The gender of rhetoric, reason, and realism

This chapter argues that moving beyond realism- to post-realism-requires moving beyond the gender-blindness of conventional accounts.1 My argument weaves together areas of inquiry that are usually treated in isolation. Intellectual developments associated with the rise of systematic inquiry in ancient Greece-marked by the shift from rhetoric to philosophy and its foundational dichotomies of reason over affect, mind over body-comprise one area of inquiry. Another is the study of historical-political developments-the shift to centralized authority and its dichotomies of public over private, civilized over "other"-within which Western science and political theory "emerged." A third area of inquiry is feminist scholarship that identifies Western philosophy and science as masculinist (privileging that which is associated with maleness over that which is associated with femaleness) and androcentric (taking male ways of being and knowing-as constituted under conditions of gender hierarchy-as the putatively human norm). A final area encompasses feminist critiques of state formation as institutionalizing and legitimating gender (and other) hierarchies and, specifically, as "naturalizing" the dichotomy of male-female "difference" that has excluded women (and others associated with the feminine) from intellectual and political power.