Feminism and Composition

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.

Technology and Composition

Technology and Composition

Selfe, Bolter and Grusin, Johnson-Eilola, Yancey, Moran, Landow

Cynthia Selfe

In Technology and Literacy in the 21^st Century, Selfe argues that we must teach students how to write with technology in order for them to survive in today’s fast-paced high-tech work environment. In fact, those high-tech jobs are often the highest paying, so in refusing to teach writing with technology, we are denying our students the opportunity to earn those jobs. This leads to the issue of access. Many lower class, non-white students do not have access to these technologies, and so are left behind; thus, the technology initiative leaves them even further behind and increases the inequality gap in America. Therefore, we must be aware of these differences and work with all students to help them gain what Selfe refers to as “technological literacy” while having discussions amongst ourselves about the complex relationships between technology, literacy, education, power, economic conditions, and political goals.

One important issue Selfe discusses is the definition of technological literacy. She urges that it should not be understood as simply as a functional understanding of what computers are and how they are used; instead, it should be a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically in the context of electronic environments. In other words, not only do students need to understand how to use computers, but they also need to be critically aware of the issues generated by technology use.

[It is important to note that while Selfe’s notions may have received push-back in the early 21^st century, most theorists appear to agree with her now.]

Charles Moran

Moran specifically addresses the issue of access. He points out that we spend a lot of time chasing after the newest technologies and finding ways to implement them into our classes, but this excludes many lower-class and underprivileged students who do not have access to these technologies. It also excludes teachers whose schools do not have sufficient funding to support such technological demands. Moran insists that we should also pay attention to and study how to use low-tech, inexpensive technologies that can teach the same skills and knowledge as their more expensive, high-tech counterparts.

Kathleen Blake Yancey

In “Composition in a New Key,” Yancey insists that we absolutely need to help our students develop what she terms “the third literacy”: technological literacy. Her motivations are slightly different from Selfe’s (who argues that such knowledge will help them have access to better jobs): she argues that students and general non-academicians are writing online frequently now, but without our impetus. In other words, they don’t have to do this writing for class or for a grade; they are simply doing it for some intrinsic value by posting to blogs, Facebook, etc. Working with our students to write in digital and multimodal platforms will also help to create “writing publics”: fostering civically engaged, informed, and literate citizens who vote and are committed to humanity through their ability to write and think for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Johnson-Eilola talks about hypertext and how it encourages both writers and readers to confrtong and work consciously with deconstruction, intertextuality, the decentering of the author, and the reader’s complicity with the construction of the text. Specifically, he argues that composition pedagogy can take advantage of hypertext by encouraging conceptions of writing and reading that are simultaneously product- and process-oriented instead of primarily one or the other. In other words, hypertext can help students understand that writing is both process and product, and that you cannot have one without the other.

George P. Landow

The most important chunk of information to take from Landow is his notion of hypertext as a rhizomatic structure that allows the reader to create the text for themselves as they move through it. Ideally, a rhizome is a text that has an infinite number entrances, exits, and paths through it; hypertext is currently the closest thing to this kind of text since readers can enter it in many locations and work their way through it according to their own volition while exiting whenever and wherever they choose to. This decenters the author by making the reader into a sort of author as well.

David Bolter and Richard Grusin

Remediation has some interesting implications for technology in composition. Bolter and Grusin argue that many texts are remediations (literally mediated again) of previous media (ie: videogames have remediated photographs, paintings, television, and film). These remediated texts are both homages and rivalries: they draw on the remediated elements in order to claim that they are more useful or superior. This has implications for composition studies because now that many teachers are engaging students in digital and multimodal texts, those students are also engaging remediation. This increases the exigency of audience and motivates students to consider broader audiences than their classmates and teacher; they must understand that writing and composition do not happen in isolated vacuums, but in the larger world of human interaction.

How I would answer a question on this theme

I could have added more to this list of authors (Reid, Ridolfo and DeVoss, Urbanski, Kress), but these six seem to adequately represent the considerations to make when discussion technology and composition. I’ve also discussed the issue of delivery in new media elsewhere, and elements from that could be useful in this discussion as well. The key things to hit here are Selfe’s challenge for us to start teaching technological literacy and not just functionality but also critical cultural awareness of its social implications; Yancey backing up that challenge less than five years later from the perspective that our students are writing without us so we must keep up to stay relevant; Moran and Selfe bringing up issues of access to technology and how that impacts teachers and students; and Johnson-Eilola and Landow discussing hypertext as a kind of digital texts from which our students could benefit because it decenters the author and teaches product and process simultaneously.

Delivery in Composition Studies

Delivery in New Media

Bolter, Yancey, DeVoss and Ridolfo, Selfe, Kress, Reid

Of the five classic canons of rhetoric, two have been neglected: memory and delivery. Of late, delivery has been making a comeback. Since digital texts now make it easier than ever to be multimodal, we need to not only teach students how to write in these media but also how to present their compositions to wider audiences. Delivery used to refer only to oral demonstrations: volume of voice, modulation, of pitch, and rhythm.

David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s Remediation mark one of the first instances delivery reemerges in rhetorical theory, though it is not addressed directly. The very notion of “remediation” has implications for composition: remediation is a process whereby new media define themselves by borrowing from and refashioning old media. In this sense, the old media can never be entirely erased because traces of it are contained in the new media. An example of remediation is computer graphics borrowing from painting, photography, television, and film. This notion has implications for delivery because most remediated digital texts also have the goal of immediacy. In other words, they seek to erase the line between media and reality as much as possible; they seek to create a feeling of satisfaction of experience that can be taken as reality. As such the delivery must be such that the user/viewer/reader perceives it as reality (ie: the graphics in a virtual reality simulator must be remediated to the point where it tricks the brain into thinking it is real reality). But remediation also has effects for delivery in Comp Studies. Based on Bolter and Grusin’s logic, we might expect that writing will remediate other media, whether the writing is displayed digitally or in print. For instance, student writing could be published electronically, which would bring an added exigency to the issue of audience by asking students to consider readers outside of their immediate classroom environment. As such, students will need to learn how to produce interactive media compositions like blogs or web pages. As they incorporate new media (visual, aural, as well as written) into their compositions, they will need to learn how to use that material to complement and advance arguments and convey information.

Selfe and Kress, in various texts, both advocate an increase in teaching visual literacy in writing courses. Kress argues that the visual can be an equally productive (if not more so) means of conveying meaning as writing can be. And in today’s digital world, we need to realize that digital texts have already started using images whenever and wherever possible; we need to start teaching students how to do the same. Similarly, Selfe wants teachers to start incorporating visual texts into the classroom: we need to understand the communicative power and complexity of visual texts by reading and looking at them, analyzing them, talking with others about them, composing them, and reflecting on our compositions as symbolic interactions. This means that we need to focus once again on the delivery of texts when working with our students, especially when making multimodal compositions. Since we are no longer limited to the 8 ½ by 11-inch white sheet of paper, we need to help our students determine how to present their digital texts to a larger audience.

In “Made Only In Words: Composition In a New Key,” Kathleen Blake Yancey is calling for a new approach to teaching composition. In particular, she focuses on circulation, the notion that texts move across contexts, between media, and across time. For example, she considers Bolter’s “remediation” to be an example of this circulation: every medium is re/mediated on another medium, and we create the new medium in the context of the old and based on the old model. Yancey also brings up the notion of “deicity,” that is, that meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered. Both circulation and deicity have implications for delivery in Comp because keeping them in mind (that texts will be circulated and that meanings will rapidly change across contexts) will change how a text is delivered. For example, if students are writing a blog, they will need to consider that a) people may read it now, next week, next year, or even never, and they may do so in this country or another, and they may read it on their phone or a computer; and b) each new reading of that text will produce a new meaning because it will be seen in a different context. Students must consider these factors and many more when designing that blog post.

Alexander Reid argues in The Two Virtuals for teachers to consider a multimodal approach to the composition classroom. He wants us to develop pedagogies that see that full potential of new media and that help our students become rhetorically effective and critical users of new media. This means students would learn to make their own multimodal compositions by editing and mixing existing media objects and blending them with new video, audio, and/or text. Delivery, then, takes on a new character as it incorporates not only student-generated artifacts, but also student-found (“ripped”) media and blends both into a new composition. Reid terms this process “Rip, Mix, Burn” and argues that all of our thoughts follow this pattern. Ripping is pulling media from another source, mixing it is blending it all together with new artifacts, and burning is publishing it in a public place; Reid points out that at any point in the Rip, Mix, Burn process, a composer can decide to burn and then start the whole process again, though material can only be ripped from that which has already been burned. This suggests that teaching delivery encompasses teaching students when to burn and when to keep mixing.

In “Composing for Recomposition,” Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss are interested in something similar to Reid: they are interested in situations where composers compose with third-part recomposition in mind; in other words, they rip, mix, and burn while considering how others might eventually rip what they burn. This leads to composers considering their artifact’s “rhetorical velocity,” or considering how far and fast their artifact will travel once it is finished. Ridolfo and DeVoss adopt similar terminology to Reid: rather than rip, mix, burn, they refer to the whole process as “remix,” but they mean essentially the same thing. Composing with consideration of remix leads to a consideration of audience: how might a third party use this composition in a new way? Or, what potential third-party might want to use it? Composers would need to consider the future of the text as carefully as possible. This is similar to Yancey’s discussion of circulation and deicity of texts.

Delivery definitely needs to be reconsidered as an essential canon of rhetoric and composition education. Reconsidering its usefulness leads to helping our students see that using language is more than just writing papers for class; it is about creating meaning and sharing new knowledge with others across time and space. Refocusing on delivery in new media texts gives students an expanded notion of audience; they must consider how a reader/viewer/user in, say, Russia may perceive their texts, rather than just what their own classmates and teacher think of it. This leads to students studying themselves, really hearing/reading/understanding themselves, and seeing themselves as users of language.

Literacy in Composition Studies

Literacy in Comp Studies

Ong, Kress, Selfe, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola

Ong’s Orality and Literacy is the key work in literacy-related studies. Some important points Ong makes are that verbal language is “paramount” because no other language can exist without it. But orality must produce writing; literacy is necessary for the development of science, history, philosophy, understanding of literature and art, and explanation of language. Perhaps the most important point Ong makes is that primary orality is incapable of introspection, analysis, and a concern with the past or future; in other words, sustained thought in oral cultures is very difficult because oral thought is tied to communication. It is not linear (like writing is), and repetitive (unlike [good] writing). Writing has transformed the human consciousness. Writing is detached from its author, therefore it is autonomous and cannot be directly questioned or contested (but oral speech can be). Writing is artificial, but it enables sustained thought on one topic, visualizing the entire artifact and arranging it accordingly, as well as analyzing and considering abstract concepts. But, Ong points out, neither orality nor literacy should be preferred over the other; in fact, both are necessary for the evolution of consciousness

In Technology and Literacy in the 21^st Century, Cynthia Selfe raises many issues about literacy, specifically that literacy and technology are linked. She argues that even though the push for technological literacy in the US during the late 20^th century is supposed to benefit all American, it instead supported (and maybe even exacerbated) the inequalities in American culture. Selfe points out that the push for technological literacy only focuses on one kind of literacy, which completely discounts all of the complex and multiple literacies in our culture. Part of what caused these unintended effects is a limited definition of technological literacy as simple competence with computers. Instead, we need to acknowledge the complex relationships between technology, literacy, education, power, economic conditions, and political goals. Selfe demonstrates that the poorer and less educated are less likely to receive access to computers in school and home, which in turn denies them access to high-paying high-tech jobs; this supports and even increases the inequality gap. As such, technological literacy needs to refer to a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in using language within the context of electronic environments. One of the biggest arguments Selfe makes is that Comp teachers need to be aware of the increasing need for technological literacy, and for us to teach it.

[This is not quite connected to literacy (although it could be), but Charles Moran has an article (or book chapter) on access that argues for teachers to consider not just how we can use high-tech equipment and software in our classrooms, but also how we can teach the same skills using more affordable low-tech materials.]

Elsewhere, in Writing New Media, Selfe argues that not only should comp teachers be interested in new media texts, but also they should be using them to teach about new literacies. This means not only alphabetic literacy, but also on visual literacy that recognizes the role images can play in making meaning. She gives the example of David, a student of hers who had remarkable technological and visual literacy, but who failed out of college because his literacy did not match the alphabetic literacy requirements the university set. She argues that teachers need to pay attention to the whole range of literacies students bring to the classroom: those practiced in the home, church, community, etc; those dependent on visual, oral, and aural performance; those based in multiple languages, cultures, and contexts. Selfe also asserts that we should avoid placing the damaging label of “illiterate” on those who are perfectly capable of communicating, making meaning, and exchanging information within various systems and contexts.

Like Selfe, Kress also thinks it is no longer possible to think about literacy as isolated from social, political, technological, and economic factors. In “Gains and Losses” and Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress argues that the images as meaning-maker is on the rise. In fact, the image is taking dominance in many locations where writing previously held sway, especially in digital environments. He points out that words are empty of meaning until a reader reads them and fills them with meaning, whereas images are depictions with full meaning whether someone sees them or not. I find fault with this reasoning: since viewers come to images with all their various background contexts, images are subject to connotations just as words are. Regardless, Kress calls for the necessity of image literacy, though he also stresses that writing is too valuable to ever fully disappear. However, by acknowledging the image a key player in meaning making, we must reassess what we think writing is, what it does/doesn’t do, and what it can/can’t do.

Kress also discusses the meaning of the term “literacy.” He posits that it means many things that range from making links between letters of text and sounds of speech to reading the texts of the elite that conform to the readings of the elite culture. However, the more meanings that are caught up in the term, the less meaning it actually has. Therefore, he argues that we need separate terms to use in place of what we mean by such distinctions as “visual literacy” and “technological literacy.” As it is, “literacy” is blurred to encompass three things: resources for making meaning, use of resources in the production of meaning, and use of resources for disseminating meaning. Literacy must remain that term that denotes the use of the resources of writing; the others need their own terms.

Anne Wysocki and Johnson Johndan-Eilola, in “Blinded by the Letter,” would agree with Kress’s call for a distinction between literacy and other similar meanings, but for a different reason. They point out that traditional notions of “literacy” have contended that if we acquire basic reading and writing skills (if we are literate), then we will be primed for success, no matter where, when, or who we are. As such, when we talk about “computer literacy” or “visual literacy,” we probably mean basic context-less skills that provide hope for an economic, social, and political equalizer. However, this kind of thinking only keeps poor people oppressed; we blame people who cannot acquire these basic skills and assume that there is something inherently wrong with them. Wysocki and Johndan-Eilola ask if we really want to perpetuate such thinking by bringing such a politically charged word into discussions of our relationship to technology. They argue that we need to find a new term (or terms), and Kress provides another step in their reasoning by showing how we can divide the different definitions.

If I had to answer a question on this theme

I would organize it in much the same way I have here with one small change: I would start with Ong, then move to Selfe (with perhaps a brief nod toward Moran), then move to Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola before finishing with Kress. Ong establishes what literacy is versus orality, then Selfe complicates literacy by adding political and social implications to its definition through a discussion of access (here is where Moran could come in). Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola complicate it further by pointing out its conception as a set of skills that are required for success and that those who don’t acquire it are illiterate and are seen as incapable. Thus, a new term is needed to denote what we mean by “technological literacy” so that we don’t carry those implications with it. Kress would agree. While he argues for a rise in “visual literacy” (in quotation marks because he would not call it that) in much the way Selfe argues for a wider conception of the various literacies studies bring with them to the classroom (one may note, she uses the term uncomplicatedly and does not question its use in conjunction with “technological,” “visual,” etc), he also provides a system through which we may begin to determine new words for “literacy” that distinguish among resources for meaning making, use of resources in making meaning, and use of resources for disseminating meaning.

Where do I stand? I agree with all of them in some way: I agree with Selfe’s notion that we need to be aware of our students’ multiple literacies and provide them with opportunities to let them shine without penalizing them for not conforming to our traditional notion of meaning making. I agree with Kress as well that images are justifiably worthwhile for making meaning. But I also agree with Kress and Wysocki and Johson-Eilola that the term “literacy” is too politically charged to carry with us to discussions of abilities to make meaning in different media from print. However, I don’t have any suggestions for how we could do that (or for what different terms we could use).

Update: In fact, Ong already makes this move when he distinguishes orality from literacy: both use language, but each has its own term. In “Made Not Only In Words,” Yancey states that technology is a kind of “third literacy,” with the first two being oral and print. But, according to Ong’s construction, the two are distinct, and each has its own social, cognitive, political implications. The same goes for what we have been calling “technological literacy.” It’s a whole new thing, so it needs a whole new term.

Update: Ulmer (quoted in Reid) uses the term “electracy” to refer to what we mean when we say “technological literacy.”