Notes from Source: This dissertation traces conceptual genealogies of the terms “form” and “voice” in relation to rhetoric/writing and to sexed bodies. An ultrasound machine searches the interior contours of a body, bouncing sound off tissue, creating a fuzzy electronic image of space and sound: a sonogram. This work is a sonogram of voice bouncing off form, creating a counter-picture of a history of exclusions in Rhetoric and Composition. I assert throughout the dissertation that “form” and “voice” are always already gendered terms, and that writing also relies on sex and gender for meaning. I find evidence for this in classical rhetorical theorists such as Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, as well as in biological or gynecological treatises of the time period. According to such theorists, one of the central problems of women’s bodies and subsequently of their writing is their formlessness, their inability to be pinned down, their proclivity to leak across barriers. I argue, like many feminist rhetoricians and theorists before me such as Anne Carson, Miriam Brody and Adrianna Cavarero, that the female voice has been characterized as dangerous and irrational, based largely on the classical conception of their leaky bodies. Female voices have therefore been quite literally ephemeral in the long history of writing, though key interventions by scholars like Cheryl Glenn, Andrea Lunsford, and Susan Jarratt have sought to rediscover these voices. Because of this history of exclusion, I advocate for voice as a viable metaphor in writing, if it can be disassociated from essentialism. I draw on the mythological figure of Echo as a potentially transformative trope for writing and rhetoric, precisely because she creates her own form, separate from her body, through voice alone. After examining some of the rhetorical strategies of women writing about gynecological concerns—including an eighteenth century midwife, a nineteenth century doctor, Mary Shelley, and the twentieth century Boston Women’s Health Book Collective—I suggest that Echo absorbs and resounds masculine and feminine voices, providing a potential transgender (as in above, beyond, transitioning) figure for writing that is more inclusive than adopting the dominant discourse or accepting a non-dominant position in rhetoric. Echo offers us a figure that can reclaim voice as an important metaphor in writing without claiming essentialism.

Further Notes: Book Title: Sonogram: A Rhetoric of Echo-Location ISBN: 9781267519238