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Transforming the Terms of Reading: Ideologies of Argument and the “Trope of the Angry Feminist” in Contemporary US Political and Academic Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

BARBARA TOMLINSON
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Abstract

Contemporary US political and academic discourse is a site for constant irruption and circulation of encapsulated arguments to delegitimize social criticism. Strategies such as the “trope of the angry feminist” – which disparages the arguments of feminist academics and feminists in general as “angry” – perform, enact, and instantiate gendered power. Because we have not adequately theorized the discursive role of such tropes, we fail to recognize the limits of our conventional reading practices, so that our responses often reproduce the problem. Whether we claim that feminists are not angry, or are legitimately angry, or that some feminists have a right be angry (though, perhaps, not all), we are responding to the logic of the trope rather than challenging it. In Wahneema Lubiano's terms, we are being mugged by a metaphor. Reframing the problem begins by transforming the terms of reading; I propose for that purpose a critical toolkit that I call “feminist socioforensic discursive analysis.” Using this toolkit I analyze two discursive events. One – a response by “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger to the inauguration of a new doctoral program in feminist studies – demonstrates what is at stake in the relentless operation of this cultural training program. The other – in which law professor Patricia Williams recounts the editing of an article she wrote for a law review – demonstrates how conventional discursive practices defend and deny their deeply political uses of racialized and gendered power by calling on what Williams calls “an ideology of style rooted in a social text of neutrality.” This episode also demonstrates how feminists can anticipate these moves and turn them to our own advantage.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 101 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Angela McRobbie examines how stereotypical framing of mythological feminism creates repulsion in young women and leaves them without resources to analyze the sexism structured into their lives in The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009).

2 While there are technical definitions of the term “trope,” this argument draws on the trope as part of a conventional “ready-made” plot structure or framework: “Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations … In storytelling, a trope is just that – a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand for a concept that the audience will recognize and understand instantly. Those familiar with Stylistics might know of Roland Barthes' ‘Codes’ – it's the same idea here … According to the Codes theory, a Code/Trope is an attempt to ‘give meaning to what would otherwise be a series of happenings.’” See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage.

3 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in idem, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

4 Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 146.

5 Feminist socioforensic discursive analysis draws on theories of power, ideology, discourse, language, and rhetoric of theorists such as Foucault, Althusser, Butler, Derrida, Guha, Warner, Raymond Williams, and George Lakoff, as well as recent theoretical work on affect by scholars such as Ahmed, Berlant, Cvetkovich, Sedwick, Puar, Tadiar, and Tyler. It connects these theoretical insights to the tools available for close examination of specific argumentative moves that have been developed by rhetoricians and critical discourse theorists such as Cranny-Francis, Kress, and Mills.

6 The university's announcement of the new graduate program included a few pleasant remarks from the department chair and the dean, mentioning only a few details about the new program: its three emphases – race and nation, genders and sexualities, and productive and reproductive labors – and our plan to approach these areas from intersectional and transnational perspectives, with a focus on social justice and public policy. University of California, UC Newsroom, 22 Sept. 2008, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/18615.

7 Laura Schlessinger, “Save Us from Feminist Studies,” Santa Barbara News-Press, 9 Oct. 2008.

8 Laura Schlessinger, “More on Feminist Studies,” Santa Barbara News-Press, 12 Oct. 2008.

9 See Laura Schlessinger, “A Young Woman Does the Research on Feminist Theory,” 11 May 2009, http://www.drlaurablog.com/.

10 See Laura Schlessinger, “Feminists Should Go Where They Are Needed,” 25 Nov. 2008. Also idem, “Where's NOW When You Really Need Them?” 7 Feb. 2008, http://www.drlaurablog.com/

11 Appeal to the emotions of the audience is one of three means of persuasion that characterize arguments created through words, according to the ancient Greek rhetorician Aristotle. An argument influences people's thinking partly through putting the audience into a certain frame of mind (Aristotle calls this pathos). Aristotle, “Rhetoric,” trans. W. Rhys Roberts, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2152–269.

12 Newman, 11.

13 Ibid., 9.

14 Appeal by the projection of the speaker's (apparent) character is another of Aristotle's means of persuasion; he terms it ethos. He says, “Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible [ethos].” Aristotle, 2155.

15 See, for example, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); and Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

16 Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives,” in Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 64–75.

17 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

18 Lubiano, 66.

19 Patricia J. Williams, “The Death of the Profane,” in idem, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 44–51.

20 Ibid., 45.

21 Ibid., 47.

22 Ibid., 47.

23 Ibid., 48.

24 Ibid., 48.

25 Haraway, Donna, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14, 3 (1988), 575–99Google Scholar.

26 Cited in Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 60.