Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (Pitt Comp Literacy Culture)

Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (Pitt Comp Literacy Culture)

Language: English

Pages: 192

ISBN: 0822961881

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Networking Arguments presents an original study on the use and misuse of global institutional rhetoric and the effects of these practices on women, particularly in developing countries. Using a feminist lens, Rebecca Dingo views the complex networks that rhetoric flows through, globally and nationally, and how it’s often reconfigured to work both for and against women and to maintain existing power structures.

To see how rhetorics travel, Dingo deconstructs the central terminology employed by global institutions—mainstreaming, fitness, and empowerment—and shows how their meanings shift depending on the contexts in which they’re used. She studies programs by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the United States, among others, to view the original policies, then follows the trail of their diffusion and manipulation and the ultimate consequences for individuals.

To analyze transnational rhetorical processes, Dingo builds a theoretical framework by employing concepts of transcoding, ideological traffic, and interarticulation to uncover the intricacies of power relationships at work within networks. She also views transnational capitalism, neoliberal economics, and neocolonial ideologies as primary determinants of policy and arguments over women’s roles in the global economy.

Networking Arguments offers a new method of feminist rhetorical analysis that allows for an increased understanding of global gender policies and encourages strategies to counteract the negative effects they can create.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

policy makers for bringing women’s issues and diverse needs to the center of policy making (Beijing Declaration).1 Because delegates from each of the 189 nations and many representatives from several NGOs presented formal speeches that addressed the unique circumstances of women from that nation or organization, rhetoricians might 1 N ETWORKING A R GUM E NT S consider, for example, who each country sent as a representative and what that representative spoke about. Or perhaps, rhetoricians

policy makers for bringing women’s issues and diverse needs to the center of policy making (Beijing Declaration).1 Because delegates from each of the 189 nations and many representatives from several NGOs presented formal speeches that addressed the unique circumstances of women from that nation or organization, rhetoricians might 1 N ETWORKING A R GUM E NT S consider, for example, who each country sent as a representative and what that representative spoke about. Or perhaps, rhetoricians

female is essential to the success of that search. Therefore, only a new era of international cooperation among Governments and peoples based on a spirit of partnership, an equitable, international social and economic environment, and a radical transformation of the relationship between women and men to one of full and equal partnership will enable the world to meet the challenges of the twenty-Wrst century. (10) To address these issues, the Beijing Platform suggests that women themselves make

above story, Wolfensohn successfully consubstantiates his audience by asking them to imagine that their deepest concerns—those about their family, their physical and economic well-being —are the same as anybody else’s. In doing so, Wolfenshon further transcodes gender mainstreaming to mean making the women of Brazil “normal.” These women have been brought into recognizable citizenship through the process of economic “empowerment” and normalcy. In this example, normalcy functions through the World

Conference of 1994, and its rhetoric of women’s empowerment, was remarkably diVerent from past Population and Development conferences. The 1994 conference, for example, included the voices not only of demographers and economists, who in the past focused on the relationship between fertility and economic growth, but also those of feminist academics and NGO leaders who contributed knowledge about the wide variety of factors that inXuence a woman’s ability to control her fertility and individual

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