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Ryan Kendall
Professor Holloway Sparks
WGS 700: Pro-Seminar
09/09/14
Rhetoric Rewritten: A Discussion of Feminist and Queer Scholarship within
Rhetorical Historiography
“…someone in some future time
will think of us”
—Sappho
When reviewing the history of rhetoric, two characteristics become immediately
apparent: whiteness and masculinity. Beginning in Ancient Greece with Tisias and
Corax, carried out by figures such as Aristotle and Plato, taken up in the
Hellenistic/Roman Period by Cicero and Quintilian, pursued still in the Renaissance by
Luther, Descartes, and others, and reworked as Modern Rhetoric in the first half of the
20th century by Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and Richard Weaver, the absence of
women as well as people of color is obvious to anyone. It wasn’t until the late twentieth
century that rhetoricians began raising questions about the foundations of the discipline
and stressing the importance of rewriting a more inclusive history. Out of this
historiographical crisis came feminist responses driven at rewriting rhetoric’s history to
include women and, most recently, came the incorporation of queer theory, specifically
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queer theory’s insistent challenge to normalizing mechanisms of power as these
mechanisms have direct effect upon how history is written.
In her essay “Let Me Get This Straight,” Sharon Crowley provides a
chronological litany of the historiographical concerns within the discipline. She begins in
the 1980s with concerns voiced by James J. Murphy, C.H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon,
James A. Berlin, and others (Crowley 1). While the concerns are mostly expressed as
contestations between one another, they share one primary concern: the history of the
discipline has not been addressed with a critical enough eye. In Crowley’s account, it
isn’t until 1988 that we see any feminist discussions on the issue; Susan Jarratt begins
considering the “gendered aspects” of the arguments regarding historiography at the time
(5), and later in 1990, her own historiography is “straightforwardly feminist; she writes
here ‘as a woman’ and asks ‘how feminist writing histories of rhetoric can take up the
challenge…to create histories aimed at a more just future’” (7). It is during this decade
that feminist proposals regarding the history of rhetoric become more and more
prevalent.
Published in 1997, Cheryl Glenn’s book Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the
Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance demonstrates the deliberate, feminist
engagements with the historiography of rhetoric occurring during this decade. As the title
of her first chapter implies, she is interested in “Mapping the Silences, or Remapping
Rhetorical Territory” (Glenn 1). She examines the rhetorical canon from the start of
ancient rhetorics up to rhetoric in the Renaissance and mindfully critiques its power
politics of gender. She calls attention to the cultural and social privileges to which men
had access—privileges that permitted them to be exclusive figures in the production and
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definition of rhetorical discourse—while women were silenced and made to stand outside
of the conversation (1-2). Glenn shares explicitly in a feminist project insofar as she
works toward the inclusion of women in the rhetorical canon, a space once seemingly
exclusive to men. She explains, “Rhetoric Retold identifies women's bodies, explores
their contributions to and participation within the rhetorical tradition, and writes them
into an expanded, inclusive tradition, for this regendered history of rhetoric neither
reproduces nor reduces the power politics of that concept we refer to as gender” (2).
While I am not suggesting causal significance because that is outside of my knowledge,
this text marks a point at which feminist applications gain notable traction in rhetorical
discourse, leading up to the animated discussions occurring today.
Currently, there are many feminist rhetoricians delving in projects that explicitly
push against traditional rhetoric’s misogynistic reputation. For example, feminist
rhetoricians such as Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald advocate for the absolute necessity that
the rhetorical tradition be inclusive of women (Enoch 61). More particularly, Jessica
Enoch’s work demonstrates the recent elaborations of the feminist project within the
discipline as she promotes not only the need for women’s inclusion in rhetorical
production but also advocates the value of their “alternative ways of theorizing and
practicing rhetoric” (58). Her essay “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography without
the Tradition” investigates “feminist scholarship that pushes beyond [traditional]
categories of analysis”; scholarship that has the potential to reanimate traditional debates
as well as think outside of their suggested methodologies (59). Enoch’s project reveals
how feminist rhetoricians are pushing feminist engagements beyond (while still
maintaining) the inclusion of women in rhetorical discourse to applying feminist theory
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to current discussions in the field. For example, Enoch discusses two major paradigms
useful to and characteristic of feminist historiography: ‘remembering women’ (60) and
‘gendered rereading or gendered analysis’ (62). Within this second paradigm, “scholars
leverage gender theory to interrogate the relations of power operating inside the tradition
that defines and naturalizes legitimate (masculine) and illegitimate (feminine) rhetorical
theory” (67). Enoch’s mobilization of feminist and gender theory in current rhetorical
discussions highlights rhetoric’s recent investment in conversing with the disciplines of
women’s studies and gender studies.
Out of these recent investments in engaging feminist theory has come the, perhaps
expected, incorporation of queer theory into rhetorical discussions. For instance, in their
joint essay “Queer Archives/Archival Queers,” Charles E. Morris III and K. J. Rawson
engage queer archives for their potential to contest and critique “normativity along many
different axes of identity, community, and power” (75). Their focus expands beyond
(while still accounting for) feminists’ primary concerns of female inclusion and seeks to
include other marginalized peoples. They outline an agenda particularly geared toward
racial inclusion as well as that of the LGBT community and look to queer theorists such
as José Estaban Muñoz and Judith Halberstam to carve out this queer, historiographical
project.
While rhetoric as a discipline has a seemingly anti-feminist history to its name,
feminist efforts over the last thirty plus years to rewrite its history have proven not only
useful but successful in producing new knowledges and methodologies within the field.
As rhetoricians continue to bridge disciplines, particularly those of women’s studies,
gender studies, and sexuality studies, more inclusive and just accounts of knowledge
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production are bound to occur in ways that are not only new but also exciting and
innovative.
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Works Cited:
Crowley, Sharon. “Let Me Get this Straight.” Writing Histories of Rhetoric. Ed. Victor J.
Vitanza. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. 1-19. Print.
Enoch, Jessica. "Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography without the Tradition."
Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric. Ed. Michelle Ballif. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. 58-73. Print.
Glenn, Cheryl. “Mapping Silences, or Remapping Rhetorical Territory.” Rhetoric Retold:
Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. 1-17. Print.
Morris, Charles E. III, and K. J. Rawson. “Queer Archives/Archival Queers.” Theorizing
Histories of Rhetoric. Ed. Michelle Ballif. Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. 58-73. Print.