Feminist Methods at work

Since we seem to be on a feminist kick this week, I want to use this post to discuss how I saw specifically feminist methodologies come to work in Royster and Queen’s essays.  Although I enjoyed the goal of the Royster piece, I had a couple problems with it and I want to identify where I questioned her argument by putting it in conversation with some key points I saw in Queen’s. Specifically, I want to discuss the ideas of transparency, intersectionality, and construction/negotiation of power.   In their own way, both projects seem to be important for their potential to spread information, promote civic engagement, and evaluate/change the representations of people involved in their projects. And reading these texts together made me even more aware of how important it is to reevaluate (based on the three concepts I mentioned) and incorporate self-reflexivity into my own projects.

 Queen refers to Nedra Reynolds’s point that teachers must “attend to the [various] negotiations of power that take place across and within a number of spaces” (474).  And while Queen expands Reynolds’  (and others’) conception of “space” and “networks” to the term “field,” I still think that this use of “fields” looks toward the various power dynamics and social, cultural, historical, ideological (and many more) forces that shape the way in which we encounter interactions (whether they are in person, or textual or digital). What this term does allow, though, is for a broader discussion of rhetorical action and power relations that results from our interactions in both concrete texts (print) as well as digital texts, which continuously evolve. In Roster’s case, the billboards for loveLife present a socially constructed text that is largely unchanging. And while the message is admirable (to inform people about HIV), the audience does not seem to be taken into account. I guess what I mean is that while Royster states that the billboard campaign “bring[s] visibility, definition, and meaning [to problems and actions related to sexual health],” (157) I see this overpowering the voice of African people affected by HIV.  Admittedly, the billboard does make sexual health problems more visible, but whose place is it to define the problems here? Shouldn’t the voices of South African people (those actually affected) be involved?  To be sure, Royster does not have a stake in what these billboards advertise, but I do think it’s important that she seems to ignore that the audience/subjects of the billboards (in my opinion) seem largely disengaged or disempowered.  I’m not sure this is a fair interpretation, but my main point is that while Royster begins her essay talking about the intersectionality (or the how social, educational, political, economic forces come together) of dealing with HIV, I imagined that she would also be concerned with how those various factors are (or are not) represented within the campaign. And it didn’t seem to me that they were discussed.

 By looking to “rhetorical genealogy,” Queen emphasizes the need to “uncover…the structuring of meaning” as well as discover which “particular representations and interpretations gain validity and power” (476).  Emphasizing the “decolonization of self” in those who are doing rhetorical genealogies, Queen alludes to the idea of a transparent and self-reflexive approach.  Additionally, Queen alludes to transparency in her final sentence she states that “We must make visible the ways in which all our knowledge is mediated…and how profoundly that knowledge shapes, but also can be changed by our encounters with others, down the block and across the globe” (486).  I see Queen using this as an approach to counter the differences between one-thirds world and two-thirds world technologies and constraints. By making “visible” and acknowledging the many ways in which “knowledge is mediated,” she asks for transparency in a project. This does not automatically make her project better but I think that it allows for change in representations of power. On the other hand, one of the things of I found disturbing in Royster’s piece was how little transparency there was in the people involved. When you go on the website, there is an entire section on the Board of Directors and the “Organizational Structure” of loveLife http://www.lovelife.org.za/about/structure.php , but what I found most interesting was the lack of emphasis on actual people affected by HIV as well as the reasoning behind this. The organization looks more like a company selling products than an organization devoted to civic engagement.  Even if the goal is to spread information, I would think it important to include the people affected. Otherwise, I can only think of the billboard as a means to “speak for” these people and this situation. I admit that this is possibly because of the medium of billboards.

I hope this post isn’t taken as a negative against loveLife since I really don’t know enough about it. However, the important feminist aspects in Queen’s piece were not as apparent to me in Royster's—and, whether she wants it to be “feminist” or not, I think transparency, intersectionality and construction/negotiation of power  are crucial to her article.