Feminism and Scientism Author(s): Elizabeth A. Flynn Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Oct.

, 1995), pp. 353-368 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/358710 . Accessed: 25/05/2011 15:07
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ElizabethA. Flynn Feminism and Scientism

We should investigate ways of giving an identity to the sciences, to religions, and to political policies and of situating ourselves in relation to them as subjects in our own right. Luce Irigaray,"Writingas a Woman" (56) Clearly,differentiationbetween strong and weak, powerful and powerless, has been a central defining aspect of gender globally, carryingwith it the assumption that men should have greater authority than women, and should rule over them. As significant and important as this fact is, it should not obscure the reality that women can and do participate in politics of domination, as perpetratorsas well as victims-that we dominate, that we are dominated. bell hooks, Talking Back(20)

themein recent n important investigations

of composition studies is the field's feminization. Compositionists such as Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbrook discuss composition studies' feminine attributes and marginal status within the academy as a result of its being comprised largely of women many of whom teach part time and have Miller describes compositionists Carnivals, heavy teaching loads. In Textual as victims and uses the metaphor of the sad woman in the basement, an allusion to Gilbert and Gubar'sTheMadwomanin the Attic.Miller's book is a portrayal of the field's struggle for legitimacy within the academy and
A. Elizabeth Flynnis a professorof Reading and Composition at Michigan TechnologicalUniverof and sity. She is co-editor of the journal Reader, Gender Reading(Johns Hopkins, 1986), and of Constellations (HarperCollins, 1992, 1995). She has also published essays in College English,CCC, and elsewhere. She is president of the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languagesand chair of the CCCCCommittee on the Status of Women in the Profession.This essay is part of a larger exploration of relationshipsbetween feminism and reading, writing, and teaching. CCC 46.3/October 1995 353

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especially of its subjugation by its most threatening adversary,the field of literary studies that dominates the English departments within which most composition specialists are housed. This struggle is also beginning to be
recounted in articles and books such as The Politics of Writing Instruction

edited by Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. The concept of feminization is powerful because it suggests that feminist analyses of the situation of women can be usefully applied analogously to academic fields. If women can be abused and undervalued, fields of study can be as well. The term needs to be problematized, though, if it is to be useful in providing a picture of the complexities of the struggles of composition studies for legitimacy and power within the academy. One limitation of the feminization metaphor is that it suggests an essentialized and oversimplified conception of gender. Compositionists are seen primarily as victims even though we are gaining power within the academy by developing graduate programs that are successfully placing students, obtaining large grants, developing and administering large programs in first-year English, technical writing, and writing-across-the-curriculum, and developing and administering writing centers and computing centers. Also, many compositionists who have gained administrative experience developing composition programs are now moving into positions of power and authority within university bureaucracies. Another limitation of the feminization metaphor is that it suggests the field is a unified one, though this is hardly the case. Compositionists occupy positions of varying status within the academy and often have very different teaching, research, or service roles, so conflicts and power struggles among compositionists-sometimes among women and feminist compositionists-are inevitable. The battle between Linda Brodkey and some of her colleagues over the composition curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin was played out in a national arena. Discussions among colleagues at composition conferences suggest, though, that such intragroup struggles and tensions are widespread. In the early phases of the field's development, the situation of having a common adversary,literature specialists, may have united compositionists. As the field has matured, however, it has tended to fragment. If compositionists have been sad women in the basement, we have also attempted to overcome our marginalization through identification with more powerful fields. If we have been feminized, we have also sometimes been "masculinized"by attempting to increase our status by emulating the techniques, beliefs, and attitudes of fields more powerful than our own. Such emulation has been complex and has occurred on multiple sites. I will focus in this article on the negative consequences of identification with the sciences and social sciences on the part of empirical researchers as the

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field struggled to gain stature within the academy, a form of identification I call scientism. doing so, though, I do not mean to suggest that there have In been no positive consequences. Scientifically-oriented empirical research has contributed substantially to the field's development and growth. I might also have traced scientistic tendencies in humanistic discourses such as literary theory and rhetorical theory. Scientism is hardly limited to empirical research. Finally, I could have traced the considerable resistance to scientism within the field especially on the part of compositionists influenced by the work of rhetoricians such as Kenneth Burke and those whose work derives from neo-Romantic movements such as expressivism. The scientism of empirical researchers is but one of many tendencies identifiable as part of the emerging field of composition studies and is not clearly separable from other tendencies and influences. I argue here that recent feminist analyses of gender and power can illuminate the situation of the profession of composition studies as it has struggled for legitimacy and power within the academy. Feminists from a number of different orientations have attempted to account for the alienation that can result when the powerless identify with more powerful others. I will call this alienating form of identification "masculinization,"a term suggested by Judith Fetterley'sterm "immasculation."I use quotation marks around "masculinization"to indicate my discomfort with its suggestion of a binary conception of gender, a reductive conception of identification, and its implication that gender can be detached from other factors such as race, class, and ethnicity. Feminist critiques of the sciences and the social sciences have also made evident the dangers inherent in identifications with fields that have traditionally been male-dominated and valorize epistemologies that endanger those in marginalized positions. I will also discuss recent feminisms that have developed theories of resistance, alternatives to identifications that can be debilitating. My aim here is not to provide a revisionary history of the field of composition studies. Such a project is far too ambitious for a single article. Rather, I will provide a brief overview of scientistic tendencies within the field and foreground moments in the field's emergence as a discipline in which identification with the sciences or social sciences has been used as a defense in the struggle against its chief adversary, literary studies. I will then explore some alternative ways of gaining authority that do not necessitate "masculinized" identifications with powerful fields. Feminist Conceptions of "Masculinization" Feminists, regardlessof theoretical orientation, have attempted to account for the negative consequences that can result from identification with

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powerful individuals and powerful discourses. Judith Fetterley in her 1978 The ResistingReader,for instance, coined the term "immasculation" to describe the alienation experienced by women who were taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a system of male cultural values one of whose central principles is misogyny (xx). Fetterley saw immasculation as a better term than emasculation for the cultural reality of the power relations between women and men. Often, Fetterley observed, a woman "is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself" (xii). Fetterley urged women readers to resist domination, to become resisting readers. Other feminist discussions of related ideas can enrich and problematize Fetterley's conception of immasculation. Julia Kristeva, for instance, speaks in "About Chinese Women" of the namelessness of women (140), of a tendency of monotheism, paganism, and agrarianideologies to repress women and mothers (141). Kristeva sees that women have no access to the word or to knowledge and power (142-43). If they choose identification with the mother they remain excluded from language and culture; if they choose identification with the father, they become an Electra, "frigid with exaltation" (152). Kristeva recommends, instead, a middle way. Paternal identification is necessary in order to have a voice in the chapter of politics and history and in order to escape a "smug polymorphism." But women need to reject the development of a "homologous" woman who is capable and virile by swimming against the tide, by rebelling against the existing relations of production and reproduction (156). Doing so is extremely difficult, though, and feminists are beginning to recognize that feminisms themselves are susceptible to damaging identifications with dominant discourses. Theorists who espouse a particularkind of feminism sometimes identify other feminisms with repressive ideologies. Postmodern feminists, for instance, often see liberal and cultural feminists as having internalized the values of rationality and enlightenment thought, the very values they see as contributing to the oppression of women. Jane Flax in "TheEnd of Innocence" focuses on the identification of white-feminist politics with discourses that are inhospitable to feminism. According to Flax, liberal feminism and cultural feminism participate in the very modes of thought that have resulted in the oppression of women. She speaks of white-feminist politics as being deeply rooted in and dependent upon Enlightenment discourses of rights, individualism, and equality (447). She sees feminist discourses such as liberal political theory, Marxism, and empirical social science as expressing some form of this Enlightenment dream. For postmodern feminists such as Flax, there is no unitary reality against which our thoughts can be tested. Western

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philosophers create an illusory appearance of unity and stability by reducing the flux and heterogeneity of the human and physical worlds into binary and supposedly natural oppositions including the opposition male/female. Gender is seen as a highly variable and historically contingent set of human practices. It is not a stable thing or a universal or unitary relation present in all cultures. Flax urges feminists to give up our innocence, to take responsibility by firmly situating ourselves "within contingent and imperfect contexts, to acknowledge differential privileges of race, gender, geographic location, and sexual identities, and to resist the delusory and dangerous recurrent hope of redemption to a world not of our own making" (460). Others, however, have pointed out the limitations of postmodern feminisms. In FeminismWithoutWomenTania Modleski is disturbed by liberal feminism's emphasis on equality. Modleski is also worried, though, about the tendency within postmodern feminism to eliminate the meaningfulness of the category of woman altogether. If the critique of essentialist approaches to feminism is pushed too hard, women disappear almost completely and are replaced by men. Modleski criticizes the emphasis on what she calls "male feminism" in such books as Men in Feminism edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. Modleski sees that such books, insofar as they focus on the question of male feminism as a topic for men and women to engage, bring men back to center stage and divert feminists from tasks more pressing than "decidingabout the appropriatenessof the label 'feminist' for men" (6). Modleski also sees that these books presume a kind of heterosexual presumption and tacitly assume and promote a liberal notion of the formal equality of men and women, whose viewpoints are then accorded equal weight. For Modleski, "feminism without women" can mean the triumph either of a male feminist perspective that excludes women or of a feminist anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term "woman" is disallowed (15). Modleski concludes her book by warning that the post-feminist play with gender in which differences are elided can easily lead us back into our "pregendered"past where there was only the universal subject-man (163). These different constructions of identification with more powerful others suggest the enormity of the problem and the importance of looking at it in its complexity rather than through the lens of a single feminist perspective. The critique of enlightenment rationality is valuable, but it threatens the meaningfulness of gender as a category. The critique of patriarchal domination is valuable, but it tends toward essentialized conceptions of gender. Juxtaposing postmodern feminism and cultural feminism serves as a check on the excesses of each.

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Feminist Critiques of the Sciences and Social Sciences Feminist discussions of "masculinization"are helpful in understanding the dynamic behind alienating identifications with more powerful others. Feminist critiques of the sciences and social sciences suggest as well that these fields may be especially inappropriate or dangerous models for feminized fields, that is, fields in which women are disproportionately represented. A number of feminist scholars (Rossiter,Keller, Harding)have established that the sciences have traditionally been a male domain. These scholars argue, further,that beliefs in the objectivity of the scientist and the neutrality of scientific investigation serve the interests of those in positions of authority and power, usually white males, and serve to exclude those in marginalized positions. Identification by women or by feminized fields with the sciences and social sciences, therefore, may necessitate association with discourses that ignore issues of concern to those in marginalized positions and that arise out of epistemologies antithetical to their needs and interests. For instance, feminist scientist Ruth Berman in "FromAristotle's Dualism to MaterialistDialectics: Feminist Transformationof Science and Society" argues that dualist ideology pervades western science and philosophy and serves the interests of those in positions of power. Berman is careful to provide a complex view of both gender and power, acknowledging that a simple dichotomy of male/female is itself dualistic and ignores the specific details of power relationships, the contradictions within "maleness," and differences among women (241). She nevertheless sees that both Plato and Aristotle depict mind and body as split with the mind associated with a master class, males, and the body associated with an inferior class, females. She argues that Descartes, while preserving the eternal, supernaturalcharacter of the soul, transformed the body into a machine (240). He held that rational thought is objective and it, alone, leads to truth. The Cartesian perspective, according to Berman, conceptualizes phenomena as composed of discrete, individual, elemental units, the whole consisting of an assemblage of these separate elements. It also assumes a linear, quantitative cause-effect relationship between phenomena (235). Berman calls for a materialist dialectics that sees change as directional rather than random, as a complex process characterizedby dialectical struggle, tension, and turbulence (244). A number of other feminists have established that research methods in the sciences and the social sciences, while claiming to be objective and neutral, actually reveal a strong male bias. Women are often excluded from research samples, and researchers make extraordinary claims for their research because they do not recognize or admit that their own prejudices

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and values affect research results. Toby Jayaratne and Abigail Stewart summarize some of the objections feminists have made to traditional quantitative research methods in their essay, "Quantitativeand Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences: Current Feminist Issues and Practical Strategies."Such criticism focuses on selection of sexist and elitist research topics; the absence of research on questions of central importance to women; biased research designs, including selection of only male subjects; an exploitative relationship between researcher and the subject and within research teams; the illusion of objectivity; the simplistic and superficial nature of quantitative data; improper interpretation and over-generalization of findings; and inadequate data dissemination and utilization (86). Jayaratne and Stewart make evident that uncritical acceptance of the epistemological underpinnings and methods of the sciences and social sciences is risky for those in marginalized positions. Feminist Conceptions of Resistance Feminist critique is almost always accompanied by some conception of resistance, some exploration of how to neutralize the power of conscious and unconscious identifications such as those described above. If powerful others can be emulated, they can also be resisted. Feminist conceptions of resistance are not necessarily oppositional. In Yearning, instance, bell for hooks speaks of the "homeplace" as a site of resistance, of healing. It is a place where the oppressed can heal themselves in the midst of suffering, a place of refuge that will allow them to see clearly. Resistance can also suggest some form of new situationing so as to change the status quo. Judith Butler in BodiesthatMatter, instance, focuses on the abjection of for lesbians and gays, and suggests that terms such as "queer"that have been used to subject a group can be reclaimed to enable social and political resignification (231). Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe in Hegemonyand SocialistStrategy emphasize that relations of oppression are characterized by antagonism and awareness of inequality. Resistance becomes possible when individuals become aware that their relationships with others are unequal. Laclau and Mouffe say, "Our thesis is that it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forms of resistance to subordination that the conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of inequality" (154). Democratic discourse, then, makes resistance possible. Others make a useful distinction between resistance and collective political action. Resistance may give rise to collective political action but is not synonymous with it. In Henry Giroux'sterms, resistance "contains the

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possibility" of galvanizing political struggle, but is still only a state of Class awareness that precedes change. In Women Gender, for Teaching Chance: and Power,Kathleen Weiler draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci and others to distinguish between counter-hegemony and resistance. According to Weiler, counter-hegemony implies criticaltheoretical understanding and is expressed in organized and active political opposition (54). Resistance, in contrast, is usually informal, disorganized, and apolitical (54). Feminists, regardless of orientation, almost always hold out the hope that processes of subjugation, including processes that result in alienating identifications with the powerful, can be countered in some way, even if these attempts are not entirely successful. Implicit in the concept of resistance is the belief that those in marginalized positions can take action to improve their situation, can reterritorializediscourses that have dominated them and with which they have consciously or unconsciously identified. Scientism and Beyond The site of composition studies as it emerged as a discipline is well-suited to a feminist analysis of the damaging effects of scientistic tendencies on the field and to an exploration of alternative ways of achieving legitimacy within the academy. In the field's early years, research was often synonymous with scientifically-oriented empirical research, and identifications with the sciences and social sciences were clear attempts to gain authority by association with more authoritative discourses. As composition studies has matured, though, it has embraced the research methods and approaches of a number of different fields and as a result its associations with scientific traditions have become increasingly self-reflective and selfcritical. In the early years of its development composition studies relied heavily on research models developed in the social sciences, especially psychology and education. A prevalent approach involved comparison of groups that were given different treatments. In such an approach, the researcher formulates a hypothesis, selects an experimental group and a control group, administers a treatment to the experimental group, and attempts to measure the effect of the treatment. Every attempt is made to eliminate possible contaminating effects of the researcher'sintervention and to limit the number of variablesbeing measured and controlled. The results of such experiments were often granted the authority of scientific knowledge. in Stephen North in TheMakingof Knowledge Composition says that he assembled a list of well over 1,000 experimental studies conducted between 1963 and 1985 and thinks that the total number is closer to 1,500-more studies than that produced by all of the other research methods combined

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(142). North sees the experimentalists as the oldest and the largest community of researchers within composition studies (141), though he does not think they have exercised anything like a proportionate influence on the field (144). This commitment to scientific approaches to research is evident in in Research Written edited by RichardBraddock, RichardLloydComposition, Jones, and Lowell Schoer and published in 1963. Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer make clear that they only included research that employed "scientificmethods" such as controlled experimentation. They argue that research in composition has not frequently been conducted with the knowledge and care that one associates with the physical sciences, and they compare research in composition to chemical research as it emerged from the period of alchemy (5). Of the references for further research that they append to their study, all 504 are, in one form or another, experimental. By the late 1970s, however, empirically-oriented compositionists began to recognize some limitations of the field's scientific approaches to composition research. Research Composing: on Pointsof Departure, published in 1978 and edited by Charles Cooper and Lee Odell, for instance, accepts comparison-group research as a valuable approach to the study of writing, but places considerably greater emphasis on the importance of theory and cautions that research results should be seen as tentative rather than definitive. Later overviews of empirical research in composition studies provide an increasingly criticalperspective on scientific approaches to research. Lillian Bridwell and Richard Beach in their 1984 New Directionsin Composition Research,speak of the "mistakes of the past" that occurred because we "grosslyoversimplified the nature of written language and the processes by which humans create it" (12). They emphasize the need for a more valid and comprehensive theoretical base for research in composition and call for studies that relate writing to social, political, and psychological contexts (6). Like Cooper and Odell, they call for acknowledgment of the limitations of research methods (9). The follow-up volume to Braddocket al.'s Research Written in Composition, published in 1986 and written by George Hillocks, is more directly critical of experimental research. In an introduction to the volume, RichardLloyd Jones effectively dissociates himself from his earlier co-authored work by claiming that he is actually a "rhetoricaltheorist." The material he examined in 1963, he says, "forced me into empiricism" (xiv). Lloyd-Jones applauds the far more varied approach to research in Hillocks'study, which includes case studies and protocols. Also, Hillocks includes in the book an extended discussion of criticisms of experimental studies including prob-

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lems with control of variables and reporting of data. By the late 1980s, scientistic composition was coming under serious attack by compositionists with political orientations but also by researchers who had begun their careers doing scientific work. By 1988, when Janice Lauer and J. William Asher published their Research: Composition Empirical Designs,there was clearly a need to defend empirical research itself and to explain it to a community of compositionists with commitments to more humanistic approaches to scholarship. Alan Purves in his foreword speaks of the need to supplement traditions of humanistic research by social science research; Lauer and Asher in their preface are also defensive. In response to those who have responded to empirical research either by dismissing it or by accepting its conclusions indiscriminately, they argue "that an adequate study of the complex domain of writing must be multidisciplinary, including empirical research" (ix). They call for communication among composition theorists, writing instructors, and empirical researchers and for respect for each other's efforts (ix). In "Hearing Voices in English Studies," Margaret Baker Graham and Patricia Goubil-Gambrelltrace the field's movement away from methodologies of the sciences and social sciences toward methodologies of the in humanities by examining recent issues of Research the Teaching English. of They observe that in 1978, Alan Purves, editor at the time, noted that RTE was publishing fewer experimental studies and more qualitative studies. By the time Judith Langer and Arthur Appleby's tenure as editors of the journal, according to Graham and Goubil-Gambrell,quantitative research was no longer the unquestioned methodology of choice in RTE.They also see that Sandra Stotsky, the latest editor, has continued to shift the emphasis away from empiricism (111). Scientism vs. Literary Studies This brief overview makes clear that empirical researchers within composition studies have themselves become increasingly aware of the dangers of uncritical acceptance of the methods of the sciences and the social sciences in the study of reading and writing. Emulation of scientific methods can lead to reductive conceptions of language and to unwarranted conclusions. Also, scientifically-oriented composition research, originally embraced, in part at least, as a defense against its nemesis, literary studies, is losing its effectiveness as literary theorists influenced by postmodernist critiques of enlightenment rationality have begun to question the authority of scientific claims. Identifications intended to enhance the field's status can result, ironically, in increased vulnerability. Essays by Maxine Hairston

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and Linda Flower illustrate some ways in which scientism has been used to gain authority and even dominance within the academy and within English departments. Hairston's "The Winds of Change," published in 1982, was written in the spirit of Braddock,Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer's Research Written in Composition. In this essay, Hairston is enthusiastic about scientific approaches to the study of writing. She invokes Thomas Kuhn's TheStructure Scientific of Revolutions, arguing that the field of composition studies, at the time she was writing, was undergoing a paradigm shift from a product-oriented paradigm to a process-oriented one. The reliance on Kuhn is itself an indication of Hairston's acceptance of a scientific frame of reference, and perhaps, as well, what Robert Connors in "Composition Studies and Science" calls a "yearning toward the power and success of the natural sciences" (4). More importantly, though, Hairston attributes the emergence of an enlightened approach to the teaching of writing to research and experimentation. Empiricalinvestigations of the composing processes of actual writers have given us the data we need to understand how writing really is accomplished, she claims. Those in the vanguard of the profession, Hairston tells us, are "attentively watching the research on the composing process in order to extract some pedagogical principles from it" (78). For the first time in the history of teaching writing, Hairston says, we have specialists who are doing "controlled and directed research on writers' composing processes" (85). Even graduate assistants in traditional literary programs are getting their in-service training, according to Hairston, from rhetoric and composition specialists in their departments (87). That Hairston saw empirical research in composition as a defense against the domination of literary studies becomes clear in "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing"published in 1992, ten years after "The Winds of Change." In the essay she refers back to her 1985 CCCCchair's address in which she warned that the field needed to establish its psychological and intellectual independence from the literary critics if it hoped to flourish. She then proceeds to rail against the radical left whom she thinks are attempting to co-opt the field (187). By 1992, though, empirical research was losing its power as a defense, and Hairston's tone changes from the spirited optimism of "TheWinds of Change"to anger and frustration. Linda Flower's "Cognition, Context, and Theory Building,"published in 1989, though ostensibly an acknowledgment of the social and political dimensions of writing, and hence an acceptance of approaches to language advanced by literary theorists committed to postmodernism, is ultimately an argument for the superiority of scientific approaches to research over other approaches. In this essay, Flower is indirectly responding to critics,

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no doubt including literary or cultural theorists within her own department, who challenge the idea that empirical research has greater authority than other forms of research. An essay by David Shumway, published several years after Flower's, suggests the nature of the critique of her work that may have motivated her essay. Shumway, a colleague of Flower's at Carnegie Mellon, acknowledges in "Science, Theory, and the Politics of Empirical Studies in the English Department"that Flower is not a naive empiricist. He nevertheless finds her claim that her work aims to build theory unconvincing and the cognitive theory she employs self-reproducing (155). Shumway suggests that empirical studies such as those conducted by Flower and others should be viewed as arguments that have the same epistemological status as other forms of discourse and that empirical data should be seen as having the same status as other forms of evidence (156). In "Cognition, Context, and Theory Building," Flower provides a careful, well-developed defense against her challengers, though she never explicitly acknowledges who they are or what their charges are. The goal of her essay, she says, is the development of an "integrated theoretical vision" that will bring together theories that explain literacy in terms of individual cognition and those that see social and cultural context as the motive force in literate acts (282). Her answer is an interactive theory that will explain how context cues cognition, and how cognition, in turn, mediates and interprets the particular world that context provides (282). She calls for a "grounded vision" that can place cognition in its context while celebrating the power of cognition to change that context (284). Flower claims that cognition and context interact equally and reciprocally, so there is no need to frame the question of how they can be integrated in terms of conflict or power imbalances (287). Flower aims to eliminate rigid boundaries and artificial distinctions, values integration and synthesis, and attempts to demonstrate that intellectual traditions are not necessarily competing and agonistic. As the essay proceeds, however, it becomes clear that she implicitly privileges empirical research over other forms of research. Flower takes pains to make it clear that she is not a naive positivist who believes that knowledge can be found simply by observing external reality and recording one's findings. She demonstrates she is aware that observation involves interpretation and argumentation when she says, "Within the conventions of research, however, the 'results' of a given study, especially those which merely show a correlation, are just one more piece of evidence in cumulative, communally constructed argument" (300). But while she has come a long way from the simplistic cognitive theories she was advancing in the late 70s and early 80s, she is finally not successful in

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overcoming her earlier commitments to cognitivism and positivism. For one thing, she has a limited conception of context. She says that context includes (but is apparently not limited to) other people, the past, and the social present, cultural norms, available language, intertextuality, assignment giving, and collaboration (287). It would thus seem here that context includes everything other than the individual language user. It becomes clear as the essay progresses, though, that for Flower, context means the immediate social context within which a writer is situated, the context of the classroom or of an immediate group of peers (287). The historical past, the linguistic system, intertextuality, and other factors seem to drop out of the picture entirely. And although Flower admits that context can be either nurturing or oppressive (289), it becomes obvious that the individual writer she describesinhabits a relatively benign world where intentions are purposeful and fully conscious. She dismisses conceptions of context that emphasize its overdetermination and complexity and conceptions of research that insist on the situatedness and partiality of the researcher. For all of Flower's insistence that research is not a simple matter of gathering and reporting data in a transparent way, she continues to use language such as "Good data is assertive and intractable" (299). Such statements suggest that the researcher is a passive absorberrather than an active agent, a view of research that is at odds with an interactional approach to language where the writer (who is also the researcher in this case) is seen as mediating contextual cues and as being a purposeful and active producer of meaning. Flower's desire to connect seemingly disparate discourses and to view their interaction as benign and non-conflictual, certainly a utopian impulse, becomes a defense of the authority and value neutrality of the empirical researcher and, implicitly, of the superiority of the results of such research over other kinds of research. Empiricismresults in authoritative truth claims because it makes use of data that accurately describe reality. Some Consequences and Alternatives I have argued that scientific approaches to the study of writing have often led to the development ofreductive conceptions of reading and writing, as well as to limited conceptions of the role of the researcher in the research process. Composition studies' longing for legitimacy and power within the academy has sometimes resulted in identifications that have had unfortunate consequences. Though valuable in providing composition studies an identity separate from that of literary studies early in the field's development, scientism has also provided composition studies a false sense of the significance and authority of its research results. But in recent years scien-

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tism has begun to lose its effectiveness as a defense against postmodernist literary theorists who insist that scientific truth claims are no more authoritative than other kinds of truth claims. A commitment to scientism has at times limited our vision of what should be investigated. Too often we have allowed other fields to dictate to us, not recognizing the importance of having research questions and methods grow out of our own problems and questions. Ellen Quandahl points out in "The Anthropological Sleep of Composition" that we have focused so exclusively on the writing student as the subject of composition that we have neglected to examine the work of reading and writing itself (426). This neglect is no doubt a result of allowing other fields and disciplines to determine what our research questions and methods will be rather than developing our own. As Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie observe in their essay "Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research," strong identifications with traditional approaches to empirical research have also resulted in our neglecting to collaborate with research subjects in the development of research questions, the interpretation of data at both the descriptive and interpretive levels, and the writing of research reports. One especially serious consequence of the early dominance of empiricist methods and epistemologies has been that feminist and other approaches that provide richly contextual and politicized representations of language have been ignored until quite recently. We have not developed strategies of resistance that these approaches would encourage. The story Nancy Sommers tells in "Between the Drafts" of her identification with more powerful male theorists and the consequence of this identification, a muting of her own voice, powerfully demonstrates the debilitating effects of "masculinized"approaches to research. She speaks of being stuck in a way of seeing, reproducing the thoughts of others, using them as her guides (28). Composition studies needs to develop strategies for resisting those aspects of the fields with which it has identified that threaten its development and growth. This does not necessarily mean that scientific methods and epistemologies need to be rejected. It does mean, though, that we cannot rely on our association with more powerful fields to confer authority on our work, and we have to borrow carefully and criticallylest we find ourselves asking inappropriate questions, employing inappropriate methods, and embracing perspectives that leave us vulnerable in the face of persistent challenges by literary theorists and others. The recent embrace within composition studies of discourses of resistance such as cultural studies and feminist studies is promising because it allows for self-reflexivity about research practices and for resistance to

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co-optation by dominant discourses. It also encourages collaboration among literary specialists and composition specialists. But identifications with discourses of resistance can be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than identifications with the sciences and the social sciences, since an ostensible commitment to the elimination of power imbalances can sometimes mask a will to power. As I have suggested, the authority of the sciences and the social sciences has been seriously challenged by compositionists in recent years. But that authority can be replaced by the authority of discourses of resistance, with the result that debilitating identifications take new forms rather than being eliminated. Some compositionists and the field itself are unquestionably gaining power within the academy. A reasonably healthy job market in composition studies and in related fields such as technical communication is an important contributing factor to our growing strength, especially given unhealthy markets in numerous other fields including the sciences. There is the possibility that in coming to power we will merely reproduce already existing power imbalances or create new ones. My hope, however, is that we will use the power we are achieving to develop democratic research practices and administrative and pedagogical structures.
I wish to thank Sharon Crowley, Lisa Ede, John Flynn, Glenda Gill, Debbie Acknowledgments: Fox, Gesa Kirsch, Susan Jarrett,Jennifer Slack, Kurt Spellmeyer, Rob Wood, and an anonymous CCC reviewer for the help they provided as I have revised the essay. I was also assisted by faculty and graduate students in the English Department at Ohio State University who listened to a version of the piece and provided very useful feedback.

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