Abstract

From the sophists to the contemporary uses of Kenneth Burke, rhetoric has been theorized without reference to a body marked by sexual difference. That is, something called 'the body' has been implicated in rhetoric, but that body either has been based on a male model or has been sexually undifferentiated. This dissertation investigates the way the rational subject of discourse has been figured in Rhetorical Studies as a disembodied masculine subject who speaks without reference to his corporeal substance. The text follows a deconstructive protocol for reading, supplementing that protocol with a feminized Foucault. It begins with a reading of the late 20th-century Rhetorical Studies literature for the purpose of demonstrating that rhetorical theory and criticism, even when informed by a feminist analysis, is indebted to the same binaries that structure philosophical discourse: masculine/feminine, reason/emotion, theory/practice. It then moves to a reading of Kenneth Burke, who until quite recently, was the only 20th-century theorist to take the body seriously, arguing that Burke's body may be mapped directly onto nature in a nature/culture split. From there, the dissertation moves to the work of Luce Irigaray in order to make the case that bodies are cultural through and through and that her critique of philosophy offers a way to critique Rhetorical Studies' resistance to feminist theory and criticism. Finally, in the last chapter, the dissertation calls for rethinking identification as the 'master' term for Rhetorical Studies and for imagining a speaking subject whose lived body is feminine