The rhetoric of feminism: reading and writing women's experience from Oprah to composition classrooms

Abstract

Oprah's Book Club offers an important venue for studying prominent rhetorical modes and literacy practices in mass media for how these modes translate political gendered issues into personal experience. This dissertation studies the feminist rhetorical work of Oprah's Book Club and argues for reading strategies in writing pedagogy that integrate personal experience into ongoing cultural debates. Using Steven Mailloux's cultural rhetorical approach shaded with feminism, chapters two and three argue that Winfrey's strategic essentialism reinforces certain reading practices and social roles for women through her emphasis on feminine ways of knowing. Chapter two extrapolates the effects of televised reading and applies Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's formulation of consciousness-raising as rhetorical genre of women's liberation to argue that Winfrey's mediated version of the genre construes a limited, apolitical reading practice. Applying recent arguments that link epideictic rhetoric with social change, I argue in chapter three that Winfrey's encomia create a mediated community that opens space for cultural critique of social values but also constrain such critique by emphasizing feminine epistemological responses. Chapter four examines Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory and argues that given Winfrey's rhetorical moves, the cultural context, and the rhetoric of the text, the novel invites readers to consider propositions about parenting circulating in popular culture. Thus, Winfrey's site may be propaedeutic to feminism by producing viewers more receptive to feminist arguments that address specific social and political policy. In light of these implications of mediated experience, chapter five argues for writing pedagogy that teaches rhetorical reading skills to develop in students a rhetorical conscience-an awareness of their responsibility for engaging in social, public, and academic writing communities. Subsequently, these strategies help students put personal experience into the cultural context of ongoing debate. These strategies within a pedagogy that fosters social justice develops feminism's most crucial premise¿a premise missing in much mediated feminism and literacy in popular culture¿that individual and social change is not only desirable but also possible if students are willing to engage in the conversation.