Feminist Challenges to “Academic Writing” Writ Large: Changing the Argumentative Metaphor from War to Perception to Address the Problem of Argument Culture

A significant cohort of feminists in the eighties and nineties questioned the genderidentified/ patriarchal notion of academic argument as impersonal and disembodied contest/combat.1 Yet little has changed. In academia and beyond, many continue to identify “good” arguments within logical, abstract, and agonistic (from the Greek agon, “struggle”) terminologies. As Richard Fulkerson admits, even as he defended argumentation as being an alternative to violence,“[w]hen asked how they think of argument, students usually come up with the idea of two sides in a verbal battle, each seeking victory” (11). While argumentation that is conversational and directed at common goals is not uncommon in informal contexts, public rhetorical praxis continues to focus on “winning” the contest of ideas, exemplified by the either/or extremes of what Deborah Tannen calls our “Argument Culture” with its no-middle-ground positioning and agonistic posturing—a type of argument too often reflected in our students’ onesided and antagonistic essays.

Agonistic argument is effective, but mostly in swaying the nearly converted, establishing coalitions among the already converted, or entrenching and inspiring the opposition (Foss and Griffin 17–19). This is more than evident in television news and in US politics. As Susan Jarratt lamented in 2003, “we live now in a media wasteland so far as argumentation is concerned” and, perhaps, this “is all the more reason to keep making the case for conflict, informed by feminist pedagogical principles and strong rhetorical theory” (“Reflections” 343). Ironically, Jarratt and others who came to the defense of confrontational traditional rhetoric may have effectively closed the doors to any viable feminist alternatives. To date, only one composition rhetoric—Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz’s Everything’s an Argument—addresses any conception of feminist rhetoric, Jarratt’s or otherwise. Most people do not know alternate feminist approaches to rhetoric exist, and references to it are thin after 2004.

One interesting reason is, as Robin Lakoff noted in 1990, that in academia, “women, once the quintessential outsiders, have been taken into the inner circle. Feminism, once a stance of radical external critique, can only be compromised by admission to insider status” (209). That is exactly how feminist resistors were perceived, as biting the hand that feeds them because many used academic arguments to attack academic argument. Though, as Elizabeth Flynn admits in her later reflection on “Composing as a Woman” (an earlier challenge to academic writing-as-is), feminists needed to use the dominant mode or risk not being heard (“Contextualizing” 340), repercussions resulted in a movement that virtually disappeared, with traces mostly in feminist anthologies like the one in which Flynn’s reflection occurs. In 1992, when Terry Meyers Zawacki suggested to a colleague that a freshman writing class might be just the place to “present alternatives to traditional academic discourse,” her colleague responded, “with surprise and some annoyance, ‘What alternatives are out there?’ ”(315). Unfortunately, this conversation could have occurred yesterday.

The raison d’être for this essay is threefold. First, academia is in a unique position to address the imbalances of Jarratt’s “media wasteland” that remains the most prolific model of public argumentation. Though there is a time and place for agonistic argument, the feminist critiques outlined above suggest positive alternatives that open less confrontational, more conversational argumentation, a goal many aspire to and teach, but may have trouble conveying because they lack a clear alternate model. Second, academic discourses, though theoretically egalitarian spaces, in the case of this feminist critique, functioned dismissively, though many of their observations remain valid. Third, although some of these feminist solutions may have been flawed, it turns out that this feminist critique of academic argument was not only accurate, but also prophetic. The “media wasteland” of 2003 is now even worse. A recent Gallup poll indicated that while in 2003, 35% of Americans had little or no confidence that the legislative branch would “do the right thing,” in 2012 that figure had risen to 65 % (“Trust in Government”). Gallup ran a similar article on the media, reporting that “Americans’ distrust in the media...