RHETORIC & STEREOTYPES

Rhetoric & Stereotypes

Rhetoric & Stereotypes

Political rhetoric

Contemporary thinking on the subject considers that political rhetoric manifests itself within all forms of political speeches, candidate and issue advertisements, debates, campaign films, ritualistic public ceremonies, journalistic reporting and opinion, and many of the other communicative facets of a modern political campaign. “Image politics” is the modern and postmodern reliance on polling, public relations “spin,” and media handlers to shape highly stylized, narrative meaning on events of national significance. The televisual positioning of candidates and politicians, and the staging of events for media consumption, has greatly altered public and academic assessment of political rhetoric. This evaluation of the form and content of contemporary political rhetoric has primarily centered upon ideology, style, the use of generic forms, and the postmodern condition of political rhetoric. It has considered the contexts of political advertising, debates, polls, the “constructed” public person or issue, and political media.

Ideology has a significant role in contemporary thinking on political rhetoric. The two main perspectives of thinking about ideology, ideology as false consciousness and ideology as a belief system are reflected in the scholarship on political rhetoric of the last two decades. An important contribution to the literature on ideology and political rhetoric has been in the development of the “ideograph” and its link between rhetoric and a collective worldview in understanding how political sentiments are expressed symbolically. The context of rhetorical action is more than just the immediate circumstances that brought life to the discourse; historical and cultural forces were equally important to the understanding of a statement. (Gronbeck, 2004)

Feminists

Besides the conservative attacks, the feminist movement was plagued by its own internal contradictions and inequities. NOW's liberal feminist emphasis on integrating women into the public arena discounted the realities of the jobs that most women held, Radical feminists' argument that women ...