Wood, J. T. (2010). Gendered Lives: Communication, gender and culture (9th Ed/International Ed). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Reviewed by: Dr Stephen Mackey, Deakin University

This encyclopaedic scholarship into the contemporary culture of gender and sex is relatively coy for its first 11 chapters, but on page 285 the motivation for an extremely readable study becomes clear:

• In the US three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day.
• Every nine seconds in the same country a woman is beaten by an intimate partner.
• There would be more women than men in the world but for infanticide.
• 16,000 girls have their genitals mutilated every day.
• Between 28 percent and 50 percent of women suffer physical, mental, emotional, verbal or economic violence in romantic relationships.

Professor Wood acknowledges that Chapter 12 may be: “…as distressing for you to read as it was for me to research and write…” but it is this chapter that gives the clue why more than 100 reviewers have to be thanked for the book’s nine editions since the first in 2005. The eighth edition alone acknowledges 44 reviewers. This book is a standard work in the field. It is a product of and a major contribution to a global movement engaged in epochal struggle.

A review of an already-100 times formatively reviewed book by someone who is not field-specific for a public relations journal might be termed an interesting exercise. The approach will be to précis the contents then suggest how some aspects might relate to public relations processes and theory. There will be an emphasis on the productive dissonance which certain strains of theory might produce.

The book catalogues the dire consequences for women of pathologies in predominantly Western modern culture. It explains how socially manufactured gender roles create harmful thinking and behaviour. The book discusses transgender, androgyny, chromosomes, same-sex relationships and racial discrimination. But these sections are generally used for comparison and illustration of the ways many cultural conceptions are destructive for women.

The book starts gently as if to avoid startling young students who are currently naïve in the ways of the world:

Chapters 3 and 4 are the most relevant to public relations. It helps to give the respective chapter names in full: ‘The rhetorical shaping of gender: Women’s movements in the United States’; and: ‘The rhetorical shaping of gender: Men’s movements in the United States’. What Wood and similar American scholars mean by ‘rhetorical shaping’ is what some European scholars used to call ‘semiotic construction’ before the term ‘semiotics’ fell foul of Derridean and allied navel gazing. Wood is writing about the mechanisms to imprint or manage ideology. These are mechanisms which are as old as the advent of shamans, the classical pantheon and churches of all kinds, particularly the one based in Rome. The management of ideology is also as new as Greenpeace’s viral campaigns on Facebook and Fox News’ de facto invitation for us to eat our children by allowing climate-change deniers to rant. For an explanation of how public relations activity can be explained rhetorically and semiotically as a process which anchors capitalist ideology, see Mackey (2010 and 2011).

In terms of rhetoric as purveyor of ideology, what Chapters 3 and 4 cover are the marches, the lobbying, the web sites, the coming together for discussion groups and conferences – in other words, campaigning. This is campaigning on both sides or rather from many cultural and political perspectives to do with views, protests and eventual legislative outcomes. These outcomes manifest in laws such as anti-harassment enforcement; improvements to family law; and rights over what one is allowed to do with one’s own body.

It is to do with campaigns that this book intersects with public relations. Both public relations and the challenge to cultural pathologies involve struggles to affect the perception of sections of the public. Public relations teachers might be too polite to use terms such as struggle and ideology. This is because courses are usually set up to feed graduates into controversy-averse public sector or consumer-oriented organisations. However the term ‘rhetoric’ would seem to be a suitable value-neutral term to stand in for such an aggressive sounding lexicon. In America, unlike Europe, the original classical and scholastic meaning of the term ‘rhetoric’ was never totally cowed beneath the scathing epithet: ‘mere rhetoric.’ Consequently, in the New World rhetoric can be regarded as a euphemistic place-holder for what used to be called ‘ideology’ in the days when European cultural studies still dared to breathe words such as ‘Marxism’ and ‘oppression’.    

One hesitates to criticise a 100-times legitimised landmark work. But it is hard to withhold comment on the political credence of a book which does not speculate overtly on the ideological effects which the Catholic Church and capitalism may be having on women in both developed and developing countries. Wood relies heavily on ‘standpoint theory’ i.e. the perspective which you or I may have as a way of explaining how we understand ourselves and our world. It is a shame that her milieu does not allow her to go much beyond campaigns in order to speculate how the standpoints got there in the first place and why they persist. In order to do this there is a need to re-theorise rhetoric along Peircean semiotic lines. That is, we have to look more intelligently at how ideas are formed in the mind rather than just at how ideas are marshalled through protest marches, news releases, whims of Rupert Murdoch, feminist support groups and so on. But then, if people became that interested in how ideas are really formed, as I explained in Mackey (2010), the raison d’être for many cultural norms, including a large chunk of the public relations industry, would be exposed.

References:

Mackey, S. (2010). The original bailout of US corporations: The public relations bailout. Public Relations Review, 36(1), 1-6.
Mackey, S. (2011). Pragmatism, semiotics and sacred truth. In L. Edwards & C. Hodges (Eds.), Public Relations, Society and Culture: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations. London: Routledge.

About the reviewer:  Dr Steve Mackey is a Senior Lecturer in Public Relations at Deakin University.

Purchase information: The book is available from good bookstores or direct from Cengage Learning at http://www.cengage.com/search/productOverview.do?N=+11&Ntk=P_Isbn13&Ntt=9780495794165 

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