Acknowledgment and Access

Like Bruce and Amy, I noticed that consciousness-raising appeared in these rhetors writings in a way we have not yet encountered with the other theorists.  Though Burke pointed to identification as an aspect of rhetoric, these women emphasize identification (of community, of shared oppression) as an imperative for social progress.  Both Anzaldua and Campbell address a dormant audience that must be woken up in order to make strides towards liberation.  For them, liberation has everything to do with access to social roles and liberties denied by what Anzaldua calls throughout her introduction, “the dominant culture.”

If a rhetorical movement is defined by a slew of “rhetorical acts” (as Campbell notes on page 125), then Campbell probably would find Astell’s notion of a women’s rhetoric held within the domestic sphere pretty ineffective.  A kept woman has little to offer in terms of rhetorical acts disrupting the public sphere.  Campell defines liberation along these terms when she calls it, “a rhetoric in search for an audience, that transforms traditional argumentation into confrontation, that ‘persuades’ by ‘violating the reality structure’ but that presumes a consubstantiality so radical that it permits the most intimate of identifications” (134). This directly contradicts my understanding of Astell, who dances along with the reality structure, careful not to disturb it too much, so that she can get what she wants.

I read these writings on Cesar Chavez’s birthday; his face on the Google browser called my attention to how the liberation movements I’m most familiar with rely on the rhetor’s ability to disrupt the public sphere—a sphere dominated by men.   Chavez’s rhetoric—though not as speech oriented as say, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King--relied on his ability to disrupt the public’s notion of the laborer.  I remember that he stopped eating as a way to demonstrate the laborer’s suffering. Even though this was a quite private rhetorical device (one man’s refusal to eat), he relied on the publicity of his fast (media passing news of his fast to the public) in order for it to have any sort of social impact.  His fast helped raise consciousness in the same way that Campbell and Anzaldua require for women’s liberation, but the difference was that he had access to the public sphere.

In many ways, I saw these two writers functioning in a sort of “call and answer” between the two articles. Campbell says we need more acknowledgement and Anzadula says, “I acknowledge that the self and the race have been wounded” (1602).  Campbell argues that the women’s movement needs a rhetor, while Anzaldua proposes the metiza as rhetor: “Here we are,” she says, “weaponless with open arms, with only our magic” (1603). She’s looking for a “sense of purpose” for all people, offering the metiza as an example for the rest of humanity to follow.  As I’ve been considering these rhetors in terms of scope, Anzaldua, like Burke, seems to have a huge humanitarian vision that propels her ideology.   But progress seems to come for her in terms of one’s ability to claim and tame their language; in other words: through creative expression.  Creativity is key for Anzaldua, and as a creative writing major, I was almost whip-lashed by how she folds literary pursuits into her ideology, particularly because I remember our class beginning with an Aristotilian (I think it was?) separation between rhetoric and poetics.  For Anzaldua, poetry and figurative language is a large part of rhetoric.  I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that.