Writing Centers, Postmodernity, and Intersectionality: A Study of Tutor-Training Guides
Abstract
Writing center tutor-training guides follow a dogma that has been disseminated through time by writing center directors, tutors, and researchers. This dogma creates a structured set of rules and regulations that place students into narrowed categorizations, labeling them in ways that do not account for multiplicitous, intersectional identities. Society has made strides towards accepting bits and pieces of individual marginalization pertaining to race, culture, gender, and sexual orientation – to name a few. However, when one person identifies by all of these (and other facets) at the same time, society at large has a hard time figuring out what “boxes” that person belongs to. Postmodern philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault discuss conceptions of history, perception, reality, social construction, deconstruction, and aporia – all of which provide a way of understanding what it means to be removed from what is natural. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and the removal from (T)ruth can lead writing center professionals to meeting students where they are, instead of prescribing solutions to assumed hypothetical problems. I argue that if writing centers spent less time with the categories that show up in training guides, they will have more time to meet students where they are, in the moment. Less structure within tutor-training pedagogy can lead to a stronger implementation of intersectionality. My analysis demonstrates the ways in which Foucault and Derrida help writing centers to see a space outside of dogma. The resulting benefits allow academics to exist in comfortable spaces outside of the restraining rules and regulations placed on collaboration; this ultimately renders less pressure to marginalize themselves and others to constrained labels. In short, implementing a space that embraces more intersectional bodies allows writing centers to get closer to answering the question: what would it mean to deconstruct dogma?
Degree
M.A.
Advisors
Denny, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Rhetoric
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