee writes, “It sickens me how we have to use words everyday in a certain matter.…[I]f it were up to me, I would not use words at all.” Words make her feel ill, or they disgust her. It is as if she experiences the violence of language in her body. She says later in that same paragraph, “I feel like I am being trapped everywhere I go because of words.” Figuratively, her freedom of movement in the world is limited by words. She can’t go where she wants, or do what she wants, because of words. Words have the power to trap her, restrict her freedom. This is exactly what Indian Affairs Commissioner Thomas Morgan was aiming for when he wrote that Indians “can not escape [the white man’s civilization], and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.”22 Morgan explicitly named the English language as the means by which Natives would be constrained, and Renee does indeed feel confined by words. But that is not the worst that words can do. Renee writes, “Words make me go insane sometimes.” The violence of words, by making her sick and making her feel trapped, drives her out of her mind. Words can make her lose her mind, and herself. But the violence still doesn’t end, because words replace what they drive away—her own words—with someone else’s words. When I think of words, I think of people getting brainwashed. The brainwashing I mentioned here is forcing someone with their beliefs of language. It is in the books how we are supposed to use them and how we are supposed to say them. Teachers throughout elementary and high school make sure these rules stick with you from day one.

Brainwashing is one instrument of war, especially cultural war. In fact, Renee uses the language of war when she writes, “I guess you can say the dictionaries are definitely one of my enemies.” Her use of the word “enemies” cannot appear casual to me in the context of US colonization and subsequent assimilation policies that specifically employed English. For Native Americans, forced education, and forced use of English, was specifically intended to change the way they thought and acted and lived their lives. Renee is reflecting the history of assimilation policies, and the 22

Morgan, “Annual Report,” 177.

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cultural violence of English literacy for American Indians. Forced assimilation of American Indians via English education continues to affect the students in our classrooms. If we only understand her words literally, Renee might appear to both subjugated and diminished by the violence of literacy. In that case, Stuckey’s literacy theory seems to shed more light than Brandt’s theory of appropriation. However, Renee’s actions are, in every respect, “louder than words.” Rather than falling passive victim to literacy’s violence, she uses the weapon of literacy against itself. She appropriates the sponsor’s literacy and rejects sponsorship. Ironically, she tells me, her English teacher, exactly what she thinks about words, and words serve as the means of protest. To begin understanding, we can return to the informal writing of my own that I shared with the class, and see how Renee’s essay engages my text in dialogue. In comparison to Renee’s renunciation, I wrote a hymn in praise of the written word. I said that writing is powerful, and it makes me feel alive, and it helps me think about things. I also said, “The power of writing that I know least about as a writer, anyway, is the power to affect other people.” Well, I now know quite a bit about how writing affects Renee. First, Renee is ambivalent about the power of writing. On the one hand, she writes that words are meaningless and she could live perfectly well without them. On the other hand, words can trap her, brainwash her and make her go insane. Throughout her essay, Renee alternates between claims that words are unimportant and she doesn’t need them, and that words are powerful weapons used against people. Her position is more complex and more accurate than the one I recorded on that sunny, summer day when I was writing about writing. I stand with Renee in acknowledging that words can be dangerous and destructive. Second, I said that writing makes me feel alive, alert and engaged. But Renee said that writing makes her feel sick, and I’m not entirely sure she was speaking metaphorically. “It sickens me how we have to use words everyday in a certain matter,” she wrote. She also feels afraid, because words can “ruin and control” her life. Between the fear and stress she describes, I don’t doubt that Renee sometimes does feel nauseous about words. Third, I said writing helps me think, that writing on paper seems to make thoughts and emotions concrete and more easily managed. But Renee said that she does not need words to think, or at least would prefer if she didn’t. She writes, “A wordless mind that could say anything without actually saying anything is how I would put it.” For Renee,

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thinking and words are better off separate. However, she recognizes that they are not, and so she claims the right to think in her own way. “Everyone thinks differently and this is how I think, to myself, my own words, my own thoughts.” Finally, among these contrasts between Renee’s essay and my informal writing, there is one interesting point of correspondence. Describing my preference for writing over speaking, I wrote, “I am still not much of a talker. Never have been.” I actually have wished, at times, for the life of a monk or a nun in which I could be silent. But like Renee, I am unwilling to relinquish all that I must in exchange for silence. Thus, a life without speech does not feel like a real choice for me, just as it does not for Renee. What does it mean that Renee and I share this fantasy of a life without speech? In a way, without ever having read Malea Powell,23 Renee created an alliance with me by using something that she and I have in common. Rhetorically, this is a strategic move. Writers create identification with their audiences by pointing out what they have in common, their shared ground. From a stance that was figuratively right next to me, Renee stood in opposition to English teaching and words. Had she not used this similarity, yet written an essay about the duplicitous and manipulative nature of English education, I might have had a different response. In other words, Renee knows that if you are going to tell your professor that her work is both meaningless and frightening, you would be wise to make friends with her first. Renee is a skillful participant in dialogue, and I would argue that engaging in dialogue is an enactment of survivance. Renee did not passively accept my glib statements about writing, but instead, she took the opportunity to educate me, her teacher, about another point of view. Vizenor writes that survivance “…is clearly observable in narrative resistance and personal attributes, such as the native humanistic tease, vital irony, spirit, cast of mind, and moral courage. The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry.”24 Who would doubt that Renee’s resistance to words, using words, is anything other than a courageous application of irony? Although she is deeply and personally aware that literacy can be violent, Renee uses literacy for purposes of survivance. In fact, there is one circumstance—just one—in which Renee does like words. Using two sentences in her four and a half page essay, Renee tells us that she does 23

Malea Powell, “Down by the River, or How Susan La Flesche Picotte Can Teach Us About Alliance as a Practice of Survivance,” College English 67.1 (2004): 3860. 24 Vizenor, “Aesthetics,” 1.

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like words under one condition: “The only time I like using words is when I get to use them my way and no one else’s.” And her interest in words is, at least in part, motivated by the desire to defend herself. Renee explains, “I like using them to the extent when no one can fully understand me completely because I find it nervously scary when someone thinks they know you too well.” Renee likes words when she can use them, perhaps as a weapon, to protect herself from an invasive Other. She has told us she can use her words; she knows how. And she likes using words when she has the power to determine how they are used, and when she can use them for her own purposes. Renee usually discusses words as being externally directed or motivated. As described earlier, Renee feels like she needs to use words for other people, such as her mother and the people she interacts with daily. In that case, she uses words because other people need her to, and not because she needs to use them. Conversely, but still externally motivated, it is because of other people that she doesn’t want to use words, because she will be judged, endangered, misunderstood. She has little use for words, but the people around her do. This suggests to me that words for Renee are part of authoritative discourse, and not yet fully integrated as internally persuasive discourse. However, there is one case in which Renee indicates she uses words for purposes that begin internally, for her reasons and not as a response to someone else. She tells the reader that she does want other people to hear what she has to say. In the concluding paragraph of her essay, Renee summarizes her beliefs about words, and indicates how important this belief is in her life. With all of this said, I hope this makes all the perfect sense than how I described my feelings deep down. Believing in something is a big part of my life and the words only make this a bigger part of my belief. It doesn’t matter who will or will not agree with me but who will or will not want to listen to it. There are just too many words that mean the same and it doesn’t make sense how all of them came about so now it is all overrated to me.

Several things are notable about these sentences. First, when she writes, “the words only make this a bigger part of my belief,” do “the words” refer to language as she has been discussing it in the essay, or do they refer to the written, authorial words she has used to explain her belief about language? The latter explanation is plausible, because the general belief she has been describing is about words. If this sentence means “words used to write this essay,” then the sentence suggests that Renee has

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used the words in the essay in her way “and no one else’s.” This is a literate act of survivance. Second, Renee’s statement about who will agree and who will listen seems particularly important. In this dialogue, she is not looking for agreement or conversion to her point of view. She says, “It doesn’t matter who will or will not agree with me but who will or will not want to listen to it.” She is not arguing. Instead, she wants to know who is listening to what she says. Who will listen to Renee? Who wants to know what she has to say? Her desire is particularly poignant when I think of Scott Lyons’ question, “What do American Indians want from writing?”25 Renee recognizes herself as immersed in a conversation; she asserts the value of her own words, used her way; and she expects that someone should be listening. That’s one thing, at least, that Renee wants from writing. Bakhtin would suggest that in addition to her desire to be heard, Renee is also expecting some kind of response. Renee’s essay is part of an ongoing dialogue between American Indians and English teachers, especially those of us who are non-Indian. If we are listening to Renee tell us about her complex experience with words, how will we respond to her, as well as to the historical and cultural voices that inflect her dialogue with us? What is our role, if we have one at all, in helping Renee to write in her own way? In Brandt’s terms, Renee demonstrates that she is capable of her own “subversive diversion of literate power.”26 She uses writing to “talk back” to her English teacher and assert her reality as valid. And in so doing, Renee enacts the potential for exchange between the sponsor and the sponsored. By using words to resist, Renee enables me and other English teachers to transform our own uses of language. If we listen, we can learn, too. Stuckey does get it right when she argues that literacy is violent, but Renee demonstrates that literacy is not only violent. Renee has imagined and enacted survivance, using, at least in some measure, her words, her way. The assimilation policies of the United States government, partially enacted through English education, did not silence all Natives. Though the damage inflicted by the policies is real, Indians are adapting and creating a future for themselves, as individuals and as nations. Yes, literacy can be a weapon, but it can also be a tool. Many Natives are using this tool for their purposes. There have been resisters all along, such as Sarah Winnemucca 25 Scott Lyons, “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What do American Indians Want from Writing?” College Composition and Communication 51.3 (2000): 447-68. 26 Brandt, “Sponsors,” 183.

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Hopkins and Luther Standing Bear. Today, some of the resisters are in our classrooms. And many are enacting survivance, some of them by using writing. Renee did. And while she is not asking for our agreement, she is hoping we are listening to what she is saying.

TOWARD A CHICANA FEMINIST BODY POLITICS MARISSA M. JUÁREZ

“A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives— our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings— all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity.” —Cherríe Moraga1

Cherríe Moraga’s description of a “theory in the flesh,” which she presents in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color suggests a theory rooted in materiality: A theory in the flesh is one in which our bodies (“the materiality of existence”) and our personal experiences, locations, and even desires come together in the articulation of a new political philosophy.2 For Moraga and other writers in this collection, individual experiences challenge totalizing or generalizing claims to knowledge and highlight the complexities of identity. Moraga’s theory in/of the flesh provides a compelling starting point for defining body politics. Whereas the term “body politic” refers to a group of people within the same organized political system (like government), I define body politics as the ways in which bodies become politicized, indicating how bodies take on power-laden meaning as the result of dominance, oppression, or marginalization. For example, Susan Bordo explores the ways that medical doctors and psychiatrists have pathologized women suffering from conditions like anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and, in the 1 Cherríe Moraga, “Theory in the Flesh,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1983). 2 Sherry Shapiro and Svi Shapiro, “Silent Voices, Bodies of Knowledge: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of the Body,” Body Movements: Pedagogy, Politics, and Social Change, eds. Sherry Shapiro and Svi Shapiro (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002), 25-44; Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), xvii. These sources offer further discussions of the body as “the materiality of existence.”

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Victorian period, hysteria, failing to recognize the extent to which cultural influences, such as media images and social standards of beauty, cause these illnesses. According to Bordo, the discourse of medical expertise (discourses entrenched in scientific positivism), combined with normalized conceptions of the body in the media, result in a dichotomy of normativity/pathology—a politics of the body that assigns power and privilege to those bearing markers of normalcy while marginalizing (pathologizing) those who do not. A body politics thus aims to disrupt the discourses that marginalize bodies in attempt to reclaim political power for the body. Simply put, the personal is political. Recognizing this, Chicana feminists challenge claims to theory that limit it to consummate, universal truths removed from experience, removed from the body. In understanding how these scholars “make theory in the flesh”—bring narratives of personal experience and lived (bodily) oppression to frame new theoretical understandings—I argue that scholars of rhetoric can disrupt a Western Eurocentric rhetorical tradition in the following ways: (1) We can challenge the canon of rhetoric by continuing to engage in historiographical recovery and reclamation; (2) We can explore how rhetors use lived experience and their bodies in/as rhetorical strategies and how these tactics challenge dominant epistemologies; (3) We can bring greater attention to physical bodies, bodily difference and privilege, and the structures of power that bear upon these bodies, not just within the field of rhetoric and composition, but also within the academy as a whole; and (4) We can unsettle dominant ways of knowing/theory production that are disembodied, removed from the everyday lives of people. Chicana feminists’ reclamation work is central to understanding how body politics can disarticulate a Western, Eurocentric tradition. To understand Chicana feminists’ work first requires an understanding of the role the body plays in reclamation scholarship. Norma Alarcón explains that “the quest for a true self and identity” was a primary objective of the Chicano/a Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but this quest resulted in the recognition of the myth of fixed identity.3 Instead, the legacy of conquest among peoples of Mexican descent has resulted in the mixing of indigenous, European, and African genealogies. Consequently, “[t]he idea of historicized bodies is proposed with respect to the multiple racial constructions of the body since ‘the discovery.’”4 Similarly, Cindy Cruz 3

Norma Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman,” Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998), 373. 4 Ibid., 374.

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notes that “[r]eclamation, for the Chicana social agent, is not only a strategy to make visible Chicana voices and histories, it is also the struggle to develop a critical practice that can propel the brown body from a neocolonial past into the embodiments of radical subjectivities.”5 Cruz vehemently asserts that considerations of the body are “essential in the development and evaluation of an epistemology of Chicana thought and culture.”6 Chicana feminist scholarship thus invokes the body in at least two ways: first, it calls attention to the brown body as a racialized subject in an effort to reclaim its various racialized identities (e.g., the indigenous blood that runs through the Chicano/a body but that is often denied); second, it demands awareness of the lived experiences of the brown body and the ways in which these experiences have been informed by the legacy of colonialism and conquest. Such work was, and is, crucial for destabilizing a Western, Eurocentric (and patriarchal) tradition since, as Alarcón notes, “[t]he effort to pluralize the racialized body by redefining part of their experience through the reappropriation of ‘the’ native woman on Chicana feminist terms marked one of the first assaults on malecentered cultural nationalism on the one hand and patriarchal political economy on the other.”7 Chicana feminists find empowerment within their own experience, on their own terms; in displaying such agency, and in reclaiming what Alarcón calls “‘the’ native woman”—who historically has been raped, assimilated, enslaved, robbed, bought, sold, labeled, beaten, and otherwise oppressed by men—these scholars engage in a re-visioning of history. Widely cited in Chicana feminist scholarship, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera further elucidates the role of the body in unraveling the threads of Western Eurocentricism. Anzaldúa’s work draws heavily from her lived experience and counters dominant ways of knowing that she feels are marred by a presumed objectivity. Admonishing this legacy of knowledge production, she says: “In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.”8 Anzaldúa goes on to explain how 5

Cindy Cruz, “Toward an Epistemology of the Brown Body,” Chicana/Latina Education in Everyday Life: Feminista Perspectives on Theory and Pedagogy, ed. Delores Delgado Bernal (Albany, NY: State University, New York Press, 2006), 60. 6 Ibid., 61. 7 Alarcón, “In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman,” 375. 8 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 2007), 59.

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Catholic and Protestant upbringings teach one to censure the body and “inner knowledge” while emphasizing that “intelligence dwells only in the head.”9 Working from her belief in the power of inner knowledge, Anzaldúa introduces the concept of la facultad, “an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning” that is most strongly cultivated within the most oppressed, vulnerable people within a society.10 One might understand la facultad as an innate response mechanism that enables Othered people to navigate through difficulties in the world via sensory experience. For Anzaldúa, la facultad offers Othered people agency; it provides a way for dealing with the unexpected, daily challenges that those who are marginalized face because it represents significant changes in awareness—a deepening of the senses. La facultad, then, is an intuition, a form of “gut” knowledge—a kind of “felt” way of knowing. In confirming the relevance of embodied ways of knowing, those that come from the body and not the mind, Anzaldúa pulls at the threads of a stubbornly sewn tradition that considers the mind the ultimate frame of reference. Additionally, Anzaldúa’s theory of la conciencia de la mestiza, recently “accepted” (appropriated?) within the rhetorical tradition, ruptures rigid dualisms—discursive, geographical, or psychological. Anzaldúa’s articulation of mestiza consciousness signifies progression from “convergent”/Western modes of thought that assume rationality and aim for teleology to more “divergent” ones “characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.”11 Informed by Anzaldúa’s upbringing in the borderlands of South Texas and Mexico, mestiza consciousness is a recognition that borders themselves function as dichotomous structures: woman/man, Mexican/American, homosexual/heterosexual, third world/first world, Mexico/U.S., Spanish/English, body/mind. Refusing to buy into these poststructuralist binaries, Anzaldúa imagines a new way of being in the world—one in which ambiguity and contradiction are accepted and understood. As an ambiguous and contradictory subjectivity, then, la mestiza can choose to inhabit multiple locations and categories of being at once, recognizing that they are all a part of her identity. This “both/and” consciousness of the borderlands refuses reductionist categorization or identification, understanding that la mestiza is “a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another” 9

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 60. 11 Ibid., 101. 10

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and that she takes on these multiple and conflicting values as her own.12 Yet, equally as important as the deconstruction of rigid dualism in mestiza consciousness is the acknowledgement and comprehension that it is informed by the violence, miscegenation, and oppression lived and experienced by Chicanos/as as a border people. In other words, the legacy of colonial oppression and its associated systems of dominance are central to the theorization of mestiza identities because, according to Anzaldúa, “in our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures.”13 Anzaldúa continually stresses the importance of sharing Chicano/a history with others so that Chicana feminists can create a mutual tolerance for and celebration of difference. Only when the racial stereotypes others have of Chicanos/as are dispelled and only when silences about Chicanos/as’ historical oppression are broken can Chicanos/as forward in coalition with others. When Chicanos/as refuse to forget our history and allow it to inform our scholarship and teaching—when we also acknowledge that there is no “one” Chicano/a experience—we engage in a Chicana feminist struggle that resists coercion by Western Eurocentricism in any discipline. Work by third world feminists in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color further illustrates the concept of body politics. As noted earlier, this work attempts to make theory “in the flesh”—to locate theory in the everyday, lived experiences of its contributors. Thus the text includes personal narratives, poetry, essays, and letters—genres of writing not usually associated with the production of “theory” in the academy. For example, in a personal race narrative, Cherríe Moraga describes her process of anglocization, motivated by her Chicana mother’s lived oppression and desire “to protect her children from poverty and illiteracy.”14 Moraga could “pass” as white (although her mother was Chicana, her father was Anglo, making her güera, or lightskinned); her mother saw this as Moraga’s way to have a better life. As Moraga explains, she came to understand her mother’s oppression only when she came out as a lesbian and felt/lived instances of subjugation as a result of her subjectivity. Through her experiences as a lesbian, she could relate to her mother’s experiences as a brown/poor/uneducated woman. Drawing upon this personal history, Moraga theorizes what it means to become a radical feminist committed to social justice. And for Moraga, it

12

Ibid., 100. Ibid., 103. 14 Cherríe Moraga, “La Güera,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 28. 13

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means recognizing our own race-, class-, gender-, or sex-based privileges and coming to terms with our own oppression. She says: The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.15

Challenging structures of inequality demands that we come to grips with the oppression we have lived and experienced, but also that we remain cognizant of the fact that our oppression is ours; saying that we are more or less oppressed than anyone else only thwarts progress. Instead, we come to recognize the specificity or our experience and learn from each other and ourselves. In this way, we can challenge hierarchies that assign power and privilege to certain groups and move closer to a vision of equality. Moraga asserts that accomplishing this requires new methods and “a new language”—a theory in the flesh that stakes its claim not in the discourses of the academy but in the discourses of the everyday, where these oppressions take shape and are lived out. In locating her theory in the flesh (that is, in the body) and in using the genre of personal narrative to create this theory, Moraga presents an alternative method for making knowledge. If, then, the body politics thus far discussed have come from Chicana feminists, are we to assume that these body politics belong only to Chicana feminists? Further, within what geopolitical spaces are these transforming bodies located, and what are the implications of these locations? Chéla Sandoval addresses these questions, tracing the parallels between Chicana feminist scholarship and U.S. third world feminism to show “how both have inspired and engendered an emerging cross-disciplinary and transnational politics of resistance that is increasingly theorized as ‘border,’ ‘diasporic,’ ‘hybrid,’ or ‘mestiza/o’ in nature.”16 Although Anzaldúa frames her theory of mestizaje in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico, her goal is to undo the sutures of these geographical boundaries so as to encourage border-crossings and transformations. The mestiza “syncretic form of consciousness” thus “comes to function as a working chiasmus (a mobile crossing) between races, genders, sexes, cultures,

15

Ibid., 29. Chéla Sandoval, “Mestizaje as Method: Feminists-of-Color Challenge the Canon,” Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998), 353. 16

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languages, and nations.”17 Like borderlands feminism, U.S. third world feminism develops out of efforts to support global decolonization, resulting in “a new form of alliance among peoples of color both outside of and within the United States.”18 As Sandoval suggests, the borderlands and the third world can be understood as a kind of “third space,” an inbetween or liminal space that exists between geopolitical boundaries. If we can assign geopolitical space to the borderlands, then it is space born out of lived oppression—a place where conflicts of globalization, colonization, and conquest are played out, wrestled with, and overcome. It is the space of the traveler, the migrant. It is space that belongs to no one and yet everyone; it is an inclusionary space where people of different social, political, national, economic, and racial backgrounds come together in glorious multiplicity. Within these “geopolitical” spaces, borderlands Chicana and U.S. third world feminists create chiasmic alliances that work toward an ethics of egalitarianism. Built upon principles of inclusion rather than exclusion, a body politics developed within these border spaces belongs to anyone willing to dwell within contradictory, chiasmic, and coalitional spaces. Finally, I want to return to the claims I made at the beginning of this essay, where I map out four ways Chicana feminist body politics can help us challenge a Western Eurocentric rhetorical tradition. Although I discuss a few of these points within this essay, they are worth repeating. First, I claim that challenging the canon of rhetoric means continuing to engage in historiographical recovery/reclamation work—methods central to Chicana feminist scholarship. Anzaldúa’s inclusion in the canonical text of the field of rhetorical studies, The Rhetorical Tradition, is a step in the right direction but it is far from enough. Scholars of rhetoric must continue to interrogate historical erasures within the rhetorical tradition and exhume the voices of those whose bodies have been omitted from our historical narrative. This means, too, sharing our own personal histories and lived experiences with others in the field and allowing it to inform our scholarship and teaching. Second, I claim that we need to turn our scholarly endeavors toward the body so that we can understand how the lived experiences and bodies of individuals inform their rhetorical practices. As the work of Anzaldúa and Moraga illustrates, our bodies inform the ways in which we experience the world; rhetors develop embodied strategies to confront the challenges associated with bodily difference. La facultad and mestiza consciousness 17 18

Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 352. Sandoval, “Mestizaje as Method,” 355.

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are two examples of embodied rhetorical strategies that challenge objective, linear patterns of thought. In making these kinds of “felt,” internal strategies more central to our rhetorical practices and scholarship, scholars of rhetoric challenge Western Eurocentricism. Third, I claim that we need to bring greater attention to bodily differences and privileges—and their associated structures of power—both within the field of rhetoric and composition and in the academy as a whole. Teresa Córdova helps me understand how this might be possible. Describing her experience as a woman of color in the academy, Córdova asserts that her right to articulate her own identity was “appropriated through the ideology of objectivity”; whenever she tried to engage a discourse of resistance to ideologies of dominance within the academy, she risked being called “angry,” “irrational,” “difficult,” and “fearsome,”—she was reduced to emotive markers.19 Scholars of rhetoric (whose area of expertise is language) thus need to seriously question the ways in which bodily difference in the field and in the academy determines how we are labeled and understood. Furthermore, we also need to ask, Who decides what counts as knowledge, and in what ways is this authority bound up in bodily privilege? Finally, following Cindy Cruz, I claim that we need to “embody our theory.” Cruz observes that the theory continues to be “a bodiless entity, a concept and a framework whose interests lie outside our social environments, unaffected by the workings of everyday material realities.”20 To bring the body back into our teaching and scholarship, Cruz suggests incorporating narratives about the body in the classroom and working to ensure that the theories we develop remain informed by our communities, connected to the material world. Doing so speaks to the valuation of multiple experiences and ways of knowing, a vision to which so many rhetoric and composition scholars affirm commitment.

19 Teresa Córdova, “Power and Knowledge: Colonialism in the Academy,” Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998), 41. 20 Cruz, “Epistemology of the Brown Body,” 62.

CULTURAL RHETORIC OF THE SARI MOUSHUMI BISWAS

It was the first day of spring in Bengal, a month after my sixteenth birthday: the designated day of the year to offer prayers to Saraswati, goddess of learning. I was unsuspecting when my mother pulled out an ice-blue chiffon sari from her wardrobe and asked me to try it on. “How about going to the temple wearing this?” she suggested. Girls in Bengal have traditionally worn saris on Saraswati Puja day; it’s a cultural performance manifesting gender norms. But little did I know about Foucault and Butler then! I struggled with five meters of the sheer, gleaming fabric that seemed to have a mind of its own. “This is how I’m going to hug you,” it said, as it embraced my softly blossoming body. After half an hour of struggle, l looked at the mirror. “Holy cow! Who’s that?” I discovered a new me. The girl I knew was becoming a woman. It may have escaped my own eyes but not my mother’s. She chose the time and occasion to celebrate my coming of age. Thus, I stepped out of home, as a butterfly breaks out of a cocoon. My mother looked at my father, her eyes laden with joy, pride and tears. My father looked at me, the smile at the corner of his mouth partly shadowed by a hint of concern in his eyes. He would have to be more protective about me from now on. His little girl was becoming a woman.

Performing a Gendered Norm My tale is not unique; it speaks for girls in India, or perhaps everywhere else. Coming of age is an experience filled with a sense of fulfillment, happiness, expectations…and apprehension as well. In my homeland, Bengal, it also comes with the gift of a sari. Seen through the lens of patriarchy, the sari is probably the most powerful symbol of bondage and restrictions imposed on women by the centuries-old subcontinental Indian society. Recalling Judith Butler’s Michel Foucault-inspired idea that sex is a regulatory ideal,1 the sari seems to be a powerful invention to regulate 1

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New

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women’s performance of gender. Butler’s assertion that sex is “normative”2 explains how, through repeated performance, women begin to accept heterosexual normativity as something that is natural and a matter of course. When my mother handed me the sari that spring morning after I turned sixteen, she was initiating me into a gendered norm through repetition of her own experience, albeit made exciting with a “girly” ritual. For her generation, the first day of wearing a sari denoted coming of age, like the high school prom described by Amy L. Best.3 Several years ago, when my grandmother discarded her entire collection of the finest silks in the prettiest colors to pick up all-white widow’s weeds in cotton, she was grieving the loss of her husband through a cultural norm which had percolated down to her via several generations. She was faithfully upholding society’s dictate that she remain loyal to her husband even when he was dead. White, the color of mourning in India, was meant to ensure that she remember, for the rest of her life, her vow to him when they got married.

Drag/Cultural Performance So what role does drag or performing the feminine play in wearing the sari? Why do girls look forward to the so-called “coming of age” ritual and why do they help perpetuate the norm by ensuring that their own daughters repeat the performance? Jaques Lacan’s psychoanalysis4 (rooted in culture and not biology, as with Butler and Simone de Beauvoir) and notion of fantasy explain role-play or drag by adolescent girls who are still in the liminal stage but looking forward to donning the sari and acting like adults. This premature yearning for a taste of life as an adult woman is explained by Lacan as the manifestation of a condition of lack that girls try to overcome.5 It is a lack of the feeling of completeness, which the girls imagine will only come with adulthood, and this lack results in a quest for “l’objet petit,”6 or the small, lost object (which is the feeling of completeness). York: Routledge, 1990), 135-41. 2 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 235. 3 Amy L. Best, “Girls, Schooling, and the Discourse of Self-Challenge: Negotiating Meanings of the High School Prom,” in All About the Girl 1, par. 6 (September 2004), 195-203. 4 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Taylor & Francis, 1990), 1-8. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

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Lacan also offers the “mirror stage”7 of development theory for children, which throws light on the way a girl’s mind works when she tries on a sari and sees not only her current image in the mirror but also the promise of her future, complete adult self. By the time she grows up and becomes an adult, she becomes what de Beauvoir calls the “naturalized,”8 female self, not questioning the act of conforming. That is how she believes it is the right thing to teach the next generation of women to conform just as she did. So, now I understand why my mother handed me that sari; but would I do the same if I had a daughter? Butler, de Beauvoir and Foucault have taught me better. However, I don’t mind wearing the sari just for fun, and I do have a collection of some of the best Indian silks for aesthetic reasons. But for the “naturalized” woman then, the sari denotes a natural act of conformity and obedience. Five meters of unstitched cloth wrapping a woman like a burrito! This brings to mind the Victorian corset which held European women tightly (quite literally) to gendered norms. Just as the way corsets were seen to have restrained and straitjacketed Victorian women,9 the sari limits a woman’s movement and gait. Also, just as the corset upholds the female bust, the sari (with some help from the blouse) can help accentuate a woman’s assets if draped adroitly. Wendy Dasler Johnson mentions some educated women like Catherine Beecher who sported the corset to have her “most authoritative portrait.”10 In India too, most women in power, particularly political and academic, wear the sari as a uniform of sorts to official events. Besides, women in the non-combat divisions of the armed forces wear the sari as a uniform with a short-sleeved shirt tucked in at the waist. Air hostesses serving on board Air India wear the sari as a uniform, thus becoming unofficial worldwide ambassadors of the national dress. Unlike the corset, which is practically a museum piece these days, or at best an occasional retro fashion statement by haute couture enthusiasts, the sari is a living and thriving attire in practically every Indian woman’s wardrobe. She has adapted it to generate sari power in the Foucauldian sense of power11 that makes new realities and meanings to boost her woman power. Women in present day India seem to have figured out ways to make the sari produce power and then use sari power, as it were, to 7

Ibid. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 301. 9 Wendy Dasler Johnson, "Cultural Rhetoric of Corsets," Rhetoric Review 20, no. 3 (2001): 203-33. 10 Ibid., 218. 11 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 92-102. 8

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boost woman power. The current Indian version of woman power encompasses the power of femininity in all its sensuousness and elegance on the one hand and stateliness and substance on the other.

Any Room for Agency? The Indian woman now asserts her agency by showing or hiding her body as she pleases, and playing the professional or the traditional or the party animal with equal flair. In the badlands of Bundelkhand in northern India, the pink sari brigade or gulabi (a vigilante group comprising dispossessed rural women), has actually picked up bamboo sticks to chastise abusive husbands and rapists in the absence of an effective administration. For the gulabis, the pink sari is a uniform with the color symbolizing feminine strength that can (literally) beat the forces of male oppression instead of being beaten for a change. This is when I disagree with Butler and de Beauvoir that there’s no room for biology in the crystallization of the concept of gender. When de Beauvoir says “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,”12 she totally negates agency and the strength of individuality in the crafting of identity by a woman, thus not being able to explain the chutzpah and gumption of the gulabi gang. However, I do believe that Foucault’s notion of regulated ideals and bodies13 plays a significant part in establishing gendered norms which coerces a woman to “become one.” And that also helps explain how, through repeated performance of wearing the sari, Indian women learn to make it such a “naturalized” part of their existence. Practically all marriage proposals from Indian women—as seen on matrimonial sites such as BharatMatrimony.com and Shaadi.com—are accompanied by at least one photograph of the prospective bride in a sari to demonstrate that she adheres to tradition despite the winds of globalization. Foucault’s concepts of discursive formation of sexuality14 and power producing positive meanings also explains how, owing to the ongoing discourse on gendered norms regarding clothing for centuries, Indian women learned to first accept and get used to wearing five meters of cloth every day, and then eventually assert their agency in the act of wearing it, turning the apparently restrictive apparel into a powerful tool to negotiate challenges posed by a male-dominated society. Instead of being tied up by the sari, she converted it into something that made her look sensuous and 12

de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 12. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 92-102. 14 Ibid. 13

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elegant…and irresistible if she wanted to!

A Cultural Artifact As per Barry Brummet’s15 classification, I see the sari as an “indexical cultural artifact,” worn to uphold heritage and national identity. Since “indexical” artifacts are those that point to a culture through association, logically every sari-clad female from India could consider herself an index of her culture. However, there are also those from other parts of the world who proclaim themselves sari aficionados and try to appropriate an alien culture, pleats, pallu, choli and all. Power girls such as Madonna, Liz Hurley, Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez, the Williams sisters (tennis), Anna Kournikova, and (guess who?) Martina Navratilova have been on camera sporting saris, clearly not daunted by its five-meter length. Seems like more instances of sari power boosting woman power! So, what sort of girlhood has the sari helped Indian women perform over the ages? It is a long tale, quite like the sari itself, speaking of norms, practicality, patriarchy, cultural imposition as well as agency. This tale has wound its way around centuries of history, culture and mythology in the subcontinent. The word sari is derived from Sanskrit ĞƗ৬Ư which means “strip of cloth” and ĞƗঌƯ or sƗঌƯ in Prakrit, corrupted to sƗ৚Ư in Hindi. Legend has it that the sari originated in a weaver's loom. This weaver who was fond of daydreaming kept imagining a beautiful girl. All the minute details and attributes of beauty that he invested this imaginary girl with found their way into the cloth he was weaving. Absent-minded as he was, he did not realize that the cloth had become several hundred yards long. When the weaver finally saw what had happened, he smiled in delight at the wonderful piece of cloth he had woven inspired by his dream girl. Women in the village wanted to wear this piece of cloth and look beautiful, and thus it became the sari. Girlhood, then, is about being beautiful. And a man knows what makes a woman beautiful! That’s food for feminist thought, especially for second wave feminists.

15

Barry Brummet, "Part 1: Theory," Rhetoric in Popular Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications), 2006.

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Figure 1. Maharani Chimnabai and Indira Raje of Baroda in Nauvari, the Maharashtrian sari, in 1924.16

16

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_and_Child_in_Saree.jpg. The original source of the photograph is unknown. According to The Indian Copyright Act, 1957, this work is in the public domain in India because its term of copyright has expired. Permission is granted for reuse.

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Figure 2. Conforming to the dress code, 1912.17

But bra burners have will have much more to think about if they delve into the oldest documents we have of the sari. Dating back to the Indus Valley civilization (Vedic times, 2,800-1,800 BC), it was actually a prototype of the sari; an unstitched single piece of cloth. A unisex garment, it was used by men and women alike with no vest or bodice… or bra to burn for that matter. The Indo-Aryan society was remarkably liberal, concerned primarily about hygiene and comfort in a tropical land. Moreover, an ancient Indian treatise on dance and costumes called the Natya Shastra says that the navel of the Supreme Being is the source of life and creativity and therefore, the midriff should be left bare by the wearer of a sari. One of the most powerful feminist commentaries on society in Indian literature, related to the sari, is found in the epic, the Mahabharata (circa 500 BC). In the Dice Game episode of the epic, 17

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_in_Sarees.jpg. photograph is part of the Archaeological Survey of India Collections.

This

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Draupadi, wife of the Pandavas, is disrobed by the evil Dushyashan in full view of the royal court while she is menstruating. Here, the sari not only symbolizes a woman’s dignity, but also society’s decorum and pride that are violated by the act of disrobing a woman. This episode is a commentary on society and life itself at multiple levels. While on the one hand it is a feminist critique of the validity of a husband’s right to use his wife as a bet (as if she’s his property) and then lose her, it is also a commentary on the helplessness and callousness of authority in the face of evil. At the metaphorical level, the woman represents life, nature and continuity since evil (as personified by Dushyashan and his elder brother Duryodhan who commands him to perform the dastardly act) cannot finally win. Through providential interference (not human), Draupadi gets an unlimited supply of sari as Dushyashan keeps unraveling the diaphanous material. He eventually collapses due to fatigue.

Figure 3. The disrobing of Draupadi by Dushyashan in full view of the royal court. A miniature of the Basohli School, attributed to Nainsukh, c.1765.18

18

Source: http://www.asia.si.edu/devi/fulldevi/deviCat82.htm.

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While the sari plays an important role in this drama, it is still only a symbol of the more important concept of a woman’s place in society. The act of disrobing Draupadi shows how a woman can be denied respect and her rightful place in society even when the custodians of justice are watching. As the wronged woman, Draupadi criticizes the elders present in the court and questions values and norms while being dragged by the hair, her sari soaked in blood. Her words are as scathing as any feminist voice could ever be. Bollywood has recreated this epic disrobing drama innumerable times, translocating the moot concept of violation of a woman’s dignity to contemporary times. The sari has sometimes been replaced by the salwar kameez or Western clothes, reflecting the influences of Islamic culture and globalization on Indian society. But even when the attire changed, the basic issue of a woman’s loss of her position in society remained the same.

Culture, Not Religion The genesis and evolution of the sari has to do with changing cultural norms rather than religion. The earliest depiction of the sari’s prototype that exists is the statue of an Indus Valley priest wearing a wrap. Ancient Tamil poetry from southern India by celebrated poet Banabhatta—written in a language belonging to the Dravidian group, which is older than classical Sanskrit—describes women in gorgeous sari-like wraps. Sculptures from the Gandhara, Mathura and Gupta schools of art (1st-6th century AD) in northwestern and northern India feature deities and dancers wearing fishtail (dhoti or sarong) wraps that cover the legs loosely and have elaborate pleats falling decoratively in the front. These figures do not wear bodices. The sari developed as a garment in northern and southern India around the same time but independently. The two-piece mundum neryathum (mundu, a dhoti or sarong and neryath, a shawl or unstitched upper body wrap) still worn in the southern state of Kerala survives from ancient times. Kamasutra, the 16th century Indian treatise on the art of love, offers a great peek into the wardrobes of Indian women in an era just preceding the arrival of the Mughals. The film version of the book, directed by Mira Nair19 is the result of a great deal of research as evident from the costume designing, among other things. Of course the costumes, as remediated by the designer and the director, are glamorized versions of reality, but a comparison with illustrations of clothing from the same era 19

Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, DVD, Dir. Mira Nair, 1996; US: Trimark Pictures Inc., 1997.

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seen in other sources shows that the drapes and silhouettes in the film are more or less true to the times. The liberal gender norms of pre-Islamic times are amply reflected in the free dressing sensibilities of women in Kama Sutra. The Mughal period stretches from 1526 till the mid-19th century when under the impact of Islamic culture, the Hindu society adopted conservative ways to cover the body; that is, by incorporating stitched blouses to go with the sari. Women also started covering their heads, apart from wrapping their bodies less revealingly than before. After the British Raj replaced Mughal rule in 1857, English fashion—including corsets— influenced the dressing sensibilities of Indian women. Young women from the educated upper class in particular experimented with English as well as French silhouettes and cuts in their bodices. Fancy lace-work in petticoats also became very popular. Women who could afford it even went to Europe to learn about haute couture first hand. The present day way of wearing a sari is to drape it over a petticoat (lehenga or shaya) with a blouse (choli or ravika) to cover only the chest. The choli usually has short sleeves, a low neck and a cropped back, but there could be numerous customized variations of the basic idea. For example, cholis may be backless or halter neck. Cholis for special occasions are dressy with plenty of embellishments such as glass, mirrors, stones, beads and embroidery in gold and silver thread (zardozi). With a burgeoning fashion designing industry in the country that has well-honed marketing machinery selling attractive womanhood dreams, girls constitute a considerable section of willing consumers. Call them Karl Marx’s cultural dupes20 or Lacan’s incomplete beings seeking to overcome a condition of lack, girls are certainly helping the fashion industry flourish. They have also found role models in the Miss Indias who have gone on to win international pageants such as Miss Universe, Miss World and Miss Asia-Pacific. These winners are hailed as “women of substance” and icons of beauty rolled into one, something that adolescent girls aspire to be when they grow up. One fashion designer in particular, 65-year-old Ritu Kumar, has caught the imagination of young Indian women by bringing about a revolution of sorts in women’s dressing norms over the past few decades. Her innovative, West-influenced style sensibilities have given traditional Indian attires like the sari an all-new look. Kumar is best known for her 20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engles, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document, Phil Gasper, ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 68.

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prize-winning ethnic costume creations for Miss India contestants at beauty pageants around the world. Her costumes won Aishwarya Rai the Miss World crown in 1994, Yukta Mookhey the Miss World in 1999, Dia Mirza the Miss Asia Pacific in 2000, Priyanka Chopra the Miss World in 2000, and Lara Dutta the Miss Universe in 2000. Kumar has been instrumental in promoting the “woman of substance” image for the Indian woman at the international front just as much as she has made that image accessible to girls within the country. A chance discovery while searching the Internet for information on woman power in India was a site on designer saris.21 Having been away from the country for quite a few years now, I did not know that woman power has gone to the extent of inventing pre-pleated saris to make it simple and convenient for herself. And it does not look five meters to me anyway! Also, the blouses are much more daring these days, reflecting liberal cultural perceptions. Thanks to Bollywood, an exposed midriff is not as offensive to the eyes of the custodians of culture today as it used to be even 30 years ago. Talking of Bollywood, the film Bride and Prejudice by Gurinder Chadha is a great introduction to Indian couture for a Western audience.22 Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice was rewritten by Chadha and co-writer Paul Mayeda Berges, moving the plot to the Indian city of Amritsar and London in the 21st century. The worth of this film, in the context of the cultural rhetoric of the sari, lies in the visual feast of designer saris in true north Indian style reflecting gendered norms in dressing in a family of four unmarried daughters. Particularly worth watching are the scenes of wedding celebration where the girls sing and dance in resplendent, sequin and stone-studded chiffon and georgette saris, and the colorful street scene in which the girls go on a shopping spree.

The Drape The sari is a versatile apparel which can make a woman as feminine as feminine can be by accentuating her assets, tease male gaze by hiding flesh in a sensuous way instead of being downright sensual, and even help cover up flaws in the female frame. So the trick lies in the draping style; in wearing it to one’s advantage. The different draping styles seen in Kama 21 This commercial site can be accessed at: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Embroidery-Sarees-Great-For-AllOccasions/1395729. 22 Bride and Prejudice, DVD, Dir. Gurinder Chadha, 2004; New York City, NY: Miramax Films, 2005.

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Fig. 4. North Indian lady draped in the Nivi style. Painting by Raja Ravi Varma. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art, which is in the public domain in the United States.23

23

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raja_Ravi_Varma,_Expectation.jpg.

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Fig. 5. Miss Universe 1994 Sushmita Sen has been the role model for subsequent generations of girls in India.24

Sutra, in Bollywood, and in contemporary society speak of different connotations of drapes and how they became identifiers in the discourse on girl/womanhood (the housewife, the slut, the bride and so on). 24

Source: http://www.desibucket.com/db2/01/6645/6645.jpg.

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The most popular draping style today is called Nivi which was popularized through the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906). The Nivi drape starts with one end of the sari tucked into the waistband of the petticoat, usually a plain skirt. The cloth is wrapped around the lower body once, then hand-gathered into even pleats just below the navel and tucked into the waistband of the petticoat. Poets have likened the decorative effect of the pleats to the petals of a flower. After one more turn around the waist, the loose end is draped over the shoulder. The loose end is called the pallu or anchal. The navel can be revealed or concealed by the wearer by adjusting the pallu, depending on the social setting. The drape, as much as the material of the sari, is also an indicator of a woman’s place of birth (or current residence) and social status just like any indexical cultural artifact. Both drape and material can pinpoint a woman’s social identity and heritage, though when it comes to the material a considerable amount of appropriation of culture takes place among women from the different regions within the subcontinent. For instance, Kanjeevaram silk from southern India is a prized possession for any woman who can afford it while Dhanekhali tangail, made of the finest cotton from Bengal is a status symbol. The appropriation of culture can also cause panic among staunch defenders of identity as we have witnessed over the past few years on the Pakistani side of the subcontinent. Torn between identifying with West Asia and South Asia at the time of the nation’s birth in 1947, religious hardcores in Pakistan finally decided to opt for the conservative salwar kameez instead of the revealing sari to place itself in the Islamic world. Condemned as it was as “Indian and un-Islamic,” the sari surprisingly started staging a comeback as high-fashion attire among upper class Pakistani women three decades after it went out of vogue due to the military establishment’s attempts to Islamize the country. That’s feminine agency at work even under restrictive circumstances. Of course Bollywood was blamed for the growing popularity of the sari among Pakistan's fashion-conscious elite. The Nation, an English-language newspaper published from Lahore, reported in 2007: “The Indian electronic media played an important role in promoting the sari culture in Pakistan. Now Pakistani actresses on TV channels are being seen wearing saris, especially young women,”25 and that too when Indian films and television channels are banned in Pakistan. So the market culture mantra here seems 25 Irfan Malik, “Nasreen revives sari culture in political arena,” The Nation, February 19, 2007, Retrieved from http://www.nation.com.pk/daily/feb-2007 /19...ionalnews11.php.

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Figure 6. Watercolor illustrations of different sari drapes (1928) by Rao Bahadur M. V. Dhurandhar. According to The Indian Copyright Act of 1957, this work is in the public domain in India since its term of copyright has expired.26 26

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Styles_of_Sari.jpg.

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Figure 7. Kama Sutra-style drape combined with contemporary design sensibilities as evident in the halter neck blouse. Model: Bollywood actress Nandana Dev Sen.27

27 Source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZrUz79UszOA/TK_hQtoxuuI/AAAAAAAAAAs/42S_ EHgPoKE/s1600/Nandana-Sen-Saree- Blouse-Design.jpg.

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to be: Where there’s demand, there’s supply. Bootleggers have obviously offered unexpected service to the cause of women and culture, apart from subverting the hegemonic efforts of the establishment and fundamentalists.

Conclusion In this age of market culture, we have sari manufacturers and sellers setting up websites featuring a lineup of the so-called “women of substance” who have worn saris, former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Police Chief Kiran Bedi among them. Having paid apparent obeisance to these illustrious women, the websites28 quickly proceed to showcase party wear and bridal collections which they claim will make women look prettier than ever on their wedding day. So it seems beauty is still the benchmark of a woman’s worth. Feminism and consumerism make strange bedfellows in such commercials where the only casualty seems to be the woman and her organic self. If ever there was such a thing as the organic woman that is, given the bodies regulated by society that Foucault talks about and de Beauvoir’s theory that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.” Geared towards pandering to consumer tastes and demands while at the same time pushing sales by creating tastes through constant designing innovation, this marketplace phenomenon as demonstrated by sari store websites is an example of what British cultural theorist Paul Willis said was production in use.29 Finally though, it’s about ethos. It’s not just about the sari or how a woman wears it but about how she carries herself while wearing it (her demeanor and individuality) that produces the total effect, determining her image and identity and the way her womanhood is perceived by society.

28 For example, http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Embroidery-Sarees-GreatFor-All-Occasions/1395729. 29 Paul Willis, Common Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press), 1990.

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Woodmansee, Martha and Jaszi, Peter, eds. 1994. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Yalae, Papa. 2008. Neo-Africanism: The New Ideology for a New Africa. Victoria: Trafford Publishing. Yarbrough, Stephen R. 2010. “Richard Rorty, Feminism, and the Annoyances of Pragmatism.” Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty. Ed. Marianne Jack. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 173-197. —. 2006. Inventive Intercourse: From Rhetorical Conflict to the Ethical Creation of Novel Truth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Yochum, Ruth. May 2003. Interview by author. Yochum home in Brown County, Ohio. Young, Morris. 2004. “Native Claims: Cultural Citizenship: Ethnic Expressions, and the Rhetorics of ‘Hawaiianness.’” College English 67.1: 83-101. Zhao, Suisheng. 2000. China Democracy: Reconsidering the Prospects for a Democratic China. New York: Routledge. Zitkala-Sa. 2003. American Indian Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Ayres has been a member of the faculty in the Texas A&M School of Law since 1999. She has also taught at Roger Williams University School of Law, Providence College, and Texas Christian University. In addition to her teaching experience, Professor Ayres serves as Treasurer of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities. Professor Ayres’ scholarship examines the interplay between cultural theory and the law, including the implications of postmodern feminist theory on current legal doctrines and the intersections between law and literature. Her current research focuses specifically on mothers who kill their children, examining existing cultural constructions in order to critique the inconsistent legal treatment such mothers receive and to offer recommendations for change. Professor Ayres’ work on infanticide has been published in several journals and she has been invited to present her research at many conferences. Moushumi Biswas is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research interests include global rhetoric, feminist rhetoric and all forms of resistance rhetoric manifest in intercultural discourses, particularly in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Biswas is also an Assistant Instructor who teaches First Year Composition and Workplace/Technical Writing. A former journalist who worked for India Today, The Hindustan Times and The Pioneer newspaper in India, Biswas returned to the academy in 2008 to earn her second master’s degree in Rhetoric and Professional Communication from New Mexico State University, USA. Her first master’s degree is in English Language and Literature from Jadavpur University, India. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University, Macomb Campus. Her research examines the narrative writing lives of zinesters. She explores zines as a life-long literacy practice that creates permanent writing lives and communities. She is interested in how personal narratives published in alternative spaces create sites where participants challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She has published articles on popular culture in the classroom, youth’s out of

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school literacy practices, and creating writing programs for dissertators. Her recent conference presentations include discussion of narrative inquiry as a research practice, riot grrrl rhetoric in zines, and research into dissertators’ writing practices. Kirsti K. Cole is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literature at Minnesota State University. In addition to advising and teaching in the online Teaching Writing Graduate Certificate, and the MS in Communications and Composition, she teaches literary, argumentation, and composition theory. She has published on women in the profession and feminist pedagogy in College English, JAC, and Harlot. She has also published a chapter on poststructural interpretations of transatlantic Gothic literature. Jennifer Dorsey is a Ph.D. student of Rhetoric and Composition at Saint Louis University. She is currently focusing her research on the topics of composition theory, assessment, and writing program administration. Her other research interests include professional writing and feminist composition theory. Returning to school after working in publishing for 10 years, she has taught first-year composition and technical communications, worked as a writing consultant, and served as SLU's writing program assistant for the 2010-2011 school year. Suellynn Duffey is an associate professor and teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis where she directs the writing program, as she has done at several other institutions. In part, her relocations around the Midwest and southeastern United States have prompted her interest in place as a heuristic for scholarly investigation of subjects as diverse as students’ silences and listening arts, writing program administration, and, in this volume, the historical and sociological texture of family stories repeated through generations of women. Her other work appears as chapters in books on writing program administration and silence and listening and as articles in CCC, The Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education, ATD, Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Rhetoric Review, and Writing on the Edge. William Duffy is an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, and his articles and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Rhetoric Review, Composition Studies, and College English.

356

Contributors

Sarah B. Franco is the Associate Director of the Connors Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire. She received her BA in English and Psychology from the University of Rochester, and her MA in English and MAT at Simmons College. Her academic interests include therapeutic writing practices, nonfiction prose, and development of writing services for returning veterans. In addition to working as Associate Director of the Connors Writing Center, Sarah facilitates writing workshops at the Manchester VA Medical Center. Catherine Fox’s research focuses on the rhetorical construction of power, agency, and subjectivity, particularly as they are articulated within feminist and queer theories. She has published articles in College English; Pedagogy; Feminist Studies; Third-Space; Feminist Challenges/Feminist Rhetorics: Locations, Scholarship, and Discourse; Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes; and Technical Communication Quarterly. She works at St. Cloud State University. Jessica L. Furgerson (M.A. Ohio University, 2011) is a doctoral student in Communication Studies at Ohio University. She teaches classes in political communication and public speaking. Her research interests include gender communication, the rhetoric of reproductive rights, and modern political rhetoric. Rebecca Gardner is an Associate Professor at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. Her research interests include rhetorical analysis at the intersections of culture, particularly between American Indians and nonIndians. She is also involved in “The Fargo Project,” a collaborative venture between local artists and the city of Fargo to design community space in ways that are socially useful and ecologically sound. The project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and by the city of Fargo. The project has made an effort to involve the community, especially members from traditionally underrepresented groups, such as recent immigrants. Rebecca is interested in the resulting intercultural communication, as well as the communication between artists and city leaders. Marissa M. Juarez is an English Faculty member in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Central New Mexico Community College, Montoya Campus. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English.

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Jennifer Helene Maher’s research focuses on the politics and morality of software. In Software Evangelism and the Rhetoric of Morality: Coding Justice in a Digital Democracy (Routledge 2014), she examines how the evangelical rhetoric of software developers encodes code within a liberal system of democratic justice that allows competing moral visions of programming to flourish. Maher is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she teaches in the English Department’s Communication and Technology track, as well as in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program Language, Literacy and Culture. Aurora Matzke received her Ph.D. from Miami University, Ohio in December 2011 and is now an Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Co-Director at Biola University in California. Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger is an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston where she teaches courses in first-year writing, gender studies, composition theory and history, and literacy studies. Her research focuses on the rhetorical practices and education of progressive era women, as well as writing across the curriculum theory and pedagogy. Her research has appeared in Genders, Across the Disciplines, and the edited collection Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies. Lydia McDermott is Assistant Professor of Composition and Director of the Writing Center at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her scholarly work has appeared in MP: An Online Feminist Journal and eRattle. Her creative work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Quarter After Eight, and Kalliope: A Feminist Journal. Janella D. Moy is an Instructor and Doctoral Candidate at Saint Louis University. Her research interests include American Literature, women in literature, and composition. Lori Ostergaard is the Director of First-Year Writing and an associate Professor whose archival research examines the history of compositionrhetoric at Midwestern normal schools and high schools. Lori focuses primarily on the research, theories, and practices of educators working during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Her research has appeared in Rhetoric Review, Composition Forum, Studies in the Humanities, Issues in Writing, and Peitho.

358

Contributors

Amy Pason (Assistant Professor, University of Nevada, Reno) is a critical rhetorician who earned her PhD at the University of Minnesota . Her work focuses on dissent rhetoric, and her dissertation work on Cindy Sheehan utilized interdisciplinary social movement and counterpublic theory in understanding how rhetorical forms (blogs, camps, autobiographies, and letters) function in movement networks and to advocate movement goals. Pason has always combined activism with her academic work, organizing conferences and participating in academic labor and community education projects. She has published on academic labor events in in ephemera: theory and politics in organization and the International Journal of Communication. Currently, she is working on projects related to Occupy Wall street and the meanings of direct action tactics. Alison Piepmeier takes on the patriarchy. She writes books and articles about feminism, plus she blogs and occasionally tweets. She is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston. Kelly Sassi (PhD, University of Michigan, 2008). Sassi is an assistant professor at North Dakota State University with a joint appointment—55% in the English department and 45% in the School of Education. She coordinates the English Education program, co-directs the Red River Valley Writing Project, and teaches courses in both English education and composition. Her research agenda focuses on social justice issues, including race in the classroom, fair practices in writing assessment, feminist research methodologies, pedagogical approaches to Native American literatures, multicultural field experiences, and the high school to college transition in writing. Heather Blain Vorhies is a post-doctoral research associate at University of Maryland, College Park, where she directs the Graduate School’s Writing Initiatives and the WRITING FELLOWS program. She earned her doctorate in the Department of English and the CENTER FOR WRITING STUDIES at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work uses Enlightenment physiological psychology and early nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant women’s writings to define the canon of style. Margaret E. Weaver is Professor of English at Missouri State University, where she also served as Director of the University Writing Center for 10 years. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in history of rhetoric, composition theory and pedagogy, feminist theory, and basic

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writing. Her research has appeared in such journals as Journal of Advanced Composition, Writing Center Journal, Journal of General Education, and Research and Teaching in Developmental Education, as well as in several anthologies, including Promise and Peril of Writing Program Administration, The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book, and The St.Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Her article entitled “Censoring What Tutors’ Clothing ‘Says’: The ‘Right’ Path or Violation of First Amendment Rights?” was recognized as the International Writing Centers Association Outstanding Scholarship Award, Best Article in 2004. Kristin Winet is a Graduate Assistant in Teaching at University of Arizona. She is completing her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, doing freelance writing and editing. Her research interests include rhetoric of place and digital media, and she is focusing her dissertation on the rhetoric of contemporary women’s travel through a revisionist history of women and travel. Henrietta Rix Wood is an assistant teaching professor of English and the coordinator of writing assessment at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She teaches classes in writing, literature, and women’s and gender studies; oversees the online writing assessment of undergraduates; and promotes writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives. Her research focuses on the rhetorical activities of young women and secondary-school composition in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She won the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award, and her work has been published in Rhetoric Review and American Periodicals.



INDEX

Activist (Activism) 4, 18, 21, 41, 60, 77, 98-101, 104-108, 111112, 115-116, 118, 120, 126, 160-161, 165, 167, 169, 170171, 175, 220, 246 Addams, Jane 71, 77-83 Advertisement 51, 164, 166 Agent (Agency) 24-26, 28-32, 3637, 83, 86-88, 90, 94, 119, 122, 160, 194, 199, 215, 279, 290, 303-304, 312-313, 322 Alternative Sites 71, 119, 121, 143, 152, 278, 306 American Indian 256-257, 265-266, 268, 273, 276, 278, 281, 283284, 296, 299 Anzaldua, Gloria 143, 170, 303-307 Aristotle 195-196, 199-200, 233, Authority 45, 105, 108, 127-131, 134-135, 137, 139-142, 151, 199, 215, 287, 308, 316 Biesecker, Barbara 8, 230-231, 233 Bizzell, Patricia 299, 230, 234 Body (Bodies) 5, 25, 79, 87, 97, 99101, 103, 105, 107, 111-112, 115, 128, 139-140, 145-146, 148-149, 151, 154-155, 165166, 168, 178-187, 189-192 Bordo, Susan 301-303 Butler, Judith 73, 101, 103-104, 106, 148, 151, 179, 194, 309312 Callahan, S. Alice 264-82 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs 228, 230232 Camp Casey 98, 100, 107-113 Care (Caring) 3, 16, 21, 86-88, 90, 98-99, 107-113, 129, 131-133, 135-137, 145, 218, 220, 257



Chicana 301-308 Civic 41, 51, 68, 70-71, 76-81, 91, 99, 107, 112 Class 22, 25, 44, 46, 58, 61, 130131, 135-136, 143, 161, 198, 224, 245-246, 284-286, 288, 306, 318, 322 Classroom 48, 53, 64, 66, 81, 127132, 134, 136-143, 148, 209, 211, 215, 217-218, 223, 225226, 282, 288, 296, 300, 308 Community 2, 36, 50-51, 54, 65, 69, 72, 79, 85, 87-88, 93, 106, 115, 117, 119, 154-155, 158-164, 167, 188, 197, 200-201, 205206, 208, 210-211, 213-217, 220-226, 249, 269, 287, 308 Crowley, Sharon 199 Culture (Cultural) 12, 14, 25-26, 33, 35-38, 51, 56, 66, 82, 90-91, 95, 101-102, 114, 116-119, 136, 142, 149-150, 159-167, 170176, 180, 182, 187, 201-203, 207, 209, 212-214, 220-221, 236-237, 240-247, 255, 257263, 266, 268-270, 278-279, 281, 283-284, 288, 295-296, 299, 302-306, 309-313, 317319, 322, 325, Discourse 42, 45-48, 57-62, 64, 66, 68, 70-73, 78, 80-81, 98-99, 101, 103-104, 107, 118, 134, 138, 142-143, 155, 161, 194, 196, 199, 203, 206, 208, 212214, 216, 219, 221-224, 245, 257, 259-261, 266, 268, 274, 283, 287, 291, 294, 298, 302, 306, 308, 312, 321, Echo 193-198, 200-201, 203-207

Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Embody (Embodiment) 60-61, 6466, 72, 76, 105, 120, 130, 145, 152, 154-155 Emotion 12, 16, 19, 21, 57, 63, 69, 76-77, 82, 85, 94, 96, 98-101, 103-104, 106, 108, 111-113, 122, 138, 147, 152-154, 183, 185, 191, 200-203, 206, 230, 237-238, 292-293, 296, 306 Faculty 41, 48, 145-148, 151-154, 171, 280 Family 4-7, 11, 20, 24-38, 45, 61, 65-66, 68, 71, 82-84, 88-90, 104, 107, 125, 163, 165-166, 173, 180-181, 183-184, 271, 275, 284, 289, 293, 319 Feminism(s) 3, 8, 10, 12, 18, 27, 4041, 56-57, 60, 66, 70-77, 80, 82, 84, 88, 90, 101-102, 114-120, 126-145, 148, 154-155, 158162, 164, 166-171, 174-175, 208-209, 212, 217, 219-226, 228-238. 245-248, 251, 258, 265-266, 269-270, 273, 282, 290, 302-303, 305-309, 313, 315-317, 325 Fern, Fanny 10-23 Fish, Stanley 69, 72-74 Folksonomy 208-212, 214, 217, 224-226 Foss, Sonja 230 Foucault, Michel 152, 266, 271, 273, 277-279, 309, 311-312, 325 Free Speech 68, 70-74, 76, 78, 80, 252 Garrettson, Catherine Livingston 29 Gender 6-8, 11-12, 14-15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 30, 32, 45-46, 50, 63-64, 78, 86, 102, 114, 116-117, 119, 129, 131-136, 138-140, 142, 147, 154, 159-161, 171, 178179, 193, 198-201, 204, 207, 220-221, 224, 226, 230, 235,



361

238, 240, 268, 274, 306, 309312, 318-319 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 57-63, 66 Girls 40-56, 58, 84, 87, 95, 115-126, 158, 160-162, 164, 166, 168, 170-176, 183-184, 188, 195, 203, 266, 274, 276, 309-311, 313, 318-319, 321 Glenn, Cheryl 200, 203, 206, 234235 Grief 98-100, 103-108, 110, 112 Haraway, Donna 244, 247, 258 Harmony 243-248, 250-251, 255, 259-262 Hawisher, Gail 134-135, 143 High School 32, 34, 39-41, 47, 5153, 56, 84, 171, 182-183, 188, 190, 295, 310 Homosexuality 69, 178-180, 187188, 304 hooks, bell 135, 170, 209, 220-224 Identity 4, 13, 17, 20, 25, 30, 59, 89, 122, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 148, 151, 161-163, 178-180, 182-192, 246, 256, 258, 265, 274, 281, 283-284, 301-302, 304, 308-309, 312-313, 321322, 325, India 309-315, 317-323 Indigenous 42, 46, 241-245, 255263, 269, 279, 282-283, 302303 Infanticide 83, 85-89, 95-97 Intellectual Property 241-245, 248255, 257-263 Jarratt, Susan 135, 154-155, 216 Kairos 83-84, 89, 91-94, 97, 216 Kirsch, Gesa 3, 136 Landscape 12, 17, 32, 178, 181, 185, 188, 211, 215, 225 Lesbian (Lesbian Identity) 178-181, 186-191, 258, 305 Literacy 2-3, 39, 46, 55-56, 58, 215, 283-286, 290-292, 296-297, 299, 305 Literary Magazines 52

362 Location 24-27, 95, 119, 189, 191, 245, 268, 301, 304, 306 Lorde, Audre 169, 178-192 Madness 57-63, 66 Maid 20, 133, 135-136, 139-140 Media 16, 22, 84, 101-102, 105105, 108-109, 114, 120-121, 124-125, 137, 158-159, 161163, 167, 170-171, 174, 246, 302, 322 Methodist 2-9, 28, 33 Moraga, Cherrie 170, 301, 305-307 Mother 4-5, 24-30, 34, 36-37, 55, 60, 84-88, 93-95, 98, 104-106, 110, 112, 123, 132-133, 135137, 139-140, 154, 167-169, 173, 179, 180-181, 183-184, 190, 298, 305, 309-310 Newspapers 40, 43, 56, 81, 102, 120, 175, Normativity 11-12, 15, 19-23, 302, 310 Pedagogy 37, 64-66, 127-135, 137, 139-144, 217, 219-221, 223, 226 Piepmeier, Alison 119-120 Plato 92, 203, 205-206, 215, 237 Pregnancy 84-89, 92-97, 185 Property 22-23, 33, 45, 240, 272, 291, 316, Public 5, 7-9, 10, 12-15, 19, 22, 3642, 50, 55, 64, 66, 68-72, 74, 76-82, 86, 94, 98-99, 101-108, 111-112, 126, 131, 141, 163164, 201, 206, 213, 223, 230, 242, 249, 251-252, 254, 259260, 284 Punk 114, 120, 126, 158-160 Race 24-25, 27-28, 35-36, 44, 58, 88, 117, 128, 130-131, 135, 143, 161, 187, 209, 212, 221-222, 224, 226, 245, 284, 305-306 Religion 6, 288, 317 Resistance 29, 45, 114, 119, 151, 159, 161, 169, 183-184, 188, 198, 209, 224-225, 242-243,



Index 257-258, 262, 265-266, 268270, 273-274, 278-282, 287, 289, 297, 306, 308 Reynolds, Nedra 25 Ritchie, Joy 58, 141 Riot Grrrl 114-126, 165-167, 170 Ronald, Kate 58, 141 Royster, Jacqueline Jones 3, 39-40 Sari 309-325 Schell, Eileen 133, 136, 141 School 5, 7, 13, 32, 34, 40-43, 45, 47-56, 73, 84, 92, 127, 171, 178, 180-184, 188, 190, 234, 265266, 272, 274-279, 283-284, 295, 310, 317 Senier, Siobhan 270-271, 274, 279, Sex 21, 35, 46, 57, 62-63, 65, 87, 121-123, 133, 138, 142-143, 161, 166, 168, 170, 178, 183, 185, 187, 191, 202-203, 221-22, 232-233, 235-236, 245, 270, 301, 305-305, 309, 312 Sexism 115-116, 118-119, 135, 149155, 160, 167, 282 Sexton, Anne 57-66 Showalter, Elaine 57-58, 62, 66, 269 Speech 25, 40, 68-78, 80, 82, 147, 193, 199, 202, 204, 206, 232, 246, 252, 291, 297 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 170 Student 41-43, 47, 52, 54-56, 64-65, 127-129, 131-143, 151-154, 170, 209, 211, 214, 216-222, 225-226, 276, 277-278, 284, 287-288, 290, 296 Survivance 265-266, 268, 278, 281282, 287, 289, 291, 297, 299300 Ventriloquism 193, 198-199, 205, Violence 13, 36, 68, 74, 81, 83, 103, 115, 119, 122-126, 148, 154, 240, 245, 256, 261-262, 265, 284-286, 292, 295-296, 303, 305 Voice 3, 20, 40, 42, 45, 57-59, 63, 101-102, 105, 118, 125, 128-

Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? 129, 131-132, 139, 142-143, 159, 163, 169, 171-172, 193199, 201-207, 218, 223-224, 229-231, 256-257, 266-270, 276, 279, 282, 287, 291, 299, 303, 307, 317 Woolf, Virginia 57-66 Writing 9, 11-12, 15-20, 22, 25, 40, 41, 43, 48, 52, 58-59, 65-66, 118, 131-136, 138, 140, 142-



363

143, 154, 171, 180, 192-193, 206, 211, 214, 222-223, 232, 244, 247, 256, 258, 264-265, 269, 271, 274, 278, 282, 284, 287-289, 292, 296-297, 299, 305 Writing Clubs 39, 41, 47, 56 Yarbrough, Stephen 75-76 Zines 114-115, 118-121, 125-126, 143, 158-176