Women in the Gulf War: Toward an intersectional feminist rhetorical cristicism

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that an expanded version of critical legal scholar Kimberle Williams Crenshaw's “intersectionality thesis”; supplies a rewarding model for feminist rhetorical criticism. Her thesis suggests the need to trace the categories of race and gender to their intersections to reveal both categories’ multidimensional character and the complex experience of oppressions stemming from them. An expanded intersectional method prompts critics to move from a conception of difference as that difference between women and men to an understanding of difference that accounts for differences among women. This method, applied to several print media reports about “women in the Gulf War,”; reveals the privileging of heterosexual, white U.S. women as the cultural norm. Through an analysis of extant critical scholarship on the Gulf War and a comparison of different critical approaches based on the two conceptions of difference, I suggest that an expanded version of an intersectional method can and should account for multiple human differences among women. It reveals the interconnectedness of patriarchal, heterosexist, and neo‐colonial ideologies and how they mutually reinforce each other. This approach fulfills a theoretical and ideological commitment to equality among women. It does so by seeing the category “woman”; as a political coalition of diverse women in whose interest it is to resist all forms of subordination rather than using their individual heterosexual or White or colonial status privilege to resist only the form of subordination that directly affects them.

Key words:

• difference
• feminist rhetorical criticism
• gender
• heterosexism
• intersectionality
• neo‐colonialism
• race