Chapman 1

Rachel Chapman

Intro to Comp Studies

Dr. Carrie Leverenz

11 November 2015

Composition in the Fourth-Wave: Emerging Activist Pedagogies from Feminist Teachers

Fourth-wave feminism is an emerging idea, and just like we’re unaware of paradigms as we’re in the middle of them, feminists are not fully aware of the borders, boundaries, and definitions of the fourth wave as they are in the middle of its emergence. Recognized by Jennifer Baumgardner to have started around 2008, the Fourth Wave emerges at the time of Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s legendary presidential campaigns, which enlivened a younger generation of voters (especially feminists) to become actively engaged participants in the political process. Baumgardner notes that this new feminist wave emerged in order to enact the consciousness-raising tenants of the Third Wave before it. “Drawing from their own experiences, young activists created after-abortion talk lines…and trans-inclusive organizations like Third Wave Foundation (helmed by feminists in their twenties and thirties) reinforced the potential for all people to access feminine and masculine genders” (“Is There a Fourth Wave?”). Intersectionality, disability studies, and postcolonial feminism characterize the increasingly globalized focus of feminist activism, along with the importance of making space for third-wave feminists to dictate their own feminist priorities, rather than have them dictated by white feminist advocates (Cochrane). Finally, the most characteristic features of the Fourth Wave are the intersections (yes, intersections abound) of social media, internet work, and activism. Sites like Feministing and @EverydaySexism were the work of 20-something feminist activists who took the “personal is political” mantra, applied it to their everyday experiences with sexism, street harassment, and “[prove] these problems aren’t individual but collective, and might therefore have political solutions” (Cochrane).

So how does Composition Studies enter this conversation? Laura Micciche’s bibliographic chapter “Feminist Pedagogies” in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies denotes the plurality of feminist theory and approaches in the title, but only briefly nods to the influence of Fourth-wave feminism on composition teachers: “Fourth-wave feminism (2010-present) is associated with the strategic use of new media to wage politically motivated campaigns for human rights” (Micciche 129, ref. Baumgardner). While Micciche admits that her chapter is focused primarily on second-wave scholarship, this choice is also indicative of Composition Studies late incorporation of feminist concerns within the discipline: “The ripple of this wider [feminist] movement did not reach Composition Studies until the mid-1980s, trailing feminism’s migration to the academy by at least fifteen years” (130).Micciche does not give a reason for this lag, but I assert that threads of Fourth-wave feminist composition scholarship and pedagogy are already emerging, and can be identified as such because of their activist, networked, technology-focused frameworks.

Kay Siebler’s comprehensive work, Composing Feminisms reinforces this assertion, as she believes that “there is a disconnect between the contributions feminism(s) and feminists have made to composition and how we define current composition theory” (7). Stating that composition theory and practice has been largely defined by feminist practices, Siebler’s worry about the apparent disconnect between composition and feminism is more an inaccurate reflection of composition’s history. Detailing a history of feminist scholarship and praxis within Composition Studies, Siebler argues that women’s relegation to outsider or marginal status within the academy made feminist pedagogy obscured, and those employing that approach were more likely to be challenged or asked for justification than teachers who utilized more widely accepted pedagogical theory. Despite these challenges, feminist pedagogy endured and thrived, encouraging collaboration, reflection, and community-building practices in and out of the classroom, and creating pedagogical and theoretical approaches to teaching and scholarship that were not always named as feminist, but were feminist in practice. Siebler cites Andrea Lunsford’s CCCC Chair’s address as a key moment in tracing the accomplishments of feminist pedagogy, but as she described a postmodern pedagogy as “democratic,” rather than feminist, “the field of composition studies missed the opportunity to give credit to feminist scholars who have named these themes as part of feminist pedagogy” (31, ref. Lunsford). This brings to light a key aspect of feminist composition research: how do we recognize and encourage feminist practices in the classroom when teachers do not name them as such? What does that un-naming do to perceptions of feminist pedagogy?

Feminist Scholars Leading the Way

I considered these questions during my recent attendance and presentation at Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) 2015. After watching Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede, Jessica Restaino, and Jenn Fishman present their perspectives “An Intergenerational Reflection on Feminist Praxes in Writing Research,” I asked was moved to ask these two questions of all the presenters. Instead, I tied my main questions into an overarching theme in their presentation: explicit and implicit feminist practices. Restaino countered with asking me to define what these practices might look like, and I scrambled for an answer as most conference attendees do. However, Andrea Lunsford responded to my question with an astute observation: “isn’t it all about audience?” Yes, I believe she’s exactly right. However, I would argue that Andrea and I consider the benefits and costs of audience differently: while she (with her immense experience navigating the sexist hierarchies of high education) envisioned immense hurdles and resistance to identifying feminist pedagogical practices that are implicit in the classroom, I see this as a necessary cost to revealing the practices that already exist.

Much work has been done during Andrea’s long tenure in academia, and she and Lisa Ede completely paved the way for feminist pedagogy and collaborating in writing classrooms. However, since these practices are much more commonplace now that they have been in practice for more than twenty years, I would argue our new struggle is to explicitly label these elements of pedagogy as feminist in theory and practice.Furthermore, Andrea and Lisa’s consistent practice of resisting authorial hierarchies, enacting feminist pedagogies in their own teaching, and then continually producing scholarship to increase the visibility and acceptability of these practices are inherently activist acts. As feminist pedagogues, if we can identify our social activist composition scholarship as feminist, this will not only encourage the recognition of Fourth-wave feminisms permeation into Composition Studies, but also provide the means for current and future feminist teachers and scholars to trace back and expand on these practices.

Tracing back, we can find works like Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie’s impressive collection Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice, which in 2006 published the feminist pedagogical work of Lunsford and Ede, Krista Ratcliffe, Gwendolyn D. Pough, Wendy S. Hesford, Shari Stenberg, Eileen E. Schell, and others. While all of these women purport the importance of feminist theory and women’s presence in rhetoric and composition, these works are another mark in a history of feminist scholarship that traces back to Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica, and forward to Rhetorica in Motion. I identify these three texts as integral because they are collections edited and written by feminist pedagogical scholars, and the works themselves study women in the history of rhetoric and composition, as well as look for ways to, as Ronald and Ritchie state, “stir [women] into the canon we already teach” (5). None of these collections are explicitly labeled as feminist in their titles, but the chapter titles and introductions do contain the word, thus framing these works and the collections as feminist acts of scholarship.Teaching Rhetorica, situated at the edge of the Fourth Wave, provides the means through which feminist Fourth Wave scholars can situate their research, find resources and frameworks through which to analyze and claim women in academia and the rhetorical tradition, and also put forward feminist pedagogies within resistant, masculinized structures of higher education.

Furthermore, all of these collections emphasize the importance of feminist disruptions or interruptions of traditional notions of scholarship and teaching, and provide frameworks, lesson plans, classroom strategies, scholarly research insight, and even advice on navigating masculine institutional structures in order to enact these feminist interruptions. Micciche’s work in Rhetorica in Motionexemplifies this approach: “For feminists, writing is always political because language reflects and deflects power relations. It is freighted with a long history of inequality—gendered, raced, classed, and more—which bears down upon the act of putting words together” (“Writing” 179). Recognizing the difficult feminist pedagogues face in the act of writing, as well as teaching and scholarship on writing, Micciche provides emotional guidance, even multiple assignments, to assist feminist teachers in interrupting dominant cultural and social norms, and enacting political and social change through movement: “movement is a synecdoche for feminism; it denotes both a critical mass of people and demonstrable shifts in thought and action” (187). Micciche’s work is an act of engagement with feminist scholars, reaching out from the page to collaborate with other teachers and provide feminist resources for teaching and writing. Her work, along with all the others in Rhetorica in Motion, promote an activist approach to writing and scholarship not previously seen in feminist rhetoric and composition texts.

Another aspect of making space for the fourth wave is Julie Jung’s critique of Robert Connors in Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts. A firmly feminist approach to teaching and writing scholarship, Jung addresses current (in 2005) feminist scholars’ concerns with the expressivist nature of feminist critique, specifically Susan Jarratt’s concern that all-inclusive pedagogies that smooth over differences discount the productive nature of argument in and out of the classroom. Jung questions not only feminist approaches to argument in rhetoric and composition, but her own motivations toward revising her arguments for different audiences, thereby tackling Robert Connors’ “Teaching and Learning as a Man.” Instead of avoiding her agonism toward Connors’ writing (despite a positive feeling toward the man himself), Jung addresses her trouble with Connors’ centrality of men within composition studies, as well as demonstrating the ways that feminist scholars can engage and critique without falling into “feminist composition’s most resilient binaries—mother/bitch, ethic of care/agonistic debate—and into a more productive discussion about how we as teachers-scholars might consciously perform these subjectivities and discourses in both our classrooms and our scholarship” (109). Jung’s work articulates the ongoing difficulties of binaries in feminism and especially for feminist teachers, but are more delicately mentioned in other research. By taking on these ideas though her own critique of Connors, her analysis of feminist argumentation in scholarship and pedagogy, and critical examinations of her won teaching practices through the testimonials of her students, Jung provides a detailed picture of the struggles of feminist composition teachers on the cusp of the Fourth Wave. However, her work makes visible the need for activist pedagogy, and provides multiple means for reaching back to claim feminist scholarship and teaching within composition’s history, as well as creating the space for women to argue effectively in scholarship and teaching while resisting the sexist binaries of academia.

Emergences in the Fourth Wave

While none of the works in this section identify themselves as specifically within the fourth wave of feminist, these texts are firmly situated within the activist, social structures that shape this movement. Therefore, these women scholars put forward research, scholarship, and pedagogy that grows out of and responds to the calls of third-wave feminist pedagogy, providing feminist teachers with support, assignment examples, and multiple testimonials of successes and failures for others to learn from, use, and shape feminist scholarship to come.

Shari Stenberg has been publishing on feminist and critical pedagogies since 2002, but her two major books mark significant shifts in feminist pedagogical development. Her first, Composition Studies Through a Feminist Lens, is positioned as a primer for introductory graduate students or even as a resource for advanced undergraduates, which is why it was aptly published with Parlor’s recent “Lenses on Composition Studies” series. Published in 2013, this book provides a detailed bibliographic reference on feminism’s history in writing, rhetoric, and gender studies, and each chapter provides detailed questions for discussion of these topics. This book could function as a course in itself, guiding the reader through a detailed synthesis of feminist composition sources and providing models for research and argument through a feminist lens. While the existence of such a work is a milestone in itself for feminist pedagogy, Stenberg’s book also directly engages the reader, not only educating them about feminist approaches to scholarship, writing, teaching, and research, but also about the feminist strategies for engaging audiences in plural voices and collaborative ways. Stenberg’s work might not extend out the activist methods of the Fourth Wave, but her publication of an instructional feminist composition text is an active move toward increasing feminism’s visibility in composition studies.

Stenberg’s focus in her newest book Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age, provides a critical feminist critique of neoliberal permeations into higher education, as well as the effects of neoliberal culture into writing, pedagogy, and classroom spaces. In her inclusion and critique of both popular (Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s public manifestations of emotion) and institutional neoliberal values, Stenberg not only provides the means to understand and engage with these culturally obscured ideas in feminist scholarship, but also in the composition classroom. Furthermore, Stenberg’s tenant of “enacting responsibility through listening and dialogue” carries forward the work of feminist composition and rhetoric scholar Krista Ratcliffe and promotes an activist stance that is intrinsically feminist: by engaging in dialogues and truly listening to the students she represents and the institutional structures to which she reports. As a Fourth Wave act, Stenberg provides a model for feminist composition scholars and teachers to engage with the institutions that hold power over us, and possibly enact feminist principles and actions that reposition students as whole beings, rather than just enrollment statistics in FYC programs.

Stenberg further asserts the need for feminist composition teachers to reestablish the notion of logos in the classroom that has been elided by (Stenberg argues) the exclusion of listening in higher education (“Cultivating Listening”). Both Stenberg’s work along with Wendy WolterHinshaw’s identification of student resistance due to culture address the overwhelming cultural resistance to feminist practices still present in and out of the academy; however, both citing Ratcliffe’s influential work, encourage listening to students as essential to fully enacting feminist composition pedagogy. Hinshaw argues that in feminist composition classrooms, we must meet out student’s needs as well as “provide a space for students to interact productively with our pedagogical agendas in order to create their own place in the classroom and in the world outside of it” (275). Providing students with the means to understand, adequately engage, and question our approaches is essential for feminist pedagogy, and student can only do so if they understand the tenants of that pedagogy, which we are responsible to expose to them.

One of the largest aspects of fourth-wave feminism is the need for social activism through technology. The collection Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces, edited by Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi provided some technological groundwork for feminist pedagogical scholarship in 1999, and provides a means to trace back the immersion of feminist teachers and scholars in technology and computer research. However, the more recent emergences of feminist computer scholarship can be seen through the overwhelming participation of women in the Computers and Writing conference. The podcast This Rhetorical Life, produced by the graduate students at Syracuse University, recently profiled the “Women Scholars of Computers and Writing,” showcasing the inclusive and productive nature of a conference that this year had three female keynote speakers. While each of the women showcased in this podcast spoke to female and feminist-specific concerns within their individual programs, departments, and experiences, many also mentioned the importance and encouragement of seeing other women scholars publishing and interrupting traditional notions of scholarship and the scholars that conduct it. Speaking about her first C&W experience, Stephanie Vie said, “There are so many different people I ad mire here, there are so many different strong women who are here doing amazing research, and again everyone was so friendly and interested in other people’s research” (Hitt and Rosinski). Vie, whose research centers around social media studies, also mentioned her work with the online journal Kairos, whose Editor, Cheryl Ball, has been one of the leading feminist technology and computers and writing scholars for the past decade. Through the production of scholarship, podcasts, scholarly presentations, and networking with other feminist scholars, feminist composition pedagogy is consistently developed through these active networked engagements. Feminist pedagogy is developed through these kinds of collaborations, and the recording, promoting, and sharing of such work takes up the fourth-wave feminist appeal for activist social media and internet work.