Feminist Engagements with Rhetoric: The Possibilities
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Cheryl Glenn is professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.  She is one of the few rhetoric scholars who can honestly claim that she has changed the face of rhetoric -- by simply including women within rhetorical history.  Her ground-breaking work started with the Braddock award-winning "sex, lies, and manuscript," an article about the ancient rhetorician Aspasia.  She expanded this work in Rhetoric Retold, including many more rhetorically gifted women in ancient Greece, Rome, the Medieval period, and the Renaissance.  Her current book, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, is about how silence works as a form of rhetoric to both empower and disempower others.

In her talk on Thursday, September 27 , Feminist Engagements with Rhetoric: The Possibilities, Cheryl Glenn opened by saying that rhetoric can never be retold enough. We need to keep investigating the unseen and unspoken spaces within rhetoric. In Rhetoric Retold, she engaged in feminist historiography, looking at previously unexamined female rhetorical engagements. Then in Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, she explored the purposeful delivery of silence. Next, she would like to examine how the Marmons became Indian, using the work done with identity studies in other disciplines to inform this rhetorical historiography. However, she says her project of expanding the inclusivity of rhetorical spaces still remains unfinished; this is only a partially realized country. Other minority groups that have historically been as rhetorically unspoken as women need to continue to take up this work as well.

Glenn explained that in her talk she was using gender as an analytical category that signifies inequities. Used in this way, gender signifies who controls discourse. Rhetoric inscribes language and power at a particular point in time by deciding who can speak and what gets said. For this reason, rhetoric has always been a self-interested enterprise of investing white males with the power to speak for and over others, while at the same time denying all others this right.

When Glenn began her work of uncovering female rhetorical spaces, her work was met with excitement but also disbelief. She was amazed at the tangled logic that informed the circulating, unwritten, and unspoken privileges governing who could be considered a rhetorician or even a rhetor. It seemed that the same rules that applied to men could not be applied to women in the same ways. For instance, reviewers of Rhetoric Retold argued that Hortensia could not be considered a rhetor because she had only given one speech her entire life never mind the brilliance or kairotic timeliness of it. In a similar fashion, even though Queen Elizabeth had given many speeches throughout her long and illustrious political career, speeches which shaped Englands future for centuries, she could not be considered a rhetor of worth because she was a queen. To Glenn, these unspoken rules seemed to suggest that rhetoric was made purely through male mastery and dominance. There seemed to be an invisible formula which said that these female rhetors may have achieved X, but they really needed to achieve X + 1. However, the + 1 was an invisible essence that was never clearly defined and always seemed to conveniently change according to the circumstances.

Despite this nebulous + 1 factor, she decided to continue with her project of studying female rhetors and rhetoricians by establishing some groundwork. Female rhetoricians could be studied if speech done in a private space such as the home could be deemed a legitimate rhetorical space. Furthermore, female rhetoric could be studied if X could be stabilized and then applied across the board to all women. In this way, she read primary sources looking for traces of silence. For instance, she read Plato and Plutarch, noticing the places where Aspasia actually gets mentioned as having rhetorical skill, even though she is not only foreign-born outside of Athens but also a woman. Just the mere fact that Aspasia was mentioned as having rhetorical savvy in a society in which women were forbidden to speak in public means that most of her great talent probably lay submerged, unspoken just below the surface of the text.

To look for women in rhetorical history is to notice this silence, this silencing. For example, Anne Askew was rhetorically brilliant precisely because she practiced a rhetoric of silence. While being persecuted for her Protestant faith which gave her the authority to read and interpret Biblical scripture for herself she never gave away her fellow Protestants. Instead, as a Biblical scholar, she simply quoted the scripture in which her Protestant faith was based. In this way, she cleverly spoke only of silence.

Glenn finished her lecture by stating that after doing this work, she would like to see a new kind of rhetoric that is not merely concerned with domination, but that is concerned with making a difference in the world. There needs to be a more inclusive rhetoric which is used strategically to empower. Language and differences in identity need to nourish each other, not be the basis for exclusion from each other. In this way, we need to envision a rhetoric of dialogue and collaboration. Furthermore, in order to do this, rhetoricians need to learn the art of listening so that they can learn to listen with a profound sense of caring. Learning to listen to each other is the way toward a smarter, more ethically centered rhetoric.

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