Maitra and Richards: Reconfiguring Feminist Agency through Rhetorical Performance

In “The Questions of Identity and Agency,” Keya Maitra acknowledges that while her primary aim in this text is to identify implications of a mindful approach to feminism without borders, she hopes that the type of feminist self-consciousness for which she is advocating may be useful for other kinds of feminism as well (362). Thus, it seems useful to test that hope by thinking of Richards’ account of historical and contemporary Iron Ladies in terms of the agency and feminist self-consciousness that may exist as part of this particular rhetorical performance.

The notion that “an iron lady can move herself in and out of complicity with these hegemonic structures” (Richards 5) suggests that the iron lady is a potential site of agency for women leaders. While Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign would fairly certainly fall within the scope of the “mainstream Western feminist discourses” (Maitra 361) with which Mohanty takes issue, Richards’ multiple examples of iron ladies across the world (and in particular, their connectedness and constant comparison to each other) suggests that the iron lady is a subject position through which women leaders can “develop a perspective of self that not only acknowledges its own constitutive dependence on its given intersectionalities, but that is also aware of its own grounding in such” (Maitra 361).

While it seems fairly clear from Richards’ article that the iron lady can be a means of gaining agency and access to the male-dominated political arena, it is less clear whether inhabiting the iron lady moniker necessarily constitutes an act of mindfulness. Richards points to examples of women who very purposefully sought out that trope, but others who utilized it after the nickname had been given (and still others for whom the nickname has only been attributed posthumously). For the women who consciously sought out the iron lady name or embraced it once it was given, there appear to be some connections between this creation of the iron lady self and Maitra’s description of mindfulness. If both the “essential entity of self and the materialist notion of self as nothing but the body are denied” in the mindful approach (Maitra 363), then the cyborg, and the Iron Lady in particular, seem to fulfill, at least in part, both requirements. Even as Richards points out that the cyborg can be homogenizing, she maintains that the cyborg self is fragmented, consisting of partial identities, and resists unification. In addition, Richards’ examples describe ways that Iron Ladies like Queen Elizabeth and Benazir Bhutto transcended their female bodies to present a self that was more than the body. For Elizabeth, this was done through language, by replacing parts of her biologically female body with those of a king in order to become hybrid. For Bhutto, this meant using technology to subvert her own biology by manipulating her childbirth so as not to “encourage any stereotypes that pregnancy interferes with performance” (qtd. in Richards 11).

Maitra claims that “self-consciousness is the location for a woman’s self-reflective, self-altering opportunities” (368); taken this way, the iron lady as enacted by leaders like Clinton may be a source of self-consciousness. As Richards points out, Clinton’s campaign sought out the iron lady name, and Clinton’s actions in response to the claims that she wasn’t iron lady enough could be read as self-altering in the sense that she was engaged in what Richards refers to as a “politics of becoming” (17). With her identity always partial and in flux, Clinton “allowed [her] gendered performances to fluctuate for each temporal situation, in order to confront and attempt to take control of the given rhetorical situation (ibid).

Ultimately, though, I don’t know if the feminist self-consciousness theory entirely holds up in Richards’ examples because, as she rightly points out, some of the iron ladies she identifies are complicit in maintaining patriarchal order and the masculine political status quo. Thus, it becomes unclear whether the iron lady trope can be a source for feminist self-consciousness and an opportunity for agency, or whether (at least as deployed by Clinton et al.) it is merely part of the machine. For me, the most pertinent question remains whether self-consciousness can be attained when one is caught in the double bind Richards describes. Given that Clinton’s attempts to enact her cyborg identity were read as “mere political maneuvering and not the natural fluctuating identity that we all experience,” the potential for true feminist agency and self-consciousness seems less than robust. Does the iron lady trope “result in an empowered sense of agency [and] open up an expanded range of choices,” (Maitra 362), or do female leaders remain limited to two choices: inhabit the iron lady trope (and cease to be a “pleasant” woman) or resist the Iron Lady trope (and be seen as unfit to lead)?

Transcending Feminine Oppression

In her article Cyborgs on the World Stage, Rebecca S. Richards sets up a complex, multifaceted argument for the necessity of using all available means to advance their cause. She uses the example of the nickname “iron lady” used to describe Margaret Thatcher during her term as Prime Minister. The term became ubiquitous with a capable female leader who was able to transcend human weakness. In order to appropriately grapple with this assertion and the implications it carried, I found it necessary to investigate Haraway’s cyborg ontology myself. My reading of this piece allowed me to form a new perspective on femininity in the politics sphere- one that accounted for “cracked glass celling” that Hillary Clinton could never quite break through. Haraway provided me with a uniquely useful set of vocabulary that helped me understand Richards’s complex feminist narrative. The term posthuman, though not expressly named, is coined in Haraway’s piece and is useful in understanding the space that female heads of state attempt to occupy. This location manifests into the “iron lady” nickname, which denotes a mixing of femininity with masculine militarism and capability. Haraway also gives us the term cyborg, defining it as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (Haraway). This term is akin to the posthuman label in that it signifies a border space between two fixed identities.

Keya Maitra struggles with issues of generalizing identity and deferring individuality in favor of the “hegemony of discursive methods” in her article The Question of Identity and Agency in Feminism without Borders (Maitra 362). She also suggests an attractive connection between feminism and Buddhist mindfulness. “My goal here is to develop the notion of feminist agency as fully as possible by using feminism without borders as its most direct location” (Maitra 362). The primary focus here is the construction of identity and agency as they relate to feminism, yet Maitra expresses them through a new reading of Buddhism. Buddhism hinges on viewing oneself in a non-essentialized way that allows the spirit to be liberated from social constraints and singularity of view. Maitra relates the Buddhist sense of mindfulness toward the desired state of being to the plight of feminism- positing a connection between mindful thought and transformative experience. 

 Maitra’s work can be connected to the way Richards attempts to reconfigure the performative nature of gender tropes and the ‘iron lady’ title as it relates to politics and feminism. Richards wants us to understand that this naming tope does not flatten women into a homogenized unit, rather it can be used to “conceal from the public the entrance of women into positions as of heads of state; it functions invisibly through metaphorical flattery, for what could be more gracious and welcoming to a woman leader than to giver her a nickname that ostensibly credits her for, simultaneously, her femininity and for her steely resolve” (Richards 4). By this logic Richards seems to be urging women to embrace the misconceptions of naming and use whatever means available to enter into roles of power. Similarly Maitra advocates for an active approach to dispelling false consciousness and combatting the restraints of a masculine world.

Both women are more concerned with demonstrating that oppression is an inevitability of life and an unfortunate circumstance of femininity. Rather than professing the inhumanity of this condition it is more worthwhile to embrace any means of overcoming it. Maitra invites women to embrace, “the cultivation of a mode of engagement that is non-judging, fully present, open, free of habitual reactivities, and above all compassionate” (Maitra 365). In order to bring about new attitudes in the world it is first necessary to alter our own attitudes, there needs to be a conscious break in the “conditioned patterns of responses before new ranges of response become available and viable” (Strong qtd in Maitra). Both authors advocate for embracing the hybrid nature of the self in order to achieve self-awareness and autonomy.

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. 

Making a Deal with the Patriarchal Devil: Cybernetic Feminism on the Global Stage

Richards’ analysis of cyborg identities on the global political stage helped illustrate just how broadly we can construe the cyborg ontology. Even though the theory was precipitated by the 20^th Century proliferation of computers, Haraway points to how humanity has blended with our technologies—something that began when we first developed writing systems. But Richards isn’t directly concerned with technology as much as she’s concerned with how our political systems

have been a) instantiated by technology, b) imbued with power dynamics, and c) privileged male power. Thus, American presidential politics represents patriarchal technology as it has shunned the body and vaunted a cult of masculinity; subsequently, when women enter into this realm, they must become cybernetic, adopting the cultural scripts of technological patriarchal politics, fulfilling the trope of the “iron lady,” a term that simultaneously evokes the machines of war and a feminized body. However, where this gets complicated is the fact that this isn’t a zero-sum game—a female politician isn’t required to evoke this trope, as much as she has the autonomy to exercise this trope at will depending upon the rhetorical situation. This, of course, can have positive and negative consequences—female leaders are required to maintain fractured identities and held to a mythical male standard of a unified, solitary identity. But ultimately, Richards is hopeful that the use of cyborg identity by female bodies can be liberating and empowering. In a sense, the cyborg identity allows cybernetic individuals more liberty to act both within and against the system—seeing how the incorporation of the dominant discourse can ultimately be beneficial for the cause of feminism. Put succinctly, the cyborg feminist must make a deal with the patriarchal devil in order to defeat him.

We see this deployment of cybernetic feminism in Kuehl’s article on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR is a document that was approved by the United Nations and a division of the UN is devoted to investigating human rights violations—meaning that a lot of the discourse on human rights has been instantiated by masculinist political technologies, and as such has mitigated the importance of bodies and the social rights of individuals, critiques of the document that Kuehl mentions. But, Keuhl’s overarching goal is to show how the document might actually be working within a feminist paradigm. For one, Eleanor Roosevelt—an iron lady in her own right—was influential in the creation of the document. But what Keuhl ultimately focuses on is how the social rights of individuals are framed in the metaphors of procreation and family—metaphors that seems much more focused on the biological, despite being housed in a “technological” context. We see this cybernetic juxtaposition in the second stanza of the UDHC that contrasts the “barbarous acts” of the early twentieth century (conducted via masculine political technologies) with the overarching goal of “the advent of a world” that abhors such atrocity (172). This advent of the world represents the feminist liberatory goal of the UDHC that is couched in a biological metaphor in stark juxtaposition to masculine atrocity. Keuhl also points to the subordinate metaphor of the “Human Family” as another biological metaphor that is operating within this international logic, re-framing the nations of the world as engaged in more than just civic relationships. Keuhl reminds us “People do not belong to a family because of rational thought, but instead, because of ethnic ties, [or] blood relations…”; bringing in the idea of family pushes us beyond the cold mechanisms of politics and gets us to biology. In that way, we are seeing how both technological and biological discousres are at play on the global stage, illustrating the cybernetic frame put forth by Richards in her analysis of the Iron Lady trope.

Not JUST a Woman: a Cyborg

            In her article, I believe Richards posits that women who have successfully achieved political power today have done so by, in some way, emphasizing their ability to be more than "just a woman" - rather, these women in political power have proven that, in some ways, they can use technology to somehow liberate themselves from their female bodies and maintain qualities which are, today, thought of as more "masculine." (Richards 4).

            What, though, is the reconfiguration of feminism that Richards posits? Keya Maitra, I believe, informs us of this answer by noting Sandra Bartky's development of feminist consciousness. Feminist consciousness is a woman's understand that "the entire structure of socioeconomic and cultural systems ... work[s] toward women's oppression." Thus, feminist consciousness is a "consciousness of victimization" that seeks the "possibilities of change, transformation, and eventually liberation." (Maitra 367).

            Maitra attempts to reconfigure the feminist consciousness by advocating for a change in the way we view the oppression of women: rather than viewing women's oppression as a group, Maitra claims that we should be open to understanding the cultural differences that lead to each individual woman's oppression. (Maitra 368).

            Richards offers another tactic. Rather than reconfiguring the feminist consciousness by more thoroughly understanding individualized oppression, or even on the oppression of women itself, Richards offers a new focus: women's abilities, through technology, to act as a "cyborg": that is, to overcome the limitations of our female bodies when necessary to promote a facade of strength. (Richards 10). For example, Richards notes the chant in Liberia of "Ellen--she's our man," and extrapolates that "this woman president cannot be just a woman, but must transcend biologically determined sex and culturally constructed gender to become a cyborg that can shape and shift gender for the given rhetorical situation."

            Richards notes numerous times that Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan did an excellent job expressing the "cyborg" personality by planning a C-section after her due date to minimize the times she was "incapacitated" in the political opposition's eyes. (Richards 13).

            Richards posits that, in order to achieve politically, women must embody this "cyborg" mentality and gender-shift when necessary to show both traditional feminine emotion and empathy and traditional masculine strength and power. One explicit example of this is Richards' analysis of why Segolene Royal of France lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in the fall election; Royal "appears to perform a rejection/ignorance of the iron lady that has traditionally broken the glass ceilings of other countries." (Richards 12). Because Royal failed to show her ability to be a "cyborg" and display a "manlier" side evoking power, Richards believes she did not win in the election: "Much of the criticism around Royal after her defeat centered on how France could have accepted an iron lady into the 'old boy's club' of French presidents, but not a sexually attractive mother or a Socialist in Stilettos." (Richards 13).

            Thus, I believe that, by focusing on how women can overcome oppression, as opposed to focusing on how women become aware of their oppression, as did Maitra, Richards offers a new reconfiguration of feminism.

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