Essentializing and Style

I have categorized a bunch of the things I have read under the heading of "essentializing." This was stuff I didn't want to get in to and didn't really find interesting. But having FINALLY read Elizabeth Flynn's Composing as a Woman, I think I may have dismissed this group too quickly, especially in how it applies to agonism.

Essentializing happens when we say "women (or whoever) are this way" and we thereby limit them, even when it's well intentioned. One example I used while teaching American Lit was the tragic (although overused) story Yellow Wallpaper. The crazy woman’s poor, well-meaning doctor husband made her more crazy because of what he believed was essentially true about women. Back in the day, the arguments (not that I argue) for why a woman shouldn't go to school where biological, scientific and medical. Learning directed blood away from the woman parts to the brain and the woman parts would atrophy in the mean time. Or that women's brains were smaller than men (they weighed them!) so they didn't belong at school. We say women, or any group, are a certain way and that's that. You can even find proof. But, it's the whole chicken or the egg thing. Are women this way and men that way and that's just the way things are or is their another explanation? In the meantime, essentializing is used as a reason to perpetuate the status quo and is frequently an excuse for inequality.

According to Flynn, the argument (but I don't argue) goes, "women and men differ in their developmental processes and in their interactions with others" but these differences are a result of the imbalance in social power, "of the dominance of men over women" (425). Women are judged by what is perceived as a universal standard but is entirely (I would say largely) a male standard. As Flynn says, "men have chronicled our historical narratives and defined our fields of inquiry" and though we may now be able to function within them, it's still the Master's house and his rules (425). So all the stuff I threw in that essentializing category was basically this stuff that was trying to look at women, their writing, their ways of knowing, outside the Master's house.

Now I do believe in essentialism and truth for that matter. I also believe that as humans alone we have a difficult time accessing that truth, which doesn't mean we shouldn't try. So the problem for me in investigating women's ways of writing or knowing is that I don't know when my own bias, or anyone else's, has creeped in. And maybe I'm afraid of dating myself or something, but I just don't want to go there.

In a lot of ways, my students feel the same way as woman did in the 1920s (I'm thinking of that great line in Thoroughly Modern Millie...) and in the 1950s. There is a perceived equality and therefore no need for feminists to rage. And I am guilty, too. As I have worked on this paper I have wondered whether or not feminism helps or hinders the process of evolving our views on argument. he deepest bias is always the one we can't see.

And yet, I do know that agonism is a tradition that was formed entirely without female voices. And yet, and this is another concern of feminists I have read, if we don’t speak in the established modes of discourse, we won’t be heard. But how much do we sacrifice? And at the same time, this whole women’s writing thing is pretty new. How much of the way that I write is just latent teenage rebellion against established forms, how much of it is experimental for experiment’s sake (because I get bored easy), and how much of it is really writing as a woman. And even by saying “this is writing as a woman” I could be essentializing. So I’m back to stylistic concerns.