A Second Population of Rhetors

Gloria Anzaldúa writes about her experience as a lesbian, Chicana rhetor, and in these overlapping identities, she finds both agency and invention. Her ability to speak in unconventional ways—her “mestiza rhetoric”—is a product of the affordances of these identities, though hard-won in the mostly Euro-centric and patriarchal academy. However, having won the right to speak, she is able to speak to subjects that might otherwise be overlooked, like white privilege and sterility.

She is also afforded a rich source of invention, as she explores the congruencies and departures of these overlapping and interwoven identities. She is able to mine the possibilities of her Mexican (and Indian) heritage, especially the way she is both shamed and upheld by her native tongue. As a lesbian, she is “every woman’s sister or potential lover (1599).

This is an expressive rhetoric, sometimes obscured by ambiguity (perhaps, like Burke, she would see this as a site of invention), rich in metaphor, and aimed at complicating certain structures of power.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, on the other hand, is far more academic in style as she considers the Women’s Liberation movement—a phenomenon that is, paradoxically, both public and private—one that has a certain telos, yet diverges. The traditional idea of rhetoric is at odds with societal expectations of women: rhetoric is to “entail qualities of self-reliance, self-confidence, and independence, [yet] its very assumption is a violation of the female role” (126).

To assume such a rhetorical stance is, to a large degree, to acquiesce to patriarchy—to admit that rhetoric is public, logocentric, agonistic, and disembodied. Instead, feminist rhetoric advocates “consciousness raising,” which posits a particularly feminine rhetorical stance: the sharing and honoring of private experience in order to build a common value system. Perhaps strangely, however, women’s liberation rhetoric also employs tactics like “attack metaphors” and “symbolic reversals”—both of which are fairly agonistic.

Mary Astell has already privatized rhetoric for women; this is nothing new. What these rhetors bring to the table is a kind of public/private, where the private experiences of women become shared value systems, and shared understandings. Additionally, as Jacob points out, Campbell complicates Bitzer in seeing Women’s Liberation as a movement that is cohesive, yet responds to multiple exigencies. This makes the concept of a monolithic rhetorical situation problematic.