CCR 601. Miller, Chapter Four.

Miller, Susan.

Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition.

Chapter Four, “The Sad Woman in the Basement.”

 

Keywords: Goffman, stigma, Freud, femininity, subservience, women, maid/mother, authoritarian, identity, sociology, psychology, teaching, promotion, gender, process and paradigm, power.

 

Summary: This chapter makes the connection between the predominance of women in the field and the field’s suberviant position to literary studies as analogous to women’s traditional role outside the university.  Miller uses Goffman’s concept of stigma to explain the different attitudes instructors working in composition take on to deal with the pejorative position assigned the discipline in most universities, and then uses Freud’s concepts of “feminine” as the basis for the “gender-coding of composition teaching” (136).  Miller asserts that through this “blurring” of gender boundaries and social contexts, the composition teacher is nurturer and totalitarian, mother and disciplinarian, and in all ways this constricts the composition instructor. The instructor is “at once powerless and sharply authoritarian, occupying the transgressive and low status site from which language may be arbitrated” (139).  Miller closes by explaining this position as the motivation for explanations of composition done in the style of “hard science,” ie, a way to distance the field from this assigned subservient role and closer to the status of a rigorous discipline.

 

Notes:

The risk of moving further from English studies (122).

The move towards masculine, objectivist terms to describe composition and its implies benefit (122).

Dominance of women teaching in the field in contrast to the inordinate number of men writing scholarly, theoretical work about the field (124-125).

Goffman and stigma and how stigma dictates social interaction (128-130).

Freud and the feminine (136-138).

Process and paradigm as a choice predicated by stigma and femininity (140).

 

(Thanks to cgb for sharing his note taking style, which I’ve borrowed in the spirit of academic sharing.)