Abstract

This study is a rhetorical analysis of the therapeutic narratives articulated by the ecofeminist social movement employing Jurgen Habermas's model of therapeutic critique. While historical, sociological, or dramatistic approaches to the study of social movement rhetoric document the beginning phases and goals of social movements, these methods have not examined how the moment of inception originates given the conditions of false consciousness and systematic distortions of communication described by Habermas. Therapeutic critique provides an inventional framework to examine discourse that is prior to political activism of social movements. ;The purpose of this research is threefold: to provide a close textual reading of ecofeminist narratives thus adding to our understanding of hybrid genres, theories of invention, and social knowledge; second, to use ecofeminist discourse as test case for Jurgen Habermas's model of therapeutic critique that purports to explore the connection between utopian contents of narratives, oppressive social conditions, and public communication; and third to study the potential of social movements' narratives to reinfuse inventional resources to a discourse community, a critical rhetorical concept missing from Habermas's conception of therapeutic critique. ;My findings indicate ecofeminism is an unusual social movement. First, it is a hybrid of environmental and feminist social movements that articulates a cultural grammar of equity, community and diversity, reciprocity, and responsibility. Ecofeminist therapeutic narratives recover alternatives histories of human society absent a premise of domination, a history of feminisms as culminating in ecofeminism, and selfhood as developed in relationship, rather than in conflict, with external nature. Three paradoxes result from ecofeminism's internalizing different voices of feminism and environmentalism, paradoxes that make the movement self sustaining. This quality distinguishes ecofeminism from confrontational social movements. Ecofeminist discourse also holds implications Habermas's theory of knowledge-constitutive interests, especially the technical-cognitive interest. I claim that his model of therapeutic critique might benefit from a rhetorical lexicon that includes notions of rhetorical invention, enthymematic argument, and narrative as political performance