postfeminism

Music: Julee Cruise: Floating Into the Night (1989)

First, my sincere thanks to all of you who emailed with condolences (and also to those of you who thought them too). Although my grandfather and I were not very close these last many years, it is upsetting to loose him, and hard to see (or rather hear) my parents grieve, and a real bummer to talk to my step-grandmother about it, as she's very upset. It's particularly difficult for me because "Papa" was cremated and there is no service planned; I should be there, but here I sit.

I think it was de Man who said somewhere that literature and writing about literature were ways to stave off the certainty of death and any full reckoning with lack. As hackneyed as this sounds, one could say such is the purpose of scholarship in general, or at least scholarship in the theoretical humanities (that is, we stave off certainty). While working in Baton Rouge folks used to ask how I managed to be so productive those three years, and my answer usually was "sexual sublimation." I mean, I couldn't get a date to save my life (or start any new ones, either). In retrospect that answer is not quite right, especially when I think about the death-culture of Louisiana. Heck: Lacan says that all drives are death drives, right? So we write (about) death.

On that cheerful note, I've been staving off certainty by writing about post-feminism or postfeminism today (I prefer the unhyphenated version). Or more specifically, I've been revising my "Size Matters" essay for publication, focusing particularly on my discussion of an essay by Blair, Brown, and Baxter titled "Disciplining the Feminine." In this controversial 1994 essay the authors argue that there is a tacit masculinist norm in Communication Studies that spanks different ways of writing and researching, especially if those ways are coded feminine. I'm trying to argue for a reading of that essay as a critique of tone.

Here's my problem: recently this essay won a prestigious award, but I want to claim that it is still widely critiqued. The critiques of this piece are always anecdotal: in the hallway, at the bar, maybe in a classroom sometimes, but never in print. So I have to figure out a way to use this anonymous anecdotal "evidence" in the service of my argument, that the award is actually somewhat of a postfeminist move. I'm pasting in a DRAFT of the revision below. I'm wondering, however---if anyone's still reading---I'm wondering if anyone has heard similar dismissals of this essay? I would be embarrassed to mention some of the folks that have dissed Blair, Brown, and Baxter (so I will NOT disclose the names), and I've always been baffled because I think the essay is pretty darn powerful.

Anyhoot, here's a chunk:

ON SEEKING SUBSTITUES, OR, THE ARRIVAL OF THE ALWAYS ARRIVING

What a hunk of love . . . . Gigantic, Gigantic, Gigantic/A big big love!
--The Pixies, "Gigantic"

If we understand the traditional apocalyptic as a characteristically phallogocentric enterprise, the analogies of the pervert and the apocalyptic prophet interpenetrate: it feels good to discriminate in the tone of impending catastrophe, even when told to stop. Consequently, I have suggested that we can come to grips with the debate over Big Rhetoric as sounding an apocalyptic tone that is symptomatic of perversion. Such a conclusion suggests that those who continue to address the identity of rhetoric's field or undisciplined discipline might attend more studiously to the role of affect and emotions via the symptomology of tone. It also suggests that those who continue to prophesy the castration of rhetoric's prowess are themselves committing a kind of masculinist violence by excluding those who reject the monotony of death knells. How do we, as Cher once quipped in the film Moonstruck, "snap out of it!?!" Or, insofar as the apocalyptic as such is fundamentally exclusionary, can we? Perhaps a renewed attention and rereading of the "feminist" and deconstructive arguments in respect to tone intones and answer?

Redisciplining the Feminine

In the key of postfeminism, some might argue that the phallogocentric character of traditional apocalyptic suggests the primary exclusion effected by rhetoric's version was the work of feminism, and that we seem to have overcome its exclusions thanks to important, critical work by feminist critics. Such optimism is reflected in the recent attention received by Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter for their controversial 1994 essay, "Disciplining the Feminine," which received the National Communication Association's 2006 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award for having "stood the test of time" and for becoming a "stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena" ("Call for Awards"). Although the essay does not address the Big Rhetoric debate, it registers the anxieties of our (seemingly) ever-expanding field and, to my knowledge, is the first essay to examine seriously the scholarly tone of discipline-related conflict. Moreover, "Disciplining the Feminine" directly engages the classically phallogocentric social-contracting of scholars in the private, hush-hush off-screen of (going-)blind review. I suggest that one can better understand the dominant, apocalyptic tone of the Big Rhetoric debate by revisiting and reframing this important, award-winning essay.

In "Disciplining the Feminine," Blair, Brown, and Baxter argue that a "masculinist disciplinary ideology" governs the norms of scholarship in rhetorical (and Communication) studies, especially the "demand for a refined, ahistorical, smoothly finished univocality" (383). They critique of a 1992 report on the "Active Prolific Female Scholars in Communication" and the remarks of blind reviewers regarding their criticism of the report (Hickson, Stacks, and Amsbary 350-356). Blair, Brown, and Baxter castigate the report for, first, advancing a postfeminist rationale that works to obscure masculinist ideology (e.g., that because there are "prolific females" working in Communication Studies, we no longer need to scrutinize male privilege), and second, for advancing a "male paradigm" that excludes thought and work that is not impersonal and abstract, that does not heed strict boundaries between disciplinary territories, that does not promote the centrality of individual autonomy, and that does not reify dominant social hierarchies. This paradigm is signaled by its chief figure, the phallus:

Equally offensive is [the authors'] description of their report as an attempt to establish a "yardstick for active, female researchers in communication." Hickson et al.'s report-as-yardstick hearkens to the vulgar (and frequently brutal) political arrangements characterizing dominant/non-dominant group relations in times we have come to believe were "less enlightened." The yardstick (along with its metonymic associates, such as "the ruler" and "the rod") often functioned as the instrument used to "articulate" and reinforce the punitive politics of domination and oppression. . . . the yardstick (or its equivalent) is used by one individual to discipline another. In so doing, discipline and those traditionally charged with its preservation, are maintained. (393)

The authors criticize the responses to their critique by showing how cruelly the rod was used to dismiss their arguments as embarrassing, un-scholarly, and unprofessional. "There are too many feline, petty attacks in this manuscript," says one blinded reviewer, "and [there is] too much ball-bashing [for the essay] to be a scholarly article" (398). Insofar as the authors admit that "no conclusions offer themselves easily" and that it is "not up to the three of us alone to resolve" the tacit contracting over professional propriety, it is clear who claims the phallus in its coming castration (and, of course, which cats are blamed for posing the threat).

After Blair, Brown, and Baxter's important exposé, some rhetoricians may be tempted to argue that our phallogocentric apocalyptic has been tempered by their and related, subsequent critiques (e.g., Biesecker, "Coming" 140-161). That the conference planners of the most recent RSA meeting in Memphis chose "Sizing Up Rhetoric" as the theme should temper any unbridled optimism, as should an understanding of the apocalyptic tone as monotonously perverse. Although professionally recognizing "Disciplining the Feminine" contributes to an argument for feminism's acceptance, in light of the recent "sizing-up" idiom one should consider whether such recognition is merely a symptom of the very same yardstick-disciplinarity the essay is said to expose. To what extent does recognizing the essay sound like a "resolution" of the monotonality it critiques? In other words, can the celebration of the essay as a "feminist success" play into a kind of postfeminist ruse (see McRobbie), a tired, disciplinary iteration of "been there, done that?"

The threat of monotonal assimilation is easy to recognize if we take matters back to the off-screen (primal) scene where Blair, Brown, and Baxter originally bid readers to go: unquestionably, recognizing the essay over a decade after its publication is a (somewhat generationally marked) reaction to the oft-heard and overheard dismissals of the study in everyday encounters (e.g, in conversation at the RSA conference bar). For example, recently a blind reviewer for the present essay described "Disciplining the Feminine" as mere "whining" (a tonally-coded word if there ever was).[1] I have often heard the same sentiment from respected scholars at conferences and in casual discussions, a sentiment few would be willing to publicly voice because the essay has become a fetish of so-called political correctness. In this qualified respect, celebrating what some characterize as a critical castration is merely a toothless variety of lip service.

The problem with voicing an opposition to Blair, Baxter, and Brown's argument is that, presumably, it would brand one as a misogynist. Such a presumption, however, is party to the binarism of exclusion and, in a sense, misses what I understand as the core of their critique: gender coded rhetoric ("feline, petty attacks," "ball-busting," "whining") intones a phallogocentric, off-screen form of the disciplinary contract-the kind of contract that Derrida has shown entails a secret exclusion. To characterize their essay as a castration, consequently, is a mistake. Blair, Brown, and Baxter's critique has been (sometimes deliberately) misheard, for the critique is not only leveled at the level of the word, but also at the level of its expression and event-those things better discerned by an attention to tone. For example, the masculinist rules for expression they deplore demand "personae of the singular, neutral, authoritative observers who are detached from or ambivalent about their own histories and contexts" (402). Hearing/reading the tone of "detachment" is central to their arguments, which run counter to the monologic of apocalyptic. "Our talk about 'scholarly dialogue' and 'scholarly communities' notwithstanding," they argue, "we tend to construe our work in monologic terms" (403). Blair, Baxter, and Brown conclude their essay by calling for a rigorous attention to "patterns in our writing and speaking" (403). Yet, to my knowledge, few have taken their charge seriously in subsequent studies (see Schwartzman and Swartz 69-76). Insofar as prohibitions and protests have failed to put an end our perverse, apocalyptic tone in rhetorical studies, then, I shall come to an end-or better, I shall keep coming-by diagnosing why our strange brand of enjoyment is overdetermined and, perhaps, inescapable.

Rereading Gaonkar as Huldah

Whether from its institutional and political history or rhetoric's centuries-long status as a supplement, rhetorical studies is foundationally and fundamentally an apocalyptic and perverse discipline. As the Blair, Brown, and Baxter essay demonstrates, rhetoricians have been prohibited from this or that perversion many times and in many ways in the past thirty years. We can locate many more examples in . . . .

Note

"Blair et al., despite the circulation their essay has gotten, struck me as simply whining, and generalizing on the basis of a highly limited sample." Comment to the author from a blind reviewer.