Flynn, “Composing as a Woman” (CCC, 1988)

Premises:  Gender is socially constructed.  Writers’ view of the world, and writers’ understanding of what writing is good for, arises out of a gendered identity which strongly suggests, or even controls, what writers compose.

Conclusions from her study of 24 college-age student writers:

• “The narratives of the female students are stories of interaction, of connection, or of frustrated connection” (my emphasis, 182). 
• “The narratives of the male students are stories of achievement, of separation, or of frustrated achievement” (my emphasis, 182). 

Lu, “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” (CE, 1987)

Premises: Political ideology dictates certain languages and dialects and usages are privileged, and others are un-privileged, or even “taboo.”  Languages, dialects, and individual words can be organized in hierarchies from most privileged to least privileged, or from public privilege to private privilege.  Because language constructs thought, and thought is consciousness, those political linguistic hierarchies shape our consciousness of ourselves and our world.  Speakers can switch among languages to negotiate power, but they risk losing their identities when doing so.

• “I learned to speak English with my parents, my tutor, and my sisters” (my emphasis, 166).
• I was allowed to speak Shanghai dialect only with the servants” (my emphasis, 166).
• [M]y parents sent me to a local private school where I learned to speak, read, and write in a new language—Standard Chinese, the official written language of New China” (my emphasis, 166).
• “’Red’ came to mean Revolution at school, “the Commies” at home, and adultery in The Scarlet Letter.”  [ . . . ]  I began to put on and take off my Working class language in the same way I put on and took off my school clothes to avoid being criticized for wearing Bourgeois clothes” (169).

Love, “Learning from Writer’s Block” (P&P, 1999)

• “One of [Mike] Rose’s main findings . . . [was that] writers who use stiff rules are the ones who most often experience writer’s block [ . . . ] which can be confining and crippling to the reader if conceived algorithmically rather than heuristically—as a commandment to be adhered to completely and infallibly rather than as a good-humored, light-handed piece of advice” (144).