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Abstract
This essay offers a theory of collective rhetoric derived from a case study of a central rhetorical event of the second wave of feminism, the Redstockings’ 1969 abortion speak-out. A central rhetorical function of consciousness-raising was the collective development of experiential knowledge, and I propose that collective rhetorics are characterized by the collaborative articulation of individual experiences through such rhetorical processes as narrative, irony and humor, and symbolic reversal. I conclude by discussing the importance of collective rhetorical processes in feminist contexts and the potential utility of a theory of collective rhetoric in understanding a range of contemporary discursive forms.
Notes
1. Celeste M. Condit, “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity: Gender and Rhetoric as Public Persuasion,” Women's Studies in Communication 20 (Fall 1997): 105.
2. Diane Helene Miller, “From One Voice a Chorus: Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1860 Address to the New York State Legislature,” Women's Studies in Communication 22 (Fall 1999): 153.
3. Miller, 153.
4. Mari Boor Tonn and Mark S. Kuhn, “Co-constructed Oratory: Speaker–Audience Interaction in the Labor Union Rhetoric of Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones,” Text and Performance Quarterly 13 (October 1993), 313–330.
5. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (March 1995), 19–46; Fernando P. Delgado, “When the Silenced Speak: The Textualization and Complications of Latina/o Identity,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (Fall 1998), 420–438.
6. Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (May 2003), 109–131.
7. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (February 1973), 74–86; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Consciousness-Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (Winter 2002), 45–64; Sara Hayden, “Re-claiming Bodies of Knowledge: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Feminist Theorizing and Feminine Style in the Rhetoric of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (Spring 1997), 127–163; Diane Kravetz, “Consciousness-Raising Groups in the 1970s,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 3 (Winter 1978), 168–186; Nancy A. Naples, “Deconstructing and Locating Survivor Discourse: Dynamics of Narrative, Empowerment, and Resistance for Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse,” Signs 28 (Summer 2003), 1151–1185.
8. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, personal communication.
9. My use of articulation points to the ways in which the collaborative telling of experiences allows for connections, or linkages, to be drawn among those experiences. Articulation in this sense is not merely the voicing of a narrative, but rather the expression of relationships among various individuals’ narratives.
10. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1954), 90.
11. Herbert W. Simons, “Genres, Rules, and Collective Rhetorics: Applying the Requirements-Problems-Strategies Approach,” Communication Quarterly 30 (Summer 1982): 182.
12. Simons, 182.
13. Miller, 185.
14. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric Vol. 1 (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1989).
15. Miller, 184.
16. Michael Calvin McGee, “The Origins of ‘Liberty’: A Feminization of Power,” Communication Monographs 47 (March 1980), 23–45.
17. Michael Calvin McGee, “Texts, Contexts, and the Fragmentation of American Culture,” Western Speech Communication Journal 54 (Summer 1990), 274–289.
18. Simons, 186.
19. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Inventing Women: From Amaterasu to Virgina Woolf,” Women's Studies in Communication 21 (Fall 1998): 111.
20. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation,” 80, 81.
21. Campbell, “Inventing Women,” 112.
22. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation”; Campbell, “Inventing Women”; Sonja Foss, “Feminist Confront Catholicism: A Study of the Use of Perspective by Incongruity,” Women's Studies in Communication 3 (Summer 1979), 7–15; Anne Demo, “The Guerrilla Girls’ Comic Politics of Subversion,” Women's Studies in Communication 23 (Spring 2000), 133–156.
23. Demo, 138.
24. Burke, Permanence and Change, 90.
25. Martha Solomon, “Ideology as Rhetorical Constraint: The Anarchist Agitation of ‘Red Emma’ Goldman,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (May 1988): 187.
26. Tonn and Kuhn, 314.
27. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp and Lori A. Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (May 1998): 152.
28. Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti, 151.
29. Michelle A. McKinley and Lene O. Jensen, “In Our Own Voices: Reproductive Health Radio Programming in the Peruvian Amazon,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (June 2003): 190.
30. Hayden, 148.
31. Adisa A. Alkebulan, “The Spiritual Essence of African American Rhetoric,” in Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations, ed. Ronald L. Jackson, II and Elaine B. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37.
32. Isidore Okpewho, The Heritage of African Poetry (London: Longman Group, Ltd., 1985) as cited in Alkebulan, 37.
33. Alkebulan, 38.
34. Tonn and Kuhn, 326.
35. Tonn and Kuhn, 325.
36. Tonn and Kuhn, 315.
37. Marilyn Frye, “The Possibility of Feminist Theory,” in Feminist Frameworks, 3rd ed., ed. Alison Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 104.
38. Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn, “‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (August 1993): 291.
39. Olga Idriss Davis, “In the Kitchen: Transforming the Academy Through Safe Spaces of Resistance,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (Summer 1999): 366.
40. Olga Davis, 366.
41. Tonn and Kuhn, 315.
42. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation,” 78.
43. Hayden, 141.
44. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984), 180.
45. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation”; Bonnie J. Dow, “Politicizing Voice,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (Spring 1997), 243–251.
46. Kristin M. Langellier, “Personal Narratives: Perspectives on Theory and Research,” Text and Performance Quarterly 9 (October 1989): 269, emphasis mine.
47. Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 124.
48. Ellen Willis, “Talk of the Town: Hearing,” The New Yorker, February 22, 1969, 28.
49. Celeste Condit Railsback, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy: Stages in the Argument,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (November 1984): 412.
50. Celeste Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 28.
51. Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
52. Condit, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy,” 415.
53. Condit, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy,” 414.
54. Condit, “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity,” 107.
55. Condit, “In Praise of Eloquent Diversity,” 107.
56. Redstockings Abortion Speak-Out (1969). Audiotapes available from the Archives Distribution Project, P.O. Box 2625, Gainesville, FL 32602, USA.
57. See Miller.
58. Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” in Feminist Revolution, ed. Kathie Sarachild (New York: Random House, 1975), 147.
59. Condit, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy,” 411; Mari Boor Tonn, “Donning Sackcloth and Ashes: Webster v. Reproductive Health Services and Moral Agony in Abortion Rights Rhetoric,” Communication Quarterly 44 (Summer 1996): 269.
60. Langellier explains, “Personal narrative as political praxis begins with the notion that narrative makes meaning. The act of telling a story is the act of organizing experience” (267).
61. Susan Kalčik, “… Like Ann's Gynecologist or the Time I was Almost Raped: Personal Narratives in Women's Rap Groups,” in Women and Folklore: Images and Genres, reissue, ed. Claire R. Farrer (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1986), 8.
62. Langellier, 253.
63. Redstockings, 9, 1.1. Each citation of the audiotapes is organized in the following manner: talk turn number, tape number, side number. This quotation is from talk turn 9, tape 1, side 1.
64. Redstockings, 10, 1.1.
65. Redstockings, 10, 1.1.
66. Redstockings, 11, 1.1.
67. Redstockings, 38, 1.2.
68. Redstockings, 40, 1.2.
69. Redstockings, 41, 1.2.
70. Although I have distinguished between panelists and audience members in this section of the essay because I wished to demonstrate the involvement of all people at the speak-out in the co-construction of narratives, I do not want to reify the orator/audience divide that a theory of collective rhetoric necessarily disrupts. Thus, throughout the remainder of the essay I will refer to both audience members and panelists as “participants.”
71. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 512; Mark P. Moore, “Making Sense of Salmon: Synecdoche and Irony in a Natural Resource Crisis,” Western Journal of Communication 67 (Winter 2003): 84.
72. Linda Hutcheons, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (August 2003), 216–234.
73. Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 173.
74. Kalčik, 5.
75. Kalčik, 5.
76. Redstockings, 34, 1.2.
77. Redstockings, 35, 1.2.
78. Redstockings, 36, 1.2.
79. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 514.
80. Redstockings, 36, 1.2.
81. Redstockings, 37, 1.2.
82. Redstockings, 12, 1.1.
83. Redstockings, 14, 1.1.
84. Redstockings, 14, 1.1.
85. Redstockings, 7, 1.1.
86. Redstockings, 7, 1.1.
87. Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain.
88. Redstockings, 1, 1.1.
89. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1959), 173.
90. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 171.
91. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation,” 82.
92. Campbell, “Inventing Women,” 113–4.
93. Tonn, 267.
94. Condit, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy,” 412.
95. Redstockings, 6, 1.1.
96. Redstockings, 6, 1.1.
97. Redstockings, 11, 1.1.
98. Redstockings, 6, 1.1.
99. Redstockings, 2, 1.1.
100. Tonn, 267.
101. Redstockings, 6, 1.1.
102. Redstockings, 6, 1.1.
103. Redstockings, 17, 1.2.
104. Redstockings, 17, 1.2.
105. Redstockings, 2, 1.1.
106. Redstockings, 2, 1.1.
107. Redstockings, 1, 1.1.
108. Redstockings, 4, 1.1.
109. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1978).
110. Redstockings, 7, 1.1.
111. Redstockings, 5, 1.1.
112. Redstockings, 4, 1.1.
113. Condit, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy.”
114. Redstockings, 31, 1.2.
115. Redstockings, 6, 1.1.
116. This point was problematized by an awkward moment in the speak-out when a well-known abortionist attempted to provide an “expert” perspective, but was immediately challenged by a participant who argued, “I would like to point out that I hope that a day will come very very soon when we won't need male crusaders for essentially a woman's issue.” Redstockings, 42, 2.1.
117. Redstockings, 24, 1.2.
118. Redstockings, 41, 2.1.
119. Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1995), 21.
120. Susan Brownmiller, “Everywoman's Abortions: The Oppressor is Man,” The Village Voice, March 27, 1969. Reprinted in Redstockings Women's Liberation Archives for Action Packet, Archives Distribution Project, P. O. Box 2625, Gainesville, FL 32602, 9.
121. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 242.
122. Baumgardner and Richards, 242.
123. Baumgardner and Richards, 243.
124. Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation”; and Demo, “The Guerrilla Girls’ Comic Politics of Subversion.”
125. Promise Keepers, retrieved from http://www.promisekeepers.org on August 26, 2005.