Title?

My college roommate (a fellow English major) and I hated writing titles for our papers, and hated even more getting papers back from teachers with "title?" scrawled across the top. So when we read and commented on each other's papers, we always wrote "title?" at the top, just to be obnoxious.

Because I didn't have any other ideas, and because my husband insisted that simply titling my blog with my name was lame, I borrowed the phrase "standing under" from Krista Ratcliffe. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, she writes:

[U]nderstanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent--with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well. To clarify this process of understanding, rhetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular--and very fluid--standpoints....

Standing under our own discourses means identifying the various discourses embodied within each of us and then listening to hear and imagine how these discourses might affect not only ourselves but others.... Standing under the discourses of others mean first, acknowledging the existence of these discourses; second, listening for (un)conscious presences, absences, unknowns; and third, consciously integrating this information into our world views and decision making. (28-29)

This may not be a perfect fit for what we are doing in this class, but it has been in my mind since reading Ratcliffe's book in FemRhet last semester and I think it is beginning to inform all the work I do.