I’m trying very hard to be a good student this summer! I’ve started out by finishing up some reading that I really wanted to get done during the semester. I’m including here some of my favorite concepts and quotations (some with context) from these texts, which will hopefully create interest for others and job my own memory in the future. (Citations precede quotations/contextualizations/concepts.)
Bizzell, Patricia, Ed. Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. Print.
- Lester Faigley’s critique of fast rhetorics because they risk creating “a culture where things are quickly used and discarded, a culture where the abuse of the environment and gaping inequalities are ignored” (9).
- Harriet Jacobs’s “decision to be a fugitive (absent-present) mother” (Carlacio 319)
- El Mundo Zurdo, quoted from Anzaldua
- Christa Jean Downer recognizes her own privilege as “a light-skinned woman” (335). She says: “women-of-color feminists realize that labels and categories are important life strategies; they create visibility and break silences. However, women-of-color feminists understand also, that the act of joining in uncomoplicated solidarity around an identity category reifies oppressive relationships and, therefore, limits the efficacy of social movements that seek to change relationships of domination” (336).
- Downer calls for women to base alliances on interconnections
- Jung theorizes the potential flattening effects of over-identification, giving an example wherein her students, by over-identifying with bell hooks as victims of racism, were “able to avoid the hard work of contrasting the historical, material, and institutional contexts of their experiences with those of African Americans” (349). The students were able to gloss over the differences between individualized and institutionalized racism. Jung suggests that disidentification, listening for difference, is a potential solution to such defensive mechanisms.
Olson, Gary, Ed. Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Print.
- Lynn Worsham suggests pursuing a deeper understanding of the relationship between intellectual work and ideology. “What I am suggesting, then, is that the primary work of ideology is more fundamental than the imposition of a dominant framework of meanings. Its primary work is to organize an emotional world, to inculcate patterns of feeling that support the legitimacy of dominant interests, patterns that are deemed especially appropriate to reigning gender, race, and class relations” (106).
- Crowley says: “In a posthumanist dispensation, to say that bodies are not containers of something-else-that-is-more-important (that is, to reject the modernist body) is not enough” (177). Drawing on Halberstam and Livingston, Crowley suggests that the body is a technology that “both writes and is written upon; it is the scene as well as the aegis of representation” (178).
- After proving the point with a quotation from Susan Bordo, Crowley suggests that because women’s worth has always already been connected to their bodies and how they use them, “women are particularly well placed to develop analyses and critiques of the body and of the regimes that govern bodily practices” (179).
- Crowley: “we do not celebrate the multiplicity of sexes ‘given’ use by ‘nature’; rather, we presume that people whose bodies do not clearly comply with our bipolar definition of ‘true sexuality’ are inadequately or inappropriately sexed” (183).
- Crowley: “What I learn from body studies is that no body is disinterested. And that’s why this work is central to rhetorical studies, which has always taken the study of partisanship as its province” (186).
Erin Clark Frost 