Eminent Rhetoric

Fay examines the unacknowledged political uses of language in modern culture that engender and effectuate power imbalances among speakers and listeners. She locates six strategies in which women are particularly targeted by politicized rhetoric and shows how they are used in a variety of language-informed social arenas. Using bell hooks' pedagogy of talking back, Eminent Rhetoric argues that women need not only to learn how to recognize victimizing rhetoric, but also to start to challenge it and its rhetors. Women must be shown how the everyday language of politicians, educators, and newscasters is not natural but is marked--designed for manipulative purposes that put women at risk.