My Philosophy of Rhetoric

What does it mean to study communication and gender through a rhetorical/philosophy of communication lens? I think the first thing I have to do to answer this question is to define what I think the rhetoric/philosophy of communication phrase means.

Earlier I offered the following definition: "By using language both effectively and persuasively communication scholars praxically explore the relations and intersections between contemporary arguments, positions, philosophical concerns, and the study of communication itself in an effort to provide a place for those interests which challenge the current assumptions of the discipline (theory building)."

Wow. That is a confusing piece of phrasing that I did in the above definition. Basically, I think that to study from a rhetorical/philosophical standpoint is to study the article, event, object, person, etc... in an all encompassing way. To study an article from this perspective, you must look at the time the piece was written in because no one can be a-historical. The author is, for good or ill, a product of their times and culture.

Because of the impossibility of being a-historical, we can factor the author's time period and its events into determining several things. These include the author's frame of reference (personal history), their understanding of social constructions and the material world, discourse of the age, and how all of the preceding information affected their ontology and epistemology.

All of these things are determined during the analysis of what the article is actually saying about the topic and how the author says it. And to top it all off, we can take all of the information that we've gathered, throw it in a martini shaker (if we adhere to Burke), and pour out a brand new piece of theory! This is a process that will never end.

And how does this relate to gender and communication? It's quite interesting to ponder actually. Because isn't communication all encompassing as well? Can we ever make a gesture or say a word or blink in confusion or just to get a gnat out of our eyes without communicating a message to someone, even if it is only to ourselves? I don't think that's it could be possible not to communicate.

And as for gender...well, think back over the articles that we've read. Haven't many of them tried to say that gender is another all encompassing force? Even the articles that have advocated for the dissolution of gender completely have done so from the perspective that gender is too much of a focus on the wrong aspects of our lives.

From an epistemological standpoint (how we know what we know) the rhetorical/philosophical study of gender is especially interesting. Of course, epistemology is closely tied to ontology (our way of being) because how we are in the world will necessarily effect how we come to know how we are in the world as well as what we know of the world.

How do we know what we do about gender? Approaching this question from a rhetorical/philosophical standpoint, we know what we do because we are able to analyze the traditional ways that gender has functioned as well as how it functions now. We are able to see (or more accurately, we are able to hypothesize) what social constructs are influenced by and influence our genders. We can examine if, culturally, there are more than two genders. We can explore if gender is tied to sex (the biology or the act itself) and if so, to what extent.

In short, because the rhetorical/philosophical perspective is so encompassing, it is the perfect vehicle or lens through which to study gender and communication.