Women, Words, Writing :: Gender Literature Papers

Women, Words, Writing During my morning commute, I faded myself off from the world around me and think. The last thing I go to before shutting off generally starts a process of guiltless association that is carried on by memory. For instance, this morning a woman sit beside me, reading The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams. Williams is someone I bring in heard of and read. I remembered her essay And We Are Not Married-a marvelous sample of womens writing. For the rest of the time I traveled by subway, I popular opinion of pieces of writing I have read that, somehow, bear the punctuate of their writers gender. Now Im home, at my desk, and I am re-reading the texts I have thought of in the morning, trying to understand why and where I feel the interbreeding of gender. Take, for example, Williamss essay as I go along, I am spell-bound by its complexity, by its huge network-or should I say labyrinth?-of ideas, so huge that the reader can easily get lost, become powerless, and forfeit the struggle. Williams argues, among other things, that the practice of certain forms of rhetoric constitute acts of ideology, that style is never neutral, so that types of writing and behavior are always suffused with political content. mavin of her primary rhetorical tropes is the telling-and retold-anecdote, which always requires interpretation. With each story she relates, new affirmable paths appear, and one doesnt know which of them is the right one the Benetton incident, with its three consecutive versions. hence Tawana Brawley. Maxine Thomas. Mrs. Williams, her mother. Herself. Professor Bell and Geneva Crenshaw. Mr. Williams. Finally, the dream.The stories are presented at length, and commented upon each assertion is supported-either because of the authors juridical experience or because of her exactness-by footnotes. This makes the overall structure of the essay a bit confusing. For example, the listing of opinions expressed ab let on Maxine Th omas is backed up by eighteen footnotes. The readers eye has to go back and forth in order to read everything, and going back and forth eighteen multiplication can be very challenging.In addition to that, the language is sometimes difficult at times even impenetrable the rhetoric of increase privatization, in response to racial issues, functions as the rationalizing agent of public unaccountability, and, ultimately, irresponsibleness (696). One has to stop reading and figure out what she means, to figure out the idea behind that gathering of legal (and thus certainly esoteric) terms.