Motivated by my experience with dance, movement education, and writing, This Book Called My Body: An Embodied Rhetoric is a methodologically diverse project, locating the literal body in Rhetoric Studies. I look to dance and movement education as sites where the body is not only important, but necessary to the articulation of knowledge. This dissertation argues for an expansive definition of rhetoric as the study of motion and function, the relationships between bodies, space, and time, and all the resulting change that inhabits these relationships. I show how this study can be demonstrated specifically through acts such as balance, weight transfer, range of motion, and fluidity/resilience. This revised notion of rhetoric as both phenomenon and disciplinary practice, works to decolonize bodies, groups of bodies, and language about both. Too, this project helps unseat the false "naturalization" of Cartesian dichotomies and reveal explicit and implicit consequences of such naturalizations in Rhetoric and Composition Studies. Finally, this dissertation argues that writing is a material and physical practice; that the body carries agency within it; and that the field's tendency to "read" the body as another text has resounding complications that obscure racist and colonialist impulses.My methodological choices for the project call on Debra Hawhee's description of "transdisciplinarity" as well as Jacqueline Jones Royster's "disciplinary landscape." Both insist on an attempt to see things newly, and avoid the preoccupation with re-circulating and re-inscribing the same stories in new language. This new vision requires we suspend our beliefs ingrained in us through our disciplinary lenses, and attempt to look through other fields. requiring us to see our preoccupations and warrants inherent in our "own" field's operating theories and belief systems. I also rely on Michel De Certau's tactics and practices to inform the inductive process of my project. In order to attempt a transdisciplined approach to my theories of rhetoric as always embodied, I argue that I must emphasize the practices and citational logic in movement education. In addition, I trace the body in key Greco-Roman rhetorics, showing how these thinkers have been conceived by Enlightenment philosophers to construct knowledge about the body which places it in a position of mistrust, fear, and anxiety. Alongside these readings, I offer different points of entry from another lineage of theorists, that of movement education, identifying a sustained and rich canon of knowledge about the role of the body in meaning-making practice. Not only does this establish another existing canon of material which invigorates our own discipline's understanding about the role of bodies, but the combined work of looking to these texts and contemporary practitioners further theorizes how we see and interpret what I refer to above as "bodily discourse." In the process, bodies are de-textualized, recognized as exigent beings unto themselves, but also beings which exist in a complex system of others, and which all function as relational and coordinated parts.The implications for such a revision requires a rigorous inquiry into our discipline's current practices in the teaching of writing, as well as in our scholarship. As a case study, I describe what subtext is carried in our discussions about "voice," that, like rhetoric, "voice" is always an embodied act, but which has become abstracted over time and continual colonial practice. My revised definition of rhetoric allows us to reshape our expectations and objectives in all our scholarly (indeed, human) activities, and to intervene in the patterns and practices which have obscured bodies, but also violence's enacted on groups of bodies, and individual ones.
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