Producing Identities: Gender Problematization and Feminist Argumentation.

Feminist argumentation studies have frequently been limited in significant ways because of tendencies to reify gender stereotypes. There is a propensity in many rhetorical studies devoted to "women's" argumentation to assume that men and women are essentially one way or another because of biological factors, socialization processes, or usually a combination of the two (Campbell, 1973, 1989; Foss and Griffin, 1992, 1995; Dow and Tonn, 1993; Tonn, 1996). These rhetorical studies dealing with "feminist argumentation" have predominantly been of three types: "archival" studies that reveal how important female rhetors have been relatively ignored by "traditional" rhetorical scholarship (Campbell, 1989, 1991), studies distinguishing "patriarchal" and "feminist" argumentation characteristics (Foss and Griffin, 1992, 1995), and studies dealing with "feminine style" (Campbell, 1973; Dow and Tonn, 1993; Tonn, 1996). Rhetorical theory, concerned as it is with public influence, is intimately concerned with the argumentation process, and this essay seeks to explore the way in which feminist argumentation is articulated in these contemporary rhetorical studies. While these studies have played an important role in unmasking unquestioned presuppositions within the field of rhetorical studies, I would like to suggest that these three types of feminist critique tend to reify gender stereotypes more than problematize them, and that a more productive notion of feminist argumentation can be found by synthesizing feminist insights from other studies in a variety of fields. This essay, then, will begin by briefly tracing the development of these three forms of rhetorical studies in order to clarify the theories of feminist argumentation that inform them. These forms have played a pivotal role in furthering the interests of women and working on the limits of what is considered acceptable within the field. But it is also the case that the essentializing tendencies in these forms of rhetorical studies indeed, to use Campbell's (1973) famous phrase, tend to make "feminism" and pervasive forms of "argumentation" oxymoronic. That is, what is "essential" in "feminine style" is fundamentally non-argumentative inasmuch as "feminist" argumentation is seen as being different in kind from aggressive, "patriarchal" argumentation. Next, I will show how scholars outside of these particular research traditions have pointed to a way of understanding feminist argumentation that avoids the reification of gender stereotypes and leads instead to a different way of thinking about argumentation. Over the last three decades feminist theory has progressively moved away from the relatively simplistic notion that "patriarchy" stands for coercive and constraining forces and that "feminism" stands for nurturing and capacity generating forces residing within language systems. Identity theorists have moved instead toward the notion that language systems are both constraining and enabling (Foucault, 1983b; Butler, 1990; Simons, 1995). Furthermore, identity politics in general have recently been problematized by critics who point out various shortcomings in both "naive essentialisms" and certain brands of deconstructive responses to such essentialisms (Adams, 1989; Briskin, 1990; Bailey, 1993; Bruner, 1996). The culmination of this theoretical and critical trajectory leads in part to what I argue is an ethics of identity and a feminist argumentation strategy called limit work.(1) Limit work is the perpetual analysis of the limits of subjectivity in order to distinguish enabling constraints from constraining limitations (Simons, p. 22). Ultimately, this essay argues that feminist argumentation is not oxymoronic, that dichotomizing argumentation into "patriarchal" and "feminine" characteristics disempowers and unnecessarily constrains feminisms, that "feminine style" reifies gender stereotypes, and that the theoretical perspectives of Mary Adams (1989), Judith Butler (1990), Michel Foucault (1977, 1984), and Jon Simons (1995) can be combined to create a notion of feminist argumentation that transgresses the limits revealed by the important essays critiqued in the following section. …