Feminist Communication Theory: Selections in Context

Citation

Rakow, L.F. and Wackwitz, L.A. (2005), "Feminist Communication Theory: Selections in Context", Women in Management Review, Vol. 20 No. 5, pp. 376-379. https://doi.org/10.1108/09649420510609203

As a woman in the world of work it is difficult to avoid taking up positions on issues that relate to aspects of feminist theory. Yet it is hard to feel confident that one understands feminist theory, because of its complexity. Thus feminist theory seems like something which could support arguments you would like to make, if only you could understand it fully so this book roused my interest. By declaring its mission to be one of highlighting feminist theory relevant to my specialist area of communication, this book seemed to hold out the promise of gaining more knowledge about feminist theory and using my familiarity with communication as a pathway. The preface seemed to confirm the promise. The books' editors set up a very clear, well‐defined context for the book and a structure for its contents. The structure is explained as relating to three distinct areas: voice, representation and difference. The three parts of the book each comprise five selected writings relevant to each of the three areas. Each part has an introduction by the editors on the area and the selections included.

The editors' preface reminds us that “gender is everywhere” (p. viii). They see their book as providing the “tools of analysis” to use for gaining understanding, creating change, naming examples of sexism and being able to shape and tell stories of injustice within our own lives. In the introduction to the volume as a whole, the editors make their purpose in this project absolutely clear. They are setting out to collect and discuss feminist writing from the previous two decades which “challenges and repudiates traditional communication theory” (p. 1). Rakow and Wackwitz identify a problem within communication which is also common to many other fields of study: territorial struggles to categorise and guard separate areas of communication study such as interpersonal, organizational and political communication.

Nevertheless, despite the entrenched nature of the categories which influence the way people write and think about communication, the boundaries dividing categories are completely artificial. These artificial boundaries have little to do with the way that communication itself works, but more to do with people guarding their professional territory or area of specialism. Rakow and Wackwitz see the field of communication as it exists in tertiary institutions as having “developed out of the Western worldview, which expresses the thinking of white men and falsely universalizes their particular experiences” (p. 2). Rakow and Wakwitz point out that the ideal model of speech communication is typically what would be seen as a western male approach:

the competitive monologue, logical, rational and linear – in a social context that assumes a split between public and private spheres. Consideration for the other styles and approaches to speaking found in a variety of speech communities is rare… Interpersonal studies, likewise, commonly utilize normative white male communicative behaviour as a standard model to which other communication styles and patterns are compared. Against this model, women have suffered from the identification of their speech as overly polite, and hesitant. When compared to the white male model, women's speech is not only essentialized (as endemic to being a woman) and universalized (from white women to all women) – it is also considered diseased (p. 3).

The editors consider that it has only been in the second half of the 1980s that a stream of work that explores communication through feminist theory has emerged. To be feminist communication theory, they say, theoretical work must deal with gender, communication and social change and be “political, polyvocal and transformative” (p. 6). Unlike traditional communication theory, feminist communication theory is grounded in people's lived experience and helps both in making sense of that experience and in challenging and critiquing the structures which shape those experiences. Because it assumes the existence of injustice in the world and seeks change, feminist communication theory is political and therefore personal, concerned with “treating gendered, sexual, racial and ethnic cultures and their experiences as serious and important” (p. 6). By inspiring dissent and allowing for a multiplicity of perspectives and meanings, feminist communication theory is able to create a space for disparate and sometimes conflicting viewpoints.

However, Rakow and Wakwitz have had to select much of the work included in their book from writers working outside the field of communication. They have no difficulty in justifying their decisions. They argue that it is necessary to look outside the constraints of the traditional, narrow, restricted view of communication, to find writing that does not conform to it. So they have selected the readings included in the book from feminist writers who write about communication‐related topics, but are free from the influence of the traditional views of communication academics and practitioners.

So the book provides selected readings on the three themes, difference, voice and representation. Difference deals with all the ways that people communicate differently, voice deals with whether people are permitted to have a separate voice or whether their communication is stifled and representation concerns the way that different people's communication is represented or categorized. In orienting readers to the difference theme, the editors talk about the way that human beings construct meaning and devise organised systems and patterns of meaning. These patterns of meaning reflect judgments and norms; for example, which kind of communication is to be valued and which dismissed. In this way, different types of communication that do not reflect the western male model – such as the less assertive, more tentative style of communication associated with women and several non western cultural groups – are labelled as lesser and deviant.

Rather than ignoring, minimising or denigrating the difference, say Rackow and Wakwitz, feminist communication theory can account for the difference. They point to postcolonial studies and queer theory as ways feminist theorists have found to explore the multiple identities of human beings' similarities and differences and break free from categories which deal more with what supposedly ought to be, rather than what is. The readings in this section deal with: the place of women in traditional societies as models of egalitarian gender systems, the problem of the man/not‐man binary logic which defines women, the need for a definition of equality which includes those with disabilities as equal, the struggles of women for citizenship and political representation in Zimbabwe and the need to account for the privileged position of white women in feminist theorizing, rather than assuming that all women are the same.

In the section on voice, the editors give an example of a woman whose experience was denied and discredited. The woman was a female university staff member who was bullied and sexually harassed, then pushed into leaving her job after making a formal complaint. When she told her story to a conference, a university administrator from her former institution tried to convince audience members that she was sick and deluded, in an attempt to silence her “voice”. Rakow and Wakwitz consider that after difference, voice is the next most valuable concept for feminist communication theory. They use the term “voice” to mean “the means and ability to speak and have one's speech heard and be taken into account in social and political life” (p. 95).

The readings in this section include a chapter written by Linda McCarriston about growing up as working class but learning to pass as middle class, so that most of her experience and identity could not be given voice. The second reading deals with an Asian American woman, Leslie Bow, and her sense that it is complicated for her to speak as “a woman of color” since that very phrase encompasses a whole hierarchy of authenticity where she occupies a lesser place on the ladder than others. In the next example of issues involved with voice, Diane Glancy, is influenced by Cherokee traditions to write about the importance of the spoken word and the oral tradition. She argues that voice should not be allowed to become submerged in or secondary to the written word because voice carries life. Moreover, everything has a voice and within each voice, generations of voices are speaking.

In the next reading, Catherine Boyle uses the Chilean women's protest against Pinochet in demonstrating, banging pots and kitchen utensils and breaking the state‐imposed silence with noise as an example of voice. The final selection by Luce Irigaray points to the dilemma and complexity of a situation where male communication is expressed for and to the speaker himself, while female communication seeks and needs a response from the male which cannot be achieved.

In the third section of the book, on representation, the editors point out that there have been many criticisms of images of women as portrayed in the media and advertising and other contexts. Representations of women are often ideological assigning meanings linked to relationships both within the print or visual contexts and in society. Rakow and Wakwitz quote Kuhn (1985) who explains that meanings do not exist within images, but move around and between three aspects of the representation‐forming process: the representation itself, the person or people who see the representation and the social formation of the representation.

The readings in this section begin with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's discussion of women's self‐representation in India. Although the official perspective is that the women's movement is irrelevant to Indian women, some women's writing shows their assertion of an autonomous identity. In the next offering, Michelle Wallace deals with the difficulty of the underprivileged black woman who cannot speak for herself even though there is a need for a radical black feminist perspective. She is silenced by a lack of resources, education and access. Yet middle class black women should not assume that they can speak for her, even though academics often attempt to theorise about her experience of reality.

Next, Teresa de Lauretis discusses ways of escaping from the cycle of representing, constructing and deconstructing gender within a male context and then Leith Mullings discusses representations of African American women. Finally, Elizabeth Waters and Anastasia Posadskaya explain that political changes in Russia have seen feminist issues sidelined as being more attuned to the former era.

As you can see there is a lot of material in this book. But you may be asking yourself, will it make me wiser about feminist communication theory? Yes, in terms of understanding what the arguments are and having the opportunity to read examples from the work of five writers in each section. The variety of the situations the 15 selected writers are writing from gives an energy to the book and a sense of surprise as you shift to a new perspective. There are significant overlaps within the concepts of difference, voice and representation. Yet structuring the readings into these three areas is very helpful in terms of clarifying theory into bite‐sized pieces you can get your mind around. Many other theoretical works are written so densely that they obscure meaning, rather than making it more transparent.

Rakow and Wakwitz make these diverse perspectives available to us and give us the structure in their introductory discussions to the book and each section which facilitate our understanding. They do not go back over the historical emergence of the work in each of the areas, difference, voice and representation – but to do that would probably require at least three more books. What they have done enables the reader to jump into the current debates, then look for further illumination. The book is well‐suited to providing readings for discussion groups, for use in classes on gender and communication and for providing clarification for women and men in any setting who want to understand the “what” and “why” of feminist theory relevant to communication.