With all of the talk about feminism and gynocriticism, it harder to tell what kind of critique is accurate. To some, feminist theory is a movement. Smith says it "awaken's selfhood." Without that word being a definable term, it is difficult to say what it is exactly. If I had to make a definition for the word, it would read as follows: "a true knowledge of and about one's own personal being."
But what does knowing one's self have to do with rhetoric. I found that the entry for gynocriticism can actually help explain that. In the glossary, we are told that feminist criticism is separated into three phases. In those phases, we see women imitate masculinity, than protest against standard values, and finally advocate for their own perspective. That final step is a key to selfhood. By knowing what one's own perspective is on a topic, we can know ourselves.
But how can selfhood deal with rhetoric? Later in Smith's work, we see that consciousness is also a component of the creation of Feminist Criticism. Freud had introduced the idea about humans having three levels of consciousness: the id, ego, and superego. Now those deal with our normal conscious and our subconscious. It is difficult to deal in our subconscious due to it taking a larger percent of our brain to access. But if we know our ego, that is knowing our conscious. To learn our conscious, I believe writing what you believe and what you think can help. If you can defend your thoughts, you can defend you.
If you can defend you, that means your conscious can lead to your own selfhood.
This is very interesting term you’re trying to unpack. I think self-hood can function in rhetoric as an awareness of one’s self that can project authenticity. Self-hood can also refer to the way in which one transcends above the dialectic and goes beyond thinking between dualities and is aware of the way those terms can influence their perception of self. The terminstic screens that shape and mold our world-views. Identity is important in the narrative of minorities who struggle under the suppression of their work because of the of how dominating Western thought is. An awareness of this can lead to the ways in which Western thought has influenced literature and can be filtered out in order to get down to self-hood. Feminism for me personally has awakened my own self-hood. When I felt comfortable calling myself a feminist to anyone that heard me, I was more than ever aware of the inequalities I faced as a female. I became aware of the various ways women have been suppressed in society. For example, gender norms that enforce standards that men and women must supposedly adhere to. (ex: Pink is for girls; Blue is for boys) I gained a further sense of self-hood that heightened my awareness of the ways marginalized minorities in general have been subjugated. As a Latina female, in college, I became very aware of how privilege functions in the stratification of races, sexes, etc. Attaining self-hood is how I’ve internalized these functions and keep myself conscious of them in my daily life.
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