They make it sound like it's scholarship. He is describing coercion and manipulation of identity. Manipulating "author function."
They APPLY this stuff TO students and refuse to explain what they are doing.
By genre he means a group of people, a cult, a "discourse community" an "ecosystem" as they call it.
Bawarshi:
"The function of a genre only
seems like nothing when we, through practice and socialization,
have internalized its ideology in the form of rhetorical conventions to such an extent that our invention of a text seems to
emanate independently and introspectively, even almost intuitively, from us. Indeed, as we will examine later, the power of
genre resides, in part, in this ideological sleight of hand, in
which social obligation to act becomes internalized as self-generated desire to act in certain rhetorical ways."
"Not only does
the author-function privilege the author to the exclusion of
genre, but in using it to characterize and clarify only certain
discourses’ modes of existence, we also stand to ignore a great
many other discourses and their existence, in particular, how
and why nonliterary discourses assume certain cultural values
and regulate their users’ social positions, relations, and identities in certain ways."
