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- All Subjects: Historiography
- Creators: Goggin, Maureen D
Description
ABSTRACT For many years, difference scholars, such as Cornel West, Iris Marion Young, and Janet Atwill have been reminding humanities scholars that if social equity is ever to be realized, difference needs to be reconfigured and reframed. As Janet Atwill puts it, "difference can no longer be the anomaly, the enemy, or the problem to be solved. Difference is the condition" (212). While these scholars insightfully recognize that difference needs to be accepted, welcomed and loved rather than merely tolerated, they have not sufficiently addressed the perceptual change that must occur worldwide if difference as an intrinsic underlying condition of human existence is to be embraced. This project provides a point of departure for carrying out such a dramatic epistemic change by arguing that hierarchical thinking, not difference, is the real agent underwriting societal violence and discord. Hierarchical thinking delineates a more appropriate critical space than does difference for social justice inquiry, invention, and intervention. This project also rhetorically theorizes the realm of intersubjectivity and provides two novel contributions to contemporary rhetorical theory: 1) privilege as a rhetorical construct and 2) the untapped inventional potential of the postmodern understanding of intersubjectivity. To illustrate the embodied and performative aspects of hierarchical thinking, this work draws upon the writings of Lillian Smith, a white southerner (1897-1966) whose descriptive analyses of the Jim Crow South allude to large systems of privilege of which Jim Crow is merely representational. Illustrating the invidious nexus of privilege, Smith's writings describe the ways in which individuals embody and perform practices of exclusion and hate to perpetuate larger systems of privilege. Smith shows how privilege operates much as gender and power--fluidly and variously and dependent upon context. Viewing privilege as a rhetorical construct, operating dynamically, always in flux and at play, provides rhetoricians with a theoretically important move that un-yokes privilege from specific identities (e.g., white privilege). When viewed through this more dynamic and precise lens, we can readily perceive how privilege functions as a colonizing, ubiquitously learned, and variegated rhetorical practice of subordination and domination that, as a frame of analysis, offers a more fluid and accurate perspective than identity categories provide for discussions of oppression, social justice, and democratic engagement.
ContributorsHoliday, Judy (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The position of Dean of Women was created in response to novel exigencies rising from women’s acceptance to coeducational institutions of higher learning in the late nineteenth century. While these early women administrators had a profound impact on women’s higher education in the United States, their work has received relatively little attention. In response to this discriminatory erasure, this dissertation applies feminist historiographical approaches and qualitative methods that center these women and their rhetoric within the historical narrative. In particular, this dissertation explores, synthesizes, and analyzes the archived rhetorical documents produced by the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) and Evelyn Jones Kirmse, an early University of Arizona dean of women, between 1922 and 1942. By privileging the rhetoric of these women and positioning them as authorities of their own experience within hegemonically masculine coeducational systems and administrations, this dissertation brings to light their own theories, debates, and arguments concerning how to best make room for women in higher education professionally, physically, and intellectually.
While positing the complexity and efficacy of their rhetoric, this dissertation also marks critical ideological negotiations within the deans’ arguments in response to socio-cultural shifts and opportunities born of the Progressive Era. By locating paradoxical navigations of traditional essentialist values and burgeoning progressive ideas within the deans’ rhetoric, this dissertation provides an important illustration of the awkward stage of growth within feminism’s development. It provides insight to deans of women’s own rhetorical explorations on how their identity and success should be constructed, attained, and measured in the new academic territory of coeducation.
ContributorsPrice-McKell, Cheryl (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K (Committee member) / Ratcliffe, Krista (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022