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last.updated 11.25.07

 


Gender & Rhetoric

Purpose

Like race and ethnicity, the lived experiences of individuals who identify as–or are marked as–women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and intersexuals, can shape the way these individuals come to knowledge and, consequently, the strategies they use to persuade. Likewise these issues of gender can also limit how persuasive their audiences find them. Throughout class we will examine what a gendered rhetoric adds to our understanding rhetoric and how it can inform our composition classroom practices.

Before Class


FreeWrite

In your own words, how would you define feminism? What then would a feminist rhetoric be? And what value do both of these bring to the composition classroom?

Questions and Discussion (by Jennifer Odom)

Joy Richie and Kathleen Boardman
Richie and Boardman emphasize the significance of personal experience in regard to the advancement/promotion of a feminist perspective in composition. They specifically support the narrative as a means to comprehend the relationship between feminism and composition and determine how that relationship has developed since the 1970s. Is it believable that personal experience is capable of implementing positive changes in an academic environment? Exactly how effective is narrative—in the composition classroom and/or to further the progression of academic field integration—as a rhetorical strategy?

Karen Kopelson
Kopelson states: "The performance of the very neutrality that students expect from their (composition) instructors, and from education more generally, can become a rhetorically savvy, politically responsive and responsible pedagogical tactic that actually enhances students’ engagement with difference and that minimizes their resistance to difference in the process" (pg. 5). Can such a concept be conceived as problematic for the instructor? In other words, do you believe that neutrality poses as restrictive or hindering, or is it necessary?

Judith Butler
Butler describes 'fantasy' as a "part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable." (pg. 28-29) What role, if any, does fantasy play in the composition classroom? Does a diverse student body within a classroom–one within which are various differences–indicate a presence of fantasy?

Butler states: "My reflexivity is not only socially mediated, but socially constituted. I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me" (pg. 34). If we are socially constructed, existing as we are because of predetermining factors, how does this affect the credibility of the personal experience? Do Butler's ideas of self and body support Richie's and Boardman's perception of the feminist-related narrative (namely the "disruptive" narrative) in composition studies?

Andrea Lunsford
According to Lunsford, has the prominence and promotion of difference become problematic in the realm of copyright law? Does a difference (such as gender) pose as synonymous with'property'? What does the lack of individual ownership over work mean for the scholars of rhetoric and composition involved? And lastly, how does Lunsford's concern of textual ownership correspond to feminism?