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The next U.S. President

Sometimes I wonder if critical thinking is the downfall of the political left. I like critical thought and all, but lefties are splintered (into Green Party, Democrats, various independents) as a result of all this disagreement on fine points, so there isn't the unity you have with the right-wing and right-leaning support of the Republican Party. Obviously, I don't know a lot about politics, but this is the impression I get. I am, however, cautiously optimistic when it comes to Howard Dean. When I look at all the stuff on his site and Blog for America, it's just so dang upbeat, and now I'm hopeful. Could he become our next president? Could Carol Moseley Braun? Now that would make me ecstatic...

Happy to inspire...

Earlier today, I read Rebekah Bennetch's M.A. thesis proposal for her project titled "The Gospel According to Glamour: A Rhetorical Analysis of Revolve: The Complete New Testament." I was really impressed and wondered if maybe my earlier post about Revolve inspired the project. Tonight she emailed me, saying that it did! I feel so beneficent.

Position Papers Aplenty!

The Alliance of Rhetoric Societies recently held a conference in which participants got into groups and discussed four questions:

  1. How ought we to understand the concept of rhetorical
    agency?


  2. Do we have a “rhetorical tradition”?  Are we better
    advised to think of traditions rather than a single tradition?  If we
    do recognize a tradition or several traditions, how do we identify and
    characterize it (or them)? 

Considering buying a laptop

I'm thinking about using this year's birthday money toward an iBook. Logie and others have expressed dissatisfaction with their titanium PowerBooks, so I'm thinking an iBook would be more sensible for my needs (and budget!).

• 128MB SDRAM built-in
• 40GB Ultra ATA drive
• DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo
• Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English

I *heart* Gayle Rubin

For most of the afternoon, I've been reading Rubin's well-known 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex." Rubin is fabulous; she has even inspired a new item in my post taxonomy, "People I *heart*." In case you're wondering, "heart" used in this way means you like the person a lot, but you wouldn't say "I love Gayle Rubin," unless of course you and Rubin have a meaningful relationship, so you say you heart them instead. I'm going to post some initial responses to this essay--quotations mostly, like a commonplace book--while it's fresh in my mind. Here are the questions I was asked to consider for class discussion on Tuesday:

"How does Rubin in 'Traffic' articulate the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality?"

"Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. It is a product of the social relations of sexuality," Rubin writes. She uses Lévi-Strauss' theories of kinship to point out trends in human sexuality: "the incest taboo, obligatory heterosexuality, and an asymmetric division between the sexes. The asymmetry of gender [...] entails the constraint of female sexuality." At this point, it is difficult for me to tell if Rubin is arguing that any one item--sex, gender, and sexuality--logically or temporally precedes the others. I did find this point useful: "Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex." Rubin's illumination here helps me to understand exactly why "gender studies" is thought to be more inclusive than "women's studies" when it comes to studies of sexuality, especially queer theory. Yeah, it was probably obvious to the rest of you, but I needed that sentence from Rubin for my own edification.

I'm pickin' up good vibrations...

Today has been awesome so far! This morning was busy, but as I was getting ready to leave my apartment I listened to my Beach Boys CD. I got a few of those "10 Best" series CDs the other day at Best Buy when I went there for a flash drive. I got Beach Boys, Culture Club, Bonnie Tyler, and Blondie/Pat Benatar. I had a nice lunch of pho with Jennifer and Amy, and I also got this lovely compliment. Yippee!

Blogging as privileged speech

Last May, I did a presentation at Computers & Writing titled, “Blogging as Social Action: The Weblog as Genre.” In my genre theory class, our readings have been mostly been on the deep theoretical and methodological implications of genre, which I find very valuable, but I am also interested in the ideological and political implications of genre and writing/speaking practices within genres (not that I mean to imply that there's a separation between those two areas). In that presentation, I reviewed Carolyn Miller's argument in “Genre as Social Action,” in which she points out the limitations of the concept “genre” to describe simply a taxonomy of different kinds of texts. She argues that a genre is a response to social forces. Such social forces can be at the small-scale community level, like the relatively small community of scholars in a certain discipline. Here I'm thinking of the community of scholars involved in the publication of June Davis' article (from Berkenkotter & Huckin, Genre Knowledge)—the researchers doing work on the mice, the editor of the journal, and the reviewers, and then the larger concentric circle of the authors of articles Davis read that influenced her research and the way she packaged the data from her study. The social forces can operate on a larger scale, too, and the forces I'm referring to here are global capitalism, racism, gender hierarchy, heteronormativity, and the like.

In my Computers & Writing presentation, I claimed that blogging services, by offering free hosting and easy-to-use software, have enabled more people than ever to have a voice on the internet, to be able to participate in political discourse, like a citizen in the Classical sense. In saying this, I realize that I am taking the same tone as the scholarship on computers and composition which has been characterized as uncritical and overly enthusiastic, and I want to point out the obvious class implications: Unfortunately, most voices still are not heard, and the internet is still very much a North American, western European province. However, millions of people keep blogs and express their political and ideological convictions. This is why I found Bazerman's article (in The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre) so interesting. In a discussion of major online news publications, he writes that:

although all these sites provide news and commentary for various publics to contemplate, and this news and commentary may provide the basis for later actions, these electronic journals afford no immediate active form of participation except letter writing in response—typically, an email response form is attached to each web site (p. 27).

Blogging definitely qualifies as an “immediate active [and public!] form of participation,” and for that reason, I am dedicated to studying them. I still struggle with this point that Bazerman brings up:

Insofar as the polity is reduced to issues of economics and the marketplace, and insofar as the most important actors on the political stage are coincident with those that have the most economic power, nonmarket values will have a hard time getting voice within the political discussion, for that discussion will be in genres not amenable to the expression of noneconomic values and interests (p. 33).

Is the blog amenable to the expression of noneconomic values and interests? Sure, people talk about Marx all the time on their blogs, but the blog arose from the internet, which we know has a fraught history (see the work of Laura Gurak, Cyberliteracy and Cynthia Selfe, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention). Blogging allows for a multiplicity of voices and the expression of a lot of politically progressive thinking, but a blog entry is not as powerful an agent for change as a letter to a congressional representative. I will leave my reading response, then, with a question: How powerful are bloggers, and can genre analysis assess that power?

That was my reading response. Last night's class was really helpful to me; we talked a lot about class implications for blogging. Carol [Berkenkotter] said that blogging is privileged speech--you have to have access to a computer, obviously, and you also have to have a significant amount of leisure time. She raised the question, "What kind of illocutionary force does privileged speech have?" She also noted that genres are perpetrators of the status quo and of ideology.

Identity

Go rent Identity. It's awesome, but I am puzzled by this review by Ted that I read on IMDB. Here's an excerpt, my emphasis (warning! Spoilers!):

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