Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage

Theory in the Body

Fiona Harris Ramsby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000298956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Through a fusion of narrative and analysis, Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage examines how theater can enact critical discourse analysis and how micro-instances of iniquitous language use have been politically and historically reiterated to oppress and deny equal rights to marginalized groups of people.

Drawing from Aristophanes' rhetorical plays as a template for rhetoric in action, the author poses the stage as a rhetorical site whereby we can observe, see, and feel 20th-century rhetorical theories of the body. Using critical discourse analysis and Judith Butler's theories of the performative body as a methodological and analytical lens, the book explores how a handful of American plays in the latter part of the 20th century—the works of Tony Kushner, Suzan Lori-Parks, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others— use rhetoric in order to perform and challenge marginalizing language about groups that are not offered center stage in public and political spheres.

This innovative study initiates a conversation long overdue between scholars in rhetorical and performance studies; as such, it will be essential reading for academic researchers and graduate students in the areas of rhetorical studies, performance studies, theater studies, and critical discourse analysis.

1 Performing Rhetorical Theory

Let me comply with you in this garb.

—Hamlet

One might even hope. . . [to] take the lead in showing how appreciation and interpretation of performances as unique events can be united with analysis of the underlying rules and regularities which make performances possible and intelligible.

—Dell Hymes, 1975

I walk through an industrial parking lot to a dark theater in West LA on a drizzly autumn night in 2005. The theater is small: 99 seats. A black box. I amble through the tiny, shabby lobby, where vintage-wearing hipsters clutch plastic cups of wine. I buy my own from a girl who doesn’t smile.

As I enter the theater, band members loiter on the stage—a motley crew of glam and post-punk. The bass player wears a Marc Bolan T-shirt. One of them looks like Robert Smith from The Cure, pre-bleeding lipstick. But this Robert Smith subverts that Robert Smith. He twists his shock of black hair into a fake mustache. The bass player laughs.

The entrance to the theater sits at the apex of a right angle where the two walls of the theater meet. The seats, resisting the arrangement of a conventional proscenium space, are arranged in unison with the walls that jut out from the apex. The seats cascade down into the performance space. Audience members thus enter through the apex door and onto the stage, climbing the steep steps up to their seats. Walking through this performer’s domain, I feel as though I am invading a sacred place. A place where performance and reality should not mingle. I feel I’m mixing ontologies.

As the lights darken, a roadie in a grungy T-shirt trudges to the microphone center stage. He looks vaguely feminine. He says with effort in a thick Eastern European accent, “Ladies and gentlemen. Whether you like it or not. . . Hedwig.” A grainy spot-light searches the back of the house behind me and the audience to find Hedwig descending to the stage like an Egyptian queen. Dressed “in a full-length acid washed denim cape inspired by the American flag,” she brushes my knee as she passes (Mitchell and Trask 13). This body, this actor, her cape, makes me shudder.¹ I feel excited, agitated. She is tall and skinny. Her thighs in denim Daisy Dukes push the limits of intelligibility. Her makeup is an inch thick. It evokes the smell of backstage, baby wipes, and cold cream. Its effect is sickly and unnerving. Her eyebrows glitter into menacing arches. She wears a Farrah Fawcett wig, all winged and sprayed. I shudder. Wigs represent a disconcerting facet of performance; they index a subterfuge that is often out of the wearer’s control: hair loss, subjugation. They perform Real.

A cyclorama projects a montage of photographs of the Berlin Wall (Mitchell and Trask 14). Hedwig opens up the cape. On the inside, the audience sees a lining “painted to look like a wall” (13). “Don’t you know me,” Hedwig wails. “I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try and tear me down” (14).

Hedwig opens the show with “Tear Me Down,” a hard-rock anthem that stings with frustration about estrangement, about division, and about the sort of opposition that rips people apart. In the middle of the song, the roadie, Yitzhak, shouts:

On August 13, 1961
A wall was erected
Down the middle of the city of Berlin
. . .

Hedwig is like that wall,
Standing before you in the divide
Between East and West,
Slavery and Freedom,
Man and Woman,
Top and Bottom.

(Mitchell and Trask 15)

At first glance, Hedwig has a more-than-subtle interest in dichotomies.

Theory in the Body: Laying the Groundwork

As Hedwig opens her show with “Tear Me Down,” we see and hear her preoccupation with dualisms. Soon, we discover that dualistic language establishes her body—the constraints of which offer a tragic challenge, so we feel it too. The limitations of language and its consequences for those trying to negotiate those limits thus introduce this book’s central claim: Hedwig and other theatrical bodies from late-20th-century American theater are powerful rhetorically charged theoretical entities. This book argues that theatrical performances specifically concerned with the material effects of human language demonstrate the transgressive potential of bodies-on-stage to disrupt the normative discourses that constitute them. Bodies on stage demonstrate that norms perform the status quo. Like Hedwig’s wig, norms perform real.

However, Hedwig, along with other onstage bodies, exposes the boundaries of those norms. As we will discover, she enacts what Kenneth Burke calls “the corrective of a disintegrating art” (Counter-Statement 105). As Debra Hawhee’s work on the Burkean rhetorical body posits, bodies, especially bodies that are different, enable “critical reflection on meaning making” (Moving Bodies 20). To clarify, Burke was extremely interested in bodies “particularly indisposed to societal trends” or “out of sync with ‘normal’ societal rhythms” (14). They demonstrate “a good thing” because of their “transformational force,” which enables interruptions of the bodily status quo (14, 7). Theatrical bodies, then, through their attention to how the body is established and reinforced through language and its relationship to power, demonstrate the potential of alternative modes of thought, action, and language. One wig can be exchanged for another, since on stage, the body is theory.

The relationship between rhetorical theory and theater has been only sporadically explored in rhetorical studies. For instance, some Classical Greek rhetorical scholars insist that we look to the tragic and comic stage to establish poetic beginnings to the Western rhetorical tradition.² Nevertheless, Joel Benabu indicates rhetoric’s infrequent interest in the association of drama and oratory; or, more specifically, the performance of rhetorical theory on the dramatic stage. While they reflect similar arts, rhetoric and the drama have traditionally occupied discrete domains—perpetuated by the Aristotelian division between rhetoric and aesthetics (Benabu 29), or at least by the way the fields of rhetoric and drama have fostered that disciplinary distinction. Yet if we ignore the theater as a rhetorical site, we abandon its potential to offer us insights into, as I argue in this book, bodily rhetorical theory.

This book takes the “rhetorical” plays of Aristophanes as a starting point. As a comedic playwright obsessed with bodies and their various functions, Aristophanes offers a useful template for rhetorical theorizing. Through Aristophanic bodies, we witness, as Wilfred E. Major insists, the passage of language-in-use as it shifts, first, from a commonplace linguistic concept into an embodied form. After embodiment, Aristophanes reconfigures the meaning of this embodied expression into the ethical landscape of his choosing. Or, at the very least, he leaves us to ponder it differently. Consequently, Aristophanes’ comedies offer proto-performative models of the body as languaged. In fact, Aristophanes foresees the performative theories of Judith Butler.

Hence following Aristophanes, I discuss, using his template of the proto-performative, 20th century play pairings that enact Butler’s theories of performativity. For example, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song anticipates Tony Kushner’s Aristophanic Angels in America. Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship lays down the gauntlet for how the black female body is performatively incarcerated in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus. Finally, to extend and elucidate my Hedwig discussion, I show how David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly foresees Hedwig’s struggle as the characters in both these plays negotiate the limits and affordances of performative iteration.³

These plays, as this book demonstrates, enact both Aristophanes’ proto-performative and Butler’s theories by presenting embodiments of critical discourse analysis (CDA)—or what I will term critical discourse perspectives (CDP).⁴ That is, characters on stage perform micro instances of iniquitous language use that have been politically and historically reiterated to oppress and deny equal rights to certain groups of people. (Groups that still suffer marginalization.) Yet by following the Aristophanic template, these playwrights then reconfigure that language in their own ethical worldview. The theater thus offers us the opportunity to observe those performances of the languaged body that, as Butler has so famously argued, matter. And it shows us how those that don’t can.

******

Hedwig’s dualisms provide us with a useful starting point to introduce the rhetorical body as theory because they present a set of circumstances that necessitate rhetoric. Dualist doctrine, as Collette Conroy puts it, “holds that an entity can be divided into two separate but related parts” (18). Dualisms often result in a hierarchal relationship between one part of the entity and the other. Hedwig performs an array of these relationships—national, global, ideological, and sexual: East Berlin is portrayed as the poor relation to West Berlin; and Hedwig must undergo a torturous sex change to move to America. The underlying assumption that motivates this surgery is that heterosexual desire is superior to homosexual desire. But Hedwig’s sex change is horrifically botched, and he, or she, as she identifies after it, is left with an “angry inch” (Mitchell and Trask 43). As a result, she is neither man nor woman. Yet Hedwig resides in a world established by division, estrangement, and sexual gradation. During the first section of the show, binaries are performed overtly, especially those concerning sexuality, gender, and desire. In fact, Hedwig is most concerned with dualistic interpretations of the sexualized body.

In addition to the dualisms Yitzhak lists in “Tear Me Down,” Hedwig’s next song, “The Origin of Love,” relates Aristophanes’ myth of the division of the sexes in Plato’s Symposium: According to Aristophanes, as recounted by Hedwig, double-faced, four-legged, male and female proto-humans angered the Gods, and so Zeus split them in half (Mitchell and Trask 81–2). The myth continues to say that these men and women were doomed for their lifetimes to wander in search of their other half, divided and alienated (Mitchell 84–5). Such, sings Hedwig, is the human condition. Hedwig yearns to find love and comfort in identification with her other half, her soul mate. But her desire to identify with her other half, according to the normative rules of essentialized sex to which she adheres, is fraught, given that the sex change left her with a sexualized body that is unreadable and un-languaged. As Christian Blood puts it, she is now “some nameless, complicated amalgam” (199).

Hedwig’s mythic yearning enacts an ontology of divisiveness, which, as Burke posits, in a Rhetoric of Motives, prompts rhetoric. That is, she longs to find a soul mate with whom she can identify. Burke establishes rhetoric as “identification,” in that “identification is compensatory to division” (Motives 22). Crucially, Burke interrogates the traditional notion of rhetoric established and characterized by Western Classical rhetors: Aristotle, Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian—who all frame their conceptions of rhetoric around persuasive discourse (46). Instead, by challenging this narrow normative, identification marks a necessary change in attitude, in sentiment, or action so that persuasion can occur (55). Burke says, “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his (55 emphasis in original). So underlying a traditional notion of rhetoric as persuasion is “identification or consubstantiality in general” (55). Burke, therefore, provocatively re-establishes rhetoric as the domain of identification, so that we find rhetoric saturating every aspect of our lives as we identify, or not, with the world around us.

While Burke doesn’t necessarily boil his theories down to identification via sexual desire or the need for companionship, Hedwig’s desire to identify with her other half provocatively demonstrates Burke’s description of the rhetorical situation. For Hedwig, identifying with her mythic other half will bring her completeness; yet her unlanguaged rhetorical body evokes a dilemma. Burke states that, fundamentally, rhetoric is rooted in the human need to forge identifications across our natural state of separation. In fact, Burke’s principles of rhetoric are founded on the notion that we are primordially divided—not unlike the mythical creatures, post-Zeusian separation, of which Hedwig sings. The properties of being human are based in the “individual centrality of the nervous system, in the divisiveness of the individual human organism, from birth to death,” whereby “the body becomes its special private property” experiencing “its own pleasures and pains” (Motives 130). For Burke, then, the need for rhetoric is universal, as it forges connections, consciously and unconsciously, between bodies that are essentially separate. We conceptualize our world according to this separation, which lies at the core of being human. Our separateness from one another determines the human desire to identify with others. Consequently, we need rhetoric to form communities.

Community and identity are mutually constitutive. How one identifies and with whom, as Greg Clarke points out, marks identity (252). While identities are seemingly individual, one gathers experiences from encounters with others, which shapes personal identity. Clarke notes, “We make and remake [identity] for ourselves on the fly from experiences we have across time” (252). Therefore, identities are collective. But for Burke, “identity is primarily collective. Even our personal characteristics are learned in one way or another from others” (252 emphasis in original). Moreover, building one’s identity, performing identifications, assumes that the community operates on a set of symbolic norms within which one can identify. However, given Burke’s fam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Performing Rhetorical Theory
• 2 “And My Life Blood Out They Suck”: Embodying Logos in Clouds
• 3 “III” Is for Ideology: Staging Metaphor in Torch Song and Angels in America
• 4 Acts of Silence and Silences’ Acts in Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus
• 5 Blonde Wigs and Butterflies: Queering the Intertextual Binaries in M. Butterfly and Hedwig and the Angry Inch
• 6 Rhetoric, Performance, and Pedagogy
• Index