Abstract

Composition scholars have, in the past two decades, focused much of their scholarly efforts on developing theories and practices to effect social and political change within the university, and thus in the larger culture as well. The work of Mina Shaunnessy in basic writing in the 1970s, Kenneth Bruffee's work on collaborative learning in the mid-eighties, and Min Zhan Lu's current work on teaching in "contact zones" illustrate how compositionists have become increasingly interested in addressing social inequities that are necessarily reproduced in the academy--both in the classroom and in the profession as a whole. The socio-political aims of the work of these and other scholars is, through theorizing and teaching writing, to make visible the power structures and systemic oppression that relegate certain members of the culture to marginalized positions and to change the degree to which certain groups and individuals may attain agency. ;I argue, however, that the progressive, even transgressive goals articulated in much of composition scholarship are less attainable than they might be if scholars in the field were more self-consciously engaged in continual ideological critique of the progressive projects for which they hold deep political and philosophical commitments. Further, I propose that if compositionists would also work to change the field's scholarly publishing practices to reflect the work of feminist standpoint theorists, the progressive projects articulated within the field might be more effective because a standpoint epistemological model offers a more accurate picture of how systems work, and because such a model embraces notions of difference, multiplicity, and situatedness that so much of composition theory and practice is based upon. After discussing the theoretical work of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Pierre Bourdieu as it pertains to ideology, hegemony, and cultural reproduction, I turn to the feminist standpoint theories of Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill-Collins, Dorothy E. Smith, and Susan Hekman in order to outline an alternative model of publication for composition, unlike that found in our current journals, that envisions scholarly conversations as a conjuncture of multiple and variously interested voices. Such a model, I argue, provides alternative versions of the discipline of composition, its epistemological project, and the ways in which power operates within and around institutional writing