Rhetoricians of Antiquity -- Sappho and Aspasia

For this week's posting, my professor has asked my class to discuss and compare the aforementioned female rhetoricians. I find myself hesitant and I struggle with the topic. The idea that the work of these two women barely survived only to be retained in fragments or kept alive through other's words inhibits my ability to compare them. What I know of Sappho especially seems to be written through biased lenses. Regardless of the translation, her poems tend to deal with interpersonal love on the whole whereas Aspasia's one surviving speech has a political focus. However, they both describe love profoundly. One writes of it in regards to other people and to the beauty around her, whereas the other writes of love in regard to the city of Athens and its beauty and nobility.
Another idea that plagues me deals with the lack of credit society gave these women. I know that some people out there might say, "But some considered Sappho the tenth muse!" or "Plato kept Aspasia's speech alive!" I argue that, flattering as it was, they received superficial credit. Few citizens of their country and their day looked and them and though that if these two women could be such rhetorical masters after claiming an education that maybe other women could as well. Instead, as Marie Delcourt points out, as quoted in Cheryl Glenn's "Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric," "It was all too amazing to be proper; and Aspasia was so brilliant she could not possibly be respectable." As we learned in class from reading Barbara Biesecker's "Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women Into the History of Rhetoric," Aspasia's situation represents the very idea of female tokenism. Society found it distasteful a woman should be so educated, despite the men who flocked to her for knowledge. Her esteem did nothing to raise up the women around her either. Sappho and Aspasia seem more than other women, rather than being average women given a chance at education.

Week 2 -- Tariq Ramadan's Rhetoric on Islam and Feminism

While Feminism in the States still has significance and relevance to modern society, I yet find myself distracted by Feminism in other cultures across the globe. I had hoped to take International Women's Studies last semester but a lack of sufficient enrollment resulted in cancellation of the class. When the opportunity to view an oral presentation and discuss the importance of the speech to women's issues arose, go figure the title of Tariq Ramadan's keynote speech at one of the Salzburg Global Seminars caught my attention: "Tariq Ramadan on Islamic Feminism and Women's Leadership."
The religion of Islam and women's status in Islamic nations and cultures has long held my curiosity, but due to time constraints I have yet had the freedom to research it. Now, I have a starting point from which to further inform myself of the religion itself as well as interpretations of it. Ramadan, a Professor of Contemporary Islamic Issues at Oxford University, has published several books on Islam and its place in the modern world. These facts coupled with his eloquence in speaking as well as his presence at the Salzburg Seminars gives him a great sense of credibility. Additionally, he speaks with an authority on the issue, conveying well to his audience his personal ties to the subject.
In his discussion of Islam, he points out that as Muslims have moved to different countries such as Europe, where he was raised, and the states, they begin to see the differences between culture and religion. Much of the fundamentalist teachings, he states, result more from the culture of Islam's origin rather than deriving from religious texts. In this way, he reaches out to his audience by speaking globally and by explaining variations and evolutions in a way that non-Muslims can understand.
His power of persuasion relies upon his credibility, his ability to connect with his audience and in the way he explains this transitory period in the Islamic faith. "We are in a transitory period, and we have to understand that it is to be a very long process." This quote in particular appeals to my knowledge of my own culture's transition in its view of women. I think some of my North American counterparts are quick to frustration in regards to other countries and their culture or religion; they quickly assess them with an ethnocentric view and think of them as backward or evil and don't stop to realize that some of those behaviors or attitudes are not so far behind in our own nation's history. Even today, some women in the U.S. must endure unequal pay or a lack of opportunities due to stereotypes, religious influence, and cultural stigmas. We have to recognize that other countries need to go through some of the same steps our country went through of their own volition. Ramadan's speech clues us in to the fact that Islamic culture has begun its transition and we should respect from our own experience how long that may take.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do--YdH-888

Week 1 Response -- Define Rhetoric

 Hello all!

I've created this blog as a requirement for my Women and Gender Studies 310 class; however, I am excited at the opportunity to manage my first blog and hope that it becomes a hobby I can pursue, requirement or not. 

So for this week's posting, my professor has asked my classmates and myself to define rhetoric in our own words. We're also supposed to think of modern day examples of rhetoric which has constrained or empowered women. First of all, I'm not a real literature guru. I love reading and analyzing texts but before this class, "rhetoric" lacked tangible meaning for me. I hear the word frequently around campus, but failed to discover a concrete definition. Though I now understand rhetoric includes a diverse range of media used to convey a message to a specific audience, I initially thought rhetoric constituted writing and language alone. Instead, the word usually conjured an image inside my head: that of a politician or religious figure (usually male) bellowing their ideas forth from behind some kind of altar or platform. I never thought of philosophy or art. Now that I open my mind to it, I think of Frida Kahlo and her wildly organic, intensely personal, and emotionally riveting paintings. I also think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wall-paper." At the time I read and re-read it I thought it to be simply an interesting story attacking the masculinity of medicine in her time. Now I can see how she used her own condition to convey to other women that their struggle to be "cured" failed not because of their lacking, but the lacking of their male doctors to validate their right to speak. Probably less well-known would be the artists in the group Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls create flyers, t-shirts, books and the like to push support for female artists and their right to be showcased equally with male artists in art museums. Their efforts parallel those attempting to get female rhetoricians read alongside male rhetoricians like the authors of our textbook "Available Means." My favorite example of Guerrilla Girls' paintings criticizes the Venice Biennale for keeping works of female artists in the basement by depicting a woman on all fours beneath a man. The painting reads, "Where are women artists of Venice? Beneath the men." Their art empowers women by not only attacking museums that discriminate against female artists, but by encouraging women to allow their oppression to inspire them instead of defeating them.