JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

When the JAC book review editor forwarded these monographs to me, I wondered if he understood the implications of asking a middle-class, ethnic, white, conservative, southern, male Republican to review two texts on gender issues—texts which continue the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series and, thus, carry the stamp of approval of the CCCC and the NCTE. However, I must say that what most surprised me about these two texts was not simply new information and new insights, though they do provide both of those things. What surprised me most was how many times I found myself jotting in the margin “me too.” In fact, had the reports not told me that they were focussed on women’s issues, I could easily have felt that they were focussed on merely human issues: in the case of Kirsch, a multi-disciplinary look through the lenses of writing and audience at issues of empowerment, authority, and advancement through the academy. And for Rubin, a cogent focus on the influences of theory and pedagogy in relation to gender as male and female writing teachers evaluate their students’ texts. Both authors raise interesting questions about the role of theory in writing research.

Kirsch creates an atypical text, interspersing between chapters lengthy responses (slightly edited and reorganized) from some of her study’s thirty-five case study participants, a mix of successful women writers ranging from undergraduate students to full professors in five disciplines. Two interviews with each participant and scattered follow-up conversations with a few formed the basis of the study which “follow[s] feminist research principles.” The opening section of the text takes a historical view ofwomen entering the academy, and then moves to an integrated and consistent accounting of theories surrounding women’s intellectual development and gender as relat­ed to language and to writing. Later sections address the ways women perceive their audiences and themselves in relation to the texts they com­pose, and chapter six takes up the matters of interdisciplinary work and women’s attempts to transform the academy.

Rubin begins with a different, broader, and more chaotic theoretical context. After the first twenty pages, in which she covers reader-response, muted group, oppositional feminist, and unifying feminist theories, the reader may well wonder how Rubin plans to escape from her theoretical quagmire (she also includes an appendix elaborating on the reader-response view with summaries of Poulet, Iser, Fish, and Rosenblatt). And, oh, but does she escape. Initially, though, she leads the reader through two studies. In the first, she distributed four selected student texts to thirty-one volunteer teacher participants and conducted follow-up interviews with four male and four female teachers. Two of the student papers “were on gender neutral subjects... while the other two were deliberately chosen for their strong gender-dependent issues, male and female dating habits.” Rubin submitted the responses (approximately one page per instructor) to a rigorous content analysis and then formed emergent categories which she reads as offering little support for gender-based differences in responding to student texts. She did find some evidence of gender-based responses in interviews with eight of the participants; however, she attributes these differences partially to the lack of contact between the teachers and the students: “Removed from the reality of the context, the teachers reverted to culturally inscribed gender behaviors.” Overall, in the first study, Rubin found that “when teachers read and evaluate student texts, lines between traditional male-female reading patterns blur.. . and the gender-based influences that occur when readers encounter literary texts cease to be significant.”

In describing the second study, Rubin provides a specific context. She concentrates on the responses by a female and a male writing teacher to their own students’ papers. Another critical aspect of the context is that both classrooms are described as non-directive, and process- and conference­based. Finally, a third pivotal feature of the monograph’s midsection is that Rubin turns to the work of Emig, Faigley, Murray, and others whose work is rooted firmly in the writing classroom experiences of students and teachers. Her second study has much more depth, based on six to eight hour-long interviews with each participant. Rubin provided a brief rubric to focus instructor comments on papers they had the most trouble responding to and those they liked most and least. In spite of this guidance, she found a notable difference from responses in the first study: the instructors’ comments centered on the students’ progress and difficulties in the class, not on the student texts. The author maintains that such responses align with what she labels a “maternal” teaching pattern, a pattern of high student involvement, teacher support, and an allowance for divergent opinions. She eventually demonstrates that “although maternal behaviors seem natural to women.. in the context of process/conference pedagogy, these maternal patterns are equally ingrained in men.” She even goes so far as to say that the male instructor “instinctively assumed the same maternal behaviors” naturally expected of the female instructor (emphasis added). In making these claims, Rubin moves further and further from essentialism, oppositional feminism, and even from the reader-response theorists with whom she begins the text, and edges ever closer to theories of remnant primary bisexuality, extending Cixous’ idea to men.

Rubin and her subjects’ experiences decenter the theoretical grids she took with her to her research. She eventually rejects much of the several theories she brought to the projects and couples that rejection with a claim that our theories should be rooted in our classroom experience. Rubin responds to Roger Sanjek’s admonition (see his Fieldnotes, Cornell UP, 1990) to go the field with significant theory and emerge with theories of significance. In doing so, Rubin achieves a balance in her text. Though she points out that gender biases do exist, she is careful at several points to foreground the point that any devaluation of the feminine “silence[s] not only the feminine in women but also that portion of feminine perception that inscribes the consciousness of men.”

Such a view highlights a limitation of Kirsch’s study; here the theoretical grids overwhelm the data. Kirsch notes early in her methods section that feminist methodology includes an open discussion of the researcher’s agenda both with the participants and with the readers of the report. This “open­ness” makes Kirsch’s study quite different from Rubin’s. Whereas Rubin consciously avoided asking about gender influences, allowing such discus­sion to arise naturally in the conversation, Kirsch prefaced the first interview with a statement that she wanted to learn more about each participant “as a writer and as a woman in the academic setting” and included questions directing participants to discuss gender issues. Following Belenky’s example, she seems intent on doing research for, and not just about, women. But in doing so Kirsch converts methodology into an ideological weapon of exclu­sion, precluding the need to ask whether the problems she addresses are equally important for men. Method is not only grounded in theory; theory becomes method. She draws heavily on Belenky et al. as evidence of a separate way of knowing for women, yet ignores Belenky’s own claim (in a JAC interview) that “we are not claiming that these might not also be men’s ways of thinking. Actually, I think most of what we say in [Women’s Ways of Knowing] applies to human ways of knowing” (see Olson and Gale’s (Inter) views, SIUP, 1991). In Kirsch’s report women are, by virtue of their gender, always and ever more disadvantaged in each academic discourse situation, whether it be reaching out to a broader audience, dealing with negative writing experiences, or identifying with their own texts. Her singlemindedness, finally, becomes a problem of ethos. It becomes quite obvious less than halfway through the text that Kirsch has encased the data within a rigid ideology. Two hallmarks of qualitative research—emergent theory and alternative explanations—go by the boards. And her credibility suffers. To find Kirsch in this position is a bit strange since she claims in her methods section that by using “feminist principles of research that call into question such concepts as objectivity, validity, iii... [r]esearchers will be less likely to ignore their own cultural, class, and gender biases.” Also early in the monograph, she lauds new studies which upset “norms that were based on studies that.. .failed to include women as their subjects” (emphasis added). Launching what maybe viewed as an attack on her text is uncomfort­able. First because I can be dismissed as a male, but also (and perhaps more importantly) because Kirsch enshrouds herself in the ideological attachment of feminist methodology; that is, if her method calls for her to ignore alternative or additional explanations, then she cannot be criticized for ignoring them. She becomes unassailable.

I think (and hope) the above comments on Kirsch do not arise from a reactionary monitor lurking somewhere inside me. That is, had I read a study as exclusionary to women and as void of explanations allowing like problems to women, I am reasonably sure I would have challenged the author in the same fashion. However, another enlightening element in both texts was more noticeable to me, perhaps because of my gender. Both women’s writings include several manifestations of their own (unconscious?) gender bias. Examples of two different elements in their writings will serve to illustrate: silences and labeling.

Feminist writers are concerned with silence, and much of the work of feminist scholars has been to re-search for the voices of women who have been omitted from the literary canon or that have been silenced by their cultures. Yet there are interesting silences in these texts. Kirsch not only silences males by banning them from her study, but she also withholds comments when her participants make sexist claims. One participant, a full professor of anthropology, asserts as part of the recollection of her career:

“You just were so glad to have a job and be doing what you liked to do. Money was quite secondary. ... I don’t think you would ever find a man saying that.” One can imagine that societal expectations might play some role if, indeed, the professor’s claim were even true. Kirsch elects not to comment. One can imagine that in these texts such anti-male comments arise at several points.

In the first section of her text, Rubin allows silence to cast a negative light on males. The silence here comes from muting claims of primary bisexuality and the ability to control gender bias, views propounded later in her own text. In the discussion of oppositional feminism, Rubin wades into the reader-response theorists. Switching to first person to emphasize that the voice speaking is her own, she conveys her distress at even discussing “men’s abstract theories of how women might read” because to do so “is to validate what can only be an androcentric and alienated view.” Yet, three pages later she uses Annette Kolodny to enforce a claim about the writing processes of “male students who, in all probability, pay little heed to feminine concerns.” Rubin’s silence indicates no distress at this alienated view of men.

I also found men demeaned by the way actions and conversations were labeled in the text. Kirsch surrounds the following comment, made by a female student-participant, with the descriptors “confidence” and “cour­age”: “He saw it my way because I know what good writing is. That’s one thing I know—what good writing is. The man was ignorant; he understood that by the time I was through.” Lacking any other context in which to know this man, and given the context provided for the quote, we are certainly likely to believe that the man was ignorant. Rubin introduces the following remark by saying that the female participant was “candid”: “My inclination would be to grade that paper higher, and I’d be glad to see that a male wrote it because I don’t expect that much from them. I expect less from men.” Is “candid” really the word that first comes to mind when one reads this comment in a book about gender influences? Somehow that candid response, with its positive connotation, may help us to believe that we really should expect less from men. There are other examples of both of these text features, as well as other features that of themselves cast males in a bad light. Although I haven’t the space to attempt to document a pattern fully, I believe that there is such a pattern in each text.

Such a focus on small textual features reemphasizes, albeit somewhat ironically, a central issue in language and gender studies critical for those of us who teach writing. Negative influences of gender as well as of our ideologies (theoretical, methodological, pedagogical) seep not only into our responses to student writings, but also into our personal and professional writings even at times when we try to be most self-conscious. These two authors have made me acutely aware of the subtle nature of those biases. I feel these influences, feel them lurking in this text, some better hidden, better controlled than others. These two monographs, in the end, present two ways of responding to those influences. Kirsch leaves us bound up in difference, focussed on the inescapability of gender. Rubin’s message of hope is that, through consciousness and self-consciousness coupled with theoretical and pedagogical awareness grounded in experience, we can not only limit the negative effects of gender bias, but we can also rise above static gender labels and respond humanly and humanely to others’ discourse.