Wingrove, Elizabeth. (2016). blah Blah WOMEN Blah Blah EQUALITY Blah Blah DIFFERENCE. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 49(4), 408-419.

Summary:

Wingrove argues, within a Rancièrean perspective, that women’s ‘dissensus’ or assertions of injustice are tied and muted by a grammatical and historical police order.

Keywords: feminism, feminist rhetorics, feminist theory, rhetoric, writing studies

Quotations:

“[W]omen’s enactments of equality might remain so encased in the “blah blah blahs” of the gender order that their ability to disrupt the dogged certainties of patriarchal ideology remains forever diminished” (p. 409).

“The consequence, ultimately, is that within the Rancièrean framework, feminist ‘dissensus’ must remain muted, not by the unintelligibility (always potentially productive) of women’s ‘noise’ but by the challenge of ‘putting two worlds in one and the same world’… when both worlds are already lived, signed, and fabricated through the stuff of gender and the differences it presumes and reproduces. It is precisely this intertwining of worlds that risks emasculating feminist assertions of wrong, because we’ve already heard it all before: we’ve always lived in that world” (p. 417).