“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
Advocacy-Advocating: Sarah’s Story
In week 12 of a 16-week course taken to fulfill my individualized “Race and Writing Studies” minor, my professor assigned a text by a female author—the first female author he had assigned all semester. As Laura illustrates, male-dominated, or even male-exclusive, canons are the norm in higher education, and as a result, they are largely left unnoticed and unquestioned. During week 12, though, Megan realized this gendered oversight; when I expressed my excitement about reading a book entitled, Landscape of a Good Woman, she expressed her excitement about finally reading a book that featured a woman’s voice altogether. And when she informed me that she did not have plans to ask our professor about his oversight, I acknowledged that the “risks of silence [were] too high” (Ryan, Myers, & Jones, 2016, p. 3) and ultimately felt I “had no choice” (p. 153) but to advocate for her, myself, and our female peers.
According to Ryan, Myers, and Jones (2016), “Advocacy entail[s] rhetors advocating for their own right to speak authoritatively and negotiating the complexities of speaking for others” (p. 111). Given my limited authority at the time as a first-semester female graduate student, and the precarity of speaking on behalf of unknowing others, I decided to carry out my advocacy in a private conversation. After class one day, instead of accusing, arguing, or assuming, I asked my professor why he waited so long before introducing a female author. His response was powerful. Without hesitation, he apologized to me and immediately accepted accountability by admitting that this was an oversight that deserved to be corrected. But more, the very next course meeting, he apologized to the class and delivered handouts of photocopied tables of contents and fostered a discussion about the importance of diversity in the field and in course design.
The texts we read have material effects on the way we make meaning in and of our worlds. A syllabus containing entirely male authors provides the class with a narrow understanding of the field, which is especially troublesome in an introductory course that should function as a broad survey. But perhaps more importantly, this limited scope would be dangerously perpetuated in our final projects: individually designed syllabi of subsets of the field, which several students intended to submit as actual course proposals in our university. And most personally, while every text’s masculine pronouns and unrelatable masculinized examples served as micro-frustrations, their large-scale assumptions of a shared male-centered, logocentric pattern of thinking were a forceful reminder that I did not belong in academia. But my advocacy resisted; it showed me that I belong here. Because women belong here.