The problem is they didn't expect us to have so many. You know how we women are - we never can make up our minds. So we have an intellectual self and a down-home mother self, a lover self, and a pseudo-self, a self created "in love and in joy, in sorrow and in despair, in response to the realities of [our] lives and as an expression of [our] dreams" (Hedges, Wendt 8). As such, "feminism has split again and again until it has become feminisms, a set of groups, each with its own ideology, identity, and agenda" (Stimpson 191).

Yet, in the same way feminist have learned to live with multiple meanings, so should we be the initiators of multiple literacies. Like feminism, literacy should be "beyond restoration." Feminist practitioners "are too numerous, too dissimilar in situation, for one agreement to accommodate all the theories, ideas and perceptions by and about women in the post-modern world. The question is not how to paste and staple a consensus together again but rather how to live culturally and politically with fragmentation" (Stimpson 191).

Similarly, feminists, especially those of us in academe, should demand and implement the acceptance of fragmented literacies. Instead of trying to make the burger burner relevant to the canon, we should be finding ways to make the canon relevant to the burger burner. Instead of dutifully accepting policies for testing competency, we must actively promote diversity, recruiting from barrios and condos alike, challenging not only the tests themselves, but the idea that one test can somehow judge an infinite variety of people. We must pull ourselves away from our dusty bookshelves and put activism back in feminism. Ultimately "we must move form cultural explorations to explicit political practice" (Stimpson 196),

To overcome silence is not enough; we must allow silence to have its own literacy. To write the body is not enough; we must write our minds and or dreams, our run-on sentences, and our images that do not make sense, and do not have to. When internalized patriarchal voice starts to criticize us, we can say, "You are merely one of many." When we embrace our many voices, we embrace pluralism rather than dualism, co-existence rather than competition, a spectrum of color rather than black and white. Ultimately, when feminists embrace multiple literacies, we embrace ourselves.

References

Annas, Pamela J. "Silences: Feminist Language Research and the Teaching of Writing." Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender and Equity. Cynthia L. Caywood and Gillian R. Overing (eds.) New York: State of New York Press, 1987. pp. 3-17.

Belenky, M.F., Clinchy, D.M., Gold- burger, N .R., Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Draine, Betsy. "Academic Feminists Must Make Sure Their Commitments Are Not Self-Serving." Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 34, No. 48 (August 10, 1988), p. A40.

Duras, Marguerite. "From an Interview by Susan Husserl-Kapit." New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Shocken Books, 1981. pp.174-176.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Hedges, Elaine, Ingrid Wendt. In Her Own Image. New York: Feminist Press, 1980.

Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Johnson, Sonia. Going Out of Our Minds. Freedom, California: Crossing Press, 1987.

Kristeva, Julia. "Women Can Never Be Defined." New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Shocken Books, 1981. 137-141.

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Pattison, Robert. On Literacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Sledd, Andrew. "Readin' not Riotin': The Politics of Literacy ." College English. Vol. 50, No.2 (Sept. 1988),495- 508.

Stimpson, Catharine R. Where The Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces. New York: Methuen, 1988.

Tarule, J .M. Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self. Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Wheeler, Thomas C. The Great American Writing Block: Causes and Cures of the New Illiteracy. New York: Viking Press, 1979.

Dana Beckelman is currently finishing her Master's degree in English at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she teaches freshman English. Her scholarly interests primarily concern feminist literacy and cultural theory.