Abstract

This essay examines the work of Genevieve Stebbins (1857-1934), an author, teacher, and proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. Specifically, I examine Stebbins’s concept of “artistic” statue posing, a practice fraught with contradictory arguments and tensions among late nineteenth-century commentators and other elocutionists who discussed appropriate forms of female embodied display. This study asserts that Stebbins drew on the rhetorical strategy of contradiction to perform an ethos of complexity and boundary innovation in advocating for female embodied rhetorical performance. Her work reveals the conflicts women have attempted to negotiate in considering rhetoric as embodied practice.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2019-01-02
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2019.1549440
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Rhetoric Review

References (31) · 2 in this index

  1. Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Oratorical Education
  2. Imagining American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History
  3. Baright Curry, Anna. Discussion [of Stebbins’s “The Relation of Physical Culture to Expression”].Werner’s Mag…
  4. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose
  5. “Introduction.” Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, Gr…
Show all 31 →
  1. 10.1080/00335637309383155
  2. Adams. “The Rise and Fall of Statue-Posing.” MA thesis
  3. “Aesthetic Gymnastics.”
  4. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600-1900
  5. 10.5642/mimejournal.20052301.05
  6. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  7. Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language
  8. 10.5642/mimejournal.20052301.08
  9. Invention as a Social Act
  10. Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance
  11. 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01029.x
  12. Rhetoric Review
  13. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studi…
  14. Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture and Power
  15. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism
  16. Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance
  17. “The Spread of the Delsarte System in the United States 1870-1900.”
  18. American National Biography Online
  19. Preface. Southern Illinois UP
  20. Sargent, Franklin H. Discussion [of Stebbins’s “The Relation of Physical Culture to Expression”].Werner’s Mag…
  21. Every Little Movement: A Book about François Delsarte. The Man and His Philosophy. His Sc…
  22. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America
  23. Delsarte System of Expression
  24. “The New York School of Expression.” [Prospectus] Stebbins and Norman Astley
  25. Stebbins, Genevieve. “The Relation of Physical Culture to Expression.”Werner’s Magazine, vol. 20, no. 1, 1897…
  26. Werner’s Magazine