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.
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.
Fabulous response here -- indeed, rhetoric is a difficult thing to define because, as we'll see throughout this course, it's definition(s) shifted throughout history based upon various social, cultural, philosophical, and political factors. You mention rhetoric quite extensively in literature and in art, can you think of other current avenues where rhetoric plays a significant role in women's lives (equality of pay in the workplace? Male doctors deciding about health issues pertaining to women? Etc. etc.)
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