Women, Words, Writing

Women, Words, Writing

During my morning commute, I cut myself off from the world around me and think. The last thing I see before "shutting off" generally starts a process of free association that is carried on by memory. For instance, this morning a woman sat beside me, reading The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams. Williams is someone I have heard of and read. I remembered her essay "And We Are Not Married"-a wonderful sample of women's writing. For the rest of the time I traveled by subway, I thought of pieces of writing I have read that, somehow, bear the mark of their writer's gender.

Now I'm home, at my desk, and I am re-reading the texts I have thought of in the morning, trying to understand why and where I feel the mark of gender. Take, for example, Williams's essay; as I go along, I am fascinated by its complexity, by its huge network-or should I say labyrinth?-of ideas, so huge that the reader can easily get lost, become powerless, and abandon the struggle. Williams argues, among other things, that the practice of certain forms of rhetoric constitute acts of ideology, that style is never neutral, so that types of writing and behavior are always suffused with political content. One of her primary rhetorical tropes is the telling-and retold-anecdote, which always requires interpretation. With each story she relates, new possible paths appear, and one doesn't know which of them is the right one: the "Benetton incident," with its three consecutive versions. Then Tawana Brawley. Maxine Thomas. Mrs. Williams, her mother. Herself. Professor Bell and Geneva Crenshaw. Mr. Williams. Finally, the dream.

The stories are presented at length, and commented upon; each affirmation is supported-either because of the author's juridical experience or because of her exactness-by footnotes. This makes the overall structure of the essay a bit confusing. For example, the listing of opinions expressed about Maxine Thomas is backed up by eighteen footnotes. The reader's eye has to go back and forth in order to read everything, and going back and forth eighteen times can be very challenging.

In addition to that, the language is sometimes difficult; at times even impenetrable: "the rhetoric of increased privatization, in response to racial issues, functions as the rationalizing agent of public unaccountability, and, ultimately, irresponsibility" (696). One has to stop reading and figure out what she means, to figure out the idea behind that gathering of legal (and thus certainly esoteric) terms.