Sisterhood and Social Change

The concept of social change can be examined in relation to its context, participants and audience, the particular procedures that occur in order to reach certain goals. This week’s readings seemed to target some, of these features while also providing a definition of rhetoric and its function. Maurice Charland elaborates his definition by suggesting that we should rethink our conception of rhetorical theory considering critical and cultural theory. Specifically, “rhetoric produces new social knowledge as it offers public interpretations of social experience and proceeds to make normative claims … rhetoric [then] forms prescriptives and fosters ethical judgment, not in terms of what is, but in terms of what should be” (466). This kind of rhetorical theory would benefit from emphasizing on movements that aim for some kind of social reform. The example I used in my last entry falls under this category.

Since it’s been a while, I’ll provide a brief reminder. My first time visiting La Casita Cultural Center was motivated by a panel discussion on “Messages of Sisterhood,” which brought together several feminists from different backgrounds (academic, artist, and a local social activist) to talk about their different projects and how these could be united to promote some kind of “sisterhood.” In other words, they are an ideal illustration of what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell calls an oxymoron, the rhetoric of women’s liberation. The reason for calling it an oxymoron, according to Campbell, is that “it is a genre without a rhetor, a rhetoric in search of an audience, that transforms traditional argumentation into confrontation, that ‘persuades’ by ‘violating the reality structure’ but that presumes a consubstantiality so radical that it permits the most intimate of identifications” (406). Here she is pointing to the lack of an established leader for the movement, valuing individual experience over a clear collective ethos, as well as the tactics adopted by self-proclaimed feminists in order to create some kind of unity. In the panel discussion this was definitely the case, as they all put forth different stories. However, there was a sense of hierarchy in the order of their participation, allowing renowned feminist scholar, Chandra Mohanty, to speak first, and longer, than the other two. This might have been caused by a sense of respect to those who were pioneering the movement in a matriarchal sense.

Whatever their agenda, though, each of the speakers seemed to be “inducing acceptance of a specific program or commitment to group action” (Campbell 400). Campbell also establishes another goal of the women’s liberation movement “consciousness raising [which] requires that the personal be transcended by moving toward the structural, that the individual be transcended by moving toward the political” (404). These two statements encapsulate the aims of social change; group action for consciousness rising and political reform. Hence, there is, after all, a sense of collectivity. In “The ‘Ideograph’ A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Calvin McGee argues that the truth of symbolist actions lies in the claim to “see a legitimate social reality in a vocabulary of complex, high-order abstractions that refer to and invoke a sense of ‘the people’” (435). Following this notion, then, the messages that were shared, with their distinct set of vocabularies and accents, still portrayed a sense of “the sisters.” This is explained further by Campbell, who notes that:

 

Feminists believe that sharing personal experience is liberating, i.e. raises consciousness, because all women, whatever their differences in age, education, income, etc., share a common condition, a radical form of ‘consubstantiality’ that is the genesis of the peculiar kind of identification they call ‘sisterhood’” (Campbell 404).

 

Trying to juxtapose Campbell’s description of the women’s liberation movement with the panel discussion titled “Messages of Sisterhood” has allowed me to explore the similarities of our perceptions of movements with aspirations of social change. Using McGee’s concept of the ideograph may provide a deeper understanding of how these concepts have been established, considering the historical development of the notion of “sisterhood,” and the particular contexts in which these “ideologies” are taken up.