Feminism and Writing

Although I am a woman and I understand the need for gender equality, I often have a hard time sympathizing with feminist arguments. They may have valid or intriguing points in their essays, in this case Elizabeth Flynn and Kristie Fleckenstein's, but they are filled with contradictions. In the case of the field of composition, Flynn writes that its "foremothers" are abundant and the field "from the beginning, has welcomes contributions from women-- indeed, has been shaped by women." So what's the fuss, I say. When we read Emig's essay, Flower's, Lunsford's, and so on, I was certainly captivated by their arguments just as much as the others. I felt their points of view were valuable to my understanding of the topics in conjunction with those written by men quite equally. Flynn attempts to illustrate a divide between the genders to account for the female-male differences she's observed, but I truly think, although we are a gendered society, all people differ enough for hundreds of reasons of which gender is only one. I found her ideas about the gender-dependent differences in development compelling in relation to her discussion of the student narrative examples in which female students wrote "stories of interaction, of connection, or of frustrated connection" and male students wrote those "of achievement, of separation, or of frustrated achievement." (428) I found it a little simplistic as a conclusion, but nonetheless interesting to consider. In the end though, I felt her whole point of writing was to empower these "selfless and voiceless" women to "reclaim the self" and transcend male writing and power, leading the way to a matriarchal revolution... probably not the best idea.

As for Fleckenstein, what little I could extract from her verbose argument hardly resounded for me. I felt as though she was doing exactly what she was arguing against: trying "[t]o gain discursive authority... to cultivate the voice of masculine privilege--creating a masculine writing figure inside the text by erasing expressive elements or subjectivities that reveal their feminine signature or identity outside the text" (114). I hardly had a sense of who Fleckenstein was, or where she was coming from. Her defensive point of argument lends itself well to this reduction of her identity. She seems to be coming from a scholarly standpoint, adopting the "masculine" form she denies her approval. She writes to counter Bartholomae's points and quotes enough to lose her sense of self she so desperately wishes to inform the academic community exists; yet caught up in the form, I think she is unaware that she gets lost somewhere. Perhaps if she focused less on unnecessary parentheses she would have realized her argument started to fall apart -- well before the bit about female students wishing to fulfill their male professors' sexual fantasies. I found much of her argument irrelevant, and am still turned off to feminism, maybe even more so now.