• What are the different expectations and interpretations that different audiences might have of a text?
• How can a writer imagine an audience?
• What kinds of information about the "world" must we have in order to imagine diverse audiences and their probable reading/interpretative strategies?
• What are the risks of imagining audience (or: what kinds of stereotypes and assumptions do we carry about groups of people on which we might base our assumptions of audience?).
• How can we increase our awareness of different reading/interpretative groups (audiences) and their different knowledges and perceptions?

What I Expect From You:

• An extensive reading notebook that records the reading/writing issues we define in class, your progress and process as a reader/writer, your strengths and weaknesses and strategies for meeting the writing requirements of the class. Reading notebooks will recieve a letter grade when they are submitted; they cannot be revised and I will not accept them late. As informal writing assignments, I am grading these for ideas, thinking, engagement with the text, not for punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. Your grade depends upon the depth and quality of your thinking.
• Active participation in class discussion. 
• 2 short papers (2-3 pages and 3 - 5 pages)) and a final web-based project (equivalent to (7-10 pages). These assignments will be determined partly by the context of class reading/thinking; in this sense, the class's responses to and evaluations of the readings are as important as the reading itself.  Our discussion is, in fact, an important "text" of the class! In part, I will direct these writings so that they form an assignment sequence designed to help you progressively develop your writing voice, awareness of your own process as a writer, your analytical and argumentative skills.
• A final exam that defines your progress this semester.

• The bulk of the course grade, 60%, will be determined by the formal writing assignments.  Thus, the grade breakdown is as follows:
• 25% -- Informal Reading Notebooks and class participation
• 10% -- Final Exam
• 65% -- Formal Writing Assignments

• Track your writing progress: what writing issues are you working on, how are you working on them, how are critical reading, thinking, and writing skills evolving?  Use your reading notebook entries and your writing issues checklists for your evaluated work to track your progress.

Readings/Texts

• Course Packet -- at ReproGraphics
• You will also need to get a college-level dictionary and a Handbook.  I don't care what handbook you get-- I suggest that you find a good used one from either the local bookstore or www.amazon.com.  The Blair Handbook has an extensive online support site at http://cw.prenhall.com/bookbind/public_html/pubbooks/fulwiler/ and Your Dictionary http://www.yourdictionary.com is a quick and easy look-up.  I have additional links to online writing resources at http://www2.gasou.edu:80/facstaff/lamy/tools.html.

Reading Notebook Entry # 1
Write a one-sentence summary of: 1) The SCRAP mission statement; 2) The 8 Table Scraps; 3) The relationship between the Prison-Industrial Complex Poster and SCRAP's mission statement. (exercise in summary)

Reading Notebook Entry # 2
From Peggy McIntosh's "Unpacking White Privilege," explain these points: (exercise in summary)

• "I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon of white preivlege that was similarly denied and protected."
• "For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facint it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If therse things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not hwat one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own."
• "For this reason, the word 'privilege' now seems to me misleading. We want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically. Power from u nearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate."
• "We might at least start by distinguising between positive advantages which we can work to spread and negative types of advantages which unelss rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies."
• Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see 'whiteness' as a racial identity."

Reading Notebook Entry #3
From the SCRAP site, read the essays by students and the letters about racism and white privilege. Write your reaction to the ideas/concepts these writings make. This is an informal assignment, so you do not need to worry about formal writing issues here. Think of this as a diary or a letter to me, not an essay. You are free to tell the truth -- I perfectly understand that some of you will disagree, perhaps react badly to, many of the ideas discussed in these works. For this writing, practice telling the truth of how you are responding in a respectful and thoughtful way. (exercise in interpretation and self-reflection)

Reading Notebook Entry #4
Outline the main points of Yamada’s “Invisibility” and relate these points to the SCRAP and “White Privilege” readings. (exercise in drawing relationships, generalizations, synthesizing)

Reading Notebook Entry #5
In bell hooks' "Representations of Whiteness,' re-read p. 173, beginning with the las full paragraph "For some individuals . . ." througha p. 177, ending with the first full paragraph on that page ". . . profound psychological impact of white racist domination." Pay careful attention to her examples of terror in her travels between black and white communities, in other countires, in her professional world. After considering these examples of travel and terror, explain what hooks means by:

• p. 174: "Reminded of another time when I was strip searched by Frewnch officials, who were stopping black people to make sure we were not illegal immigrants and/or terrorists, I think that one fantasy of whitenss is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. This projection enables many white people to imagine there is no representation of whiteness as terror, as terrorizing. Yet it is this representtion of whiteness in the black imagination, first learned in the narrow confines of poor black rural community that is sustained by my travels to many different locations."
• p. 176: "It is the telling of our history that enables politica self recovery. In contemporary society, white and black people alike believed that racism no longer exists. This erasure, h owever mythic, defuses the representation of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness. The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror. It has also become a way to perpetuate the terror by providing a cover, a hiding place. Black people still feel the terror, still associate it with whitenss, but are rarely able to articulate the varied ways we are terrorized because it is easy to silence by accusations of reverse racism or by suggesting that black folks who talk about the ways we are terrorized by whites are merely evoking victimization to demand special treatment."

After putting these two quotes into your own words, explain your reaction to hooks' points. Does she reflect your experience of the world? Does hooks' expression of her experience of the world make you sad, angry, defensive, compassionate? If hooks is the "other" to you, what is the experience of encountering this "other-ness"? If hooks puts into words your experience fo the world, what is your experience of finding yourself in her words?

Reading Notebook #6:
1) Reread your paper, re-reading my comments as you go;
2) Summarize my commentary, and discuss those points that you think might be helpful to your revision as well as those points that you may not agree with me about or that you do not think you want to focus your revision energy on;
4) Explain how, after this exercise, you might revise your paper.

Reading Notebook #7
This is a group reading notebook exercise -- submit one response for your group, with each group member's name on it. (Please email your response to me.) Imagine that you are teaching this reading to the class. Your group is charged with culling the most important quotes from Moraga's reading and developing questions for your classmates that can help them interpret these quotes and fully understand Moraga's main points in her article.

Wrap-up Moraga Text
These notes look pretty much like what I remember of the class :-) The only thing that made me cringe (which about what I remembered through reading your notes that I left undone in the classroom!) is the remembering that I did not wrap up the real point I wanted to make by having the students teach Moraga's text the day we had their stuff on the overhead. I wanted them to have the visceral experience of stepping into a role for which they were not psychologically prepared (i.e., the teacher's role), even though they *were* prepared in a sense (they'd studied the text, framed the questions to ask, picked out the quotes to use -- were told to and did practice together acting as "teacher's" for the text) -- so, my idea behind this was to demonstrate how crucial this issue of voice that Moraga discusses is -- they had the questions and the "words" and the "practice" to be "teacher," but not the authority of the voice -- then, I was supposed to tell them about Pierre Bourdieu's power of the performative utterance and run through the difference of the subject position of the speaker; where two of us can say exactly the same thing, but, from the speaking position of power and authority, these words mean something different (are heard and responded to differently) than they are from the speaking position of marginality, invisibility. But we didn't get this far, in part because the really way cool students in that class quickly accomodated to the new roles they were taking. As I perceive these exercises, the longer I am silent and refuse the authoritative speaking position of "teacher," the more other students develop that voice and take on that role. Of course, in some classes, this exercise bombs because the students are not seriously invested in the work, but, in this class, I think that, by the end, the exercise just took off and flew because the students are really serious and invested in the ideas. So, I never did get around to explaining the point of this exercise (which I think has to be explained after the fact so that students can see if what I project matches up with their experience) --

Reading Notebook #9
In our class discussion of Hammad's "First Writing Since," you picked out these stanzas as important:

• Ashley S., p. 117 "If one more person asks me if I knew . . . "
• Lisette, p. 117 "Thank you to the woman who saw me . . . "
• Ashlee H, p. 116 "There are Plenty of thank you's in NY right now . . .
• Mel p. 118 "Shit is complicated, and I don't know what to think . . . " & p. 119 "I feel like my skin is real thin, and that my eyes are only . . .
• Jeremy p. 120 "My baby brother is a man now . . .
• Ashley B p. 120 "There is life here . . .
• Joanna p. 115 "First, please God, let it be a mistake, the pilots heart failed . . . & p. 118 "When we talk about Holy Books . .
• Amanda p. 120 "There is no poetry in this time. There are causes . . .
• Mike p. 119 "In america, it will be those amongst us who refuse blanket attacks . . .

I want you to think about the range of emotions that this poem triggered. What emotions did it trigger in you? From our class discussion, what sense did you get about how other students responded to the poem? Why do you think Hammad wrote the poem? What is her anguish, and what is her prayer?

Reading Notebook #10
I know you were missing pp. 452 & 453 from this reading -- my apologies. The first question for this notebook comes from pp. 452, so be sure to talk this point over with your peers since you will be writing somewhat cold.

• what is the point Accad is making when she writes ""silence of the Auschwitz ovens / repeated in the silence of crucified Jenin (hint: you may have to google search auschwitz, and I'm betting most of you will have to google Jenin -- try this site to start http://this.is/jenin/
• explain this exchange between Accad and a fellow traveler (p. 453): "He says 'Things will get back to normal after we get rid of the wrong-doers.' I tell him: 'But we are not going to the roots f the problems, so how can really have long-lasting solutions?'"
• Explain Accad's point, p. 456: "How to communicate the necessity of such love to the rest of the world? . . . This love which is not mystical, nor narcissistic, nor idealized, but which seeks the growth of the other, the development andfulfillment of the other? How to show what such love can do?"
• Accad's primary point, of course is that the social construction of male sexuality is at the root of war. In her section on sexuality and war, pp. 458 - 462, she outlines the basics of her theory. I don't expect you to understand all of this, and I certainly don't expect you to jump up and down an agree with it (though I do :-) What I am hoping is that you will read this, encounter the idea (as we discussed with hooks' piece), and start thinking beyond the borders of what you might previously have thought re: war, gender, and identity. From this frame of reference:
  • explain what you understand of Accad's theory of sexuality and war
  • how do you respond to/encounter this theory (there is no "right" or "wrong"/ "good" or "bad" answer here -- I am just trying to get an idea about how her work comes across to you :-)

Reading Notebook #11
My sense is that Bronwyn Winter's "If Women Really Mattered . . . " is long enough and technical enough that you might get lost in it. Is this your experience? What did you think of /feel like when you were reading this? I think this is an especially important peice becauase Winter was in Afghanistan during the Loya Jirga and "elections" processes and writes from first-hand experience of the people, events, and issues in Afghanistan. Since so much of what we in this country know about Afghanistan at this cultural moment is second, third, and fourth hand, based on very little factual evidence and even less understanding of complicated political and historical contexts, I really wanted you to have the experience of encountering factual, reflective writing about the complexity of this situation. Again, I don't expect you to understand all of this work, and I am certainly not looking to "test" you on it. What I am looking for is that you encounter it. As part of this process of encounter, tell me what you make of these points:

• p. 493 -- Afghanistan loaded with land mines; MAPA estiames between 150 - 300 deaths per month from land mines; can't "regenerate livestock farms and agriculture in much of Afghanistan because of the mine" (494).
• Almost half of Afghanistan's population in July 2001 was under 14 years old (p. 496) -- the numbers of war orphans, the decimated economic infrastructure, and the problems of social rebuilding are even worse after the US attacks. Winter criticizes the West for leaving Afghanistan without the necessary help to rebuild when she says: ". . . it seems that while the West can eadily find the moeny to destroy lives, it is rather more hard-pressed to find the money to rebuild them" (497).
• Winter describes what she calls uncontrolled psychosis under the Taliban, controlled neurosis under the Loya Jirga, and then goes on to give an explanation of the social and political context out of which Afghanistan has to rebuild.
• In the section on violence against women, Winter says that "women are both universal symbols of masculinist ideals of culture, identity, honour, nation, even justiste and liberty,and uniersal targets, both for nationalist appropriation . . . and for fundamentalist, extreme-right and ethnicist violence" (509). In this argument, she claims the U.S. uses women's rights as a pretext for war against Afgahnistan, but that we cannot understand the real nature of the violence Afghani women suffer unless we understand the full range of social, economic, cultural, and symbolic violences that not only Afghani women, but women around the world, suffer. So that we have to understand both the burqa and the tight-fitting business suit, high heels, and make-up as a partiarchal violence enforcing requirements that "women, once they have crossed the symbolic barrier into that space designated by men as public and thus male, must tailor their appearance and behaviour to masculinis prescriptions" (514).
• Finally, Winter names the world refugee crisis -- 80% of whom are women and children -- as one of the most serious problems facing the future of this world.

After encountering this article and these points, I'd like for you tell me if you found out anything you didn't know from these three readings -- do they reflect back to you your understanding of the post 9-11 world? Do they give you a different image of this world? What is it like to see America's war on terror through the eyes of women who have lived through the bombing, the violence, and the suffering of war? None of the three women we have read thinks there is an easy answer to "what to do," but none of them believes the present U.S. actions are the "right" answers, either. What kinds of emotions and/or conflicts does reading these women's critiques bring up for you?