Alternative Rhetoric and Morality: Writing from the Margins - National ...

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David L. Wallace 

Alternative Rhetoric and Morality: Writing from 

the Margins 

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization 

in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, 

three concepts from queer theory—intersectionality, copresence, and disidentification— 

are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk of the article, 

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is examined to illustrate what engaging in 

alternative rhetoric from a marginalized cultural position may mean in practice. 

[A] central insight to keep fully present in our thinking, rather 

than on the periphery, is the necessity of resisting a tendency to 

view discourse (language in particular use) as a disembodied 

force within which we are inevitably, inescapably, innocently 

swept along. 

—Jacqueline Jones Royster, “Academic Discourses, or Small Boats on a Big Sea” 

A t the level of theory, the field of rhetoric and composition has largely accepted 

that rhetorical theory must be redefined to account for the constructed 

nature of agency and the ongoing processes of cultural reproduction—that 

objectivity no longer exists and that the new game in town is accounting for our 

unique subjectivities. Thus, as Bakhtin has led us to understand, all language 

and all rhetoric is inherently discursive, whether those using it recognize it or 

CCC 61:2 / december 2009 

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w a l l a c e / a l t e r n a t i v e r h e t o r i c a n d m o r a l i t y 

not. As Jacqueline Jones Royster argues in the epigraph above, this discursive/ 

contingent nature of discourse must be at the center of any understanding of 

rhetoric and composition that takes postmodernism seriously, and discourse 

must be understood as an embodied force that has real consequences for real 

people. Further, if we are serious about developing alternative rhetorics that 

address our field’s complicity in the discourses of power, then those efforts must 

begin with an explicit recognition that the consequences of discourse are more 

severe and limiting for some groups in our society than they are for others. 

A number of scholars have suggested that creating alternative rhetorical 

theories and practices is critical for the survival of marginalized peoples 

in American society. For example, American Indian scholars such as Malea 

Powell and Scott Lyons have begun to expose how the practice of rhetoric 

has contributed to historical and ongoing attempts to erase American Indian 

peoples and cultures. Jane Hindman (“Making”) reminds us that finding ways 

to publicly claim culturally stigmatized identities may be critical to recovering 

from potentially life-threatening addictions, and carmen kynard (among 

others) argues that denying working-class students of color the opportunity 

to use their “everyday discursive practices” in academic writing carries with 

it the risk of presuming that they are “simply inferior” (32). Yet how we are to 

enact these calls remains a complex question. 

In response to the understanding that rhetoric is not a neutral tool and 

that it has been complicit in the marginalization of groups within American 

society, a number of scholars in rhetoric and composition have begun exploring 

what alternative rhetorics would look like in theory and practice (e.g., see edited 

collections by Bishop; Gray-Rosendale and Gruber; Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell). 

This work illustrates that sorting out what counts as “alternative” rhetorical 

theory and practice is a difficult business that must take into account not only 

the intent of the originating interlocutor and the conventional or transgressive 

nature of the discourse practices themselves but also the contexts for the act 

and the varied perspectives and experiences of those who see or hear the act. 

Defining a moral basis for alternative rhetoric is one important step in sorting 

out these complexities. Indeed, more than fifteen years ago, Patricia Bizzell 

argued that attempts to develop postmodern rhetorical theory and practice 

have been largely stymied because we have been slow to act on the realization 

that just because “no unimpeachable authority and transcendent truth exist, 

this does not mean that no respectable authority and no useable truth exist” 

(665). Bizzell identifies our nostalgia for the good old days of absolute Truth 

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and for value-free, transparent discursive practices as impediments to taking 

up the serious work of defining this new moral basis. Further, she argues 

that engaging in what passes as progressive pedagogy without defining this 

new moral basis amounts to “a sort of pedagogical bad faith” in which we are 

“calling students to the service of some higher good which we do not have the 

courage to name” (670). 

In this article, I explore what it means to name the good to which we call 

students (and ourselves), arguing that alternative rhetoric begins at the point 

where one moves beyond the recognition (and perhaps celebration) of discursive 

subjectivity to exploring (and accepting one’s participation in) systems of 

power that use language and rhetoric both to disenfranchise and to liberate. 

To extend Bizzell’s argument, I contend that too many postmodern rhetorical 

theorists have been content to end their contributions to rhetorical theory 

and composition pedagogy with explicating the always unique interactions 

of subjectivities. To stop here is to be in danger of invoking a risky form of individualism 

that allows one to invoke the potential powers of deconstruction 

without accepting the attendant responsibility to assess one’s own participation 

in systems of oppression. The critical question then becomes how do we move 

forward; how do we develop a practical sense of morality that provides the basis 

for rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy that substantively addresses not 

only the contingent nature of subjectivity but also real effects of systemic oppression? 

To explore this question, I draw three concepts from queer theory, 

arguing that they provide means for thinking about identity and rhetoric in 

a way that more substantively accounts for subjectivity, and then I provide a 

reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera that illustrates how such 

an approach to rhetoric might work in practice. 

Intersectionality, Copresence, Disidentification, and Defining 

Alternative Rhetoric 

Rhetoricians have debated the relationships among rhetoric, Truth, and the 

greater good of societies for millennia, and as Bizzell has argued, the postmodern 

turn on this problem removes the possibility of any absolutely defined 

Truth and, thus, necessitates a new basis for morality. Further, if we are serious 

about accounting for the participation of rhetoric and our field’s theory and 

practice of it in the inequities and injustices of our society, then we cannot 

simply replace Truth with the greatest good for the greatest number of people. 

Instead, we must consider that what we see as good, right, or even well argued 

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is always conditioned by our place in society as well as that the rhetoric we 

teach is integrally bound up with the perspectives of the victors—of those who 

gained sociocultural and, at times, military dominance over others. 

The difficulty of finding a position from which to sort out this new moral 

basis for developing alternative rhetoric is further complicated by the fact that 

our unique subjectivities cannot be reduced to a single binary identity feature 

(e.g., gender, race, class, sexual identity, age, religion, or physical or mental/ 

emotional abledness) that captures all of our relationships to the discourses of 

power. Instead, as Kimberle William Crenshaw argues, we must take an intersectional 

perspective, seeing major features of identity such as gender and race 

not as mutually exclusive categories but as operating in complex interactions 

that make being an Asian American different from being an Asian American 

woman and different still from being an Asian American lesbian. For composition 

theory and pedagogy, attending to the intersectional nature of identity has 

the potential to help us see rhetorical agency as more than an all or nothing 

proposition that presumes either that everyone can and should have the kind 

of agency usually enjoyed by straight, white, physically abled, middle- to upperclass, 

Christian men or that identity is so complex and inherently individual 

that there is no reasonable stance from which to articulate how any kind of 

rhetorical agency is morally different from another. 

Given the inherent intersectionality involved in subjectivity, the critical 

question, then, becomes how can a moral basis for rhetorical theory and practice 

be developed that accounts for the complex interplay of power and identity. 

The notion that each of us must ultimately answer this question for ourselves 

in each situation has some explanatory power in the sense that, as Bakhtin 

has led us to see, language and rhetoric are discursive, and their conventions 

must be continually recreated and maintained through the unique interactions 

among unique individuals. However, Bakhtin is also clear that collective understandings 

exist in the form of speech genres that have real power to shape not 

only discourse but also the cultural values that are built through the exercise 

of discourse. Those of us who take it as our task (indeed, our profession) to 

describe speech genres and other patterns of interaction and to teach others 

how to usefully engage in discourse bear a particular responsibility to account 

for this collective agency. Thus, I contend that to be responsible postmodern 

rhetoricians we must build a discursive understanding of this agency and 

define a moral basis on which to pursue it. In her seminal Epistemology of the 

Closet, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued that examining how 

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and why nonformative sexual identities are marginalized in Western society is 

critical for all people, because “virtually any aspect of modern Western culture 

must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the 

degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of the modern homo/ 

heterosexual definition” (1). In essence, Sedgwick argues that exploring the 

fault lines of identity that have been stigmatized in our society is critical not 

only because society has defined these as important issues but also because 

(as Foucault taught us) these are the places where the operation of cultural 

values becomes visible, where seemingly transparently good cultural values 

and neutral discourse practices can be deconstructed. 

In addition to intersectionality, queer theory suggests that copresence 

and disidentification may be important for understanding the interplay of 

individual and collective agency when the goal is to bring marginalized voices 

and perspectives into substantive contact with the discourses of power. I borrow 

these two terms from José Esteban Muñoz, who argues that the deconstruction 

of the systems of oppression in American society are dependent on the 

substantive copresence of the marginalized with their oppressors and on the 

active disidentification of the discursive practices used to create the underlying 

marginalization. Muñoz argues that disidentification is a critical tool for 

moving beyond shallow multicultural inclusion toward a “more progressive 

identity discourse” (10) because it begins at the points of conflict within culture 

and “does not dispel those ideological contradictory elements; rather, like a 

melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works 

to hold on to this object and invest it with new life” (12). 

In the terms I have been using in his article, disidentification is critical for 

an alternative conception of rhetorical agency because it allows a marginalized 

person to act without the need to, in Muñoz’s terms, “evacuate the politically 

dubious or shameful components within an identificatory locus” (12). Thus, 

one important means for creating the copresence of the marginalized within 

a discourse is the act of those of us who have been marginalized claiming the 

right to redefine the discourse practices—even terms like queer and bitch that 

have been used to mark us—in ways that claim not only a place at the table 

but call others to question how that table has been constructed and for what 

purposes it is used. However, as important as reclaiming problematic labels may 

be, alternative rhetoric will require identifying a broader range of techniques 

that the marginalized can use to gain substantive copresence—a task I turn 

to later in this article. 

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As important as agency from the margins is, it cannot be the only 

basis for alternative rhetoric because it would place all the responsibility 

for change on the oppressed—adding the responsibility of educating 

oppressors to the burden of dealing with the oppression itself and because 

it presumes a binary oppressed/oppressor role that ignores the complications 

of intersectionality. Further, it will be critical for the enfranchised to 

engage in forms of disidentification from problematic normatives if we are 

to break out of what Sedgwick has identified as the “minoritizing” view 

in which discriminatory cultural concepts such as heteronormativity are 

considered as problematic only for those in the proscribed minority (1). 

We must understand that heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, 

religious intolerance, and the like have consequences for all of society. Further, 

we must accept that collective agency that crosses traditional identity barriers 

is necessary to unseat such beliefs and the discursive practices that support 

them if we are to avoid reifying the very problematic identity categories that 

we hope to challenge. For these reasons, developing alternative approaches to 

rhetoric also depends on a collective exercise of agency that explicitly recognizes 

that we are all implicated in a set of social-cultural issues that extend 

beyond the limits of our own subjectivities. Further, we must do more than 

recognize this need at a theoretical level while continuing to speak, write, and 

teach the discourses of power to whatever extent we have access to them. As a 

discipline, then, we must take up the task of educating ourselves about how to 

bring voices and concepts from the margins into substantive interaction with 

the discourses of power, not with the goal to simply add some ethnic spice to 

the multicultural stew but to transform existing values and rhetorical practices. 

At the heart of the moral basis for alternative rhetoric, then, is the rejection 

of the myth of meritocracy in American society and its attendant belief 

in the transparent and neutral nature of language and the inherent fairness of 

education. Instead, alternative rhetoric, as I define it, requires acceptance of 

the responsibility to develop a new kind of rhetorical agency in which we are 

not only conscious of the limits of our subjectivities but also take action to 

understand our complicity in the oppression of others and to educate ourselves 

in the use of new discursive practices. Alternative rhetoric (as I am using the 

term) differs from neo-Aristotelian rhetoric because it takes as its goal the 

unseating of oppression and because it requires a new understanding of and 

accounting for one’s participation within systems of power. One cannot begin 

with the presumption that it is possible to argue for the good of all or that 

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the benefit of the majority is an adequate rationale for moral action. Instead, 

morality itself must be understood as discursive, as an ongoing process rather 

than a fixed set of ideals. The difficulty in enacting such a position is that it 

cannot devolve into the paralysis of unending navel gazing, lamenting the 

impossibility of ever fully understanding the other; rather, we must define how 

to engage with others (as well as those who have been “othered”) in a way that 

accounts for systemic differences. To qualify as “alternative” in the terms that I 

propose here, rhetorical theory and practice must move beyond the recognition 

that no utterance is ever neutral to a substantive accounting of the operation 

of privilege and marginalization inherent in any rhetorical act. Put simply, in 

alternative rhetoric, a rhetor cannot simply seek out the most effective means 

of persuasion available but must also consider the implications of engaging in 

those means for others. 

This discursive understanding of alternative rhetoric builds on linguist 

James Paul Gee’s notion of language as existing only in Discourses, which he 

defines as “ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate 

words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, 

glances, body positions, and clothes” (6–7). Gee sees Discourses as integrally 

bound up with identity: “A Discourse is a sort of ‘identity kit’ which comes 

complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, 

and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (7). 

Alternative rhetoric not only recognizes that language, rhetoric, and discourse 

are intimately bound up with identity but also that they are not neutral—that 

the dominant versions of each are systematically detrimental to some groups. 

For example, Muñoz argues that traditional notion of masculinity (and the 

many discursive practices that enforce it in our society) “is calibrated to shut 

down queer possibilities and energies” (58). Thus, at the age of thirteen when 

I hear my father say to me, “you walk like a girl in those sandals,” language is 

being used to call me to account for transgressing a male/female binary, and, 

in retrospect, I see my father as participating in a larger system of compulsory 

heteronormativity—the purpose of which is to socialize boys and girls not 

only into narrowly defined gender roles but to stigmatize and marginalize any 

behaviors or individuals that fall outside of the supposed norms. The central 

question for alternative rhetoric, then, is how does one resist such a system: 

how does one challenge a stigmatized identity while simultaneously redefining 

the features of the Discourse that make it possible to meaningfully articulate 

that identity? 

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A number of rhetorical theorists writing from culturally marginalized 

positions have begun to suggest means for moving beyond this potential 

quagmire. For example, at the level of theory, Scott Lyons proposes a new goal 

for American Indians in rhetoric—a rhetorical sovereignty in which peoples 

have the inherent right and ability “to determine their own communicative 

needs and desire in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, 

styles, and languages of public discourse” (449–50). At the level of practice, 

Hindman (“Writing”) has argued for an embodied rhetoric of professional 

practice to counter the disembodied masculinist discourse that dominates 

our field. To build on these and other voices in our field, I explore the work of 

Gloria Anzaldúa because excerpts from her Borderlands/La Frontera: The New 

Mestiza have become staples in rhetoric and composition anthologies for both 

graduate and undergraduate students and because her account of her own 

coming to voice highlights the disidentification strategies she used to create 

a new sense of self out of the intersections of her marginalized race, ethnicity, 

gender, class, and sexual identity statuses. 

Build the Fence First! 

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third 

World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab 

forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging 

to form a third country—a border culture.” 

—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands 

Although I had read these words from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: 

The New Mestiza several times, 1 I did not understand their importance 

for alternative rhetoric until I saw the people in the park protesting the pending 

immigration reform bill and carrying signs that said “Stop the Invasion,” 

“Learn English,” and “Build the Fence First!” I had spent the morning puzzling 

about Anzaldúa’s metaphor of borderlands as a different kind of underlying 

metaphor for identity and language/literacy, and my jog through the protest in 

the park forced me to see that the white people carrying the signs wanted both 

a physical and a sociocultural fence—a crisp, clean border that separates the 

legitimate from the illegitimate with both barbed wire and clear, unaccented 

English. Vastly outnumbered, I kept my head down as I jogged on, but inwardly I 

hoped one of these people would shout out to me, force me to stand my ground 

and explain that millions of Spanish-speaking people had been annexed into 

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this country as the results of wars and treaties, that the protestors had better 

be prepared to pay higher prices for their produce if millions of illegal migrant 

workers were deported, and that freedom of speech does not apply only to those 

who speak English. What I came to understand on my silent, seething run was 

that shedding the notion of physical and sociocultural borders as distinctions 

that can and should be clearly demarcated is difficult work that requires not 

just the unseating of cultural values, such as the nineteenth-century notion 

that it was immoral for women to speak in public to mixed-gender audiences, 

but that the underlying bases for such fundamental concepts as literacy, citizenship, 

and identity must be radically reconstructed. 

In contrast to first-wave feminists who argued for the rights of women 

to have access to the same tools and opportunities as men, Anzaldúa seeks 

to shift the very grounds on which arguments can be made and, in doing so, 

proposes a more complex understanding of literacy as well as an explicitly 

intersectional notion of identity. As a woman writing from the margins of 

American culture, Anzaldúa faced the challenge of articulating a moral basis 

for creating the copresence of the oppressed within the discourses of power, and 

she uses disidentification strategies to turn cultural values inside out. However, 

Anzaldúa also challenges foundational aspects of what Audre Lorde famously 

terms “the master’s house,” and Anzalúa describes a range of rhetorical exigencies 

and moves that have been largely invisible to the privileged. The reading 

of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands that I present here focuses on the deconstruction 

and reconstruction of such seemingly straightforward concepts as borders in 

the service of redefining the moral bases for understanding language, literacy, 

and identity in American culture. 

I am keenly aware of the dangers of appropriating Anzaldúa’s notion of 

borderlands for purposes beyond those that she may have originally intended. 

Indeed, the complex interplay of Anzaldúa’s race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, 

class, religion, and other features of her identity that enriches her work also 

makes use of her work a challenging proposition. For example, it has always 

bothered me that Andrea Lunsford’s 1998 JAC interview with Anzaldúa focused 

largely on race and, to a lesser extent, gender issues in exploring how Anzaldúa’s 

work helps us further a much needed postcolonial understanding of the work of 

rhetoric and composition. Sexual identity is ignored except for one question in 

which Lunsford compares linguistic code switching to “injecting the discourse 

of lesbianism or alternative sexuality of any kind into traditional heterosexuality” 

(21), and there is no reference to the hormone imbalance that Anzaldúa 

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describes at some length as marking her early life in significant ways. As a gay 

man, I am troubled by this and other discussions of Anzaldúa’s work that pay 

what I see as limited attention to sexual identity issues as an important subject 

matter in her work. Yet I must also carefully attend to the ways in which my 

maleness, my whiteness, my Christian background, and other factors such as 

my position in the academy affect my use of her work. For example, I suspect 

that my use of her borderland concept as a metaphor for alternative rhetoric 

might make Anzaldúa suspicious given the uneasy relationship she had with 

the academy. As Cynthia G. Franklin argues, Anzaldúa felt that her position in 

the academy meant that she should “no longer lay claim to her working-class 

identity” (116) and also that to be useful “we need to de-academize theory and 

to connect the community to the academy” (54). Further, in the introduction 

to her edited collection Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative 

and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, Anzaldúa herself warns against 

the rhetoric of academic scholarship posed by teachers who are “unaware of 

its race, class and gender ‘blank spots.’ It is a rhetoric that presents its conjecture 

as universal truths while concealing its patriarchal privilege and posture” 

(“Haciendo Caras” xxiii). 

Given these concerns, I proceed cautiously, aware that Anzaldúa expected 

those who occupy positions of privilege such as mine to hear her, to engage 

with her in the difficult work of challenging the inequities inherent in systems 

of privilege (see Anzaldúa, “Preface”) and that, in her interview with Lunsford, 

Anzaldúa revealed that she saw the relevance of her work for rhetoric and 

composition and that she had been working on a book in which she explores 

how composition also means “taking it over into how one composes one’s life, 

how one creates an addition to one’s house, how one makes sense of all the 

kinds of coincidental and random things that happen in one’s life” (Lunsford 

9). Indeed, I believe that the larger issue is accounting for how the perspectives 

we bring to bear affect our readings of Anzaldúa’s (and others’) work no matter 

what the subject matter. In my case, I bring a decidedly queer perspective, 

reading Anzaldúa through Sedgwick’s notion of the epistemology of the closet 

because of my interest in understanding what it means for the marginalized to 

move from invisibility or stigmatized identities to public voices that expose the 

means used in the discourses of power to create marginalization. However, as 

a white man I must also be aware that I will never fully appreciate the gender 

and race issues in her work and that I bear a particular responsibility to attend 

to the limitations of my own understanding in appropriating the notion 

of borderlands. 

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Anzaldúa redefines borders not as simple geographical lines but as designations 

used to mark “the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us 

from them,” and she defines a borderland as “a vague and undetermined place 

created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state 

of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (Borderlands 

25). Borderlands and the people who live in them are critical concepts for 

Anzaldúa’s rereading of the history and culture of her homeland—a valley in 

what is now referred to as South Texas. Anzaldúa begins by tracing the physical/geographical 

creation of her homeland as a borderland beginning with the 

Spanish invasion of Mexico that literally created a new race: “mestizos who 

were genetically equipped to survive small pox, measles, and typhus (Old World 

diseases to which the natives had no immunity) founded a new hybrid race 

and inherited Central and South America” (27). She also rereads the history of 

Texas as an invasion of Anglos who “drove the tejanos (native Texans of Mexican 

descent) from their lands, committing all manner of atrocities against them” 

and the Alamo as “a symbol that legitimized the white imperialist takeover” 

(28). Further, she brings the rereading of history to bear on her own family: “My 

grandmother lost all her cattle, they stole her land” (30). 

Anzaldúa links this historical re-accounting of how she and her people 

come to be to the formation of underlying cultural notions of race and cultural 

power in American identity: “The only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants are those in 

power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites” (25–26). She 

links this history to culture as well: 

Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. 

Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, 

are transmitted to us through culture. Culture is made by those in 

power—men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them. (38) 

Further, Anzaldúa sees language as a critical part of this identity formation: 

“Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify ourselves as 

distinct people” (77), and she identifies education as one of the important 

cultural means used to enforce predominant white values: “I remember how 

the white teachers used to punish us for being Mexican” (111). 

How then does one respond to a system in which morality is entwined 

seamlessly into the basic cultural concepts by which the oppressors maintain 

their cultural and economic power? Anzaldúa offers two main answers to this 

question. In the terms that I have been using in this article, the first answer is 

that the marginalized must have a substantive enough copresence in culture to 

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force an accounting of previous injustice and the ongoing benefits that derive 

from physical and cultural imperialism: 

We need to say to white society: We need you to accept the fact that Chicanos are 

different, to acknowledge your rejection and negation of us. We need you to own 

the fact that you looked upon us as less than human, that you stole our lands, our 

personhood, our self-respect. We need you to make public restitution: to say that, 

to compensate for your own sense of defectiveness, you strive for power over us, 

you erase our history and our experience because it makes you feel guilty—you’d 

rather forget your brutish acts. (107–8) 

In essence, Anzaldúa calls for a deconstruction of the culture of the dominant, 

for an understanding of the other that entails challenging such fundamental 

American notions as whiteness and freedom of speech as well as what it means 

to remember the Alamo. Make no mistake, such an effort requires change to 

the seemingly unquestionable American values that led those protestors in the 

park to want to fence off not only the American Southwest but white culture 

and some privileged version of American English as well as to my own sense 

of comfort within the discourses of power. 

Anzaldúa’s second answer to the question of how one goes about such 

change helps us to imagine how both the marginalized and the oppressors 

can take voices for change, can engage in alternative rhetoric. Indeed, while 

others have helped us to see that culture must be deconstructed for change, 

Anzaldúa provides what may be the most detailed description of what taking 

up an alternative voice might entail. 

In Borderlands, Anzaldúa recounts how her own coming to a voice allowed 

her to identify the ways in which dominant culture marginalized her 

and stripped away many important cultural values as well as recounting the 

process and discourse moves she used to gain a voice in response to that oppression. 

Although she does not explicitly set out to create alternative rhetoric 

in this book, her work can be read as setting a basis for a rhetoric that seeks 

to deconstruct the master’s house and to develop tools for the reconstruction 

of the lives and identities that were bulldozed in the building of that house. 

One critical contribution that Anzaldúa’s work makes to the formation of a 

new concept of literacy and rhetoric is her insistence that we must understand 

both the complex ways in which dominant culture works to strip culture, identity, 

and language from those whom it marginalizes and the potential power 

that speaking from such a marginalized position has to be transformative. 

The notion that people in marginalized cultural positions are forced to have 

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a kind of cultural insight that provides us with a tool for unpacking the workings 

of dominant culture is hardly original with Anzaldúa. Her concept of La 

Facultad—“the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper 

realities”—is reminiscent of W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of the double consciousness 

of African Americans; she says, “Those who are pushed out of the tribe for 

being different are likely to become more sensitized (when not brutalized into 

insensitivity)” (60). Like Mina Shaughnessy, Anzaldúa understands the consequences 

of refusing to learn to speak and act in the ways dominant American 

culture expects: “Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for 

not acculturating” (85). Similarly, Anzaldúa understands the code-switching 

strategies heralded by literacy theorists and educators such as Gee, describing 

the importance of Chicano/a English for the identity of Chicanos/as as a distinct 

people and the challenges she faces as she moves among the eight languages/ 

dialects that she uses. However, her later work also makes it clear that while the 

discourses of power may encourage those in the linguistic minority to codeswitch 

into the discourses of power, those in linguistic power rarely welcome 

the reverse (see “Haciendo Caras” xxii). 

What Anzaldúa adds to these well-intended attempts to understand 

the complexities of literacy and rhetoric in American culture is a refusal to 

whitewash language, literacy, and rhetoric by accepting dominant discourse 

practices out of necessity or practicality. Instead, as I have already argued, 

she demands a rereading of history (as many postmodern, postcolonial, and 

feminist scholars have), but she sees this rereading as linked in very practical 

ways to a new understanding of what it means to take voice in society. 

For example, Anzaldúa makes much of the loss of spirituality that dominant 

culture attempted to force upon her. She recounts the process by which María 

Coatlalopeuh becomes identified by the Spanish with the Guadalupe, patroness 

of Central Spain (because the names sound alike) and eventually is renamed 

the virgin Mary by the Catholic Church in 1660 (51). She argues that institutionalized 

religion, as a tool of Western culture, encourages “a split between 

the body and the spirit and totally ignore(s) the soul; they encourage us to kill 

off parts of ourselves. We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence 

dwells only in the head” (59). Further, Anzaldúa argues for a spiritual, 

for a shamanistic understanding of what it means to take voice (88), and she 

sees this as a response to the “tyranny of Western aesthetics” (90), challenging 

even the Western European basis for higher education: “Let’s all stop importing 

Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves 

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in the mythological soil and soul of this continent” (90). In short, the kind of accounting 

of straight, white, male, able-bodied, Euro-centric, Christian privilege 

that Anzaldúa envisions requires the re-examination and unseating of values 

that have been fundamental to higher education in the United States—even 

the detachment inherent in the sense of objectivity that has been the basis for 

Enlightenment moral sensibilities. 

Anzaldúa is not naive about the difficulties of such sweeping changes; 

indeed, her second critical contribution to alternative rhetoric is her careful 

description of what it meant for her to gain the kind of voice that can speak 

back to dominant culture in a way that calls that culture to account. Anzaldúa’s 

account of her struggle to gain voice is particularly instructive because as a 

lesbian tejana seeking to reclaim a sense of indigenous spirituality not only in 

her life but also in her scholarly writing she was forced to deal with multiple 

aspects of marginalized identity. Thus, even though it would be dangerous to 

read her particular struggles as indicative of what it means for all others to 

speak or write from the margins, the breadth of her experiences with oppression 

and the considerable insights she provides about them suggests useful 

starting places for distilling what practicing alternative rhetoric may entail. 

Perhaps the most interesting starting place for considering Anzaldúa’s 

practical contributions to the practice of alternative rhetoric is her discussion 

of her sense of the loss of her homeland because this discussion both illustrates 

the complexities of identity and challenges the often too simplistic notion that 

gaining new insights or discourse practices is automatically empowering. She 

says: 

As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are 

mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no 

race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of 

me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective 

cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am 

cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new 

story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with 

images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. (102–3) 

Here Anzaldúa captures the difficulties of becoming aware of multiple identities: 

the loss of the simple cultural narratives that are often associated with 

homes and homelands, the intersections of aspects of her identity that isolate 

her from dominant culture and from her home culture but that also provide 

a basis for connection outside of her home culture, and the generative place 

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to which this tension leads her. What is particularly important for literacy 

and rhetoric here is that Anzaldúa links this liminal state directly to how she 

understands what it means to be a writer: 

Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of 

squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. (94) 

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write 

and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh. It worries itself 

deeper and deeper, and I keep aggravating it by poking at it. (95) 

I cannot separate my writing from any part of my life. It is all one. When I write 

it feels like I’m carving bone. (95) 

For Anzaldúa, getting to this state—to a place where she could imagine having 

the kind of voice that would give her substantive copresence in dialogue 

with dominant culture—required a journey that is suggestive of the process 

that other speakers or writers who need to engage in alternative rhetoric may 

experience. In this sense, my reading of Anzaldúa here begins to flesh out the 

epistemology of the closet in rhetorical terms by identifying several kinds of 

disidentification moves that Anzaldúa describes as part of the process of coming 

to a new kind of voice. 

One contribution that Anzaldúa makes to the process of coming to understand 

one’s subjugated identity in a manner that will eventually lead to a 

new kind of voice is her description of the means she used to deny her own 

identity. She writes of the danger of mirrors to the closeted person because 

these windows could provide glimpses at “the secret sin I tried to conceal—la 

seña, the mark of the Beast” (64). Here, she seems to be speaking not of real sins 

but of aspects of herself such as her love of reading and learning, her desire for 

women, and her speaking Spanish in school that she was led to see as sinful. 

This denial led her to isolate herself: “I locked the door, kept the world out; I 

vegetated, hibernated, remained in stasis, idled” (66) and to use rage as an 

active means “to drive others away and to insulate myself against exposure. I 

have reciprocated with contempt for those who have roused shame in me” (67). 

Further, she describes this denial state as dependent on addictions—rituals 

that “help one through a trying time; its repetition safeguards the passage, it 

becomes one’s talisman, one’s touchstone” (68). 

Anzaldúa describes the culmination of these denial strategies as “the 

Coatlicue State,” which may be best seen as a kind of preparation for the 

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crossing in which “paralysis” and “depression” of denial are also accompanied 

by glimpses of understanding: “I must take small sips of her face through the 

corners of my eyes, chip away at the ice a sliver at a time” (70). She describes 

the crossing, the coming to understanding not as a bold step out of a closet but 

as incremental: “every step forward is a travesía, a crossing. I am again an alien 

in new territory” (70). And the crossing itself is costly and incomplete: “Every 

time she makes ‘sense’ of something, she has to ‘crossover,’ kicking a hole out 

of the old boundaries of the self and slipping under or over, dragging the old 

skin along, stumbling over it. It hampers her movement in the new territory, 

dragging the ghost of the past with her” (71). 

Here are critical concepts for alternative rhetoric: embracing the spiritual 

as counterpoint and complement to the rational, the link between the concepts 

or myths that bind us and reclaiming those myths to move toward crossing, the 

costs of denial and the means of doing so, the necessity of crossing but its pains 

as well, the promise of healing but the ghosts of oppression carried bodily, the 

struggle to free oneself from the very mental or emotional boulders that were 

necessary to survival before crossing. It is important to note that Anzaldúa 

describes these denial and crossing states as precursors to claiming one’s wild 

tongue, as necessary before she was able to no longer “be made to feel ashamed 

of existing” and to claim “my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual 

voice, my poet’s voice” (81). 

In Borderlands, Anzaldúa offers a complicated account of what it meant 

for her to speak from a position of disenfranchisement. I believe we must be 

ready to engage in similar complexities if we wish to create a broader, disciplinary 

notion for alternative rhetoric: we are engaged in a struggle to identify our 

personal and collective denial and to prepare for a crossing that will lead not to 

a state of instant grace but to an ongoing struggle to sort out these new voices. 

Indeed, Anzaldúa suggests that even though crossing is critical for transforming 

one’s borderland status to a constructive liminal state, the journey does not 

end with the crossing. Instead she describes this new mestiza state as requiring 

“a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (101), as entailing 

a sense of homelessness: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast 

me out” (100), and as requiring a careful inventory: “Just what did she inherit 

from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the 

Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage 

from the Anglo?” (104). 

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Why We Need Alternative Rhetorics (at Least for a While) 

But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting 

questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A 

counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; 

locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are 

reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance 

refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and for 

this, it is proudly defiant. 

—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands 

Here, Anzaldúa raises the question of how we will move forward to address 

inequities in our society, arguing that shouting across the river at the people 

who want to build the fence first will not be productive. Yet, as I have argued 

in this article, allowing those in power to set the terms of the discussion, even 

to the extent of determining what constitutes morally responsible arguments, 

is not an adequate solution because it requires those who have been marginalized 

to assimilate or find ways to argue for change within the terms set by the 

oppressors. On this matter Anzaldúa says, “I, for one, choose to use some of 

my energy to serve as mediator. I think we need to allow whites to be our allies” 

(107). As a white person trying to be Anzaldúa’s ally, I take seriously my need 

to account for my own privilege, that as a white man who teaches rhetoric and 

composition I am, in one sense, standing on the other side of the river, and I need 

to take advantage of the generosity that Anzaldúa and others have extended to 

me. Yet as a gay man I often feel that I am standing beside Anzaldúa shouting 

across a river as well, hoping that someone will hear what I am struggling to 

say—that I believe as a discipline we have not lived up to our moral obligation 

because we have tolerated homophobia and heterosexism in our classrooms, 

our composition programs, and our universities. We have been insightful in 

our theories of difference and language, but slow to see the need to address 

our own privilege within the discourses of power and quick to fall back on the 

assumption that assimilation to those discourses is ultimately in the best interests 

of our students. In addition, we have had too simple an understanding 

of what engaging with the discourses of power means for ourselves and our 

students—not fully reckoning the costs of assimilation and embracing such 

things as code-switching as easy solutions. Our own, still-vulnerable disciplinary 

position in the American academy robs us of the courage to recognize that 

oppression is a complicated business that implicates all of us to some degree, 

and, thus, we must all make it our business to address it, and those of us who 

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theorize and teach rhetoric bear an additional responsibility to set forward a 

morally responsible means for using rhetoric to seek justice in American society. 

One of the possible benefits of alternative rhetoric, as I have defined it 

here, for rhetoric and composition is finding a middle ground between a pedagogy 

that presumes that assimilation to the discourses of power is inescapable 

and a shouting-across-the-river stance. Our own conception and practice of 

rhetoric may be important starting places for engaging in such moral issues 

because exposing the ideological struggle may help our students to see the 

socially constructed nature of societal values and the discursive practices that 

propagate them. However, setting the unseating of particular social inequities 

as the primary goal of our discipline could also be dangerous; as Joseph Harris 

argues, it can become an attempt simply “to influence their present attitudes 

(which strikes me as a kind of intellectual canvassing for votes)” rather than to 

“help them learn to deploy more powerful forms of reading and writing” (578). 

Certainly, we cannot substitute leftist political leanings for the more substantive 

work of rooting out how traditional rhetoric is complicit in the many faces 

of oppression. Yet, as Bizzell suggests, we must also move beyond our field’s 

nostalgia for supposedly simpler times in which language and rhetoric were 

neutral tools with which we equipped our students to use as they wish. Further, 

we cannot simply declare that postmodern understandings of rhetoric that 

acknowledge that rhetoric has never been neutral are an adequate response 

to these problems. Instead, we need to actively develop alternative rhetorics 

that take as their central task the identification and unseating of inequities and 

that substantively account for the ways in which exercising rhetorical agency 

involves the responsibility of accounting for the impact of that agency on 

others. I conclude by proposing two principles that might further such a goal. 

Principle #1: Identity cannot be ignored in rhetorical theory or pedagogy 

that seeks to address inequity. Our field has recognized for millennia that ethos 

matters. However, Anzaldúa’s work challenges us to see that ethos is bound up in 

complex relations of identity and that identity itself is multiple and contingent. 

Thus, an alternative theory of rhetoric must move beyond simple notions of 

identity and demand an accounting not only of one’s position but also of one’s 

relative privilege as the beginning point for participating in responsible social 

discourse. Some of the work we need to do may fall largely within existing argument 

structures, using the master’s tools to challenge a particular cultural 

or moral value that needs to be unseated and exposing the specific cultural 

means used to keep those discriminatory values in place. However, as rhetorical 

theorists and teachers we must also recognize that much of the work necessary 

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will require the kinds of sweeping changes that Anzaldúa envisions—changes 

not only to such fundamentally “American” concepts as citizenship, free speech, 

and equal opportunity but also to the linguistic and rhetorical practices we 

teach. As rhetorical educators we bear a particular responsibility to teach 

and model both kinds of rhetorical action. For example, as theorists such as 

Jane E. Hindman, Wendy Bishop, and Lynn Bloom have suggested, inviting 

students to engage in embodied writing—writing that asks them to articulate 

and interrogate their own experiences—is one potentially powerful means to 

bring together an understanding of one’s own experiences with the kinds of 

discourse practices that invite both articulation and analysis. Pedagogy that 

supports embodied writing may be particularly important if we understand 

that many of our students may come to us in Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue state, and if 

we take Anzaldúa’s work seriously we cannot dismiss attending to such identity 

issues as inappropriate “therapy” but must see it as part and parcel of aiding 

our students in coming to voice. However, such pedagogy must invite insight 

into the operation of systems of privilege and disenfranchisement not only in 

one’s own life but also in society at large. 

Principle #2: Developing morally responsible rhetorical theory and practice 

begins with a substantive accounting of privilege. I suspect that as a discipline we 

will make little progress in developing and implementing morally responsible 

alternative rhetoric until we move beyond a vague sense of our collective responsibility 

to account for our privilege and our complicity with the discourses 

of power to substantive accountings of the operation of privilege in our own 

rhetorical agency. Doing so requires an accounting of where we stand in relation 

to the axes of power in American culture and how that positioning affects 

the agency that we exercise. What concerns me here is the disconnect between 

academic arguments and positions and the person making them. I don’t mean 

to suggest that every academic article must begin with a soul-searching exposé 

of the author’s psyche, but a substantive accounting of our subjectivities might 

usefully begin with a careful reflection of how we are positioned along the major 

fault lines of privilege and oppression in our society. 

For example, sharing the fact that I drafted most of these lines while sipping 

three-dollar lattes in the cool little Starbucks in the trendiest neighborhood 

of downtown Orlando only hints at the underlying privilege that allows me the 

relative leisure to do so. I am a professor, published writer, and compositionist 

whose job at a research university reduces my teaching load so that I have the 

time to ponder these issues and the opportunity of doing it at a time and place 

of my choosing. However, this accounting of my fairly elite position within the 

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economy of composition studies (which offers this kind of academic leisure to 

very few of us who teach college writing courses) does little to explain how my 

subjectivity, my position in society, leads me to see a necessary link between 

alternative rhetoric and the personal. To explain that, I have to tell you that I 

grew up in a rural community in which homosexuals were invisible or laughed 

at and dismissed—that I spent the first thirty-five years of my life deep in the 

closet and that publicly owning this aspect of my subjectivity—my identity— 

changed my understanding of what it means to speak, to write, to teach writing, 

and to be a rhetorical theorist. 

My marginalized position as a homosexual trained me to be always onguard, 

to be constantly aware of how I was being perceived, and to carefully 

monitor my speech and behavior to adhere as closely as possible to the stereotypic 

notions of masculinity that dominated my cultural milieu. My version 

of gay double consciousness heightened my sense of audience in ways that 

makes me a better rhetor but also leaves me struggling, as carmen kynard so 

aptly puts it, “to get the chatter of this oppressive system outta my head” (36). 

Ironically, in the reverse economy of alternative pedagogy that I develop in 

this article, my sense of double consciousness provides me the considerable 

advantage of understanding the need for theories of rhetoric and discursive 

practices that transform the values inherent in the discourses of power in ways 

that extend into the deepest recesses of who I am. In a sense, because I have 

experienced systemic marginalization and because I am willing to publicly 

explore the implications of those experiences, I have a kind of privilege in the 

admittedly narrow territory of defining alternative rhetoric that other scholars 

may not yet have articulated. Yet, I must also constantly remind myself that 

the insights I have gained about the workings of inequity in American society 

and what it means to take voice in response to them are always partial and 

that I need the perspectives of others if I am to teach and practice alternative 

rhetorics responsibly. 

Accepting the impossibility of closure is one of the most challenging 

aspects of enacting alternative rhetoric in pedagogy and practice. Indeed, my 

students of privilege are often frustrated by what they see as inconsistencies 

in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, and despite my best prodding, they find it almost 

impossible to accept her claim that crossing is never complete, that she is always 

“dragging the ghost of the past with her” (49). In a similar way, our discipline 

needs substantive and ongoing attention to the limits of our individual and 

collective subjectivities as well as deliberate action to continually redefine 

rhetoric. Unless we continually reject the notion that we have or can reach the 

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promised land, we have little hope of moving beyond business as usual in our 

rhetorical practice and pedagogy. 

Note 

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Anzaldúa are from Borderlands. 

Works Cited 

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: 

The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: 

Aunt Lute Books, 2007. 

. “Haciendo Caras, una Entrada.” 

Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo 

Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives 

by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria 

Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute 

Books, 1990. xv–xxviii. 

. “Preface: (Un)natural bridges, (Un) 

safe spaces.” This Bridge We Call Home: 

Radical Visions for Transformation. Ed. 

Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. 

New York: Routledge, 2002. 1–5. 

Bishop, Wendy, ed. Elements of Alternate Style: 

Essays on Writing and Revision. Portsmouth, 

NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. 

Bizzell, Patricia. “Beyond Anti-foundationalism 

to Rhetorical Authority: Problems 

Defining ‘Cultural Literacy.’” College 

English 52 (1990): 661–75. 

Crenshaw, Kimberle William. “Beyond Racism 

and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 

2 Live Crew.” Words That Wound: Critical 

Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the 

First Amendment. Ed. Mari J. Matusda 

et al. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1993. 

111–32. 

Franklin, Cynthia G. Writing Women’s 

Communities: The Politics and Poetics of 

Contemporary Multi-genre Anthologies. 

Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. 

Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, Discourse, and 

Linguistics: Introduction.” Journal of 

Education 171.1 (1989): 5–17. 

Gray-Rosendale, Laura, and Sibylle Gruber, 

eds. Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to 

the Rhetorical Tradition. Albany: State U 

of New York P, 2001. 

Harris, Joseph. “Opinion: Revision as a Critical 

Practice” College English 65.6 (July 

2003): 577–92. 

Hindman, Jane E. “Making Writing Matter: 

Using ‘the Personal’ to Recover[y] 

an Essential[ist] Tension in Academic 

Discourse.” College English 64.1 (Sept. 

2001): 88–108. 

. “Writing an Important Body of 

Scholarship: A Proposal for an Embodied 

Rhetoric of Professional Practice.” JAC 

22.1 (Winter 2002): 93–118. 

Kynard, Carmen. “’New Life in this Dormant 

Creature’ Notes on Social Consciousness, 

Language, and Learning in a College Classroom.” 

Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell 31–44. 

Lunsford, Andrea. “Toward a Mestiza 

Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition 

and Postcoloniality.” JAC: A Journal 

of Composition Theory 18.1 (1998): 1–27. 

Lyons, Scott Richard. “Rhetorical Sovereignty: 

What Do American Indians Want 

from Writing?” College Composition and 

Communication 51.3 (Feb. 2000): 447–68. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentification: Queers 

of Color and the Performance of Politics. 

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Academic 

Discourses, or Small Boats on a Big Sea.” 

Schroeder, Fox, and Bizzell 23–30. 

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Schroeder, Christopher, Helen Fox, and 

Patricia Bizzell, eds. ALT DIS: Alternative 

Discourses and the Academy. Portsmouth, 

NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the 

Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. 

David Wallace 

David Wallace is professor and chair of the Department of English at the University 

of Central Florida. His work explores how identity issues such as gender, race, and 

sexual identity are relevant to composition. His current book project explores 

alternative rhetoric in the work of four rhetors who wrote from the margins of 

American society. 

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