To try to shore up its sense of community without losing individual focus, the third wave of US feminism often falls into the trap of overhyping the experiences of individual women and the worth of women's history, defending these methods at all costs even when other disciplines suggest that statistics might be more useful in the grand scheme of things. Though quantitative areas and styles of narrative-based activist research are gaining in popularity – an obvious example is the “It Gets Better” video project begun by Dan Savage – they remain underrepresented across most fields, leading to the need for “standard” feminist methods textbooks like Shulamit Reinharz’s Feminist Methods in Social Research[1] and Liesbet van Zoonen’s Feminist Media Studies.[2] Though these methods do center the individual as a key part of an argument, they can depoliticize arguments by abstracting too much information; worse, because the great strength of these methods is their emotional appeal, some researchers or individuals co-opt the social justice movement the methods are designed to serve as a place for personal advancement or attention.

The introductions to many books on the third wave, including Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, seek to popularize and valorize qualitative methods, particularly those methods which highlight, analyze or seek to extract a personal narrative. By doing this, researchers seek to challenge "whiteness," or the "promise of whiteness": the promise of individual distinction, merit, privilege and rewards, what lies down the path of quantification and competition:

[T]hat oh-so-American ideology has been ingrained into our deepest senses of ourselves, an ironic legacy of the second wave feminist and civil rights struggles that fought for equal access to the opportunities of white men. Despite our knowing better, despite our knowing its emptiness, the ideology of individualism is still a major motivating force in many third wave lives.[3]

Similarly, Dan Savage posted a video of himself explaining how, in his own life, his exposure to homophobia had decreased and his tolerance had increased; by speaking this way, Savage hoped to prevent LGBT teenagers from committing suicide, which they are four times as likely as straight teens to attempt.[4]

Savage had found a way for the latest generation’s famous self-obsession to be turned to a good cause: through the power of personal narrative, LGBT teenagers could be reassured that all was not at an end. And the early videos’ emotional impact and pull was both remarkable and quantifiable: Savage and his partner’s video, only one of tens of thousands of submissions, received well over a million views by the time this paper was written.[5] The videos had an emotional draw that many viewers found compelling, if depressing; even though the project was titled “It Gets Better,” many of the contributors retold tragic histories as a way of cementing identification with bashed LGBT teens. And, rather than giving them undiluted hope in the form of stories purely about how it gets better, video contributors must have been aware on some level of what Brian Massumi discussed when he spoke about the difference between “pleasantness” and “happiness” and the importance of intensity.[6] Hearing about others’ travails was pleasant, for LGBT teens and for relatively disinterested viewers, because it awoke intense emotion; the stories pushed listeners through the choking fear they shared with the speaker and into a promised land of hope and narrative closure. But the appeal of the personal story is a dangerous one: though at first the project sought out videos from a few gay celebrities and many average gay people, contributions began to pour in from celebrities – including, after a while, many straight celebrities, including President Obama[7] and Justin Bieber.[8] The project began to be criticized as a way for people to use a platform designed for social justice as a venue for self-promotion, a way to hijack a situation many people expected to be emotionally evocative and use it to tie those emotions to a brand or name.

Many people over the years have accused feminists of something similar. Could the fear of losing distinction, noted by Third Wave Agenda as the effects of capitalist and white-supremacist promises to the upper classes, explained by Teresa Brennan as the human desire for “living attention,”[9] possibly contribute to the wealth of navel-gazing appearing in NWSA Journal and other feminist publications, both inside and outside of the academy? Third Wave Agenda appears to answer the question:

[O]ur struggles to negotiate individualism's powerful seductions and betrayals provide the third wave with an odd form of common ground, linking us across our many differences. So many of us are panicked about our futures and places, or lack thereof, in the world… The specter of anonymity, linked as it is with the threat of un- and underemployment for all workers, is one of our generation's biggest fears.

In other words, the struggle to kick the habit of self-centeredness and is complicated by our generation’s withdrawal symptoms. Heywood and Drake continue to quote David Wild in Rolling Stone, who speaks of The Real World as a vehicle for the narcissistic terrors of young people allergic to anonymity. Wild's "ghetto of obscurity" creates a desperate need to rise above, to distinguish oneself, to appear on reality TV, to post an “It gets Better” video even if you don’t care that much or don’t have anything to say – to be recognized as special. (Maybe even to publish?) And as Teresa Brennan suggests, attention is actually what gives affect its force – and affect is a two-way street. Authors and video bloggers are energized, and their pathos is energized, when they are paid attention; they crave and begin to seek that attention.[10]

Instead of linking this generational panic to the emergence of life writing and phenomenology as mainstays of feminist scholarship or the rise in pop value of social justice programs, Third Wave Agenda describes the panic as the cause of "backlash against affirmative action programs, the tightening of border security and anti-immigration laws, and the legislation ending welfare as we know it." Fear of anonymity and loss of privilege drive Republicans, those people across the aisle desperately interested in their own exclusivity. Heywood and Drake come dangerously close to the truth when they admit that "this is a contradiction that feminism's third wave has to face: an often conscious knowledge of the ways in which we are compelled and constructed by the very things that undermine us." If emotional states can be transferred as affects, it would stand to reason that one of the free-floating dissatisfactions of the 20^th century is the fear of anonymity, and according to Brennan, it should affect feminists as well – certain feminists might have different resistances to affect, but they should not be able to think of themselves as apart. But according to Third Wave Agenda, it’s apparently not a problem that is tied to the narrative practices in use by feminists – it's just an ephemeral, floating problem, theoretically responsible for our mysterious continued inability to pluralize properly or play well with women of color.

In fact, this problem is almost a blessing: this "isn't just Generation X whining, but rather, a form of spiritual sickness that most compels generationally third wave men and women to activism and that most works as a galvanizing force for social change," implying that the very guilt or emotions inherent in an “It Gets Better” video spur average people to action – the presence of the video is a kind of proof that they possess the emotional charge to follow through with more substantive action. Heywood and Drake support this by leaping right past bell hooks' point in this quote from “Postmodern Blackness”:

The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy—ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a basis for solidarity and coalition.[11]

Bell hooks thinks this overriding sense of despair can be an incredible basis for solidarity and coalition. She does not think of it as a magic bullet that will spontaneously produce coalition-based activism, and indeed recognizes the white need to reassert community as emblematic of a people who are not especially concerned with "ways to end exploitation and oppression in the context of their lives”; she probably wouldn’t think much of Dan Savage.

But Third Wave Agenda takes the point there:

[I]t may be that the longing for community that is characteristic of some white feminists will serve as a motivation to form coalitions that seek to "end exploitation and oppression" affecting lives other than just their own. In addition, the concept of "equal rights"… because most young Americans internalize it naively, can lead to coalition.

Falling right into that trap of internalizing naïve coalition-building, Heywood and Drake do return to the problematic forces shaping white women's experience with feminism, to admit that

paths to a coalition-based feminist consciousness have often been based in ignorance, contradiction, and confusion. In some fundamental ways many of us still don't "get it." Striving for the success and equality with white men that second wave feminism made possible, white women in particular often became so focused on individual achievement and success that we became wholehearted supporters of the very structures we most wanted to contest.

They even extend the characterization to men and women of color who have gained access to traditionally white privileges, like higher education and the upper-middle class. But they make sure to limit the problem of individualism (and hence the problem of naïve coalition-building) to their pre-feminist lives, just as anyone producing an “It Gets Better” video would likely argue that this isn’t about them, it’s about the cause. In fact, the poison of individualism was what woke Heywood and Drake up to the need for feminist coalition:

In short, many of us have been clueless, swallowing status quo gambits whole, not choking until we find they have eaten us up from the inside--our hearts, livers, stomachs, lungs--until we can't feel or eat or breathe. We once could eat and breathe, and because we could, others couldn't. Third wavers know in theory that, as hooks wrote in 1984, "[B]roader perspectives can only emerge as a whole, and global revolutionary politics." But we don't always know how to accomplish this.

It seems reasonable that this failure to emerge as a whole, to engage in global revolutionary politics, could be due to the tendency of whiteness and a collective generational urge to distinguish individuals – that confluence could lead the feminist third wave to privilege methods like life writing above broader quantitative study, and could certainly be part of the reason that more than 10,000 “It Gets Better” videos have been posted but suicide by gay teenagers has not been seen to decrease. Since it can’t be the use value of these methods, a pathological need for individual distinction could certainly explain why many of us don’t “get it,” why we “don’t know how to accomplish” anything.

But at this point in its argument, Third Wave Agenda veers away to talk about the second wave and why third wave feminists have derided its focus on sisterhood and coalition, instead of interrogating their own resulting “coalition“ “politics.” Rejecting these as previously useful but too "frilly” for the modern era, Heywood and Drake name US third world feminism as the feminism that "modeled a language and a politics of hybridity that can account for our lives at the century's turn." US third world feminism taught us how to see lives marked by intersectionality and contradiction, in large part because early third wave work was closely focused on critiquing the white second wave, which denied US third world lives and their concerns.[12]

Here, a distinctive colonizing perspective emerges that Heywood and Drake overlook. Yes, US third world work brought up intersectional narratives and personal experience because, for all that the second wave was about sisterhood and consciousness-raising, it very definitely sidelined the experiences of women of color to argue for an "essential" feminine experience. At that time, personal narrative was absolutely necessary to Gloria Anzaldúa and other early third wavers of color because the second wave was using a whitewashed master narrative. The only way for these writers of color to prove that the white experience wasn’t an essential one was to turn the paradigm on its head by means of experiential data, not inference: here is a brown life, a queer life, a disabled life, an intersectional life. See how different the world looks for these specific women? This is why the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and other experience-based qualitative researchers has been relevant, powerful and useful: no one else told the story Anzaldúa was telling.

Unfortunately, no one could say that about a single essay in Third Wave Agenda, though the authors "hope that in these pages we have begun—provisionally, slowly, making some dumb mistakes—to pay our debts to those women whose work has sometimes literally saved lives." And one could probably extend the characterization to the “It Gets Better” videos. I'll buy that Anzaldúa's and hooks' work or some of the earliest videos saved lives; I'll even buy that narrative can lead to empathy, which could form a good basis for activist work. But the authors of Third Wave Agenda do not plan on telling me how that shift came about, and the “It Gets Better” authors of recent weeks seem convinced that they are contributing just by putting up the message, not by its receipt; feminists ascribe this process to a kind of magic, titling their section on third wave writing "Keeping the Faith." Instead of working from the stories told by their predecessors, third wave feminists seek to reproduce those acts of story-telling, empowerment, and above all recognition for themselves because of the common faith that “writing itself can be transformative,” because, as Manifesta notes:

[T]estimony is where feminism starts. Historically, women’s personal stories have been the evidence of where the movement needs to go politically and, furthermore, that there is a need to move forward… The media and even some feminists fail to apprehend this first step when they criticize… the Third Wave propensity to explore women’s personal stories in essays and memoirs. Recent Third Wave anthologies… are the foundation of the personal ethics upon which a women’s movement will be built. The maligned memoir—which when written by a woman is often referred to as a “confessional”—is more than a diary entry that has been typeset. Memoirs… are all introducing Third wave women’s experiences into the cultural atmosphere. (Baumgardner & Richards, 20)

Unfortunately for contributors to academic feminist writing outlets like the NWSA Journal, mainstream feminist scholarship doesn't emerge into a cultural atmosphere in need of the experiences of third wave women; and though gay teens do need to hear the stories of those who’ve been where they are, Justin Bieber isn’t likely to tell the right story. This rhetorical situation is prescribing a response, but it’s also prescribing a respondent.[13] And instead of providing new narratives of the sort provided by hooks and Anzaldúa, NWSA Journal is so loaded down with the experiences of middle-class assistant professors that the stories shouldn’t surprise or inform anyone who actually reads the journal. These narratives almost universally fail to add to the powerful story that hooks and Anzaldúa told, because these are not hidden narratives, just as Justin Bieber’s isn’t a hidden narrative about queer youth (unless there’s something he’s not ready to tell us).

In taking on the duty of narrating, the Manifesta and Third Wave Agenda anthologists and the “It Gets Better” video bloggers are missing the biggest point of the life writing that inspired them: when Gloria Anzaldúa was doing it, it was dangerous and revolutionary; it was rare; it incited action; it was action. Authors who seek solely to recognize the experiences of some or even all people have allowed the work of archiving narrative to eclipse the purpose of storytelling within the context of feminist action or queer activism in the public sphere: these stories are meant to be inspiring us to do activist work – to cross over into public media, to be taken up by people who would not necessarily describe themselves as radical, to stay alive. Narratives are tools, not the finished product of consciousness-raising activities, and while Anzaldúa’s story was the hammer to the second wave nail, a white neoliberal associate professor’s story in disguise as activist research is a square peg in a round hole, if that hole is defined as any sort of traditional disciplinary scholarship – the type which helps activists by telling them things like where the wage gap is, how many women experience sexual violence, or how local practices of resistance can be adapted or enriched by Western helpers. There are stunningly few facts or policy recommendations more specific than “honor local custom” or “be welcoming” to be found in third wave feminist books like Third Wave Agenda or Manifesta, just as the straight contributors to “It Gets Better” rarely have anything better to say than “be strong.” “Be strong” means less when it comes from someone who has never had to use that strength; even the emotional identification of shared suffering is broken, leaving the viewer and author totally dissociated and a bit annoyed with each other.

Perhaps, in our haste to embrace a new strategy of "being feminist" or “living activism,” we embraced a little less than we thought, taking the newness but leaving the radicalism. It’s true that disability studies (including the new-minted fat embodiment studies), women of color studies, queer and transgendered studies, and politics of various locations and regions have all made inroads into women's studies, most visibly through articles which rise from a position of adversity, asking the establishment why it has ignored this or that group. And, indeed, this is some of the most important work women's studies does – women's studies itself is a discipline that arose in the last fifty years, had to fight tooth and nail for recognition, and is still in danger of slipping into the bottomless pit of humanities miscellany. But is has not, in general, tried to cross back over out into the public media – feminist professors are not public experts in the way professors of political science often are. Where, for example, are the feminists commenting on gendered news items on CNN or Fox? (Yes, there are Republican feminists, and the fact that we don’t see them in Third Wave Agenda should be troubling.) Feminists who write books like Third Wave Agenda and Manifesta and blog about The Vampire Diaries, don’t see much crossover success; most people take little notice of online hubs like Jezebel, Feministe, Feministing or girl-power.org until they erupt into a battle with better-known entities,[14] after which they fade back into obscurity. Feminist messages in third wave cultures are stuck in a feedback loop.

And what was the last thing you heard about the “It Gets Better” project since Justin Bieber added a video? While at first the story was that Dan Savage had begun a revolutionary project, the story changed to who was adding videos.[15] Bieber’s own video doesn’t actually mention LGBT people at all, though he premiered it on The Ellen Show and said he posted it in response to a “faggot”-laced verbal assault at a Canadian laser tag outing.

It isn’t that personal narratives are pointless, or that they never do anything for activism. Narrative did a whole lot for Gloria Anzaldúa’s case against the white feminists who blithely believed in a raceless sisterly solidarity in the face of all logic. And I do think that, especially in the early days of the “It Gets Better” project and based on the video responses by gay teenagers, Dan Savage’s project produced a benefit for the people affected by its message. But narrative methods can be just as intoxicating for the narrator as the listeners, and activists must remember that humans seek attention just as much, and probably more than, justice.

---

[1] Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research, ed. Lynn Davidman (New York: Oxford UP, 1992).

[2] Liesbet van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies (Los Angeles: Sage Publishing, 2007).

[3] Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “Introduction,” Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, Ed. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota UP, 1997): 1-23.

[4] NPR, “Dan Savage: For Gay Teens, Life ‘Gets Better’,” 23 Mar 2011.

[5] Dan Savage and Terry Miller, “It Gets Better: Dan and Terry,” It Gets Better Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcVyvg2Qlo (21 September 2010).

[6] Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2002), 25-26.

[7] Barack Obama, “President Obama: It Gets Better,” It Gets Better Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geyAFbSDPVk (21 October 2010).

[8] Justin Bieber, “Justin Bieber on Ellen – bullying (it gets better),” It Gets Better Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJ4oVvrcqY (23 Nov 2010).

[9] Teresa Brenna, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 33-34.

[10] Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 40.

[11] bell hooks, "Postmodern Blackness,” Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994): Pages 421-27, Google Books, web, accessed 5 Feb. 2011.

[12] Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000): 50-86.

[13] Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (January 1968): 1-14.

[14] David Futrelle, “Scott Adams to Men’s Rights Activists: Don’t bother Arguing with Women; They’re Like Children,” Feministe, http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/24/scott-adams-to-mens-rights-activists-dont-bother-arguing-with-women-theyre-like-children/ (March 2011, accessed Apr 22 2011). Postings on Feministe, one of the oldest, best established, and most popular feminist blogs within the pop third wave circuit, receive an average of 20 or fewer comments. The cited post about Scott Adams received just over 300, and a subsequent posting about Scott Adams, also by guest blogger David Futrelle, received 199. Posts that receive more than 30 comments are almost universally links to other authors; replies become inflated through comment warfare.

[15] “Justin Bieber Makes World’s Shortest It Gets Better Video Yet,” Kevinism: Infotainment, http://www.kevinism.com/?p=3983 (30 Nov 2010).

My thesis rough draft was due Monday, which means that in the last two weeks I of course started three new characters on an entirely new server in World of Warcraft. On an unrelated note, I had to spend all weekend camped out at Thunderbird Coffee messing around in Excel and writing 15 pages of actual content analysis, so my final project is still in formative stages.

As I write that thesis, I'm trying to be as objective as possible -- or sound as objective as possible -- because I'm aware that this will make me more convincing to other people. This is particularly so because (before I took this class) I decided that a whole lot of feminist scholarship is terrible because it relies on emotive narrative retellings of personal stories, "embodied knowledge" or "experiential data," instead of more traditional quantitative methods -- the kind you use in psychology, sociology, and the sciences. Or, you could say if you wanted to get a cat, an unfinished knitting project, or a pair of homemade earrings that clearly began life as Shrinky-Dinks thrown at you, real academic disciplines. (Sorry, sorry, it's just really hard to spend three solid months reading NWSA Journal and not want to poison the vegan tabbouleh at the next NOW conference.)

The problem I predictably began having when we started class was with Damasio's suggestion that emotion is a key part of rationality; without feeling or interrogating the appropriateness of one's emotions, one literally can't be rational.

But I still have a problem with feminist scholarship, because even if emotion is involved in rationality, one professor's story about the experience of teaching a gender studies class while pregnant has LIMITED UTILITY.

So my idea, right, is to make everyone more responsible in their research -- advocate a return to quantitative methods, not because they're inherently better but because a research base without them is totally powerless. Pure quantitative research means that a lot of truth can be obscured with numbers -- this is feminists' point by telling so many narrative stories -- but pure qualitative research is equally dumb and has no application. Viz., poetry criticism from the 70s.

My problem is that this objective style of writing doesn't come easily to me at all. Maybe it's the journalism or maybe it's having had 24-hour access to the Internet on a personal computer since I was 11 (thank you, Dad, for slaving in the telecom mines), but I naturally write with a good deal of what my kinder editors have called verve and what most people would call constant unrestrained bitchiness cut with vocabulary. I don't write for logic. I write to the emotions, even when I'm trying to be logical -- I end up saying that, logically, you should be incensed, like in my PETA visual analysis. And my thesis, about how being objective is super important, is sounding less and less logical in and of itself.

I'm afraid that this disjoint between style and content won't literally detract from my argument, but I don't think that the juxtaposition will serve my argument. I think readers might feel that I should be making a different argument with the same voice, or think that my voice compromises the logic of my argument. Why the hell did I choose a thesis statement I believed rather than one I could defend?

Revised Final Project Proposal

ALTERNATIVE FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION!

I'm still going to write the equivalent of an eight-page research paper, but it's going on my blog so that I can embed video. I'll compare feminists' hijacking of literature to serve individual interests to a similar pattern in the "It Gets Better" video project started by Dan Savage. In both projects, writing is produced supposedly to support a social movement with a political program and specific goals for that program; ideally, "It Gets Better" videos would be about supporting and comforting gay teenagers, and feminist scholarship would provide feminist activists with the raw material for activism. Instead, Justin Bieber is among the many straight or otherwise relatively disinterested celebrities jumping on a social movement bandwagon to promote himself, and feminist scholarship obsessively analyzes feminists' own lives and makes much of their thought experiments because feminism is an individual-denying culture. Even as feminists criticize others of their generation for being terrified of anonymity and so desperate to distinguish themselves they sign up for The Real World, feminists are depoliticizing their soapbox so they can use it as a pedestal.

I'll embed "It Gets Better" videos into the presentation, and hopefully feminist consciousness-raising videos as well if I can track them down. My analysis will use Brennan's ideas about the transmission of affect and the need for "living attention," the article on rhetorical economies, the article which covered rhetoric as a form of energy, Bitzer's discussion of the rhetorical situation and Vatz's response, and Massumi's qualification of "pleasantness" as a force of intensity, not happiness/sadness. "It Gets Better" videos and consciousness-raising are cathartic and "pleasant" because they evidence a shared trauma and emotional upset, not because they make people happy.

Bitzer blog

I don't find Bitzer and Vatz mutually exclusive. I think Bitzer might be arguing from his frame within Vatz's idea of rhetoric, but Vatz himself doesn't allow for rhetoric to be a specific idea, even one as vague as his. Bitzer deals with possibility while Vatz deals with potentiality. It's easy to say that Vatz's must be the correct idea because it's broader, but is it nearly as helpful as Bitzer's?

As far as the rhetorical situation Bitzer describes goes, I also don't see as many problems with it, maybe because my tenure does not depend on whether or how violently I disagree with something. Whether we like it or not, each rhetorical situation involves exigence, constraints and an audience. Vatz's rhetoric involves constraints that we invent personally, but as we move through life, our Bitzerian identification or Vatzian interpretation is going to have the exact same result. That bear is a definitive threat! vs. That bear will certainly eat me if it gets close! mean the same thing: run away.

Likewise, whether we invent the situation of pollution or not by naming it "pollution," X company will continue to dump industrial waste into X river, and frogs are actually mutating. Sure, we could interpret that positively as a sign of the return of Xenu or whatever, but they are mutating. They are changing, and the situation is a situation, different than it was before and noticeable. You are not going to get into that fishing boat and try to bring them all round to veganism. You cannot invent that much situation or get rid of that much constraint. The reality of these men, and of your persuasive ability is not stronger than their interpretation of their situation as a fishing-only one, despite the historical example of certain fishers of men who shall remain nameless.

But you also can't say that the appropriate response to a situation is one that "fits," because many, many situations could potentially "fit" -- we know when we find one that does, but we never know how many we didn't find. Sure, Winston Churchill found himself a lot of "finest hours." But it doesn't give him enough credit to say that he found them just as they were and had the mystical ability to find the appropriate response. He was an amazing rhetor, and another rhetor could have found a totally different response to the situation which may have fit just as well. The only thing this means about Bitzer is that his "rhetorical audience" is too constrictive -- sure, the people who it was possible to persuade were persuaded by Churchill. But other people had a different fitting response. I see this most clearly in the abortion debates: to pro-lifers, the appropriate response is a violent one, since it is being committed as an act of lethal violence. To pro-choicers, the appropriate response is a peaceful one, since abortion is an action which brings peace to fraught women's lives. Who's right? We'd have to figure out whether abortion is right first. Are there two situations or one? How many appropriate responses?

It's silly to pick a side. I think what would work best for most people is to build from both ends -- select situations you recognize/interpret as in need of a rhetorical solution, but select situations which you personally can affect rhetorically. Constraints are negotiable, but not infinitely negotiable for anyone. Maybe Jesus would be able to convince the fishermen to go vegan; I can't. But at the Library Fair yesterday, which my boss did not tell me would be happening until she e-mailed me to turn up for my shift at PCL plaza and to "expect to get messy," I did successfully convince a bunch of people to make silly putty by hand, most of them people who were dead set against it once they figured out what we were doing. Their constraint was that they had to work in an hour; I negotiated that constraint by suggesting they wash their hands or get a friend to spend ten minutes rolling goo between their hands for "snap factor." I couldn't unconstrain everyone, but I could obviously unconstrain some people, because the situation required me to unless I wanted to face extreme librarian wrath.

Basically what this comes down to is that, perhaps, it's both the size of the ship and the motion of the ocean.

Final project proposal

For my final project, I'd like to shamelessly borrow material from my thesis, even though it's going to be really boring.

I'm doing a content analysis of about ten years' worth of NWSA Journal, a major feminist journal known for interdisciplinary work. My theory about feminist scholarship, which I'm so far confirming, is that quantifiable and rigorous research methods have become less important to feminist scholars than what is often called "embodied knowledge" or "experiential knowledge" -- the narratively cast personal stories of various women and the emotional and affective responses those stories garner from an audience, whether live or academic.

I think this obsessive focus on testimony allows feminist scholars to distinguish themselves in a discipline which emphasizes coalitional and cooperative action over individual achievement -- since feminist scholars learn that good feminists don't seek attention but still as humans crave it, they invent ways to cast their personal experiences as meaningful. This usually takes the form of 20- and 30-page articles about one women's studies professor's experience of being unable to find a steady job with benefits after she left graduate school, which was recast as a metaphor about the negative effects of globalization. By pretending to talk about globalization but really talking about herself, the scholar was able to redirect Brennan's "living attention" to herself.

I would like to write an 8-page research paper exploring the reasons why feminist scholars privilege embodied experience and personal narratives over more traditional and frankly more useful research methods. I will analyze the ten years' worth of NWSA Journal I conveniently have on hand and attempt to make connections between the text and the ideas we read about this semester concerning the transmission of affect, the desire for living attention, rhetoric as a form of energy, and the emotional/affective construction of borders. As I vaguely mentioned in my last post, I think borders can be a reaction to the tension of unity as well as a producer of contrast tension -- since women's studies is a discipline which privileges the destruction of borders and the rejection of any kind of definition, those within the discipline might strive to distinguish themselves through pathos-laden personal narratives rather than conducting "real" research.

Ahmed blog

"Given that the event became an object that allowed certain forms of violence and detention of others in the name of defense, we need to ask: what role does security play in the affective politics of fear? Importantly, security is bound up with “the not”—what is “not me” or “not us,” as Michael Dillon has suggested. Security is not simply about securing a border that already exists, nor is fear simply a fear of what we are not. As I argued in the previous section, anxiety and fear create the very effect of borders, and the very effect of that which “we are not,” partly through how we turn away from the other, whom we imagine as the cause of our fear. Borders are constructed and indeed policed in the very feeling that they have already been transgressed: the other has to get too close, in order to be recognized as an object of fear, and in order for the object to be displaced. The transgression of the border is required in order for it to be secured as a border in the first place. This is why the politics of fear as well as hate is narrated as a border anxiety: fear speaks the language of “floods” and “swamps,” of being invaded by inappropriate others, against whom the nation must defend itself. We can reflect then on the ontology of insecurity within the constitution of the political: it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure."

This kind of sounds like Brennan's backformation of the self-with-others as natural; we feel "alone" because we are normally packed into groups of people. My major problem with that kind of assumption is that we can also feel crowded, overexposed, which implies we have a normal state of aloneness from which we have been shaken -- we can be too strongly affected, to the point where it is uncomfortable.

Ahmed's point about borders is a compelling one, the kind that fills my liberal heart with little flowers and rainbows. Borders, in and of themselves, challenge crossing and define difference; borders are the difference in and of themselves. Without borders, we all slide together in a big happy heterogenous soup of difference.

The problem with the happy soup for me is that each person is aware of the naturalness of borders, or their apparent naturalness. Each person comes equipped with an internal observer, who, no matter how much independence seems socialized, appears to be inborn. Psychologists theorize the crap out of when this separation of self from the mother must happen, but everyone knows that it does. Artificial or not, we construct a border or run across a border very young, and everybody does it.

What is the difference between nature and culture at this point? Can any state be said to be "normal" or "natural" for a human? Brennan suggests that humans naturally affect each other and clump together, but our reliance on visual information and habit keep us thinking of ourselves as separate. Ahmed suggests that borders are fake, with the implicit second statement that removal of these borders removes the tension of difference. But people construct or are equipped with an internal observer in order to relieve the tension of togetherness -- couldn't borders be constructed to relieve a tension we don't have as much academic contact with, the tension of unity?

One of the most difficult things for many academic writers, especially feminist writers, to do is shut up about themselves and truly commit their writing and scholarship to the unified betterment of mankind. Unsurprisingly, most writers actually want to talk a whole lot about themselves, and for feminists this often translates to pretending your essay about your experience in grad school is some kind of embodied metaphor for globalization. Everyone knows, somewhere, that this isn't coalitional academic activism, but publishing these kinds of essays allows feminist scholars to relieve themselves of the pressure of being all women, writing for all women, researching for a selfless greater good. It lets them grab a substitute for the individual achievement everyone seems to crave in one form or another as soon as they're born. Everyone's seen the episode of Friends where Phoebe discovers that she only likes doing charity because it makes her feel good, makes her the center of attention. Rather than humans tending towards oneness and constructing borders, or the traditional route of tending towards borders and bringing ourselves toward unity, what if the "natural" state for everyone is balance?

I have problems with the idea of the "natural" for an intelligent species. I don't think there's any way you can say what's natural for a human to do, because our habitat, our lives, are unnatural in the way we normally think of nature. No state of nature like that suggested by John Locke can really exist for humans, because we spontaneously organize. If we're not the strongest, we find ways to make ourselves valuable to our communities. Theology, medicine, and voodoo all become natural survival adaptations as much as they are cultural constructions, because they're how we make our living.

I think this is the root of why I don't like it when Brennan and Ahmed suggest that if we could list a little more toward one side, we'd be better off because it would be more "natural." There is no human natural except that which each person negotiates half by himself and half with his community; trying to define it for everyone is obviously going to make nearly everyone feel desperately unnatural.

Edbauer Unframing blog

One thing about this article bothers me, and it's the one-to-one ratio the author takes in transforming rhetoric from a place to a process even as he insists that it is a network of processes. "We do rhetoric, rather than (just) finding ourselves in a rhetoric. By extension, we might also say that rhetorical situation is better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters; it should become verb, rather than a fixed noun or situs." Even as the author acknowledges that multiple actions make up this rhetoric (and any place), he doesn't account for the fact that rhetorics, like cities, are almost always more than the sum of their parts.

It's simple to imagine a theoretical city as a series of processes of import and export, travel around the city, random contact with others -- basically, what it takes for everyone to get through their day, made up of multiple stops, journeys and meetings along the way. But these actions are different every day. Sure, Sears is going to important five bajillion HD radios every day and the radio station is going to play the ads for them five bajillion times every day, but each person's path around the city alters each day, each week, each month. In spite of this, New York doesn't stop being New York -- the version we see in Mad Men is still recognizably and somehow spiritually related to the modern city we think about, visit, live in, or do. It's aged, but it's the same city, in that I am the same person I was when I was four -- vitally different, but intimately connected and interrelated.

On the other hand, many people argue that Austin has stopped being Austin. The processes are different; it's not as weird anymore. Something altered between 1990 and today involving different people, different work, different land use and public structures, which took the alteration too far; something was added to the mix that changed everything in a different way than the expansion and change of New York changed New York.

The problem with pinning down a rhetorical situation, or rhetoric as an activity, is that its existence as a network does make sense, but this network is constantly changing shape and constituent parts. How can something with a different structure, at a different time, for a different audience, in a different place, still be rhetorical in the way that the Edbauer piece was rhetorical? Not only is rhetoric not the sum of its parts, but it's the same sum out of different parts every time, like New York.

Back on the other hand, maybe rhetoric is a simple verb which creates its own rhetorical situation out of opportunity. A homeless prophet is not going to be able to create his rhetorical situation out of scratch, but there are many different kinds of situations we would identify as primed for powerful rhetorical action -- the Wisconsin protests, Libya, a sympathetic professor's office hours. You have to do a lot of the initial work of creating the situation -- gathering people together, putting them in the right frame of mind, etc -- but you also rely on extant factors, like you being the kind of person someone would listen to or the presence of a large rock to stand on. Rhetoric builds from both ends, with different materials at each end every time. Rhetorical situations exist halfway into the possibility of the grid: they're not actually there yet, but we can see how we would make them out of what's available., halfway between possibility and potentiality.

EDIT: not that it matters since I clearly got something very abstract from it, but I read "Unframing" instead of "Executive Overspill."

Final Visual Appeal: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Prezi link.

Self-analysis.