(Un)Making Sex, Making Race: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, Difference, and the Rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton uri icon

abstract

  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been celebrated for her astute rhetorical contributions to woman's rights advocacy and highly criticized for her racist and elitist sentiments about citizenship and the franchise. Although there appears to be a discontinuity between Cady Stanton's commitment to (sexual) equality and her racism/elitism, this tension is reconciled through a consideration of the ways her early rhetoric embodies, revitalizes, and resists a liberal enlightenment idiom of difference. Responding to immediate exigencies of nineteenth-century politics and an enduring tension between universality and biological difference in liberal political theory, Cady Stanton articulates a view of sexual and racial difference that is extracorporeal. 2010 National Communication Association.

published proceedings

  • Quarterly Journal of Speech

author list (cited authors)

  • Poirot, K.

citation count

  • 4

complete list of authors

  • Poirot, Kristan

publication date

  • January 2010