"I don't think you can straddle the freaking fence. At the very least, it would be nice to acknowledge all the mountains the women who came before you have climbed, and appreciate all the barriers they knocked down. Because of their efforts, you can go to college, delay childbirth until you feel ready, get school and home loans in your own name...and, just maybe, be elected President."
These are just some of the reminders you get, if you listen. They're reminders from Bonnie, who's a Christian feminist. "This is not an oxymoron," she's reminded us before. And now she's saying again: "Yes, I'm a feminist."
What do you say? What does your daughter say? Do you honor your mother? Bonnie does. And she reminds us to listen to intellectual honesty; the father whose words she links to says: "'I’m not a feminist, but . . . ?' That’s a fraud. It’s intellectually dishonest. So for the record, I am a feminist. My daughter is, too. She doesn’t know it yet."
Showing posts with label feminist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminist. Show all posts
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Sunday, June 3, 2007
on academic snobbery: where are the true feminists and Hellenists?
Feminists and Hellenists should provide antidotes to academic snobbery. More on that in a moment. First, a true story about some personal moments.
This is my introduction to the attitudes and behaviors of intellectual superiority. In the fall semester of my sophomore year of college, all my professors happened to be thirty-something know-it-alls. Sure enough, they fostered critical thinking in me and, I suppose, in my classmates. But they also heightened my painful sensitivity to academic snobbery. In the course of the next five semesters, I couldn't help but notice how even the most experienced, tenured professors tended to retain (well beyond their thirties) this quality: they were all arrogant intellectuals. They made us students know we were mere undergraduates.
I remember one prof who, in class, actually attacked the identity of one student. As the student left crying, the teacher declared victory of one sort or another. (The victory, I found out later, was also, at least, the professor's own "victory" over the "identity," a personal identity rejected. Two of my friends at that university, struggling over the same identity, had taken their own lives that same semester. I myself shared--but not openly--the same personal identity, an identity I did not choose. The next year, another friend with the same identity--a friend from high school who I'd followed to the college--decided to drop out the last month of the last semester of the senior year, just as the parents arrived from overseas for graduation. Private coping with a profound identity was not something snobs, in the public academy, helped with. At least we were not entirely alone). In all my classes, I clearly remember, the instructors who were men treated very differently the students who were women (just because they were women). Many of my classmates who were women, some of them feminists, were starting to talk about the arrogant thought and actions of power of some of these professors. (My classmates never used that radical word "feminist" nor the other useful terms many undergraduates today find commonplace: "sexism," "misogyny," "deconstruction," "hermeneutic of suspicion," "meta-narratives," "cultural studies," and "post structuralism, post colonialism." The U.S. was, then, riding out our second wave of feminism--and we had not yet begun to whiff the postmodern air stirring at the time in France. And I was taking semester after semester of classical Greek, not yet connecting the importance of the Hellenistic roots either philologically or philosophically. I will explain what I mean here below). It's taken me decades, now, to get to the point where I can find antidotes to academic snobbery. I've gone in and out of my thirties; in and out of my own hypocrisy, my own arrogance of intellect; in and out of a semester of seminary to examine academically--spiritually?--my own angst with my personal identity, which I need not name here; through a master's degree in linguistics; through the coursework and qualifying exams of a Ph.D. in "English" focused on ancient Greek rhetoric and on feminist rhetorics; into life as a spouse, life as a parent; and into a score of years of work with ESL college students--those women and men truly on the outside of the academy in monolingual America. It's June 3, 2007, and now I'm (nearly) ready to suggest two antidotes to academic snobbery.
First, feminists should offer an antidote to academic snobbery. Humility and profundity are the hallmarks of the woman who gets looked down upon by men (just because she's a woman) and who is seen as lacking the capability of being as rational as men are (precisely because she's not a man). Modesty and emotional depth are hardly the characteristics of self aggrandizing rational(izing) snobs.
I could say lots more. But I couldn't write anything better than Nancy Mairs has written, sitting in a wheel chair "waist-high in the world," in a body she didn't choose. So I just recommend scholar Mair's Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.
Second, Hellenists should give us another antidote to academic snobbery in twenty-first century America. I use the English word, should, here with all the ambiguous imperative-subjunctive glory we academic insiders give it. Some of you are demanding, then, that I say what I mean. Let me just warn you that, with the classic poetic feministic Greeks, I'm mainly going to play with language. (I may sound like a snob, at first. But I'll try to translate if you'll agree to try to read on and ask me questions, continue this dialogue: jkgayle at gmail dot com privately or comment here publicly.)
Helen (or Ἑλένη) is, after all, the beautiful beginning, middle, and end of Hellenism. She is a person whose personal identity--an identity she did not choose--divides and unifies. Hence, she is humble and profound. She did not choose, either, to be captured by Paris of Troy or recaptured by Menelaus or Theseus, or in epic legend by Homer and in rhetorical praise by Sappho and Gorgias and Isocrates. (I know this sounds like snobbish name dropping.) Here's how we should care: the stories of Helen are stories of a person; they are stories of beauty and of battle; they are stories of nation building; they are stories of people; they are stories of stories; they are stories of learning, of literature, of letters, of literacy, of orality. They are stories of personal identity, of passion, of profundity, of deep change in who I am and in who you are. They are stories of flawed deities and flawed humanity, stories of humility, stories of woman and man and of common humanity. They are stories that should bring down the arrogant academic.
We get our English word, academic, from their Hellenistic origins. Plato used the word to name his Ακαδήμεια, his Academy. It's related to that other word we Americans tend to love: δημοκρατία, or democracy. Both words, of course, share a common root: δῆμος, the Hellenistic word for common people, for the ones who tend to be on the outside. So where do arrogant academics in America get the right to their attitude and their behavior of power over the common sophomore? Hardly from the humble, profound Ακαδήμεια. (Just a quick aside on Plato. Feminist scholars in the history of Greek rhetoric, including Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Lisa Ede, and Madeleine Henry, have begun to show us that just as we know of Socrates from Plato, we know of Aspasia from Plato. The former, Socrates, is the much more famous teacher of Plato, the inventor of the famous Socratic method. The latter, Aspasia, is hidden in the infamy of her membership in the ἡετερεία, or "heterae," the kept women of ancient Greek higher education. But now our more inclusive, more humble and profound histories of Hellenistic influences on our American academy show something new. Of course, Plato credits Aspasia for writing for and influencing male speech givers. And yet, Plato may also have known that the Socratic method really was something that Socrates received from Aspasia, from a profound, lowly woman in higher education.)
Will you now revisit with me the first sentence of Homer's Hellenistic Odyssey? I want us to look at, to listen to, a phrase from the fourth line of the first book (repeated in Book XIII, Line 90).
It reads and speaks (humbly and profoundly) this way:
Here's our problem now in America, where the academy tends to be full of academic snobs.
We have divided the common from the ivory tower. That is, we move from Homer's opener to Aristotle's and think there's nothing common between them, and hardly anything here or there for the common person.
So, in our literate minds, we move from the heart of orality to literacy alone.
From epic poetry to didactic rhetoric.
From story to precept.
From passion suffered to "pathos" as merely one of three available means of persuasion competing somehow with "ethos" and the much preferred "logos."
From passion, then, to "pathos," and from "pathos," ultimately to "logos."
From profound heart to shallow "enthymeme," as a heady syllogism in formal rhetoric.
From Helen to Hellenism, from Hellenism to Greek, from classical Greek to American academic English.
From the common to the snobbish.
From either feminism to Hellenistic intellectualism or from intellectualism to feminism
(but never to feminism in Hellenism or Hellenism that is feministic).
From the personal identity of Hellenism, feminism
to the impersonal intellectualism of higher ivory tower education.
We can hardly fathom that anything we do in the university in this nation today, from our high vantage, should cause us to bear any responsibility for the suicide of two undergraduates and for the decision to drop out of college by a third. Will the higher education labels we put on ourselves and our students (whether "traditionalist" or "feminist" or something else) bring down our arrogance? Do we work against student passion and profundity? What can we learn from our dropouts? Are we too snobbish also to acknowledge the humble feminist and deep Hellenist roots of our academy?
This is my introduction to the attitudes and behaviors of intellectual superiority. In the fall semester of my sophomore year of college, all my professors happened to be thirty-something know-it-alls. Sure enough, they fostered critical thinking in me and, I suppose, in my classmates. But they also heightened my painful sensitivity to academic snobbery. In the course of the next five semesters, I couldn't help but notice how even the most experienced, tenured professors tended to retain (well beyond their thirties) this quality: they were all arrogant intellectuals. They made us students know we were mere undergraduates.
I remember one prof who, in class, actually attacked the identity of one student. As the student left crying, the teacher declared victory of one sort or another. (The victory, I found out later, was also, at least, the professor's own "victory" over the "identity," a personal identity rejected. Two of my friends at that university, struggling over the same identity, had taken their own lives that same semester. I myself shared--but not openly--the same personal identity, an identity I did not choose. The next year, another friend with the same identity--a friend from high school who I'd followed to the college--decided to drop out the last month of the last semester of the senior year, just as the parents arrived from overseas for graduation. Private coping with a profound identity was not something snobs, in the public academy, helped with. At least we were not entirely alone). In all my classes, I clearly remember, the instructors who were men treated very differently the students who were women (just because they were women). Many of my classmates who were women, some of them feminists, were starting to talk about the arrogant thought and actions of power of some of these professors. (My classmates never used that radical word "feminist" nor the other useful terms many undergraduates today find commonplace: "sexism," "misogyny," "deconstruction," "hermeneutic of suspicion," "meta-narratives," "cultural studies," and "post structuralism, post colonialism." The U.S. was, then, riding out our second wave of feminism--and we had not yet begun to whiff the postmodern air stirring at the time in France. And I was taking semester after semester of classical Greek, not yet connecting the importance of the Hellenistic roots either philologically or philosophically. I will explain what I mean here below). It's taken me decades, now, to get to the point where I can find antidotes to academic snobbery. I've gone in and out of my thirties; in and out of my own hypocrisy, my own arrogance of intellect; in and out of a semester of seminary to examine academically--spiritually?--my own angst with my personal identity, which I need not name here; through a master's degree in linguistics; through the coursework and qualifying exams of a Ph.D. in "English" focused on ancient Greek rhetoric and on feminist rhetorics; into life as a spouse, life as a parent; and into a score of years of work with ESL college students--those women and men truly on the outside of the academy in monolingual America. It's June 3, 2007, and now I'm (nearly) ready to suggest two antidotes to academic snobbery.
First, feminists should offer an antidote to academic snobbery. Humility and profundity are the hallmarks of the woman who gets looked down upon by men (just because she's a woman) and who is seen as lacking the capability of being as rational as men are (precisely because she's not a man). Modesty and emotional depth are hardly the characteristics of self aggrandizing rational(izing) snobs.
I could say lots more. But I couldn't write anything better than Nancy Mairs has written, sitting in a wheel chair "waist-high in the world," in a body she didn't choose. So I just recommend scholar Mair's Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.
Second, Hellenists should give us another antidote to academic snobbery in twenty-first century America. I use the English word, should, here with all the ambiguous imperative-subjunctive glory we academic insiders give it. Some of you are demanding, then, that I say what I mean. Let me just warn you that, with the classic poetic feministic Greeks, I'm mainly going to play with language. (I may sound like a snob, at first. But I'll try to translate if you'll agree to try to read on and ask me questions, continue this dialogue: jkgayle at gmail dot com privately or comment here publicly.)
Helen (or Ἑλένη) is, after all, the beautiful beginning, middle, and end of Hellenism. She is a person whose personal identity--an identity she did not choose--divides and unifies. Hence, she is humble and profound. She did not choose, either, to be captured by Paris of Troy or recaptured by Menelaus or Theseus, or in epic legend by Homer and in rhetorical praise by Sappho and Gorgias and Isocrates. (I know this sounds like snobbish name dropping.) Here's how we should care: the stories of Helen are stories of a person; they are stories of beauty and of battle; they are stories of nation building; they are stories of people; they are stories of stories; they are stories of learning, of literature, of letters, of literacy, of orality. They are stories of personal identity, of passion, of profundity, of deep change in who I am and in who you are. They are stories of flawed deities and flawed humanity, stories of humility, stories of woman and man and of common humanity. They are stories that should bring down the arrogant academic.
We get our English word, academic, from their Hellenistic origins. Plato used the word to name his Ακαδήμεια, his Academy. It's related to that other word we Americans tend to love: δημοκρατία, or democracy. Both words, of course, share a common root: δῆμος, the Hellenistic word for common people, for the ones who tend to be on the outside. So where do arrogant academics in America get the right to their attitude and their behavior of power over the common sophomore? Hardly from the humble, profound Ακαδήμεια. (Just a quick aside on Plato. Feminist scholars in the history of Greek rhetoric, including Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Lisa Ede, and Madeleine Henry, have begun to show us that just as we know of Socrates from Plato, we know of Aspasia from Plato. The former, Socrates, is the much more famous teacher of Plato, the inventor of the famous Socratic method. The latter, Aspasia, is hidden in the infamy of her membership in the ἡετερεία, or "heterae," the kept women of ancient Greek higher education. But now our more inclusive, more humble and profound histories of Hellenistic influences on our American academy show something new. Of course, Plato credits Aspasia for writing for and influencing male speech givers. And yet, Plato may also have known that the Socratic method really was something that Socrates received from Aspasia, from a profound, lowly woman in higher education.)
Will you now revisit with me the first sentence of Homer's Hellenistic Odyssey? I want us to look at, to listen to, a phrase from the fourth line of the first book (repeated in Book XIII, Line 90).
It reads and speaks (humbly and profoundly) this way:
πολλὰ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν
or
many passions [Odysseus, our hero] suffered by heart
These are the very same sorts of words and ideas that Aristotle, in his Hellenistic Rhetoric, uses much later. In the opener of his treatise on rhetoric, for instance, Aristotle complains that all previous compilers of writings on the "skills of statement" have neglected central concepts. He talks about how common rhetoric is among all people, and he names πάθος and θυμα (or passion and heart) as key concepts thoroughly mixed up with and mixed in with the common rhetoric and conversation of all people.Here's our problem now in America, where the academy tends to be full of academic snobs.
We have divided the common from the ivory tower. That is, we move from Homer's opener to Aristotle's and think there's nothing common between them, and hardly anything here or there for the common person.
So, in our literate minds, we move from the heart of orality to literacy alone.
From epic poetry to didactic rhetoric.
From story to precept.
From passion suffered to "pathos" as merely one of three available means of persuasion competing somehow with "ethos" and the much preferred "logos."
From passion, then, to "pathos," and from "pathos," ultimately to "logos."
From profound heart to shallow "enthymeme," as a heady syllogism in formal rhetoric.
From Helen to Hellenism, from Hellenism to Greek, from classical Greek to American academic English.
From the common to the snobbish.
From either feminism to Hellenistic intellectualism or from intellectualism to feminism
(but never to feminism in Hellenism or Hellenism that is feministic).
From the personal identity of Hellenism, feminism
to the impersonal intellectualism of higher ivory tower education.
We can hardly fathom that anything we do in the university in this nation today, from our high vantage, should cause us to bear any responsibility for the suicide of two undergraduates and for the decision to drop out of college by a third. Will the higher education labels we put on ourselves and our students (whether "traditionalist" or "feminist" or something else) bring down our arrogance? Do we work against student passion and profundity? What can we learn from our dropouts? Are we too snobbish also to acknowledge the humble feminist and deep Hellenist roots of our academy?
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Suffering Suffixes: "-ική" and "-ic"
Suppose someone coined the words ῥητορική and feministic. Who?
Afterwards, Plato's neologisms were readily adopted. For example, Aristotle in the Rhetoric alone (by my count) uses some 33 different terms with the suffix -ική; and he uses these words some 519 times.
But where did Plato get the suffix -ική? How early in Greece did it appear? No -ική word can be found in the fragments of Sappho's poetry. Neither does any such term show up in Homer's Illiad. (These findings are by my very careful search).
And yet, as early perhaps as the 690s BCE, Homer (in the epic Odyssey) and Hesiod (in the poem, Work and Days) use a word with the -ική suffix. They use only one word, the same single word, suggesting to me that one of these two poets coined the term and the other borrowed it. Hesiod includes the word twice in his poem; Homer but once. The neologism is παρθενικῇ (an ostensibly newly-coined variant of the much more common παρθενικός, for "virgin" or "maiden").
Here then are the contexts in which Hesiod's and Homer's παρθενικῇ can be found. I'm including, line by line, Daryl Hine's English translation of Work and Days and Johan Heinrich Voss's translation of the Odyssey (from the Chicago Homer). The boldings and underlinings are added:
ῥητορική
Rhetorician Edward Schiappa makes an excellent case that Plato coined ῥητορική. In fact, Schiappa observes, "Plato's creative use of language is well established, as is his need to invent a proper philosophical vocabulary. In particular, it is significant that Plato was a prolific coiner of words ending with -ική denoting 'art of'" ("Did Plato Coin Rhetorike," 464).Afterwards, Plato's neologisms were readily adopted. For example, Aristotle in the Rhetoric alone (by my count) uses some 33 different terms with the suffix -ική; and he uses these words some 519 times.
But where did Plato get the suffix -ική? How early in Greece did it appear? No -ική word can be found in the fragments of Sappho's poetry. Neither does any such term show up in Homer's Illiad. (These findings are by my very careful search).
And yet, as early perhaps as the 690s BCE, Homer (in the epic Odyssey) and Hesiod (in the poem, Work and Days) use a word with the -ική suffix. They use only one word, the same single word, suggesting to me that one of these two poets coined the term and the other borrowed it. Hesiod includes the word twice in his poem; Homer but once. The neologism is παρθενικῇ (an ostensibly newly-coined variant of the much more common παρθενικός, for "virgin" or "maiden").
Here then are the contexts in which Hesiod's and Homer's παρθενικῇ can be found. I'm including, line by line, Daryl Hine's English translation of Work and Days and Johan Heinrich Voss's translation of the Odyssey (from the Chicago Homer). The boldings and underlinings are added:
WD.60 Ἥφαιστον δ' ἐκέλευσε περικλυτὸν ὅττι τάχιστα
WD.60 Then he commanded Hephaistus the world-famed craftsman as soon as
WD.61 Possible to mix water and earth, and infuse in it human
WD.62 καὶ σθένος, ἀθανάτῃς δὲ θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἐΐσκειν
WD.62 Speech, also strength, and to make it look like a goddess, and give it
WD.63 παρθενικῆς καλὸν εἶδος ἐπήρατον:
WD.63 Likewise a girl-like form that was pretty and lovesome.
________________________________________________________
WD.516 Also it [the North Wind] blows through the goat's fine hairs, but the fleece of a sheep
WD.517 Cannot because it is so close-packed that the powerful North Wind
WD.518 ἲς ἀνέμου Βορέω: τροχαλὸν δὲ γέροντα τίθησιν
WD.518 Cant penetrate it, which nonetheless easily bowls over old men.
WD.519 καὶ διὰ παρθενικῆς ἁπαλόχροος οὐ διάησιν,
WD.519 Nor is it able to penetrate smooth-skinned virginal maidens
WD.520 ἥ τε δόμων ἔντοσθε φίλῃ παρὰ μητέρι μίμνει,
WD.520 As they abide in the house beside their affectionate mothers,
WD.521 οὔπω ἔργα ἰδυῖα πολυχρύσου Ἀφροδίτης,
WD.521 Blissfully ignorant stir of the doings of gold Aphrodite.
________________________________________________________
OD.7.14 Just then Odysseus got up to go to the city. Athena poured
OD.7.15 πολλὴν ἠέρα χεῦε φίλα φρονέουσ Ὀδυσῆϊ,
OD.7.15 much mist about him, with dear thoughts for Odysseus,
OD.7.16 μή τις Φαιήκων μεγαθύμων ἀντιβολήσας
OD.7.16 lest any great-hearted Phaeacian, meeting him,
OD.7.17 might taunt him with words and ask him who he was.
OD.7.18 But when he was about to enter the fair city,
OD.7.19 ἔνθα οἱ ἀντεβόλησε θεά, γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη,
OD.7.19 bright-eyed goddess Athena met him
OD.7.20 παρθενικῇ ἐϊκυῖα νεήνιδι, κάλπιν ἐχούσῃ.
OD.7.20 in the guise of a young maiden woman holding a pitcher.
There are several very important things to note about the suffix -ική in the context of Hesiod's and Homer's poetry. First, the Greek suffix -ική seems to connote an adjectival meaning of quality. In English, adjectival suffixes of quality include "-ish," "-esque," "-al," "-y," "-ist" and "-istic" as in coinable words such as "virginish," "virginesque," "virginal," "virginy," "virginist," and "virginistic." Second, in Work and Days and in the Odyssey, the suffix -ική also allows the sense of "art of," the meaning that Schiappa says that Plato has for the word-ending. Third, then--with respect to translation in the three contexts (in the poetry lines) above--one might exchange for Daryl Hine's "girl-like" and "virginal" and for Johan Heinrich Voss's "guise of a maiden woman" the following: "with the skill of a virgin in being a virgin" or, to match Plato's shorthand, "virginistic."
Fourth, the artful/skillful feminist qualities of -ική attached to παρθενικός cannot be overlooked! In the first instance, Hesiod's poem suggests παρθενικῇ is something a) skillfully crafted; b) commonly human; c) divine in appearance; d) strongly, beautifully rhetorical (though ῥητορική was not yet coined); and in the form of a female. In the second use of παρθενικῇ, there is the metaphorical, poetic suggestion that the natural ability to resist (under a goddess's protection) the force of natural elements in the cold, North Wind IS virgin-like (especially when the maiden lives in her loving mother's home). Old men and goats are not so resilient. In the third use of παρθενικῇ (Homer's use of the coined term) above, there is the disguised manner with which Athena appears to the hero, Odysseus: neither as the word-taunting Phaeaician he expects nor as the bright-eyed goddess Homer's Greek audience knows, but as a virginistic young lady.
feministic
Feminist scholar Bonnie Blackwell makes an excellent case that British English speakers coined the word, feministic. The adjectival is formed from the double suffix, "-ist" + "-ic". A similar kind of suffix application occurred with the proper noun, Puritan. While such a noun can function just fine adjectivally (as in "a Puritan ideal"), English speakers have insisted on adding to the adjective "Puritan" not only "-ic" but also "-al"; the resulting double suffixed adjective is "puritanical." To find the etymologies of feministic, Blackwell advises (my) looking in the Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, there in the OED, I find the following:
Suppose someone coined the words ῥητορική and feministic. What I have been trying to show here is how related the two terms are, not merely by the suffixes -ική and -ic but also by the inter-personal, subjective (dare I say, rhetorical and feministic?) ways we use them.
femi'
The usual process is for an abstract noun or adjective (absolute, real, fatal) to be attributed to a person (absolutist, realist, fatalist) and thereby made into a noun of another order, and then for that noun to be turned into an adjective (absolutistic, realistic, fatalistic) . . . And it is the same for us: the person who studies the class of things called "folklore" is a "folklorist," and the adjective meaning "folklorist-like" is "folkloristic." "Folkloristic" as an adjective is correct when it refers to work done by folklorists; the adjective for material examined by folklorists is "folkloric." "Folkloristic research" means "the kind of research folklorists do," but not "research into folklore." (96).
I'll leave to you bloggers to figure out the connections, grammatically, between "feministic" and "folkloristic" and such. I do want to say that searches through amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, scholar.google.com, and books.google.com all show that writers are publishing works in which they also now use the adverbial "feministically."Suppose someone coined the words ῥητορική and feministic. What I have been trying to show here is how related the two terms are, not merely by the suffixes -ική and -ic but also by the inter-personal, subjective (dare I say, rhetorical and feministic?) ways we use them.
feministicization: hosting (not targeting) Aristotle our guest
Some feminists who are rhetoricians have been reluctant to include Aristotle and his Rhetoric in the canon of feminist rhetorics. Carol Poster, for example, insists that: “Aristotle has not, and in my opinion, should not be appropriated for feminist rhetoric”; Poster adds:
Furthermore, a few feminists who are philosophers are as optimistic (and wisely, helpfully realistic) about the relationships between feminist rhetorics and Aristotle's. Eve Browning Cole, for example, reminds us that:
Likewise, Cynthia A. Freeland observes that Aristotle's rhetoric shares with feminist rhetorics the qualities of subjectivity and social-collaborative interdependence. Freeland writes:
From the point of view of feminist historiography . . . we need to reposition rhetoric, with its acceptance of subjectivist epistemology and emotional discourse and its traditionally feminine connection with pedagogy closer to the center of philosophy, and reconstitute rhetoric by displacing Aristotle’s philosophical treatise [i.e., the Rhetoric] to the margins of the discipline and reasserting the value of (feminine) pedagogical rhetoric against the agonistic and dialectical Aristotelian model. ("(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica," 327-28)
Aristotle makes no provision for the intellectual woman, except for his nod to Sappho: “Everyone honours the wise . . . . [T]he Mytilenaeans [honour] Sappho, though she was a woman” (Rhetoric 2.23.1389.b). Otherwise, Aristotle denied any philosophical or rhetorical contributions by women. (Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, 49)
Furthermore, a few feminists who are philosophers are as optimistic (and wisely, helpfully realistic) about the relationships between feminist rhetorics and Aristotle's. Eve Browning Cole, for example, reminds us that:
Aristotle is not . . . totally silent on the subject of women's virtue.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes women's virtues as being two-fold: “. . . in body, beauty and stature; in soul. self-command and an industry that is not sordid.” “Philergia,” translated “industry” above, really means “toil of love” or “delight in hard work”; it is to be dissociated from sordidness (aneleutherias; literally “unfreedom” or perhaps “servility”). ("Women, Slaves, and 'Love of Toil'," 131)
Likewise, Cynthia A. Freeland observes that Aristotle's rhetoric shares with feminist rhetorics the qualities of subjectivity and social-collaborative interdependence. Freeland writes:
Aristotle maintains that science must begin from premises that are self-evidently true and certain. This appears to require that the scientist be a sort of perfect knower, directly intuiting universal and necessary truths. Feminists sometimes criticize such conceptions of the autonomous and impersonal scientific inquirer. But in fact Aristotle believes that dialectic and rhetoric play an important role in getting the community of scientist to such starting-points. ("Nourishing Speculation," 158)
In what we might coin as "feministicization" (for feminist scholar appropriation of first-glance non-feminist ideas), might we (re)position Aristotle as a more welcome guest?Wednesday, May 23, 2007
feminismS (essence? estrangement? expulsion?)
Intellectuals insist:
"De-scribe what you mean by feminism!"- "Define its essence."
- "Differentiate it from, say, traditionalism. Declare its estrangement from so-called masculinism. "
- "Do acknowledge the extreme expulsion it expects. Either defend it or deconstruct it."
feminists foster feminisms other-wise:
1. essence? pluralities
Sonja K. Foss, for example, discusses “feminist criticism,” which she explains “has emerged as one method by which scholars engage in research designed to intervene in the ideology of domination” (157). She concedes this is simply “[o]ne common definition of feminism [that most] features the concept of equality, exemplified in definitions such as the belief that women and men should have equal opportunities for self expression” (151). Thus, she names more than a dozen “various kinds of identifications” (152) within the “three waves or stages” (151) of "feminism" [153]). Foss agrees that one may attempt to describe “the essence of feminism,” but she refuses to essentialize the pluralities. Feminisms, for the most part, seem to be involved in “the effort to eliminate relations of domination not just for women but for all people” including “women, African Americans, old people, lesbians, gay men, or others” (153); hence, what is named singularly “feminist criticism is the analysis of rhetoric to discover how the rhetorical construction of gender is used as a means for domination and how that process can be challenged so that all people understand that they have the capacity to claim agency and act in the world as they choose”(157). And, generally, perhaps “the concern of feminist critics is with relationships of domination of all kinds, not simply those based on gender . . . [but also any of many] based on race, class, sexual orientation, or any other dimension of identity” (157). Therefore, for that method of rhetorical criticism concerning “relationships of domination,” Foss explains, there is that “label—feminism.” (See the chapter "Feminist Criticism" in Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd ed, 2004).2. estrangement? no, and yes
Patricia Bizzell asks:"Have [Jacqueline Jones] Royster, and other feminist scholars for whom she has now more completely articulated methodologies already in practice, departed radically from the rhetorical tradition?"
So Bizzell answers:
Yes, and no. No, because their work relies upon many of the traditional tools of research in the history of rhetoric. No, because the rhetors they have added to our picture of the history of Western rhetoric seem to me to be working within this tradition and enriching it, rather than consituting utterly separate or parallel rhetorical traditions. But yes, because in order to get at activities of these new rhetors, researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work. (“Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” (Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, Fall 2000: 17)
3. explusion? rather: a sheltering and nurturing in a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy
Nancy Mairs writes on the difference between the "fundamental structure of patriarchy" and "women's language":
The difference that emerges here [i.e., in language marked as “feminist”] is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse [i.e., unmarked masculinism], which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy. (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 40-42)
Saturday, May 19, 2007
feminism, rhetoric, translation
Women and rhetoric are problems for elitists and misogynists, like Aristotle. Translation is equally problematic, for intellectual purists.
So now, what if we translated Aristotle's Greek Rhetoric into English feministically? Watch what happens . . .
In the mean time, what do you think of this anti-feminist backdrop?
Aristotle did not need to spend much time on slavery in the Rhetoric because he had justified it in detail in the Politics, the master art in which his rhetoric is a subsidiary . . . . In Aristotle’s system, soul is privileged over body, intelligence over emotion, humans over animals, men over women, and freemen over slaves.
--Jasper Neel, Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory and Writing in America
But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say, "It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians"; as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.
--Aristotle, the Politics
So now, what if we translated Aristotle's Greek Rhetoric into English feministically? Watch what happens . . .
In the mean time, what do you think of this anti-feminist backdrop?
Aristotle did not need to spend much time on slavery in the Rhetoric because he had justified it in detail in the Politics, the master art in which his rhetoric is a subsidiary . . . . In Aristotle’s system, soul is privileged over body, intelligence over emotion, humans over animals, men over women, and freemen over slaves.
--Jasper Neel, Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory and Writing in America
But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say, "It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians"; as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.
--Aristotle, the Politics
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