The Normality of Man and Female Otherness: (Re) Producing Patriarchal Lines of Argument in the Law and the News

Abstract

A distinguishing feature of feminist inquiry in every discipline is its political commitment to resisting patriarchal modes of thought and action. So while an assortment of feminist scholarship embraces a variety of assumptions, feminisms take as one of their central tasks the subversion of hierarchical structures that subordinate women to men (Jaggar; Smith). To accomplish this goal, feminist critics employ gender as a central category of analysis in a variety of methodological approaches (Foss; Harding; Malson et al.). Feminist rhetorical scholarship is also heterogeneous but similarly employs gender as an analytic category to investigate how symbols create and sustain gendered understandings of women and men and culturally sedimented views of women (Foss and Griffin). Feminist rhetoricians also challenge existing theories developed without a consideration of gender and construct alternative theories that account for women's communication (Foss; Foss and Griffin). A basic premise of this essay is that feminist argumentation scholars share these concerns. Feminist argumentation is characterized both by its commitment to critically analyzing patriarchal reasoning and (re)visioning argument theory in order to include considerations of gender. Patriarchal arguments are those arguments marshalled to justify attitudes, beliefs, values and policies that subordinate women to men. Drawing upon a large body of feminist research concerned with gender difference, Tavris has suggested that a common premise of patriarchal thinking is that man is the measure of all things; men are normal and women compared to men are abnormal (17). Her book, The Mismeasure of Woman, extensively documents how versions of the universal male norm and the assumption of female otherness appear in virtually every field including science, law, medicine, history, economics, social science, literature, philosophy and art. In this essay, I suggest the importance of treating this assumption as a line of argument used to justify patriarchal claims. I am interested in how the premise of the male norm can operate to circumscribe argumentative outcomes by limiting the scope of available arguments in legal discourse and in news reports of legal controversies. To investigate an example of this line of argument, I examine the legal opinions in the Johnson Controls case as well as the reports of the controversy in the national print media. While communication scholars (e.g. Bybee; Epstein; Fiske; Hartley; Rakow and Kranich; Tuchman) have explored how the media promote gender stereotypes, these studies tend to treat media practices in isolation. This study reveals how legal and mass mediated arguments sometimes function intertextually to order gender difference, and consequently our social and political relations, according to a male norm of comparison. First, I argue that Johnson constitutes an important case study for examining the male norm as a line of argument. Second, I argue that feminist jurisprudence and critical studies of print news media help to explain some of the institutional practices of the law and news which can produce and (re)produce a patriarchal line of argument. Third, I offer an analysis of the Johnson case that illustrates how this line of argument produced by our legal system and (re)produced in the news media limits the potential for egalitarian argumentative outcomes. JOHNSON CONTROLS In 1982, Johnson Controls, the battery division of Globe Union Corporation, adopted a fetal protection policy barring all women capable of bearing children from jobs involving lead exposure or which could expose them to lead through the exercise of job bidding, bumping, transfer or promotion rights (Zilis 1-2). Eight employees backed by the United Auto Workers Union challenged the company's policy in court. In the nine years after its adoption, three courts issued opinions on Johnson's policy and major national newspapers and magazines reported their arguments to the public. …