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4 P OT e N T I A l I T y, G e N d e R s H I P, A N d T e Ac H e R R e s P O N s e How do you propose to express yourself? An anonymous teacher to an unknown student The threat to a healthy writing potentiality of student writers like Victoria and Kevin, however, does not stop with the production of gendership . Because they sit in a writing course, not only do they have to turn their gendership over to the interpretive vagaries of readers, but afterward they have to reshape it. This happens when teachers ask them, as composition teachers are wont to do nowadays, to revise their first drafts. We assume that in legitimate writing-course response, that is, in criticism devoted to the improvement of student writing rather than just to the evaluation of it, teachers will require only revisions for which a student writer potentially has the capability. What educational benefit in demanding a task the student can’t see and do? Revision, then, is an arena where teachers should gauge potentiality. In our study, however, teachers and peer students seemed more bent on constraining Kevin’s and Victoria’s potential than—to use her word— expanding it. Consider some more findings of the study. Before our readers suggested revisions, they decided on a point value for the essay under review. That rating turned out to be heavily associated with gender. Overall, the association showed a pro-female bias. Readers tended to assume that women were better writers than men. Within this general pattern, though, readers also expressed samesex depreciation. That is, male readers rated the text they knew to be male-authored lower than female readers rated the same text; female readers rated the text they knew to be female-authored lower than male readers rated the same text. The most negative reaction, however, surfaced when the author appeared “cross-dressed”—when readers thought that the female writer sounded like a man, or the male writer sounded like a woman. Negative ratings associated with cross-dressing Potentiality, Gendership, and Teacher Response 57 were present both when the reader had been told the writer’s sex and when the reader inferred it. Not surprisingly, but surely more significantly for the gendership of the two authors, all three of these patterns —pro-female bias, same-sex depreciation, and negativity associated with cross-dressing—also surfaced in the degree of praise offered in the readers’ commentary.1 How the readers’ ratings and praise converted into recommendations for revision involves two new and interesting gendership dynamics . The first dynamic berates a public sin, and the second commits it; in our interviews, both operated simultaneously. On the one hand, our readers lamented gender bias, which in teachers’ evaluation of student writing they took to be preconceptions about gender unwanted by the writer or unwarranted by the text. The readers believed that a critic of writing should deactivate gender bias by not using sexist language and not falling prey to stereotypical, discriminatory, and demeaning attitudes toward one sex or the other. We call this belief gender neutrality. Our readers disagreed on how much gender might be part of the text, but they all agreed adamantly that gender should never be a factor in evaluation of the text. Their professional competence and training insisted it shouldn’t matter whether the writer is male or female. The quality of the writing is what is being judged. Yet the interview transcripts reveal that in their practice of response, cryptically, the same readers often exhibited gender bias. Other researchers have documented the same dynamic. The very readers who profess a position of gender neutrality conduct gender attacks on 1. Within this variation, we also saw the status of the reader (whether he or she was a teacher or a student) and the sex of the interviewer as significant variables. Since our original study, we have asked our own students in a variety of classes and on very different campuses to undertake the same protocol with the same two essays, and we consistently see patterns similar to our original findings. It is worth pointing out that these gender differences reported here and in other studies are differences in evaluation of performance. When one looks at performance itself, the closer one gets to an objective measurement of it, the closer males and females appear. Janet K. Swim and others (1989) reviewed over one...

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