As a result, perhaps feminists should consider implementing a "dysfunctional literacy, for literacy itself guaranteed nothing" (Sledd 499). Since E.D. Hirsch has so graciously told us what every culturally literate person should know (Hirsch 146-215), perhaps feminists should consider advocating what we shouldn't know. We shouldn't know, for example, how to build a nuclear warhead. Or what constitutes "masculine" and "feminine." (After all, do masculine and feminine even exist if the major biological difference between men and women is genitalia? Will my clitoris enlarge if I am logical? Does a man's penis shrink when he cries?) In fact, perhaps that which we should most not know, is what we should know, for "the world is covered with signs that must be deciphered, and those signs, which reveal resemblances and affinities, are themselves no more than forms of similitude. To know must therefore be to interpret" (Foucault 32).

Any act of defining what constitutes literacy, then, is merely the definer's interpretation, which may be futile to discuss at all, "for there is no thing, literacy, only constellations of forms and degrees of literacy, shifting and turning as history rearranges the social formations in which they are embedded. Pieties about Literacy with a capital L ought to be scrutinized: Which Literacy? Whose Literacy? Literacy for what?" (Sledd 499). Indeed, such questions can just as easily be applied to feminism: Which feminism? Whose feminism? Feminism for what? Therein lies the parallel between issues of feminism and literacy, for to continue to privilege definition over interpretation is to perpetuate the domination cycle of our present culture. To continue to use the metaphor of silence to imply that women are voiceless or that the general populace is illiterate is to continue to privilege communication outside one's self, which, effect, nullifies all inner voices, for they do not exist if they cannot be heard.

I am not suggesting that women, minorities, and non-traditionally educated people have indeed not been maliciously silenced throughout history. But I do wonder if, like most groups that inevitably become dominating in order to overcome being dominated, feminists haven't become extremists, ignoring "the silence in women" in which "anything that falls into it has an enormous reverberation" (Duras 175). For example, as of August 28, Elizabeth Morgan's silence is still reverberating in the form of protection for her daughter. Morgan, a plastic surgeon with degrees from Harvard, Yale and Tufts (does that make her "literate?"), has spent the past year in a solitary cell at the District of Columbia Jail for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of her six-year-old daughter. Morgan hid her daughter rather than allow her ex-husband, who she claims has continually sexually molested her daughter, to have unsupervised visits with the child.

As a result, the judge holding her in contempt of court has ruled that Morgan could remain in jail until her daughter turns eighteen. While incarcerated, Morgan has published a textbook on cosmetic surgery, written several short stories, and completed a children's book (Prasso 6). Like reporters who refuse to reveal their sources, her silence, rather than her communication, is what is being "censored."

Perhaps, in our zest to be heard, we have "censored" our own silence as well. The patriarchy ran a blue light special, advertising "silence as ignorance," offering two for one voices, and we shopped until we dropped. Somewhere along our supposedly liberated hermeneutic spiral, we stopped listening and started talking. Yet, as Marguerite Duras suggests, what isn't said can be just as powerful as what is. "I know that when I write there is something inside me that stops functioning, something that becomes silent everything shuts off - the analytic way of thinking, thinking inculcated by college, studies, reading, experience... as if I were returning to a wild country" (175). Ultimately, to deny silence is to deny one's self, which, in the end, may be the only concern about which one can be literate. If there is, indeed, a need to define literacy it is only because we have a need to define the self, for the literacy crisis "is finally a crisis of identity in which tests and television, schools and a blur of culture conspire" to create "a denial of self' (Wheeler 17).

I believe feminists have not only a unique opportunity but a moral obligation to become more involved in the process of literacy, not to define it, but to keep it from being defined, no to limit it , but to continue to expand its boundaries. It is not enough to encourage women to write the body; we must encourage all people to write the self. "Identity - a cube of ice, unmeltable, at the center of oneself, formed from all sorts of sources - is a force that allows every writer - even students of writing - to write well" (Wheeler 16).,

Women, especially, who "have always been encouraged to take their opinions from others, to depend on others' approval for their own sense of self-worth" (Hedges, Wendt 82), should be all the more conscious not only of what determines ourselves, but also of what determines the concept of self in general. It helps little to have a self, if that self is considered illiterate. It helps little if Virginia Woolf is now accepted in the canon if the person who most needs to hear her voice cannot get into the university. It helps little to advocate writing the body if that body must conform to MLA style. it helps little to encourage the development of an imaginative self if our task is "to develop the reality principle, to enforce the status quo and equip the super ego with all its niggling conventions, down to and including, if possible, those of orthodox punctuation" (Sledd 503).

Feminists need to be aware that while we are expanding what it means to be women, men such as Hirsch and Bloom are narrowing what it means to be literate. In Texas, as of 1989, all students at state-supported universities will be required to pass a competency exam in reading, writing, and mathematics before being allowed to graduate. Once again the questions proliferate: What constitutes competency? What constitutes reading? What constitutes writing? Who will construct the test and who will decide what it is supposed to validate? If the test is anything like the College Board's Test of Standard Written English. it will be "designed to distinguish on the basis of trivial dialect differences between the upper-middle class and working people. After all, college and its textbooks are not for everyone This may be good training for what life has in store, but it is not education" (Sledd 503).

It is interesting that while the body of scholarship in feminist, Afro-American, and Native American studies has increased in recent years, so has the number of standardized placement and competency exams. While we were defining our voice, those enamored of the status quo were defining our audience. While we have been developing the self, the patriarchy has been determining who can have one.