Lunsford

In reading for another class, I came across a line from Catherine Gallagher’s “Historical Scholarship’: ‘When critics specify exactly which aspect of authorial identity was thus threatened, it often turns out to be masculinity, and hence the submerged topic of the historical gender of authorship arises.” The phrase “historical gender” gave me pause. The author went on to put it into a context of the feminist desire to recover a history of women writers, but I couldn’t shake the anthropomorphic connotations of the phrase: the huge, dark body that keeps following on the heels of the present has a gender. In anthropomorphizing history, it does appear a single entity—genderizing it introduce a conflict. Exactly how does this entity work out its bipolar sexual identity?
I’m sure it is influenced by people like Lunsford. As Nancy gave her presentation, I didn’t develop an image of an individual woman so much I thought about a historical movement—an identity that has come about through a hard core social contructionist attitude. The idea of a “self creating, self expressive subjectivity” is historically gendered male. The ideas of Lunsford are opposed to this notion in every way possible: collaboration, ownership issues, multiple intelligences. I can see how she could regard the conservative/radical debate between Elbow and Bartholomae as academic.