Rhetorical Listening: Gender, Whiteness, Identification

Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness
by Krista Ratcliffe was published in 2005

Krista Ratcliffe's Biography

Department Chair
Rhetoric and composition is her primary field of study. Ratcliffe's teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical theory, composition, and women's literature. Her administrative duties currently include serving as Chair of the English Department.

Krista Ratcliffe’s third book, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, was one of two winners of the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award. The CCCC Outstanding Book Award is presented annually to the author or editor of a book that makes an "outstanding contribution to composition and communication studies."

In Rhetorical Listening, Ratcliffe "examines how whiteness functions as an 'invisible' racial category and provides disciplinary and cultural reasons for the displacement of listening and for the use of rhetorical listening as a code of cross-cultural conduct." She studies eavesdropping and listening metonymically and pedagogically as "approaches to rhetorical listening." Her theory is grounded in classical rhetorical theory, Heideggerian theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory.

An alumna of Ohio State’s Rhetoric and Composition Ph.D. program, Ratcliff wrote her dissertation, "Words of One's Own: Toward a Rhetoric of Feminism in Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich," in 1988. She is the author of three books, including: Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich; and, Who's Having This Baby?: Perspectives on Birthing. Ratcliffe teaches Rhetoric and Composition, Feminist Theory, and Women’s Studies at Marquette University, where she directs their first-year English program.


Rhetorical Listening: Gender, Whiteness, Identification

What the text is really about (thesis):

This book argues that listening should be revived within rhetoric and composition studies via a concept of rhetorical listening. This project defines rhetorical listening as a *trope for interpretive invention and as a code of cross-cultural conduct. Defined generally as a trope for interpretive invention, rhetorical listening signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture. Defined more particularly as a code of cross-cultural conduct, rhetorical listening signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural exchanges (1).

*Tropes are figures of speech. They influence signification, or how meanings are made within discourse(s). Most commonly tropes are defined as rhetorical figures, such as metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and aposiopesis…all terms are tropes (111).

This project…explores how rhetorical listening may help listeners negotiate troubled identifications with gender and whiteness in public debates, scholarly research, and classroom pedagogy (xiii)

Narrating Origins

An African-American woman in the audience told me afterwards that she refuses to read Daly because Daly’s critique of women in patriarchy is really just a critique of white women in patriarchy, one that excluded this audience member by erasing differences among women (2)

A young white woman in class said that although she was extremely moved when reading excerpts from Lorde’s cancer journals, she didn’t want to read nay more of Lorde’s writings. When I asked her why, she cited Lorde’s last line: ‘if one Black woman I do not know gains hope and strength from my story, then it has been worth the difficulty of telling’…The student felt that Lorde, by specifying ‘Black woman,’ was excluding her by erasing commonalities among women (2).

Although I certainly respect an individual’s right to refrain from dialogue at a particular moment in his or her life, I do not accept the U.S. culture’s dearth of discursive possibilities either for articulating intersecting identifications of gender and race or for promoting cross-cultural dialogues. Listening, it seems to me, might serve as one such possibility. But listening is hardly a simple solution; indeed, it raises many questions that pertain to all people: Why is it so hard to listen to one another? Why is it so hard to focus simultaneously on commonalities and differences? Why is it so hard to resist guilt/blame logic when listening? And how do power differentials of particular standpoints and cultural logics influence our ability to listen? Any definition of listening must account for these questions-and others (3).


Rhetorical Listening

Defining rhetorical listening as a trope of interpretive invention not only emphasizes the discursive nature of rhetorical listening, but [it] also plays with the etymology of the term trope as “a turning.” For rhetorical listening turns hearing (a reception process) into invention (a production process), thus complicating the reception/production opposition, and inviting rhetorical listening into the time-honored traditional of rhetorical invention. Second, rhetorical listening turns the realm of hearing into a larger space, one encompassing all discursive forms, not just oral ones. Third, rhetorical listening turns intent back on the listener, focusing on listening with intent to hear troubled identifications, instead of listening for intent of an author. Fourth, rhetorical listening turns the meaning of the text into something larger than itself, certainly larger than the intent of the speaker/writer, in that rhetorical listening locates a text as part of larger cultural logics. And fifth, rhetorical listening turns rhetoric’s traditional focus on the desires of both the speaker/writer into a harmonics and/or dissonance of the desires of both the speaker/writer and the listener (46).

The Rhetoric of Listening functions in this way:

Function One: Rhetoric of listening focuses openly on terms in order to engage them
Instead of reading the terms only as negative, listeners might also hear the terms as offering honest and painful claims that deserve further consideration
Function Two: A rhetoric of listening proceeds via a cultural logic that recognizes simultaneous commonalities and differences
Rhetoric of listening interrupts the emphasis of Western logic to perpetrate either-or reasoning, for instance, to recognize commonalities or to recognize differences. Such simultaneous recognitions are important because they afford a place for productively engaging differences, especially those differences that might otherwise be relegated to the status of “excess.”
Function Three: Rhetoric of listening offers listeners three functional rhetorical stances. A rhetoric of listening fosters recognition. Such recognition does not imply a simple reversal of racist and patriarchal binaries. Rather, recognition implies a complex understanding of how gender and race become embedded within our bodies via cultural socialization and identifications and also of how they intersect with other cultural categories, such as nationality and age, at particular historical moments to construct our personal and cultural functions and dysfunctions.
Function Four: A rhetoric of listening proceeds via the interpretive trope of listening metonymically.
Metonym signifies figurative juxtaposition; it assumes that two objects do not share a common substance but are rather merely associated, hence its prominence in postructuralist theory. For example, the metonym occurs when we say, “The chair speaks.” Literally, of course, a chair does not speak; the person who is head of a committee does. In such figuration, the chair and the person do not share a substance but are merely associated with one another. Thus, the trope of listening metonymically assumes that a text or person does share substance with all other members of its/his/her cultural group, but, rather, is associated with them. In other words, this trope invites listeners to assume that one member of a group (say, one woman) does not speak for all other members (say, all women); as such, this trope helps listeners avoid the trap of unfair generalizations and stereotyping (94-98).

Gender

Gender is a trope that signifies socially constructed “common-sense” attitudes and actions associated with women and men. This definition is predicated on the existence of two sexes, men and women (9).

Because the term gender is a trope within language and because language changes over time, the term gender has a history…gender arose in opposition to the category sex. The first principle of many early women studies programs in the 1970s was that sex referred to physical attributes of men and women, and gender referred to cultural attributes…Granted, men and women are born with particular, material bodies; however, they see, organize, analyze, and value their bodies as men and women because they are born into a culture with a symbolic system containing these terms and their associated meanings (10).

What complicates matters is that symbolic systems often house competing cultural logics. A cultural logic is a belief system or way of reasoning that is shared within a culture…In the U.S., competing cultural logics about gender inform the way the term gender signifies. For example, some common cultural logic associated with gender in the U.S. include:
(1) The logic of patriarchy-imagines sex/gender as a biological difference between men and women; it uses this difference to claim physical, intellectual, and public-sphere superiority for men as well as to grant domestic superiority for women (10)
(2) The logic of equal rights, imagines sex/gender as biological and/or cultural differences but human rights as innate God-given commonalities (11)
(3) The logic of comparable worth, imagines gender as cultural differences, and attempts to reassess the cultural value assigned to “women’s work,” the purpose being to comparably value the different work that has been culturally assigned to men and women (11).
(4) The logic of postmodern commonalities and differences imagines gender as a culturally constructed discursive category possessing socializing forces within cultural contexts; this logic posits gender as a factor in-but not the sole determinant of-a person’s identity (11).

Gender is always a question not only of commonality and difference, but of unearned privilege and power-or lack thereof (10)

What makes gender a slippery category, though, is that its associated meanings shift across time and place; for example, assumptions about women’s roles differ when talking about women in India and in France, in 1805 and in 2005. What makes gender even more slippery is that its associated meanings always intersect with meanings ascribed to other cultural categories that classify people such as age, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. For instance, a woman is not simply a woman; she may also be young, poor, white, of French ancestry, Canadian, and Catholic-all of which inform her identity. Thus, while gender marks her identity, her identity cannot be reduced solely to gender. Instead gender functions as a cultural category that is embodied and performed differently by each person, depending upon his/her culture’s socializing messages about gender, upon his/her particular identifications with gender, and upon his/her reactions to these messages and identifications (11).


Identification

Thanks to Sigmund Freud, identification is inescapably associated with the tradition of psychoanalytic theory. Within this tradition, identification emerges as doubled and interrelated sites: (1) the place of ego/id interactions and (2) the place of self/other interactions. The ego/id site of identification directs attention to inner forces that inform subjectivity, specifically the relations between a person’s conscious and unconscious processes…identification signifies ‘change [that] happens whenever the ego, under pressure from an instinctual [id’s] demand for an unattainable object, transforms itself into the object ‘for the sake of the id’ (49)

Though not grounded in psychoanalytic studies, the concept of identification is not limited solely to that tradition. For example, in rhetorical theory, Burke assumes identification to be a place where conscious and unconscious rhetorical exchanges transpire (49).

Whatever their academic discipline, theorists of identification tend to agree with Judith Butler that identification always invokes “an assumption of place” with place signifying both bodily and historical/cultural locations. In sum, theorists agree that because people are always historically and culturally situated, so too, are their embodied identifications-hence the linkage of identification with place (49).

This performance of rhetorical listening fosters a rhetorical stance of humility (not weakness), a stance that recognizes interdependency among subjects (73).

The possibility of consciously navigating (some of) our own identifications and disidentifications also circles back to the question of coexisting commonalities and differences. Because non-identification is a place that assumes the existence of both commonalities and differences, it provides a place for listening rhetorically across both (75).

Whiteness

In its best efforts, whiteness studies questions the dominant culture’s tendency to define race in terms of a black/white binary while only articulating blackness. This field acknowledges that whiteness speaks as does the slash mark. And it argues that because whiteness is impossible to understand apart from its intersections with gender, class, age, and other factors, whiteness functions differently not just for whites and non-whites but for particular people within each category and for multiethnic people straddling these categories (103).

White women may assume (or be perceived as assuming) that to say ‘I’m sorry’ is sufficient; they may assume that one’s own pain is a sufficient lens through which to view each other’s pain; they may assume that commonalities among women should take precedence over differences, and, finally, they may assume that silence (even a dysfunctional silence) is the more polite and perhaps more politically expedient response (87).

While not everyone can be classified as a white person, everyone can perform white practices. Performing whiteness is often a very visible practice for non-white people. “Acting white” on the job or in school may garner promotions of good grades, but it may also garner charges of betraying one’s roots (112).

In the U.S., whiteness has consistently signified privilege-a privilege that fosters stasis by resisting and denying differences. Here are three elements of privilege:

1. The characteristics of the privileged group define the social norm
2. Privileged group members can rely on their privilege and avoid objecting to
oppression
3. Privilege is rarely seen by the holder of he privilege

If white privilege cannot be seen, perhaps in can be heard via rhetorical listening


Color of Fear excerpt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAnbRGJQv-g&feature=related

Other works about the author:

http://enculturation.gmu.edu/5_1/pdf/ratcliffe.pdf