“To Fight an Enemy Who Has Outposts in Your Head”: Decolonizing the Mind, Gender, and Western Rhetoric

For the full experience, play this video while reading.

It’s not lost on anyone that Anzaldúa and Campbell speak to some pretty large gaps in our canon, but I’m hesitant to call these authors part of the same “second population.”  While both authors present a compelling portrait of a more feminine view of rhetoric, Campbell seems to speak more about the position of the white American women while Anzaldúa speaks more directly to the varied experiences and positions of Latina, Chicana and Mexicana Americans. Too, Anzaldúa’s openness about sexuality adds yet another experience to our rhetorical pot. However, both rhetoricians make considerable contributions to the theory and the practice of rhetoric.Both rhetoricians demonstrate the power of language to create and subjugate groups of people. Each provides examples, Campbell’s use of marriage rhetoric, Anzaldua’s use of racial slurs and discomfort from all sides of her heritage, that reflect particular social structures, often enforced by law as well as moral policing. Both approach language as a colonizer – a force that structures the world and the mind to best suit existing power relationships.

Anzaldúa’s “How To Tame A Wild Tongue” is close to my heart. The relationship I have with the text could result from having lived my whole life in border towns (my hometown bordering the Navajo Reservation; and Las Cruces, where I lived for six years before moving to Tallahassee, situated about 50 miles from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico). It could result from my own difficulties growing up a girl who didn’t feel quite “girl.” Whatever my personal affiliation with the text, Anzaldúa makes interesting moves to draw readers into her text and experience. Freewheeling between poetry and prose, Spanish and English, personal experience and political statement, Anzaldúa refuse to adhere to traditional genre conventions, an unruliness that Campbell attends to in her essay. In so doing, Anzaldúa fosters a unique sense of identification with the reader. The

reader becomes mestiza, navigating back and forth between worlds, some of which are familiar and navigable, like poetry, others of which take time and effort, such as translating unfamiliar passages or sifting through cultural idioms. The English-only reader is asked to shift between worlds in a disjunctive progression. However, unlike Gates, who posits vernacular Englishes as direct opposition to a dominant language community and its belief system, Anzaldúa must navigate a complex mixture of cultural pride and shame in order to use her own language. She loses language because she has no one to speak it with. She breaks language because she feels is oppression. On a theoretical level, Anzaldúa deepens our understanding of the rhetorical construction of self, drawing attention to the multiplicity of selves and how this is reflected in and how we use language. On a practical level, she demonstrates the ways in which binary oppositions are not useful: she does not differentiate between poetics and rhetoric; she holds that she cannot express herself fully in only one language; she pushes at the boundary between experience and theory. Moreover, her sometimes chaotic organization and delivery challenge the neatness and tidiness of rhetoric.

Campbell’s “The Rhetoric of  Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron” perhaps helps me understand and contextualize Anzaldúa’s rhetorical strategies, but ultimately feels a separate piece of the puzzle. Campbell argues that because of the way language has positioned women, a rhetoric that liberates women must break conventions. It must proceed without an audience. It must proceed without a rhetor. Campbell’s focus on personal relfection and intervention is not unlike the feminist theorists who came before her. She seems to have carried forward with Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and a focus on women as wives and their resultant oppression. Her theorizing of women shifting roles between audience, rhetors, and neither is not unlike Iriguaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One. In following this tradition of feminist theory, Campbell makes important observations about the ways in which women make rhetoric that challenges dominant genre conventions as well as social attitudes. Like Jacob, I see her making little use of her rhetorical predecessors, except perhaps preserving the rhetorical triangle, and some Aristotelian remnants of the “available means.” Her confrontation of Bitzer is especially telling. For women rhetors, Campbell argues, the available means are not available at all; There is no audience waiting to hear; There is no one single exigency. Campbell is propagating a social change that must first occur at a personal level, before it can foothold at a larger level, that has emerged not from a single event, but from centuries of oppression. Campbell offers new tools for rhetorical analysis as well as rhetorical composition that make room for new conceptualizations of what rhetoric is, how it is delivered, and what effects it can have.  Although the vocabulary in the article is a bit dated, the stylistic conventions hold somewhat true. I’ve included  with this post some examples of feminist rhetoric that don’t necessarily operate with an audience or specific rhetor, but seek to make social change.
Also a manifesto. Because feminism = manifestos.