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S. R. Aichinger

Dr. Latchaw

ENGL 8800: Feminist Rhetoric

Wednesday, 29 September 2010

³Who Is !  :

Sorting out Our Selves

I¶m interested in Jarratt¶s references to Adrienne Rich²particularly of history as

reflective (Jarratt 24) and reflexive. It is reflective in that it imitates and reproduces the truths

and perspectives of the one writing the history. It is reflexive in that is refers continually to itself,

and as Rich writes in ³Notes toward a Politics of Location, ³We can¶t build a society free from

domination by fixing our sights backward on some long-ago tribe or city (227). To be more

precise, a particular history, though beneficial in understanding where one comes from and how

one arrived at the present, does not offer objective ways to move forward.

Indeed, the best intentions of a historian cannot (I believe) undo this reflective/reflexive

nature of history and historiography. Rich opens the same essay by discussing her placement of

identities within a larger community of identities (e.g., feminist among other feminists, or

woman among men) and her ability to utilize her most narrowly defined and central geography,

her body (212), to engage in the politics of identity. She notes that in her most noble efforts, she

would have spoken « as a feminist ³
   to be a white United States

citizen, conscious of [her] government¶s proven capacity for violence and

arrogance of power, but as self-separated from that government, quoting without

second thought Virginia Woolf¶s statement « that µas a woman I have no

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country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole

world. (210-11, emphasis added)

But she tempers this statement with an acknowledgment of her revelation that she cannot be a

woman who D
 
to be a white United States citizen, noting that she ³comes « with

notes but without absolute conclusions (211).

In fact she abandons Woolf, saying, ³As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot

divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three time µAs

a woman my country is the whole world¶ (212). She makes no attempt to be seen as objective,

or addressing history without her own slant, but prefers instead to struggle with accountability,

for like the bumblebee ³trapped in a place [Rich¶s house] where it cannot fulfill its own life

(211), Rich cannot be effective in her poetry or scholarship without paying service to her unique

and subjective perspective. This is unbelievably refreshing to me.

Though I argue that all of human history has been written in this self-reflective and self-

reflexive way, ³successful and ³respectable scholars within much of academia are required to

don masks of objectivity. But the reality for many disciplines is that objectivity is not possible,

and if it were, it would not be preferable²impossible because of the flawed self-consciousness

and egocentrism that is, I believe, inherent to humanity, and not preferable because objectivity

would make personal gain and furthering of individualistic motives difficult and darn near

impossible. In other words, if objectivity were the norm, men would not have such a firm hold on

power.

³This body, Rich writes. ³White, female; or female, white (215). How does the

ordering go Which identities are most important Does the importance of one of our selves

swell and decline depending on our movements within and between our environments Almost
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certainly the answer is yes. And yet we are taught to understand the world through the lens of

very few perspectives. We learn the world as:

a male;

a white male;

an educated, white male;

a middle class, educated, white male;

a heterosexual, middle class, educated, white male.

a Protestant, heterosexual, middle class, educated, white male.

The adjectival list goes on and on, 
. And all this without regard to the religion,

sexuality, economic position, education, race, ethnicity, sex, or gender of the learner.

Not only do we learn the world through this tiny, scratched, and ugly lens, but also we

learn  


and    through this lens. We¶re brought up to understand lesbians and

Muslims and stockbrokers and queer teens and the mentally ill through this single lens. We do

this because it is all we¶re given, but it has served us poorly and caused great harm. Because

we¶re trained to see everyone in (and compare everyone to) this model, the Qur¶an is burned in a

nondenominational (but somehow anti-Islam) church and queer teens kill themselves because

non-queer teens point them out as spectacle.

I got an email this morning from a high school classmate. In response to a national story

about two teens who killed themselves to escape anti-gay bullying in just the past week, the point

of the email was to ask, ³was there much bullying at Elkhorn [High School] She was unsure

because ³maybe [she¶s] just naïve, or maybe you just don¶t pay attention when it¶s not happening

to you²since high school is such a self-involved time. My response was that yes, there was

bullying, but because it was such a self-involved time, and because Elkhorn was (at the time) a
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remarkably insular community, there simply wasn't access to language and knowledge that

would allow for people to be aware of the kinds of things others were saying. I was attacked for

being gay, but I don't think anyone truly understood what it meant to be gay because of our

geographic, political, and personal locations. That is, I think homosexuality was seen as a set of

sexual behaviors and practices, rather than an identity that touches every aspect of one's life and

other identities.

³But to dirty the water, I told her, ³I know of a lot of guys in our class who engaged in

homosexual activity, while at the same time admonishing and demonizing those very behaviors.

Because we were very definitely taught to learn ourselves, others, and the world through the lens

I defined above, we had no way of understanding things that looked funny when seen through it.

And the funnier someone looked (i.e., more and more unlike whoever designed the lens), the less

we understood her/him and the more we attacked her/him.

But Rich asks, ³Who is
 (231)

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Works Cited

Jarratt, Susan C. ³Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. (1990) !  

   
 







. Eds. Lindal

Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010. 19-35. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. ³Notes toward a Politics of Location. (1984)    

  
. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986. 210-31. Print.