Gender as a Social Construct

        One of the things that came up in class on Thursday was the idea of gender as it pertains to the world around us and our understanding of composition. In this idea, there were shades of the theory that gender in itself is a social construct created and regulated by language and other social aspects of our society. One part of society and culture that plays a large part in doing this is the canon in English as a profession. Our canon for literature and theorists, for the most part, are white men. This exclusionary practice pretty much just marginalizes every other race, class etc. that exists, at least in Western culture. How, as instructors of composition, do we expose this one sidedness while at the same time not reinforcing it? It seems almost impossible to do so. However, I think the key here is exposure. If we expose this underlying ideology to students there will be resistance, but that resistance will create a dialog. From this dialog we, as instructors, can marginalize the canon for once and help the students find their own voice. A voice in writing can gain power from the recognition of gender and the inequalities that may stem from that gender. Why would we deny a writer that power? Males get it just by being males, why should females not be able to have that same empowerment from the same point in time? As a culture, Western society has oppressed and marginalized all populations that are not white males for most of the history of time. By ignoring that structure exists, we are reifying it. By trying to push away from it in the direction of supposed "objectivity" we are reifying it. If we expose it and try to complicate it, then we create a dialog, and dialog creates knowledge. In composition this dialog is desperately needed. We need to move away from a totalizing rhetoric and move toward a more dynamic and flexible rhetoric for the instruction of composition. Gender, race, class etc. can play a huge part in creating the fluidity of the instruction of composition and we should not deny that.