(feminist) rhetorical questions for us voters

Jim Aune at The Blogora thinks it's all rhetoric. Barack Obama has a "winning formula" while Hillary Clinton "can't give a decent speech." So Aune gets us re-reading Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's essay "The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary" in the first issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (1998): 1-20.

Campbell says there:
"Hillary Rodham Clinton's style of public advocacy typically omits all of the discursive markers by which women publicly enact their femininity. Her tone is usually impersonal . . . her ideas unfold deductively . . . all kinds of evidence is used. . . . she is impassioned but very rarely emotional. . . . [She is unable to] feminize her rhetorical style, to perform a culturally defined feminine role publicly. . . . [while her audiences have a] failure to appreciate [her true power to persuade]. . . . If we reject all those who lack the feminizing skills of an Elizabeth Hanford Dole, we shall deprive ourselves of a vast array of talent" (pages 1, 6, 15).

In Iowa yesterday, did Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards have Ms. Dole's "feminizing skills"?

Do only women such as Ms. Clinton and Ms. Dole have to "publicly enact femininity" to be persuasive?

Or have frontrunners Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee exhibited "discourse markers" and exuded a "tone" that are more "personal," if they also use (in a more manly way) all kinds of evidence and are also more (masculinely and, therefore, more) logically deductive?

Is John F. Hobbins fair in comparing a rhetorically savvy "mother in Israel" with Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee?

Can Hugo Schwyzer be so sure of himself when implying (1) that Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee contrast greatly with really "handsome, articulate men [such as Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards] who [therefore more] struggle with slickness"? And (2) that "a debate between Obama and Mike Huckabee would be a thing to behold; [because they are more like women -- less handsome, and less articulate, rather like] two consummate 'outsiders', two men running on two differing visions of hope, two men who have an extraordinary ability to connect with a wide variety of people"?

What does feministing rhetoric really sound like for (or against) Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Huckabee, and other candidates?

(and here's another in quick update) Can you answer Virginia Rutter's questions: "Who votes their gender?" and "What does this mean?"

Empowerment of the Vulgar

I've been thinking a lot about how language can empower the unempowered. Some people call that rhetoric. Of course, language can be text.

"Text," starts Larry Wall in a late section of the article my good friend just sent me. And Wall goes on: "I read that word from a postmodern perspective. Of course, the term Postmodern is itself context-sensitive. Some folks think Postmodernism means little more than the Empowerment of the Vulgar."

Now Wall has developed a computer programming language, with a community of other people. They call it Perl. They call it postmodern. And they call it that because it's so like people language.

Wall continues, noting some big ironies:

But I take Postmodernism to mean that a Text, whether spoken or written, is an act of communication requiring intelligence on both ends, and sometimes in the middle too. I don't want to talk to a stupid computer language. I want my computer language to understand the strings I type.
 

Perl is a postmodern language, and a lot of conservative folks feel like Postmodernism is a rather liberal notion. So it's rather ironic that my views on Postmodernism were primarily informed by studying linguistics and translation as taught by missionaries, specifically, the Wycliffe Bible Translators. One of the things they hammered home is that there's really no such thing as a primitive human language. By which they mean essentially that all human languages are Turing complete.

When you go out to so-called primitive tribes and analyze their languages, you find that structurally they're just about as complex as any other human language. Basically, you can say pretty much anything in any human language, if you work at it long enough. Human languages are Turing complete, as it were.

Human languages therefore differ not so much in what you can say but in what you must say. In English, you are forced to differentiate singular from plural. In Japanese, you don't have to distinguish singular from plural, but you do have to pick a specific level of politeness, taking into account not only your degree of respect for the person you're talking to, but also your degree of respect for the person or thing you're talking about.

So languages differ in what you're forced to say. Obviously, if your language forces you to say something, you can't be concise in that particular dimension using your language. Which brings us back to scripting.

How many ways are there for different scripting languages to be concise?

How many recipes for borscht are there in Russia?

Language designers have many degrees of freedom. I'd like to point out just a few of them.

Now what I want to point out is how very feminist Text is (as postmodern, as Perl-ish, as linguistic, as liberated by good translation theory, even for translating the Bible).

I am talking about feminism that insists on equal empowerment of women and men. We must say this. And if Wall says "In English, you are forced to differentiate singular from plural" then let's force ourselves to decide whether the "you" in his English sentence is singular or plural. Wall would be the first to agree that we the people decide. So when Yuwei Lin says there's a gender digital divide, then we are forced in English to take that seriously, to make some decisions.

I am also talking about feminism that is Text-ual in a very whole-person way. So when Allison Randal says "know your roots," she's talking about Kenneth and Evelyn and Eunice Pike's tagmemics, which is about as personal-able a language theory for translation as ever invented. Now, that's some rhetoric, some empowering. The Pikes and Wall and Randal never called tagmemics, or human language for that matter, feminist. But we can. Do you know what's vulgar about text? Do you know your roots?

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.