Resounding the lyrical possibilities for women: Constitutive rhetoric and the ideological dimensions of Hillary Rodham Clinton's discourse

This study articulates and accentuates the possibilities for women as suggested in Hillary Rodham Clinton's discourse on women's rights at the United Nation's Fourth Conference on Women. Such an endeavor is realized via ideological criticism, which emphasizes the ethical and political implications of discourse. Concepts which inform my analysis include constitutive rhetoric, the Second Persona, and the Third Persona. These tools help discover how Hillary constituted women while in China and expose the gender ideology that grounded her discourse. Her discursive fragments suggest that women's place in the world centers on their place in the family and men's place centers in the public domain. Traditional meanings of women and men are advanced and their rearticulation is hindered. If a meaningful emancipated community is to be realized, we must reconsider our conceptions of both women and men and evoke the power of subversive discourse.