ENVISIONING A POSTFEMINIST COMPOSITION STUDIES by MELISSA MILES Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The University of Texas at Arlington December 2012 Copyright © by Melissa Miles 2012 All Rights Reserved Dedication In memory of my daughter, Madeleine Miles McCarter Acknowledgments Faculty, students, friends and family helped me to complete this dissertation. I would like to express my gratitude to these individuals for their support and assistance. I am grateful for the participation of my chair, Dr. Kevin Gustafson, and committee members Dr. Jim Warren, Dr. Tim Richardson, and Dr. Tim Morris, who provided me with needed feedback and support. I am also grateful to the other professors in the graduate program at UTA, who also provided me an important foundation for writing this dissertation. I am grateful for encouragement from my family, including Patricia Miles, Lawrence Miles, and Melinda Miles Guillory. I am also thankful to Dr. Sarah Goss Merritt and Dr. Vicki Sapp for their friendship and support during this dissertation writing process. I could not have completed this dissertation without the love and support of my husband, Dr. William Matthew McCarter, and step-son, Britin. I would also like to acknowledge my former students at the University of Texas at Arlington, Mountain View College, Collin County Community College, Mid Michigan Community College and Central Michigan University, who inspired the topic of this dissertation. November 26, 2012 iv Abstract ENVISIONING A POSTFEMINIST COMPOSITION STUDIES Melissa Miles The University of Texas at Arlington, Supervising Professor: Kevin Gustafson We must look at the changing sociological conditions that challenge many of the foundations of composition studies in order to develop the discipline. Although postfeminism is evident within academic and popular culture, so far postfeminism has been little addressed in composition studies. In the composition classroom, we can see evidence of postfeminism in the student resistance to overt and subvert expressions of feminist pedagogy and/or content. The essentialist and emancipatory elements of both feminism and composition studies not only are limiting pedagogically, but, in my view, also in themselves generate student resistance. I argue that, in order to mediate this resistance, we must be willing to question feminism’s role in the composition classroom. I suggest theoretical and pedagogical ways we can move past student resistance by recognizing the postfeminist turn that has taken place in our larger social context, especially postfeminism’s role in popular culture. I argue that we can envision a postfeminist composition studies, i.e. one that moves past the limits imposed by composition studies' intersections and parallels to feminist scholarship and activism. v Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 Relationship of Feminism and Composition Studies ......................... 29 Chapter 3 Understanding Postfeminism ............................................................ 79 Chapter 4 A Postfeminist Shift ........................................................................125 Chapter 5 Epilogue ..........................................................................................159 Appendix A First-Semester Freshman Composition Sample Syllabus ..............161 Appendix B Second-Semester Freshman Composition Sample Syllabus ..........171 Appendix C Graduate Teaching Assistant Training Course Sample Syllabus ...183 Bibliography ....................................................................................................192 Biographical Information ...............................................................................215 vi Chapter 1 Introduction Since the 1960s, second-wave feminism has so influenced American culture that it now permeates the way we do intellectual work in the academy, how we define ourselves, and how we interact with each other.1 The chief themes of second-wave feminism include the omnipresence of patriarchy; the inadequacy of existing political organizations; and the celebration of women's difference as central to the cultural politics of liberation.2 These themes are such important and common tropes in our culture, and they have been characterized and mischaracterized in so many ways, consciously and unconsciously, that they pervade our worldviews in and outside of the university. In fact, one of the main forums for feminist theory and praxis is the academy, because efforts to attain women’s equality are rooted in a larger resistance to oppression made possible by the humanist context of higher education. In turn, feminism has made its mark on the academy by providing ways to understand how gender shapes our identities and how there are intersections between power, knowledge and discourse. Because there is a tradition3 within composition studies to expose oppressive power dynamics, and to understand how these dynamics are constructed through language and social 1 There are at least two ways second-wave has permeated the academic community: in women’s access to it and the scholarship in the academy. There are more women in higher education, particularly in the liberal arts. than ever, and feminism has been a guiding force in many liberal arts departments; in Chapter 2, I examine how feminism has influenced composition studies. 2 First-wave feminism has also influenced American culture, specifically in spurring “a number of egalitarian and radical issues which included equal rights...and suffrage” (Hammer & Kellner html). For the purposes of this dissertation, I focus on second-wave feminism beginning in the early 1960s. 3 In Chapter 2, I discuss some aspects of this emancipatory tradition that aren’t limited to feminism, such as cultural studies and radical pedagogy. 1 relationships, many compositionists have turned to pedagogies that attempt to subvert oppressive power dynamics. To that end, some compositionists have also tried “to transform students into critical thinkers and democratic citizens” while using the classroom as a community that can lead to justice and equality for both men and women (Perry 201). Although it may be, according to Joy Ritchie, “almost impossible to tease out its influence in the classroom,” feminism has provided one justification for the composition classroom as an emancipatory space, which makes possible the resistance to restrictive and damaging conceptions of gender dynamics (587). Feminism has also been used to raise awareness about “the working conditions of female instructors, gender politics in the classroom, the feminization of English teaching, and opportunities for feminist scholarship” (587). Even as feminism seems in many ways to have triumphed in our culture, a backlash is equally as evident. Just as feminism has permeated our culture in defining what it means to be equal in our social context, anti-feminist sentiments have attempted to undermine these emancipatory efforts.4 Within the classroom, we can see resistance to learning about feminism, negative impressions about what feminism entails, and students refusing to self-identify as feminist (Carrillo 207). In our larger social context, this backlash is just as visible. For example, in a 2012 TIME/CNN poll, only “28% of the women surveyed believed feminism was relevant to them personally” (Issues 202). Ironically, this disinclination to see the relevance of feminism is partly due to the 4 When I use the term “anti-feminist,” I recognize there isn’t some monolithic organized movement against feminism in the present American culture, but an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and ignorance of feminism, which I further discuss in Chapter 3. 2 perceived influence, if not success, of feminism. Women who believe that feminism is irrelevant don’t want to discuss “whether men and women have equal rights because they’ve grown up in a world of information and opportunity democratization” (Goudreau html). Despite the belief that feminism has already accomplished its goals, the successes of feminist activism are not without criticism in the larger non-academic cultural context. For example, we can see this in sentiments antithetical to feminism within the 2012 Republican Primary candidates; Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and other social conservatives have blamed feminism for the breakdown of the family and have moral objections to the feminist promotion of reproductive rights (Roberts-Guardian html). We saw one consequence of this backlash when conservatives challenged Obama’s health care policy that was designed to insure full coverage of the cost of contraception without exceptions, even for employees of religiously affiliated institutions (Fox News Insider html).5 This example, among others, is not only evidence of an ongoing backlash against feminism, but of the tensions caused by the coexistence of anti-feminism and feminism within our contemporary American culture.6 The tension caused by feminism’s permeation in society and continued backlash against this permeation was evident when I first started to teach as a graduate teaching 5 This anti-feminist stance has occurred after a string of attacks, by different state legislators, on reproductive rights in the last year, including attempts to dismantle Planned Parenthood, “personhood” initiatives, which had