Graduation Date
Spring 2011
Document Type
Project
Program
Other
Program
Master of Arts Degree with a major in English, emphasis in Teaching of Writing
Committee Chair Name
Nikola Hobbel
Committee Chair Affiliation
Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff
Second Committee Member Name
Christina Accomando
Keywords
x
Abstract
This project examines the multiple challenges inherent in instructor response to narratives of sexualized violence within the college composition classroom. Rape, as well as other forms of sexualized violence, on university campuses is an endemic problem that affects the lives and safety of those who belong to these communities. This project considers, the multiple ways in which narratives of survival or experience of rape and other forms of sexualized violence enter the composition classroom. Drawing from the fields of trauma studies and feminist pedagogy, this paper suggests that there is an institutional failure to talk about sexualized violence in ways that do not victimize or otherwise re-traumatize those who survive these violences. Through the language used to commemorate incidents of sexualized violence, we can gain insight into an underpinning ideology that frames victims/survivors, perpetrators, security, and responsibility. Linguistic response often interpellates survivors into a cultural framework that recasts them as defenseless victims and fails to recognize agency, thereby doubly wounding the survivor. Within the larger context of academic institutions that often fail to meet the needs of survivors of rape, the college composition classroom is understood as a necessary place to consider structures of power inherent within language and to reclaim narratives that have exerted power over their lives. While it has long been considered unethical to require students to write about experiences of trauma, this project suggests that it is perhaps equally unethical to prevent students from critically engaging with the experiences that have shaped their subjectivities. For those who are deeply concerned about structures of power that enable violence, and who also see language as a means by which to dismantle and rearrange these structures, the classroom becomes a space of possibility for talk about violence.
Recommended Citation
Pitré, Tessa M., "Responding to Narratives of Sexualized Violence in the College Composition Classroom" (2011). Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects. 2629.
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/2629