Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Mandatory Blog Entry # 3

Vivvan C. Adair is the author of the text entitled “The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poor Women, Power and the Politics of Feminist Representation." This is both a photographic and a narrative exhibit that portrays what poverty, pregnancy, and struggles through education look like from the representation of strong single women who have overcame the lowest of lows as mothers.

The first story was very moving because it describes amazing images and sets the setting for the rest of the story of a woman with an eight-month-old daughter who woke up in misery at a shelter for tattered women; to a bus that led her to a welfare office and into classes at North Seattle Community College and eventually dedicated her self into University of Washington. Remarkably, she completed her PH.D while being a post-doctoral instructor at U of W and was hired as a professor at Hamilton College. Set up an “ACCESS Project” that was very important because it was an opportunity for her to get involved with “at risk” programs that she so desperately needed when she was struggling with a baby and missing teeth. This project at “Hamilton College is an educational, social service, and career program that assists profoundly low-income, single parents in central New York” is a program that helped her and others around her in a city that desperately needs a program to help them move from welfare and low-wage labor to rewarding and invulnerable career employment through achieving education. She goes onto argue against the stereotypes of women and how doctors, lawyers, educators, etc., and stigmas of welfare women having babies (a common theme amongst her audience and dispelling it). The second paragraph on page 8 was a very important paragraph because it provides negative feedback towards projects such as the “ACCES Project”. “Wade Horn, the Bush administration’s “Fatherhood CZAR” insists that we should not encourage education, since recipients have “failed in the past” (Ohlemacher 2007). I was really astonished that Wade Horn would insist that the Bush administration did not encourage education, especially after hearing a story like this one at the beginning of Adair’s essay. Logos appears many times through this piece because she incorporates very understandable logic and reasoning within the stories and examples in her essay. Adair also combined the use of ethos and pathos throughout her text as well.

In Ancient Rhetorics Chapter 5, Aristotle is once again is premised as an example as an experienced rhetorician who displays this notion through logical proof. A rhetorical example, or according to “Aristotle’s paradeigma (“model”) is any particular that can be fitted under the heading of a class and that represents the distinguishing features of that class (p.171). Other historical examples, both brief and extended, relates to Adair’s text because it describes the oppositions to the Bush Administration and other representations of Congress in America. Analogy was a main term that “describes a rhetor places one hypothetical example beside another for the purposes of comparison”(p.177). In other words, the simpler the analogy is, then the simpler the job is for the rhetor. A quick and easy example of this would be that the rhetor would compare two or more things/events. Similar and Contrary examples are exemplified by Quintilian distinguished these by comparing two like instances, “simile” and “contraries” (p.180). Something that might be related to Adair’s piece because she might have used this notion derived from historical rhetorics such as Aristotle or Quintilian by demonstrating “maxims”. “Maxims are wise saying or proverbs that are generally accepted by the rhetoricians’s community” (p. 182). In Adair’s piece, she uses many wise sayings and or proverbs that are generally accepted by the rhetorician’s community. An example of this in her piece could be the information that was drawn from history such as statistics on things such as “welfare leavers” on page 4. She states, “50 to 75 percent of welfare leavers remain poor two to three years after leaving welfare” (Adair 5). This essay continually gains more credibility throughout each additional paragraph by portraying the low-income; student parents that present what poverty and resistance would actually look like, with additional historical facts to back it all up. The Ancient Rhetorics text also describes the importance of signs and how physical facts or real events that inevitably or usually accompany some other state of affairs are important because this can be very effective in an argument for the same reason that examples are effective. According to Crowlee and Hawhee, “Arguments from sign appeal to the daily experiences that we share with members of our audience. By relating this to Adair’s essay, I was able to understand how she used sign appeal to display and relate these arguments with her audience. This is the very reason why she analyzed these “stories” about poor women and welfare produced in contemporary political/public rhetoric and imagery, to ultimately indentify a circuit of bodies that are represented and understood to mesh with dominant ideology. Because ultimately, her main purpose in her argument is to disrupt this force of power that she continually describes in her essay, because the end result in redirecting the policy would have a much greater impact on poor women and children throughout America today.

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