FEMINIST RHETORICAL RESILIENCE

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 University Press of Colorado
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-878-7

Contents

Introduction Feminist Rhetorical Resilience—Possibilities and Impossibilities Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady…………………………….11 Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity: Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World Eileen E. Schell…………………30Response On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls Arabella Lyon and Banu Özel……………………………………………54Reflection Eileen E. Schell……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..572 The Traveling Fado Kate Vieira…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………59Response Traveling Literacies Janet Carey Eldred…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..82Reflection Kate Vieira………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….893 Virginity and Hymen Reconstructions: Rural, Migrant Women as Agents of Literate Practices in Turkey Iklim Goksel………………………………………………..91Response Problematizing Literacy Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater………………………………………………………………………………………………….110Reflection Iklim Goksel…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1134 Diversity and the Flexible Subject in the Language of Spousal/Partner Hiring Policies Amy Koerber……………………………………………………………..116Response Expanding the Sites of Struggle over the “Flexible Subject” in Academe Shirley K Rose………………………………………………………………….139Reflection Amy Koerber………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1425 A Case Study in Resilience: Fabricating a Feminine Self in a Man-Made Era Frances J. Ranney…………………………………………………………………..144Response Philanthropy as Interpretation, Not Charity: Jane Addams’s Civic Housekeeping as Another Response to the Progressive Era Kate Ronald………………………..174Reflection Frances J. Ranney…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1786 From “Mothers of the Nation” to “Mothers of the Race”: Nineteenth-Century Feminists and Eugenic Rhetoric Wendy Hayden……………………………………………181Response Strategic Collusion in the History of American Women Rhetors Nan Johnson……………………………………………………………………………..205Reflection Wendy Hayden…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2097 No One Wants to Go There: Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing Classroom Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg………………………….211Response On Impossibility: A Response to DiGrazia and Rosenberg Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander…………………………………………………………241Reflection Jennifer DiGrazia and Lauren Rosenberg………………………………………………………………………………………………………….247About the Authors……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….250Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….254

Chapter One

VANDANA SHIVA AND THE RHETORICS OF BIODIVERSITY

Engaging Difference and Transnational Feminist Solidarities in a Globalized World

Eileen E. Schell

In “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Wendy Hesford examines how “scholars in rhetoric and composition studies are meaningfully contributing to conversations about the pressures of globalization and the consequences of the new US nationalism.” Hesford’s examination of the “global turns” in rhetoric and composition—the turn to “global studies and transnational cultural studies”—is an important one as she surveys a wide swath of recent scholarship in the field: “nearly forty books nominated for the 2005 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and a number of other sources.” As Hesford argues, we need to pay “particular attention to the methodological challenges we face as we turn toward the global.” She urges scholars to consider how we engage in “an imagined global geography in rhetoric and composition studies,” and how we “imperil or safeguard disciplinary identities and methods that take for granted the nation-state and citizen-subject as units of analysis and ignore the global forces that shape individual lives and literate practices” (788). Hesford’s thoughtful assessment of the “global turn” in rhetoric and composition studies brings with it important insights to feminist rhetorical studies as well. How are feminist rhetorics being practiced to reflect a geopolitical feminist orientation? How can we factor transnational feminist rhetorics and rhetoricians into our discussions of difference in a US context? How can we affirm and engage in difference in a transnational rhetorical context?

Living in a globalized context means we interact and transact across the borders of the nation-state. We engage in what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan call “transnational cultural flows” of bodies, goods, labor, knowledge, and capital (17). Therefore, our definitions and enactments of rhetorics and feminisms must begin to account for transnational contexts, the ways in which “any local formation is shaped in part by the presence of global forces within it” (Friedman 26). In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Mohanty comments on “the kinds of feminist methodology and analytic strategy” that are needed to create a “transnational anticapitalist feminist critique.” Mohanty speaks of the position and perspective that a transnational feminist analytic provides. First, it foregrounds “historical materialism and centralizes racialized gender.” Secondly, it “begins from and is anchored in the place [and the rhetorical situation] of the most marginalized communities of women—poor women of all colors in affluent and neocolonial nations; women of the Third world /South or the Two-Thirds World.” A transnational feminist rhetorical analytic involves a process of “reading up” rather than down the ladder of privilege, thus making “the politics of knowledge and the power investments that go along with it visible so that [feminists] can then engage in work to transform the use and abuse of power” (231). Finally, those practicing a transnational feminist analytic engage in cross-border organizing work, building linkages and “feminist solidarities across the divisions of place, identity, class, work, and belief” (250). Thus, transnational feminisms involve significant attention to rhetorical advocacy work.

Building linkages and solidarities, however, requires an understanding of transnational cultural flows, the ways in which bodies, labor, and capital move (or not) across borders and the ways in which gender is part of that equation (Grewal and Kaplan 17). Grewal and Kaplan warn, however, that if Western feminists wish to understand transnational linkages and build solidarity, they must “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations.” Without a strong understanding of those material conditions, feminists will not know how “to construct an effective opposition to current economic and cultural hegemonies that are taking new global forms. Without an analysis of transnational scattered hegemonies that reveal themselves in gender relations, feminist movements will remain isolated and prone to reproducing the universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures” (17). Grewal and Kaplan’s eloquent call to consider the politics of transnational cultural flows pushes those of us who do feminist rhetorical analysis to consider our understandings of the “transnational scattered hegemonies” at work across the globe, but also in feminist rhetorical studies, which has taken as its focus American and European rhetorical contexts, largely excluding the voices and perspectives of people who live outside those borders. To illustrate the Euro-American geopolitics of feminist rhetorics, we can consult Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede’s important 2006 chronology of feminist rhetorical historiography compiled since Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s 1989 two-volume history Man Cannot Speak for Her. Ede and Lunsford’s impressive forty-four-title list spans 1990 to 2005, and it includes significant refigurations of feminist and women’s rhetorics. Yet the list also shows that, with few exceptions, feminist studies of women’s rhetorics focus on North American and European rhetorical figures, groups, movements, and educational institutions. Studies of women’s rhetorics in antiquity are mostly focused on the Greco-Roman world, although Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley’s edited collection Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks introduce other geographic and cultural spaces for historical study. Thus, our maps for feminist and women’s rhetorical histories have been drawn and even redrawn from the vantage point of the West.

While Euro-American texts and contexts still dominate feminist rhetorical studies, there is, nevertheless, a subtle, yet palpable geopolitical shift underway as scholars have begun to consider rhetorical theories and practices across transnational contexts. The scholarship on transnational feminisms and rhetorics is slowly becoming a significant area of inquiry (see Dingo; Friedman; Hesford; Hesford and Kulbaga; Lyon; Queen; and Schell), and the Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conferences have been a proving ground for transnational feminist work. In addition, a May 2008 College English special issue that I coedited with Wendy Hesford explores the potential connections between transnational feminisms and rhetorics. This work reminds us that our efforts to remap feminist rhetorical histories (see Glenn) need to account for global maps that show transnational linkages across borders.

In this essay, I offer a transnational remapping of contemporary feminist rhetorics through an analysis of the rhetorical advocacy work of Indian feminist, environmental activist, and transnational public intellectual Vandana Shiva, whom Chandra Mohanty refers to as “one of the most visible leaders of the antiglobalization movement” (232). I analyze how Shiva makes use of symbolic action—words, signs, images—and direct action to persuade citizens across the globe to pay attention to the issue of biodiversity. In particular, I examine her strategic deployment of symbolic resources—the use of synecdoche, rhetorical identification (Burke 20), and visual rhetorics that draw on colonial and postcolonial historical legacies—as a way to connect transnational cultural and economic flows of indigenous cultural resources (seeds) with the practice of biopiracy, which she links to the social and economic oppression of women. In Kenneth Burke’s words, Shiva engages multiple publics in a process of rhetorical identification (20–22) with the struggles of Two-Thirds World peoples, reminding us all that the issue of biodiversity is one we cannot afford to ignore no matter who we are or where we are.

Through rhetorical identification, Shiva has brought environmental activists and farmers from the One-Third World together with those of the Two-Thirds World to protest unjust global agricultural policies, biopiracy, and damaging environmental conditions. As Ineke Lock has argued, Vandana Shiva has “stood beside people in their struggles against destructive forestry practices, large-scale dams and multinational dominated agribusiness.” As a rhetorical figure and organizer, Shiva displays the qualities of rhetorical resilience and agency described by the coeditors in the introduction to this volume. Shiva, as the coeditors note, “recogniz[es] and seiz[es] opportunities [for social change] even in the most oppressive situations” (8). Yet, at the same time, she is not a rhetorician who acts alone; Shiva works in solidarity with other individuals, groups, and movements, marshaling rhetoric toward collective action and change.

In her rhetorical practice, Shiva enacts the principles of transnational feminisms in concert with what Ellen Gorsevki calls the “peaceful persuasion” of Gandhian rhetoric. Yet Shiva’s engagement with Gandhian rhetoric and practice is heavily seasoned with the confrontational rhetoric of the antiglobalization and radical environmental movements. Moreover, Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy is symptomatic of the turn from the nationalist public sphere to the transnational public sphere. Part of the shift in contemporary feminist rhetorics to considering transnationalism is a result of the transnational rhetorical paths and webs of public discourse in a globalized world. Nancy Fraser, in her lecture “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere,” analyzes the widespread use of the term transnational public sphere as a way to account for “the existence of discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states.” While Fraser is cautious about the blanket appropriation of the term transnational public sphere, she finds it useful as it helps us map the “contours” of the transnational and account for the “flow of images and signs” or rhetorics across the borders of the nation-state. Rhetorical study of transnational feminist public intellectuals like Vandana Shiva is one way in which feminist rhetorical scholars might contribute to the examination of transnational rhetorics.

WHO IS VANDANA SHIVA?

Many Western feminists and environmental activists are familiar with Vandana Shiva’s public intellectual work—her many influential books, lecture tours, and interventions on the world stage—but many in the US academy may not be familiar with her rhetorical advocacy work in India on behalf of indigenous farmers via her feminist research institute Navdanya. Therefore, a short biographical introduction seems required.

Vandana Shiva began her education in biodiversity on her mother’s farm in India. Her highly educated mother chose to be a farmer “because she believed that the highest state of human evolution is to be a peasant” (Shiva qtd. in Scopacasa). As the daughter of a farmer, Shiva became fascinated at an early age with “figur[ing] out how nature works” (Scopacasa). She took inspiration from Einstein and trained to be a nuclear physicist until she realized the ethical and environmental baggage of pursuing work in that arena. Turning away from a nuclear branch of physics, Shiva became a theoretical physicist working on quantum theory. While finishing her doctorate in physics in Canada, she contemplated a career as a university professor. Rather than pursuing an academic position, Shiva decided instead to investigate a contradiction she saw between her university science education and the status of most of the citizens of India. Although India has the “third biggest scientific community in the world,” it is still “among the poorest of countries” (Kemker). As Shiva points out, “Science and technology are supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap? Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” (qtd. in Kemker). These questions motivated her to pursue research on the scientific “progress” gap in India, a decision that has made her unpopular and an object of suspicion among her scientific peers, who frequently accuse her of being antiscience and/or a proponent of “junkscience” (see Prakash). Shiva, though, is neither. Rather, she engaged in what the coeditors in this volume refer to as mêtistic thinking or “contextualized intelligence” (9). Her commitment to science is complemented by her embrace of indigenous knowledges and environmental activism whereby the stakes of scientific progress are measured against their real impact on real people and the environment. In fact, Shiva actively measures the impact of science on people and the environment instead of simply pursuing science in the name of progress, profit, and new technologies, and her stance has drawn criticism from some of her fellow scientists, which I address at a later point in this chapter.

Shiva’s decision to pursue activism and research instead of an academic career is also deeply rooted in her ongoing experiences as an environmental activist. Before going to graduate school, she was an activist in Chipko, the women-led environmental movement in India engaged in protecting the Himalayan forest from commercial logging and development (“Chipko”). The Chipko activists prevented loggers from cutting down old-growth forests by physically embracing tree trunks. Indeed, the Chipko movement motivated the nickname “tree-hugger,” which is now used, often derisively, to describe environmentalists in the West.

With farming and environmental activism deep in her life roots, Shiva moved from obtaining a doctoral degree in physics to investigating the interconnection between issues of technology, ecology, social inequality, and gender. The Indian Ministry of the Environment commissioned her to examine mining in her native valley; she did the study, stopped the mine, and continued to work on ecology. Beyond that initial work, two events galvanized her to remain actively engaged in rhetorical advocacy on environmental issues. The first was the 1984 genocide in Punjab, India, over changes in agricultural policies, which she documents in her book The Violence of the Green Revolution. The second was Bhophal, where a gas leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhophal, India, killed 3,000 people and injured thousands of others, many of whom are still suffering devastating health problems. The Punjab genocide and the Bhophal incident led her to explore two questions: “Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides—weapons of mass destruction?” (Shiva qtd. in Paget-Clarke). Since posing those initial questions, Shiva has focused her rhetorical advocacy work on three interrelated areas: biotechnology, the intellectual patenting of biological life forms, and biodiversity, or the conscious maintenance of a diversity of life forms.

NAVDANYA AND DIVERSE WOMEN FOR DIVERSITY: A FEMINIST RESEARCH INSTITUTE

As an activist, Shiva has deployed the rhetorical and material strategies of coalition building, solidarity politics, and savvy alternative institution building. Yet she is not a solitary activist, or what the coeditors of this collection refer to as a “heroic individual” (7) Her rhetorical resilience and agency are located in collective organizing and in a “web of relationships” with other activists and networks. Her stance toward knowledge making is focused on the collective good of indigenous peoples in the Two-Thirds World and on building solidarity across nations.

The primary organizing vehicle for Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy work is Navdanya, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and feminist research institute that is a program of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, RFSTE. Navdanya refers to the “nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security.” It is also an actual place, a “seed bank and organic farm spread over an area of 20 acres in Uttranchal, north India.” Navdanya as an organization works on biodiversity and conservation—helping “support local farmers, rescue and conserve crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction and make them available through direct marketing.” The members of Navdanya “rejuvenate indigenous knowledge,” create “awareness of the hazards of genetic engineering,” and “defend people’s knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalization” (“Introduction”). The scope of Navdanya’s rhetorical advocacy is both local and global; activists for Navdanya work across national borders through symbolic and direct action to gain attention to biodiversity. However, Navdanya also has an explicitly feminist agenda carried through a number of its projects and its branch organization, Diverse Women for Diversity.

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