10 Principles of Embodied Rhetorics
Meghan A Sweeney
Learning Objectives
By the end of the chapter, you will be able to
- Describe the key concepts of embodied rhetorics
- write a reflective analysis that explains the role of embodied rhetoric in a piece
Rhetoric sometimes has a negative connotation, like when someone says, “Oh, that’s just rhetoric!” or, “They are using rhetoric.” When people use rhetoric as a pejorative, they usually actually mean “empty rhetoric”: words that are being used with no intention of change behind them. Or they are words that are being used to manipulate others, with the words not actually telling the truth, only meant to persuade, deceive, or manipulate.
Rhetoric has a much deeper meaning, one that can open a writer up to opportunities for identification with others (Burke); one that promotes a stance of openness for listening to any person, text, or culture (Ratcliffe); and one that encourages writers to “foreground bodily diversity” so they can write for “accessibility and inclusivity” (Cedillo). In other words, rhetoric is not empty words or political promises. It is a moment shared between humans that affects them, both writer and reader.
Rhetoric as Identification
Kenneth Burke marks a first key movement away from rhetoric as only persuasion. In Burke’s definition of rhetoric, we first identify division (for without division there would be no need for rhetoric) and through identification, we have the invitation to rhetoric. Through rhetoric, we induce people to action by identifying your ways with theirs.
Rhetorical Listening
Several decades later, Krista Ratcliffe’s practice of rhetorical listening extended Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric as identification. Rhetorical listening “signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” (17). Her goal is to foster understanding among intersecting identifications of gender and race, by making the act of listening an overt rhetorical act, and an invention tool.
Critical Rhetorical Embodiment
Christina Cedillo challenges rhetoric further to center critical embodiment. Cedillo’s work challenges previous understandings of rhetoric as they rely on “normate standards” that erase “bodily diversity,” with intersectionality of race, disability, and gender demanding instead inclusive, accessible ways of making and sharing knowledge. Cedillo’s rhetoric opens up spaces for complicated, inequitable processes of identification (power dynamics missing from Burke’s definition). Cedillo also complicates Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening by adding an additional intersecting identification of disability.
Cedillo’s important work allows rhetorical analysis and writing to not just being a process of identifying the most effective way to make an argument or to analyze the effectiveness of someone else’s argument. Instead, it opens up a space for rhetorical analysis to be also an exploration of how the body is rhetorical.
Below is an example of a rhetorical analysis using critical embodiment.
Senator Tammy Duckworth’s Embodied Rhetoric Changes the Baby Ban on the Senate Floor
Ruth Osario in “REWRITING MATERNAL BODIES ON THE SENATE FLOOR: Tammy Duckworth’s Embodied Rhetorics of Intersectional Motherhood” provides a useful example of how embodied rhetorics can be used to offer another dimension to our analyses.
Osario examines an important moment in Senate history, after Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill) gave birth on April 9 in 2018. The Senate rules state that infants under the age of 1 are banned from the Senate floor. No senators in the past had given birth during their time as Senator, so this rule had continued for centuries without challenge.
Senator Duckworth challenged the rule because she wanted to vote. At first, male Senators suggested she vote from the cloakroom with her baby. However, because she uses a wheelchair, she couldn’t fit into the cloakroom, which was not wheelchair accessible: “Duckworth’s disability actually prevented her from being hidden away in the Senate cloakroom, and it supported her argument to allow infants on the Senate floor. Yet again, Duckworth’s embodied needs—the need for a wheelchair-accessible space wherein she could vote and hold her newborn—shaped the delivery of her argument” (153).
Because they could not put her in the cloakroom, the Senate voted unanimously to roll this rule back, allowing Duckworth to participate in governing, opening the door for more maternal bodies, and setting “the stage for more maternal bodies of color to join the leadership ranks” (153).
Osario contends that Duckworth’s and Bowlsbey’s (her child’s) bodies together on the Senate floor sparked collective knowledge making about maternal bodies, work, governance, and disability. Senator Tammy Duckworth is the first Asian American woman elected to Senate with double amputations and the first senator to give birth while in office (Osario). Her identity as a disabled veteran, mother, and person of color filters through her political rhetoric as she advocates for healthcare and foreign policy. It also frames how others understand and interpret her rhetoric—as her race, gender, and disability create an “embodied presence on the Senate floor” (Osorio 144).
To rhetorically analyze Duckworth’s arguments, Osario examines Duckworth’s embodied knowledge as a disabled woman, a nursing mother, and a woman of color: how does this knowledge that is derived from this lived experience affect her argumentative strategies? “For embodied rhetorics, an intersectional analysis prompts us to acknowledge that rhetors embody a multitude of identities, and that complex matrixes of identities and power shape the available means of persuasion” (Osario 145-6).
As part of that analysis, Osario contends that we must analyze Duckworth’s body as in constellation with other bodies, as in relation to other working mothers of color, disabled mothers. What she finds through her analysis is that Duckworth’s presence on the Senate floor to vote prompted arguments around the need for postpartum care for working parents, complicated typically whitewashed narratives about the working mother, and unsettled assumptions about breastfeeding, ultimately allowing Duckworth to change the Senate rule that babies under the age of 1 could not be on the Senate floor.
This analysis by Osario shows that rhetoric is not just disembodied words that we can analyze without consideration of the embodied speaker, their lived experience, and how their lived experience shapes their argument, its delivery, and its reception by the readers or listeners.
Video 10.1. Tammy Duckworth’s infant makes history in Senate chamber by CBS Mornings (View time 2:57)
In the space below, reflect on how the body complicates the rhetorical analysis you are currently drafting. Try to use 100 words or more.
Reflection on Critical Embodiment
Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Univ of California Press, 1969.
Cedillo, Christina V. “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy.” Composition Forum. Vol. 39. Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition, 2018.
Osario, Ruth. “Rewriting Maternal Bodies on the Senate Floor: Tammy Duckworth’s Embodied Rhetorics of Intersectional Motherhood.” In Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice. Eds. Moeller, Marie E., and A. Abby Knoblauch.Utah State University Press, 2022. 143-160.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. SIU Press, 2005.
