Getting beyond the "Iron Lady" Trope

I asked each of you to find a reconfiguration in today’s readings, and in that spirit, I’ll try to enact one of my own. It's a bit claim-driven and argumentative, but that's because I’m at the humble and awkward beginning stages of a book project that conjoins rhetoric, irony, and transnational feminism. In that book project, I absolutely echo the efforts of scholars like Richards, Maitra and Kuehl (and Tripp, and Shome, and Hegde ...) by recognizing that, if we do not situate transnational studies at the intersection of conscious awareness and subconscious circulation, then we may continue to promote notions of rhetorical agency or historical identity that are incompatible with the systems in which women need to increase their political standing.

As a result, I'm interested in any global rhetorical methodology or critical practice that raises our awareness of how women “formulate choices” (Maitra, 2013, p. 361). Formulating choices, in turn, needs “to be articulated through a level of feminist self-consciousness that provides the location of feminist consciousness” (p. 361). I find that critical irony helps point to this "location" and helps promote this self-consciousness more effectively than other global mindsets. This is because those other mindsets often assume that third-world feminists have an inadequate self-consciousness or that third-world women are automatically robbed of their historical and political agency.

What stands out to me concretely from today’s set of readings is the importance of replacing (or finding alternatives to) these mindsets so as to overcome what Maitra calls a “monolithic view of [rhetorical] agency” where oppressed “sisters” are given objectified status (2013, p. 366), and to overcome models for representation that are single-dimensional, unidirectional discursive phenomenon “located purely in the Western feminist experience, subjectivity, and consciousness” (p. 366). I see value in turning our attention to the space between what we observe or remember about women’s political identifications and the ways in which we historicize those observations and remembrances. In other words, I’m quite interested in noticing how certain discourses are used to establish hierarchies, when we are the ones using them. Irony – when we understand it as a "discursive event" – makes these hierarchies more visible.

As Kendall Phillips and Mitchell Reyes write in their project on Global Memoryscapes, “[r]hetorical claims are grounded in our collective remembrance of a shared past in such a way that each claim both recalls and reformulates that past” (2011, p. 1). One particular rhetorical claim that I find myself working against – one obvious trope that reflects remembrances of a shared past – is that of the “iron lady,” and this is why it keeps resurfacing in my work. 

We have seen Richards argues quite well that the “iron lady” nickname provides an accurate and complicated instantiation of Donna Haraway’s cyborg ontology in the writings of women leaders on the world stage (2011, p. 2), and I agree that it provides insight from a western framework into how women figures have emerged into roles of leadership as a result of global saturation. I do like her use of the “double bind” metaphor.

Yet it is this very same notion of the iron lady trope as a “double bind” that causes me to want to disrupt the trope as a tool for historicization, and particularly for historicization of pan-African women, a cultural/regional group I have been studying as of late.

I especially think “iron lady” can reveal some of the weaknesses and inadequacies of how feminist critics in the West do rhetorical analysis on African women’s texts for three reasons: (1) First, the trope colonizes by assuming a normative label that was first given to figures who inherited a familial political standing or who led states that were rich in cultural privilege (D. Leonard, 2005); (2) Second, the trope directs attention to women’s performances according to how well they overcome the outsider status to demonstrate themselves as insiders, or how they resolve the tension between belonging and not belonging, when this may not be their principal strategy or goal; and (3) Third, the trope might organize women’s diplomatic performances by linking them to certain ideas of statehood, citizenship, or decolonization (R. Shome, 1996) that may be too narrow or inadequate to account for the fraught contexts in which they work.

These limitations, in turn, undermine historians’ efforts to contend with how women can lead effectively in contexts where political allegiances are complex and familial inheritances unclear. For example, how can stateless women lead? How can women lead when there is no concrete nation, or when a nation’s borders are being contested? How would we valuate the rhetorical performances of women leaders who are discursively marked?

More importantly, I think these limitations undermine historians’ efforts to understand how new rhetorical models can emerge out of new ways of remembering when women leaders participate in networked contexts, where Kock and Villadsen say “diverse cultures increasingly seek access and acceptance in [each other’s] modern democracies” (2012).

If we have observed anything this semester, it is that the writing of rhetorical histories is multivocal and transideological. In my own work, then, because they have historically occupied liminal spaces, African women’s performances might require a critical lens that emerges more from alterity, transience, political asylum, and diaspora, and less from nationalist tendencies (Shome and Hegde, 2010; A. Tripp, 2003).

In sum, I’m working on getting “beyond” this iron lady trope, in spite of its usefulness as a rhetorical tool. And that is my “reconfiguration” for this evening.

I absolutely welcome questions, feedback, puzzlement, skepticism, and etc. This is all a work in progress,

-Dr. Graban