Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender

Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’”
“What Foucault and other poststructuralists have been arguing the last fifteen or twenty years is considerably easier to state than to act on: we are at once constituted and unified as subjects in language and discourse” (677).
“The question then is how to read what students write. And at issue is the unquestioned power of a pedagogical authority that insists that teachers concentrate on form at the expense of content” (678).
“Those who occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse. Postermodern rhetoric would being by assuming that all discourses warrant variable subject positions ranging from mostly satisfying to mostly unsatisfying for those individuals named by them” (679).
“Discursive resistance requires opportunities for resistance. Altering an institutionalized discourse probably requires an unremitting negative critique of its ideology, a critique that is most often carried out in the academy by attempting to replace a particular theory (e.g., of science or art of education or law) with another” (679).