Abstract:

"[Many contemporary feminists] …exalt the virtues of 'female nature,' nurturing, relatedness and community, as opposed to the 'male' values of domination, rationality, and abstraction."
--Susan J. Hekman, Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (1990)

"A poststructuralist feminist epistemology accepts that knowledge is always provisional, open-ended and relational."
--Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (1992)

Over the past decade, feminist theorists have scrutinized the relationship between the writer and her audience. These theorists have noted that teaching students to find and articulate their voices and reach their audience demands verbal collaboration, between the teacher and the student, between students in a class, and between the student writers and their audience. Similarly, those who have written about feminist practice in the writing classroom have emphasized the relational, practice-oriented, contextualized, open-ended nature of feminist pedagogy.

Of particular interest to me is the notion developed by Ede and Lunsford, of the distinction (and sometimes the overlap) between audience addressed and audience invoked. I am also intrigued by feminist theorists who have proposed that electronic technology liberates women writers from the limitations that our gender-bound culture has placed on them, and that the disembodied electronic voice women have access to when they write using computers, will necessarily result in stronger, more articulate personae. In my writing classes, I have used a variety of assignments and have required my women students to use several different features of electronic technology (e-mail, drafts of papers emailed to me, and to fellow students for our critical response, electronic bulletins, real-time chats, electronic conferencing with me), in order to help them become aware of the relationship between themselves as writers, and their intended audience. I have also tried to raise questions in class, in conferences, and in my written responses to their texts, as to whether they believe that a reading audience exists for their work, whether they are writing for their fellow students in the class, or simply for me, whether they want their writing read by a wider audience outside the class, and how these various kinds of audience concerns shape their writing, if at all.

Beginning writers, and particularly first year writing students (Writing 125) at Wellesley College, one of the few remaining all-women's colleges, find the notion of writing for an audience perplexing. They almost always assume--perhaps rightly--that the only audience, or at least the only audience of any consequence to them as writers, is their instructor, whose job it is to read and grade student writing. In this hypertext essay, I discuss the results of the past four semesters, flowing from my efforts to make students aware of a range of audiences, and to encourage them to begin constructing their own audience of readers both within our small classroom community, and in the college and the world beyond our writing classroom.