After many, many ideas for how we wanted to visually represent our discourse analysis of Bella Abzug’s Plenary Address at the Fourth World Conference on Women, delivered September 1995 in Beijing, Jessi and I settled on one that we think helps to represent the complex relationships between language, action, and culture. We wanted to demonstrate the ways in which language can be used to inspire action and produce culture. To that end, we were largely inspired in our analysis by Foucault who asserts that discourse is a form of action, rather than a conveyor of pre-existing meaning: “…we must call into question our will to truth, restore discourse its character as an event, and finally throw off the sovereignty of the signifier” (1470). For Foucault, language constructs knowledge and that knowledge shapes reality. Our representation then, moves through three planes (language, action, and culture) to show the ways in which the language that Abzug uses in her address constitute actions that, in turn, shape cultural ideologies. The three dimensional nature of our representation also allows for showing how culture, too, can influence language. While I realize that our representation is limited—the relationship between language, action, and culture is perhaps more disjointed and nonlinear that our representations suggests—I do think that our representation helps me to see two different ways in which resistance can be enacted through discourse: utilizing tropes and fostering consensus.
Abzug’s address simultaneously operates as a call to action and a means of shaping reality, but her discourse, too, is restricted in certain ways. Foucault explains that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality” (1461). However, as Muckelbauer suggests, Foucault’s theories do not necessarily preclude resistance. Resistance might just take a different form (73). In order to resist this kind of control, Abzug works within the existing power structures by employing tropes and other figures of speech that allow her to challenge the system while inside of it. In this way, she employs a kind of “Signifyin(g).” Gates explains, “Signifyin(g) is a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony” as well as others (1557). Through the use of these tropes, meaning “is not proffered; it is deferred because the relationship between intent and meaning, between the speech act and its comprehension, is skewed by the figures of rhetoric or signification” (1558). While Gates argues that Signifyin(g) is the black “trope of tropes,” and is therefore, limited when applied to non-black rhetorical discourse, it does offer a useful strategy for other marginalized populations to resist dominant power structures. Abzug, for instance, in speaking about the importance of women’s rights, employs repetition, metaphors, and subversively used gendered verbs as a way of using language as a form of resistance. One particularly salient example is her use of progressive repetitions, such as “From kitchen tables to peace tables women propose to turn the tables on the status quo” (Abzug). The repetition of “tables” allows her to show the progression of women from a space that is traditionally feminine domestic—the kitchen—to a space of action and resistance. Similarly, by using gendered language like “birth,” “wedded,” “craft,” and others, she’s deferring the words original meaning and imbibing them with action. In a way, using the “masters’ tools” against them.
Finally, I was also really drawn to the idea of consensus as a means of resistance. I acknowledge that this seems counterintuitive—and perhaps it flies in the face of McGee’s seeking a more nuanced explanation of “the people,” than a unified body. However, McGee writes that the myths and beliefs that people have “function as a means of providing social unity and collective identity. Indeed, ‘the people’ are the social and political myths they accept” (247). I think at the moment of Abzug’s plenary address, “the people” needed to find social unity and collective identity; that was one of the functions of the Beijing Platform for Action. It was a way to build consensus among women that would better enable them to resist dominant ideologies and construct a culture of women’s rights. Her language unites not only women, but also unites the needs of women with parts of the larger culture to which the majority of people already agree. For example, the idea of “democracy” is already a part of the American culture and with it is tied the concepts of freedom, equality, and opportunity. So, when she connects women’s rights to democracy, she invites her audience to see that the same freedom, equality, and opportunity are not a part of the status quo for women. In this way, she can use consensus as one was of resisting by working within the power structures already in place.
Works Cited
Abzug, Bella. Fourth World Conference on Women, United Nations/NGO Forum On Women,12 Sept. 1995, Beijing, China. Plenary Speech.
Foucalt, Michael. “From The Order of Discourse.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from
Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg,
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 1460-1470.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “From The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g):
Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from
Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg,
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 1551-1580.
McGee, Michael C. “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative.” The Quarterly Journal of
Speech, vol. 61, no. 3, Nov. 1975, pp. 235-249.
Muckelbauer, John. “On Reading Differently: Through Foucault’s Resistance.” College English,
vol. 63, no. 1, Sept. 2000, pp. 71-94.
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