Harriet Malinowitz
Long Island University
Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

I'd like to pursue some questions that I began to address in a recent essay ("A Feminist Critique of Writing in the Disciplines" in Jarratt and Worsham, eds., Feminism and Composition Studies, MLA, 1998). In that essay, I wondered about the "radical" role that WAC often professes itself to play in the academy, and argued that as long as its purpose is to help students perform adroitly within conventional disciplinary structures, it is inevitably implicated in the normative ideologies which the disciplines safeguard. I suggested that if WAC were truly desirous of interrogating, rather than sustaining, dominant systems of knowledge, an alliance with women's studies -- which I called "the outsider in the academy," a field that "operates as a fifth column, working to subvert from within the institutionalization of the very hierarchies that sustain social inequality" -- would be advantageous to both parties.

I'd like to extend this idea beyond women's studies to include the other interdisciplinary fiends that endure at the margins of the academy -- the various ethnic studies, labor studies, lesbian and gay studies, disability studies -- and ask what relationship composition faculty might have to those programs, which are the ones more frankly concerned with, and invested in, social change.

Some related questions to consider: How would such an alliance square with the frequent complaints emanating from within composition that our field is already not taken seriously enough, and should be accorded greater status and institutionalization? -- or, to put it another way, to what extent does escaping from our "feminized," "marginalized" status entail firming up our authority within the muscular, hegemonic domains of knowledge? How can reading and writing pedagogy best be deployed within the academy's already-vulnerable domains of subjugated knowledge? What role can composition play in bringing the "vernacular knowledge" which nourishes those fields -- e.g., the discourses of unionism, AIDS and breast cancer activism, anti-imperialism -- into contact with the "disciplinary knowledge" which even WAC theorists often perceive to be the only body of knowledge which writing instruction ought to engage? Finally, how prepared are compositionists to take the professional risks that faculty and students routinely take when they identify themselves with the programs the academy considers most trifling, unfundable, unstaffable, and dispensable?

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