Reconfigurations & Recontextualizations: Two Different Approaches to Feminist Rhetorical Study

Richards’s reconfigurations work in several ways—she does both an examination of the iron lady nickname and a reconfiguration of Haraway’s cyborg theory. Richards’s process is to “trace historically the emergence and transference of [the iron lady] nickname to various female heads of state” (2). She begins by situating herself as a researcher as “a disappointed Clinton supporter located at a university in the U.S. southwest;” acknowledging her own stance in this way follow traditional feminist research practice (3). Where Richards is arguing about a specific metaphor and its affordances and constraints for female leaders, Kuehl’s work is more of a close reading that recontextualizes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to see how it fulfills global feminist rhetoric. Both authors work within existing feminist paradigms, but where Richards’s work is more of an extension and continuation of Haraway’s theories, Kuehl’s work uses the paradigm as a lens that shapes her reading of the text, revealing the text’s metaphorical alignments with feminist theory.

Richards argues that the “naming trope attempts to conceal from the public the entrance of women into positions as of heads of state; it functions invisibility through metaphorical flattery” (3). Her central thesis examines the difficulties that arise from association with the iron lady nickname; she notes the difficulties of hybridity, claiming that “the rhetorical performance of Clinton’s iron lady identity demonstrates how Haraway’s cyborg identity can both trap women within the real, lived contradictions of identity and also obscure difference” (20). Female leaders can benefit from being perceived as the iron lady, but it is not without its negative externalities. Richards notes that the key difference between Clinton and Bhutto and Thatcher, Charles, and Sirleaf a matter of how “these two women performed their iron lady identities as cyborgs in a politics of becoming” (17). By reading the actions of these leader and their adoption or dismissal of the metaphor as an embodiment of cyborg theory, Richards is able to ground a rhetorical theory in actual events as well provide substantial grounding for her analysis of Clinton.

In contrast, Kuehl is performing a recontextualization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; she argues that “the social rights have more importance in the text than most global citizenship scholarship has recognized” (168). Her thesis is that “it does privilege social rights through its language which relies on procreation metaphors to build global citizens through human relationshops that warrant the recognition of human rights, suggesting a move toward a feminist rhetorical theory of global citizenship” ( Kuehl 168). Her close reading serves as a reconfiguration of paradigms in that it shows a different interpretation of the UDHR than what it had previously been viewed as—and this interpretation fits within a larger ideology of global feminism. (She is careful not to flatten the text, or global feminism with these claims, however.) Kuehl’s essay concludes by claiming that “the CHR successfully embraced social rights rhetorically, and how they made these rights of linchpin to recognizing all human rights” (177).

I think that Richards work does more to reconfigure feminist paradigms—her use of multiple leaders around the world and the way she extends Haraway’s ideas feels more like a reconfiguration than Kuehl’s rereading of the UHDR as “cultivating a sense of belonging” (177). Putting their work into conversation with each other illustrates different practices for feminist work in addition to illuminating how each reworks existing paradigms.