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is to speak of the processes of discursive construction, the means by which the oftentimes hidden potential of existing commonplaces may be identified, tapped, and brought surprisingly to light. What otherwise would be spoken of more generally in terms of 'social construction' or 'communication' is given precision, as we begin to investigate the strange workings of tropes such as irony, metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy. Not reducible to mere semantics, nor to either dialectic or sophistry, rhetoric concerns the event of discourse and the contingency of speech, such that our words may have the power to question conventional beliefs, open up the possibility of change, and usher in new systems of definition and value.
"A rhetorical approach therefore does not repeat, over and over again, that commonplaces such as 'man,' 'woman' and other gender categories are socially constructed and thereby open to change. Rather, it poses the question of how such changes happen. Investigating particular shifts and dramatic reversals, it posits answers to this question and conceives ways of moving mindfully into the future.
To this end, a rhetorical approach analyzes the phenomenological reality of such discursive formations and locates the strange sources of their transformative potential.
"In short, a rhetorical sensibility concerns itself with the power to change the world."
- Elizabeth Galewski, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, February 28, 2009.
