Best of the Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012, The. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ like Emme, Edna, Donna, Anna, and Dee1, is a member of the Red Hat Society (RHS), a national social club for women over age fifty, which describes itself as a way for women to “let go of burdensome responsibilities for a little while” (Red Hat Society). The growth of the group since its inception in 1997 is impressive; reportedly, its membership has exceeded one million women worldwide. According to Sue Ellen Cooper, the California woman who founded Red Hat Society, the group’s primary appeal “is our determination to find the joy in life, to grasp the fun there is to be had at this age—fifty and beyond” (8). Cooper describes the recruitment base of RHS as former “wives, mothers, and, often, career women [who] have survived the busiest, most hectic years,” and the official website promotes the social activity of the group as “an opportunity for those who have shouldered various responsibilities at home and in the community their whole lives, to say goodbye to burdensome responsibilities and obligations for a little while” (Cooper 8; Red Hat Society).

      There have been an untold number of press accounts of the group as it has attracted attention in each new community where chapters have formed. The archives of the The Providence Journal have chronicled RHS’s growth in Rhode Island since chapters began cropping up in the state between 2002 and 2003. A profile of a South County chapter emphasizes its new members’ enthusiasm to become part of the national trend, “in search of a silly state of mind” (Fleming C3). Among the reasons they participate in the group, the Rhody Red Hatters count making new friends, taking trips, participating in cultural events, and generally breaking up the monotony of daily routines and feelings of isolation a person can experience at and after retirement age.

      In addition to this notoriety, the group has also drawn critique. A 2008 editorial comment by Paula Span in The New York Times denigrates the role that the hats, as a piece of the organization’s savvy merchandising tie-ins, play in the RHS’s claim on fun. Span writes: “I think I’ll do my socializing bare-headed. When I’m old, I’ll probably wear mostly black, the way I do now. And I’ll call the group I have dinner with ‘my friends’” (9). Span’s position hints at a problem more significant than style, however. Like many social clubs of which the purpose is leisure, RHS requires of its members expendable income and time; it therefore suffers from a correlative lack of diversity in the classes and races of its members. Though RHS publicity documents use the phrase “all walks of life” to describe its members, there is little evidence of a wide scope of participation by women who are other than white and middle-class in my research experience (Red Hat Society). Other accounts of the organization, including leisure studies research by Careen M. Yarnal et al, describe a similar lack of difference among the women in their survey samples (152). My study, open to all eighty members of RHS in Rhode Island, attracted only white, middle-class participants. This perhaps reflects the state’s overall demographics: 88.5% white with an 11% poverty rate (United States Census Bureau).

      And, while the group’s several corporate sponsorship and licensing agreements have come under some critique, they are also a reflection of the RHS’s growth and influence (Span 9). In its manual of sorts, Fun and Friendship After Fifty, RHS founder Cooper explains the reason such a group is warranted in the US, particularly for aging women: “middle-aged women have gotten used to going unnoticed, to being invisible” (9). Sandra and the other participants’ reasons for belonging to RHS resound with this claim; they joined RHS as an “antidote” to the conditions of living as retired, aging women, which include loneliness, complacency, and—above all—mundanity.

      In combating complacency, these women live anything but mundane lives. Data drawn from my interviews with them reveal that literacy permeates their activities from everyday writing and reading in the kitchen to formal literacy endeavors such as taking college courses and teaching enrichment classes in community centers. The women are very proud of the latter undertakings since they value literacy greatly in its traditional forms, especially writing and reading for educational and professional purposes. At the same time, the women see little value in the everyday literacy practices they undertake. Specifically, literacies such as the processes and practices of cooking are held in lower esteem than more visible and text-based Literacy comprised of, for these women, personal and public writing projects. In taking up a variety of recipe uses in my participants’ literacy experiences both in and out of the kitchen, this article addresses a debate resulting from the “social turn” in literacy studies, which shifted traditional notions of literacy from a text-based, formally-taught set of skills learned during one’s childhood and useful in institutional settings to an extratextual set of sociocognitive practices acquired throughout a person’s life useful in a variety of contexts (see Deborah Brandt, David Barton & Mary Hamilton, and Deborah Williams Minter et al, among others). While these characteristics of literacy are generally agreed upon, a divide exists among social practice literacy theorists regarding the potential for social power that literacy affords its users. Some (Paulo Freire, Morris Young, and Jacqueline Jones Royster, for instance) ascribe literacy the power to overcome oppression, inferior status, and unjust conditions. Others (Sylvia Scribner, as well as Brandt & Katie Clinton) are highly cautious in ascribing literacy such power, given that access to literacy is usually in the hands of the powerful, whether or not users know it.

      This debate frames my participants’ experiences in acquiring professional literacies, which helped them resist the conventional domestic roles and responsibilities they faced as young women in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As professionals who came of age during second-wave feminism, the participants in this study struggled to pursue and achieve their educations and professions. Sandra is a retired English and ESL teacher with a master’s degree in Education. The contexts in which she and the other women acquired their formal literacies necessitated pitting their home lives, which included homemaking and childrearing, against their personal and professional goals. An attendant result of their experiences is the women’s simultaneous undervaluing of everyday literacies and especially those useful in housework. As this article will describe further, the cooking practices of two women in particular—though rife with the type of decision-making, material, and sociopolitical effects that characterize social practice literacy—are downplayed, unrecognizable even to the women themselves. Sandra’s sound bites offer one reason why. In describing patterns surrounding the women’s uses both in and out of the kitchen of a traditionally “domestic” text, the recipe, this article demonstrates how the women both align themselves with professional, community, and personal pursuits and simultaneously denigrate the idea of intentional, motivated participation in housework.

      Playing It By Ear: Donna and Edna

      Rather than referring to recipes in cookbooks or on websites, Donna and Edna each compose original recipes. However, in describing their cooking practices, Donna and Edna actually have nothing—no artifacts, that is—to share. Rather than relying on websites, cookbooks, or recipe cards, they compose in situ, or work from ingredients on hand to address the demands they face in their immediate, rhetorical situations. In this way, the women’s practices are comprised of basic rhetorical principles: they must consider their audience (children? adults? how many?), purpose (to nourish? to impress?), genre (simple lunch? Sunday dinner? party?), and material conditions (various ingredients and tools, money, and time). All of these elements vary, of course, according to the woman and the situation.

      Donna, a semi-retired nurse who has four adult children, says she uses “no writing, no recipe cards,” but instead engages in “instinctive cooking” of fresh foods, eschewing canned fruit, vegetables, and beans. Calling her cast iron griddle her “second hand,” she goes into detail about the preparation of potatoes: “I do them boiled and sliced and fried until they’re crispy and then added to beans—from scratch.” Donna calls this meal good for “clean energy, a perfect balance.” Partially in response to the material conditions in which she cooked while living overseas, where varieties of packaged and canned foods popular in the US were unavailable, Donna also counts among her motivations to use fresh ingredients her daughter’s sensitivities to preservatives in processed, packaged foods. Importantly, Donna describes the values that underscore her interest in fresh foods and home cooking: health and nutrition. As a nursing professional and a mother who СКАЧАТЬ