Gender and Genre Continued

I have journals due in one of my current MA classes, but the instructor is only going to glance at them. I have done all of this work for very little return. I know, a journal is often written only for oneself, but I also wrote it as a conversation with the instructor which now will not happen. So as to make this a more fruitful endeavor, I am going to post some of the journals here. Enjoy and feel free to respond so as to make these truly a conversation.
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I got this article out of a book called Feminist Theory and Folklore, and so it is, indeed, about both of those subjects, but again, any kind of feminist approach to academia must also, or should also, in my mind, deal with boundary crossing. Right away on the first page of the article she talks “how people negotiate the categories that are imposed upon them” (71). Many of the restrictions of academic writing predate women’s mass entrance into the academy and represent patriarchal categories of what “counts” as academic writing, what “counts” as academic publishing, etc. I have underlined at least half of the first page because it says so much that I have come to love and agree with.

“Theories of gender and genre converge in their exploration of the problems of classification and the disruption of boundaries. Genre is often (emphasis mine) gendered . . . . Gender scholarship questions how cultural categories are reproduced and under what conditions women are complicit with or resistant to the reproduction of conventions.”

Schuman continues, talking about the way that “genre classification systems could represent the values of a culture” (72), and the way that “genre systems are as much about disputes, maintenance, and shifting of boundaries” (73). Thus, it is no wonder that feminists coming to academic would question those kinds of boundaries.