Judy,
You wrote:
"I think of genres and identities as "out there", available for
mixing and matching, malleable (necessarily malleable, as Gordon so clearly
indicated) in the instance. We choose our affiliations to a great degree; we
talk the kind of talk we want to talk; we perform as good or bad cops or
smart or helpless students or caring or competitive co-participants.... "
Isn't the degree of malleability one of the most important issues? One can
think of obvious genres that are beyond the possibility of adopting (say me
selecting genre's appropriate to a chinese gangster in San Francisco). True
one can be a good cop or a bad cop but a lot of research on cops shows them
to form a very closed community--cops socialize with other cops primarily,
etc.
My concern about calling a genre a tool has to do with the subject of that
tool. From a Bakhtinian perspective, insofar as all genres presuppose
audiences, that subject is clearly not an individual. Individuals adopting
a certain genre are shaped by the use of that genre and become part of that
genres collective reproduction. It's a two (or more?) way street.
Paul H. Dillon
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