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  • Introduction
  • Liedeke Plate (bio) and Pierre Zoberman (bio)

The on-going process of gender-denaturalization offers a new context in which to examine the way gender-parameters shape human discourse. Such an exploration can, and even should, be viewed as a rhetorical study. Rhetoric defines what is proper to all conditions and walks of life, and this includes what befits a woman and a man as well as how to address audiences of both genders. Therefore, in this special issue of Intertexts, we explore the dynamic relations between gender and rhetoric in a comparative perspective. With Comparatively Speaking: Gender and Rhetoric, we place ourselves in the by now well-established tradition of feminist rhetorical studies, contributing to it by addressing gender and rhetoric comparatively, across different time periods, media, and cultures. Rhetoric, indeed, feminist scholars have argued for some time now, always inscribes relationships of language and power, and such relationships are neither fixed nor stable and unchangeable. This also means that this volume was conceived in the context of the development of gender studies and queer theory. As developed in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of gender denaturalized sexual difference, showing men and women, masculinity and femininity to be socially and culturally constructed. We “do” gender, at the level of the individual, the collective, and the institution; and in this “doing,” gender—its performance—appears (West and Zimmerman; Butler). In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler exposed the political significance of this performance of gender, and one should not underestimate, similarly, the political dimension of the acknowledgement and examination of gender in/and rhetoric.1 Today, however, neuroscience is re-naturalizing sexual difference, claiming sex differences in brain morphology and functionality are organized by sex-differentiating prenatal hormone exposures and thus innate. Maintaining that social inequality is therefore a “natural” given, such research ignores evidence of the plasticity of the brain, including experiments that have shown “how invoking either positive or negative stereotypes can stimulate sex/gender differences as large as those that are usually taken to be innate” (Jordan- Young and Rumiati 312). This, then, lends a new urgency to feminist rhetorical studies, to the detailed analysis of persuasive and informative writings, and to close examination of their methods of argument, invention, arrangement, style, and ends. On the one hand, given the social definition and inscription of gender and the role of [End Page 1] language in establishing heteronormative (hence fixed) gender-specific identities and behaviors, we believe it is important to continue examining the ways in which rhetorical practices are described and prescribed according to the gender of the speaking subject, as well as the ways in which those may change or differ over time or across geographical space. Such an examination raises important questions: To what extent is the rhetoric of gender culturally specific? What is acceptable as masculine or feminine and under what circumstances? What styles, figures, forms of delivery are gender-identified? How does gender shape intelligibility? What is expected of or ascribed to men and women? How are these expectations and gender inscriptions contested? And how have dissident voices managed to be heard despite the enforcement of gendered norms or, on the contrary, how have they been silenced by it? On the other hand, because of the linguistic genealogy of such notions as performativity in modern conceptions of, and resistance to, gender, the close examination of rhetorical practices and theoretical choices in the production and representation of gender is vital.

Comparatively Speaking: Gender and Rhetoric addresses both the theory and history of rhetoric. The development and establishment of gender studies has called into question the possibility of talking about language in universal terms and this questioning extends to the social usages of language with which rhetoric has traditionally been associated. As has become clear, from Andrea Lunsford’s edited collection Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995) and Cheryl Glenn’s monograph Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (1997) to Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s anthology Available Means (2001) and Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen Ryan’s Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics (2010), as a techne, rhetoric itself may well be predicated upon the social division of gender...

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