Listen? Look? Really?

Ἀκούετε. ἰδοὺ ἐξῆλθεν ὁ σπείρων σπεῖραι.
καὶ ἐγένετο ἐν τῷ σπείρειν
ὃ μὲν ἔπεσεν παρὰ τὴν ὁδόν,
καὶ ἦλθεν τὰ πετεινὰ καὶ κατέφαγεν αὐτό.
καὶ ἄλλο ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὸ πετρῶδες
ὅπου οὐκ εἶχεν γῆν πολλήν,
καὶ εὐθὺς ἐξανέτειλεν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν βάθος γῆς:
καὶ ὅτε ἀνέτειλεν ὁ ἥλιος ἐκαυματίσθη,
καὶ διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν ῥίζαν ἐξηράνθη.
καὶ ἄλλο ἔπεσεν εἰς τὰς ἀκάνθας,
καὶ ἀνέβησαν αἱ ἄκανθαι καὶ συνέπνιξαν αὐτό,
καὶ καρπὸν οὐκ ἔδωκεν.
καὶ ἄλλα ἔπεσεν εἰς τὴν γῆν τὴν καλήν,
καὶ ἐδίδου καρπὸν
ἀναβαίνοντα καὶ αὐξανόμενα,
καὶ ἔφερεν ἓν τριάκοντα
καὶ ἓν ἑξήκοντα
καὶ ἓν ἑκατόν.
καὶ ἔλεγεν, Ὃς ἔχει ὦτα ἀκούειν ἀκουέτω.
--Mark and perhaps Peter the Rock (translating for Joshua of Nazareth)

πῶς οὖν χρὴ δίκαιον ἡγήσασθαι τὸν τῆς Ἑλένης μῶμον,
ἥτις εἴτ' ἐρασθεῖσα
εἴτε λόγῳ πεισθεῖσα
εἴτε βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα
εἴτε ὑπὸ θείας ἀνάγκη ἀναγκασθεῖσα
ἔπραξεν ἃ ἔπραξε, πάντως διαφεύγει τὴν αἰτίαν
--Gorgias of Leontini (speaking for Helen of Troy)

It can be all Greek to me, and yet, and still, we all can see the play.

I've bolded and italicized and formatted the bits of text above to show some of the repetition, the variation on a theme, the parallelism even across parables.

Aristotle despised such play in language. Here's why: it didn't seem true to reality.

Reality has males above messy females, logic above messy dialectic and its counterpart rhetoric, and educated natural-born Greek men above all messy bar-bar-ians or slaves. End of story.

There is no need for fables, for parables, for others' stories. There is no need to change. No need to mess up reality.

When Aristotle at age thirty seven married Pythias his first wife, he that year declared that age thirty seven is the optimum age to marry for a man. He'd gotten his "virgin," as Hesiod said to:

Take to your dwelling a woman when you are ready to marry,
Not long after your thirtieth birthday is something behind you,
Nor when you're very much older, for that is the age to get married.
See that she's four years older than puberty; wed in her fifth year.
Marry a virgin to teach her all her respectable duties.
Most of all marry a woman who lives in your neighbourhood, nearby.
Looking about you, be sure no neighbour makes fun of your marriage.
Surely a man can obtain nothing better at last than a woman
When she is good; if she's bad, there is nothing more thoroughly tiresome;
Keeping her eye on her dinner she kippers her husband however
Strong without smoke. She'll bring him unwilling to early old age.
--Work and Days (697-705, trans by Daryl Hine)

So just guess how young Aristotle's virgin was when he got her so naturally?

When Aristotle went bald early, he observed the reality that "The front part of the head goes bald because the brain is there and man is the only animal to go bald, because his brain is much the largest and moistest. Women do not go bald." And he went on to observe "Again, one quality or action is nobler than another if it is that of a naturally finer being: thus a man's will be nobler than a woman's," something the men of Sparta with their hair - their long hair - and with their ignobly free women failed to grasp.

If life changes sometimes, that's only natural. And nature from time to time will need a helping hand. Why? Well, logically because females sometimes fail in the procreative act. And their failing nature leads to female babies (which are penis-less and otherwise botched males); sometimes a defective mother having sex defectively can even lead to male offspring that's defective, to dwarfs and to other mutations. Fortunately, logic allows female infertility and animal mothers producing defective offspring to be overcome. Why, even good horsemen know this nature:

Aristotle advises, "After an interval put the horse to the mare again because the mare cannot bear it continuously." Here he's talking logically, literally: "Ἴσως δὲ μᾶλλον ἂν δόξειεν ἀπόδειξις εἶναι πιθανὴ τῶν εἰρημένων λογική [“logic”]—λέγω δὲ λογικὴν [“logic”] διὰ τοῦτο ὅτι ὅσῳ καθόλου μᾶλλον πορρωτέρω τῶν οἰκείων ἐστὶν ἀρχῶν. . . . . οὗτος μὲν οὖν ὁ λόγος [“logos”] καθόλου λίαν καὶ κενός• οἱ γὰρ μὴ ἐκ τῶν οἰκείων ἀρχῶν λόγοι [“logoi”] κενοί, ἀλλὰ δοκοῦσιν εἶναι τῶν πραγμάτων οὐκ ὄντες. He's writing here on animal sex generally (i.e., Generation of Animals) but gets into the particular realities of geometry and of fixed, unchanging nature, by logic. Logic listens to nothing else but reality, nothing but nature, as the educated Greek male (not the Spartan man, mind you) so coldly and objectively sees it.

Krista Ratcliffe, in all her wonderful work on rhetorical listening, has correctly observed that Aristotle rejected "listening" in his canons of rhetoric.

Ratcliffe's is no small insight. Which may explain why Aristotle didn't hear Gorgias (whom his teacher Plato in the dialogue "Gorgias" has his teacher Socrates disparaging as mere Gorgias the "rhetorician"). Gorgias, in real reality, rather playfully was listening to Helen, giving her lots of wiggle room as to why she'd run off with a barbarian instead of staying home with an educated Greek man. Gorgias was listening to a woman. A vulnerable mess. This is listening rhetorically. Listening with intent for very personal, very subjective implications that are prone to make you soften your heart and change. You don't necessarily need to know educated Greek to hear.

If Mark had written and translated so that Aristotle could have read, then Aristotle wouldn't have listened to this nonsense either. Aristotle didn't listen to barbarians. Aristotle didn't change nature or his own nature.

Mahalia Jackson and Dr. Ann: Barack Obama's Rhetorical Mothers

To whom does Barack Obama owe his rhetorical abilities?  After his "Yes We Can" presidential acceptance speech, some are speculating without looking first to his mothers. 

• Is his cadence the "cadence of the Bible"?  
  
• Must we "[f]inally. . . give credit to the sermon style of the Black Church (which in Obama’s case, largely means that of Jeremiah Wright’s church)"?
  
• Might it be Wright himself, as the Rev. Jim Wallis argues to Rolling Stone as early as the '04 DNC, asserting: "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from just look at Jeremiah Wright"?
• Could our next president be an imitator of Malcolm X for racist ends, as talk-show host Taylor Marsh has suggested?
• Isn't it that "[h]e either deliberately or subconsiously, imitates the speaking style of Dr. Martin Luther King, whose style was grounded in the A-A church"?

Let's consider, initially instead, the womanly, rhetorical influences on King himself that are the same for Barack Obama.   Like King, Obama was greatly and deeply influenced by his own mother.  And both men are influenced by Mahalia Jackson.

King's mother was Alberta Williams King.  Biographer Keith Miller notes:

Not only was she an able parent and dedicated Christian, she also served as a church organist who communicated her love of music to her children, making sure that King, Jr., took piano lessons as a child. Years later King often spoke following performances by such stellar gospel singers as Mahalia Jackson and Cleo Kennedy. he encouraged group singing during protest rallies and called songs "the soul of the movement." Like folk preachers before him, including his father, he incorporated the lyrics of spirituals, hymns, gospel songs, and patriotic standards into his discourse. Plainly him mother encouraged his affinity for music and, along with her husband, helped foster the close relationship between they rhythms and content of King's oratory and the cadences and lyrics of religious songs. The metrical, rolling lines that make King's oratory memorable (e.g., "I have a dream," "Let freedom ring," "How long?") exemplify the forms of parallelism abounding in folk sermons. They also reflect the repeated refrains of spirituals, gospel standards, and hymns. The musical qualities of King's phrases are unmistakable. 
(Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources, page 64)

On the 45th Anniversary of King's "I Had A Dream Speech," we were reminded by witness Roger Witkins and biographer Taylor Branch of the direct influence of Mahalia Jackon on King's famous speech.

Now, let's consider Barack Obama and his rhetorical mothers.  Amanda Ripley, in Time magazine, tells "The Story of Barack Obama's Mother" whose name is Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) (Soetoro), Ph.D.:

Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama's life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man's story.

But Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.

Obama himself supplies some of the details. Ripley quotes him:

"My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew," Obama said in a 2007 speech. "But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I."

In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son's life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. "She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era," Obama says. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals." 

Clearly, Barack Obama's mother Dr. Ann Dunham and Mahalia Jackson are his rhetorical mothers.  If you now have been moved by him, you have been moved by them.

Gender Matters

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 (domestic confinement).
--Cheryl Glenn

Shelly Mandell, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at a rally recently by saying - in an echo of Gloria Steinem a generation ago - "This is what a feminist looks like." As a women's historian, I would have to disagree. Mrs. Palin, despite her membership in the organization Feminists for Life, is not really a feminist. She is, rather, a "maternalist"- a woman who accepts the gendered division of labor but uses her assignment to home and family to claim the right to public participation.
--Sonya Michel

The effort to create new metaphors for God bespeaks an understanding of monotheism that rejects the worship of a single image of God in favor of a new and inclusive notion of unity. Many Jewish feminists have pointed out that the inability of most Jews to imagine God as anything but male is a form of idolatry in that it identifies a finite image with the reality of God. Jews are used to thinking of idols as stones and carved figures, but verbal images can be equally idolatrous in their fixedness--indeed, can actually be more dangerous for being invisible. Underlying feminist metaphors, by way of contrast, is a conception of monotheism, not as a single image of God, but, in Falk's phrase, as "an embracing unity of a multiplicity of images." . . . God is not male. God is not a lord and king. God is not a being outside us, over against us, who manipulates and controls us and raises some people over others. God is not the dualistic Other who authorizes all other dualisms. God is the source and wellspring of life in its infinite diversity. God--as our foremothers seem to have known--is present in all aspects of life, but present not just as father and protector but as one who empowers us to act creatively ourselves. . . . God is known in community, encountered by the Jewish people at Sinai at the same time they became a community. But God embraces the inexhaustible particularities of all communities and is named fully by none.
--Judith Plaskow

he decisively broke with the conventions of his day that excluded women from receiving instruction on the Law and taught them openly and individually on the same profound matters he taught his male disciples.
When Jesus taught the multitudes, he employed metaphors from a woman's experience to draw their interest. He visited places where women commonly gathered. Beside a well, he engaged the Samaritan woman in serious theological conversation about living water. And here, in the house at Bethany, he spoke at length with Mary, despite her unfinished domestic duties and pressure from her sister.
--Carolyn Custis James

With the blessings of God, this [translation of mine] is the first complete English translation of the Quran that uses [an alternative to] the original [and male-traditional] meaning of "to beat" [a wife] in 4:34 which was [in my translation] "to go away." The translator gives three arguments for why this is so: . . . .
1. The word "beat" is a command which the Prophet chose not to carry out; and 2. The Arabic word "beat" has 25 meanings so why chose a meaning that does not follow the legal and moral principles of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet? 3. Interpreting the word as "beat" contradicts 2:231 and fosters divorce rather than marriage, commands to immorality and prohibits morality which is one of the definitions of a hypocrite in the Quran (see 9:67).
--Laleh Bakhtiar

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle. . . . Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves. . . . But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses. What . . . if our narrative had no syllogistic, metonymic, linear or triangular structure? . . . . What if Truth were a Woman . . . what then?
Cixous replies,
Then all stories would have to be told differently. . . .
--Michelle Baliff

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly. . . . since woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.
--Anne Carson

And I finally realized the irony of my reasoning: by enthymemically arguing my case from existing commonsense assumptions . . . , I was retreating into an Aristotelian rhetoric of common sense (i.e., the sense we hold in common), which was the very rhetoric that my manuscript challenged. Now I grant you, Aristotelian rhetoric is a very powerful, very useful way to reason. But as I argued . . . , it can be gender blind, that is, naïvely blind to concerns of gender. What I was realizing in my own life was that it can also be race blind. . . . When asking myself whether my defense of Woolf, Daly, and Rich was as race blind as Aristotle’s treatise of rhetoric was gender blind, I answered myself with a well-intentioned, “Of course it is.”
--Krista Ratcliffe

Western rhetorics, at least the legacies of them that we have inherited through scholarship, are demonstrably dominated by elite male viewpoints and experiences.
--Jacqueline Jones Royster

We must risk, then, getting the story crooked. We must look crookedly, a bit out of focus, into the various strands of meaning in a text in such a way as to make the categories, trends, and reliable identities of history a little less inevitable, less familiar. In short, we need to see beyond the familiar to the unfamiliar, to the unseen.
--Cheryl Glenn

Obama Talk: Why I like him

Deborah Siegel has up an interesting post XY FILES: Presidential Masculinity (as part of her on-going series on “myths and facts about a new generation of men”). She gets us thinking again about “masculinity / femininity” constructs with respect to Hilary Clinton / Sarah Palin but more with respect to John McCain / Barak Obama.

(UPDATE: Check out Virginia Rutter's astute comment on "hybrid gender performance" and "multiple statuses all at once... for race as well as gender... not androgynous in that misfit, uncomfortable “Pat” sense (remember, Pat on [SNL])... [but with a] repertoire...wide, and... using all sorts of masculine and feminine skills." Esteban Vasquez makes a similar, usually clever point in his comment below. Why the "either/ or" binary?)

That's a lot to work through. Let me focus right in on Obama, and then I'll come back to some of the things Deborah is getting at.

---------
One reason I like Barack Obama is this: the people who want to box him into some this or that just can't. It's usually their negative box they want to cram him into:

• his middle name is Hussein, and therefore . . . (he's gotta be Muslim or at least antiIsrael)
  
• his associates are terrorists and black-racist-Christians, and therefore . . . (he has to be dangerously extreme like them)
• he voted down a partial-birth abortion bill in Illinois, and therefore . . . (he is a baby killer and wants to increase the number of abortions--never mind the number of abortions has increased during the 'prolife' GWB presidency)
• he has relatively little 'experience,' and therefore . . . (he is the unknown, bad candidate even if the other is a known bad candidate)
• his supporters are 'Obam-bots,' and therefore . . . (he is a charmer who can be 'soft' or 'waffle' on the issues)
  
• he is 'nuanced' in his speech, and therefore . . . (he is a sissy woman or some new kind of black man)

I could go on. You've heard this stuff before, and more. Let me offer a few reasons why I'll vote for Obama a second time:

1. Obama is a candidate who has, not because of a war or fighting, spent time in other countries and among peoples of other cultures dear to him; the world is not a threat to him, and peoples of the world seem to respect that about him.
2. He is a listener and a learner, someone who profoundly identifies himself with a minority group in America; and he learns from those in Honolulu, in Chicago, and in Washington.
3. He wants fairness and equality and equal rights, for his daughters too.
4. He's been already too much in government but much less than the other candidate.
5. He is his own person, yes African American, but neither Alan Keyes nor Jesse Jackson.
6. His speech.

------------------
So let me say a bit more about Obama's speech, his 'rhetoric.' Obama does not use patriarchal, masculinist language. His discourse is not about 'power' and 'bullying.' He does not fall into abrupt, agonistic, antagonistic talk. So what's his discourse style? I'll say again once more, it's womanly discourse.

The “masculinity / femininity” construct seems to vary depending on who's talking, especially when talking about Barack Obama.

Jackon Katz says this (in a UCSF Today piece that Deborah cites):

“It’s just white masculinity versus person-of-color masculinity.” And, “With Obama, you have a new kind of masculinity. . . his [ethnic] heritage, but also his style. He shows that strength can be about brains, making good decisions – not just physical force.”

Katz (at HuffPo) illustrates a different construct from Rush Limbaugh:

“Limbaugh's . . . latest anti-Obama line . . . is . . . 'I don't think Barack Obama is half the man Sarah Palin is.' . . . 'He can't take a punch, he's weak, and he whines,' Limbaugh says of the Democratic nominee. 'I'm sure some women find that attractive because they would look at him as a little boy and would want to protect him...But it embarrasses me as a man.'”

I just hope Katz isn't letting Limbaugh set the agenda. In other words, Katz is right to show how ridiculous Limbaugh's “femininity” construct is for Obama. But, really, is that Obama's only choice? Doe he have to EITHER possess (A) Limbaugh's “femininity” OR (B) Katz's “person-of-color masculinity,” which is “a new kind of masculinity”?

Why can't Obama have good feminine discourse without being like Limbaugh's “girl”?

He can. He does. After the Saddleback Civic Forum, pundits were rightly exclaiming how “nuanced” Obama's speech is. For the Muslims and Christians out there, let me just throw in this zinger: Jesus's speech is as nuanced, as feminine. In contrast, McCain's discourse is abrupt, agonistic, antagonistic too.

So more questions for Katz, who I really like anyway:

Since when is “person-of-color masculinity” “new”? Isn't “person-of-color masculinity” painting with a big brush stroke? And what binary is assumed when “masculinity” is “strength” that is also “about brains, making good decisions”?

Is “femininity” not “strength” and is “femininity” not “about brains, making good decisions”?

What's interesting is Limbaugh's calling Palin a “man” with respect to Obama. Her lipstick shtick, her whole male-fantasy “femininity” is what lets her get away with using abrupt, agonistic, antagonistic (masculine) speech. (April DeConick has a great post on that). Hilary Clinton was in a double bind. She was not the male-fantasy feminine but was still required to talk like a man--and was ridiculed for her public tears. Biden choked up in the debate with Palin--no ridicule for that man.

The double standard is that women cannot have legitimate womanly rhetoric: “feminine discourse.” Clinton cannot be a woman and use such discourse; Palin a fantasy woman won't use a woman's speech style, even though or maybe because she's the Republican man's “man woman” (as Charlotte puts it at Far From Ole's) .

But then Biden (showing some emotion in public) and Obama (nuanced and irenic), as men, cannot get real credit for their “feminine discourse.”

Women's Rhetorics Class on Palin

Want intelligent (feminist) analysis of Sarah Palin as John McCain's VP selection?

Writer, blogger, academic Charlotte offers the next best thing to taking her course in Women's Rhetorics. Cecile Richards, Gov. Ann Richards, and Deborah Tannen give added perspective. Get some (perspective that is), especially if you (like me) have been finding lots of blogs and newsmedia outlets rather predictably partisan in the commentary on Palin. Here's "Sarah Plain and Tall."

Are We Ready, Really?

“This has been a long campaign. and we've traveled this road with one of the most formidable candidates to ever run for President. In her 35 years of public service, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has never given up on her fight for the American people. Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and your daughters and granddaughters will come of age.”

“I honor her today for the valiant and historic campaign she has run. She shattered barriers on behalf of my daughters and women everywhere, who now know that there are no limits to their dreams. And she inspired millions with her strength, courage and unyielding commitment to the cause of working Americans.”

“With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest – a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours -- Hillary Rodham Clinton…

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons…

The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America…

We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend. That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.”

--Barack Hussein Obama, African American man presidential candidate, to us Americans

“To serve as vice president beside such a man would be the privilege of a lifetime. And it’s fitting that this trust has been given to me 88 years almost to the day after the women of America first gained the right to vote. I think — I think as well today of two other women who came before me in national elections. I can’t begin this great effort without honoring the achievements of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and of course Senator Hillary Clinton, who showed such determination and grace in her presidential campaign. It was rightly noted in Denver this week that Hillary left 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America but it turns out the women of America aren’t finished yet and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.

So for my part, the mission is clear: The next 67 days I’m going to take our campaign to every part of our country and our message of reform to every voter of every background in every political party, or no party at all. If you want change in Washington, if you hope for a better America, then we’re asking for your vote on the 4th of November. My fellow Americans, come join our cause. Join our cause and help our country to elect a great man the next president of the United States.”

--Sarah Louise Heath Palin, woman Euro American vice presidential candidate, to us Americans

“Palin is the first candidate ever to credit me publicly.”

-- Geraldine Anne Ferraro, woman Euro American vice presidential candidate, to a tv news man

“Congratulations.”

-- Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, woman Euro American presidential candidate, to Palin in a phone conversation

“Good luck, but not too much luck.”

-- Obama to Palin

So really, Are we ready for a woman president?

Mahalia Jackson's Dream Rhetoric

Forty-five years ago today, Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King Jr.'s request. To half a million people in front of the Lincoln Memorial, she sang "I Been 'Buked and I been Scorned."

Then she listened to Martin speak. Just as he was about to deliver a line containing the scripted phrase "the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Dissatisfaction," Mahalia shouts out to him:

"Tell them about the dream, Martin."

So, Taylor Branch tells us now, "King launched into a series of riffs. . . Among them were phrases like 'let freedom ring,' 'with this faith' — and 'I have a dream.'" Take a look at King's prepared sermon notes and halfway through, when Jackson shouts outs, "You can see exactly where it broke off." Roger Wilkins was there and adds, "If Mahalia, with that voice, told you to do something, you did it."

Jackson sang and shouted and prepared King, prompted him, to speak from the heart. It was the dream for change, the audacity of hope. Listen again.

Woman in the Naked Arena of Men

A few of us men are discussing whether either “arena” or “stadium” might be the better English translation of the Greek word σταδίους in various contexts. Or whether neither. (So far it's men only discussing, which means the conversation tends more toward the dimorphic rather than the polymorphic, as Nancy Mairs might observe.)

But women have not always been allowed in stadiums or arenas or contests. Ask my wife, the marathoner, who will tell you the history of females being excluded from certain events much more recently than Adolf Hitler’s attempt to exclude Jesse Owens from the Olympic Games. (Which takes me back to the last time I was in an arena. There were 102 of us white people listening to the only black person there, telling us his personal history of once having been excluded from that place. The last time I was in a stadium, at my university, there were plenty of black and white athletes on the field but none a woman; the place is reserved for football, and football is exclusively for men). The exclusion of women, by men, from sporting events is as old as their exclusion, by men, from public speaking.

Let’s look back, and listen. The awful past (and someone else’s history) is often more palatable to us than the present (our present). Below is an excerpt from Steven Pressfield’s acclaimed Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. (It’s a retelling of Herodutus’ history of the Spartan holding off the Persian King Xerxes. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, writes of Xerxes’ conquest of Greece. Bible history includes this ruthless conquerer too; the book of Esther has the protagonist standing up to this man and famously speaking to him to save the Jews. More recently, Frank Miller has written has written the graphic novel 300 on which was based the bloodly film by the same name, in which Spartan Queen Gorgo speaks to the all-male council to save the Greeks).

As we all know, Aristotle despised Spartan women. He writes of them in the Rhetoric and in his other treatises, saying they had too much respect among men and that their men, therefore, were wimps.

What Pressfield offers is a plausible tale of how one Spartan woman spoke publicly and persuasively in the arena where men were competing naked. This woman, Arete, persuaded a man, the warrior Dienekes. The rhetoric is as fascinating as Gorgo’s and Esther’s.

Pressfield sets the stage (and note the novelist’s use of both English words “stadium” and “arena”):

“We traversed the deserted avenues to the Olympic stadium, entering via the competitors' tunnel and emerging into the vast and silent expanse of the agonists' arena, purple and brooding now in the starlight. Dienekes mounted the slope above the judges’ station, those seats upon the grass reserved during the Games for the Spartans.” (page 53)

Now, in the context of these Games, Dienekes one night relates the story of his marriage to his protégé, his “squire.” Dienekes does not want to tell the story, but he’s a bit under the influence of a long day of battling, and of strong drink:

“Dienekes drew up, his expression going suddenly sober and solemn. He declared that the story at this point proceeded into the province of the personal. He must put a period to it.”

“I [his squire] begged him to continue. He could see the disappointment on my face. Please, sir. You must not carry the tale this far, only to discard by the wayside.

“You know,” he offered in wry admonishment, “what happens to squires who spread tales out of school.” He took a draught of wine and, after a thoughtful moment, resumed.

“You are aware that I am not my wife’s first husband. Arete was married to my brother first.”

[Dienekes then reveals how he had had a secret longing for the wife of his dear brother, a great warrior named Iatrokles. The brother caught on one day, and so Dienekes nobly moved far far away to honor his brother, and Arete. He then learns of his brother’s death in battle.]

“I felt it was my doing, my brother’s death, as if I had willed it in secret and the gods had somehow responded to this shameful prayer. It was the most painful thing that had ever happened to me. I felt I couldn’t go on living, but didn’t know how honorably to end my life. I had to come home, for my father and mother’s sake and for the funeral games. I never went near Arete. I intended to leave Lakedaemon [i.e. “Sparta” but literally “Strife with Deities or Demons”] again as soon as the games were over, but her father came to me. ‘Aren’t you going to say one word to my daughter?’ He had not clue of my feelings for her, he simply meant the courtesy of a brother-in-law and my obligation as kyrios [as “master”] to see that Arete was given to a proper husband. He said that husband should be myself. I was Iatrokles’ only brother, the families were already profoundly intertwined and since Arete had as yet borne no chilren, mine with hers would be as if they were my brother’s as well.

“I declined.

“This gentleman could make no guess of the real reason, that I couldn’t embrace the shame of satisfying my deepest self-interest over the bones of my own brother. Arete’s father could not understand; he was deeply hurt and insulted. It was an impossible situation, spawning suffering and sorrow in every quarter. I had no idea how to set it right. I was at wrestling one afternoon, just going through the motions, plagued by internal torment, when there came a commotion at the Gymnasium gate. A woman had entered the precinct. No female, as we all know, may intrude upon those grounds. Murmurs of outrage were building. I myself arose from the pit—gymnos as all were, naked—to join the others in throwing the interloper out.

“Then I saw. It was Arete.

“The men parted before her like grain before the reapers. She stopped right beside the lanes, where the boxers were standing naked waiting to enter the ring.

“‘Which of you will have me as his wife?’ she demanded of the entire assembly, who were by now gaping slack-jawed, dumbstruck as calves. Arete is a lovely woman still, even after four daughters, but then, yet childless and barely nineteen, she was as dazzling as a goddess. Not a man didn’t desire her, but they were all too paralyzed to utter a peep. ‘Will no man come forward to claim me?’

“She turned and marched then, right up in front of me. ‘Then you must make me your wife, Dienkes, or my father will not be able to bear the shame.’

“My heart was wrenched by this, half numb at the sheer brass and temerity of this woman, this girl, to attempt such a stunt, the other half moved profoundly by her courage and wit.” [Pressfield reserves the word “andreia,” or manly valor, for men only, later in the novel]

“What happened?” I asked.

“What choice did I have? [The woman was more persuasive than the gods or her father.] I became her husband.”

What She Said

According to all four Gospels, women were the first witnesses of the resurrection, a fact that no conspirator in the first century would have invented. Jewish courts did not even accept the testimony of female witnesses [much less Roman courts]. A deliberate cover-up would have put Peter or John or, better yet, Nicodemus in the spotlight, not built its case around reports from women. Since the Gospels were written several decades after the events, the authors had plenty of time to straighten out such an anomaly—unless, of course, they were not concocting a legend but recording the plain facts.

A conspiracy also would have tidied up the first witnesses stories. Were there two white clad figures or just one? Why did Mary Magdalene mistake Jesus for a gardener? Was she alone or with Salome and another Mary? Accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb sound breathless and fragmentary. The women were "afraid yet filled with joy," says Matthew; "trembling and bewildered," says Mark.
--Philip Yancey

μετὰ φόβου καὶ χαρᾶς μεγάλης
--Matthew

τρόμος καὶ ἔκστασις
--Mark

Are We Ready for a Woman President?

Professor Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (scholar in presidential rhetorics and in women’s rhetorics in the U.S.) gets us remembering. Kohrs Campbell, asking if we're ready, has identified several women who have made the world readier for an American woman president:

*Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 1848. Reads the “Declaration of Sentiments” co-written by her and several women, and modelled after Jefferson’s Declaration, for the first national woman’s rights convention. Charlotte Woodward, a 19-year-old, participates. (Frederick Douglass and other African Americans and other male first-wave feminists or feminist allies are also participants).

Victoria Claflin Woodhull. 1872. Runs for U.S. President (and is the first woman to do so). Woodhull’s choice for running mate in her Equal Rights Party was Frederick Douglass, making him the first African American candidate for Vice President. Woodhull and her sister, Tennesee, were the first stock brokers who were women; they gave professional advice to Cornelius Vanderbuilt.

Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood. 1884 and 1888. Runs for U.S. President on the Equal Rights Party ticket. In her first run, she’s the first woman to get votes—149; her second run gains her more than 4,000 votes. Lockwood is also the first woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. She represented indigineous Americans in Cherokee Nation v. United States, and won for the native Americans, the Eastern and Emigrant Cherokees nearly $5 million in settlements. Lockwood said, "We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it."

*Charlotte Woodward. 1920. Casts her vote as one of the first women legally to do so in the United States. At age 81, she is the only participant from the first national woman’s rights convention of 1848 still alive.

Margaret Chase Smith. 1940 and 1964. Is elected Senator as the first woman to the U.S. Congress in 1940. Senator Smith showed political courage by criticizing the antics of communist witch hunter, Senator Joseph McCarthy, in her speech “Declaration of Consicence.” Although she’s passed over as the Republican nominee for Vice President in 1954, Senator Smith makes a run for the presidency in 1964. Senator Smith is the first woman nominated by either major party. Her votes in the primaries carry her all the way to the Republican National Convention.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm. 1968 and 1972. Is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first African American woman to be included in the U.S. Congress, in 1968. In 1972, Chisolm runs for the U.S. Presidency, the first black woman to do so. She received 151 delegate votes.

Frances “Sissy” Tarlton Farenthold. 1972. Becomes the first woman to be nominated and voted on for U.S. Vice President. Farenthold was one of three women of a class of 800 to graduate from the University of Texas Law School in 1968. With Barbara Jordan, she was the only other woman to serve on the Texas State Legislature in 1968; and with Jordan, Farenthold was one of the “dirty thirty” Members of the Texas State House of Representatives who called for the ouster of the allegedly corrupt Speaker at the time.

Sonia Johnson. 1984. Becomes the first woman to be nominated for U.S. President by two different political parties (the U.S. Citizens Party and the Peace and Freedom Party). In 1977, Johnson co-founded Mormons for the ERA with three other women . She testified in 1978 to the U.S. Senate’s Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, and the next year delivered the speech “Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church” to the American Psychological Association, moves which had her excommunicated from the Mormon church. (Campbell wonders why 2008 Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has been publicly silent on Johnson.)

Geraldine Anne Ferraro. 1984. Becomes the the first woman to represent one of the two major political parties as a candidate for Vice President. Polls showed that she was more popular among American voters that her running mate, presidential candidate Walter Mondale.

Patricia Nell Scott Schroeder. 1988. Becomes the first woman Presidential candidate whose tears in public get attention. In 1972, she’s become the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Colorado in that state’s 79-year history. And in her first term, she’s become the first woman appointed to the House Armed Services Committee, where she literally shares one single chair in the committee room with Ron Dellums, whose become the first African American on the Committee. The Committee chair remarks: “That girl and that black are each worth about half. I'll give them one chair.”

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. 2008. Becomes the first woman Presidential candidate who has resided in the White House.

Professor Karlyn Kohrs Campbell reflects that the world has already had to be ready for a Texas gun-slinger cowboy type for President the last eight years. Yes, he's not the only model for a president, for a male president anyway. Kohrs Campbell asks whether we’re ready not just to look at Hillary Clinton as a viable Presidential candidate, but also at how we ourselves look at her. Is the anti-Hillary rhetoric we speak or hear or tolerate or speak against, is it actually against a woman because she’s a woman running for president? Who can our mothers, and sisters, and daughters—aspiring to be President—look to? What models are there? Do we even have good models in our own heads, or any ideals at all, for a “womanly” President? If not, then we may look to Margaret Chase Smith and to “Sissy” Farenthold with June Jordan, who’ve called us not to tolerate lapses in judgement; we may look to Francis Perkins, President FDR’s secretary of labor, the first woman in the cabinet of a President, and the only person to stay in FDR’s cabinet during his twelve years in office. And there are others, many others, we can look to as exemplary: Jean Duane Jordan Kirkpatrick, the first woman U.S. Ambassor to the United Nations; Claudia Alta Taylor “Lady Bird” Johnson, whose 1964 Whistle Stop campaign tour caused Max Freedman to write: “Lady Bird’s no passive partner. . . Perhaps this marks the emergence of women as central figures in a national contest instead of being on the edges of a campaign”; Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius, the second woman to be Governor of the state of Kansas, and the first woman to give a political party’s response to the President’s State of the Union Address; *Leticia R. San Miguel Van de Putte, Texas Senator, the first woman to give a political party’s response to the President’s State of the Union Address in Spanish.

------------------------

*Kohrs Campbell did not identify Cady Stanton or Woodward or Van de Putte in the particular speech I heard her give. And the other recollections above are from my quick notes as she talked (and from subsequent research). Those who brought Professor Kohrs Campbell to Texas Woman’s University to make the address have said they hope to make it public some day. I figure we can correct all my mistakes here then. (And trickydame at FCW Society gives a very similar history when asking if we're ready).

Update: Girl with Pen

(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?"

Pythias Influencing Discourse

Long before George Lakoff's "embodied mind" was Robin Tolmach Lakoff's "third wave feminist linguistics." And long before that were the Gestalt psychologists with their "put together, figure and ground." But long before that was Phythias's "woman's discourse."

Nancy Mairs in Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer reminds us:

[The dominant, objectivist, Aristotelian discourse is not] women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”

The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, 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. (40-42)

Here's how Aristotle struggled with a poetic riddle in the Rhetoric. (He struggles with the same in the Poetics). And here's how Pythias reads that (with a few traditional English translations -- dominant discourse translations -- following).