Ethos, Ethics, and Performative Writing

Central to the pedagogy I adopted for a writing-intensive, general education course called "Gender in the Humanities" is the assumption that writers do not rely on a definitive, essential self that they always project in their writings. Rather, writers have many options at their fingertips, methods for shifting "self" through changing style, voice, diction, position on a topic, etc. As the Internet has shown us repeatedly, the selves we perform in texts might be utterly unrecognizable to our friends, families, co-workers. Yet for all the postmodern theories of the anti-Cartesian self that we've read and studied, well-meaning writing teachers often continue to assume that students' "transgressions" in texts demonstrate a relatively stable self. When students write homophobic comments, the liberal teacher tends to dig in, assume the writer is dangerously homophobic, slots the student in a category, and then decides what to do with the writing, how to respond, and how to evaluate.

But what if students' homophobic comments are more complicated than that? How do we get students to reflect more carefully on their positions without just "attacking" them? After all, if our students are writing in classes where they share their writings with peers, perhaps they assume that their peers believe the same cultural commonplaces as they do about LGBT people, so accessing them may seem a logical rhetorical move. Aggressive pedagogies have left me cold; no matter how "left-oriented" those pedagogies may be and how much I may agree (ideologically) with the teachers who perform them for their students, when they're enacted on me, I get downright defensive. So, too, do our students, and for good reasons. Certainly, they are less experienced than we at "academic argument"--which I'm beginning to think is less rational than we pretend and often means little more than the loudest academic wins.

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