Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature
Cynthia Haynes
The University of Texas at Dallas
Inside the Teaching Machine:
Actual Feminism and (Virtual) Pedagogy
- The field of composition is one of the most self-critical disciplinary fields in academia.
In composition studies, the wide range of research that wrestles with ethical and political issues in
writing instruction has fostered a constant stream of debates among theorists who are troubled by the
totalizing effects of current-traditional rhetorics and institutional spaces upon students and teachers. In
recent years, calls for the democratization of the teaching of writing, the incorporation of technology,
and the deconstruction of classroom spaces have dominated composition publications and conferences.
[1]
- Given its predisposition to autocritique, the field of composition has become a technologist's dream -- it
churns out tool and technique, design and draft, with one self-sufficient mechanism. In one sense, the
composition industry now resembles a teaching machine: it is both the mode of
production of normative composition practices and spaces and the mode of resistance to both.
- One particular group, however, leads the way in bringing about the most radical changes in
composition theory and practice. Though not without their own internal debates, feminist composition
theorists can be credited with having effected some of the most significant changes in our field today.
Interestingly, feminist composition pedagogy is only beginning to form a crucial alliance with
technology in response to these broad shifts occurring at both disciplinary and institutional levels.
Suspicious of the masculinist evolution of technology and industry, feminists have been ambivalent at
best toward embracing the use of machines in a field that is also rapidly shaping itself as an "industry"
supported by growing conferences, inundated with textbook publications, and multiplying exponentially
with the speed of internet communication and access to information. Ironically, the field's
metamorphosis has opened a space for feminist morphing of technology and pedagogy in such a way
that ambivalence gives way to amphibious multivalence.
- This essay does more than enter the teaching machine, however, it seeks to educate the machine,
to work inside the machine in order to foster a self-regulating mechanism already begun in feminist
composition research, and to create a new space for that work to achieve its goals. What follows is an
attempt to work inside the teaching machine of actual feminist concerns using a virtual pedagogy in
order to reconceive the space of teaching composition and the ethos of feminist space.
- In a 1995 review of feminist composition research, Elizabeth Flynn points out numerous benefits
to composition made possible through various feminist theories: the promotion of gender-inclusive
language (liberal feminism), the transformation of partriarchal institutions (radical feminism), the
explanation of gender differences in the way men and women write (cultural feminism), and the
rejection of gendered and essentialized binary oppositions (postmodern feminism), just to name a few
(202-203, 211). Suzanne Clark (in her 1995 review of scholarship focusing on feminist theory, rhetoric,
and teaching) calls our attention to other feminisms that are slowly making their way into rhetoric and
composition research, namely, social feminism and feminist critical pedagogy. In my opinion, there are
some scarce or missing elements in feminist composition research, and they involve at least two other
benefits to composition: the introduction of radical deconstructive reading strategies in the teaching of
writing (deconstructive feminism), and the reconception of "space" and identity politics in the
networked computer classroom (cyborg feminism). While individually these alliances with
composition present radical new possiblities for feminists in our field, taken together, as my argument
will show, they also present problems in terms of locating oneself within a situational politics and a
particular feminism. In short, they confound the notion of "situatedness" or "location." Not
surprisingly, then, my "politics of location" as a feminist is problematic. By themselves, either
of these feminisms troubles the waters of location politics. But that is precisely my aim. The spaces of
location for feminism and composition (and the discourses of space) are too often constructed via
annexations of a concept of space itself that cyborg feminism and deconstructive feminism
implode. In order to capture the strains of these other feminist forces, it is necessary to morph
them together into something like cyberfeminism. Kira Hall explains the derivation of this
term in her forthcoming essay, "Cyberfeminism":
- After arriving at the term independently, I noticed that some participants in the 1994 London
conference "Seduced and Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World" spoke of "cyberfeminism" as a
derivative of Haraway's "cyborg feminism." Virginia Barret of the VNS Matrix (an electronic art
project) in Adelaide, Australia, and Sadie Plant at Birmingham University, England, have been
influential in popularizing this use of the term. The VNS Matrix first employed the term in the 1991
billboard manifesto A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. Plant has discussed
cyberfeminism from both a philosophical and activist standpoint in a number of short articles . . . , and is
currently expanding her ideas in Beyond the Spectacle (Forthcoming). (158)
- While Hall's essay attempts to "reconcile two conflicting feminist responses to computer-
mediated communication," liberal cyberfeminism and radical cyberfeminism (141-42), my essay is not
meant to focus on the differences among cyberfeminists, though there clearly are some. I more
concerned with articulating how cyberfeminism fits into a general matrix of feminist composition
theories, and in what ways cyberfeminisms may transform current theory and practice in the actual and
virtual spaces of composition classrooms. In other words, I am interested in a process of shape-shifting
a body of thought (i.e., feminism) rather than rejecting certain organs within that body. To that end, this
essay examines cyberfeminism as a new feminist space in which feminist theories, technologies,
and rhetorics are spliced together to re/wire our field in new ways and to conceive an even more
productive relation between feminism and composition than has existed until now.
- My particular version of cyberfeminism can be characterized by one striking commonality
between its deconstructive and cyborgian strands, namely, it sustains the tension among the shifting
perspectives and locations I occupy as I move through my argument. At first glance, this tension
resembles what a number of postmodernists use to characterize a groundlessness defined by a loss of
faith in the Enlightenment rational subject, in morality, and in knowledge. But, insofar as I have
situated this discussion within the context of feminist composition theory and practice, the tensions I
wish to sustain are marked by certain limitations of scope and relevance to these broad issues. Thus, my
discussion is organized to bring feminist composition practices into productive alliance with
deconstructive and technocultural feminist practices for envisioning how new feminisms will transform
composition pedagogy in the next century. This strategy could best be summarized in Diane Elam's
words as moving toward a "groundless solidarity" (69), or as evoking what Rosi Braidotti calls a
"figuration," a "politically informed account of an alternative subjectivity" (1). Specifically, Braidotti's
"nomadic subject," Donna Haraway's "cyborg," Cixous' "laughing medusa," (what feminist
composition theorist, Diane Davis, calls a "laughing pedagogue"), all of these act as the various graphic
overlays or images I use in a process of morphing the subject that most aptly describes the amphibious
a/position(s) I alternately inhabit. Further, there are a number of conditions under which such a
morphic subject writes. That is, I raise the possibility that postmodernism is a radically exhausted
concept, and favor instead several other twists on that old plot, namely, something like what Arthur
Kroker calls the bimodern, and what Bruno Latour calls non-modern, or amodern. Kroker insists that in
a bimodern age, we are "living at the violent edge of primitivism and simulation" (Possessed
18). Bimodernity is a schizoid "uncertainty-field" in which our body flips "aimlessly between opposing
poles. Nostalgic yet future-bound, depressed yet euphoric, fascinated yet bored, committed yet
detached" (McFadden 26). In contrast, Latour suggests we have never been modern yet, and
characterizes our condition not as post-modern, or post-post-modern, but as non-modern (47). I tweak
both of these conditions slightly to suggest we are a least quasi-modern and probably hyper-modern, if
not qua-qua-modern (flying in all directions at once).
- I am, then, what Latour calls "a weaver of morphisms" (137). In the three parts of my essay, I
morph three key topoi that radically question the efficacy of prior feminist attempts in
composition to undermine oppressive notions of identity and writing. In short, I aim to challenge
present feminist conceptions of space (location), movement (agency), and the writing
self (subject). In part one, I present an analysis of feminist spatial discourse in order to map a
cyber-spatial landscape in which the boundaries between text and personae become blurred. In the
second part, I focus on virtual systems theory taking into consideration both its advantages and
disadvantages in terms of movement and agency. Finally, in part three, I explain how text-based virtual
reality is being used today to inject writing programs and writing centers with the energy of
cyberfeminist morphings of self and hypertext genres of writing. If the effective result of my argument
is a/morphous, then the 'shifting ground' will have allowed us to situate (provisionally) feminist
composition somewhere between technophobia and technomania.
[2]
[Introduction]
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[Conclusion]
[Biblio]
Page:"Teaching Machine: Introduction"
Copyright (c) 1996