Acts of Institution: Embodying Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies in Space and Time

Abstract

While feminist scholars consider bodies, dress, and space central to inquiry into gendered rhetorics, we lack methodologies that situate these factors—and the additional factor of time—in an integrated system. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “acts of institution” can help feminist rhetoricians to construct richer accounts of the gendering of the female body. The example of rhetorics surrounding women factory workers in World War II America demonstrates how rhetorical practices produce gender differences through embodied, spatiotemporal rhetorics. In this case wartime adjustments did not bring about long-term changes because they relied on a fundamental antithesis between men and women.

Notes

¹The author thanks Jessica Enoch and Michelle Bailiff and Rhetoric Review reviewers John Lucaites and Barbara Warnick for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.

²While Collins advocates “material rhetoric” as a methodology for feminist historical work, her definition is much narrower than what I am envisioning here. Collins defines her methodology as “the theoretical investigation of discourse by examining how the rhetorical aims and functions of the initial text are changed by processes of material production and distribution” (547). My use of the term material or materialization refers more broadly to the enactment of gendered rhetorics in space and time: the ways in which rhetorics of gender difference, for instance, shaped bodily practices, workplace arrangements, and even the schedules for women workers. In this way I am following work by Bourdieu, but also Chris Shilling (see The Body and Social Theory) and Judith Butler (Bodies That Matter).

³Feminist scholars are not alone in treating the body as an important site of rhetorical inquiry Many scholars have recently advanced definitions of rhetoric that bring bodies into the purview of rhetorical analysis and action. For example, in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, Wayne Booth defines rhetoric as “the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another” (xi). Working from Booth's definition, Debra Hawhee argues that “words, images, spaces and bodies are all part of the rhetorical enterprise—the range of resources—for producing effects” (159) while Jack Selzer argues in the introduction to Rhetorical Bodies that scholars should consider “what it might mean to take very seriously the material conditions that sustain the production, circulation, and consumption of rhetorical power” (9).

⁴Massey writes that “any conception of space has a (logically) necessary corollary in a particular ‘matching’ conceptualization of time” (264). Accordingly, she suggests that cultural geographers should understand time as “the product of interaction” (274).

⁵Image courtesy of the United States. Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division; 1944. LC-USW3-009451-C. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8d44934>. Retrieved November 21, 2008.

⁶Image courtesy of the United States. Office of War Information. LC-USE6- D-005881. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b07357>. Retrieved November 21, 2008.

⁷Image courtesy of the Farm Security Administration––Office of War Information Photograph Collection. LC-USW3- 058607-C. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8d44302>. Retrieved November 21, 2008.