Subjectivity Matters: Using Gerda Lerner's Writing and Rhetoric
to Claim an Alternative Epistemology for the Feminist Writing Classroom

by Kathleen J. Ryan


"We have to teach the traditional academic essay since that's what students write in all their other classes." Every time I hear this statement, and I have been hearing it since I began teaching in 1992, I wonder why teachers stop short of critiquing the dominance of this genre. As a feminist, a writing teacher, and a writing program administrator, I am regularly troubled by the ongoing assumption„made by students, faculty in other disciplines, and administrators, in addition to writing teachers„that the traditional academic essay is the most appropriate sustained writing students do as they pursue their college education. My concern stems from the fact that the traditional academic essay reifies a positivist, patriarchal epistemology that governs beliefs about knowledge and teaching practices on my campus and on many others' across the United States. A positivist epistemology privileges distant, universal, and valuefree ways of knowing and discoursing; it reinforces what Paulo Freire refers to as the banking model of education and shores up the privileged place of the academic essay.