Реторика и комуникация в обществото, медиите и бизнеса
Rhetoric and Communication in Society, Media and Business
DOI 10.55206/CFPI7338
Nodhar Hammami Ben Fradj
University of Kairouan, Tunisia, Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Kairouan
E-mail: nodharhammami@yahoo.com
Abstract: This article re-theorizes the science of public speaking through a critical, gendered lens, focusing on the female orator as a performer of power within contested public spheres. Moving beyond a descriptive directory of rhetorical techniques, the analysis situates female public performance within the dynamic tension between classical rhetorical traditions, Habermasian ideals of communicative action, and Foucauldian critiques of power, knowledge, and disciplinary society. The article argues that while women orators possess unique performative strengths that range from theatrical authenticity and strategic communication to charismatic intellect, their efficacy is perpetually mediated and challenged within patriarchal and capitalist frameworks that systematically commodify the female body and objectify the speaking subject. It suggests that successful female oratory constitutes a form of discursive resistance, a performative act that must navigate the dual perils of ideological persuasion and corporeal spectacle. An analysis of female speakers from different countries in the 21st century has been conducted, focusing on their significant speeches: Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Greta Thunberg, and others, with the aim of identifying important features from a rhetorical point of view. By synthesizing theories of power, performativity, and public deliberation with analyses of spectacle and the male gaze, this work constructs a sustained theoretical framework for analyzing the distinct challenges and strategies that define female eloquence across historical and contemporary contexts.
Keywords: female oratory, performative power, rhetorical theory, Foucault, public sphere, commodification, male gaze, gender performativity, discursive sovereignty.
Introduction: Rhetoric, Performance, and the Gendered Speaker
From the agora of ancient Athens to the digital public squares of the twenty-first century, oratory has been venerated as an art of civic life and a means of persuasion, deliberation, and communal formation. The classical treatises of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero established the Western rhetorical tradition as a systematic discipline, codifying speech as both a technical craft and an ethical practice essential to political and legal engagement. Aristotle’s foundational taxonomy of logos (logical appeal), pathos (emotional appeal), and ethos (ethical appeal), alongside Cicero’s five canons: inventio (invention), dispositio (arrangement), elocutio (style), memoria (memory), and actio (delivery) provided an enduring framework for effective public discourse. Yet, this revered tradition emerged from androcentric public spheres in which the orator or the rhetor, was axiomatically and exclusively male. As Susan L. Trollinger states, classical rhetoric emerged in ancient Athens in a social world where women were largely confined to the private sphere, while “[d]irect participation in the affairs of government – including holding public office, voting, and serving as jurors and soldiers – [was] possible for only the male citizens” (99). [0] Women were not visible in the public sphere, and were therefore absent from the podium and structurally excluded from the category of the public speaking subject; they were restricted to the oikos (household) and silenced in the polis. This exclusion is not a historical situation but a constitutive condition that shapes the very terrain upon which women enter public speech.
Consequently, the analysis of female oratory necessitates a critical re-examination and an expansion of rhetorical theory through the intersecting lenses of gender, performance, and power. This article argues that female public speaking, encompassing politicians, preachers, activists, storytellers, and leaders, constitutes far more than the application of neutral rhetorical rules. It is, instead, a complex performance of power within culturally and politically different fields. To analyze this performance, the present work moves beyond the classical playbook and engages with interdisciplinary critical theory that elucidates the intertwined operations of discourse, authority, embodiment, and spectacle.
Contemporary scholarship provides essential tools for this task. Jürgen Habermas’s (1996) theory of the public sphere and communicative action offers a normative model of rational-critical debate aimed at mutual understanding. This is a framework that promises, yet often fails to deliver, a meritocratic space where female voices might transcend gendered prejudice through the “unforced force of the better argument”. [1] Michel Foucault’s (1977) work offers a crucial corrective, revealing public discourse as an arena of perpetual strategic action and power relations, where “regimes of truth” authorize certain speakers and discipline others, and where the body itself becomes a site of biopolitical management. He writes: “But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs”. [2] Feminist theorists, most notably Judith Butler (1990), have further complicated this statement by theorizing gender not as a stable identity but as a performative accomplishment, constituted through the “stylized repetition of acts” within a regulatory framework. [3] This performative lens is essential for understanding how the female body becomes both instrument and obstacle in public space, a site where authority must be enacted and materialized through repeated discursive acts.
Starting from this interdisciplinary conversation, this article constructs and applies a theoretical framework that positions the female orator within the tension between Habermasian ideals of rational-critical deliberation and Foucauldian realities of disciplinary power and strategic action. The efficacy of the female performance is perpetually mediated and challenged within patriarchal and capitalist frameworks that systematically commodify the female body and objectify the speaking subject. The very publicity she requires renders her vulnerable to what Laura Mulvey (1975) theorized as the “male gaze”, a possessive and objectifying mode of looking that can distort reception and undermine her rhetorical logos by reframing her as an aesthetic spectacle rather than a discursive agent. Mulvey puts: “Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen”. [4] Consequently, successful female oratory operates as a form of discursive resistance, a performative labor that must struggle with the dual perils of ideological persuasion and corporeal spectacle.
Methodologically, this article employs a critical theoretical synthesis, weaving together rhetorical theory, performance studies, feminist critique, political theory, and visual culture studies. This approach facilitates a sustained examination of the distinct challenges and strategic adaptations that define female eloquence. The argument proceeds by first establishing a multifaceted theoretical framework centered on power, performativity, and the public female body. This framework is then applied to a series of historical and contemporary case studies, like Sojourner Truth, Amina Wadud, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, and Greta Thunberg, that illustrate the diverse strategies women employ to claim authority, manage visibility, and resist objectification across different epochs and contexts. A dedicated section then deepens the analysis of the perils of publicity, examining the structural forces of commodification and the consequent struggle for what can be termed “discursive sovereignty.” What is posited is that the female orator’s power lies in a reflexive, resistant eloquence that strives to reclaim the position of the speaking subject, the rhetor in her own right, through a continuous performative negotiation with the overdetermined fields of power she must inhabit.
Theoretical Framework: Power, Performativity, and the Public Female Body
To construct a firm theoretical lens for analyzing the female public performer, one must synthesize several interconnected aspects of critical thought that move beyond the classical rhetorical tradition to position the orator’s body, voice, and authority within a matrix of cultural, political, and disciplinary power. This framework is anchored in four principal theoretical pillars: the dialectic of communicative and strategic action, the Foucauldian nexus of power-knowledge-discipline, the Butlerian concept of gender performativity, and the political economy of the gendered spectacle.
The Dialectic of Communicative and Strategic Action
The first pillar interrogates the nature of public discourse through the productive dialectic between Habermas and Foucault. Habermas’s (1991) idealized model of the public sphere presents a space for rational-critical debate oriented toward mutual understanding (Verständigung), where legitimacy derives from discursive reason alone. Habermas contends:
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere to be regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour… The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason. [5]
For the female speaker, this model promises a potentially meritocratic arena where expertise or logos and ethical character or ethos could theoretically transcend gender. Fraser highlighted the idea that Habermas acknowledged feminist movements as vital forces in expanding this sphere which had historically “defined the public in masculine terms” (Fraser 1992). [6] However, women’s capacity to expand the public sphere remains persistently haunted by the legacies of historical exclusion. Nancy Fraser (1992) argues that the bourgeois public sphere was never singular but was always accompanied by a plurality of competing “subaltern counterpublics”, alternative discursive grounds in which marginalized groups, including women, invent and circulate counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs. [7] The female orator thus speaks not within a singular, neutral context but from a counterpublic position, carrying the burdened labor of translating subaltern experience into a hegemonic discursive register that may be structurally resistant to it.
Foucault’s (1977) work provides the necessary rectification to this Habermasian idealism, insisting that discourse is never free from the constitutive operations of power. For Foucault, power is not a negative, repressive force held by a sovereign, but a productive, capillary network that generates the “regimes of truth” that govern what can be said, who is authorized to speak, and which bodies are deemed legitimate. Foucault states:
Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault 1980). [8]
His concept of “biopower” is particularly significant, denoting the modern form of power organized around the administration and optimization of life, with the body as its primary target. According to Foucault, bio-power designates:
what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life… Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. (Foucault 1978). [9]
Building on Foucault’s concept of a power applied “at the level of life itself”, this biopolitical logic becomes intensely gendered when enacted upon women’s bodies. As a result, when a woman takes the public stage, her body immediately enters this field of biopolitical management; her demeanor, fertility, age, and appearance become sites of intense public scrutiny and normalization. Furthermore, Foucault’s insistence that “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge” establishes a critical link for understanding female authority (Foucault 1977). [10] The female speaker’s credibility is always contingent on battling a pre-constituted societal “knowledge” about feminine capability, emotionality, and proper domain. Her expertise must first destabilize the epistemic regime that positions her as inherently less authoritative. In this context, and following Jon Erickson’s compromising viewpoint, public performance necessarily involves both “communicative action”, as oriented toward understanding, and “strategic action”, as oriented toward effects within a field of power (Erickson 2003). [11] In the case of the female orator, she must master this demanding duality.
A Taxonomy of Feminine Power
Building from this Foucauldian base, the second pillar incorporates a taxonomy of the social power that female performers must challenge and mobilize. Power for them is multifaceted and hard-won, requiring strategic adaptation of classic schemas like that of French and Raven. In their 1959 study, “The Bases of Social Power”, French and Raven systematically delineate five distinct sources from which an agent’s power over a person is derived: reward power, coercive power, legitimate power, referent power, and expert power. They define social power broadly as the “maximum potential ability of one party (O) to influence another party (P)” within a specific relationship (French & Raven 1959). [12] Crucially, they argue that the strength and effectiveness of each power base is dependent upon P’s “perception” and “acceptance” of O’s capacity within that base, making it a profoundly relational and psychological dynamic. This perceptual dependency renders each base susceptible to the gendered cognitive frames that mediate public reception of female authority.
The first two bases, reward and coercive power, are structurally linked. “Reward power” is grounded in O’s perceived ability to administer positive valences or remove negative ones for P. French and Raven specify that its strength depends on “the magnitude of the rewards which P perceives that O can mediate for him”. [13] “Coercive power”, conversely, stems from O’s perceived ability to mediate punishments for P, relying on “the magnitude of the negative valence of the threatened punishment multiplied by the perceived probability that P can avoid the punishment by conformity” (French & Raven). [14] For the female orator, these bases are often circumscribed. While a political leader like a chancellor may exert formal reward and coercive powers, their application is frequently filtered through a gendered lens, where female assertion of coercion is pathologized as aggression or harshness, and the administration of rewards is infantilized or attributed to collective action rather than personal authority.
The third base, “legitimate power”, emanates from internalized values in P which dictate that O has a legitimate right to influence, and P has an obligation to accept this influence (French & Raven. [15] This legitimacy can derive from cultural norms, formal hierarchies, or designated social structures. French and Raven note that changes in legitimacy “are perhaps the most important and dramatic instances of social power”. [16] For women, accessing this base is the core struggle, as the very “internalized values” defining legitimacy have historically excluded them from the podium. A woman’s occupancy of a position of legitimate power, therefore, is never a neutral fact but a continuous performative argument that must reaffirm her right to wield the authority of her office against latent societal doubts.
The final two bases are more personal and charismatic. Referent power has its basis in P’s identification with O; the strength of this power “depends upon the attractiveness of O for P” and fosters a desire for unification (French & Raven). [17] “Expert power”, then, is predicated on the perception that O possesses superior knowledge or ability in a specific domain relevant to P. Its scope is limited to this domain and is highly dependent on credibility, as “the extent of the expert power of O/P in area I is proportional to the extent of the knowledge or ability attributed to O by P which exceeds that attributed to P himself” (French & Raven). [18] For female speakers, these bases are fraught with paradox. Referent power, tied to attractiveness and identification, can easily slide into the realm of spectacle and the commodified persona, while expert power must constantly labor to override pre-constituted societal “knowledge” that doubts feminine intellectual authority. The female orator must thus navigate this taxonomy as a contested terrain where each base of power is mediated, and often distorted, by the gendered dynamics of public perception.
Based upon French and Raven’s foundational catalog, which delineates the relational and perceptual dynamics of social power, this analysis now adopts and adapts these bases as a critical lens for interpreting the distinct challenges and strategic negotiations of female rhetors. Since these power bases are not neutral tools but are mediated by the gendered cognitive frames of public reception, women orators across varied contexts must mobilize, circumvent, or transform “legitimate”, “expert”, and “referent power” in particular. Their rhetorical performances become strategic engagements with this taxonomy, attempting to secure the perception of legitimacy where it is often withheld, assert expert knowledge against epistemic prejudice, and harness referent attraction while resisting its collapse into commodified spectacle. The following analysis applies this lens to the case studies at hand, illuminating how the pursuit of discursive sovereignty is a continuous labor to master and redefine these very bases of influence.
Legitimate or Positional Power
Traditionally withheld from women, legitimate power stems from institutional roles (such as president, CEO, bishop). When a woman holds such a position, her authority is never neutrally assessed; it is always diffused through institutions, thereby her command is constantly a performance of legitimacy requiring unremitting reinforcement. In this regard, Sally Kenney (2013) argues that “justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done”, suggesting that gender diversity on the bench helps bolster public perceptions of judicial legitimacy by making courts more representative of the broader society. [19] Women’s occupancy of the role is itself a discursive act that must be continually re-authorized against skeptical or hostile norms.
Expert Power & Knowledge
This type of power matches Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus. In a context where a woman’s word is a priori suspect, intellectual, technical, or spiritual expertise becomes a crucial tool for epistemic disruption. It enables the critical shift from being the object of discourse (the one spoken about) to the subject who knows and speaks truth, allowing her to frame debates and define the terms of engagement. This form of power allows a woman to become, in Foucauldian terms, an authorizing subject within a regime of truth.
Referent and Charismatic Power
As articulated in Steven Lukes’s (2005) “three-dimensional view” of power, charismatic power involves the capacity to shape desires and perceptions through personal allure, authenticity, or magnetic presence. [20] Lukes identifies this as a form of “inactive power”, deriving from the perceived properties of the powerful agent. For women, however, charisma is a double-edged sword. It is often psychologized and gendered, dismissed as “emotional” or “irrational” dedication in contrast to male “rational” authority, or else commodified as mere personality, detaching it from substantive intellect and reducing it to a consumable image.
Gender as Performative Accomplishment
The third pillar, Performative Power, is drawn from the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1988). Extending J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory, Butler (1988) argues that gender is “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief”. [21] Gender is not a stable inner essence but is materialized through the “stylized repetition of acts” over time within a rigid regulatory frame (Butler 1990). [22] The female orator’s speech is thus doubly performative. First, it seeks to accomplish a worldly perlocutionary effect (to persuade, legislate, convert, mobilize). Second, the act of public speaking itself, with its attendant bodily actio, is a repetition that either consolidates or subverts normative gender scripts. Each time a woman commands a podium, she engages in what Butler (1993) calls a “reiterative power of discourse” that can, through cumulative performative force, materialize her legitimacy. [23] Her performance enacts a claimed authority, and its success gradually reshapes the perceptual field of what is possible for a woman to be and do. This performative labor is the mechanism by which she can alter the conditions of her own speakability.
This leads to the critical, paradoxical technique of theatrical authenticity. In this context, Lynn Voskuil (2004) argues in her study of Victorian culture that effective public figures must master the art of being “authentically performative”. [24] The audience must believe in the speaker’s sincerity and spontaneity; this belief is produced through rhetorical craft, strategic self-disclosure, and embodied conviction. This “natural theatricality” is the vital bridge between Cicero’s inventio and actio, creating the powerful illusion that the speaker’s “true self” and her public role are fused, a fusion that is itself a carefully staged achievement. For the female orator, this authenticity must be performed against a backdrop of suspicion regarding feminine artifice or duplicity, making the paradox even more acute.
The Political Economy of Visibility: Spectacle and the Gaze
The fourth and final pillar addresses the hostile political economy of visibility: commodification and the male gaze. Habermas (1991) critiques the “refeudalization” of the public sphere, arguing that it has shifted away from being a space for rational-critical debate among citizens. Instead of facilitating meaningful discussion, the public sphere has become dominated by elites and private interests, turning into a realm of passive consumption and spectacle where ordinary people participate more as spectators than as active contributors. [25] This refeudalization, therefore, carries heightened dangers for women. In a capitalist society dominated by media, the female body is a privileged site of commodification. In this regard, Rachel Bowlby (1985) claims that consumer culture relentlessly constructs the feminine as the object of a “just looking” that is never innocent. [26] The female orator’s political or spiritual message is everlastingly at risk of being outshined by a fetishistic focus on her appearance, fashion, or maternal status. Her image, essential for visibility, is easily absorbed into what Guy Debord (1994) termed the “spectacle” as the capitalistic mode of social relations mediated by images; he argues that “The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production – signs which are at the same time the ultimate end – products of that system. [27] The spectacle as appearance is underlined by Debord who goes on, saying, “the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life – a negation that has taken on a visible form”. [28] For female performers, their campaign posters or televised close-up align them, although unwillingly, with advertising logic.
This process of commodification reduces women’s substance to a mere appearance and executes a profound objectification, transforming the speaking subject into a discursive object. The female speaker ceases to be the one who speaks truth and becomes the one who is spoken about. Mulvey’s (1975) concept of the “male gaze”, formulated in film theory, enlightens this dynamic on the political stage. [29] It represents a patriarchal, possessive mode of looking that positions woman as “image” and man as “bearer of the look” (Mulvey 1975). [30] Transposed to the context of public speaking, this gaze systematically distorts reception, turning a substantive policy address into a commentary on her suit’s cut or a powerful sermon into an assessment of her vocal timbre, thereby invalidating her rhetorical logos by reframing passion as hysteria and expertise as unnatural ambition. The result is what Susan Bordo (1993) terms a “cultural containment” of female power, where the substance of speech is diverted and disarmed by the spectacle of the speaker. Bordo argues that controlling and containing a woman’s hunger for food “is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger – for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification- be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited” (Bordo 1993). [31]
In synthesis, this theoretical framework shows the female public performer as a strategic politician struggling in an overdetermined field. She is simultaneously a rhetorician wielding classical tools from a marginalized position; a deliberator appealing to a compromised public reason; a strategist operating within and against disciplinary norms and regimes of truth; a performer materializing authority through reiterative acts; and a detractor of spectacle laboring to convert the objectifying gaze into an audience captivated by discourse. Her power is not a monolithic possession but a precarious, continuously enacted synthesis of these modes, performed upon a stage where her body is always already a site of cultural projection and political struggle.
Performative Power in Historical and Contemporary Praxis
The theoretical framework, interweaving the dialectics of deliberation and discipline, the performative constitution of gender, and the political economy of the spectacle, finds vivid illustration in the embodied practices of female rhetoricians, activists, preachers, and politicians across history. Their struggles and strategies evidence how power is enacted, contested, and reconfigured from the public stage, with each figure navigating the specific historical and cultural constraints of her moment. The following case studies are not exhaustive but are carefully selected to demonstrate the range of strategic adaptations and the persistent structural challenges outlined by the framework.
Sojourner Truth: Corporeal Testimony and Counterpublic Formation
The nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) exemplifies the synthesis of counterpublic formation and disruptive bodily presence in the era of American slavery and nascent women’s suffrage. Appearing at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Truth, a formerly enslaved woman, performed a powerful act of rhetorical and corporeal reclamation. Her legendary intervention, later recorded by Frances Gage in 1863 as “Ain’t I a Woman?”, directly challenged the normalized “knowledge” of feminine fragility that underpinned both racial and gender subjugation (Painter 1996). [32] By baring her muscular arm and citing her capacity for physical labor and maternal suffering (“I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery”), she weaponized her body against the genteel, white bourgeois construction of womanhood that dominated the suffrage movement (Painter 1996). [33] This was a Foucauldian strategic action of the highest order, deploying her own corporeal reality to shatter a hegemonic truth. She spoke from a marginalized counterpublic, yet her charismatic power and unassailable ethos of lived experience forced an entry into the dominant discursive ground, demanding recognition as both a woman and a speaking subject. Her actio, as a reference to her reportedly deep, resonant voice filling the hall, was an embodied rebuttal to objectification, a conscious redirecting of the gaze from the spectacle of her Blackness to the compelling logos of her argument, at a historical moment when Black women’s bodies were primarily commodified as property or labor.
Amina Wadud: Expert Power and Ritual Subversion
Moving to the realm of religious authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Islamic scholar and preacher Amina Wadud (b. 1952) provides a significant case study in the mobilization of expert power against patriarchal disciplinary structures within global Islam. When she controversially led a mixed-gender Friday prayer in New York City in March 2005, she engaged in a performative act situated within post-9/11 debates on Islam, modernity, and gender. Her authority was not derived from institutional legitimacy, which was explicitly denied to her by orthodox structures, but from deep scriptural knowledge and theological expertise. This is a direct application of Foucault’s power-knowledge linkage in a religious context. Wadud (2006) emphasizes that her engagement in what she terms “jihad”, which she defines as a “struggle for gender justice”, is motivated solely by the fact that “justice and full human dignity granted to us by Allah has been ignored or abused”. [34] She planned the event ahead of time and meticulously prepared her sermon, grounding her argument for gender equality in close Qur’anic exegesis, thereby wielding expert power to reconfigure the “regime of truth” within Islamic discourse. The act of leading prayer, a traditionally male actio involving specific bodily postures and vocal commands, was a Butlerian performance of gender subversion. Its repetition by other women globally creates a “reiterative power” that slowly materializes new possibilities for female religious leadership. Yet, this very performance also instantly triggered the mechanisms of spectacle and objectification. In the foreword to her book Inside the Gender Jihad, K. Abou El Fadl states: “As her act raised a firestorm of heated exchanges all over the Muslim and non-Muslim world … hundreds of journals and television shows not only debated the permissibility of women leading men in prayer but also inappropriately analyzed or attacked the author’s character and motivation”. [35] This media coverage in a post-9/11 climate focused disproportionately on the controversy and her persona as a “Muslim feminist”, risking the commodification of her dense theological intervention into a mere symbol of liberal progressivism within a geopolitical spectacle.
Angela Merkel: The Performance of De-Gendered Neutrality
In the political sphere of the early twenty-first century, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Chancellor, 2005–2021) mastered a performance of power that deliberately minimized the gendered body to foreground legitimate and expert power within the context of European crisis management, especially in Eurozone and refugee crisis. Merkel’s rhetorical style developed over her sixteen-year tenure methodically eschewed charismatic flourish and theatrical emotion. She cultivated a persona of rational, almost scientific calm, famously employing a “triangular” hand gesture (fingertips together) that became a signature of controlled, analytical authority. This was a conscious strategy to deflect the male gaze and the reductive gendered scripts that interpret female emotion as hysteria or weakness, particularly within the male-dominated, technocratic background of European Union politics. She performed a kind of de-gendered ethos, assimilating into the Habermasian ideal of the rational deliberator while simultaneously engaging in a deeply strategic Foucauldian action: by refusing to perform femininity as expected, she normalized her authority. However, this strategy highlights the double bind; her success depended on minimizing aspects of her identity. This is a compromise less routinely demanded of male leaders. Her power was, in part, a power of neutralization, resisting objectification by rendering her gender, and by extension her body, a seemingly irrelevant detail in the sphere of governance and an accomplishment that required relentless discursive and behavioral discipline.
Jacinda Ardern: Managing Authenticity within the Affective Spectacle
Contrastingly, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (Prime Minister, 2017–2023) wrestled with these tensions in the era of social media and “strongman” politics by strategically integrating the personal into the political, managing rather than refusing spectacle. Her public performances, ranging from announcing her pregnancy while in office in 2018 to her empathetic response to the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019, exemplified a calibrated “theatrical authenticity” tailored for a digital, affective public sphere. In her national address, she performed a powerful act of communal identification, stating, “The people who have been impacted by this act of extremism, they are us. New Zealand’s grief is our grief” (Ardern, 2019). [36] She performed a fusion of legitimate positional power with referent power grounded in perceived compassion and sincerity, a style that resonated globally amid crises of trust in institutions. However, this integration made her intensely vulnerable to the mechanisms of 24/7 media commodification. Global discourse obsessively dissected her pregnancy, her relationship, and her childcare arrangements, threatening to reduce her to a “mother-in-chief” spectacle. Ardern’s skill was in the constant redirection of this gaze; by acknowledging the personal while immediately pivoting to policy substance (e.g., linking her experience as a working mother to child poverty policies). In the same Christchurch statement, she impeccably shifted from mourning to a collective call for policy and social change, urging the nation: “let us ask ourselves what we can do, what we can change, what we can achieve to make our nation a safer, more tolerant, more inclusive place” (Ardern, 2019). [37] She strove to control the frame, demonstrating the constant meta-struggle female leaders face to be consumed by their ideas, not their images in an age of viral content. Her performance was a high-wire act of inviting identification while asserting professional authority.
Greta Thunberg: Disruptive Purity and the Weaponization of Un-Likability
Finally, the activist performance of Greta Thunberg (b. 2003), emerging from 2018 onward, reveals how a young woman can consciously craft a public persona to maximize disruptive power within the climate crisis while confronting intense, gendered objectification in the digital era. Thunberg’s ethos is constructed through a resolute consistency, going from her plain speech and “Fridays for Future” school strikes to her transatlantic sail. This performance of moral purity and urgent truth-telling is a direct, Habermasian-inspired challenge to the strategic, deal-making “habitus” of the political establishment, an appeal to communicative action in a field of entrenched strategic action. She uses expert power through her command of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data, but her greater power is referent and charismatic, derived from the perceived authenticity of her conviction. Yet, as a girl on a global stage, she is subjected to persistent disciplinary and objectifying gazes amplified by social media and conservative media systems. Critics pathologize her demeanor, reducing her passionate advocacy to Asperger’s tropes or teenage hysteria. This is a classic Foucauldian normalization tactic to discredit subjugated knowledge. The spectacle machine simultaneously commodifies her image into memes and merchandise. Thunberg’s resistance lies in her rigid adherence to her script and her refusal to perform conventional, appeasing femininity; her performance is one of intentional un-likability by patriarchal standards, a strategy that weaponizes her otherness to maintain discursive control and resist co-optation by the very spectacle that seeks to absorb her.
These cases collectively demonstrate that there is no singular strategy for female performative power across historical contexts. Sojourner Truth handled her corporeal reality as testimony against the racialized patriarchy of the nineteenth century. Amina Wadud wielded textual expertise in the early twenty-first century to claim sacred space within religious patriarchy. Angela Merkel performed a studied neutrality to transcend gender in post-reunification European technocracy. Jacinda Ardern managed authenticity within the affective spectacle of digital-era politics. Finally, Greta Thunberg cultivates a persona of unyielding, disruptive purity to challenge the patriarchal political economy of climate inaction. Each, however, operates within and against the same constitutive tensions: between deliberation and discipline, between constituting authority through performance and being reduced to a performed body, between accessing the public sphere and resisting its refeudalizing, commodifying gaze. Their eloquence is thus never merely persuasive; it is invariably, and necessarily, a form of resistant political action, a continuous performative labor to materialize and sustain the authority of the female speaking subject against the evolving mechanisms of patriarchal power.
The Perils of Publicity: Commodification, the Gendered Spectacle, and the Struggle for
Discursive Sovereignty
A comprehensive theoretical framing of female public performance has to account for the hostile and determined environments into which women speakers step. The transition from the classical agora or the bourgeois public sphere to the modern world inhabited by media represents a fundamental transformation in the nature of public discourse; a transformation that disproportionately penalizes women. Habermas’s (1991) critique of the “refeudalization” of the public sphere is central at this stage. He argues that the twentieth-century collapse of the rational-critical debate of the bourgeois public sphere led to its replacement by a “staged display” of manipulated publicity, where citizens regress to the status of consuming spectators rather than engaged deliberators. [38] This decay of discourse into a spectacularized space of consumption carries specific, potential dangers for women, whose historical association with the private sphere and the body makes them hyper-visible yet discursively vulnerable figures within this new political economy of attention.
Based on his statement that “[t]he spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 1994). [39] Debord argues that in modern society, people experience relationships and events indirectly through images, turning social life into a form of observation rather than direct participation. The logic of late capitalism, as he theorizes, transforms social relations into relations mediated by images, where the spectacle becomes the “very heart of society’s real unreality”. [40] For the female orator, this means her entry into the public is always mediated by a representational regime that seeks to absorb her into its logics. In this vein, Helen Tookey (2003) claims that consumer spectacle often carries a “strongly feminine inflection”, positioning women as the “quintessential objects of consumption”, where their bodies and images rendered as surfaces upon which desire, morality, and politics are projected and commodified. [41] The female speaker’s body thus becomes a highly charged site of semiotic inscription, where her political or moral message is constantly at risk of being overshadowed by the public’s obsessive focus on her appearance, perceived attractiveness, age, maternal status, or personal choices, often reducing her to an object of idolization and gossip rather than a bearer of substantive authority. This process reduces her to what Bowlby (1985), analyzing consumer culture, identifies as a spectacle for “just looking”, an object to be aesthetically appraised and possessed, rather than a subject to be heard. [42] Her campaign poster, media headshot, or televised image, while necessary for modern political visibility, inherently risks grinding her in the advertising logic, where, as Tookey (2003) notes, “the commodity and the spectacle go hand in hand”. [43] This is not a secondary concern but a primary condition of her publicity: her image circulates within an economy where her personhood is ceaselessly at risk of being flattened into a persona and her complex subjectivity reduced to a symbolic or eroticized type.
This systemic commodification executes a profound objectification, a process that transforms the speaking subject into a discursive object. The woman’s actual ideas, policies, or arguments become secondary to this process of bodily and biographical scrutiny. Her political logos is drowned out by the noise generated by the cultural machinery. Transposed to the political or religious stage, the male gaze represents a mode of reception that is possessive, patriarchal, and objectifying. When directed at a female orator, it turns a political address into an entertainment spectacle. This produces the central paradox of female publicity: the mechanisms of visibility and amplification required for political, social, or moral success in a mediated age are the primary tools through which objectification and commodification occur. The microphone, the camera, and the social media platform are hence double-edged technologies of the self. For female preachers, politicians, and activists, there is no pure space of discourse outside this economy; there is only a constant, exhausting, and meta-communicative struggle. Their performance, therefore, must be a tactical performance of resistance conducted on two simultaneous fronts.
First, Female performance involves a relentless struggle to re-appropriate their image from the endless cycle of commodification. This requires a strategic self-fashioning that anticipates and counters objectification. Figures like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, crossed the threshold of social media platforms like Instagram not merely for publicity, but to consciously re-narrate her image through a discussion of policy, just as in make-up tutorials, thereby acknowledging the gaze while explicitly subordinating it to her political logos. She thus claims control over her own representation. This is a performative act of re-contextualization, wresting the terms of representation from external media narratives.
Second, and more fundamentally, women’s performance demands the continuous labor to direct and re-educate the gaze. The successful female orator’s performance must work to fascinate and compel through intellectual density, rhetorical mastery, and performative ethos. The performer must consciously redirect the collective attention from her corporeality to her content, from her appearance to her apparition as an authoritative subject. This is achieved through a masterful command of actio that channels presence into argument, using gesture, vocal modulation, and spatial command to direct the audience’s focus to the discourse itself. It is the performance of discursive sovereignty: the arduous project of insisting, through repeated performative iteration, that she is the subject of the sentence, the agent of the verb, and the author of the political reality she seeks to articulate, even as the spectatorial apparatus constantly seeks to re-write her as the object of the gaze. This sovereignty is not given but performed, not a status but a practice. For that reason, the perils of publicity are constitutive elements of the modern female performer’s condition. Her eloquence is forged in direct, strategic engagement with these perils. Every public appearance becomes a negotiation with the spectacle, an attempt to maintain its power while resisting its logic, in a continuous performative effort to ensure that she consumes the audience with her ideas, rather than being consumed as an image. This negotiation is the defining labor of female public power in the age of spectacle.
Conclusion: Toward a Resistant Female Eloquence
The journey through the theoretical negotiations of power, performativity, and publicity, and across the lived rhetorical practices of women from Sojourner Truth to Greta Thunberg, reveals that the science and art of public speaking, when examined through the prism of female performance, is basically a perilous theater of power. The effective female orator emerges not as a singular type, but as a necessary theoretical and practical hybrid: a Cicero’s rhetorician mastering inventio and actio, a Habermas’s deliberator appealing to a compromised public reason, a Foucault’s strategist struggling with disciplinary regimes and regimes of truth, a Butler’s performer materializing authority through iteration, and a critic of spectacle working on redirecting the consuming gaze. Her power is not a stable possession but a challenging synthesis, constantly enacted upon a stage where her body is never a neutral instrument but always already a site of cultural projection, political struggle, and potential reclamation.
This study underlines that the perils of publicity, as reference to the commodification of the female body and the distorting power of the male gaze, are structural features of the modern public sphere. In an age of refeudalized spectacle, the female speaker’s visibility is permanently a fraught bargain. Her challenge, accordingly, transcends traditional rhetorical goals of persuasion or consensus-building. It becomes the project of achieving discursive sovereignty: the arduous, continuous performative effort of insisting that she is the subject and not the object and the designer of the political or moral reality she creates. This requires a reflexive, resistant eloquence that is consciously meta-communicative. It is an eloquence that, in the words of Steven Lukes (2005), exercises power by shaping “the very parameters of what is perceived as possible and desirable”. [44] It demands a narcissistic investment in one’s own authority sufficient to counter the possessive gaze of the patriarchal audience, a constitutive looking-back that challenges the passive, objectifying look.
The female orator’s greatest act may be ontological. By controlling and subverting the tools of discourse, by performing authority until it materializes, and by daring to consume the audience with her ideas rather than be consumed as an image, she does more than communicate. She engages in an act of ontological reclamation. Her speech becomes a performative declaration of her right to appear, to signify, and to exercise symbolic power. She asserts her role not as a spoken-for object, but as the speaking subject. In doing so, she not only expands the possibilities of public speech but also reimagines the public sphere itself, transforming it from a space of exclusionary spectacle into a more capacious, contested, and plural site for the performance of power. Her resistant eloquence is, consequently, both a personal strategy and a political intervention, a performative proof that the female body on stage can be the locus of authoritative, world-making discourse.
References
[0] Trollinger, S. L. (1992). Rhetoric, Possibility, and Women’s Status in Ancient Athens: Gorgias’ and Isocrates’ Encomiums of Helen. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 22(1), 99–108. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/eng_fac_pub/53/. Retrieved on 10.01. 2026.
[1] Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. MIT Press, 306.
[2] Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975), 25.
[3] Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, 17.
[4] Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 11.
[5] Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962), 27.
[6] Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). MIT Press, 122–123.
[7] Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). MIT Press, 131.
[8] Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books, 131.
[9] Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.).
[10] Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975), 27.
[11] Erickson, J. (2003). Defining political performance with Foucault and Habermas: Strategic and communicative action. In T. C. Davis & T. Postlewait (Eds.), Theatricality (pp. 136–155). Cambridge University Press, 143.
Vintage Books. (Original work published 1976), 143–144.
[12] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 151.
[13] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 153.
[14] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 157.
[15] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 159.
[16] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 161.
[17] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 162.
[18] French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research, 166.
[19] Kenney, S. J. (2013). Gender and justice: Why women in the judiciary really matter. Routledge, 127.
[20] Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan, 23.
[21] Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 521.
[22] Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, 191.
[23] Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. Routledge, 2.
[24] Voskuil, L. (2004). Acting naturally: Victorian theatricality and authenticity. University of Virginia Press, 2.
[25] Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962), 195.
[26] Bowlby, R. (1985). Just looking: Consumer culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. Methuen, xiii.
[27] Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967), 3.
[28] Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967), 4.
[29] Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 11.
[30] Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 11.
[31] Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. University of California Press, 202.
[32] Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A life, a symbol. W. W. Norton, 164–165.
[33] Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A life, a symbol. W. W. Norton, 166.
[34] Wadud, A. (2006). Inside the gender jihad: Women’s reform in Islam. Oneworld Publications, 262.
[35] Abou El Fadl, K. (2006). Foreword. In A. Wadud, Inside the gender jihad (pp. vii–xiv). Oneworld Publications, vii.
[36] Ardern, J. (2019, March 15). Prime Minister’s statement on Christchurch. The Beehive. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/statement-jacinda-ardern-christchurch-shootings. Retrieved on 10.12.2025.
[37] Ardern, J. (2019, March 15). Prime Minister’s statement on Christchurch. The Beehive. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/statement-jacinda-ardern-christchurch-shootings. Retrieved on 10.12.2025.
[38] Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962), 195.
[39] Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967), 2.
[40] Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967), 6.
[41] Tookey, H. (2003). Anaïs Nin, fictionality and femininity: Playing a thousand roles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 47.
[42] Bowlby, R. (1985). Just looking: Consumer culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. Methuen, xiii.
[43] Tookey, H. (2003). Anaïs Nin, fictionality and femininity: Playing a thousand roles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[44] Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan, 23.
Bibliography
Abou El Fadl, K. (2006). Foreword. In A. Wadud, Inside the gender jihad: Women’s reform in Islam (pp. vii–xiv). Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications.
Ardern, Jacinda. “Prime Minister’s Statement on Christchurch.” The Beehive, 15 Mar. 2019, https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/statement-jacinda-ardern-christchurch- shootings. Retrieved on 10.12.2025.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. University of California Press.
Bowlby, R. (1985). Just looking: Consumer culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. Methuen.
Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40 (4), 519–531.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” Routledge.
Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967).
Erickson, J. (2003). Defining political performance with Foucault and Habermas: Strategic and communicative action. In T. C. Davis & T. Postlewait (Eds.), Theatricality (pp. 136–155). Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975).
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol. I: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1976)
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Institute for Social Research.
Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962).
Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy (W. Rehg, Trans.). MIT Press.
Kenney, S. J. (2013). Gender and justice: Why women in the judiciary really matter. Routledge.
Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16 (3), 6–18.
Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A life, a symbol. W.W. Norton.
Thunberg, G. (2019). No one is too small to make a difference. Penguin Books.
Tookey, H. (2003). Anaïs Nin, fictionality and femininity: Playing a thousand roles. Oxford University Press.
Trollinger, S. L. (1992). Rhetoric, Possibility, and Women’s Status in Ancient Athens: Gorgias’ and Isocrates’ Encomiums of Helen. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 22(1), 99–108. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/eng_fac_pub/53/. Retrieved on 10.01.2026.
Voskuil, L. M. (2004). Acting naturally: Victorian theatricality and authenticity. University of Virginia Press.
Wadud, A. (2006). Inside the gender jihad: Women’s reform in Islam. Oneworld Publications.
Nodhar Hammami Ben Fradj is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of English at the University of Kairouan, Tunisia. She holds a PhD in English language and literature. She specializes in English literature and feminist studies, exploring feminist rhetoric, public speaking, and activism, and examining intersections of gender, literature, and cultural discourse in nineteenth-century and contemporary contexts.
Manuscript was submitted: 10.01.2026.
Double Blind Peer Reviews: from 11.02.2026 till 12.03.2026.
Accepted: 14.03.2026.
Брой 67 на сп. „Реторика и комуникации“ (април 2026 г.) се издава с финансовата помощ на Фонд научни изследвания, договор № КП-06-НП7/23 от 08 декември 2025 г.
Issue 67 of the Rhetoric and Communications Journal (April 2026) is published with the financial support of the Scientific Research Fund, Contract No. KP-06-NP7/23 of December 08, 2025.