The Rhetorical Commitment to Oppositions / Pamela L. Caughie.

So much has been written about feminism and composition that it may seem that there is little left to be said. But one question to ask is what scholars gain by keeping up the debate--that is, instead of asking how feminism relates to composition, what should be asked is why feminism insists on a relation to composition. A look at Elizabeth Flynn's review essay on feminist composition in the February 1995 "College English" is a good place to start because many of her rhetorical moves are characteristic of much feminist scholarship. She begins by dividing feminism into types, such as feminism, cultural feminism, and postmodern feminism. Her analysis of several articles posits that the dividing of feminism into types or camps reinforces the "boundary-marking logics" of modernist knowledge, and, at the same time, generates the possibility, or rather, the inevitability of a happy alliance through the eradication or tolerance of differences. What is dangerous about this approach is that it risks reducing feminism to taxonomies that are easily mastered and shores up the profession's commitment to consensual knowledge, while reinforcing the commitment to oppositions (and its corollary, the happy alliance) that structures and limits much student writing about differences. What if the profession gave up its rhetoric of oppositions--what else might it do? It might, for one thing, interrogate its own motives for attempting to conjoin discourses; it might, for another, attend more to the politics of writing. (TB)

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