Composition Studies Through a Feminist Lens. Shari J. Stenberg
5 Research and Writing Through a Feminist Lens: A Focus on Experience
Raising Consciousness of and about Women Writers
For Writing and Discussion
From Research on Gender to Feminist Research
For Writing and Discussion
The Evolving use of Experience
For Writing and Discussion
Works Cited
For Further Reading
6 Argument Through a Feminist Lens
Persuasion, Conflict, and Negotiation Through a Feminist Lens
For Writing and Discussion
Beyond the Monologic Voice
For Writing and Discussion
Rhetorical Listening
For Writing and Discussion
From Monologic to Dialogic: A Feminist Revision of Argument
Works Cited
For Further Reading
Works Cited
About the Author
Acknowledgments
The feminist scholars and teachers represented in this book, as well as those I work with daily, have taught me much about the possibilities of collaboration. Indeed, this book is a product of collaboration, and I’m grateful for the conversation and inspiration from others that have fueled it.
Perhaps above all, my process of developing this project has deepened my gratitude for the women in and outside of academia whose early feminist contributions now benefit all of us. Joy Ritchie is one of these women, and I’m especially thankful for her mentorship—as a scholar, colleague, and department chair. Her guidance and suggestions were a gift to me as I wrote and revised this book. I’m also grateful to Barbara DiBernard, a feminist teacher and scholar, whom I was lucky to call a colleague, and who remains a strong inspiration for my own feminist teaching and writing. Debbie Minter offers me a daily example of what it means to enact feminist leadership in the university, and her colleagueship and friendship deeply enrich my work and life.
I greatly appreciate those who read chapters of this book and offered important questions and ideas: Chris Gallagher, Jennifer Dean, and my Rhetoric of Women Writers students.
My husband, Jason, and daughters, Zoe and Anika, provide me daily doses of love and laughter that balance and feed my work. I thank them.
Finally, I want to express heartfelt appreciation to series editors Stephen Westbrook and Sheryl Fontaine for seeing the value in the project and providing thoughtful, encouraging feedback that enabled me to develop and strengthen it. I thank David Blakesley for his expert guidance of the production process and Terra Williams for her careful copyediting. They’ve helped make it possible for me to share with a new generation the important contributions feminists have made to Composition Studies.
1 Composition’s Origin Stories Through a Feminist Lens
We use stories to define ourselves, to create traditions, and to establish our heritage. Because Composition Studies is a relatively new discipline in the university, it has been important for its scholars to record its story, to show how it emerged and evolved and why its presence matters. As with any story, there is not just one version—and which plotlines, characters, and tensions most vividly occupy the narrative landscape depends on the lens of the storyteller. This book introduces you to stories of Composition’s history, struggles, and accomplishments through the lens of feminism.
Composition Studies and feminism hold much in common. As Susan Jarratt writes:
Both [. . .] seek to transform styles of thinking, teaching, and learning rather than to reproduce stultifying traditions. They share a suspicion of authoritarian pedagogy, emphasizing instead collaborative or interactive learning and teaching. They resist purity of approach and the reduction of their scope by moving in and around many contemporary critical theories and disciplines. (2–3)
Within both Composition and feminist scholarship, then, you are likely to find projects that value revision of classrooms, institutional politics, and knowledge practices. These projects may well be collaborative, whether involving scholars who work together to discover new knowledge or fusing knowledge from different disciplines. You are also likely to hear voices not always valued in intellectual traditions—students, community members, teachers—as well as discourse that might “sound” different from other academic writing, drawing from narrative and experience as a resource for knowledge. In fact, much of what makes Composition Studies a unique field can be traced to the infusion of feminist thought into its conversations.
By focusing a feminist lens on Composition Studies, then, this book aims to spotlight how feminist contributions have made Composition Studies a more inclusive, innovative, and exciting field. Whether illuminating difference within our classrooms and institutions or recovering and “gathering” women’s voices in the rhetorical tradition, feminist contributions have created space for subjectivities previously unheard or marginalized. Feminists have introduced new methods of making arguments and engaging in research, prompting us to reevaluate what “counts” as both legitimate knowledge and legitimate subject matter for our writing. Feminist perspectives have also played a key role in broadening the field’s notions of academic discourse, pointing out that restricting ourselves to traditional, Western notions of logical, linear, and objective writing consequently limits possibilities for intellectual and creative work. Finally, feminist scholars have altered our view of classrooms, underscoring the ways gender and power dynamics shape our interactions with students and offering new visions and practices for the teaching of writing.
As is probably clear by now, both feminism and Composition Studies work from values that challenge academic business as usual; consequently, both have also struggled to claim legitimacy. While the large part of this book focuses on the contributions of feminist thought to Composition Studies, this chapter examines the field’s beginnings—the different ways compositionists claim the origins of the field—which illuminate ongoing tensions between maintaining countercultural values and achieving disciplinary credibility.
Now, let’s return to the beginning(s).
The Origin Stories of Composition Studies Through a Feminist Lens
When you think about Composition Studies, what comes to mind? The first English course you took at college? Practices like peer response and revision? Learning new rules and expectations for college-level writing? Or maybe, like so many English majors, you know it as the class you passed out of with an AP exam.
Although Composition Studies is now well established as a discipline with its own conferences, journals, and graduate programs, it is still most often conflated with the course from where it began: freshman writing. In fact, some scholars argue that the exact origins of the field lie in the Harvard exam of 1873, a test designed to sort out those students who needed additional training in grammar and spelling before moving on to their real coursework. Many of us who work in the field today still confront the prevailing expectation that composition teachers will—for once and for all—prepare students as writers before they enter their biology, political science, or literature classrooms.