Gender in Rhetorical Theory

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.75 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Joan Faber McAlister

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Rhetorical Theory ◽

External Reality ◽

Gendered Identities ◽

Rhetorical Studies ◽

And Gender ◽

Material Conditions ◽

Scholarly Attention

The phrase gender in rhetorical theory refers to how gendered identities and dynamics have shaped the conceptualizing of rhetorical performances and interactions. Scholars have attended to this dimension of rhetoric by examining problems relating to gendered norms and representations as contexts, conditions, and functions for rhetoric. Despite the different aims and times of these inquiries, they share central concerns about the gendered productions and exclusions of discourses and rhetorical practices. Scholars also contribute to work in both rhetorical scholarship and gender studies by bringing diverse projects into contact to create new insights. Scholarly attention to gender in rhetorical studies has often critiqued conventional theories of rhetoric for importing simplistic accounts of gender or for failing to address its importance at all. Many crucial contributions to rhetorical studies have worked to correct this problem by drawing on interdisciplinary literature—particularly from feminist theory, intersectional analysis, queer theory, trans theory, and masculinity studies—enriching understandings of how rhetoric functions. Such research has enabled rhetorical theory to begin to account for distinct embodied encounters, material conditions, and performative agencies. Scholars have drawn on interdisciplinary literature to advance a more nuanced account of gendered experiences and representations in rhetorical theory. This research has often related sexism and misogyny to a host of other forms of bias and bigotry that are evident in some of the scholarly assumptions and abstractions guiding the discipline of rhetorical studies. These include universal and neutral standards of rhetorical efficacy, individualistic accounts of the rhetorical agent, and definitions of rhetoric as a representation of (or response to) an external reality that appeals to a preexisting audience. Rhetorical theorists have also contributed to broader conversations engaging complexities of gender by highlighting the role of discourse in the production of biological essentialisms; gender binaries; interlocking oppressions; and multiple vectors of marginalization, discrimination, erasure, exclusion, and violence.

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From "Looking for Alibrandi" to "Does my Head Look Big in This?": The role of Australian teenage novels in reconceptualising racialised-gendered identities

Transforming Cultures eJournal ◽

10.5130/tfc.v2i1.598 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lana Zannettino

Keyword(s):

Race And Ethnicity ◽

Ethnic Identification ◽

Dominant Culture ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Post Colonial ◽

Female Protagonists ◽

Gendered Identities ◽

And Gender ◽

Biological Race

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of three Australian teenage novels – Melina Marchetta’s ‘Looking for Alibrandi’ (1992), Randa Abdel-Fattah’s ‘Does my Head Look Big in This?’ (2005), and Morris Gleitzman’s ‘Girl Underground’ (2004). Drawing from feminist post-structural and post-colonial theories, the paper examines how each author has constructed the racialised-gendered identities of their female protagonists, including the ways in which they struggle to develop an identity in-between minority and dominant cultures. Also considered is how each author inter-weaves race, gender and class to produce subjects that are positioned differently across minority and dominant cultures. The similarities in how the authors have inscribed race and ethnicity on the subjectivities of their female characters, despite the novels being written at different points in time and focusing on different racial and ethnic identities, suggest that what it means to be a raced subject in Australia has more to do with the significance of all-at-once ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ to the dominant culture, of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ and of ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’, than it has with the unique characteristics of biological race and ethnic identification. The paper argues that this kind of fiction carries with it an implicit pedagogy about race relations in Australia, which has the potential to subvert oppressive binary dualisms of race and gender by demonstrating possibilities for the development of hybrid cultural identities and ‘collaborations of humanity’.

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Introduction

10.5406/illinois/9780252037245.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ruth Hellier

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Identity Politics ◽

Life Story ◽

Methodological Issues ◽

Women's Music ◽

Music Making ◽

And Gender ◽

Musical Genres

This introductory chapter discusses the conceptual and methodological issues regarding the study of women's music-making, including vocality, subjectivity, individuals, theorization, contextualization, feminist theory and politics, understandings of woman and gender, identity politics, and authoring. The analysis is varied in terms of musical genres, geographical areas, and the role of singing in the life of the singer. The chapter develops its ideas around the proposition that the current understandings of what and how music means could be expanded by more flexible and socially based notions of “selves” as locally articulated in specific contexts. In mapping these occurrences, the chapter encompasses major events, life markers, moments of decisions, and elements of vocality, all placed in a broadly chronological life-story framework.

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A Cross-Examination of Female Masculinities and Male Femininities in Mema by Daniel Mengara

Studies in English Language Teaching ◽

10.22158/selt.v3n4p384 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 (4) ◽

pp. 384

Author(s):

Ayodele A. Allagbé ◽

Akinola M. Allagbé

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Gender Studies ◽

The Novel ◽

Critical Reading ◽

African Culture ◽

Gendered Identities ◽

Socially Constructed ◽

Language And Gender ◽

The Feminine ◽

And Gender

This paper attempts a critical reading of Mema (2003) written by Daniel Mengara. The study draws on insights from language and gender studies, feminism and queer theory to critically cross-examine how female masculinities and male femininities are represented in the novel. It holds the view that gendered identities are socially constructed via speech. This means that language encodes means which overtly mark masculinity or/and femininity. However, it should be noted that neither masculinity nor femininity is an exclusive characteristic of the male or the female sex/gender. In this sense, the role(s) an individual takes on in a given context confers either the masculine or the feminine profile upon him/her. This study concludes that gendered identities as portrayed in Mema are intricate, and that in most cases the portraiture of both sexes counters the expectations of African culture.

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Domesticity and Queer Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198743415.013.26 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 371-387

Author(s):

Holly Furneaux

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Emotional Experience ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Katherine Mansfield ◽

Domestic Ideology ◽

Bleak House ◽

Our Mutual Friend ◽

And Gender ◽

Political Value

Katherine Mansfield described Dickens’s Mrs Wilfer (Our Mutual Friend)—a character who strenuously resists the role of angel in the house showing distaste for marriage and motherhood—as ‘after my own heart’. This chapter reconsiders Dickens’s difficult women in the light of recent work in queer and gender theory on the political value of anti-sociability with particular attention to the domestic and emotional experience of the affect alien. As well as Mrs Wilfer, key figures include Mrs Jellyby (Bleak House), and Martha Varden (Barnaby Rudge). The chapter offers a sustained new reading of the ugly feelings and household disharmonies of Barnaby Rudge, exploring Dickens’s engagement with the incoherence of Victorian domestic ideology as enshrined by figures like John Ruskin.

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Gender Precarity: Gender Identity and the Economy of Authenticity

Orbit Writing Around Pynchon ◽

10.20919/exs.9.2019.241 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 61-75

Author(s):

Benjamin Carpenter

Keyword(s):

Gender Identity ◽

Feminist Theory ◽

Identity Politics ◽

Sex And Gender ◽

Trans People ◽

The Common ◽

Gender Based ◽

And Gender ◽

Gender Trouble

In this paper I examine the role of authenticity within contemporary debates about gender identity with an eye to exploring the structure of sex and gender-based oppressions - with particular consideration with the marginalisation of trans subjects. I begin with a return to Butler's Gender Trouble to critically examine her ontology of gender and the suggestion that gender cannot be a matter of authenticity. Though this disagrees with the common schematic of trans identity mobilised within contemporary identity politics, this paper seeks to use this critique to provide a deeper explanation of trans oppression within the context of Butler's heterosexual matrix. The aim of this move is to situate trans struggles as central within philosophical feminist theory - whilst breaking from several of the shortcomings of contemporary identity ontology. These considerations will then be explored alongside Butler's work in Precarious Life, wherein the oppression of trans people will be explored in how these subjects bear a greater burden of authenticity - wherein trans genders are automatically regarded as authentic whereas cis genders remain unquestioned. This contextualises the rhetorical and ontological move adopted by many trans activists whereby they present gender as a matter of absolute and inviolable fact - which is incompatible with Butler's ontology of gender. Using bother of Butler's texts, we can regard this move as the pursuit of an impossible security, a move that serves to obscure the inauthenticity of gender overall. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace in inauthenticity of gender and to refuse to allow ourselves to sink into an economy of authenticity that marginalises trans subjects.

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Epistemology of the Answering Machine

Camera Obscura Feminism Culture and Media Studies ◽

10.1215/02705346-8085099 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

pp. 1-37

Author(s):

Lilia Kilburn

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Coming Out ◽

Media History ◽

Sound Studies ◽

Gender Transition ◽

Transgender Studies ◽

Media Technologies ◽

Service Role ◽

And Gender

This article responds to the call, long latent in queer theory, for more nuanced portrayals of vocality. As Andrew Anastasia writes in the introductory issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, accounts of vocality that consider only the voice’s discursive or linguistic qualities “relegate the embodied voice to a service role of rendering audible the coherent thought.” Similarly, for trans-gender individuals undergoing vocal change, media technologies of vocality like the telephone and the answering machine—the subject of this article—do more than render subjects audible. Through a sustained engagement with archives concerning Cher and her transgender son, Chaz Bono, including the documentary Becoming Chaz (dir. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, US, 2011) and memoirs and coming- out guides written by Chaz, and with a particular focus on an exchange concerning an answering machine that lodges Chaz’s changing voice, this article examines how sonic archives are, for Cher and Chaz as for earlier listeners, contested sites of mourning and becoming. Through a reading of Chaz’s voice on Cher’s answering machine, one that considers the projects of phonography and telephony on which it is based, and which draws as well on the concurrent archival concerns of the television show Transparent (Amazon, 2014–19), the article demonstrates how the epistemic and affective stakes of transgender bodies are mediated through specific sonic technologies that give rise to forms of mournful archives. It seeks to show how the answering machine subtends histories that conflate literal death and gender transition; for Chaz, it also affords more radical possibilities than verbal practice alone. Attending to the answering machine complicates the association between voice and agency on which a slogan like “Silence = Death” relies and yields a rethinking of media history and sound studies as they relate to queer lives.

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Czy dyskurs transseksualistyczny ma jednoznacznie wyzwalający czy ambiwalentny charakter?

interalia: a journal of queer studies ◽

10.51897/interalia/vrdq7528 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Urszula Nowak

Keyword(s):

Medical Treatment ◽

Feminist Theory ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Sexual Difference ◽

Point Of View ◽

Gender Identities ◽

The Status ◽

And Gender ◽

Queer Movement

Transsexuality, which refers to the conflict between gender and physical sex, can pose a challenge to feminist theory(ies) as well as to queer theory(ies) and queer movement. The aim of this essay is therefore to analyze the status of transsexual discourse within feminism, with the focus on Judith Butler's reflection, and within queer theory. The question, raised at first by Henrietta Moore, is if those who operate on their bodies and identities do really overthrow sexual difference and gender or maybe they are simply imprisoned in their murderous arms. It is being underlined that transsexual people can really point at instability and discontinuity of gender identities. However, this is somewhat problematic as, from the pragmatic point of view, it may cause a lot of problems to them, i.e. by limiting their access to proper medical treatment.

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