The Human Gaze

The term Ecopornography as described in Bart Welling's Ecoporn is an interesting term that calls the audience to reconsider how they receive content. When initially reading the term it seemed almost a bit ridiculous. The comparison of how inhuman beings are depicted in relation to women; but as Welling's went on to explain I began to notice similarities in not just the content itself; but how it is enjoyed by the viewer. This term illustrates the audience's desire to exploit concepts for pleasure and how as writers we cater to this pleasure based writing style.

Ecoporn

To me the reading on Ecoporn was the most interesting text I’ve gotten to explore in this class so far. In the dictionary “porn” is defined as something that sensualizes a non sexual subject and stimulates a compulsive interest in their audience. This made me think of rhetoric right away. Isn’t that what rhetoric is attempting to do in many ways? Convey a meaning so that the audience is effected with out necessarily realizing they have been? As I read on I realized how much Ecoporn there is surrounding us in our everyday lives. Every time a television show or movie shows an image of a beach or a mountain could that be considered ecoporn? Okay maybe not, but it’s definitely influencing the way we view the world around us. A large part of Ecoporn, to me, seemed to be the hiding of what’s really going on with the environment, and therefore only showing the beautiful and full side of nature seems to be wrong.

In the text Ecoporn is defined as a “type of contemporary visual discourse made up of highly idealized, anthrompomorphized views of landscapes and nonhuman animals.” These images are then aimed to relate to the human body and manipulate certain social structures. This immediately had me thinking back to the feminist paradigm and the social structure of the patriarchy. What is it about ecoporn that is generating a rhetoric that speaks to these structures?

Well, ecoporn represents the female in many ways. The images are in whole constructed by humans and don’t speak to the process that the animals or environment is put through in order to produce the picture. This is much like the experience of a women when she is put in front of an audience. Ecoporn is doing to nature in photographs what the male gaze is doing to women in film. Women are exploited and their exploitation is saying something to the world about the feminine experience. In Ecoporn animals are exploited and the rhetoric that is generated from their exploitation is rooted in deceit.

Not only could this issue be related to the feminist paradigm, but it could also be viewed through campbell’s lens of agency. Agency is something that is generated by society and causes certain rhetorical views to form. Those views help establish and keep in place certain societal views and structures. In this example, agency could be ecoporn and then rhetoric that it’s producing is speaking to society’s unlawful views of nature.

- Jiana Estes

Identity: Where do I fit in?

In our culture, a saying is thrown around when referring to someone who seems to have lost one’s self amidst the fast-paced, ever changing world. We call this an identity crisis. Many times this term tends to label angsty teenagers who lash out to their parents and peers because they are “just trying to find themselves”, or a feed up middle aged father who buys a convertible so he can feel young again. However, the concept of an identity crisis can aptly be applied to the state of the feminine paradigm as we see it today in modern society. In Seyla Benhabib’s essay “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea For the Nineties”, she highlights the constant struggle for women to form a united voice and finally become equal to their male counterparts. As she points out, since the birth of the feminist movement in “the eighteenth century and particularly in the period of their articulation in mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminism and the women’s movements have always struggled with dilemmas of equality and difference; equality with males versus being different from them; preserving a women’s separate sphere versus becoming full members of existing society by giving up women’s traditional spaces”(3). With the heavy burden of recognizing what women are as whole, the final plunge to gain equality once and for all seems very far away. If the female population struggles with such an outright identity crisis, how can we move forward?

Benhabib sheds light on the female identity crisis when she argues that the problem is that “the clash of multiple identities as well as of the allegiances which surround them have come out into the public; the continuous and inevitable fragmentation of identities has made it almost impossible to develop a common vision of radical transformation” (3). Although it can appear that women are the source of the problem since they simply cannot form a unified voice and identity. However, perhaps the root of this setback lies in where women first formed their ideas of themselves. As secondary components in patriarchal society, women have formed their self-concepts through the ideologies and epistemologies of men. No doubt, if you were told from birth that you were ugly and stupid, then you would grow up to believe you were both ugly and stupid, despite being told differently by others. The same thing has happened to women in our society. Despite the giant leaps that women have made since the eighteenth century, they are still being told they are lesser than men. An identity crisis is almost impossible to avoid.  Benhabib notes the power of identity when she states, “identities, personal as well as collective, are seen as ‘social constructions’ with no basis of givenness in nature, anatomy, or some other anthropological essence. Such social construction, most identity/difference theorists also add, is to be understood as a process of social, cultural and political struggle for hegemony among social groups vying with one another for the imposition or dominance of certain identity definitions over others”(5). Benhabib points out that identities are not inherent, but rather formed by social constructions. If this is true, then our own brain does not form our ideas of ourselves, but by the brains of others who came before us and forced us into a select category they felt comfortable placing us in.

With the knowledge of identity as a social construction, it is very easy to assume a submissive position, because what’s the point? Why should I care about my place in society if it has already been perfectly mapped out for me? Well, if I learned anything from this piece or Karlyn Campbell’s piece, it’s that despite what lot we are given in life, we have every right to challenge in order to make our own lives, as well as others, to change it for the better.

 -Clare Davis

Benhabib, Seyla. “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties.”

            Web. http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/94_docs/BENHABIB.htm.

1-13.

Let's Play: Where's the Author?

So I'm going to take my post in a bit of a different direction from focusing mainly on Welling's "Ecoporn" and what questions that raises for me, and instead, blend the reading with Barthes' "The Death of the Author." (I can't help myself, I like this reading.) This post will be more of a extended musing than a critical analysis.

Ecoporn & Feminism

In his essay, Ecoporn, Welling discusses how “It [ecoporn] is pornographic and not simply like porn,” (Welling 57). He goes on to state that it “places the viewer in the role of the ‘male surveyor,’” (Welling 57) This role can also be described as a gaze or perspective. Ecoporn invites the viewer to take up an androcentric perspective. Feminists such as Shulamith Firestone would argue that it is an example of how “males had defined truth, beauty, love, and justice since the beginning of time” (Smith 339). Welling draws attention to the objectification of nature and women. He also describes the way through participatory agency by which many forms of ecoporn simultaneously portray femininity and nature in an explicitly male gaze. This is evident in the quote “I will, however, touch upon the processes of pornographic substitution by which landforms and nonhuman animals come to stand in for women in the public eye, and on the other hand, the processes by which women are naturalized and animalized,” (Welling 56).
 

Feminist Nature

I will admit that I traveled back and forth between the syllabus and the Welling reading many times before convincing myself that this was the correct assignment. I could not figure out how "ecoporn" could possibly relate back to the feminist criticisms we have dealt with in our previous classes. "Porn"...maybe, but "eco" as in ecology, as in nature...in no way was my brain taking this all in. However, a couple pages in and Welling is reading my mind and addresses my (clear) points of confusion, "...ecopornography concentrates on a certain type of image in which humans are for the most part conspicuously absent, I will not be dealing with representations of "zoosexuality", or with pornography featuring human sexual contacts with plants or inorganic matter." (56) I can think a little clearer now.

Campbell's "Agency" as a Physical Group

One of her central propositions on the term “agency” in Karlyn Campbell’s essay “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean” is that “agency” is communal and participatory. It is “both constituted and constrained by external that are material and symbolic” (2).  This seems to imply that “agency” isn’t so much a thing that can be possessed, but rather it is an entity, a group, that can be participated in. I think Campbell gives a new form to the term “agency” in her essay, a new way to view it.

My understanding of “agency” so far in this class is that anyone or thing can have agency. When a person stands up to give a speech, or turns in a paper on a subject, they then possess “agency” of that subject. But, by applying Campbell’s thoughts, I’d say that person is becoming an agent within that specific agency, rather than claiming agency. Agency becomes a group or collective of agents in this case. Agency isn’t the action in itself, but rather refers to the participants who join a rhetorical conversation of that action or subject.

In the case of Sojourner Truth, Truth, Frances Gage, historians, and readers are all agents of a specific “agency”. Now, pinpointing and naming that specific agency is more difficult to tell. It could be the agency of black women in the 1800’s or the agency of women in the 1800’s. It might just be that agents can perform in multiple “agencies” at the same time. Either way, “agency” becomes an umbrella that contains the actions of multiple agents on a subject. It’s not an action itself, but rather a binding term for all of the agents within a circumstance.

Campbell says that in the very least “rhetorical agency refers to the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community” (3). And while it may refer to “the capacity to act”, I believe her definition, agency as communal and participatory, means there is a group in which agents have the capacity to act.

In this way, the word “agency” almost implies there are multiple agents involved. I guess there could be circumstances where there is a sole agent, but it seems like there could be so many different parts of an “agency”. This includes the speaker, the interpreter, the recorder, the dramatizer, and the readers. When there is a reader, there must be an original speaker, so the “agency” is already a multiplicity of people.

So, a question I’ll end with: is “agency” always a group of two or more people?

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

2.1 (2005): 1-19. 

Ecoporngraphy and Agency

I had never put much thought into the official animal of my state, the Florida Panther. Not out of a lack of education, I can remember taking a trip to the zoo in the fourth grade and learning all about Florida's state mammal, as well as Florida's state bird, and our state flower, and our state fish, and so on. I had never put much thought into our state animal, because in all honesty the Florida Panther doesn't occupy much of my time. I come from central Florida, where there are no Florida Panthers lurking in the bushes. And while I'm not a vegan, I consider myself a conscientious person when it come to nature. I recycle, I try to eat organic and use cruelty free products, and so on. But I'm not a 'nature fan', in the sense that I don't have a 'save the animals' bumper sticker, or a screensaver of the endangered manatees. Maybe this is why I found Welling's assertions on ecopornagraphy so foreign and hard to grasp. How could someone look at a picture of a forest or an animal and think 'this is pornographic'? I thought, deeply confused. However, as I read through Welling's essay, I realized that he was not drawing a comparison between visual representations of sexual intercourse and visual representations of nature, but between the lens through which a viewer sees these things.

Who is the agent?

When we first discussed agency as a class, I had been a little confused. When shown the video of the talking dog and discussing what would be considered the agent in the video, it was revealed to me that there were so many more ways to be an agent than I had imagined. I felt this same sense of confusion after reading Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean."

Erasure and the united way of lenses

Barton makes note of the efforts of United Way that are presented simply as a way to help the disabled (by donating money that will contribute to making their lives “normal”) and that the effect of this is inversely harmful. This “erasure” that Barton offers does suggest the idea that the presentation of handicapped people as other than normal would suggest on the other hand that they are, in fact, normal. In the critical feminist, cultural lens that Barton holds up to present the situation, identification by the target audiences is influenced by the inherently simplistic lens that advertising offers. 

This might be characterized by other cultural critics under Kenneth Burke's terministic screens in that the "screen" placed in front of the audience's eyes deeply influences the notion of normal, disability, and the nature of society and how it is characterized, separated and incorporated by division of things like physical characteristics. The interesting thing about this is that physical characteristics like physical disability are the first to identify because the eye is the first thing to take in information, followed by the ear. This would suggest that the first way we categorize divide and incorporate is based on things like physical disability, race, and gender, respectively. The ear is the next to take things in, and the divisions created related to the ear would be mental disability, language and cultural ethnographic difference. Followed by this, after longer amounts of time allow for discussion of values, ideologies and general opinions, division and incorporation. The observation from the most basic and surface level characteristics through beliefs that are deeply seated and are considered more important because they affect ethical behaviour. In the past, the ethical question was applied to these uncontrollable physical characteristics such as race and certain physical disability, but the current track begins moving towards not only the abstinence from the "judgment" of a person based on attributes that have no real conscious control and are subject only to circumstance, but also to abstain for matters of ideological ethical differences that are consciously taken that more consciously affect decisions and lifestyle. 

Truth's Speech & Ecoporn

In my last blog I wrote about representing truth as a reality. However, I believe that this can be a very difficult feat considering that our perceptions of reality can be so heavily misconstrued with our own personal experiences and emotions. With the readings we have had this week, I can’t help but see how these ideas overlap, specifically the writing of Sojourner Truth’s speech in regards to feminism and with Ecoporn.

The Politics of Erasure in constructing "normal human life"

How does an agency, charity, or society depict “normal human life” to serve their means? How are their means framed artistically and otherwise in order to farcically project a sense of “fairness?” In a system defined by externalities, a discussion of semiology and materiality can offer several useful insights into these contingencies of “Otherness” – particularly when comparing the feminist struggle for agency in crafting the female narrative, with the degrading depictions of the 'disabled' in early United Way advertisements. Our very conception of the agents in question, however, is thoroughly complicated by such a comparison. In different societal contexts, agency is participatory in different ways and but most often relies on the erasure of individual experience in order to define normalcy for the in-group.

Eco(feminism)porn

Ecoporn. Eco-what?

When I printed out this reading by Bart H. Welling, I must say, I was almost embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone seeing that I was printing out something that said porn on it. Pornography today has such a negative connotation and specific stigma surrounding it in today’s world, so I was completely baffled by “eco” and “porn” being squished together to create some sort of definition that initially, I had no clue about. After reading Welling’s piece though, I realized that it was much less about actual pornography – makes sense, right – and more about the “dialectical relationship between ecopornographic representations and human attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors vis-à-vis the non-human world” (Welling 54). But I thought to myself, what on earth does the exploitation of nature and women and the importance that Welling feels in addressing these issues have to do with past readings, such as Seyla Benhabib’s “From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties”?

Enter eco-feminism. But first, let me unpack ecoporn.

A Delicate Balance of Collectivism and Individualism

I've recently dug up some old transcendentalist literature that I read in high school and begun to immerse myself in it once again, in some sort of vague attempt to calm the nerves of graduating university and stepping out into the whirlpool of society.  Upon poring through the romantic lines of Thoreau's Walden, in which he recounts two of his introspective years spent in the perfect harmony of the Massachusetts wilderness, I began to realize a perhaps less-than-obvious similarity between the goals of feminism and the echoes of transcendentalism.

Agency: For Better or For Worse

Campbell’s essay, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” she not only outlines her five characteristics of an agent, but also touches upon the effects these agents have on society. Agency is presented as a social construct. One purposefully set in place and perpetuated by society’s practices, which further stereotypes and grouping. She discusses the agency of Sojourner Truth’s speech, more so the agency of the written renditions of her speech. In this sense the agency of Truth is only conveyed through the biased perspective of others. This is similar to the way handicapped individuals are presented in Barton’s essay due to the fact that the audience has no actual interaction with the agent. There is now an opportunity for the idea of handicapped individuals to be created by rhetors, through agency.

Deep Disable

Barton shows a clear passion about stripping down the motives of the United Way and their effect on the individuals who are disabled. Barton's claims that because of the business structure of a charitable organization that disabled persons are now viewed as nothing more than "needy" and to help them, you can donate to the United Way.

Success at the Expense of Morality

In "Textual Practices of Erasure", Ellen L. Barton obviously has a problem with the discourse used by charities, specifically the United Way Foundation, when discussing the disabled. She chronicles the ways in which the United Way has advertised in the past for donations. Her issue has to do with erasure. In these advertisements, disabled people are seen as the "other" community. They are not part of normal human life but rather always different.

I personally don't see how one could look at it as anything but. People with disabilities are so very obviously different from people without disabilities and to refute that is nonsensical. These people, no matter what the disability is, conduct their lives with a very large and debilitating constraint. Not only do they have their physical or mental ailment, but they also have to deal with society and the stigmas towards disabled people. I think the United Way Foundation has been doing the best they can to help and Ellen L. Barton cannot see that because she has been blinded by her upstanding morals.

Show and Tell

I titled this post "Show and Tell" because these three simple words have seemed to evolve with us over the years. I'm sure many of us remember the act of 'show and tell' in kindergarten. Everyone sits in a circle and brings in an item to share (usually of some significance) and shares it with the class. This simple act taught us (perhaps without our awareness) the difference between showing and telling. Describing the object to the group was 'telling', giving them a second hand account. However 'showing' the object game them the experience. This very literal understanding of the difference between 'show and tell' was built upon in latter years. As we learned how to write effectively in grammar school, we were taught to show NOT tell because showing engaged our audience in a way telling could not. You may be wondering where I am going with all this?

Unification, But at What Cost?

In both Campbell and Benhabib's essays, the issue of feminism is discussed. Benhabib in particular pushes against the feminism (or feminisms) we still see in our society today: confused and fragmented. She states that, "The clash of multiple identities as well as of the allegiances which surround them have come out into the public; the continuous and inevitable fragmentation of identities has made it almost impossible to develop a common vision of radical transformation" (Benhabib, 3). I can certainly understand a desire to move toward change. To have disagreements within our community, to reach a point of stagnation, must constitute some sort of action. But in fact, this logic is something I cannot agree with. I would argue that the diversity we see in feminism is not something to fight against, and that even with these differences within the movement, we are making progress. Because I am of this opinion, I am greatly skeptical of Benhabib's cry for unification. And the Sojourner Truth example in Campbell's essay only provides this skepticism with more ammunition. Unification is well and good, but when it comes at the price of the narratives of women of color (and why stop there? Disabled women, LGBTQ women), is it really worth it?

Best Buddies: Friend or Foe?

"Disability must also be defined as a more complex social construct, one that reflects not a benign evolution of acceptance, but a dynamic set of representations that are deeply embedded in historical and cultural contexts." (Barton, 169) Barton makes a daring claim in her article, "Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way;" a claim that, though grounded in a multitude of examples and demonstrations of the United Way's exploitation of media and neglect of the dynamic complexities of being a disabled person, I find hard to fully support.

Benhabib's Envisioned Agency: Does ecoporn unite theory?

Throughout Benhabib's "Identity Politics," the reader is made aware of some of the major problems faced by feminists (or rather, within feminism).  She expresses the struggle in defining the feminist paradigm because it is no longer a simple one because of all the different narratives attempting to coexist.  Because there are so many narratives, there's also no real definition, and instead chooses to organize her text by highlighting two very specific problems of contemporary feminism, which she also echoes by the end of her piece in the form of more formalized paradigms: (Benhabib 3)

Barton & Heilbrun: Women and the rhetoric they use

In Barton's text “Textual Practices of Erasure”​ she starts off discussing disability . Then she connects disability with language and rhetoric by using the term "discourse of disability" and with that term he states that they are "stretches of language...." I was wondering how the original definition played a part in rhetoric but then he goes on to say that disability is not solely a medical condition, it can also be a complex social experience as well. By that she means the disability culture has been accepted because there are many schools and foundations that are willing to help disabled people, that it's almost normal. 

Barton then describes three textual practices the United Way used for fundraising money for the disabled children. The first attempt they used to make she world aware of disability was putting children in the light of pity and fear. They placed these kids on advertisements with crutches and stale looks on their faces as if they wanted say "please help me by donating money." Also their choice of diction was very important to observe. They used words like "neglected, arthritis, sick dependent and more words of that nature to really get people to feel bad for these kids and donate money. In all honesty I feel as if they did a good job in getting people to donate. Whether the money really went to where it was suppose to go or not, it served its purpose.

This also brings me the to Heilbrun and how she says women can't differentiate between public and private, however women still accomplished the task and the autobiography that they were writing still served its purpose because I know there is someone out there from who read it from the first page and back. I don't want to say that women will do anything just to get people to read their work but that is the way it is perceived to the readers. However that is not the case for Barton and the different advertisements that we were able to see from the 50's.

Going back to Barton,  she states that “This kind of language and terminology diminishes the understanding of disability by not only the American public but society in general” (170).  Quite frankly I agree with Barton because as I stated earlier their diction was very descriptive and caught the reader's attention in such a bad way. I would prefer them to show how disabled children and adults are flourishing even though they were not created the same as the average human. That way we would still encourage the people to donate money without it being a pity case and we would make the disabled people feel less isolated. 

Agency: Destroys and Empowers

I have never really considered agency as a paradoxical concept as we’ve unraveled the past few weeks - that idea seemed quite unlike my original definition for it. Agency for me had been previously defined as being able to withhold power and authority over one’s self, to be an agent that empowers oneself. However, the meaning of agent as we’ve discussed in class is one who facilitates action and I won’t reiterate what we have expanded upon the definition of agency/agent but what intrigues me is the idea that agency can be beyond a person. 

Conceal, Don't Feel

When we discussed Sojourner Truth's statement on Tuesday, I thought is was interesting how the meaning was changed to be taken as fiction. This that this makes her argument any less true, but it does hurt the validity of what she is saying. Many times the want of what the author or orator wants their audience to take from their work is not what is actually taken. In this case, it was because of another person telling the audience how to absorb the work.

By having the audience view Truth's work in a fictional light, the meaning cannot be taken the way Truth wants it to be. The agency has changed. When Gage made the speech look as though it were a work of fiction, the ability for the speech to act diminished greatly. Fiction automatically means not true. By her speech not being true, an audience cannot take it as seriously if they knew it was true. Think of it this way: we have all seen at least one movie that is either inspired or based on a true story. I will use The Blind Side for example. Would the film have evoked as much pathos as it did if this tale were fictional? I do not believe so.

This was mainly done due to one gleaming fact: Sojourner Truth was a women. It did matter that she was black women, but the female part is a larger component. Women in the 19th Century had very few rights. Feminist writings were often not taken as actual work. Campbell said that the laws of the age often shaped the role of the woman in society based on social norms. Of these norms, a serious author was not one of them. Especially since no audience would be used to a black woman speaking out.

While Gage's actions did hurt the validity of this speech, it also helped it. By Gage's actions, the agency was changed, but it was so that the audience would read the piece of work. During this time period, feminine writings were not taken seriously if they were not fiction. This is why Emily Bronte's gothic novel, Wuthering Heights, did so well.

As for her race, Truth's African heritage did not do her any favors when writing. Heilbrun would agree with Gage's changing of the text for one reason: the "other." Heilbrun would say that the work would circulate better than the real version (speaking in Dutch) because it would better serve the binaries between race. This would end up creating a dramatic space and a dramatic identity.

This idea of people not taking writing by female authors seriously is still an issue. For instance, a woman by the name of Joanne would use the pen name Robert Galbraith so that her writing would sell better. She did have another pen name though, one we know very well: J.K. Rowling.

So due to the changing of the piece, whether it be fictional or factual, we can say that it can affect the message of the piece. Whether that be for better or worse is up to the reader.

Connotation is Everything

In Barton's "Textual Practices of Erasure" she delves deeply into the human creation of the term "disability" and the implications for those who are disabled as well as implications for how the public views disability. I think the way she explores the connotation of the word disability is interesting and reflects some of the other theorist's views from our readings. Burke understands man as symbol using animals and the inventor of the negative, which is extremely apparent in the creation of the term "disabled."

Barton's quotation of Carol Gill here is interesting to me because it seems to neglect the literal way we have named people with disabilities. The quote reads, "Society would accept [the experience of] 'disability culture,' which would in turn be accepted as part of 'human diversity'" (Barton 170). Barton goes on to acknowledge that being labeled disabled is to be labeled as "other than'' or "less than." I think disability is hard to be considered as being equal to other humans because of the word "disabled" in and of itself. If you are disabled, you are quite literally "not abled." People who are not abled to perform tasks like children, the elderly, and the handicapped are equally seen as inferior.

To be continued: A Feminist Paradigm

In her essay, Benhabib discusses her strategy for comprising a feminist paradigm, which will narrow the gaps of gender inequality for women. She incorporates multiple feminist theories, both postmodernist and standpoint feminism, to emphasize how women haven’t been able to conform to one identity. Throughout the text, she invites readers to question which theory to choose or rather how feminism will be defined in the future. Fortunately, as current readers, we realize that some of Benhabib’s main arguments about woman’s identity still hold true, particularly exemplified in Emma Watson’s “HeforShe” campaign.

Truthful Women Are The Most Powerful

One thing that stood out to me in Heilbrun's essay--like an ink splatter on a piece of starch white paper--was her example of May Sarton's novels. She briefly explains that this female author penned a book about her experience with buying a house and living alone, but realized after that she didn't reveal any of the "anger, passionate struggle, or despair of her life," (Heilbrun, 13) unintentionally being less than honest. Her next book, Journal of a Solitude, deliberately exposed the pain that she hid before, paving a new path for women in literature.

Honesty of Women's Writing Today vs. The Past: Limitations on History and How We Understand Women's Rhetorical Practices

History seems to play a role in pretty much every rhetorical theory there is. In fact, in my opinion, each rhetorical theory was formed as a result of some sort of history or historical event. When I was writing my dialogue for our PE assignment, I started off my reading the Heilbrun and Campbell texts looking for the ways in which the limitations of history affected our understanding of the rhetorical practices women use in their writing. I ended up not basing my dialogue around this question, but I did find a lot of support for this idea in the two texts.

Audience Construction for Barton and Heilbrun

I have read my fair share of Walter Ong’s rhetorical theories (that seems like a given as an Editing, Writing, and Media major), and while I have understood what I’ve read on the theoretical level, I have never had such a complete grasp on the ideas in his writings as I have after reading Ellen Barton’s “Textual Practices of Erasure.” The idea of fictionalizing an audience seemed, to me, to be something a writer had to do in order to write his or her actual text. It never crossed my mind that it might be something a writer does to push an agenda or to identify normalcy and difference in a community. Barton made an extremely compelling argument for how United Way used different strategies to construct an audience that would react to their campaigns exactly how they wanted it to. At the same time, however, Heilbrun seemed to have trouble with this idea. If a writer could simply invent their own audience—and audience who would react in precisely the way the writer wanted them to—then why would it be so difficult for a woman to write about herself or other women? What if the audience has already constructed itself?

A Plea For The New Millennium

            Benhabib’s initial plea for the nineties was to emphasize the ongoing paradigm within feminist theory and politics. Her main area of focus was on the contemporary manner in which “feminist theory [was] about to unfold in the coming years,” (Benhabib 1). However, years later and well into the 2000s we find ourselves still experiencing the same and even different sorts of paradigm wars with regards to contemporary feminist theory. Women as “social and political agents” are still seen as lesser individuals in the public sphere than their male counterparts, likewise there is a link to the American State and how identity and difference play a role in our society and politics, (Benhabib 2). The identity of the woman is still continuing to be defined by our gender and societal norms.

Ecopornography through a feminist lens

"Ecopornography is like 'real' pornography...because it masks sordid agendas with illusions of beauty and perfection." (page 55)

While Welling does not seem to view ecoporn in a sexual sense, he feels it should be considered porn and categorized alongside human pornography because it is viewed in the same manner. Ecoporn equates nature and animals to a powerless figure to be controlled by the viewer much the same way a female in pornography is viewed. Welling notes three specific reasons why ecoporn IS porn. For one, it equates nature to a domesticable, exploitable commodity the same way human porn does to woman. Secondly, pornography is capable of empowering and degrading; it degrades women to nonhuman standards and elevates nature to human standrads with men still being the all-powerful "male surveyor" (here he compares zoos to peepshows to show their striking similarities). And lastly, ecoporn acts in many similar ways to human porn such as animal snuff films, big cats in traditionally sexy poses, and flesh colored landscapes that mimic the female body.

"Anatomizing ecoporn as porn can help us interrogate the androcentric, ethnocentric, and anrthopocentric assumptions that ̶  despite appearances to the contrary ̶  animate ecoporn, perpetuating nature/culture dichotomies that sabotage environmentalism's attempts to inspire wider publics." (page 55)

Welling views ecopornography through the feminist lens many people tend to view heterosexual human pornography with. The usual androcentric power dynamic expressed in human pornography can be easily ascribed to ecopornography. The masculine gaze looks upon the feminized depiction of nature (i.e. a womb-like canyon or a docile animal) and sees it as something to be conquered or otherwise violated and subdued. Scenes from nature take on a pleasure-giving role in the relationship between the natural image and the viewer. The viewer has the power and nature becomes the victim of the anthrocentic, masculine gaze. Welling applies the patriarchal logic linked to the exploitation of women in the porn industry to ecoporn. Nature is exploited when it is photographed and documented to look pristine, pure, and virginal. While the sexist implications of ecopornography are more subtle than the sexist implications of human pornography, Welling claims they are just as pernicious. He points out the PETA "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaign which is notoriously sexist and detrimental to women. He puts a new spin on it though, delving into the example of one ad featuring a naked woman whose body is painted to make her look like a snake that reads, "Exotic skins belong in the jungle, not in your closet." Through a feminist lens, people would see the ad as extremely sexist and totally pornographic, but those people are missing the alternate issue that while the image is dehumanizing women, it is simultaneously sexualizing snakes. Snakes are reduced to "exotic skins" and the object of heterosexual male desire. While women are naturalized and animalized, nature is womanized. PETA ads are a good example of Welling's theory at work because they have a history of blurring the lines between ecoporn and human porn.

"In the end, despite the large sums ecoporn helps raise in the name of animals and the environment, its rhetorical focus is less on nonhuman subjects ̶  which suffer from our rage to look at them in ways that ecopornography not only does not show but must keep hidden in order to survive ̶  than it is on man's pleasure, man's power, man's control." (page 66)

Environmentalist groups often use ecopornography as a tool to raise money to somehow help wildlife, but Welling sees this as counterproductive since these "pristine images of nature" do very little to actually educate the public and in fact more often contribute to the destruction of nature. He provides examples such as the colonization and eventual destruction of land Europeans thought was beautiful and the increase in shark killings after many movies and TV shows about sharks came out. In some less drastic examples, the subjects of ecoporn become victims of voyeurism instead of being helped. Florida panthers were effectively fetishized and now can be found in zoos and have their images on license plates all over Florida despite the fact that cars pose the biggest threat to the species' survival.

- Kayla Goldstein