The Rhetorics of Feminism by Lynne Pearce

Author:Lynne Pearce [Pearce, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780415281829
Google: tcCDqLXipZcC
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2004-01-15T05:46:49+00:00

4 Thinking through the body — or not

This chapter investigates the way in which feminist writers have used conceptual frameworks to generate and develop ideas. In terms of book or thesis production, the text's literal framework — often in the form of a chapter outline — is normally arrived at before the central hypotheses and/or related lines of argument, although it should, ultimately, be intricately bound up with them. It may also, of course, constitute the first step towards a central hypothesis inasmuch as it is the moment the author strives to discover a structure, context or taxonomy for what may be thought of, broadly, as their ‘subject of enquiry’.

The fact, then, that this structure ‘appears’ to us as a metaphor, or set of metonymically linked concepts, is not at all surprising. Metaphor, as discussed in the Preface to this section of the book, is the rhetorical mechanism that most conspicuously enables thought-production. While, in classical rhetoric, the ‘discovery of arguments’ was seen to begin with the formulation of propositions or hypotheses, twentieth-century scholars have recognized that it is the ‘collision’ of two, previously unrelated, concepts or conceptual systems, that more often marks the birth of a new idea: the ‘big bang’ account of knowledge, as it were. In metaphorical thinking, as we have already established, one kind of thing is used to understand or experience another that is often quite absurdly ‘other’ (e.g. ‘Contemporary theory is a can of worms’), while in metonymic thought one entity is used to refer to another that is related to it (e.g. ‘The nude has taken over contemporary art’).1 While Lakoff and Johnson imply that metaphor is the more radical trope conceptually (it works to ‘explain’ one concept in terms of another, rather than merely substitute for it) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 35), it is clear that both have the potential to generate and organize ideas and are hence invaluable to all those of us struggling to give order, coherence and embodiment to abstract thought.

The extreme usefulness of metaphor in the construction of analytic frameworks was first raised to a conscious level in my own work with the writing of Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Pearce 1997). Struggling to find a means of uniting three of my old essays on reading and reception with my more recent interest in the emotional dimension of the reading process, I hit upon (by sheer chance), Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1977). This wonderful text provided me not just with a fabu-lously suggestive metaphor — ‘reading as romance’ — but a ready-made, exhaustive taxonomy of emotion in all its great subtlety and variety. The effect of the collision of these two systems was extraordinary and served to take me inside the processes of reading in ways that, would have been literally ‘unthinkable’ before.

Not all books or theses aspire to such conceptual coherence, of course, but in the Humanities and Social Sciences there is normally evidence of an attempt to produce some symmetry, sequence or conceptual mirroring in the list of contents.

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