“Doing it Herself: Cultivating a Feminist Ecological Ethos as a Female Graduate Student”

by Sarah Fischer, Laura Rosche, and Megan McCool | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

Introduction

Doherty (2018) addresses the challenges of establishing a “suitable academic self” as a female graduate student, which is a sentiment echoed by countless women in higher education. From well before the feminist revolution of the 1970s to beyond the girl power movement of the 1990s, female graduate students have consistently felt the ways that academia was not made for them, the ways that they lacked access to the pervasive boys’ club around them. The female graduate student identity is informed by the precarity of gender in higher education, and it is vital that we continue to investigate these power dynamics that are still in play today. Though all obviously enter graduate school with different backgrounds, positionalities, and temperaments, women still have “interconnected experiences [of oppression] under patriarchy” (Ryan, Myers, & Jones, 2016, p. 13).

For us, these feelings and experiences have consisted of wondering if we belong in both the field and graduate school, negotiating how to enter into and articulate oneself in classroom discussions, and crafting our own unique teaching personas. Even though most of the people in our field of Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp) are women, the majority of scholars we are reading in our coursework and in preparation for our comprehensive exams are not. Indeed, as Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016) assert, the patriarchal traditions of the academy cause many female academics to find it difficult to cultivate a “comfortable ethos” (p. 2). We have turned to their “alternative theory of ethos” (p. 2) to account for the different discursive and agential choices that we have made, especially their three rhetorical strategies: interrupting, advocating, and relating.

While traditional scholarly conceptualizations of ethos belittle and often reject first-person ways of knowing, we believe that using our own lived experiences provides something valuable that other kinds of research cannot. Inspired by Martinez’s (2014) use of counterstory to document institutionalized issues of oppression in Rhet-Comp and joining González (2020) in his scholarly use of autoethnography, we have determined that the best way for us to illustrate the feminist practices of interrupting, advocating, and relating is to narrativize our own first-person experiences of responding to sexism as scholars in Rhet-Comp.