Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

by Krista Ratcliffe

Winner, Rhetorical Society of America Book Award, 2007

Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award, 2007

Winner, Gary A. Olson Award for Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, 2006

Extending the feminist rhetorical project to define and model rhetorical listening
Long-ignored within rhetoric and composition studies, listening has returned to the disciplinary radar. Rhetorical Identification, Gender, Whiteness argues that rhetorical listening facilitates conscious identifications needed for cross-cultural communication. Krista Ratcliffe establishes eavesdropping, listening metonymically, and listening pedagogically as approaches to rhetorical listening. She defines and models rhetorical listening, addressing identifications with gender and whiteness within public debates, scholarship, and pedagogy. Offering an approach grounded in classical rhetorical theory, Heideggerian theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory, Ratcliffe presents rhetorical listening as an invention tactic that engages spoken and written texts and supplements reading, writing, speaking, and silence as a rhetorical art. Theorizing intersections of gender and whiteness, Rhetorical Listening examines how whiteness functions as an "invisible" racial category and provides disciplinary and cultural reasons for the displacement of listening and for the use of rhetorical listening as a code of cross-cultural conduct. Ratcliffe presents rhetorical listening in terms of cultural logics, stances, and dominant interpretive tropes. She highlights the modern identification theory of Kenneth Burke and the postmodern identification and disidentification theory of Diana Fuss and presents nonidentification as a more productive site for rhetorical listening.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Theory, Academic, Teaching

248 pages, Paperback

First published December 19, 2005

Reviews

[Jolivette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ratcliffe defines rhetorical listening as "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture, rhetorical listening may be employed in many different contexts for many different purposes" and that it is a heuristic for negotiating "troubled identifications with gender and whiteness in public debates, scholarly research, and classroom pedagogy" (xiii).

What I appreciate most about Ratcliffe's book is the structure of positing her term rhetorical listening and then focusing her argument throughout her book on what this term may encompass. I also appreciate her effort to "map more theoretical terrain and provide more pragmatic tactics for peaceful, cross-cultural negotiation and coalition building" in rhetoric and composition (72). Research in cross-cultural rhetorics and praxis in rhet comp is one of my own interests.

The introductory section has a very useful lit-review type discussion laying out key terms such as identification (Freud, Burke), Dis-identification (Diana Fuss, Butler), and a third "position" she proposes: non-identification - a space of reflection that enables listening to others' arguments, across commonalities and differences, and fosters interdependency.

This being a rhetorical study (with lesson plans added in the appendix for the composition focus), the communicative relationship focuses on address - specifically cross-cultural address and even more specifically, I gathered failed addresses (What Ratcliffe class "dysfunctional silences") between a primarily "white" audience (Ratcliffe's readership) and a "non-white" interlocutor, whatever individual or collective form that may take. I know this is not Ratcliffe's intent and that she writes from a position that jumps off of Jackie Jones Royster's essay "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." But what seemed hugely missing from Ratcliffe's argument was an evaluation of how structure factors into cross-cultural dialogue and "listening." She poses how personal agency is created through rhetorical listening, but power is created or limited within structures - linguistic, social, political, etc. For example, the nation-state is a structure that sets the terms for who may legally and effectively communicate, privileging national citizens vs. aliens; heteropatriarchy is another structure. Ratcliffe's elision of how structure factors into how one may claim personal agency is most evidenct in her discussion of dis-identificatory moves, or what she sees as an immobilizing pre-occupation with differences, as influenced mostly by Fuss.

What I propose is missing from Ratcliffe's theory is how people disidentify with the structure of the debate or communicative realm to begin with. And this is what Ratcliffe's argument builds upon as an unstated belief, the conditions for what constitutes enunciations and listening. Sometimes disidentification is the most powerful method through which oppositional claims and coalition building can be made amongst people of multiple racial, class, gender and sexuality positions, when women and men disidentify from the terms (structure) of the debate(as are the cases that Jose Esteban Munoz describes in his Disidentification .

The question I came away after reading Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, and Whiteness is: Can you employ rhetorical listening for fostering cross-culturall communication, even if the message is not directed to you?

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Rhetorical Listening (2005), Krista Ratcliffe builds a theory of rhetorical listening — "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural settings" (1), "a trope for interpretive invention" (17) — as a way of understanding why some people do not listen and how we might listen more productively to cross-cultural texts and in cross-cultural interactions. Following Burke that identification precedes persuasion, Ratcliffe argues that "rhetorical listening may precede conscious identifications" (19). She sees rhetorical listening as a way to understand "with intent," a way of "standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others" (28). This also allows for listening for the cultural logics behind someone's claims, but not identifying those logics necessarily with the speaker/writer.

Ratcliffe proposes three inventive strategies for rhetorical listening: 1) listening metonymically (the act of listening to public discourse and identifying a text with a cultural group; an associative identification, not a representative one) (78); 2) eavesdropping (listening to all sides of an argument, including one's onw, and not overstepping boundaries or impeding agency) (106); 3) listening pedagogical (the moves students and teachers can make to recognize resistance, analyze it, and resist that resistance if necessary) (133).

[Nanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book because it helped me reflect on difficult issues of identification, race, and gender that we're all experiencing in our current moment and strategize ways to discuss them. While Ratcliffe didn't pretend to erase the difficulties, she acknowledged the challenge for everyone and provided tools for negotiating these challenges in my mind, in the classroom, and in society at large. She does a great job of recognizing and analyzing cultural logics and unpacking tropes. The tools Ratcliffe provides are practical, if at first hard to grasp--tools like listening metonymically, eavesdropping, and listening pedagogically. By the end of the book Ratcliffe has educated her reader such that s/he can understand what Ratcliffe is talking about--much like the evolution in being able to articulate our dis/comforts, dis/associations, resistances, etc. on these sensitive topics--it's a gradual understanding that washes over the reader until I felt comfortable with Ratcliffe's terms and analysis. The last chapter focuses on pedagogical applications of Ratcliffe's theories and provides case studies I hope to use in my own classrooms. She even includes teaching materials for writing about gender and whiteness.

[Erika · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book, in part for it's thoughtful revisioning of the split between Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly, and how Second Wave feminism might better have survived the difficulties it faced in trying to overcome the dominance of the movement by white, middle class women. It might seem simple now, but the idea of listening rather than speaking then--when we'd been fighting so hard for our voices for so long--just didn't seem viable. Ratcliffe shows us that we were wrong.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this book. Want to steal it from our university library but I won't. I'll save up my book money and buy a copy as I know it's one I want in my own library. Excellent resources at the end on teaching materials for writing about gender and whiteness.

[Lizzie Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

VERY interesting, but very academic, and not very fun to review.