Satina Smith Department of Communication University of Utah
Contemporary feminist scholarship visits the image of Dame Rhetorica as a site of female power. A young woman gripping sword and shield calls men to the battle of words, but can she defend herself? Throughout the classical and Christian traditions, although women have been forbidden to speak in public, the art of rhetoric, nevertheless, has been emblematized by the female figure. Feminist critiques of rhetoric have worked in various ways either to recover lost female texts, or to reread historical texts through a feminist lens. These scholars, armed with insight and theory, retreat back through history seeking connections between feminism and rhetoric. Other scholars have argued that rhetoric is, and can only be, a masculine tradition, and that therefore a new way of writing must be forged in order to represent the concerns of women. Hélène Cixous (1977), for example, calls for woman to write their bodies (The Laugh of the Medusa). Such a claim brings about deliberation on the body as text. What is rhetoric but adornment of the text? Cixous' packed image of the smiling Medusa is one of many icons that may represent the complexities that occupy the discursive space between "rhetoric" and "feminism." Scholarship up to this point has moved beyond exposing the rhetorical structure behind a particular feminist agenda to ask how the various traditions of rhetoric might be useful sites to develop feminist arguments. For example, Biesecker (1982) argues that "The Laugh of the Medusa" is a rhetoric because "it posits what can and must be done by women if they are to intervene effectively in the public sphere through written and oral discourse--we can enrich both rhetorical and feminist theory and criticism." She describes the essay as Cixous' "boldest attempt to articulate a philosophically rigorous concept of écriture féminine or "feminine writing." Biesecker reasons that although the article "seems an unlikely beginning point for revising and reconstructing rhetorical theory…[it is] a treatise that seeks and strategically intervene in the public sphere…a call to women to discursively intervene in the public sphere."
