Response to March 1st readings

I absolutely agreed with Berkenkotter when she affirms that thinking-aloud protocols affect what is being observed. And this goes along with the idea that writing is a social activity, and therefore, contextual features play a major role in it. Along the same line, I don’t think that her study was “naturalistic”, there is a layer of superficiality in it as well, but this layer may be attenuated as the time passes by. At the same time, I took this study as it is: a case study, which says a lot but only about the subject studied. We can’t generalize and say that everybody writes that way. At least, though, by getting a little in a writer’s life, we could better understand how writing processes are highly personal and how different variables play a role in them.
Regarding Flynn’s article, I appreciate her effort to include gender theory in the composition field. I think that some of her claims are true, because after all, we live in a patriarchal society and as Virginia Woolf states, the capitalist system haven’t done much to help in this regard. One thing that I didn’t like was the way Flynn chose to finish the article: “We must alert our women students to the dangers of immasculation and provide them with a critical perspective. But we must also encourage them to become self-consciusly aware of what their experience in the world has been and how this experience is related to the politics of gender. Then we must encourage our women students to write from the power of that experience” (p. 188). I think that this statement doesn’t do more than reinforce the static distribution of gender roles. Why we must encourage only our women students? What about our “men students”? (I was gonna write “male students”, but maybe Flynn wouldn’t have liked it). In any case, if we are expecting any consciousness about gender roles to promote changes, we should do not reproduce what we are trying to demolish: a static and binary way of defining masculinity and femininity.
As I said in class, my response to Murray’s article is kind of mixed. I did not enjoyed reading it as much as I felt Kasandra did. Things that I didn’t like: his examples. I think they pose the risk of falling in the flat argument of saying that writing is autobiographic because we name our childhood. Things I liked: I do think that we put ourselves in our writing, but I think that this is related to the fact that language is social and it has embedded in itself pieces of history, as ourselves. In this regard, I grab Bakhtin’s “dialogicality”, put it under my arm and keep on living my life as an unwritten autobiography.