Those of us who teach graduate or upper-division courses in composition research methods will be pleased by Gesa Kirsch's newest volume. With its feminist and qualitative focus, this book is an important addition to the limited number of texts for such courses. Feminist reflection on and discussion of research methodologies has until now been possible only for those willing to cull isolated chapters from edited collections or to extrapolate points of view from other disciplines' study of feminist research methods.

In addition to collecting those resources for us (her eleven-page bibliography alone is a useful resource for feminist researchers), Kirsch assesses and applies their insights to composition studies. Further, she utilizes specific research data and descriptions of research processes from several published projects in order to examine the ethical dilemmas, problematic and successful resolutions to those dilemmas, and future directions for feminist research. Kirsch is more than qualified for this task: her previous works theorizing and applying the methods and materials of feminist qualitative inquiry attest to her methodological expertise; her critique of her own study of academic literacy (Women Writing the Academy) bespeaks an ethical commitment to the kind of self-reflexive stance that she promotes for all feminist researchers.

Kirsch's most useful contribution to the field is her precise and coherent overview of the goals and implications of feminist-centered, qualitative studies of literacy. Although this presentation immeasurably benefits novice researchers, her purpose is not to outline the logistics of planning and initiating such study. Noting that "few scholars have investigated the methodological and ethical implications of feminist research for composition studies," Kirsch sets out to fill this gap. This attempt can be seen in her first chapter's examination of the origins of feminist principles of research and in the illustration of how those principles have been and can be applied to composition studies. The next three chapters examine the political implications listed in Kirsch's subtitle--namely, the researcher's position within a study and among its participants; interpretation(s) of research data; and publication of findings. The final chapter--coauthored with Peter Mortensen-suggests future practices that will support ethical feminist research.

At first glance, those familiar with feminist and/or postmodern critiques of ethnographic research may find Kirsch's conclusions and advice somewhat commonplace. I did, but that's probably because Kirsch is preaching to the choir when she speaks to me. Yet, the ethical dilemmas she describes and the solutions she suggests may well seem innovative or even subversive to readers less persuaded by feminist critiques of traditional methodologies or by the revisionist readings of traditional ethnographies advocated by such scholars as Clifford Geertz and James Clifford.

Nonetheless, even readers well-versed in feminist theory and methodology can discover something valuable in this volume, something more potentially pioneering than its sometimes guarded and dispassionate consideration of the stakes and future of feminist research. What's most innovative about Ethical Dilemmas is its attention to the status of knowledge-making in the discipline and, in particular, to the interconnections between epistemology and ethics in feminist research. Kirsch's tripartite discussion of the politics of feminist methods--the politics of location, interpretation, and publication--begins the sophisticated exploration necessary to helping the profession recognize the complexities that result from feminist challenges to positivist paradigms for qualitative research.

Kirsch initiates this discussion in "Assessing Feminist Principles of Research," where she reflects on conversations she has engaged in at conferences and online about whether feminist principles of research lead to better research. She cites one email correspondent who in response to the argument "that researchers should examine the impact of their research on subjects and, if possible, research should give back something in return" replied that such an argument is ethical rather than epistemological. While she explains thoroughly how and why feminist research principles are ethically "better," Kirsch also notes that the distinction between ethical and epistemological grounds is "not clear." In fact, she claims that it is precisely because of this "artificial distinction" between ethics and epistemology "that we have arrived at research that justifies research for its own sake and fails to examine its ethical dimensions."

Although she does not track the feminist challenge to traditional epistemology as consistently and thoroughly as she does traditional ethics, Kirsch does well to argue for "better" research that is conducted not simply for its own sake. Furthermore, her discussion of the politics of publication presents crucial implications for members of the discipline regardless of whether they actively conduct feminist research. Just as we tend to justify research for its own sake, we also tend to ignore the ethical dimensions of what I view as the autobiographical authorization of scholarly texts.

In my view, we are members of a self-authorized, self-professed, self-surveilled discipline wherein our own professional practices construct our disciplinary knowledge, and we traditionally go to great lengths to maintain the appearance that such is the case. Nonetheless, it is our daily comings and goings that construct and sanction our epistemology. Thus, any shift we make in what we theoretically agree to authorize demands a parallel shift in the professional practices that reproduce that authority. Because our professional discursive practices include reading as well as writing, textual consumption as well as production, we must interpret and evaluate the agreed-upon shift as epistemologically sound, lest we de-authorize our own theorizing. Consequently, when--as Kirsch and Mortensen explain-our "aim is to map out significant problems and opportunities that await researchers who want their inquiries to be a resource for individual and group expressions of self-determination," we need to recognize how our own individual and group expressions construct the success, rigor, and ethics of scholarly research and publication. This professional self-determination is what authorizes our knowledge and our inquiries, and not any inherent superiority in the tradition of positivist research and its attendant claims for ideological, methodological, epistemological, and, therefore, ethical purity.

Kirsch overlooks, however, the crucial role of self-determination manifested in academics' professional practices, well-disciplined as she is (as we all are) in a tradition that misrecognizes the autobiographical, self-defined authority of scholarly work. Although she urges us to examine "our own complicities in the institutional power structures we wish to interrogate and change," her examination of the politics of publication fails to hold academic readers accountable for the process by which their "complicities" construct their readings of feminists' revisionary rhetorical forms. Time and again she refers to the "enormous institutional pressures to 'succeed': to finish fieldwork and publish results" according to the standards and timetables of the academy. She notes that in composition publication trends will "hamper this [feminist] effort at wider communication." But never does she mark the ways that we as professionals are the authors and guardians of these pressures and trends.

In short, Kirsch overlooks a key ethical issue in feminist research--namely, how a researcher can cultivate the habits of mind (the professional practices) that recognize and authorize the epistemology and ethics underwriting those "evolving textual forms that [feminist researchers] believe more justly represent the voices of those who contribute to and participate in their research projects." Clearly, Kirsch recognizes some consequences of this rhetorical innovation, for she explains that "those interested in ethical inquiry must realize that our task is not simply to do research and to publish it, but also to cultivate audiences that can be moved to action by it." Yet, she apparently does not imagine that we ourselves might very well be an audience needing such cultivation.

Instead, she retracts her earlier "enthusiasm for new textual practices in composition," saying, "I want to step back and scrutinize my enthusiasm, to articulate some of my reservations" concerning such issues as "readability, and the questions of access and utility that attend any act of rhetorical innovation." Feminists' new textual practices, Kirsch concludes, involve "demanding, time-consuming tasks which ask readers to carry out much of the interpretive and analytical work usually done by authors. . . . This is an unusually hard burden for readers to bear, one for which readers expect a significant reward." But she fails to explore the ethical, epistemological grounds of readers' resistances to feminist texts as well as the academy's gendered understandings of "reward" and "demand." (To most readers in our profession, plowing through Derrida or Foucault or even Kenneth Burke is a demanding time-consuming task requiring much interpretative analytical work from the reader, yet the "significant reward" for doing so is naturally assumed, the "utility" of those authors' contributions rarely questioned.) When Kirsch analyzes readers' needs in economic terms and assumes this economy to be--if not natural--at least beyond reproach, she disempowers feminist authors by charging them with the full burden of "greater interpretive responsibility" for their construction of texts that challenge traditional publication practices.

In this analysis, Kirsch aligns herself, perhaps unwittingly, with the economy of textual consumption that former CCC editor Joseph Harris implicitly advocates. In an article published in Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor's Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, he claims that "the briskness, clarity, and self-effacement of classic academic prose can be seen not simply as a surrender to the logic of patriarchy but also as a kind of deference, as a desire not to impose too much on one's readers." In his view, it is not surprising--and certainly not unethical--if academic readers angrily reject an author's efforts to "flout" the obligatory deference to academic convention and ask the audience to attend to his or her feelings or experiences. As Harris observes, "it is the reader who has usually paid to attend an academic conference or subscribe to a journal" or--in the currency of sweat equity--to review a manuscript. Harris concludes that "there is an economic as well as psychological aspect to this discomfort and anger--that one wants to get what one has paid for." This consumerist view not only fails to consider that a speaker/author has also paid to attend the conference or write for the journal, but, more seriously, it fails to question the institutionalized and therefore almost certainly masculinist ethics and epistemology that have traditionally dominated research and scholarship. Such a view fails to see a feminist author's deference to an authority other than that of a conventional academic reader. What I would wish from Harris and expected from Kirsch is recognition that accountability for discursive practices comprises an academic professional's ethical and interpretive responsibility not just to feminist theory and method, but to any system grounded in equitable, open-minded exchange.

Perhaps I am not being fair or open-minded when I criticize Ethical Dilemmas for not considering more thoroughly the ways that professional discursive practices embody the ethics of disciplinary knowledge-making: after all, Kirsch's title and introduction promise to consider "feminist research," which implies the construction of such research--the actual doing, rather than reading, of it. Furthermore, it's clear that Kirsch recognizes the interface of textual form and epistemological status, for she has argued in her article in Methods and Methodology in Composition Research that the "rhetorical stance of research reports contributes as much to the making of knowledge in composition research as does the methodology used." And yet her book's topic, feminist ethics, itself suggests reflection on readers' roles in textual construction: one of the major tenets of feminist theory is that the construction of meaning is a collaborative process, that voicing what was previously unknown and unrecognized is unsuccessful and unproductive unless others bear witness.

Thus, when we consider--as Kirsch and Mortensen do--how we should be "doing ethics," we must account for our roles as professional consumers of academic texts. Just as they urge researchers to protect participants from undue control over them, I urge that we protect feminist researchers from methodological and rhetorical biases. Not only must we interrogate and subvert the potential of the positivist model to pejoratively typecast innovative qualitative feminist research, we must also interrogate the institutional power and control exerted by some readers' demands for conventional academic prose and for deference to their interpretive sloth. To borrow the authors' wording, "if we detect that this control--this power--is causing harm to participants"--or, to scholars struggling to publish textual forms grounded in feminist ethics--we must "take immediate steps to mitigate that harm." We must encourage a politics of difference in our practices as consumers, not just producers, of feminist research. With this important addendum to the ethics of professing feminism, I can now agree with Kirsch that "only then can we begin to come to terms with the fullness of our interpretive responsibilities."