What the ?

Q: What's a self professing "very chauvinist" man (called out by another man for his neglect of women, and calling award-winning the grievous smackdown between this feminist and a linguist) doing blogging as a guest here during the silence of my dissertation writing?

A: flapdoodle, snickerdoodle, and domination

Q: The difference between my evangelical missionary dad and my feminist teachers?

A: The weeks before my first Ph.D. classes started, I began reading one of the textbooks for the Composition Theory course. I'd picked up early the late Robert J. Connor's Composition--Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Without knowing of Roxanne Mountford or her review of Connor's book or of the grievous smackdown between him and her that resulted, I was as shocked as she is at his "dichotomy" between "two medieval rhetorical arts: ars dictaminis (the art of letter writing) and ars praedicandi (the art of preaching)" of which "Connors argues, women are absolutely excluded from the art of preaching."

Even though I was shocked that the academy, according to Connors, had been excluding women from oral rhetoric just as the Christians had, I was in for more shock. In addition to the Comp Theory class, I'd enrolled in a Rhetoric seminar. On the books it was called Women's Rhetoric, but on the first night the professor explained that that was a Registrar's error and that the title of the class was really the Rhetoric of Women Writers. "Yup," I thought to myself remembering quiet authoresses like Edith Schaeffer, "women write and men debate." And yet within minutes the seminar was a "ovinar" (the professor's joke, which I embarrassed myself with by laughing aloud). I was one of four males, the minority among a vast majority of women, eighteen of them as I remember, and we were debating already. "Feminism, what (good) is it?" After the break, the prof had us write to ourselves which writers we read. (Mine? And lots and lots of them. All men. I'd glanced at Edith Schaeffer's book in my mom's room once. But even the academic books I'd read for the M.A. in linguistics and for a two-decade career in ESL program teaching and administration were male authored. Linguistic theories? all male. Theories about how adults either learn or acquire language. all written by men. The practice of language program administration? mostly us men, who hired women most of whom were dependent, as least in the early days of the profession, on their husband's jobs for fringe benefits. Research articles on minorities in ESL learning and teaching? yeah, there's been much of that; but by the time I was in this Rhetoric of Women Writers course, there had not been a single article published in TESOL Quarterly on the ways women speak or write, despite the professionally marginal niche-research by some women such as Deborah Tannen and Robin Lakoff, who casts no shadow as huge as George's.)

After the last class that semester, the prof commented on my research for her course. She said, "So you'd suggested someone needs to do a dissertation on the profound sexist inequities in your academic field. Are you going to do it?" I looked down, and quickly replied: "No."

But earlier in the course, I had been quietly blown away by how different Cheryl Glenn's history of women in oral rhetoric is than Connor's. Her thesis is that women are not in the history of oral rhetoric because men have silenced women in history and in the writing of history. Glenn then retells, rewrites, rhetoric in Rhetoric Retold to show that, in fact, women like Aspasia are as vocal as men like Socrates. And there's very good reason to believe that the dialectic method Plato attributes to his male teacher was actually learned from the female teacher of rhetoric, whom Plato does acknowledge as the speech writer and coach of the male Pericles. More loudly I'd been blown away by Nancy Mairs, who writes like I want to write. "You weren't ready for Mairs, were you?" a female classmate asked one evening when I was complaining to the professor that she should have started the course with Mairs.

Learning happens when I'm ready.

I'm fascinated with adult human conversion. Which is one reason I'm drawn to adult learners of English as an additional language. And to people like Evelyn Pike and Kenneth Pike who humble themselves and learn by listening as outsiders to people who use languages and categories that are not the ones the Pikes have known in their mother tongue.

Which is why I have a new appreciation for parables:
as Anne-Claire Rivollet talks about them, using them "perhaps not to be understood but to encourage people to search further to go deeper into their lives";
and as Luise Schottroff writes about them, finding in them "good justification for taking the part of the oppressed, the marginalised or the outsider; of letting the text speak for those people and of using as much social-historical research as possible into their situation to do this." Schottroff, Jane Stranz tells us, is also involved with a "translation project" of the Bible" that is "seeking to find 'more just' or more inclusive translations. . . to deal with some of the inherent anti-semitism in Christian translations and also to tackle the way some translations make people (women, slaves, children) and their realities invisible."

Which brings me back to the "difference" in my second Q above. My feminist teachers believe that silence of women and secrets of men are not entirely healthy. It's true in religion and in higher education. And yet the preaching is not to convert the other first; rather it's profoundly personal and self transforming. (Alexander the Great dominator did not get that from his teacher Aristotle either in principle or in practice. And so I get back to my translating, to feminism. Thanks to David, translator consultant still learning, for being our guest and for saying a few things to us, and to his mom.)

a (personal) progress report

Oy vey!

I have to tell you all this:

Should you not turn around to become children

you should not enter into the royal palace of the sky.

As you lower yourself to the level of this child here,

you are the greatest one in the royal palace there.

--Joshua, a Bethlehem baby and child of Egypt

just as we as society have begun to raise our daughters more like sons

–more like whole people–

we must begin to raise our sons more like our daughters

–that is, to value empathy as well as hierarchy;

to measure success by other people’s welfare as well as their own.

--Gloria Steinem, a whole person and feminist

Our family enjoyed the holiday celebrations together. But I did bring up presidential politics and religion and sex to the adults. And someone did ask me about the dissertation.

One of the relatives after a very short while declared that she may agree to disagree with me (on the candidates, on the church, and on the crises of sexism) but was most certain that neither of us would change the other’s mind.

Another asked in mocking disbelief: “how? why would you, a man, be a feminist? isn’t it kinda dishonest for you to translate anything of Aristotle as if you were his daughter?”

Now you might be asking me the obvious: “Why bring up taboo topics of conversation with family members during the holidays?”

So now I’m just asking these questions:

Whether we can dialog through Aspasia’s (aka Socrates’s) dialectic? Why do we have to think we have to change each others’ minds, when what I’m after really is my own very profound need to change? What if I refuse to turn around? Who will that help? And why your limited question focused on my gender, on my feminism? Where are the questions about my American barbarianism (not Aristotle’s Hellenism), my twenty-first-century academic learning (not his neo-Platonic teaching), my translated English (not his original Greek), my position of being a child (not his patriarchy), my repentance (not his rhetoric)?

And I'm still wondering about the antidotes to envy. What was Jesus after in talking to the men following him, those males each one wanting to be the top dog in the kingdom of heaven (as recorded in that epigraph above)? What was Gloria Steinem after (as in that other epigram, from “Supremacy Crimes”) when remembering it’s mostly those less-whole humans with penises who are the most violent, the most hierarchical? Doesn’t each one of us have a role to play, our own role to play out, in envy moderation? When will I know that I myself value empathy of others, and measure success by any other person’s welfare as well as my own?

Thanks to Molly and Suzanne for helping us ask the questions of envy, and of empathy, and of personal change.

My personal progress report on the dissertation is this: I've finished the interlinear Greek-to-English translation of the whole of the Rhetoric. Now, I've just about finished reworking John H. Freese's 1926 version. Each English word is being chosen for its ambiguity, for its relation to the body (mine mostly, but Pythias's empathetically), for its absolute refusal to sit as a static abstract transliteration of the Greek (no elite academic-rhetoric-ese here), for its transformative power (as if a conception, a pregnancy of sorts), for its regard for woman's discourse (as Nancy Mairs relates it), for its feminist binarying that values empathy as well as hierarchy. Some day or another in 2008, I'll post up some of this.