It still feels strange to me that an academic book really can just be an introduction, several chapters of illustrative case studies, and then a conclusion. I don’t have a particular reason to think this is wrong except for an internal and definitely misguided sense that every book must make big arguments about the nature of the universe.
My partner and I are also having an ongoing discussion about materialism and its relationship with discourse, so I’m excited to read the materialist rhetoric articles cited here!
Quotes I Marked
(p.2) “That is, while cases of gender ambiguity were ‘talked about’ in ways that encouraged an undermining or questioning of the very notion of ‘aberration’ as related to sexuality and gender, bi-gender normativity was for the most part underlined and reemphasized. Significantly, one finds assumed (and not necessarily spoken) within these discourses a series of binary roles and behaviors which ultimately constitute the very notions of male and female, masculinity and femininity, hetero- and homosexual.”
(p.12) This is quoting from someone named Evans- “Once we know that a ‘real woman’ is a cultural fiction rather than an ontological birthright, have we thereby….reduced at all the rewards of continuing to be feminine in ways that society will recognize and approve?” (No)
(p.15) Longer passage about how because of medical gatekeeping, trans people need to present themselves as normatively gendered, and have social pressure to continue doing so after they get access to (XYZ). “A ___ trapped in a ___’s body” still implies that the first ___ has some essential characteristics. Which is different from being able to say “I would like to take testosterone” and being allowed to for no other reason than you’re an adult and you want to. (Even if some people genuinely do feel the first way.)
(p.7) “Here, Hale suggests that people who are [cis] should feel encouraged to write about [trans people] provided they do so in terms of investigating what the public discourse about [transness] tells us about culturla ideologies concerning gender and sexuality rather than what it tells about [trans] identity (which, Hale argues, should be left to [trans people] to investigate).” Everything in brackets is just stuff I changed to update the language
(p.18) “First, critical rhetoric places its focus on doxastic rather than epistemic knowledge. That is, rather than being concerned with knowledge of the essence of objects (e.g., the ‘truth’ about sex) or philosophical discussions about meanings, critical rhetoric is concerned with public argument and public understandings about these objects.” Rhetoric is about an emic perspective!
(p.19) “As Foucault’s work and assumptions were disseminated…almost every aspect of identity and politics was slowly subsumed under the study of discourse. In the most general sense, one of the vital implications of this observation is that those interested in political change came to think more in terms of slow rhetorical transition than in terms of overnight revolution. Lasting change is always a slow process, if only because it requires changes in meaning, and such changes are intergenerational rather than intrapersonal. In Raymond Williams’s terms, meaningful revolutions are by necessity long revolutions.”
(p.20-22)- on Greene (see “Sources to Look Up”), the materiality of discourse, and how reverse discourses and counterpublics always emerge from the dominant discourses, so they’re limited from the start. Unclear if Sloop is critiquing this or not.
(p.23) “While those in multivocal communities and academics ‘in the know’ might be able to look at these as cases of transgression and liberation [like the John/Joan case and Brandon Teena], those without community as Alfred Kielwasser and Michelle Wolf have pointed out in their discussion of televised representations of adolescent homosexuality, are most at risk precisely because the images they see of themselves are disciplined in advance by a hegemonic understanding that ‘holds them in place,’ judging them. When the only [trans] model one has was killed for ‘deception,’ one has understood [transness] only through the way it is policed.”
Sources To Look Up
Michael McGee, 1982, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric”
Ronald Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric”