PROCEDURAL FEMINISM AND SLOW ARGUMENT: THE VALUE OF LISTENING IN FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION

Abstract

This essay argues that program-wide curriculum planning can benefit from feminist practices that have come from the past decade’s feminist rhetorical theory, such as Krista Ratcliffe’s work on rhetorical listening and the methods Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch offer in Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizon for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literary Studies. Because first-year composition is a site in which theory and practice come into contact with thousands of diverse students each year, feminist theory must be embedded within curricula rather than the subject matter students engage, so as to avoid overtly ideological classrooms that may cause strong student resistance. To keep student interest at the center of their writing while maintaining a feminist classroom that takes feminist revisions to rhetoric seriously, the article suggests distilling feminist theory and implementing it through major writing assignments and daily activities. Rather than write about feminist issues, students employ feminist practices to investigate their own lives, beliefs, and interests. Using the University of Oklahoma’s 2016 curriculum, the essay explores specific major writing assignments in depth, pulling out the ways that straight-forward assignment prompts can ask students to employ meaty theoretical concepts without any familiarity to the concept itself, to demonstrate what procedural feminism may look like in real-world classrooms.