The turn to the social in composition studies, as in other disciplines, has involved numerous commitments engaged in troubling the certainty of the boundaries of the subject, placing a once-indefatigably impervious self within the grasp of an exterior previously deemed incapable of encroachment and alteration. Among these critical endeavors that have hurtled towards a sort of revivification and blurring of what may be considered extrinsic, those explicitly subscribing to some sort of feminist bent are within the displacement of notions of the self-generative with a vitalized distension of the body swollen by conflictual societal pressures. More expansive notions of both the subject and writing have posited a vast range of positions and identities within which to compose the self.
It is feminist theorizing (implicitly or explicitly), that looms large particularly with respect to the consideration of gender as composing the limits of subjectivity,[1] compounding an existing frame in which multitudinous capacities, characteristics, inclinations, and practices accessible to a subject may be constrained by experience and social relation(s).[2] There is a need to critically consider the implications of scholarship that persistently severs and confines the most deplorable effects experienced to the composition of particularly the feminine as a gendered subjectivity, excised and set apart from continuous experiential strands of relation composing the social, in the service of advocating for a resistance tacitly defined as indemonstrable by its very characterization. To compose as gendered in this way is to be composed—to be consumed by writing. To be finished by the writing of what has been experienced itself and, in the horrors evoked by the material enactment of writing as what has been done (to me), extricate and consolidate and envelop the assailable.[3] An examination of my own experiences writing in social relation with feminist contemporaries in my Masters program which challenged the (perhaps already) precarious subject positions to which they clung will serve to underscore the perils of becoming (un)composed, embodying an ideology so encysted that presumes a violent de/composition of the gendered self in its very contestation.
Aegerter, Lindsay Pentolfe. “Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege.” College English 59.8 (1997): 898-915. Print.
Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the ‘Literacy Letters’.” College English 51.2 (1989): 125-141. Print.
Hesford, Wendy S. “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation.” College English 62.2 (1999): 192-221. Print.
Phillips, Kendall R. “Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006): 310-332. Print
Ritchie, Joy, and Kathleen Boardman. “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption.” CCC 50.4 (1999): 585-606. Print.
[1] For example: “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption”; “Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege”; “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the ‘Literacy Letters’”
[2] “Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance”, 310, 312-313.
[3] “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation”, particularly the opening epigraph, 192, in conjunction with discussion of “re(presenting) trauma”, 196, and Strosser’s interpretation of her narrative as the “control of female subjecthood”, 200.
It is feminist theorizing (implicitly or explicitly), that looms large particularly with respect to the consideration of gender as composing the limits of subjectivity,[1] compounding an existing frame in which multitudinous capacities, characteristics, inclinations, and practices accessible to a subject may be constrained by experience and social relation(s).[2] There is a need to critically consider the implications of scholarship that persistently severs and confines the most deplorable effects experienced to the composition of particularly the feminine as a gendered subjectivity, excised and set apart from continuous experiential strands of relation composing the social, in the service of advocating for a resistance tacitly defined as indemonstrable by its very characterization. To compose as gendered in this way is to be composed—to be consumed by writing. To be finished by the writing of what has been experienced itself and, in the horrors evoked by the material enactment of writing as what has been done (to me), extricate and consolidate and envelop the assailable.[3] An examination of my own experiences writing in social relation with feminist contemporaries in my Masters program which challenged the (perhaps already) precarious subject positions to which they clung will serve to underscore the perils of becoming (un)composed, embodying an ideology so encysted that presumes a violent de/composition of the gendered self in its very contestation.
Aegerter, Lindsay Pentolfe. “Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege.” College English 59.8 (1997): 898-915. Print.
Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the ‘Literacy Letters’.” College English 51.2 (1989): 125-141. Print.
Hesford, Wendy S. “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation.” College English 62.2 (1999): 192-221. Print.
Phillips, Kendall R. “Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006): 310-332. Print
Ritchie, Joy, and Kathleen Boardman. “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption.” CCC 50.4 (1999): 585-606. Print.
[1] For example: “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption”; “Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege”; “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the ‘Literacy Letters’”
[2] “Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance”, 310, 312-313.
[3] “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation”, particularly the opening epigraph, 192, in conjunction with discussion of “re(presenting) trauma”, 196, and Strosser’s interpretation of her narrative as the “control of female subjecthood”, 200.
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