“My voice is bound to the mass of my own life”: Private and public boundaries in feminist rhetoric

Abstract

Recent feminist rhetorical theory (Griffin, 1996) questions the conventional dichotomy of public and private discourse which helps to define the field of rhetoric. A criticism of the independent short film You Take Care Now by Ann Marie Fleming (1989) appropriates a concept from French developmental psychology of the 1950's dubbed “syncretic sociability” in order to demonstrate the difficulty of maintaining any such defining opposition. Syncretic sociability construes consciousness as a relation between body, mind, world, and other which exists as a series of coordinates in a relational field, an irreducible embodiment. The reflexive insertion of the body in the world and the world in the body makes a distinction between public and private realms arbitrary and distorting. A close reading of You Take Care Now, which depicts in the form of personal narrative the rape of a young woman, demonstrates a rhetoric that refuses the violence of separating the private and the public.