Campbell and Anzaldua both focus on marginalized groups of people, women for Campbell and all people fighting oppression (homosexuals, people of color and diverse cultural backgrounds, and women) for Anzaldua. Campbell and Anzaldua discuss how rhetoric created by white, Western men is not a sufficient mode of communication for these groups and explain how these groups use their own brands of rhetoric for liberation and expression.
Campbell argues that women's rhetoric is a "distinctive genre" since it attacks the the values of the cultural context in which it occurs (126). Throughout her article, Campbell describes women's rhetoric as "a rhetoric of intense moral conflict," since it contradicts traditional women's roles and cultural values in American society. Campbell argues that women are denied the democratic values that dominate American culture (equality, achievement, and independence), and feminist rhetoric uses distinctively unique methods that attack these dominant American values. Feminist rhetoric offers women the tools they need for liberation; whereas, traditional rhetoric (with an expert persuading the masses and the speaker's adaptation to audience norms) would only encourage women's oppression. According to Campbell, "This rather "anti-rhetorical" style is chosen on substantive grounds because rhetorical transactions with these features encourage submissiveness and passivity in the audience--qualities at odds with a fundamental goal of feminist advocacy--self-determination (127-128). Instead, feminist rhetoric employs "consciousness raising" as a mode for rhetorical transaction (128).
Since leaders would encourage oppression and submissiveness, feminist rhetoric, according to Campbell, involves small, leaderless groups in which every woman leads and every woman is an expert. Women are encouraged to speak about their personal experiences in order to "make the personal political: to create awareness that what were thought to be personal deficiencies and individual problems are common and shared, a result of their position as women" (128). In this model, there is not one message being conveyed, as participants should only try to understand their lives as women and find their own truths. The stylistic features of this rhetoric are: "affirmation of the affective, of the validity of personal experience, of the necessity for self-exposure and self-criticism, of the value of dialogue, and of the goal of autonomous, individual decision making" (128). Campbell uses the metaphor of oxymoron for the rhetoric of women's liberation since it violates and transforms the traditional modes of rhetoric and argumentation.
Anzaldua likewise argues that traditional rhetoric coming from an ethnocentric, Western cannon is not a sufficient mode of communication for oppressed people. Anzaldua argues that Western art is "always whole and always in power" (1593). Instead of learning from and respecting different cultures, Westerners borrow art from other cultures and exploit it with no respect for its traditional origins. Anzaldua insists, "instead of surreptitiously ripping off the vital energy of people of color and putting it to commercial use, whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way" (1593). Anzaldua describes her stories as performances that have identities; they are enacted when spoken or read. She in turn, associates whites with sterility and a loss of spiritual roots and states that Westerners think of art works as dead objects (1592). For Anzaldua, composing solely in English would not allow her to communicate her true identity. Instead she finds the need to speak a variation of two languages, Spanglish, since ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity" (1588).
Anzaldua explains how culturally oppressed groups exist in liminal spaces, in borderlands between the dominant groups and their ancestral homelands. Such a position creates a dual identity; people are not quite Anglo-American and not quite Mexican (in Anzaldua's case), but a hybrid of two cultures exhibiting varying degrees of each (1590). Anzaldua explains that in this borderland conflict, sometimes one culture cancels the other out, making her feel like a no one. Yet although this space may be a painful place to exist, Anzaldua suggests that there is an opportunity in the borderland for discursive resources. When Anzaldua states, "A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy" or "Sometimes I am nothing and nobody. But even when I'm not, I am," she seems to suggest that existing between borders is a culture in itself and not a void between two cultures. Anzaldua goes on to state, "this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable more malleable species with a rich gene pool" (1597). This mestiza consciousness can be a source for creativity since it creates a tolerance for ambiguity, unlike the Western mode of using rationality to move toward a single goal (1598). The mestiza consciousness thus creates a new consciousness since it is constantly breaking down paradigms (especially the subject-object duality) and changing the way we see reality.
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