Gotta Post

It's January 4, so I need to say something here if I'm to be a blogger and not just another blogger wanna be.

What I need to work on today is the feminist WPA piece I'm writing with I. (who, sadly, is currently out of the country: in fact, she's in southeast Asia, though not in one of the countries hit by the tsunami. Still, I wonder how the devastation in the area has affected her trip and the work she was planning to do there. To donate directly to a Sri Lankan relief agency, go here: http://www.lanka.info/sarvodaya/donate.html. There are others, of course. Other countries and other relief agencies.)

At any rate, the feminist WPA piece is something we originally wrote back when we were in grad school, and I'm finding it difficult to re-enter the piece and to make it say something relevant. I think our original point is less original now. (Collaboration isn't perfect! It isn't even necessarily feminist! Being feminist means something else!) We need to focus more on that second part: what does it mean to be a feminist WPA? And it is a crucial question, given the preponderance of women in rhet/comp and hence the increasing numbers of women in administrative positions. Still, the whole freaking book is about feminist approaches to WPA work, so we can't work at that level of generality. What's distinctive about our proposal is indeed that we were graduate students when we wrote it, that we were writing out of that experience. So that focus is something we can't readily do away with.

So I'm off to work on that.