Revisiting a Feminist Perspective Can Rhetoric Accommodate Multiple Perspectives

REVISITING A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE CAN RHETORIC ACCOMMODATE MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES  

When agencies increase the number of viewpoints represented in regulatory decision making, they also increase the potential for disagreement and 

In mining communities, individuals frequently have multiple affiliations with labor unions, local miners groups, political parties, and work teams. Experienced miners have heard colleagues and management express competing viewpoints—in union halls, pubs, and training sessions. When miners talk about hazards in their work, they frequently represent more than one viewpoint. As this chapter demonstrates, however, agencies may inadvertently silence these diverse viewpoints when they reconstruct events in an accident. 

Rhetorical analysis, informed by feminist theory that attempts to examine the silences in written texts, can make visible the viewpoints lost at critical moments of transformation. Such an analysis, we argue, can help us resolve the dichotomy between incommensurable post-modem relativism (all viewpoints are equivalent) and the limitations of a perspective that privileges a single distanced perspective (the so-called androcentric viewpoint of the Archimedian observer).  

Feminist theorists like Harding (1991), Haraway (1991), and Fox Keller (1985) have argued that theories of knowledge production must take into account the situated viewpoints of individuals within economic and social communities. Their research raises epistemological questions about how we value information when it comes from sources outside traditional disciplinary and intellectual frameworks. For rhetoricians, feminist theory helps us. see (a) how culturally constructed notions of masculinity have influenced how we think about risk and safety in the workplace and (b) how the discourse practices of science reflect institutional and cultural assumptions that may inadvertently or deliberately silence the voices of men and women who labor in risky occupations. 

---