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5. Potentiality, Gendership, Teacher Response, and Student Voices
- Utah State University Press
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5 P OT e N T I A l I T y, G e N d e R s H I P, T e Ac H e R R e s P O N s e , A N d s T U d e N T vO I c e s I write not because I am male, female, both, or neither, but simply because I am myself. Jan Morris, “Traveling Writer” The voice is all me. Victoria We say “voices” advisedly. Today among English teachers, the term “voice” has a hair trigger. This small word holds an arsenal of conflicting meanings, each defending critical and ideological positions in which people are often deeply invested. Stylists hear in voice the timbre of a literary persona successfully projected. Expressivists take voice as a sign that the student writer is speaking out of authentic experience. Developmentalists read voice as evidence that the young adult has matured to some point of selfautonomy . Critical pedagogues champion voice as a means to resist political oppression (“voicing dissent”). Early feminists found in voice a vehicle for women’s independence (“the feminine voice”), while later feminists distrust voice as a ploy of patriarchal individualism (“the feminine voice”). Poststructuralists deconstruct the notion of voice, with its assumption of personal discursive origins. Social constructivists dismiss voice, with its trust in the myth of the autonomous individual or the isolated author. Analysts of discourse sites disconnect voice entirely from the human larynx and attribute it, if anywhere, to an organizational complex and its disembodied electronic communication network. As a critical term, “voice” is in worse shape than “potentiality.” The temptation is just to abandon it to the sea of depleted terminology. As we did with “potentiality,” however, we will stick with “voice.” One reason is that for student writers in college the term still has appeal and use. They know what they mean by it, and they often resort to it in 64 AU T H ORI N G defending their ground from teacher encroachments: “I turned down your suggestion for revising just because I thought it took away some of my personal voice.”1 Victoria, it will be remembered, thought that the notion of “voice” helped advance her writing after first-year composition : “For the first time I became conscious of my own ‘voice’ as a writer and as I gained control of this concept my proficiency in the medium grew.” The term especially helps students gain confidence that they can handle different styles to operate within social and institutional contexts that they are gradually beginning to recognize as distinct and powerful. Victoria continues, “Imagine my sense of power once I realized I had something [voice] nearly as individual as a fingerprint that was flexible enough to control each reader’s perceptions and response.” In a word, from the perspective of students and their sense of authoring , voice carries potential. Let us see if our own perspective on potentiality may help maintain “voice” as a viable critical term.2 The readers in our study affirmed that textual gendership is partly achieved through voice. To more than half of them, for instance, Victoria’s essay sounded like a man. Through what socio-semantic “potentials” this interpretation was channeled is impossible to tell, of course, and we are not about to argue that the teachers were resorting to a simplistic sense of voice produced solely by human vocal chords. As voice functions as a vehicle for gendership, it operates out of both systemic and phenomenological potentiality. Like gendership, it can serve authorial ethos, however mediated by institution or culture, intended or not by the writer; or it can help generate the implied author, however mediated by institution or culture, imagined or not by the reader. It also carries the authors’ sense of their own 1. Quoted by Peter Elbow in “Voice in Writing Again” (1987, 170). Elbow, along with other compositionists, recognizes the polyvalence of the term “voice” but argues that at times it is still useful for writers and critics to see texts through “the lens of voice and the lens of not-voice” (185). 2. In For More Than One Voice, philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) argues that the corporeal voice allows expression of the uniqueness of the person, and that the “devocalization” of our print culture has helped erase singularity as a political reality. In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts extends the same line of reasoning to digital technologies, arguing that as individuals we each have “a unique presence...