Spring 2006

WGS 393 • Women, Writing, and Gender

Course Description

The title of this class is ambiguous enough to indicate multiple interpretations on the part of studentand instructor. On the one hand, until recently, women were erased from the rhetorical tradition, silenced. Only since the late twentieth century have they gradually been recovered. We will read about some of these womenthe contexts in which they spoke/wrote, ways in which they were discounted/silenced tracing the differences and similarities among the issues they felt compelled to address and the rhetorical strategies they used to construct arguments. Writing and language were key issues in the first wave of the feminist movement and we're going to look how those early theories have evolved into the interesting work done now: how language has defined women of color from multiple perspectives, how women seek now to define themselves through language; how text on a page reproduces our internalized images of other women and ourselves (men or women). There will be multiple, reflective responses to readings that will form the basis of short essays. These, in turn, will contribute to a longer research project in which students will trace the use of a term or phrase as it is applied to women and as it evolved over time, examining the ways in which the term has constructed or been constructed by women and for/against women, paying close attention to the rhetorical cotntexts in which this term emerges.

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