Anzaldúa and Campbell

Anzaldúa and Campbell both seem to be arguing for including new populations and expanding the definition—or at least the bounds—of rhetoric. Both deal with the oppression, and both deal with the complicated idea of selfhood and self-consciousness, but they approach these issues from very different angles. Both also discuss the importance of writing as a form of expression, both tackle the rhetorical relationship between the personal/private and the political/public, and ways in which personal language can be used to subvert and challenge existing power structures; both seek to overcome subjugation—but, again, they discuss these ideas in very different terms.

I am intrigued by Anzaldúa's style in Borderlands/La frontera. She jumps between the intensely personal and culturally resonant political moments while also switching seamlessly from English to Spanish, poetry to prose, and interspersing quotes from other writers in with her own work. Honestly, I find her style refreshing and engaging, and I think it is worth considering that the freshness of her style is something that she contributes to rhetoric; it's a meeting of form and function, of demonstrating the exact sort of multiplicity that she's discussing. As she writes in the first section, "Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out" (1585). For Anzaldúa, to attempt to tame one's tongue seems equivalent with cutting one off from one's heritage, just as to attempt to freeze language and meanings is impossible because of the "living" nature of language itself. In discussing the nature of writing, Anzaldúa uses an interesting metaphor:

The problem is that the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form is discerned or uncovered during beginning, middle and final stages of the writing (1592). 

While she is expressly talking about writing, I could not help but think of the sort of interplay between sign and signified and language and consciousness that we read about in Bakhtin last week. And her discussion of identity as being something hinging on language—"Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity. I am my language" (1588)—certainly seems to mirror this idea. Her "Tolerance for Ambiguity" also reminds me of Burke's ideas about ambiguity as a site for meaning-making.

Campbell's discussion of women's liberation rhetoric as a separate and distinct genre is an interesting one to me, but I feel like her assertion that it is perhaps "the only genuinely radical rhetoric on the contemporary American scene" (132) is hyperbole. That said, her inclusion of both style and substance in her discussion as being interdependent establishes her assertion that women's liberation rhetoric is its own thing, distinct from the rhetoric of other movements (like the civil rights movement). But to Campbell, women's liberation rhetoric is decidedly un-rhetorical (especially in light of Bitzer's rhetorical situation and Aristotle's means of persuasion) in that it is a movement without a leader, a rhetor, or an audience, and its goal is to subvert and, indeed, "attack the fundamental values underlying this culture" (128) and "violate the reality structure" (130).

Campbell, like Andalzúa, is interested in the interplay between the personal and the political. Her use of an essay by Sally Kempton demonstrates the sort of intensely personal details that make up women's liberation rhetoric. This is used to fine effect to demonstrate that the struggle is indeed a radical one because the enemy has "outposts in your head."

Andalzúa similarly questions the patriarchy of language and the established system, writing that "Language is a male discourse" (1586). This and Anzaldúa's discussion of language occupying a "borderland" go right along with Campbell's assertion that culture is inherently rigged for men (her discussion of the terms "man and wife" sums this up). So, both are challenging the reality structure in which they operate. I would argue, though, that Campbell's fight is more adversarial and, to use her word, "radical," while Anzaldúa's seems more concerned with navigating the difficulties and ambiguities of a "constant changing of forms" (1604).