The Teaching of Cultural Theory in the Composition Classroom

Anushiya Sivanarayanan
Instructor Rhetoric and Composition Theory
African American Literature, and Advanced Composition
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
E-mail: anushiya@att.net

The ubiquitous research paper assignment - a writing exercise that has found an unshakeable niche in many high school and college composition classes - requires the writer to show proof of academic literacy. The assignments typically call for expertise in documentation, integrating quotations into the text, identifying, evaluating and organizing multiple sources for research, and avoiding any form of obvious plagiarism. Most popular handbooks on college-level research paper writing have whole chapters on paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, quoting, and writing bibliographies. The whole exercise in writing the research paper is justified in terms of inducting students into the halls of arcane academia by teaching them a whole new set of rhetorical skills in argumentation.

The problem with the mostly skill-based orientation of research paper writing is the narrow definition it gives to academic literacy. To write a scholarly paper does not mean simply avoiding the first/second person singular and placing the commas on the documentation page correctly (two descriptions of research papers culled from the many form-based definitions made by my freshmen). One of my students proudly admitted that the year before she joined college, her exclusive private high school brought the graduating seniors to the area university library to do their senior research paper project. The students were trained in using the on-line library cataloguing system and taught about the differences between the APA and the MLA documentation systems. Interestingly enough, the student could hardly remember what she wrote about and notes that the experience helped her in knowing the importance of conducting electronic research on CD-ROMS and the Internet. She mentioned that the writing requirements were a series of assignments that dealt primarily with finding sources and documentation.

Most students in the early stages of their academic career associate research and scholarship with matters of form, what Bartholomae calls "a set of conventional rituals and gestures" (135). But students quickly realize that in order to do justice to any kind of academic writing, they need to be familiar with certain theoretical frameworks that most of their teachers seem to take for granted. In "Inventing the University," Bartholomae argues that learning to "speak our language" (134) means for students to have access to the specialized vocabularies, presentation methods and interpretive schemes of the academy. Without such specialized knowledge, freshman writers attempting to explain social phenomena find themselves making use of what Bartholomae calls "commonplaces." Commonplaces are concepts that are seemingly self-evident truths that prove nothing beyond the fact that the writer is making authoritative references to the larger culture. "Commonplaces are the 'controlling ideas' of our composition textbooks, textbooks that not only insist upon a set form for expository writing but a set view of public life" (136). The deeper problem with these commonplaces is that they are not only facile explanations of social phenomena, but are also implicitly sexist, racist and elitist in their conclusions.

Students look to the writing teacher to teach them the standardized techniques of academic inquiry (how to identify and evaluate sources, for instance), but the critically aware teacher also needs to demonstrate the particular ways in which language works to continuously re-defining reality. I have found the terms of cultural criticism very useful in the college composition classroom in teaching writers to read and write in an active fashion. We read essays and selections from traditional Cultural Studies anthologies (Grossberg et al's Cultural Studies is a good resource) and learn to apply the classifications, theoretical terminologies, and interpretive frameworks we have identified in our readings.

In Negotiating Difference: Cultural Case Studies for Composition, Bizzel and Herzberg argue that in order for students to engage in serious writing, they need to "locate themselves in the systems and institutions that are the sites of debate" (vii). As my composition writing class is thematically organized around popular culture, we analyze the various manifestations of North American popular culture and critically study the ways in which we consume and participate in it. It is important to make clear that the class is not organized around writing critical papers assessing the different theoretical processes in cultural studies; pedagogically, it is not sufficient to simply present to the class the various literary/cultural models of interpretation and then expect the students to apply these reading practices in an abstract manner. Rather, our attempts at studying the ways in which intellectuals and intellectual traditions have theorized our language and cultural practices is to gain an understanding about the processes of language in the making; and even more importantly, to study the heterogeneous and constructed nature of certain cultural factors (like race, class and gender) that students might otherwise accept as monolithic, normative, and immutable. Cultural Studies offers us ways to self-critically and reflexively study how we as language users systematically become acculturated to the hegemonic values of the larger culture. Teaching the research paper (or for that matter any other kind of composition writing) could be turned into an exhilarating exercise in studying the ways in which the students, their identities, their subject positions, their discourses, their value systems, and the academy are connected, implicated, distributed, and shaped by each other.

But before I describe the methods I use in teaching cultural criticism, let me talk about John. In the "'post-disciplinary' spirit of cultural studies" (Storey xii), our reading of student writing has also become rather more complex (see Judith Goldman's Working Theory: Critical Composition Studies for Students and Teachers for a theoretical and practical demonstration of the ways in which the social intersects with the personal in student writing). I wish to describe the writing of John and the ways in which I read his work because critical pedagogy is based on actively studying how the variables of social divisions, identity formations, and power differentials form our consciousness as students and teachers. My study of John's writing illustrates the need for composition classes to provide rhetorical means for students to be able to define, clarify, and articulate the topics that they choose to write about in ways that will take into account "who they are becoming as knowing beings" (Comfort 558).

John was the only Black male student last semester in my college composition class (in a mid-size campus in the Midwest). Most of the time, he refused to participate in class discussions by barricading himself behind the computer in the back corner. He was usually the last to leave class because he would wait for me to check his work in progress on the computer screen for mechanical errors and for whether he was "on track." The class wrote three research papers on popular culture over the semester; for the first paper, John came to class with a paragraph-by-paragraph plotted out-line, thesis and concluding remarks all written out in his blue notebook. Titled "Television and its Effects on Children," he patterned the paper so clearly that it was almost transparent. According to him, he was fulfilling the assignment in a systematic and competent fashion by placing his explanations in a framework of received and familiar authority. When I pointed out that my assignment clearly calls for inquiry rather than a report, John almost panicked. Finally, we worked out discursive ways in which John could enter his own closed-off text and offer insights and explanations that would make the paper more than an exercise in using Internet resources. I have given an excerpt below from one of his drafts; it is a rather typical illustration of the coming together of the personal and the public. Notice how John struggles with keeping the style of his writing balanced between the objective, third-person voice of dry academic prose and the wildly evocative images let loose into the text from his personal story.

John's Text:

Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others. A study from the American Psychological Association shows: children that watched violent programs instead of non-violent programs were slower to intervene or to call for help when, a little later, they saw younger children fighting or playing destructively. A child doesn't really know the difference between real and fantasy. If you can convince a child that there is a real Easter bunny, why couldn't a television convince a child that fighting is fun if you get punched, stabbed, kicked or shot you can get right back up and keep going. To a child seeing someone getting hurt on T.V seems to stimulate his interest. Television is filled with violence. Especially on Saturday morning television where there are 25.2 violent acts per hour. Young children are often not able to separate reality from fiction according to the National Coalition on T.V violence. After seeing so many people on television get hurt, a child tends to feel someone getting hurt is natural and they may pop right back up. After studying this subject, I feel that this is true. I was a little kid once and I used to do most of the things that the research shows. After reading up on this particular study children become less sensitive to the pain and sufferings of others. Made me think back to the days of me growing up. And when I saw my first dead body in real life. It was a teenager lying there in a puddle of dried up blood next to a church of all places. It looked as if he was there for a while. I never once thought of calling the police I was amazed at it, and the first thing I could think of was an old western movie I saw a week earlier. I can't remember the name but at the end: two cowboys had a duel, and one got shot, after the cowboy died another man came and poked him with a stick. So I rushed off to get a stick and started poking the dead body and that's exactly what I did. Never even had the thought of calling an ambulance, just wanted to poke the dead body and feel like I was John Wayne and I just got me a bad guy. I know looking back on that day it feels a little crazy that I didn't get any help for him and stood over him marking the words of John Wayne.

What I find most interesting in John's example of how TV violence modifies the behavior of children in negative ways is the way he uses his personal experience in a transparent and commonplace fashion. He keeps the anecdotal evidence rigidly within the basic structure of argumentative proof and presents the particulars of the story only to show the validity of his larger thesis. He seems unable to explore the multi-dimensions of the story and mine it in a variety of ways that will make his paper a much more nuanced study of how violence on TV affects children. Within John's interpretive system, the class/gender/and even race factors of his story are made invisible. The violent spectacle of a young, male, ostensibly black teenager lying dead next to a church is presented by John as a given, as a "when I saw my first dead body" story. He doesn't even see the possibilities of how his (or his inner-city neighborhood's) reaction would have been different if the body had been white or maybe even a woman. He is unable to see that the normative, middleclass reactions he feels ought to have made it impossible for a child living in the midst of casual urban violence. He is also unclear whether his remorse for not having the right emotional responses comes out of his current situation of living at a college campus situated among the cornfields, far different from the city environs where he grew up. Most of all, he ignores the rich resonance of the John Wayne reference, taking it for granted that the reader would make the necessary connections between his thesis about TV violence and the impact it has on young impressionable minds, and the genre-driven codes of the immensely popular Hollywood Western. John's explanation is linear, direct, and relentlessly one-dimensional in its conclusions.

I find it significant that this young black male student, writing in a classroom filled with mostly middleclass, white students and black female students, chooses to write about the iconic power of that essentially American, macho white male figure. He seems to imply that the effect of watching John Wayne on TV is the same for all children, irrespective of race, gender or class. It is important to remember that John is participating in a culture where his class and race definitely place him in the margins; and he ignores that marginalization in his writing by choosing instead to place his interpretations in a context-free system of children in general. He finds safety and comfort in the "child-zone" that is ostensibly free of class/gender/race indicators. And he justifies the overt gender associations of his story by his identification with John Wayne, the Alpha male. The dominant culture that might otherwise reject John as a young Black male on class and race grounds will find his gender acceptable, and therefore, by playing upon the gender connection, John is able to enter an otherwise exclusive world. Remember that it is not by chance that the National Rifle Association settled on that other Wayne-like character, Charleston Heston (the man who was Moses) as its spokesperson. Wayne, the plain-speaking, straight-shooting, great white patriarch has long been seen as the ultimate embodiment of typical American frontier values like individualism, vigor, and a recognizable male code of violence that justified itself in terms of patriarchy, race, and patriotism. Interestingly enough, in his conclusion to the paper, John sounds rather like John Wayne himself, promoting an uncompromisingly patriarchal view by claiming that it is "clearly apparent that children in our society today are a lot different due to negligence and bad parenting. Parents need to filter what their children are watching." John proves his solidarity with the larger culture by stating certain commonplaces in the form of centralized and normalized viewpoints and by refusing the particularity of his own historical circumstances. Worse, by making overt gender connections with the larger culture, he repeats ideas that are in many ways unfairly sexist. Not surprisingly, John's last paper for the course was on the social and emotional dangers of growing up in a single-parent (read female) household.

As I read and re-read John's writing, I realize that to place his story in a framework that will allow for his race, class and gender to be factored in would bring in complications that he would find difficult to accommodate within his paper as he conceives it now. For working from his own preconceived notions about research paper writing, John wanted to write a paper that was devoid of any kind of subjectivity; he attempted to write a faceless report filled with facts and figures that attested only to the researching capability of the writer. John believes that his legitimacy as a knower depends upon proving his connections to authoritative discourses: a process that requires him to adopt the appropriate identity of the traditional student. He wants to write in a fashion where his race and class become invisible, whereby he would be able to "pass" in academia in an unremarkable manner. But as he started to integrate his personal experiences into his writing to explain a lived reality - that of the black male child of a single mother, of growing up in a violent, poor, urban neighborhood where it was possible to play with the corpse of a fellow black male -- John finds it increasingly difficult to offer commonplace explanations. The particular details of his story invite the writer/reader to question the easy conclusions of the broad thesis and the equally sweeping conclusions of the paper. John solves what was for him a writer problem -- how to get out of the murky waters stirred up by the details of his personal story - by calling upon the universalized fantasy of John Wayne. John dilutes the particular horror shared only by children of his race and class who live in the poor areas of the inner city into one of generic violence. So why does John refuse to explore the particulars of his own story and instead stick to the safety of dull commonplaces?

I think for most students, repeating patterns of the already known is a safe and uncomplicated discursive technique. Having said that, I also think that many students, who for one reason or the other don't fit the profile of the traditional norm (white, male and middle-class), feel unsure of how their experiences would fit into the generic, centralized and idealized statements of the familiar academic discourses. When students use the mostly static language of generalized statements, they do so because these commonplace ideas actually link them to the powerful master discourses circulating in the larger culture. And because these official statements are presented as authoritive, objective, and beyond question, students believe that in order to produce legitimate writing, they need to adopt the discursive modalities of the dominant discourses.

As a writing teacher, I need to show students like John ways of transcending the old models of subjectivist/objectivist writing; and as a socially conscious writing teacher, I need to show them the possibilities of writing that is transformative in new and lively ways. In recent years our understanding of literacy itself has expanded: from being specific sets of abilities (like basic reading and writing) literacy now takes into account a broad range of contextual possibilities. Literacy has come to define a network of knowledge and sets of practices that include everything from participating in a specialized academic discourse, to an act as ordinary as reading the instructions on a bottle of prescription medication (Indrisano and Chall 64-65). Research on literacy has also highlighted the roles played by class/gender/race factors in the unequal distribution of social benefits. I found it interesting that the private-school educated student realized the class-base of her school's action only after coming into the college composition classroom and finding out that the others had not received similar preparation. John kept emphasizing that his academic success was due to certain factors that had nothing to do with his class or race: a father who emphasized high academic standards and a mother who herself struggled to get a degree in order to better herself.

I also realize that essentializing identity formations alone would not necessarily help, for students need vocabularies and interpretive frameworks that are markedly academic. They need to be able identify various discourses by placing them in meaningful ways against each other and see how these discourses work in creating and maintaining the forms of reality that they are trying to describe in their writing. For instance, if John had been able to place his childhood hero John Wayne in the larger structure of gender/race/class politics, he could have shown how ideas about violence are constructed and disseminated through a variety of networking institutions that also promote notions about a recognizable kind of maleness; more importantly, he could have shown that the Wayne model participates in a gender description that is also unrelentingly racial. The figure of that inner city Black male child, adopting the stance of the screen hero John Wayne in standing over a dead body, participates in a familiar cultural desire of powerful maleness. John's writing, a writing that encodes signs and symbols that are presented as normal and reasonable, once placed against feminist/cultural discourses of interpretation, becomes highly gender, class and race specific.

My reading of John's writing, the ways in which I see him positioning himself comfortably as a male within the master discourses, did not overly surprise him. In our conferences over the paper, he talked extensively about his life and desires. He kept stressing that his academic success record attests to the fact that he has the "right attitude." In his paper on the perils of growing up with a single parent, he makes extensive references to his childhood and the factors that helped him avoid becoming a prison statistic or even dead. And yet, even as he describes his hardworking mother and the caring of the women in his close-knit extended family, John refuses to allow these personal knowledges to dissuade him from presenting his unified thesis that female-headed households are at the root of numerous social evils. John found the contradictory evidence thrown up by his personal experiences a nuisance to his conservative agenda, and by stressing upon his individual efforts to overcome the adversity of growing up in an all-female household, he was able to deny the other versions to his story. Each time I pointed out the exceptions to his central idea, John felt that I was showing him weak areas in the paper. The notion that he might use the paper to explore new ways of looking at his topic or even raise questions about the commonly held beliefs about the phenomenon under study never occurred to him. In fact, he felt that the section where he presented his positive experiences with the female members of his family as detracting from the singular strength of his overall argument (and he is right).

My experience with writers like John has proven that skill-based, narrowly defined exercises in academic argumentation do not teach students to look at the complex and contradictory ways in which active scholarship works within language and society. Instead, they are taught in many ways to become what Brodky describes as "a writing machine": cut off from the social, subjugated to mechanical concerns, practicing and refining their craft alone (54-70). And because most students deal with the constraints of school writing by avoiding rhetorical ventures that they perceive as risky (writings that are open-ended and inquiry-based), research writing projects need to be radically re-figured to allow writers to reintegrate the social into their writing.

So, how do we teach students to deal with the possibilities of difference, negotiation and incompleteness in their writing? Postmodern theories of cultural studies have made it possible for us to view identities and subjectivities as constructed by ideologies, histories, social structures, and representations. We have now come to understand that viewpoints taken for granted as normal, inevitable, and true have traceable histories that allow us to question these received knowledges. My experiences in teaching critical theory have shown me that students embrace certain methods of inquiry with enthusiasm when they are shown how to apply these theories to their own writing. After all, critical pedagogy is not just applying theory to classroom situations but in understanding in a self-critical and reflexive fashion how theory works within the classroom. I like to teach the essays of cultural theorists, especially the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, as a practical method in making meaning of our world. Foucault's work, among other things, studies power/ knowledge formulations, the ways the human body has come to be understood in the West, modern methods of disciplining the body, the subjectivities and identities we willingly adopt in our pursuit of the "will to knowledge," and especially, the various ways in which we talk about sex. For the purposes of this paper, I am going to focus on only one of Foucault's works, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. (Selections from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, especially the section on "Docile Bodies," is also useful in studying the ways people willingly adopt identities and subject positions; Sandra Lee Bartky's Femininity and Oppression has a chapter on applying Foucault's analysis on "Docile Bodies" to the female body in the West.) I find the writings of Foucault on sexuality and the human body particularly useful in a writing class because he not only provides a broad social analysis of language and culture, but he makes it possible for students to talk about sexual identities in a self-aware fashion. And the History of Sexuality is not only one of the more accessible of Foucault's works, it is also relentlessly self-conscious: for even as we are enthusiastically decoding the ways in which sexual discourse is constituted in our culture, Foucault worries whether our critical discourse is but a more "devious and discreet form of power" (11).

Michel Foucault, in the History of Sexuality, traces the discourse of sexuality through the various discursive domains of "demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism" (33) in order to show how our ideas on sexuality have become constituted and normalized. Foucault points to the ways in which the discourse of sex has gained acceptance in our culture due to the "political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex" (22-3). Living in a culture that uses overt images of sex to sell everything from shampoo to pre-cooked rice, students usually make the connections as to why we need to critically study the subject of sex in discourse, or as Foucault puts it: "...to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said" (11).

            One of the ways of sparking discussion on the ways we participate and even promote the functions of what Foucault calls "mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power" is to have the class watch a typical daytime talk show (48). I particularly like bringing in an episode from one of the many shows that deal almost exclusively with teenage sexual behavior. In recent years, hosts from Dr. Phil to Sally Jesse Raphael have taken it upon themselves to chastise certain behavior as "wild" and "unruly." In the case of the "Sally" show, the hour-long talk show features mothers and daughters (very rarely is there a male present) describing their chaotic lives at home. Invariably, the mothers are presented early on in the show as helpless in controlling their mouthy, nasty, sexually uncontrollable young daughters. The daughters, on the other hand, come on stage to the accompaniment of boos and catcalls from the audience, and further alienate everyone by yelling "whatever" to every statement. One of my female students wrote an essay on how the rhetoric of the young teens alienates everyone, so that, ultimately, as they are being humiliated, we cheer. The narrative structure of the show is very simple -- the mothers cry, the daughters appear and prove themselves to be incorrigible, a female therapist intervenes and scolds the teens, and then the host steps in to offer a solution. The answer is a stay at a boot camp or jail (in one show, the young girls had to go to both jail and boot camp), followed by extended sessions with the tough talking therapist, and finally, a fashion makeover where the rings, chains, short skirts and tube tops are exchanged for a Sunday-at-the-grandmother's look. The show ends with happy mothers embracing their tearfully repentant daughters who promise to radically change their behavior.

Before watching this pre-scripted mini-drama, the class would read a couple of chapters from Foucault's The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. I usually have them read selections from the early part of the book (3-13; 17-35; 36-49), and I divide the reading part of the exercise into two segments. At first, we spend some time in carefully setting out Foucault's formulations about the "repressive hypothesis": the commonly held belief in the Victorian repression of all matters sexual, when sexuality became carefully confined to the parental bedroom, and the spillover was relegated to the brothel and the hospital. We discuss how this hypothesis about the systematic suppression of sexuality in the West works within our received knowledge about sex. Foucault's discussion of what he calls, "a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse is particularly useful when placed against our ideas about sexual freedom, the most obvious corollary once we accept the idea of repression (34). The chapter titled "We 'Other' Victorians," has a section on the revolutionary factors attributed to talk about sex, and I usually like having a student read aloud from pages 6-7. Once we are comfortable with the dominant ideas about sexual repression and the resultant freedoms, I take the class very carefully through the next section of the chapter, where Foucault presents his doubts about the pat nature of the repressive hypothesis.

Students usually find the carefully argued prose a bit of a challenge, so I re-phrase and recapitulate Foucault's formulations at every point. It is important to note at this juncture that I teach Foucault in this detailed fashion so that students can see for themselves the various ways in which received knowledge is questioned. Foucault's doubts about the mechanisms of prohibition, whether they are actually repressive, are particularly significant. For instance, we elaborate on the ways Foucault draws attention to the architecture of schools -- the seating, toilets, hall monitors, the locker rooms -- and apply it to events like the case of the young high school student who was punished for showering with five male friends, and the significance of the unisex bathroom that is the center of the popular drama "Ally McBeal." I find the chapter on "The Incitement to Discourse" also very useful in discussing the ways in which "one sees a veritable discursive explosion" in matters sexual (17). Foucault's discussion of the transformation of sex into discourse, the various motivations to talk about sex, and the necessity to tabulate, analyze, and track sex in its different manifestations, provides the class with ways of discussing the talk show segment they are about to watch. Once the class is comfortable with the various frames of reference, we get into small groups and watch and take notes on the taped episode from the "Sally" show.

I set up the class discussion to focus upon certain key questions dealing with how teen sex is defined, diagnosed, and characterized within the show. The groups discuss the broad rhetorical techniques of presentation (voice-overs for example), along with the ways in which viewpoints about sexuality are categorized within the show. We study the ways the young women's actions are described: what constitutes their "wildness" according to the show? If the sexually illegitimate acts these female teens are accused of committing -- multiple sexual partners, mostly -- were committed by either older women or even teen males, would they be considered wild? Next, the gender, class and race factors, which are obviously ignored and elided within the show, are brought to the forefront of our discussion. For instance, in the particular segment we watched, a 13-year-od expressed her desire to have a baby. She is told that her desire is unfeasible because she cannot financially afford to have a child dependent upon her. I would interject at this point and ask whether her desire would be seen as legitimate if she happened to have a trust fund. The sexual activities of males, teenagers or otherwise, is conspicuously absent within the show. We critically look at the gender, race, and class codifications of the show and learn that, interestingly enough, the gender factor is shown as being more important than race, for the show presents black, white, and brown teenage girls behaving in a similar fashion. The show ignores particularities of race in its presentation of the subjects themselves, emphasizing the fact that these young women behaving in a sexually irresponsible fashion are a danger to society because of the risk of pregnancy: biology is destiny, according to "Sally." And as we all know from the welfare reform debates, the biology of poor women is especially vulnerable to social control.

When the discussion moves to study the issue of class, we realize that it is the most significant factor in the structure of the show. My students (along with most of the televised audience members, as evidenced by the relentlessly bourgeois statements made throughout the show) easily identify the guests on the show as being working class/on the margins of lower middle class; but we have a little more difficulty in placing the values presented by the show in the context of a particular class. The show presents notions of propriety and sexual control in an uncomplicated fashion as normal. Once we start searching for a class base, we can easily peg the assumptions of the show about legitimate sexual behavior as typically middleclass. What is significant about this class identification is now we can see how these values present themselves in other spaces and discourses in a timeless and natural fashion. Using Foucault's formulations about the repressive hypothesis, we explore the ways in which the discourse on sexuality comes against certain other discourses identified with the moral, civic, familial, legal, theological, and pedagogical institutions within our culture.

Once we start tracing the discourses to their institutional bases, it becomes possible to raise questions about the very raison d'être of the show itself: Why does the show pick on the sexual behaviour of young teen girls, especially girls of a particular class as its focus? Who is the audience for such a show? Once we identify the rhetorical, and ultimately ideological methods of persuasion used by the show (which masks its ideologically privileged position and presents itself as simply representing the cultural values of our culture), we begin the next part of the exercise : In what ways do we identify and are implicated with the worldviews presented in the show ?

But first, a discussion of the teen sex issue. Foucault contends that since the eighteenth- century the sexual behavior of children and adolescents has come under such heavy scrutiny that it has lead to not only a variety of authority figures (teachers, doctors, priests, administrators, parents) to talk about it, but has also made the children themselves speak about their sex. It is a description that fits the activities of the "Sally" show. The contrast between the inarticulate, emotional, and essentially powerless female guests and the host who is an older white female whose screen persona is that of a concerned but strict parent is obviously underscored. Rather like that other infamous talk show host, Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael clearly sets herself to be seperate from the guests (both the teens and their mothers) on the show. The difference she posits is based mainly upon recognizable class factors : her facial demeanor, body movements, clothes, language, and her expressed value system clearly work in placing her as being securely middleclass. Raphael's disapproval of the uncontrolled and extreme behavior of her teenage female guests is justified in terms of her status as an adult authority figure who stands for the voice of normalcy. The mothers of these young girls are made to seem helpless because they obviously lack the access to powerful institutions (therapists, private schools, or boot camp) that will force their daughters to behave. In fact, many of the women tell the host that she is their only hope in reforming their daughters. Raphael's spectacles, her slowly enunciated speech, the presence of the uniformed jail guards, therapists and boot camp handlers all buttress her carefully constructed image of a powerful adult authority. By describing her subjects as an undifferentiated class of female adolescents lacking control, Raphael is able present her authority as essentially benign and inevitable. And again, like Springer, Raphael too is paternalistic and conservative (Springer in the last few seconds of his show, editorializes as to why the preceding behavior of his guests is socially illegitimate), and underlines the powerlessness of her guests in a systematic fashion. Imagine the uproar, if instead of showing adolescent women being humiliated and shamed on national TV, "Sally" featured promiscuity along racial lines (which is why the show denies racial differences among the young women and harps only on their gender identity). By choosing to expose the sexual behaviour of the most powerless of all groups -- extremely young women who also cannot vote -- Raphael is able to justify her bullying, condescending and overt hostile actions. Also, the narrative presented is rigorously pre-defined, and therefore the guests and their particular histories become objectified to fit the title of the show. Even the revelations that take place -- confessions of extreme sexual behavior, results of lie-detector tests, and surprise guests who offer other versions -- are absorbed into the larger thesis of the show as typical wild teen behavior.

The "Sally" show's broadly conceived and described category of teenagers, rather like my student John's description of children, refuses particularities of individual histories in its attempt to provide a commonplace answer. If the show were to take contingencies of each case into consideration, that is, if the details of each teenager's personal story were to be studied outside of the framework already provided by the show (the titles especially say it all), "Sally" would not be able to offer the pat solutions and pre-defined behavior modifications that is its stock-in-trade. By presenting the teenagers in an essentialist and undifferentiated fashion, "Sally" is able to provide a one-size-fits all description of teenage sexual behaviour that in no way provides us with meaningful information about individual motivations, or more importantly, other versions about these teenagers' activities that might give us ways to explore the topic beyond the deterministic plot line of the show. As an exercise in studying the construction of identity formations, "Sally" provides ways for students (most of whom are not too older than the teens on TV) to self-critically analyze how their subject positions fit the master narrative of the show.

Learning to write as emergent knowers requires students to take themselves seriously as meaning makers. Often, personal writing by students on public issues is not taken seriously by both the teacher and the writer because of academic writing's propensity to dichotomize between the personal and the analytical (Harvey 645). When students learn the rhetorical methods to write themselves into their texts, their writing becomes powerful and challenging. For students like John who are newcomers to an academy that presents its own race/class/gender base in powerful ways as privileged and singular, being able to acknowledge the multi-locations of their own speech is liberating. Such transformative writing invigorates composition from being mere papers written for a grade to writing that has powerful implications for the way we make knowledge.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David.

"Inventing the University." When a Writer Can't Write. Ed. Mike Rose. NY: Guilford, 1985. 134-165.

 

Bizzell, Patricia, Bruce Herzberg

Negotiating Difference: Cultural Case Studies for Composition. Boston: St. Martin, 1996.

 

Brodkey, Linda.

Academic Writing as Social Practice. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.

 

Comfort, Juanita Rodgers.

"Becoming a Writerly Self: College Writers Engaging Black Feminist Essays." College Composition and Communication 51 (2000): 540-59.

 

Foucault, Michel.

The History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1979.

 

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds

Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

Harvey, Gordon.

"Presence in the Essay." College English 56 (1994): 642-54.

 

Indrisano, Roselmina, and Jeanne S. Chall.

"Literacy Development." Journal of Education 177 (1995): 63-83.

 

Storey, John.

Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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