Feminist Rhetorics and Other Voices

I don't have much to say this week, perhaps ironically, given the emphasis in the readings on developing voice and pushing for that voice to be heard. To start, I feel silenced by the two readings on race and racism (Royster and Villanueva). I don't interpret that silencing as oppressive, however. Rather, it's a matter of those readings forcing me to reflect on what I'm actually qualified to speak about, and concomitantly, what conversations I should just keep my trap shut for and listen instead. Royster's "Scene One" makes that point with emotional force. Although I have not, like Royster, "been compelled on too many occasions to count to sit as a well-mannered Other, silently, in a state of tolerance that requires me to be as expressionless as I can manage, while colleagues who occupy a place of entitlement different from my own talk about the history and achievements of people from my ethnic group, or even about their perceptions of our struggles" (612), that description hurts. I have listened to people discuss what's best for me, or been forced into silence because my experiences or my knowledge are not enough to make others listen. But then, as soon as I write these last words, I question the validity of mapping any of my own experiences onto Royster's. If her point is that others who haven't been there don't get it, then I am trivializing or essentializing or just plain not listening when I immediately react with a comparison to my own experience, which comes out of a much different subject position. Similarly, I hesitate as soon as I try to squirm my way into Villanueva's article. I could write about its rhetorical strategies, or the interesting juxtapositions of transactional and imaginative writings, or his use of Spanish titles. But, without the experience that leads him to choose these strategies, these writings, this multilingualism, what qualifies me to say anything about them?

Here I run into an overlapping issue between attempts to write about racism and attempts to write about ESL/WE. I enjoy the privilege of being white in America; this subject position (I agree with Royster here) has to inform any move I might make in the conversation about racism. When it comes to ESL, I can lay more claim to a right to speak.I grew up bilingual in a Western European country; my sister and I spoke English at home and German at school. On the first day of Kindergarten, I knew how to say "ja," "nein," and "Toilette." Years later, now, I am a supposedly fluent German speaker. Yet, I don't feel like one and I think that's largely because I am not a fluent writer of German. Boo hoo for me. This experience hardly justifies a comparison between me and the ESL students discussed by Zamel and Canagarajah, who take on the unthinkable challenge of pursuing a college degree in a foreign language. Unlike in the discussion of racism, though, I do think that my experience allows me to recognize the enormity of that challenge though, in a way that people who haven't undertaken academic work in an L2 can't. Just the thought of trying to accomplish in German any of the work I currently do (even the reading, but especially the writing, and to some extent the oral communication) just now made me literally shudder. How to translate that empathy to my own teaching? I'm not sure. Certainly, Lu's "can able to" example of a deliberate grammatical choice made by an ESL student (cited in Canagarajah) makes me wonder how many such deliberate choices I've overlooked in student papers. Huzzah. One more worry in the quiver of things-I-should-be-doing-as-a-teacher. [Sidebar: I did read the Zamel. It doesn't fit into the larger point I'm making here about my own voice and right to speak. Perhaps one connection is for a future use to which I would like to put my voice: Carrying out Zamel's belief that "our role in our institutions ought not to be defined solely by the service we perform for other faculty...but in helping faculty understand the role they need to begin to play in working with all students" (511).]

So on to the feminist writings. Flynn's 1988 "Composing as a Woman" got me hot and bothered for reasons which Ritchie and Boardman nicely summarized in their 1999 "Feminism in Composition." They quote Eileen Schell arguing that "femininist pedagogy, although compelling, may reinforce rather than critique or transform patriarchal structures by reinscribing what Magda Lewis call the 'woman as caretaker ideology'" (598). This issue lies at the heart of my own intellectual and emotional grappling with feminist theory, its history, and its applications. I worry about spending too much time and effort on gender. I worry that the process may reify gendered categories. At the same time, we all know that ignoring existing gender categories, or sexism, or heterosexism, or the many other forms of discrimination and oppression that feminist theory calls attention doesn't make them go away. Because of this concern, I very much appreciated Ritchie and Boardman's take on the state of feminism in the field. I think they handle the potentially divisive and destructive aspects of feminism very well. Interestingly, I should note also, this is the one arena that I feel have a leg to stand on and a voice worth listening to, since I am a woman. Yet, when I think about my experiences thus far in the field, I have little to say on the topic of gender. The main area that my gender ever becomes an issue is in interactions with students. Perhaps that's all the more reason why I should adopt a feminist pedagogy. I don't know. I'll be quiet now.