Theory of Hospitality
Something that has both historically and presently sets women’s rhetoric apart from men’s is hospitality. While men may engage in hospitality rhetorics, women have had to find alternative routes for building their ethos for their audience than men do. What we’ve seen in the canon of women’s rhetoric is that women speak from a place of liminality. Their exclusion from education, the academy, and writing spaces at large means that women walk a trepidatious tightrope of performativity, persuasion, and self-representation that has heavier consequences and more severe risks than men do when speaking. But women are smart. Throughout time, they’ve found innovative ways to walk the tightrope of liminality and be successful. These women created a new ethos by providing a different means of persuasion through contexts that were unique to women. This includes the places that made up their daily lives which were different than that of a man’s, i.e. the kitchen, parlor, nursery, garden, and their own bodies. Women also found ways to be persuasive without words that made sense with their unique ethos: hospitality. As Sean Barnette describes in his essay “Dorothy Day’s Voluntary Poverty,” hospitality rhetoric means “An ecology of objects and practices involved in offering guests space, shelter, food, and other materials. These objects and practices allow hospitality to do rhetorical work” (112). Women’s hospitality, then, affects people physically as well as intellectually. Through the lens of Kenneth Burke’s definition of Identification, or constructing similarities in a group of participants to build ethos, we can see how women’s hospitality rhetoric is unique to them. By using materials and spaces to create a
