Dr. Katherine HeenanEnglish 472Spring 2007April 5, 2007Bizzell, Patricia. "Opportunities for Feminist Research in the Histories of Rhetoric." Rhetoric Review 11:1 (Autumn 1992): 50-58.a call-to-action for research on women and rhetoricDuring her work (with Herzberg) on the first edition of The Rhetorical Tradition, Bizzell discovered that, to a large extent, the existing research on rhetoric “represented a single, very traditional ‘rhetorical tradition,’ which pretty much excluded women, people of color, and anyone without an elite education” (50)while acknowledging that more revisionist work is now going on, Bizzell argues here for “neededresearch on women and rhetoric, although this category crosses those of race and social class in interesting ways”(Bizzell 50)she then “outlines” three possible ways such research might proceed, noting in each case various potential objections to the methodologies she promotes:1. the first approach, one she borrows from Judith Fetterley’s 1978 The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Here Fetterley offers a methodology for reading texts produced my men with a male reader in mind. Because, she argues, male authors presumed for centuries their readers all were male, female readers unconsciously have to forget they are female and to read as if they were men. This is theonly way one could follow the overt and covert assumptions that make the literature operate. To be a resisting reader, women must fight that transformation and detect the ways in which the text's constructions of its world reflect assumptions about gender, itself, as well as reproduction, marriage, careers, and many other things in a culture which may be identified by the gender of their participants.Because the traditional rhetorical canon “is so unrelentingly white, elite male,” Bizzell suggest the resisting reader can notice aspects of the canonical texts that a reader isn’t supposed to notice and resist the view of reality the work seems to want to purvey.Objections: such an approach does nothing to dismantle the existing canon or power structures, but, Bizzell notes, such readings are beneficial because they call attention to what’s inadequate and/or oppressive in canonical texts, and can be used to critique the traditional canon—she cites Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists (1991) and Swearingen’s Rhetoric and Irony (1991) as examples of this kind of scholarship.the second approach Bizzell advocates is to look for women who have done work similarto that found in the traditional canon and to frame arguments for inserting women into the traditional history—Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak For Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, Volume 1 (1989) Objections: as with the first, such an approach does nothing to dismantle the existingcanon or power structures—it instead requires submitting to traditional standards of whatrhetoric is and what a rhetorician ought to do, but, Bizzell argues, discovering more women rhetors is important, especially given the small number of existing materials 2. Bizzell’s third approach is to look in places not previously studied for work by women that would not have traditionally be considered rhetoric and to frame arguments for redefining the entire traditional notion of rhetoric—that is, to look for issues rather than for names of individuals: abolition, temperance, suffrage to name a few In closing, Bizzell notes the 3 approaches she’s outlined are not necessarily distinct approaches—that they blend into one another—but that there is such a need for more work on women and rhetoric that we ought not “allow ourselves to be stymied by theoretical quibbles” (57)—is she referring here to Biesecker’s critique of Campbell?She also notes her examples have all come from before the 20th century, but that she thinks feminist approaches to research in rhetoric can be applied to the presentGlenn, Cheryl. “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric.” CCC 45:2 (May 1994): 180-99.Glenn is "restorying" the Classical rhetorical tradition to include silenced women like Aspasia through historiography, feminism, and gender studies.Also trying to insert a very different portrait of Aspasia—not as concubine and harem slut but as an articulate and influential colleague of famous men, the life-long companion of Pericles, and an exceptional woman asserting herself in a culture that made little space for women to speak (194)Glenn writes that for “the past 2500 years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an encloses life (domestic confinement). Little wonder than that women have been closed out ofthe rhetorical tradition, a tradition of vocal, virile, public—and therefore privileged—men” (180).argues that “in challenging the dominant stories of the West, feminist scholars are challenging the contemporary academic and cultural seen as well” (181).As part of this feminist challenge to the history of rhetoric, Glenn wants to “reconstruct and refigure a woman whose texts, life, and manuscripts have been annexed by men: Aspasia of Miletus”