(Download) "Who are We? What Do We Want to Become? A Response to Jonathan Alexander" by Writing Program Administration ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Who are We? What Do We Want to Become? A Response to Jonathan Alexander
- Author : Writing Program Administration
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 62 KB
Description
Jonathan Alexander's "Literacy and Diversity: A Provocation," in asking us to challenge false-inclusion strategies as a sort of "diversity apologia," asks us to re-conceive the work of composition. To "queer" composition is to push at and even exceed the boundaries of composition, even as that field itself seeks to help students create boundaries around their own texts, to produce the "composed" text, to produce texts that have composure. Alexander appears to argue that we need to begin accounting for how the "composure" of our field (even materially and rhetorically engaged composure) reifies boundaries--of writing, of identity, of our professional and administrative work. Our own lack of accounting for those boundaries may be why our field and our colleagues, well-intentioned though they are as "allies," aren't paying attention. It may also be why some of us dread the simple "tolerance" of diversity that has become too-common a fallback position in discussions of gender and sexuality in our field. Such tolerance leads to, as Alexander poignantly notes, a view of some Others as acceptable "sacrifices" (165). To fall back on rhetoric, I offer an attention to kairos here. Each of us knows what counts as the "exigent circumstances" that compel us to speak out, as well as those that compel us to quiet ourselves, to civilize ourselves, to compose ourselves. How are those kairotic moments inflected by sex and impossibility, and to what extent must we shift the ground itself in order to speak? Who are we, and what are we to become? Queer asks composition to change--and to change a lot by becoming a kind of writing studies that would acknowledge positions that are most decidedly not safe, that are challenging, that refuse composition itself. Indeed, Alexander urges us to take up this challenge, to pay attention, to "move beyond including, to understanding," (168), to "risk substantive discomfort" (qtd. in Alexander 168) by refusing the flattening discourse of our stock responses to diversity and focusing instead on "the rough spots poking us to think through our differences" (167).
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