Embodiment 

As a scholar of embodied rhetorics, I understand that our bodies shape the way we move through the world, produce knowledge, and communicate with others.  Whether writing words on paper or recording oneself on camera, the body, my body, is present. Laying that presence bare, in order to interrogate how one's body affects every aspect of their work, is a critical step in producing embodied scholarship. 

Embodiment is difficult to define neatly. It spills across multiple social categories including gender, race, culture, (dis)ability, and sexuality. It takes up residency in several academic fields and subfields. Within Rhetoric & Composition alone, we can witness conversations of embodiment happening all around us in queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, multilingual and translingual writing pedagogy, writing center praxis, and—as my research and teaching demonstrate—multimodal composition and feminism. Embodiment is slippery and messy and prone to resisting borders. I agree with A. Abby Knoblauch’s 2012 statement: “there seems to be little agreement within our field about how, exactly, we might define embodiment as it relates to writing” (pp. 51-52).

While all categories of embodiment are necessarily lines drawn in sand, Christy Wenger proposes two groupings that have helped me research embodiment, teach diverse bodies, and better understand how my own body shapes my research and teaching. Wenger (2015) explains that “embodiment is both a social mapping process, signifying and marking our social interactions, as well as a material reality” (p. 68). As such, the two branches she offers for talking about embodiment, especially in relation to the teaching of writing, are fleshy bodies and cultural bodies. According to Wenger, our fleshy bodies correspond to our individual physical beings, including things like senses and emotions, but also the physical appearances of our skin color, sex, ability, etc. Our cultural bodies, on the other hand, encompass how our bodies are perceived and socially categorized based upon our fleshy bodies.

My fleshy body can be characterized by pale skin, dark hair and eyes, and the same thin frame as all 30 of my cousins on my father’s side of the family. It can also be understood as someone who performs traditional notions of femininity through my clothing and make-up choices. (If it comes in pink, I’m going to buy it. And probably add glitter.) These fleshy characteristics lead my cultural body to be classified as a white woman. In both my everyday life and academic career, my whiteness, my cisgender body, and my heterosexuality impact the way I understand and am understood. As Jacqueline Jones Royster (2000) poignantly reminds us: “Knowledge is produced by someone and […] its producers are not formless and invisible. They are embodied and in effect have passionate attachments by means of their embodiments” (p. 228). By eliding the relationship between bodies and knowledge—between bodies and writing—we fall victim to the myth of what Susan Bordo (1993) calls the “disembodied view from nowhere” (p. 4). The disembodied view from nowhere is harmful to all marginalized bodies as it allows perspectives from dominant bodies (read: white, masculine, heterosexual, able bodies) to exist as unquestioned universal truths (Banks, 2003). Therefore, I am committed to overtly interrogating the way my fleshy and cultural body shape my research. In other words, I strive to practice what Knoblauch (2012) calls “embodied rhetoric,” wherein I make the “purposeful decision to include embodied knowledge and social positionalities as forms of meaning making within a text itself” (p. 52). In my teaching, especially of digital writing where virtual representations of bodies are often present, I encourage my students to practice this self-reflexive embodied rhetoric as well.

I came to my research on embodiment because of a unique combination of bodily paradoxes. First, in the spring of 2020—the onset of the global pandemic that changed our lives and learning/writing modalities forever—two conflicting thoughts were running through my mind: I felt paradoxically hyperaware of my embodiment and yet simultaneously disembodied because of the shift to Zoom education. Before the pandemic, I would sit in a classroom, paying attention, mostly, to whomever was speaking at the time. But on Zoom, where my camera was always on, and the small square showing my face and my immediate surroundings was always present, I focused more than ever on myself and my physical presentation. Never had I been so aware of how I looked while thinking, while speaking, while listening. However, at the same time, because of the stay-at-home orders, and the completely sedentary nature of online working from home, I felt detached from my body. I was not walking from class to class, breathing heavier as I climbed up stairs, taking in new smells as I entered new buildings. Though my emotions were heightened because of the fear surrounding the pandemic, my physical senses were not stimulated in ways they were used to from in-person activities.

Second, during this same time, I was also grappling with symptoms of PTSD, which created another bodily paradox. While I tried to cope with the bodily trauma that I experienced years prior by ignoring my body and, instead, grounding myself in the belief that bodies are only mere vessels for our humanity, I was experiencing a hypervigilance of my body and everything around it. In a subconscious effort to protect myself, every sound was amplified, every smell heightened, every quickened heart rate and cold sweat acutely present. My body refused to be ignored.

And third, I created a YouTube channel and began posting weekly vlogs about my life as a graduate student. I sought to build a community during a particularly isolating time and to demystify the process of applying to and completing a Ph.D. program. As I vlogged, I uncovered ways to reckon with these bodily paradoxes. Primarily, my hypervigilance was repackaged into something productive rather than paralyzing. When vloggers see their body reflected back to them on screen as they are documenting their life, they experience what I call “embodied hyperawareness,” wherein they are acutely aware of their body and its relationship to others (i.e., how their body is functioning rhetorically). In my dissertation, I argue that this embodied hyperawareness can translate to "audience hyperawareness," where vloggers—and students-as-vloggers—can think more critically about their audience's diverse bodies, designing with equality, inclusivity, and accessibility in mind.

When researching embodiment, then, I am committed to embracing its interdisciplinary messiness. For me, centering embodiment means simultaneously operating within multimodal composition (including vlogging, but also social media usage in general, podcasting, website building, etc.) and intersectional feminism. And doing embodied work means continuously and carefully interrogating my own fleshy and cultural body. In my research, teaching, and daily life (including my lifestyle vlogs), I highlight the messiness of embodiment, welcoming the ways it influences all that we think, do, and create.

References:

Banks, W. (2003). Written through the Body: Disruptions and ‘Personal’ Writing.

College English, 66, 21-40.

Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight : feminism, Western culture, and the body. University of California Press.

Knoblauch, A. A. (2012). Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions, Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy. Composition Studies, 40 (2), 50–65.

Royster, J. J. (2000). 6. A View from a Bridge: Afrafeminist Ideologies and Rhetorical Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Wenger, C. I. (2015). Yoga minds, writing bodies: contemplative writing pedagogy / Christy I. Wenger. The WAC Clearinghouse.