Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age - Softcover

Stenberg, Shari J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874219914 ISBN 13: 9780874219913

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Shari J. Stenberg is associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Composition Studies through a Feminist Lens and Professing and Pedagogy: Learning the Teaching of English.

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Repurposing Composition

Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age

By Shari J. Stenberg

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-991-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 Feminist Repurposing in Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy, 
2 Feminist Repurposing of Emotion: From Emotional Management to Emotion as Resource, 
3 Repurposing Listening: From Agonistic to Rhetorical, 
4 Repurposing Agency: From Standardized to Located, 
5 Repurposing Responsibility: From Accounting to Responding Well, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Feminist Repurposing in Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy

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 revisioning 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 tactics 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0874219914
• ISBN 13: 9780874219913
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 165
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar