MK on Mary Queen: "Genders and Authors"

While reading Mary Queen’s account of a troubling student conference in “Genders and Authors,” I found my incredulity rising each time the female student referred to a female author as “he”—this despite repeated on-the-spot corrections.  Queen narrates:  “[The female student] smiled somewhat sheepishly, nodded, and said: ‘Oh!  Okay’—and then promptly did it again” (102).  I wrote, in my purple-ink NDSU Forward pen, a single word in marginalia response: “Dude!”  It took me a few moments to realize I’d chosen a gendered term to express my disbelief with a student’s gendered assumptions. 

So I must step off my high horse and admit that, like Queen’s student, I find it difficult to avoid masculine terminology as part of my “natural” responses.  Even in the classroom, I occasionally catch myself referring to a mixed-gendered group as “guys” or throwing around terms like “manpower,” and though this does in part reflect my own personal failings, I think it likewise reflects the importance of Queen’s pedagogical focus, the importance of discussing the implications of gendered constructs of authorship.  As I asked my Business and Professional Writing students during a conversation about biased language:  is it a coincidence that dominant terminology so heavily favors the masculine construct?

With regards to authorship, Queen argues that “to fix authority as a noun, a thing, is to mask the ways in which authority is actively constructed in social relations, especially the social relations of power and force” (103).  She uses the Declaration of Independence as an example of a document whose authorship encapsulates the social values of a very specific time and place—a fitting choice of examples in light of the way the Declaration is often used in an ethos-dropping manner to garner political capital.  How many “founding fathers” references do we hear when Politician X is looking to support (or attack) a recently authored piece of legislation?   

Speaking of recent legislation battles, I was struck by a parallel between Queen’s Declaration example and a recent event on Capital Hill.  A visual parallel, to be specific. 

Here is a famous painting of the signing of the Declaration.       

And here is a photograph taken last week during a hearing on President Obama’s healthcare proposal.  This specific panel is testifying in regards to the birth control benefit portion of the plan. 

 

And here is the frame Queen provides in “Genders and Authors” for both pictures: 

Just as the male response to women’s inherent power over life (through giving birth) has been to constrain and circumscribe that power by deprecating women, so these commentaries suggest fears and anxieties about the power manifested by women who mount their own productions without the aid of men.  (398)

As a pedagogical response, Queen suggests “examining historical texts from a variety of traditionally marginalized authors” as a way to subvert and/or challenge dominant ideological patterns (115).  But according to Susan M. Adams, attempting to do so can potentially backfire.  As she writes in “The Erotics of Authorship,” composition textbooks often anthologize female and minority authors whose writing speaks to some common social trope, one heavily crafted by existing power structures.  For example, essays (or rather, personal narratives, as the case often is) written by minority women tend to reinforce their position as a victimized member of society, a misunderstood outsider.  I wonder if Queen’s plan to explore marginalized authors might translate into better praxis via a different selection of texts.  The records of the Friday Club, for example (excerpted in Anne Ruggles Gere’s “Common Properties of Pleasure”) might make for an interesting pedagogical choice. 

Question for Class

(Note: I apologize for presenting a mismatched blog and question.  There were so many topics to think about this week, I thought I might cover more ground by using the Question portion of my blog for a different topic).  

In “Common Properties of Pleasure,” Anne Ruggles Gere refers to a women’s club production of Antigone, which generated thousands of dollars for charity.  Gere argues that “in valuing pleasure over economic profit, and emphasizing aesthetics over functional concerns, they posited texts as communal property rather than economic commodities”  (397).

Can we think of any modern-day groups, artists, writers, musicians, etc., whom similarly place value on collaborative textual pleasure over economic gain?