Repurposing Composition

Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age

Shari J. Stenberg

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781607323884
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Linguistics

In Repurposing Composition, Shari J. Stenberg responds to the increasing neoliberal discourse of academe through the feminist practice of repurposing. In doing so, she demonstrates how tactics informed by feminist praxis can repurpose current writing pedagogy, assessment, public engagement, and other dimensions of writing education.

Stenberg disrupts entrenched neoliberalism by looking to feminism's long history of repurposing "neutral" practices and approaches to the rhetorical tradition, the composing process, and pedagogy. She illuminates practices of repurposing in classroom moments, student writing, and assessment work, and she offers examples of institutions, programs, and individuals that demonstrate a responsibility approach to teaching and learning as an alternative to top-down accountability logic.

Repurposing Composition is a call for purposes of work in composition and rhetoric that challenge neoliberal aims to emphasize instead a public-good model that values difference, inclusion, and collaboration.

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Feminist Repurposing in Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy

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In her 1973 essay, “Toward a Woman-Centered University,” Adrienne Rich calls attention to the masculinist arrangement of university curricula, pedagogy, and purposes—and to the cloak of neutrality it wears. “When a woman is admitted to higher education,” she writes, “it is often made to sound as if she enters a sexually neutral world of ‘disinterested’ and ‘universal’ perspectives” when, in fact, “the structure of relationships, [and] even the style of discourse, including assumptions about theory and practice, ends and means, process and goal” are decidedly male centric (Rich 1979, 134, 136). In response, Rich challenges her feminist readers to work at once within and against the existing institutional structure in order to imagine and enact possibilities beyond it. To do so is to re-create a university that benefits not only women but all who work within it, by making room for multiple ways of knowing and being (134). We might see Rich’s work, then, as a call for repurposing the institution, for locating possibilities, complexities, and contradictions within it, and then for finding ways to remake it into something else, a something else that is more spacious, expansive, and reflexive for all of its inhabitants.

While our institutions today have by no means achieved Rich’s ideal, we can point to many ways in which her vision now animates our daily landscape. Women and gender studies programs flourish; curricula feature contributors representing diverse racial, ethnic, and sexual identities; diversity and difference are embraced in many university mission statements. In rhetoric and composition, the body of feminist scholarship on rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy continues to grow, examining the politics of gender in sites ranging from local classrooms to the rhetorical tradition to international relations.

And yet, the cloak of neutrality Rich observed in 1973 has not disappeared from our institutions—it has, perhaps, merely changed designs, now obscuring (and sometimes not even bothering to hide) a decidedly neoliberal agenda. Within neoliberal logic, there is no distinction between the economy and society; what’s best for one is considered best for the other. Neoliberalism views the free market as a benevolent force, distrusts state intervention and regulation of the economy, and regards the individual as a rational economic actor (Saunders 2010, 45). Here, education becomes an economic enterprise in service of the market, with students as rational consumers who make choices based on economics, and faculty as managed or managerial professionals.

In our contemporary climate, workforce production is assumed to be the primary purpose of education, feeding the larger aim of bolstering the nation’s position in the global market. As Cochran-Smith and Lytle observe, “In much of the discourse about public education, it is now considered self-evident that the nation’s place in the global economy depends on the quality of its educational system” (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009, 8). Because a discourse of “self-evidence” informs the tie between the university and the market, a corporate approach is conflated with common sense. Consequently, the values of the neoliberal university tend to be cloaked in the discourse of inevitability—it’s just the way it is—and neutrality—“It’s not about politics, it’s about money” (Weber 2010, 128). Here, of course, an economic exigency is so naturalized as to seem neutral.

In this book I contend that now is a vital time to illuminate the values and practices that compose the neoliberal institution and then to look for ways we might enact it differently. As Judith Butler observes of gender, we need to first understand what appears normal or neutral—who we read as a woman, say, or a queer woman—as informed by a “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1988, 519). Once we see how norms are constituted by a repetition of enactments, we can locate possibilities for disrupting the pattern so as to create new possibilities for a “different sort of repeating” (520). It is this new repetition that I focus on here, articulated as repurposing.

In what follows, I mine our field’s history to uncover moments of feminist repurposing in the areas of rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy. Here, my aim is to illuminate key examples of feminist enactments that broke the repetition of presumed neutrality and normalcy in order to create new alternatives for all speakers and writers. I define repurposing as a practice that involves (1) attending to and challenging the habitual or status quo, (2) drawing on and departing from these existing conditions, and (3) moving to articulate and enact new purposes.

Indeed, a look back at rhetoric and composition’s history reveals many moments of repurposing elements of our field, including writing, first-year writing programs, and the role of writing students and teachers. I focus in particular on feminist scholars’ repurposing efforts for two reasons. First, in a neoliberal culture centered on “rational” individuals and knowledge practices, feminist perspectives need to be made clear so that they are not contained or lost by pressures to narrowly define educational practices and purposes. Second, contemporary and historical feminist scholarship in rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy offers some of the most compelling repurposing efforts in our field, providing instructive examples of re-visioning and reenacting our pedagogies and scholarly practices. As feminist scholars including Patricia Hill Collins (1986), bell hooks (1990), and Donna Haraway (1988) have well established, there is much to be learned from the keen views produced on the margins. In the pages ahead, I excavate tactics¹ of feminist repurposing from the landscape of rhetoric and composition to show how this work is embedded in our field’s history. These tactics, I argue, become resources to draw upon during a moment when our field’s values are often in tension with neoliberal purposes.

Feminist Repurposing of Rhetoric

I begin with the work of feminist rhetorical studies because it offers one of our field’s clearest examples of teachers and scholars appropriating a tradition that is at once ripe with potential and steeped in masculine ancestry. The work in feminist rhetorical studies, which surfaced in the 1980s and gained momentum in the 1990s, is centered on the prefix re: recover, reclaim, rescue, restore, retheorize, revise. While technically “re” indicates a repetition, within feminist rhetorical work, the prefix functions as a disruption that draws on what exists and opens a pathway for a new set of practices. That is to say, it repurposes rhetoric. Indeed, as the presence of feminist rhetorical studies has grown, we see recurrences of work that moves beyond adding to or critiquing the current tradition; increasingly, these texts and studies do both at once, appropriating and revising the classical tradition to alter the very conception of rhetoric.

Kathleen Ryan (2006) provides one rendering of feminist rhetorical studies’ evolution in “Recasting Recovery and Gender Critique as Inventive Arts: Constructing Edited Collections in Feminist Rhetorical Studies.” She traces two distinct epistemic and methodological threads in the field’s early literature—recovery and gender critique—with the former focused on the addition and inclusion of women’s voices in the rhetorical canon and the latter on revising and retheorizing the tradition. Ryan marks three linear phases of edited collections, beginning with a strict divide between recovery and critique (with texts like Karyln Kohrs Campbell’s 1989 Man Cannot Speak for Her and Shirley Wilson Logan’s 1995 With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women on the recovery side and the 1992 special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, “Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetorics,” edited by Susan Jarratt [1992], representing gender critique). The next stage of edited collections, she argues, is built upon a causal relationship between recovery and gender critique, such that the addition of women’s voices to the tradition results in new approaches to theorizing and enacting rhetoric (for instance, she notes that the introduction to Lunsford’s 1995 Reclaiming Rhetorica focuses on chronological recovery while the ending—the outcome—prompts readers toward gender critique). Ryan concludes with an analysis of Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s 2001 Available Means and a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, “Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric” (Bizzell 2002a), which she categorizes as enacting a both/and approach in which recovery and gender critique occur simultaneously. Here, as Ryan observes, “gender critique opens up possibilities for recovery because this art entails challenges to gendered assumptions about the contexts and content of rhetoric previously taken as foundational and recovered texts become rhetorical theory and sites for criticism and theorizing” (Ryan 2006, 36). This both/and approach, she contends, is most promising for the field’s future scholarship and, I would add, a necessary component of repurposing rhetorical study and practice.

While I agree with Ryan that scholarship in feminist rhetorical studies moves progressively toward a both/and approach, my reading suggests that rather than three distinct movements, we can observe a growing recurrence of what I label feminist repurposing.² Thanks to those who have recovered and recast women’s speech and writing as rhetoric, there is evidence of women rhetors from across history working within and against conventions and norms to create new purposes with and for their words. And as Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch argue in their book Feminist Rhetorical Practices, now that a large body of feminist rhetorical scholarship exists, we can observe repetitions of strategies and methodologies that “have broken through habitual expectations” of a tradition historically “about men and male-dominated arenas.” (Royster and Kirsch 2012, 17). These disruptions create “volatility in research and practice, tectonic shifts on the rhetorical landscape,” which they see as ripe with potential to facilitate continued transformation of the field (17). Following a similar path, my aim is to locate feminist disruptions and revisions of the habitual within rhetorical studies that illuminate possibilities for repurposing not only rhetoric and composition but also the institutional contexts and practices in which we engage the discipline. I turn now to highlight some of the key practices and patterns—which create a new kind of repetition—employed by feminist scholars to repurpose rhetoric.

Recovery as Repurposing

As I’ve suggested above, feminist repurposing requires viewing the normative or habitual as context specific and value laden. While the omission of women in the rhetorical canon is perhaps glaring to contemporary eyes, the deep-seated values and assumptions inherited from that masculinist tradition tend to remain so naturalized as to appear universal. As Cheryl Glenn observes, rhetoric as we have known it is “exclusively upper-class, male, agonistic, and public—yet seemingly universal” (1997, 2). Feminist scholars shed light on the contradiction borne by a tradition at once upheld as “universal”—a sphere into which anyone, presumably, can enter, with equal potential to speak and to be heard—and at the same time decidedly male centric and exclusive.

Challenging the neutrality of the rhetorical tradition has aided historical recovery work, helping us to better understand the cultural conditions that rendered women’s presence invisible. We learn, for instance, that the near absence of women in classical rhetoric transpired from the fact that women in fifth-century Athens were utterly silenced; in fact, because women were denied citizenship, the language did not even have a word for a woman from Athens (Loraux 1993, 10). Women were deprived of education, literacy, citizenship, and even entry to the public sphere, except during religious festivals. In the words of Aristotle, “Between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” (Aristotle 1944, 1.254b). By contextualizing ancient Greece through a gendered lens, feminist scholars make clear the exigency for recovering a greater range of perspectives and underscore the limited scope of a rhetorical tradition designed to train the male elite for public oratory. But feminist scholars also seek possibilities and ruptures in a tradition that at first glance appears monolithic; it is by “listening—and listening hard” (Lunsford 1995, 6) and recognizing silence as a “fertile field of investigation” (Glenn 1997) that they discover traces of women’s contributions.

Cheryl Glenn’s recovery of Aspasia, a rhetorician, philosopher, political influence, and teacher of male rhetoricians in fifth-century Athens—whose influence and speech is r...