Female Embodiment, Contradiction, and Ethos Negotiations in Genevieve Stebbins’s Late Nineteenth-Century Statue-Posing Arguments

Abstract

This essay examines the work of Genevieve Stebbins (1857-1934), an author, teacher, and proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. Specifically, I examine Stebbins’s concept of “artistic” statue posing, a practice fraught with contradictory arguments and tensions among late nineteenth-century commentators and other elocutionists who discussed appropriate forms of female embodied display. This study asserts that Stebbins drew on the rhetorical strategy of contradiction to perform an ethos of complexity and boundary innovation in advocating for female embodied rhetorical performance. Her work reveals the conflicts women have attempted to negotiate in considering rhetoric as embodied practice.

Notes

¹ I would like to thank RR reviewers, Nan Johnson and Lyneé Lewis Gaillet, for their perceptive and helpful feedback. I also would like to thank Glen McClish, Elizabethada Wright, and Martha Cheng for their generous responses to earlier versions of this article.

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Notes on contributors

Suzanne Bordelon

Suzanne Bordelon is professor and chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University. Her teaching and research interests include feminist rhetorics and pedagogies, rhetorical education, literacy studies, archival research, and composition pedagogy and theory. She is the author of A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck. In addition, her writing has appeared in Advances in the History of Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and other journals.