Literacies, Lies and Silences: Girls Writing Lives in the Classroom

Although written language historically has relegated women to the silence of the margins, writing can place women’s voices among those that would be heard. Scholars in composition and rhetoric have done little since Janet Emig’s (1971) influential study of twelfth-grade writers to look at adolescent women’s specific situations and experiences vis-à-vis writing. This ethnographically designed book reinterprets Emig’s findings through the lens of Judith Butler’s performance theory and reports on t…