Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
474. "embedded in the discursive construction of plagiarism are metaphors of gender, weakness, collaboration, disease, adultery, rape, and property that communicate a fear of violating sexual as well as textual boundaries. to regulate textual relations...is to regulate the gendered, sexualized body."
475. as we use it, "the comprehensive term plagiarism...supports the worst sort of liberal-culture gatekeeping, maintaining false distinctions between high and low literacy" & its metaphors "draw the teacher into an amorphous cultural regulation of the body, a regulation that wholly exceeds the scope most of us would claim for our work"; furthermore, "this cultural regulation...is hierarchical in the very ways that many of us abhor"
gender in words
475. "women are (to adapt irigaray's phrase) 'this author which is not one,'" are "not authors but the threat to authorship"
476. "the masculine is strong and admirable, the feminine weak and contemptible"; "masculinity is intellectually subtle, femininity is not"; "the authorial function of the feminine is to inspire the originary male, but the female, far from trustworthy, is a trollop. she is an essential part of the male's creativity, but finally the male must go it alone"
477. plus, pragmatically, "women may not mate with other women, with the female muse; hence they cannot be original"; "patriarchy reduces women to the stereotypes of angel and monster"
479. "gendered metaphors of authorship and its transgressive variant, plagiarism, advance arguments...and they participate in a highly articulated, very explicity modern economy of authorship in which only the writer who can work alone, autonomously, free of others' influence, can produce an 'original' text. and that author of original text is male"; more metaphors: "paternity and the author as tiller"
480. students' plagiarism & "venereal disease"--where "disease is, of course, of the body, and a prominent tradition in the West says that the body is the feminine."
481. "in the modern economy of authorship, the spiritually inferior is, of course, the plagiarist, the binary opposite of the true and thus moral author, the masculine. the immorality of plagiarism is infectious, capable of contaminating (feminizing) those who come into contact with the offender"; add to spiritual impurity how "women writers of centuries past often depicted themselves--or were depicted by others--as mad" & "the familiar association of plagiarism with adultery"
483. and rape. but "who is being raped"? "is it the originary, proprietary, male author? or is it his property, his text?" (b) "it is the text that plays the feminine role of rape victim. the outrage of plagiarism, therefore, is that the text belongs to the proprietary--male--author" although in application "it is usually the reader or the author, not the text, who is identified as the rape victim"--and since the author can only be male...
484. ...what's left is "homosexual rape," rarely stated but still hovering there as the "enthymeme [that] does inform our culture of authorship" which "can powerfully affect our attitudes not only toward plagiarism and plagiarists but also toward authors whose texts have been plagiarised"
486. the claim, then:

the properties of autonomy, originality, proprietorship, and morality attributed to the modern author do not 'merely' describe modern authorship; they also instate and reproduce hierarchized textual values that operate from a model of heterosexual, binary gender. the metaphoric arguments of authorship invest the masculine gender with power and creativity--with subject status--and the feminine with powerlessness and an absence of creativity--with object status. this rhetoric of authorship depicts plagiarism not only as a transgression against textual ethics but also as a transgression against the masculinity that defines binary heterosexuality

"plagiarism represents authorship run amok--hence gender rendered indeterminate--and thus incites gender hysteria in the community in which it occurs"; "the metaphors are more than a coincidental add-on; they are the meaning of plagiarism. if we take the metaphors away, plagiarism is bereft of meaning; it becomes a transgressive speech act without consequent injury."
487. integral connectivity: "metaphors of gender and sexuality are part of our economy of authorship because our economy of authorship is part of our cultural regulation of gender and sexuality"
488. therefore: ixnay orfay ethay ermtay! "the term plagiarism, denoting a heterogeneous variety of textual activities, is doing cultural work that few of us would deliberately endorse"; "walter ong is right; the metaphors cannot be detached from the term they construct. hence the term--and with it the notion of unity among its hetergeneous subcategories--must be set aside." new terms instead: fraud, citation, and repetition. & the bottom line: "fraud? let's go right on getting angry about it....and then let's deal with everything else as issues of pedagogy, not as issues of morality or sexuality"