Making Relationships: Gender in the Forming of Academic Community presents two case studies of student-teacher writing conferences to make visible what is usually invisible in academe: the "personal." It shows that successful academic community may be most easily achieved by students and teachers who create relationships marked by masculine themes and values - and that this may be true even when the teacher is a feminist woman. If change is to occur, the author argues, compositionists must rethink both contemporary composition and gender theories and develop new ways of representing narrative and other expressive discourses.
"Kathleen Dixon's 'Making Relationships: Gender in the Forming of Academic Community' is a lively exploration of the complexities of gendering within composition studies. Arguing against the reductiveness of feminist approaches rooted exclusively in expressionist composition and Anglo-American cultural feminism on the one hand or in constructivist and post-structuralist composition and feminism on the other, Dixon calls for a positioning of these two approaches so as to allow for their interanimation. Dixon's work takes feminist composition in a much-needed new direction." (Elizabeth Flynn, Michigan Technological University)
"In this conscientious study of the workings of gender in the student-teacher conference, Kathleen Dixon carries out a refreshingly honest and self-reflective exploration of what we say and do to each other as gendered teachers and students of composition." (Susan Jarratt, Miami University of Ohio)
"In this conscientious study of the workings of gender in the student-teacher conference, Kathleen Dixon carries out a refreshingly honest and self-reflective exploration of what we say and do to each other as gendered teachers and students of composition." (Susan Jarratt, Miami University of Ohio)