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7 # Appeals to Gender

Much of the liveliness in human society—along with much of the ten- sion—arises from differences between men and women. The division of the sexes certainly doesn’t begin in modern times—it’s as old as Eden—but shift- ing opportunities for women in modern cultures beget more and more frequent questions about how much is “instinctual” and how much is “learned”—how much “nature,” how much “nurture”—in what people as- sume about the way men and women operate. Is motherhood, for example, an “instinct” or the result of “social conditioning”? Because such questions cannot be answered fully by biological science, they fall within the tradi- tional purview of rhetoric. Again, rhetoric traditionally deals with things that we argue over, not things that can be settled by clear evidence.1

The physical differences between the sexes and their roles in repro- duction, which are distinct, obvious, and striking to begin with, tend to be- come even more pronounced and more complicated when we consider the ways that societies apply the principles of gender, the categories of “mas- culinity” and “femininity.” People immersed in any given society are likely to think that the traits and roles normally included in the gender catego- ries are “natural”: the man hunts, the woman cares for the children; men are straightforward and tend to be brutal; women are communal and tend to be devious; men are from Mars, women from Venus—and “that’s just the way it is.”

But in fact, the categories, traits, and roles shift, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically, as we look across different cultures. What’s con- sidered masculine behavior in some societies—farm work, for example— may be undertaken by both men and women in other societies, or perhaps only by women. An aspect of feminine beauty in one culture—smooth skin, for example—may appear as gender-neutral in a second culture, or may be a matter of something like social class and not a concern of gender at all in a third culture.

Because of the fluidity of gender, appeals that involve sexual differences can never be merely categorized as appeals to the body. The very distinc- tion between sex and gender—sex defined as a bodily condition (“nature”) and gender defined as the result of social conditioning and training (“nur- ture”)—is not so easy to sort out as you may think. Investigative journal- ists have revealed, for example, that hermaphroditism is much more com- mon among newborns than most people ever knew and that doctors, with

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86 # Appeals to Gender

and without permission of the parents, have been known to “correct” the condition, leaving only a nagging confusion to haunt the “male” or “female” patient in later years. Beyond the genitalia, “masculine” traits, such as broad shoulders, heavy musculature, and facial hair, and “feminine” traits, such as broader hips, pronounced breasts, and sparse body hair, vary widely among individuals and racial types. Still the categories persist, to be alternately bolstered and undermined by the practice of rhetoric.

Appeals to time and the questions of modernity also affect the rheto- ric of gender. People living in modern democracies tend to feel superior when they regard the practices of cultures that closely monitor the divi- sion of the sexes and the control of the body. Tribal customs such as fe- male circumcision and social rules involving women’s clothing (veiling and long dresses that cover the legs) are judged on a scale ranging from un- conscionably cruel to merely unfair. It is hard to see them otherwise once the values of liberty and equality come into play. The old patriarchal cul- tures, in which the power to make decisions and control the key processes of life belong exclusively to older men, are treated with contempt by most educated people in modern Western societies. Such social hierarchies ap- pear as premodern and outmoded in cultures that pride themselves on allowing men and women to mingle more or less freely in public and make their own choices about how to display, care for, and share their bodies.

But feminists, along with gay, lesbian, and transsexual activists, often ar- gue that a fundamental patriarchy still exists in modern cultures beneath the mask of social tolerance and individual liberty. And even if you don’t subscribe to these political perspectives, it doesn’t take much looking around to see that, no matter how modern the culture, practically everything in the social landscape remains heavily gendered. In the United States, choices at every stage of life are shaped by gender categories. The conditioning begins even before we’re able to make our own choices. Parents are still urged to buy pink for girls and blue for boys in baby clothes. The togs for little boys have trucks, frogs, and bulldog puppies stitched into them; the girls get little pink flowers, hearts, and fairies. In the next stage of life, toys divide between beginner baking ovens and baseball bats, baby dolls and action figures, ballet slippers and BB guns. By adolescence the patterns are set, and the self-policing and peer pressure begin. Even the brightest and most self-aware high-school students seem to make choices that divide neatly along gender lines. Data from standardized tests, for example, re- veal that young women favor and perform best in courses and on tests in the humanities and arts, while young men do best in math and science. This trend has been present from the beginning of such testing and con- tinues to this day despite the women’s movement and scholarship pro-

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grams encouraging girls to cross over into the technical fields. And the divi- sion certainly doesn’t end with the onset of adulthood. We have magazines for men with a heavy emphasis on sports and magazines for women that concentrate on fashion. Hollywood markets romantic comedies for women (“chick flicks”) and “action-adventure” shows for men (chase scenes and big explosions linked together by the thinnest possible plots—“dick flicks”?). Entire television networks are devoted to audiences divided by gender.

Such heavy investment in the division of genders raises questions of personal and political power. Who gets to do what? And what measure of liberty and equality can you count on? Society has different expectations of men and women, and how to work within these expectations or slip free of them often becomes a matter of how you position yourself as a woman or a man, how you appeal to gender.

To come to terms with this kind of appeal, we might begin by asking who benefits most from any particular way of defining gender categories and who “pays the price”? A quick survey of modern rhetorical practices leads, not surprisingly, back to the advertisers.

Marketing Gender: Empowered or Exploited?

I remember an ad from the late 1970s or early 1980s. Like many other edu- cated, middle-class, young professionals in the western world, I was try- ing in those days to make sense of gender relations under the influence of the women’s movement and the consequent perception of changes in home and workplace roles. I happened to be writing a book about sexuality in literature at the time, but I wasn’t just studying gender formally; I was also trying to figure out how to behave as a responsible human being.

The ad pictured a dressed-for-success working woman bursting into the family home and shouting out a brassy show tune to the accompaniment of an invisible orchestra. The bluesy style of the music strongly suggested the atmosphere in a stripper bar. I don’t remember the product advertised and not much of the lyric the woman was belting out—only one line in fact: “I can bring home the bacon, / fry it up in the pan.”

The ad had appeal for me, I confess. I realized its general corniness, but it seemed encouraging and empowering for women. It allowed them a position in the traditional world of men. The cliché of “bringing home the bacon” meant, as usual, making money to support the family, but with a slight twist. The superwoman in the ad could bring it home and fry it up, absorbing the roles of man and woman—breadwinner and bread-baker— without (and this is important) losing her sex appeal. Indeed, the impli- cation was that she got even sexier when she got liberated. No longer the

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88 # Appeals to Gender

home-bound drudge, she gave the impression that her liberation brought with it the freedom to express a tantalizing sexual naughtiness. She com- bined the intellectual appeal of the smart businesswoman or lawyer, the comfort of wife and mother, and the raw attraction of the stripper. She could have it all for herself and still be everything her family and her man could ever need.

I eventually forgot about the ad, but I was jolted back into remember- ing it and somewhat embarrassed by its former appeal for me when, in 1989, I encountered a new book called The Second Shift by the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. The book reported on a long-term study of couples in which the husband and the wife both worked. The question was, with both partners working, who covered the housework and childcare, the “second shift” of work that every family must account for? The short answer was that the women did most of the work at home. Sure enough, they were bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan, but they didn’t feel particularly sexy and empowered. They felt tired, and some felt exploited.

Hochschild introduces The Second Shift with a reference to the same kind of advertised image that caught my eye. Chapter 1 begins this way:

She is not the same woman in each magazine advertisement but she is the same idea. She has that working-mother look as she strides forward, briefcase in one hand, smiling child in the other. Literally and figuratively, she is moving ahead. Her hair, if long, tosses behind her; if it is short, it sweeps back at the sides, suggesting mobility and progress. There is nothing shy or passive about her. She is confident, active, “liberated.” She wears a dark tailored suit, but with a silk bow or colorful frill that says, “I’m really feminine underneath.” She has made it in a man’s world without sacrificing her femininity. And she has done this on her own. By some personal miracle, this image sug- gests, she has managed to combine what 150 years of industrializa- tion have split wide apart—child and job, frill and suit, female cul- ture and male.

When I showed a photograph of a supermom like this to the work- ing mothers I talked to in the course of researching this book, many responded with an outright laugh. One daycare worker and mother of two, ages three and five, threw back her head: “Ha! They’ve got to be kidding about her. Look at me, hair a mess, nails jagged, twenty pounds overweight. Mornings, I’m getting my kids dressed, the dog fed, the lunches made, the shopping list done. That lady’s got a maid.” Even working mothers who did have maids couldn’t imagine com- bining work and family in such a carefree way. “Do you know what

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a baby does to your life, the two o’clock feedings, the four o’clock feedings?” . . . They envied the apparent ease of the woman with the flying hair, but she didn’t remind them of anyone they knew. (Hoch- schild 1–2)

The advertised image appeals to the desire for enough power to do it all, to be able to accomplish all that life sets before you—and to avoid the hard choices that life in a modern society puts before you, above all the choice of how to divide the labor in working families, a decision that has led to more than one divorce.

Even at the time I first saw the ad, I understood that the appeal was directed not only to the working woman who longed for sufficient power to succeed in a double role, but also to the “enlightened” man, the kind of person I understood myself to be in the late 1970s. The man wants his wife to “fulfill herself” by having a career, but he doesn’t want to give up the wife and mother who takes care of everything at home, leaving him free to be the “principal breadwinner.”

Professor Hochschild’s rhetorical strategy involves an “unmasking” of the ad’s appeal. As chapter 3 suggests, rhetorical situations always involve “personae,” literally masks. The “first persona” is the author position, the “I,” the face put forward to the world. The “second persona” is the audi- ence position constructed by the author, the “you” to whom the perfor- mance is addressed. In the supermom ads, the producers put forward the image of the empowered woman, the “I” that sings, “I can bring home the bacon.” I always supposed that the implied “you” of the ad would be the overworked housewife or working mother that longs to be like supermom. “Buy our product,” the advertiser says indirectly through the agency of su- permom, and you can be like “me.”

But the working mothers whose stories appear in The Second Shift aren’t buying the image: “They envied the apparent ease of the woman with the flying hair, but she didn’t remind them of anyone they knew.” They ac- cept the mask of what I assumed to be the second persona, overworked and exploited, but they reject the image of supermom as unreal and un- attainable. She is only an image, a fantasy figure.

The fantasy works in the service of educated men sensitive to the de- mands of the women’s movement but worried about the challenge to their position. One of the most disturbing findings I remember from Hochschild’s research was that the educated professional men in the study were more likely than the working-class men to proclaim the need of husbands to share the housework and childcare with their working wives; but, when it came to actually chipping in and doing the work, the professional men were, if anything, less likely to contribute than their working-class counterparts.

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90 # Appeals to Gender

As the old saying goes, they talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk. It was just the opposite with the working-class men.

The irony in this situation turns on the reversal of expectations revealed in this situation of inequality. This particular appeal depends upon the creation of not just a first and second persona, an “I” and “you,” but also a third persona: “they.” The author appeals to the audience by forming an inner circle of knowledge—what “you” and “I” can see but others are oblivi- ous to: “They” don’t get it. The force of the irony is directed against the third persona “them.” In Hochschild’s book, the position of the third persona is occupied by the professional men who don’t hold up their part in the equal relationship they profess to believe—and by the advertisers who support them. Supermom appears as the advertisers’ mask, or their puppet. Hoch- schild’s research deflates the farce, revealing the true authors of the ad and their beneficiaries—“them.” Her “I” appeals as a working mother—who tells her own story in the preface—reaching out to an audience of “you” other working mothers who are tired out from trying to live the life that super- mom supposedly succeeds in, a life that “we” find too hard to manage.

The irony and unmasking led me to take another look at my mental image of the old “bring home the bacon” ad. With new eyes, I could see that the ad appealed to me by approaching me with a fantasy image. The sexy composite of working woman, housewife, and stripper said to me, in effect, “Don’t you want a woman like me?” It could be that men like me were always the intended second persona, the “you” of this ad. The sad part is that the implied third persona was the overworked housewife working virtually two jobs, a first shift at the store or factory or office and the sec- ond shift at home. As I watched from the position of observer or distanced social critic, Professor Hochschild removed the mask of the second and third personae and exchanged the places, making the overworked house- wife the “you” she addressed and treating the neglectful husbands and their accomplices the advertisers as the third persona. Now it became us against them, and I found, with some dismay, that the old “enlightened” version of myself of the 1970s belonged in the position of “them.”

The short answer to our question about power, then, is that profes- sional educated men stand to benefit most from the values and ideology implied in the appeal of such ads. Working women pay the price, as do homebound women who continue to perform heavy, sometimes unfulfill- ing labor in a low-prestige job (often these days receiving a share of con- tempt from women who do pursue careers outside the home).

But if men stand to get empowered and women exploited by such rheto- ric, what do the marketers stand to gain? I see two possible explanations. First, by siding with men of the professional class, they appeal to the group most likely to control the greatest percentage of the society’s capital re-

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sources, the guys with the money to buy the products. Second, and more subtly, they benefit by perpetuating gender divisions of any kind—the stronger, the better. It only stands to reason that if products can be divided by gender—if men are likely to make decisions about some products and women about others—you can more easily “target” the market for your ads. You know it’s best to advertise cleaning products during “soap operas” (hence the name) and trucks and beer during football games. About the only time you ever see a man cleaning house in an ad, he appears like “Mr. Clean” as a fantasy figure who shows up to rescue the housewife in dis- tress from the burden of her work. In the world projected by advertising rhetoric, housekeeping remains women’s work.

Demystifying the Image: The Appeal to Fulfillment and Health

Many of the ideas and rhetorical strategies found in Hochschild’s study were anticipated in the now classic book The Feminine Mystique, published by Betty Friedan in 1963. Friedan, who went on to found the National Orga- nization of Women (NOW) and become a preeminent leader in the Ameri- can women’s movement, offers a powerful example of a technique favored by modern rhetoric and suggested in our analysis of The Second Shift. Call it image competition.2

Considering the reputation Friedan earned as a pioneering feminist in the 1960s, she uses a surprisingly subtle and unthreatening image to set up a rhetorical situation that turns out to have great power. In her first chapter, she slowly works her way toward the articulation of an unnamed problem that gradually comes first into focus in what was then a familiar, everyday image: a ladies’ coffee group, which serves as not only the focal point of the problematic image but also a projection of the book’s ideal au- dience. Instead of the expected small talk and gossip, or worries over chil- dren and husbands, these housewives and mothers are talking about them- selves. Letting go for once of the ideal of selfless womanhood, the ethos of wife and mother who sacrifices personal needs for the family, they find that they share a sense of vague dissatisfaction. Friedan describes their problem with a famous phrase that Henry David Thoreau applied in Walden to the lives of “most men”: “quiet desperation.” Before the meeting, Friedan tells us, the women had been saying to themselves, “There isn’t any problem”:

But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, “the prob- lem.” And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the prob-

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lem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone. (19–20)

Women like these and the people who know them—their husbands and their children—may feel that Friedan is addressing them directly, I to you, by the end of the book. But the subtlety and much of the rhetorical power of The Feminine Mystique arise from a more indirect approach, tipped off by the author’s use of pronouns. She does not write from the radicalized position of “we,” inviting dissatisfied women to join together under the ban- ner of feminism. Nor does she follow the practice of the advertisers who invite housewives to identify with images like supermom, saying in effect “You can be like me.” Instead she borrows the rhetoric of objectivity from the magazine psychologists and doctors of the day; she steps back and invites the audience to join her as observers of the condition of women, treating the ladies of the coffee group and other cases in the third person: “they all shared the same problem,” “they were not alone.” To reinforce the audience in the observer’s role, Friedan quotes authorities, such as (male) doctors reporting on “the housewife’s syndrome” and “the housewife’s blight” (20–21). But rather than becoming distant and cold, the rhetori- cal situation becomes highly dramatic as case after case appears. Author and audience assume the role of research observers watching an experi- ment in the process of going bad, or theatre-goers beholding a tragedy of human waste and sorrow, left to wonder, how do our own lives compare? The “problem” comes to seem more and more familiar.

In her second chapter, Friedan takes the image she has impressed upon the minds of the observing audience—the unhappy housewife with the vague malady that unfolds in chapter 1—and places it into competition with the image of the happy housewife and ultrafeminine helpmate that prevails in the advertisements and feature articles of a typical women’s magazine of the day:

The image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine, passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home. The magazine surely does not leave out sex; the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man. It is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physi- cal bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit? In the magazine image, women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beau- tiful and to get and keep a man. (36)

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The magazine woman is yet not augmented to the point of supernatural power, as the “lady with the flying hair” would be in the images of the 1980s. This woman is reduced. Like the specialist in Wendell Berry’s cri- tique of modern society (see chapter 1), one part of the woman is unhealth- ily distended—the life of the body and particularly the function of repro- duction—but she is denied “thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit.” Like the person reduced to slavery, her humanity is denied and she is treated like a lower being, at best a child, at worst an animal.

Friedan expands the image and traces its American history for the re- mainder of her book. She argues that, under the burden of this image, women’s “wasted energy [is] destructive to their husbands, to their chil- dren, and to themselves” (377). The unfulfilled woman, striving to deny her wholeness to fit the image, opens herself to all kinds of resentments, neuroses, and physical ailments. The experiment is failing; the tragic waste continues. Women are not merely sad; they are sick, and their sickness is spreading to the whole culture.

The image of the thoughtful, awakening woman remains somewhat poorly defined in this early work by Friedan—realistically so, considering the argument that it is hard even to think outside of images so pervasively imposed upon us by the mass media, as Orwell ominously warned in his novel 1984. But the awakening has begun in the coffee circles and in the pages of books like The Feminine Mystique. Friedan concludes that only “when women as well as men emerge from biological living to realize their human selves, those leftover halves of life may become their years of greater fulfillment”:

Then the split in the image will be healed, and daughters will not face that jumping-off point at twenty-one or forty-one. When their mothers’ fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to “beat themselves down” to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and chil- dren, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this may be the next step in human evolution. (377–78)

“Fulfillment” becomes aligned with “healing” in the constellation of val- ues that guides Friedan’s appeal to her audience. She appeals along the lines of traditional humanism. Wholeness (health) involves not just the body, but also the mind and spirit. When women are asked to remain in a state of childhood, or when their importance is limited to bodily functions such

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94 # Appeals to Gender

as sex and reproduction or animal functions such as physical labor, they are stuck in a biological world. In Friedan’s time, women could vote and get an education, but they were asked to take on a kind of voluntary mind- lessness. In a poignant appeal to time, Friedan calls for “the next step in human evolution.”

Images of the Body and the Problem of Stereotyping

The mildness of Friedan’s humanist rhetoric no doubt accounted for her wide appeal and sympathetic audience, but many writers in the women’s movement felt the need early on to turn up the volume. One of these was Germaine Greer, whose book The Female Eunuch attracted a wide and more radical audience when it came out in the early 1970s. Like Friedan, Greer begins in the position of the observer, using passive-voice verbs and third- person pronouns to describe the plight of women, but at the very end of her book, in a kind of feminist manifesto entitled “Revolution,” she switches abruptly to the first-person plural “we”—“We have but one life to live, and the first object is to find a way of salvaging that life from the disabilities already inflicted upon it in the service of our civilization” (326)—and then she ends by directly addressing the reader with the second person in her very last sentence: “What will you do?” (329).

Much of the edge that Greer achieves throughout her book comes from her focus on the female body and particularly female sexuality. In the in- troduction, she writes,

female sexuality has been masked and deformed by most observers, and never more so than in our own time. . . . What happens is that the female is considered as a sexual object for the use and apprecia- tion of other sexual beings, men. Her sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by being identified as passivity. The vagina is oblit- erated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed. The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate—timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity. . . . [F]emale reproduction is thought to influence the whole organism in the operations of the Wicked Womb, source of hysteria, menstrual depression, and unfitness for any sustained enterprise. (5)

Greer, a British woman who relocated to the United States, caught the spirit of the European women’s movement of the late 1960s, particularly the French feminists who took to the streets with banners saying “WE ARE

ALL HYSTERICS.” The word “hysterical,” which derives from the Greek word

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for “womb,” has been used since ancient times to describe an illness that crosses the boundaries between mind and body but has also been used in association with a dismissive attitude toward the complaints of women. By claiming the word that had for centuries been used against them, the French feminists found a way of celebrating their difference from those who would oppress them. “Yes, we are different,” they said in effect, “but now you must deal with our difference rather than using it as a stigma; you must work through it rather than around it.”3

Greer uses a similar tactic, arguing that, in the prevailing imagery of the times, women’s sexuality has been seen primarily as something lacking. Because woman lacks the male genitalia, she takes on the attributes of the eunuch. What has really happened is that the reality of her own sexuality has been denied, the image of the vagina removed from sight and made mysterious, an object of fear and loathing. The result is not only misrep- resentation, but ultimately violence, an attempt to act out in real life what has happened in the social imagination: namely, the destruction of the woman. The penis becomes a sword or a gun in popular symbolism, and the cycle of violence is perpetuated.

Repetition, the motor for this kind of image-perpetuation, gains force in a culture where print and broadcasting media allow mass reproduction of imagery, where television and internet flood the home and saturate the mind with images designed for quick consumption and easy memory. So it is that the practice of stereotyping emerges and takes hold as a key prob- lem in modern times. The very word derives from the print industry; it signifies the ability of the printing press to create master images and re- produce them with exact precision. Thus, as Greer writes, “the myth of the Eternal Feminine, nowadays called the Stereotype,” becomes the “dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire”:

Assuming that the goddess of consumer culture is an artifact, we em- bark on an examination of how she comes to be made, the manu- facture of the Soul. The chief element in the process is like the cas- tration that we saw practiced upon the body, the suppression and deflection of Energy. Following the same simple pattern, we begin at the beginning with Baby, showing how of the greater the less is made. The Girl struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines with her feminine conditioning until Puberty resolves the ambiguity and anchors her safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it doesn’t she is given further conditioning as a corrective, especially by psychologists, whose assumptions and prescriptions [amount to] the Psychological Sell. (5)

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96 # Appeals to Gender

In this passage from her introduction—with each italicized topic covered in later chapters—Greer hints at how the entire life of the stereotypic woman gets imprinted by the male-dominated institutions of social life: church, family, school, state, and health care establishments (particularly the men- tal health industry), all reinforced by advertising, mass communication, and the entertainment industry.

Anticipating that she will be criticized for not offering solid alterna- tives for the gender system she criticizes, Greer follows Friedan in suggest- ing that we cannot yet know what woman will become when she is fully liberated. But considering the spiraling violence against women, Greer ar- gues, we must stop it at its root. The root of the violence, in her view, is the prevailing image of the woman’s body as something either threaten- ing or totally without value, something lacking. So—unlike Friedan who points ultimately to the humanistic values of mental and spiritual fulfill- ment, the things men and women ought to have in common—Greer hones in on the differences in an appeal to the body. Not until women’s bodies are valued at the same level as men’s will men, and women themselves, stop treating the female body as an object to be feared, loathed, punished, erased, and destroyed.

Breaking the Hold of Stereotypes: Shifting Perspectives

To get a stronger hold on the problem of stereotyping, consider an example from imaginative literature: The Left Hand of Darkness, a science fiction novel written just about the same time as The Female Eunuch. The author, Ursula K. Le Guin, invites the reader to join her in a story that involves a “thought experiment.” An earthly envoy representing an interplanetary federation is sent to a planet inhabited by humanoids with no permanent sexual identities. These aliens are neither male nor female until they en- ter kemmer, their season of estrus. In kemmer, any individual may mani- fest as male or female and in the course of a lifetime may experience both states. From their viewpoint, the envoy—a normal male earthling—lives in a state of more or less permanent kemmer. Thus he is received as a cu- riosity by his hosts, who think of him as a “pervert.” As an anthropologist as well as a diplomat on a sensitive mission, he finds that he must struggle with stereotypes that he has never given a second thought but that inform every habit of his thinking about other people. Here’s a typical case, in which the envoy describes one of the planet’s denizens:

He was the superintendent of my island; I thought of him as my land- lady, for he had fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, and a soft fat face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature. He was good to me,

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and also showed my room while I was out to thrill-seekers for a small fee: See the Mysterious Envoy’s room! He was so feminine in looks and manner that I once asked him how many children he had. He looked glum. He had never borne any. He had, however, sired four. It was one of the little jolts I was always getting. (48)

Le Guin says in her introduction to the novel that science fiction usu- ally comes closer to describing the present than predicting the future. The hint suggests that the envoy’s struggle with stereotypes and the “jolts” he gets from time to time are typical experiences in modern life. The fact that he is a black man underlines Le Guin’s point: It is painful and difficult to work through the encrusted stereotypes and assumptions we carry with us in an effort to understand, with the care of a professional diplomat and anthropologist, the reality of the Other. The envoy’s race, a huge issue on his home planet, turns out to be of little consequence in this new setting, but his masculinity, his gender, figures powerfully in his relations with people from the host planet.

The suggestion is that such categories as race and gender are relatively arbitrary. They are socially constructed. They are like language in the sense that any word, such as “tree,” bears an arbitrary relationship to the object it refers to in nature, the thing with leaves and bark. The meaning is at- tributed by language users, and the word changes from culture to culture. Though arbitrary, however, the attributions are no less real. They inspire violent emotions (pathos), determine the qualities of character (ethos), and even affect reasoning (logos). The connection between language and think- ing has been a matter of great concern in modern rhetorical theory, lin- guistics, philosophy of language, and cognitive psychology. It would be ex- tremely difficult to separate thought from language or some other kind of symbol system (such as numbers or the visual images and movements of dreams). We think in signs.

This cognitive dimension of symbolic activity suggests that when ste- reotypes predominate in language, they take root in the mind, place lim- its on what a person can think, and can only be dislodged by a jolting shift of perspectives. The jolt that Le Guin’s envoy feels also comes from a rapid shift in perspective—a common experience of travelers in foreign countries. Their old habits of interpreting the world bump up against a new reality. Old positions must be reconfigured; old habits adjusted to new informa- tion. Rhetoric often serves as an accompaniment to, or a substitute for, the jolting experience of foreign travel and cultural exchange.

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