Kirsch,+Gesa.+Feminism+and+Composition..+A+Critical+Sourcebook

Part I: Early Feminist Voices and Visions

I think it's interesting to note that the last essay in this section is very similar to the first two essays combined. Florence Howe suggests that women writers have a serious lack in self-esteem and that needs to be encouraged through a supportive writing environment. Hyatt suggests that there is a feminine style, but that it isn't necessarily what we would think--actually less emotive, shorter and more concise sentences, etc.--and shouldn't be stigmatized in the ways that it has been. Bolker's piece "Teaching Griselda to Write" is remarkable for it's classification of the student (rather than the student's writing) by claiming the female student to have a "good girl" syndrome in which she wants to please to the point of ignoring her own thoughts. Gearheart's essay is a complete polemic, suggesting that any attempt to persuade is an act of violence. Finally, Pamela Annas' "Style as Politics" picks up from where Howe and Hyatt left off, except tying it more specifically to the slogans - personal is political - of feminism. This all reminds me of the type of writing block that I've experienced lately. Especially when she talks about the different places and the different reasons that people block - resistance to the assignment, fear that what they have to say doesn't matter or isn't good enough, pressure to keep producing, guilt at the selfishness of writing - and I find myself nodding my head to all of the different types. I feel that I'm blocked on writing for exams for ALL of these different reasons, and that they are tied inexplicably to my background as a female student and my current position in a rather patriarchal degree program.

There is a strong thread in this section to assure that 'the personal is political' and to encourage the importance of personal writing. As yet, all of the focus has been on students (rather than teachers) with the exception of Gearheart who goes for a theoretical reading of Rhetoic (writ large) as violence. Politics here means how to empower individual female students through a revision of teaching practices or writing values.

Part II: Feminist Theories and Research

This section strongly emphasizes the 'ethical' nature of Composition research (and, implicitly, teaching), warning us of the dangers of research while, at the same time, insisting on the possibilities and transformative nature of feminist (or afrafeminist or postcolonial feminist) research practices. Not to undo what has already been done, but to offer an alternative to practices that are hegemonic and/or controlling. By the 1990s, we're aware of the essentialism-social construction debate (as evidenced from Ritchie's article)

There is little explicit evidence of systematic theorizing about gender from the 1950s to the late 1980s. As late as 1988, Elizabeth Flynn could write, "For the most part...the fields of feminist studies and composition studies have not engaged each other in a serious or systematic way" (425). Indeed, when we began this study, we framed it as a paradox: prior to the mid-1980s, feminism seemed absent from composition but present among compositionists.From those early investigations we pulled one useful reminder: that the connections of composition and feminism have not been an inevitable result of the presence of so many women in the field. But subsequent conversations with a number of longtime teachers and scholars, dating back to the 1960s, reminded us that the near-absence of feminism from our publications does not constitute absence from the field. (586-7, my emphasis)
 * who spoke to us about their own feminist beliefs and activities** in composition

In the documents and accounts we have read and heard, we find three overlapping tropes that shed light on the roles feminism has played in composition and in the strategies women have used to gain a place in its conversations: (1) Following the pattern of developing feminist thought in the 1970s and 1980s, many early feminist accounts in composition sought inclusion and equality for women. (2) More recent accounts like those of Louise Phelps and Janet Emig posit feminism as a "subterranean" unspoken presence (xv), and Susan Jarratt and Laura Brady suggest the metonymy or contiguity of feminism and composition. (3) Also developing during this time has been what feminist postmodernists define as disruption and critique of hegemonic narratives-resistance, interruption, and finally redirection of composition's business as usual. (587)

Scott reminds us that narratives of experience should be encountered not as uncontested truth but as catalysts for further analysis of the conditions that shape experience. (588)

None of these articles is heavily theorized; with the possible exception of Hiatt's, they arise from and return directly to classroom experience. Because they do not attend closely to larger systemic issues of power and discourse, these studies also make it possible for feminist concerns to be contained, encapsulated, or dismissed as "women's issues." Yet essays like these deserve credit for challenging the field's gender-blindness by insisting that women be included in narratives of classroom writing practices. They have contributed to a sense of intuitive connection between composition and those who ask, at least implicitly, "What difference might it make if the student (or teacher) is female?"

Carolyn Ericksen Hill uses feminist theory to read composition history through the gendering of practices, of theories, and of the field itself.3 She reads the label "midwives" back onto male composition theorists active in the 60s and early 70s: Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, John Schultz, and William Coles, Jr. Without necessarily claiming them as feminists, she can, with the aid of postmodern theory, gender their approach as feminine and place their work in a certain feminist context: they helped "birth" the experiential self. The expressivist/nurturing feminist connection has often been made in passing, but Hill's label "midwives" claims these key composition figures for feminist theorizing-and also marginalizes them. In the 1990s, Hill argues, these four "expressivist"f igures have been pushed to the edge of a newly theorized and professionalized field; their gender-blindness and humanistic model of the autonomous self have had to make way for gender difference and shifting subject positions, powerful constructs for feminist analysis. Hill sees in the compartmentalizationrather than dynamic rereading-of the four men's so-called expressivism a parallel with the "othering" of "woman," and of feminism, that continues to occur. (594-5).

Another form of disruptive narrative is less grounded in the impulse for individual disruption and change, but seeks wider consideration of difference. Such critiques often create conflict and may evoke more resistance because they demand changes in institutional and epistemological structures that conflict with composition's continuing need to establish legitimacy.(598)