Wr20: The Body In/On The Market

Wr20: Writing About Real Things

Wr20: Writing Sex & Gender

ENG: Sexuality, Censorship & U.S. Culture

Wr20: Rewriting the 1950s

Wr20: American Dreams, Gothic Landscapes

ENG: Literature & U.S Urban Centers

SexStudies: Sexuality in Postwar American Lit

ENG: Short Story & Community

ENG: Transgression & Postwar Suburbia

GenEd: Interpretation of Lit

Download the PDF for this course here.

W R I T I N G   2 0 – Spring 2009 (24-34-45)
Indeterminate Subjects: Writing Sex & Gender

CONTACT INFORMATION

Professor Keith Wilhite
Office: 200Y Art Building (East campus)
Email: keith.wilhite@duke.edu

COURSE DESCRIPTION
The central goal of this course is to give you guided practice in academic writing of the sort you’ll be expected to produce at Duke University and in professional life.  Academic writing is intellectual writing not primarily because of who writes it (university students, scholars, and other public intellectuals), and not because of its subject matter (which ranges from politics to literature to biology to engineering), but rather because intellectual writing typically includes certain identifiable features, all of which you will learn to master:

• it locates its project within the context of previous thinking on the subject
• it responds to and makes use of the work of others
• it judiciously offers reasons to support its claims
• it recognizes its guiding assumptions and the implications of its findings

I have designed the course to highlight your relationship as a writer to the words and ideas of others.  Such a relationship carries certain responsibilities, such as careful reading, thoughtful response, and reasoned analysis and argument.  The assignments will invite you to use the words and ideas of others as points of contention, extension, and departure.  At times you may disagree with what a writer has concluded, but often you may choose to build upon and extend what’s been said, or take your argument in a new direction altogether.  When composing intellectual writing, how you read is intimately connected to how you write.  We will practice strategies for responsive reading, emphasizing how you can put pressure on previous findings and arguments and how to focus your writing on such responses.  Rather than begin with the question, “What do I have to say?” we will begin by asking: “What have others had to say about this subject, and how might I respond to them?”

WHY SEX AND GENDER?
The primary subject of this course is academic writing, but you must have an issue to address in your writing, and something to read about.  I assume that you have signed up for the course partly because you hold some interest in the topics of sex and gender or would like to explore how writers frame arguments about sex and gender for specific disciplines and audiences. 
The idea for this course emerged from thinking about sex, gender, and writing as “indeterminate subjects.”  But what does that mean?  Recent scholarship has raised a number of challenging questions about the connection between sex and gender, the usefulness and limitations of thinking about gender or sexuality in strictly binary terms—male/female, heterosexual/homosexual—and about the fraught relationship between genetics, social construction, and sexual desire.  Such potential ambiguity or imprecision has implications for how we think and write about the connection between the self and the body, and how that intellectual work bears on our understanding of a gender or sexual “identity.”  And all these concerns hinge on questions of value: What is normal? What is natural? What is deviant? What is traditional? What is new? What is acceptable? 

Because this is an academic writing course, it is useful to explore how such questionshave played out across a variety of texts, and I would contend that the indeterminacy of language and writing should lend complexity to that exploration.  In other words, language and writing are also embroiled in questions about identity, representation, and the arbitrary relationship between words and things.  Language—in all its forms—helps negotiate our relationship to others and the world around us, but as soon as we sit down to write, we realize how quickly representation becomes an issue: How do I best put complex ideas and feelings into words? How do I articulate a sense of self or identity through writing? 

In intellectual contexts, writers are always writing with and struggling against the limits and possibilities of language, trying to articulate as concisely and clearly as possible positions on issues that themselves seem to resist perfect clarity or resolution.  Therefore, we’ll consider competing arguments and approaches to our subject in order to discover both WHAT writers have to say about sex and gender and HOW they say it.  We’ll pay particular attention to writers’ methods of debate and exchange, identifying the strengths and limits of their writing while exploring how the controversy might be framed differently.  You’ll have numerous opportunities to deliberate (in seminar discussions and in writing) on issues that resist easy answers.  Such work will give you practice in navigating similar public issues that call for reasoned analysis and response.
           
REQUIRED TEXTS
The following texts will help us think about our topic and the practice of academic writing:

AT THE BOOKSTORE
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex
Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts
Harvey, Gordon. Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students

ON BLACKBOARD
I have installed a “Course Readings” page on our Blackboard (Bb) site where you will find most of the articles and chapters you will be required to read over the course of the semester.  You’ll be responsible for printing, reading, and bringing these texts with you to class on the assigned date.   

COURSE GOALS AND PRACTICES
The only way to become a better writer is through practice—not only through the revision of your own writing, which is critical, but through developing the practice of reading and responding to the written work of others.  With that in mind, all Writing 20 courses share three common goals:
           
1.  Engage with the work of others. In pursuing a line of inquiry or research, intellectual writers need to identify and engage with what others have written about a text or issue. This academic move asks that you read closely and attend to context, and that you make fair, generous, and assertive use of the work of others.

2.  Articulate a position. The point of engaging with the work of others is to move beyond what has been said before. Writers respond to gaps, inconsistencies, or complexities in the literature of their field and anticipate possible counterarguments in order to provide new evidence or interpretations that advance clear and interesting positions.

3.  Situate writing within specific contexts. In order to best contribute to their fields of inquiry, writers need to develop an awareness of the expectations and concerns of their intended readers. These expectations include not only appropriate and effective support for arguments, but also conventions of acknowledgement, citation, document design, and presentation of evidence.

We’ll work on meeting these goals by honing your skills as readers and writers:

1.  Researching. You will critically read scholarly work about our course topic. This research may include locating sources, questioning methodology, examining evidence, identifying social or political contexts, or considering the implications of a work.

2.  Workshopping. Academic writers reread their own writing and share work-in-progress with colleagues in order to reconsider their own arguments. You will learn how to become critical readers of your own prose through responding to one another in classroom workshops, seminar discussions, and/or conferences.

3.  Revising. You will be asked to rethink your work-in-progress: to extend, refine, and reshape what you have to say and how you say it.

4.  Editing. As a final step in preparing documents, you will edit for clarity and correctness.

 

THE PLAN OF WORK
As you might expect, training in intellectual writing requires your commitment of time and energy.  You will need to develop the habits and discipline of a writer: maintaining a regular schedule that allows you to work with texts for sustained periods of time, finding a place for writing that works best for you, mapping out time to draft and revise your work.  There is nothing especially fancy about this. The key for most writers is to develop a routine, as you would if you were learning to play a musical instrument. The best way to grow as a thinker and writer is through practice.
           
There are two Major Projects (MPs) in the course.  Each project begins with your reading a text or set of texts.  Next, you’ll prepare a Major Project Draft that I will respond to in writing.  Your classmates will also respond to your work-in-progress and review your writing.  As part of the revising process, you will compose a “Revising Plan” that articulates what feedback you have found particularly helpful and how you plan to put that advice into practice.  Finally, you will revise your draft in light of seminar discussions, my comments, and the remarks of colleagues.  Drafting and revising papers involves you in a steady rhythm of daily work.  If you fall behind, it will be difficult to catch up.  Therefore, I generally do not accept late papers.  If you find that you are stuck, or feel that you cannot meet a particular deadline, I ask that you email me so we can address the problem together.
           
In addition to the MPs, you will also submit a number of less formal writing projects.  You will be responsible for three Blog Postings (300 words each) and six brief Blog Responses (50-100 words each) over the course of the semester; you will write three Short Essays (500-750 words each); and you will assemble an Annotated Bibliography of three sources in preparation for MP2.  In-class writing and “think pieces” or questions for discussion will also be part of the day-to-day work of the course. 

ENGAGEMENT
Your preparation for class and your responses to others (in our seminar discussions, in peer reviews, and on the blog) is central to the goals and practices of our course.  As such, I’ll expect you to be in the room, on time, and ready to participate every class period this semester.
           
I will assess your engagement in seminar based on two questions: 1.) What observations, questions, or arguments did you bring to the table pertaining to the day’s work? and, 2.) How well did you respond to your colleagues’ observations, questions, and work-in-progress?

If you are not present in class, or you consistently arrive late, you cannot effectively engage in the work of the course.  Work missed as a result of an absence (i.e. workshops or in-class writing) cannot be made up at a later date.  You are responsible for keeping up with any information you missed during your absence, especially any discussion of upcoming assignments.  Check our Bb Announcements page regularly, and please contact another student if you’re absent from class.

GRADING
I will calculate your grade for the course in the following way:

Engagement in Seminar - 10%
Annotated Bibliography (w/ MP2) - 10%
Blog Postings & Responses - 15%
Short Essays - 15%
-Major Project 1 (4-6 pp.) - 20%
Major Project 2 (8-10 pp.) - 30%

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY
Writing with Sources addresses the issue of academic dishonesty, and I will direct you to a set of web materials available on our Bb site concerning plagiarism and citation.  We’ll also discuss definitions of plagiarism and how to avoid misuses of source material as you compose your Major Projects.  As an academic writer, you are personally responsible at all times for properly acknowledging and citing your source materials in Blog Posts, Short Essays, and Major Projects.  The penalty for plagiarism is failure of the assignment and, possibly, the course.  Since academic writing draws heavily upon the work of others, it is vital that you understand the distinctions between the ethical use of others’ texts and the unethical appropriations of their work.

THE WRITING STUDIO
The Writing Studio offers free help with drafting and revising any writing project associated with any course at Duke.  Trained tutors are available to help students who are struggling with writing, as well as students who are confident writers in search of critical feedback to help them polish their work.  You can meet with a tutor on a one-time basis to help with a particularly difficult assignment, or you can meet with a tutor on a regular basis.  To learn more, or to make an appointment, please visit the Writing Studio website at http://uwp.aas.duke.edu/wstudio/.  

COURSE SCHEDULE
READING & WRITING ASSIGNMENTS ARE DUE AT THE START OF CLASS ON DATE    
SPECIFIED.  YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BRING A COPY OF THE DAY’S REQUIRED READING(S) WITH YOU TO CLASS.