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November 11, 2006
Goodbye Gerald...
Gerald Levert, an unforgettable R&B singer is gone. No details, just this brief news report. Your beautiful voice will be missed by many.
Posted by dvaldesd at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2006
Mayweather vs. Baldomir
Well, by now you know that Baldomir, despite being the predicted winner of the bout, lost in a big way. Mayweather won the fight, but really did not "fight". What he did manage to do was keep his distance from Baldomir long enough to win on points. Blah. Dull. That what this fight was. I will never pay to see him fight again. Yeah, he is the "pound for pound" best fight in his class, but so what? People want to see him fight, not run. So, the fight was pretty uneventful, but the real news was a sleeper by the name of Paul Williams. This guy is a tall, lean, punching machine. He performance was (almost!) worth the $50 I spent to see the main event. He is a welterweight, and definitely on the way up. I think we'll be seeing a lot of this young contender in the future.
Here are "The Punisher's" stats: WBA No. 11, IBF No. 15 at 147 pounds 07/27/81 Augusta, GA 27-0-0 19 KOs
Posted by dvaldesd at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2006
Ladies First
Storming the Castle: Disruptive Rhetoric as Authorization
Rhetoric, according to Aristotle, is the counterpart of dialectic. While dialectical methods and processes are necessary to acquire knowledge (or in his interpretation, truth), rhetorical methods are required to communicate it. When we observe the ways in which rhetoric has been employed throughout history, the absence of female rhetors becomes evident. While the argument can be made that there were a few women rhetors whose work has been recovered and recognized, there are fewer still that did not require the validation or interpretation of their words by their male counterparts. In this paper I propose to examine the ways in which female rhetors were/are granted authorization to speak for themselves, and how those rhetorical devices acted upon their audiences. In attempting to examine female rhetors of the past and those within the present, it is my intention to juxtapose Hortensia and Gloria Anzaldua in a way that will demonstrate the complexities inherent in gaining authorization; then and now.
Gloria Anzaldua was a Chicana feminist that makes no apologies for who she was, the language she spoke, or her sexual orientation. In her seminal text, Borderlands, she chronicles and elucidates her journey from being a Chicana that was unaware that women were even recognized within the linguistic mechanism of her culture, to a scholar that embraced cultural collisions. In her text, she manages to carve out a space for deliberations concerning not only the meaning of marginalization, but also the assimilation and negotiation of it. Her writings encompass issues of gender, sexuality, personhood, and the fragmentation of identity- not just as a woman but as a rhetor as well. In her work we see the way in which she refuses to conform to a male dominated discipline (although I believe this is changing), using linguistic defiance and rhetorical maneuvers beneficial to her emancipation as an authorized voice that needs no male validation. In many ways, she stormed the rhetorical castle of our field, for she was not only a theorist of rhetoric and queer studies, but also a poet, a mestiza, and a very spiritual person. For Anzaldua, writing provided entry points for understanding the injustices perpetrated against her based on her gender and sexuality. She explicates, “The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me”.
Like Anzaldua, Hortensia stormed the metaphorical castle, and with no apologies. While she did not utilize the same rhetorical strategies, she paved the way for future female rhetors. As one of the few educated women during this period (1 B.C.E.), she became the voice of the wealthy women of her time. Like Anzaldua, she created her own space and utilized rhetorical strategies that were unprecedented. Her presence/forced entrance in an all male environment was trumped only by the fact that she arrived with a captive audience ready to champion her cause despite the obvious breech of cultural mores. Hortensia’s rhetorical moves have certainly continued to be emulated even today.
What I find most compelling is the way in which she utilized rhetoric in an authoritative manner to illuminate the very audience that objected to her presence by declaring: Why should we pay taxes when we do not share in the offices, honors, military commands, nor, in short, the government, for which you fight between yourselves with such harmful results? You say 'because it is wartime.' When has there not been war? This level of authorization allowed her to participate in a conversation that she and the other women were purposefully excluded from. Indeed, despite the difference in eras, Hortensia and Anzaldua have several rhetorical things in common:
· They use their own words/no one else speaks for them
· The defend women (this is how they develop their ethos)
· They discuss the separations created among people by those in power (Hortensia bet. men & women and Anzaldua bet. Cultures)
· The both disrupt the power structures
· They both engage in transgressions: Hortensia by walking into the public meeting and Anzaldua by writing in languages not understood by those in power.
I would like to engage in an analysis of these two female rhetors with particular focus on how their cultures acted upon them as rhetors-not solely as a Latina and Roman, but as women from different eras that remain connected through rhetorical strategies because of gender politics. Some of the questions that I would like to address are:
· Was Anzaldua authorized to speak/write in the way that she did?
· Was Hortensia?
· Can we classify Hortensia as a theorist of her time?
· How do these two female rhetors intersect?
· How have rhetorical strategies for women changed since Ancient Greece?
· What about their audiences? How did the rhetoric of these women act upon them?
I plan to utilize two types of sources for this project: texts written by the authors (although I realize that with Hortensia this may be an issue), and criticism written about their theoretical contributions to the field. As this is a research project that involves some recovery, I also plan to make an attempt at acquiring some archived material about Anzaldua from the University of Texas. This should prove to be fruitful, as my understanding is they have notebooks (treatise’s if you will) written by Anzaldua that remain unpublished. This will allow me to work within the framework of authentic authorization. That is, words that have not been edited from any outside source/s.
As our field continues to establish a history that includes women, I hope this project will afford me the opportunity to see how the connection to the past manifests itself in the present. While female orators like Hortensia continue to be recovered, there is much work to be done in understanding the different and similar ways that we, as women, engage in rhetorical practices and why we still struggle to be seen as well as heard.
Posted by dvaldesd at 01:45 AM | Comments (0)