Feminism and Composition
Sullivan, Gearhart, Annas, Lunsford and Ede, Lamb, S. Miller, Selfe, Hawisher and Sullivan
Pamala Annas
Annas argues that women should be allowed to ground their writing in the self (personal experience) and women’s lives. She asks, is it fair to ask marginalized students to ignore these aspects of themselves? In order to achieve the required academic distance. No, it isn’t. For some, it’s impossible. Instead, students should use writing to validate their own lives. As instructors, we can help them to find a way to do so.
[Plays well with Elbow and Mitchell, who argue on a similar topic.]
Sally Miller Gearhart
Gearhart recognizes that students have a variety of backgrounds and languages (literacies?), but that not all of them are recognized by the academy. She asks, is this an act of violence? An extension of Imperialist ideals (asking them to give up their “home” ways of expression for traditional academic ways)? Yes, it certainly can be. Gearhart argues that feminism rejects this notion in favor of creating a classroom space that invites (rather than forces) students to change.
[Both Annas and Gearhart focus on politicized approaches that combine feminism and comp in order to create a classroom space where all aspects of the self come together to stimulate and create change.]
Patricia Sullivan
Sullivan argues that composition studies is too slow in examining how gender informs writing. She analyzes several aspects of the writing classroom and finds that androcentrism remains pervasive in comp studies. Thus, we must ask how gender shapes the meaning of a writing situation.
[This works well with Annas and Gearhart because all three recognize that different backgrounds lead to different approaches to composition; thus, being female can lead to a different approach to composition than being male would.]
Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede
Lunsford and Ede found two primary modes of communication in comp studies classrooms. The first is hierarchical and was determined to be masculine: writing is delegated by a superior and implies bureaucratic writing; the superior values efficiency; multiple voices and shifting authority are problems. The second is dialogic and was determined to be feminine: writing values fluidity in meaning, openness, and creative tension; writing is producing (not discovering) knowledge; it has the potential to challenge phallogocentric, subject-centered discourse.
[Lunsford’s and Ede’s study has implications for Sullivan’s notion that gender shapes the meaning of a writing situation. They have shown that it shapes how a writer will respond to and write within a particular situation.]
Catherine Lamb
Lamb argues for a “maternal” view of argument that does not promote conflict. Power is not a quality to exercise on others, but is instead a force that energizes and enables competence and reduces hierarchy. Lamb explains that adapting negotiation and mediation (cooperative approaches to resolve conflicts) to writing will help avoid the divisiveness of monologic argument (which emphasizes its own interests and only acknowledges opposition to refute it). In other words, monologic argument is only interested in winning, whereas Lamb’s maternal argument is interested in finding a resolution that is fair to all sides: the goals are to see knowledge as collaborative, cooperative, and constructed. Lamb argues that written argument should be a give-and-take and power should be mutually enabling.
[Lamb’s argument plays well with Sullivan, Lunsford, and Ede because she suggests a kind of argument that is “maternal” (not paternal), and therefore feminine in nature. Thus, she suggests that this negotiative, collaborative, knowledge-making, and hierarchy-dissolving kind of argument is feminine as well.]
Susan Miller
Miller points out that the notion that composition is feminized must be challenged; she shows that the negative connotations with feminist approaches to composition reinforce the notion that composition is marginalized. Instead, we need to use political action to change the negative connotation of the “feminization” of composition, and for intellectual/political movements toward gender balance in composition studies. We must explore the status of females as lower on the hierarchy of the academy. Miller argues here and in Textual Carnivals that composition studies is a culturally designated space for political action. She adds that composition is the discourse of the majority, so it’s an effective place for counterhegemonic intellectual politics.
Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan
Hawisher and Sullivan study women’s self-representation in digital environments. They point out that feminists have focused almost exclusively on the textual environments of computer-mediated composition, but since the Web has more possibilities for self-representation, they argue that a simple transfer of arguments about women’s verbal online lives is inadequate as a strategy for exploring visual representations. In other words, new methods for examination must be created or adapted in order to study women’s visual self-representation.
It was once promised that online spaces would be egalitarian, but, since women and other underrepresented people are often unduly harassed, that has not happened. Often, women are shut out entirely of mixed-group electronic discussions; they make fewer and shorter contributions than men, and both men and women respond more frequently to men’s postings than to women’s. Neither have these spaces proven to be devoid of communicative power for women, as was also predicted.
Hawisher and Sullivan argue that in order to extend and complicate electronic discourse theories, we need to examine online visual depictions in a variety of discursive settings. In other words, the digital realm is full of images that people view and interpret daily, and which exert influence over them; thus, we need to examine how these visuals impact their viewers. When women become visual objects online and have no say in the ways in which they are represented, the outcome is predictable. Old identities like the “pin-up girl” or academic talking head are reproduced, and traditional narratives are re-created with new technologies.
Cynthia Selfe
Selfe reinforces what Hawisher and Sullivan argue. She explains that the representations used to sell computers often reinforce the same traditional gender narratives of our culture. These conventional stories told in the context of new technologies remind us of our ethical responsibilities to work as college English teachers toward productive change. It’s our job to both analyze, critique, and deconstruct these hierarchicalizing narratives and replace them with egalitarian notions, and to teach our students to do so. Some cultural stories we are telling ourselves about computers are that 1) the electronic landscape is open to everybody (it isn’t), 2) gender will no longer be a predictor of success (it still is). Just because we now have technology does not mean social progress will automatically follow. Instead, we must educate students on how to culturally critique electronic artifacts so that they may recognize the inequalities that challenge humanity (ethnocentrism, racism, classism, sexism).
If I had to answer a question on this theme
Since a lot of these texts play well together, there are a few different approaches I can take. Annas and Gearhart argue that women (and other underrepresented) writers should write in their own voices, even if that means using personal experience or disrupting traditional hegemonic-academic notions of writing. Ede and Lunsford tie into their arguments well by showing that men and women write differently, thus calling for an acceptance of feminine/dialogic writing as well as traditional masculine/hierarchical writing. Then, Lamb goes into greater depth about what such feminine/dialogic/maternal argumentation could look like.
Susan Miller kind of stands on her own, but her notions could easily fit into a discussion of Comp’s power/powerlessness in the university, or of the politics of composition.
Finally, Hawisher and Sullivan and Selfe discuss issues of women’s identity in electronic spaces. All three scholars show that visual representations of women reinscribes traditional gender narratives into new digital spaces. They call for new approaches to studying women’s self-representations, and well as cultural productions of women in these spaces.
Exam. Play. 