THIS BOOK CALLED MY BODY: AN EMBODIED RHETORIC
By
Daisy E. Levy

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Rhetoric and Writing
2012

ABSTRACT
THIS BOOK CALLED MY BODY: AN EMBODIED RHETORIC
By
Daisy E. Levy
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 reinscribing 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 Certeau’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 meaningmaking 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.

Copyright by
DAISY E LEVY
2012

iv

“Plasticity of mind is what makes movement possible at all.”
~Irene Dowd, Taking Root to Fly

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

More than once, I said to Malea Powell, dissertation chair extraordinaire, “I’ve been
waiting to write this dissertation for years.” What I had been waiting for, I wasn’t quite sure until
just the other day. In some ways, I was hoping for permission, and Malea gave that to me in
bushels-full. But too, I was waiting for courage, and what I understand now, is that this is
something that comes from my connection to the universe, to the floor. This connection is the
kind I try to explain in the following pages and chapters, but for now, please allow me to express
my gratitude for all those who have encouraged me to stand in my feet, as fully as was possible
at any given moment.
As a new and mostly terrified dancer at the old age of 19, I was fortunate to collide with
Killian Manning, who trusted me with her choreography, and introduced me to the world of
modern dance as both a physical, emotional, and intellectual activity. I still long for the solace of
her technique classes, when we would hang our torsos over our legs, and she would read to us,
from Vonnegut, from Cage, from Rich, from whomever, because as she said “some things are
easier to hear when you are upside down.” It’s true, K.
Along similar lines, my friendship and work with Cara Reeser taught, and continues to
teach me, about the power of silence and seeing. Her patience and humor helped me rehabilitate
a shoulder and knee, but right alongside these physical healings were emotional ones too, and
with Cara I have learned more about what it means to fail, to make mistakes, to say “I’m sorry”
and to witness others doing the same. This is as intrinsic to movement education as it is to
teaching writing, as it is to making change in the world, and I am grateful to have had the
practice at such difficult tasks with Cara.

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I am, of course, wildly thankful for the members of my guidance committee: Julie
Lindquist, Trixie Smith, and Dean Rehberger. Julie’s unflagging enthusiasm and attentive
questions about my hesitance at so many points along the way were just the kind of prods a
woman needs when she is about to step out on a ledge, unsure of what is underneath her. My
work with Trixie reminded me all along the ledge that I was not, in fact, the only person in the
world interested in what I was writing, that I was not the only person to feel the things I did. And
Dean’s insistence that I not be a sledgehammer (though he may wince at this comment, now),
helped me look for a standing position informed by balance and care, rather than might and
defensiveness.
And then there is Malea. While I’ve already mentioned her in the opening to this list of
gratitudes, there is always more for me to say. From the very first conversation I had with her,
and throughout the process of writing this dissertation, Malea encouraged me to try things I had
only ever dreamt of before. Even when I faltered with doubt, or felt exhausted from all the work
that goes into such a thing, Malea helped me see possibilities, ways of moving through it all, and
reminded me that what I know, and how I have come to know it, is valuable. Not to say she
didn’t push me, of course, and I am grateful for that too, for I know it’s the pushing that helps me
to feel the world around me, where I am standing.
Standing in that world, I am increasingly aware of how many people are there with me, a
list too long for me to do justice to here. But on that list, Andrea Riley Mukavetz is constant in
her willingness to listen to my ridiculous anxieties, to remind me of my successes, to ask me
difficult questions, and to laugh out loud in public with me. Fran Yelon honored me with her
commitment to moving powerfully in her own body, and sitting across from me at Chapelure
every week for months, knitting while I alternated between muttering to myself, to her, or staring

vii

out the window. I also want to thank the members of the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, the
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, and The Writing Center, all at
Michigan State University, for their individual and unique support and assistance. Whether it
was in the form of financial assistance, intellectual persistence, or community existence, each of
these three institutional spaces were grounding elements for me. And absolutely, within these
spaces are many, many people whose individuality and brilliance sparked and helped me to
sustain my energy level, especially Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Matt Cox, Doug Schraufnagle,
Suzanne Webb, and Trav Webster.
Of course, I’d like to thank Barbara Mahler, especially, for her generosity of time,
patience, spirit, and insight. I dreamed up the idea of interviewing her late one night in the
middle of my comprehensive exams, having known of her and admired her from afar for many
years. The time I spent talking with her in New York City was instrumental to my project, but
more than that, it gave me the chance to meet and learn from one of “the greats” in movement
education. At every moment, I hope I have represented her faithfully and true to her intentions.
And finally, there is my family to thank – Louis and Jane Levy, and Kevin Johnston –
each of whom let me know in no uncertain terms that she or he had my back at every turn. My
father commiserated with me, and at a crucial moment, reminded me to “just let your brain go,
Daisy. Do what you know.” I have joked about it before, but Dad, I think your chemistry and my
writing have more in common than you know. My mother, Jane, is tireless in her encouragement
and willingness to listen. I have a shoebox full of notes of affirmation and a stack of beautiful
quilts to wrap myself in at the end of a long day of work, thanks to you Mama. And my partner,
Kevin, who insisted that I finish, that I say what I had come here to say, even if it was in “baby

viii

steps,” also always reassured me that in the end, it’s “just a thing.” It is, indeed, just a thing, Kev,
but I never would have tried it without your support.
And that’s the whole point.

ix

Table of Contents

Breath: Supine

1

Ch. 1 An Articulation of Joints: How My Body Learned to Story Itself in Disciplines
Dissertation: A Story Told Out of Time
A Beginning: Coffee Shops and Humanists
A Beginning: Transdiciplinary Methodology
A Beginning: 2010 RSA Biennial Conference, Keynote Address
Refrain: A Note on My Logic and A Little Context
A Beginning: Interventions

2
2
2
7
9
12
17

Ch. 2 Stacking the Bones: European Narratives of Rhetorical Bodies
Deferring the Physical Body
Surveilling/Knowing the Body
Desiring Bodies
Vocalizing Bodies
Manifest Goodness
Manifest Language
In the Voice, the Empire

24
26
28
32
36
41
43
44

Ch. 3 Righting the Pelvis: Orientations and Tropes from Movement Education”
Bodies in Gravity: A Re/Orientation
Trope: Embodiment as Affect
Trope: Embodiment as Material Act
Trope: Embodiment as Language – Language as Bodies
Unstable Bodies
Centered Bodies
No Good Bodies

50
51
56
60
66
70
75
78

Breath: Seated

83

Ch. 4 “Axial Elongation”: Cellular Culture and Rhetorical Bodies
In the Voice, the White People
Bodies in Balance
Bodies that Transfer
Bodies in Motion

85
85
88
98
103

Breath: Standing

107

Ch. 5 “Feeling the Floor”: Exposing and Transforming Ideological Discourse Through 108
Performance and Rhetorical Bodies
Exposing Ideological Discourses/Gravitational Force
115
(Composite) Individualism/Weight Transfer
117
x

Performing Bodies
What Shall We Do with All These Bodies?
Mediated Body (Not Used)
Transformations: Bodies, Boundaries, and Ideology
Forging New Patterns/Neural Pathways
Accumulations
Works Cited and Considered

119
123
126
129
132
138
140

xi

Breath: Supine

I invite you to sit comfortably where you are and close your eyes.
Once you are comfortable sitting here, use your mind’s eye to look into your ribcage at
your lungs. Picture them as balloons. Give them a color. As you breathe in and out, watch the
balloons expand and deflate. Notice where in the balloons the color thins, and where it is darker,
where the balloon is less elastic. Don’t change the way you breathe; try to just observe.
Take another inhale, noticing what is different in the way your balloons inflate, and as
you exhale, feel the weight of your body drift down through your middle, into the bowl of your
pelvis, filling the seat of the chair with the weight of your skeleton. Notice if you are holding
yourself in the chair, or if the chair is holding you. Notice what you feel in your shoulders.
Notice your neck.
Notice how the balloon’s expansion presses against the inside of the ribcage in certain
places, or against the respiratory diaphragm. Too, as the balloon deflates, it gathers the rib cage,
the diaphragm, maybe even parts of the belly back inward, or downward, or center, or some
other direction.
Keep watching your balloons fill and empty, pressing against your ribcage, your shoulder
blades, your sternum. Can you allow the chair to hold you while you inhale into your balloons?
Can you do it while the balloons empty? Does anything change in between the exhale and the
moment when you start to breathe in again? What happens in your legs or your arms?
At the end of your next exhale, open your eyes. Notice how you feel after these couple of
moments. Is anything different? What is the same? Can you still feel the chair holding you?

1

Chapter 1: Articulation of Joints: How My Body Learned to Story Itself in Disciplines
Dissertation: A story told out of time
Somewhere in the middle of my project, I remembered that bodies are smart. It seems
such a funny thing to say, and also so striking. Isn’t that what I had been trying to get people to
understand all along? And yet, at some point, or more accurately over and over again during data
collection, interpretation, writing, and drinking all the coffee in the world, I remembered what I
mean when I say that bodies are smart. I don’t need Aristotle to help me know that bodies are
smart, neither do I need Hugh Blair, Foucault, Austin, not Damasio, not Burke, not Freud.
Definitely not Freud. Bodies are smart because they are, not because these people say so.
In the middle I realized that all along, I had really been asking about consequence. In my
prospectus, I asked these questions: If we embrace the body as a means for making knowledge,
what happens to all the other infrastructures through which we try to understand? If we embrace
understanding kinesthetically, then what do we have to let go? Do we have to? Does this one
way of knowing have to become less, by virtue of there being more than this?
In the middle of this project, it occurred to me these were not the questions, not the ones I
was concerned with. These questions were easy to answer, and that answer is, of course, NO.
Instead, I understood that I was preoccupied with teasing out how moving bodies function in
ways that communicate, persuade, interpret, articulate. But, since my answer to the earlier
questions, the ones about embracing understanding kinesthetically, is no, then how is it I could
show bodies as communicating entities, rather than communicating about bodies?

A Beginning: Coffee Shops and Humanists

2

I am sitting in a coffee shop in East Lansing, Michigan, worrying about two people I love
dearly, both of whom are struggling with health, illness, and the kind of existential angst that
usually accompanies both of these things. While I am worrying about both of these people, I am
also rereading this very collection of writings you are reading now, as well as a slew of other
things I’ve produced in the last five years. I am trying to find the way, trying to find the answer
to what I’ve been fretting over all this time. What is it, I keep asking myself, about bodies? What
is it that I just can’t let go of, whenever people start talking about discourse, about language,
about rhetoric? Because I can’t let go of it. Not in the writing classes I teach, and not in the
doctoral program I am finishing. I also, strangely, can’t let go of it in the pilates classes I teach,
or in my yoga practice. This is the very problem that’s driven me to this project, that there’s no
“way”, no answer - as in the right one, the single one. What keeps me from trying to talk about it
is the anxiety that I will say the wrong thing. Or worse, that I will say it in a way that makes it
seem illogical, fanciful, artsy-fartsy, a bunch of hooey. And that is what’s at the beginning of this
whole endeavor.
We are ground through with the notion of language and knowledge and reason and logic
and persuasion and order. My yoga teacher last night suggests that we should see a white light in
our bodies, filling up the spaces that are tight, or holding, or hurting. It’s a perfectly fine
suggestion, and yet, it bothers me - bothers me to the point of distraction. I can’t lie on that mat
1

in savasana and see white light running through my aching back without thinking of things like
“purity” and “salvation” and “grace.” And then I am angry. And the white light takes on a brittle
1

Savasana is a common posture to close yoga practice. It’s English translation is “corpse pose,”
as in, to lie like a corpse. The body in this posture is supine, legs straight and hips relaxed, arms
to the side and away from the torso just a bit. Generally, the emphasis on this posture is on
breathing, not holding a position, but allowing the physical body to deepen all its joints and
sockets, allowing the focus to move inward.
3

quality, sharp through the edges. Those fucking Humanists, I am thinking. Those fucking
Scholastics.
You would be right to chuckle at this. It’s a sign of over thinking, of a woman who
“knows too much,” of the dangers of phd work. But now you should be thinking, yourself. You
should be wondering about this phrase “over thinking”, about how much is too much and what is
it about a phd that is dangerous. All of this is exactly my point. We have not thought enough, not
considered what it means to know anything, about what consequences and risks our language
foists onto the world. Somewhere it became acceptable to separate the act of knowing from our
bodies, and to subsequently overlook the work that is borne out, not by our consciousness, not by
our soul.
And I am back to thinking about my loved ones, and their own struggles, physical ones as
well as emotional, and intellectual, and spiritual. Sometimes deciding you want to live is not
enough. Sometimes your body makes the choice for you. All the white light in the world will not
kill the cancer that spreads through your lymph nodes. People disagree with me. I know that.
And I don’t take their argument lightly. I believe that white light (or red, or green, or whatever
color it is), and belief in powers greater than you, and positive thinking, and community, and
emotional support, and even modern chemistry can all intervene powerfully against a body that
is struggling to find its way to continue functioning.
But not all powerfully.
In this space between thinking, belief, and a body’s material power is where I continually
found myself, during this project. In this space, I felt sure there was something important,
something very important, to get to. I could feel it in my personal life, as in these instances with
my family members, but I could feel it in other places too – in the rooms where I taught writing,

4

or those where I was a graduate student, even in “rooms” in the world beyond the academy, in
newsrooms, and senate chambers, in neighborhoods in other cities, in other countries. In the span
of time during which I worked through this project alone, roughly two years, handfuls of
2

examples presented themselves as indications that there was a disconnect between how we
think of bodies, of people, and of the distinctions between both.
Over and over again, I found myself at the limits of rhetoric as a discipline, it seemed. In
order to allow for the material body to show itself, and for me to be able to point out the
elements I see as critical to an understanding of embodied rhetorical practice, I needed to slow
down. I needed to listen to how our disciplinary traditions have silenced and pressured the body
out of its potential communication, persuasion, interpretation, and articulation. I needed to listen
to the silence, to look at all the places where I could see these bodies, but where it seemed no one
else was recognizing them.
I started to wonder why I could see them. What is it about movement, and a knowledge
about how bodies function that allows for this kind of visibility? Why did it make me feel as if I
was obsessive, over-reaching? Why was I so worried about over-simplifying this conversation?
At some point towards the end of the middle, I wrote down this intensely simple list:
A Note on My Logic:
1. Rhetoric is always about power.
2

As just a few of these examples: Arizona’s passage of SB1070, a supposed “solution” to the
“immigration problem”; Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, is shot down by a
neighborhood watch member, allegedly for “suspicious behavior,” the shooter going uncharged
for months after the event; video footage of US Marines brutally raping, abusing, and murdering
Afghani civilians is released to the public in the US; a state representative in Michigan is banned
from speaking in her professional and elected capacity on the floor of the house of
representatives, for using the word “vagina” in public dissent of a heavily restrictive and punitive
piece of legislation against reproductive rights, “vagina” apparently being vulgar and derogatory
language.
5

2. Power can be expressed as power over or power to.
3. The body can be understood entirely as a system of power.
4. The body is rhetorical.
Of course, the conversation is not a simple one, yet, it seemed every time I mentioned my
interest and fixation on the body, people would nod, say things like “of course” and “uh huh”
and “you’ve read Hawhee, haven’t you?” To which I thought hastily unkind things, and then
3

often turned those unkind things back on myself . At some point, I realized that my irritation was
not born from the various responses, but from my own insistence in feeling the need to defend
what I was trying to say.
And then I wrote this dissertation, and instead of pointing out all the issues I take with the
tendency to oversimplify bodies and knowledge, I committed myself to a different practice – one
where I offered an alternative vision of power and force – as an embodied one, which manifests
action, ability, energy, fluidity, resilience, balance, range of motion. Describing these elements
as rhetorical acts for our field expands our disciplinary patterns to include negotiations of
culture, discourse, knowledge as things which are made up of and by all kinds of these moving
bodies. Even as our disciplinary traditions have some excellent terminology and concepts for
talking about meaning and practice and discourse (and the list of words goes on and on here), I
believe we don’t use them very well, don’t use them with the kind of depth and breadth and
fluency that effects power, as in dynamism, as in force, as in motion.
I argued that rhetoric is about movement. What does this mean, I asked myself
continually, and what does it give us? If, as I claim above, our discipline is constraining itself
3

This, we know from Foucault, is one way that the panopticon of the various institutions in our
lives works on us, encouraging us to doubt our own initial responses to criticism and then to flip
our response towards authority, aiming it at our own “obvious” inadequacy, thereby securing and
6

with many of the ways we tend to study meaning-making practices and discourse systems, then
what should we do differently? Rhetoric describes a study of motion and function, the
relationships between bodies, space, and time, and all the resulting change that inhabits these
relationships. To study rhetoric then, means cultivating an awareness of bodies, space, and time,
as entities which are always present, and always changing.

A Beginning: Transdisciplinary Methodology
When I started this project, I was dissatisfied with the ways I hear “embodiment” in our
4

scholarship . I kept seeing this word used in ways that had less and less to do with bodies,
explicitly, at least as I have come to understand them in my own personal and professional
experience in dance and movement education. I saw and heard embodiment getting taken up as a
metaphor for talking about language, or writing, or persuasion. I saw and heard it as another way
5

of talking about affect, as in emotion . But I couldn’t find the bodies, the limbs and trunk, and
organs, the skin, the tissue, the fluids.
What I have learned as a dancer and educator, is that bodies move themselves through
6

space, they story their way in the world . What I was hearing and seeing, and importantly feeling
maintaining the status quo.
In a lot of ways, I still am.

4
5
6

These conversations are ones I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3.

Dancers and movement educators are not the only ones to understand bodies this way, of
course. Michel de Certeau theorizes about walking bodies as ones which constantly write and
rewrite the city as relationships and subversions of structures: “Their story begins on ground
level, with footsteps. They are myriad but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted
because each unit has a qualitative character; a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic
appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their
intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together” (The Practice of
Everyday Life 97). Elaine Scarry reconciles the in/expressibility of pain as an interconnection
between a) the difficulty of articulating it, b) the “political and perceptual complications” that
7

as a scholar and teacher of writing and rhetoric is that bodies are a vehicle for the mind, a
container of consciousness, one that has to be read, has to be interpreted. This isn’t what I had
experienced. It isn’t what I know. And so I took on this project – and had to go – forgive me –
“beyond the body” of the scholarship, to articulate what I was feeling. Debra Hawhee describes
coming to a similar place in her introduction to Moving Bodies. She says, of her project, that she
had “come up against the limits of humanist approaches to the body,” reacting to these same
approaches’ predilection to “freeze bodies, to analyze them for their symbolic properties, thereby
evacuating and ignoring their capacity to sense and move through time” (7). I’ll reiterate
something I stated just a page ago: Somewhere it became acceptable to separate the act of
knowing from our bodies, and to subsequently overlook the work that is borne out, not by our
consciousness, not by our soul.
Hawhee’s methodological decision was to move from interdisciplinarity to something she
calls transdicisplinarity, a move requiring her and her readers to recognize the “limits of
knowledge itself” (3) and in so doing, to suspend our own disciplinary norms and frameworks. It
sounds hard. It is hard. But the notion of recognizing what I do not know, and how I do not know
it came to be liberating, and in fact, gave back to me a sense of all the multiple things I do know,
7

and the ways I know them . Rhetoric studies wasn’t offering me a way to make meaning about

result, and c) “the material and verbal” quality of expression: “Physical pain has no voice, but
when at least it finds a voice, it begins to tell a story, and the story is about the inseparability of
these three subjects, their embeddedness in one another” (The Body in Pain 3). Trinh T. Minh Ha
insists that story is both a theoretical and practical necessity to physical survival, as well as being
incomprehensible without the material and livable self: “Understanding is creating and living,
such an immense gift that thousands of people benefit from each past or present life being lived.
The story depends on every one of us to come into being.” (Woman, Native, Other 119).
7
Hawhee is not the only scholar in our discipline to suggest such a radical extra-disciplinary
vision of course. As one very recently published example, see Jaqueline Jones Royster’s
reflection on her own “disciplinary landscaping” concept in Feminist Rhetorical Practices, a
“metaphor” she introduced years earlier, and claims “served as a springboard from which I
8

bodies and knowledge making practices because there are limits to what that discipline
understands and marks as knowable. But what I found, or perhaps more accurately, came to
remember about what I already knew, was a deep and sustained theoretical, intellectual, and
pragmatic history of knowledge about bodies, what they know, and their relationship to the
mind.
Even more significant, I would say this tradition, this rhetorical tradition, has much to
offer us today about how to see and feel the body, our bodies as knowing and moving agents of
8

change. Mabel Ellsworth Todd wrote in The Thinking Body, in 1937, that
Living, the whole body carries its meaning and tells its own story, standing, sitting,
walking, awake or asleep. It pulls all the life up into the face of the philosopher, and
sends it all down into the legs of the dancer. A casual world over-emphasizes the face.
Memory likes to recall the whole body. It is not our parents’ faces that come back to us,
but their bodies, in the accustomed chairs, eating, sewing, smoking, doing all the familiar
things. We remember each as a body in action. (1)

A Beginning: 2010 RSA Biennial Conference, Keynote Address.
Sharon Crowley is speaking, asking us what we shall do with all the white people. I feel
my skin prickle. Crowley is invoking W.E.B. DuBois, and I understand why, or at least I think I
do. She wants us to reconsider the question, perhaps even the moment in which DuBois felt

started thinking in a more coherent way about the need in RCL to incorporate deliberately into
our theoretical and methodological approaches mechanisms for moving beyond the constraints of
habitual paradigms in order to notice conceptual and ecological features that might otherwise go
unnoticed.” (11).
8
Todd is one of Movement Education’s early theorists and practitioners. Her book, The Thinking
Body, is still considered to be a reference for kinesiologists, dancers, physical therapists, massage
therapists, etc.
9

compelled to ask it. I feel my skin prickle. There’s too much assumed with this question, too
much unarticulated critique. I certainly don’t want to argue with DuBois’ point; but I am curious
about Crowley’s invocation. I trust her intention is respectable, not a rash act, not an
appropriation of DuBois’ act of necessity for a cheap joke. In fact, I believe Crowley is acting to
hold an ironic mirror to the faces in the room. To the bodies, perhaps.
As I sit in her audience, I wonder how many variants of that question I might ask. What
shall we do with all the Straight People, maybe. The Hearing People. The Rich People, et
cetera.

9

Of course, this series of questions is not simple; not to answer, and neither to decipher

what meaning they’re trying to get at. As I sit in her audience, I am preoccupied with a feeling
I’ve been trying to articulate for the last few months, that we might be asking the question in a
language that does not offer us enough in its words. I want to suggest that the power of spoken,
written, heard language allows us, we Hearing, Straight, Rich, White people, to avoid other
languages – those that reveal themselves and are revealed to us as they are practiced and enacted
and felt in the bodies around us, in our own bodies. After all, these questions, whether they are
about white or brown people, queer or non-queer, native or colonizer, are all about bodies –
those that mark or have been marked over and over again, inscribed, written and written upon.
Months and years later, I return to this moment as a defining one, for my own
preoccupations. I believe that Crowley was asking us to look at our own bodies through her
ironic mirror, and that she was performing this mirror in order to reveal other things too - to
notice the history of power as registered in our particular bodies. Or, more, to illuminate the
workings of an ideology not yet gone from our world.
9

I’ve capitalized each of these identifications purposefully, here. In some cases, the
communities represented here, specifically, Hearing, the capital letter is not my own invention
but a way of marking a culture, one that can be named and is coherent. Capital H Hearing is used
10

I don’t believe she succeeded in this gesture.
10

In order for this room full of rhetoric historians

to get a good glimpse at our own

bodies, we would need an indication that our bodies are important, as signifiers. Not only do we
require this signification, but we would need an acknowledgment that our bodies are living
11

things with critical impact on our disembodied

selves. If we were to look in an actual mirror,

those of us in the RSA Audience might see the color of our skin, mostly because it’s been
12

pointed out to us. We might see the ways we have aged, or not. We might “see”

the ways in

which culture has worked its way on our image - what we wear, the color of our hair, the style of
it.
13

But I am thinking of what we would not see, instead.

We would likely not see the ways

we carry our shoulders, how we stand in our feet, the shape of our spine. We would probably not
hear the sound of our voice, the accents, the colloquialisms we use (or don’t), the rhythm of our
speech, the breath we bring to the words and sounds we utter. Other things we likely pass over
are the particularities of our genders - while we might recognize how our clothes negotiate those
identifiers, most of us will notice these things, and then dismiss them. We don’t see these things

in Deaf and Hard of Hearing cultures to denote a person who self-identifies with other folks.
The Rhetoric Society of America is comprised of a variety of types of scholars; however, the
convention is often attended heavily by rhetoric theory historians. I note this dominance to
recognize the proclivity of scholars who are focused on historical work, but who also perhaps
remain ignorant of the physicality that history maintains, even in a present reality.
11
For the sake of argument, and at the risk of being imprecise, I suggest here, that
“disembodied” can be code for “intellectual.”
12
“See” is in quotation marks here because I intend a figurative seeing to infer “interpret” or
“read.”
13
And here, I mean “see” literally, as in “to recognize with our optic nerves.”
10

11

because we believe they are unimportant, markers of the frivolous, manners of identification
14

which have no place in the professional world, where intellect is king.

We have learned to consider race in special ways, contextualizing it in terms of the color
of our skin, and the histories we have studied and experienced. Those who carry the mark of
extra-pigmented skin have also carried the burden of awareness and internalized inferiority
marked through other physical markers - broad noses, or hooked ones, wide hips, high gluts, full
lips, slanted eyes, stick-straight hair, or nappy. We know this list. For these bodies, attention to
the physical is crucial, unavoidable, fundamental to how lives are constructed. But for those of us
with the good fortune to carry whiteness,

15

physical particularities and attributes are passed

over, unseen. We don’t make our selves (in our minds) as entities with physical lives; to do so
would acknowledge limitation, fallibility, weakness. Physical lives include multiple and
persistent threats to survival; we need water, food, shelter: we die.
In the beginning of my project, I worried about distinctions between “embodied” and
“bodily.” It seemed to me that every time I used the word “embodied,” I was invoking something
not entirely bodily, as in not trapped in a material reality. So often, “embodiment” suggested a
“cleaned up version” of bodies, a quality to aspire to, but which doesn’t require mess. And so, I
would change up my terminology, and get myself stuck in what I see now is a predicament
which only distracted me from a clearer route. Was I trying to give a theory of bodily writing or
of embodiment? This continually tripped me up, trying to nail down these words, trying to align
myself somewhere in a neat category.

14

I do mean king, and all the assumed signifiers that correspond - Male power which is singular
and total.
15
and other markers of white privilege
12

The answer to this question, in retrospect is Yes. The answer is Stop making it so neat and
tidy, Daisy.

Refrain: A Note on My Logic and A Little Context
1. Rhetoric is always about power.
2. Power can be expressed as power over or power to.
3. The body can be understood entirely as a system of power.
4. The body is rhetorical.
What does it mean to make such a claim: the body is rhetorical? At this starting point, I’ll
modify the claim just a bit, to state that rhetoric is always an embodied practice. Recall the
breath I asked you to explore in these opening pages, how the balloons inside your chest filled
and emptied, and how that filling and emptying created conditions of lightness and heft in other
parts of your body. In Movement Education, there is a constant attention to these conditions, as
they exist in gravity. Clearly, these conditions do not stay the same, and are not controllable, in
the ways many of us think of controlling language, say, or writing. Gravity sucks, goes the
bumper sticker, the point being that no matter who you are, how smart, strong, and effectual you
are, gravity will always pull you down, will always root you to the earth.
In our traditional, disembodied conception of rhetoric, we can think of our will as
exerting force, or power, over other things - our words, for example, or words of other people, or
other people themselves. We can change their minds, influence their desires, their decisions,
their actions. I argue that to think of this as somehow not bodily is naive and uninformed.
Rhetoric is always an embodied practice, regardless how you intend it, and always there, just as

13

gravity is, whether you think of it as a force to which other bodies must yield, or one which
connects bodies and the environment around them.
It’s the way we experience that force that matters, and the way we continue to orient
ourselves within it. Rhetoric, as an embodied practice, is always constituted of layers of
changeable entities, as speakers, purposes, texts, audiences, and bones, tendons, ligaments, and
16

nerves. In the relationships between them all,

in the slippage of these joints, meaning is made,

decisions forced, patterns put in motion. Rhetoric as an embodied practice means that the body is
more than a text to be read by the mind. It means, too, that so are texts more than the printed
word on the page, but that they are also the accumulation of practices and bodies engaged in the
production of those pages. Rhetoric as an embodied practice means that rhetoric is something we
do, something that lives in our bodies, as much as in our minds.
How does it, though, live in our bodies? This is the question that movement educators
help me to answer, and a central question to this dissertation. As I stated earlier, I believe
rhetoric to be the study of motion and function, the relationships between bodies, space, and
17

time, and all the resulting change that inhabits these relationships . In order to articulate these
qualities, relationships, and changes, I offer four principles of physical movement:
proprioception, innervation, coordination, and locomotion, explained in the coming section. Each
18

of these principles play a part in how we arrange our bodies in relation to gravity,

but they are

also useful in terms of rhetorical theory. Additionally, and importantly, they are principles I
considered necessary to the orchestration and completion of this project, ones that construct a

16
17
18

This list is certainly not exhaustive, but merely representative.
from page 9
a necessity I call on and describe explicitly in the next chapter
14

methodological orientation attending to the complexities of the relationship between bodies and
meaning-making practices.
PROPRIOCEPTION describes a system which is crucial to regulating all other systems
within the body. It’s often referred to as the system which tells us how to move specific body
parts, where we are at any moment in time, and how we can get somewhere else. Proprioception
is made up of three different types of awareness: kinesthetic;

19

labyrinthine;

20

and visceral.

21

These different types work together, and in collaboration with what Mabel Todd calls the “outer
senses” to let our bodies sort out how we know where we are, which ultimately leads to how we
know who we are. For Todd, proprioception “is responsible for the appearance of the individual
as an organized unit when he is moving about” (27). In terms of my methodological orientations,
maintaining my own awareness of where I am, who I am, and how to get to the next place is one
way to describe the general arc of my project, more of which I describe below. But for now,
assume this arc to be described as my locatability in a discipline which generally identifies with
an ancient Greco-Roman and Western European tradition, my own experience within and outside
this tradition, and my desire to make sense of these inside and outside experiences.
INNERVATION refers to the process of stimulating a part of the body with nerves. While
proprioception regulates a body’s awareness about location, relationship, and motion, this
stimulus spurs fibers of muscle tissue to contract, lengthen, engage, stretch, work, or release,
according to the body’s specific goals. These goals may range from gross motor activities –
19
20
21

or movement-related
or, spatially related

This one is a little more difficult to reduce easily. Visceral awareness is generally not
associated with any conscious awareness. Todd has this to say about it “They [visceral
sensations] are not related directly to the motor apparatus save in certain areas […] A feeling of
fatigue, for instance, may mean a culmination or sum-total of unrecognized stimuli from fatigues
15

taking a step, say, or reaching overhead – or they may be internal, more finely tuned, such as the
way your lungs are innervated to expand and shrink as you breathe, and all the related actions
required of such an event. According to Todd, again, “the signaling between the various parts of
the body and the cerebellar switching station is like that in the dispatching office, only far more
complicated” (37). Methodologically, innervation looks similar to a web; stories, data,
experience exist in a type of signaling network, connecting to each other, and cuing each other to
contract and expand, or release and stretch, or some other activity, accordingly. No elements of
this research project exist without “talking” to each other, in this innervated system.
COORDINATION draws on both principles above, using proprioception for an appropriate
sense of where and who I am in space, and innervation to supply the various elements of the
project with commands and actions to complete. The combination of these two principles, as
long as they are balanced and working together, results in a balanced effort between them and
the related body parts as “automatic and not the result of any consciously directed movement of
particular muscles. It is the result of a combination of reflexes, no one of which can be selected
as in itself ‘causing’ the movement or pattern of movement” (Todd 33). Coordination is a
phenomenon referred to when we say things like “it just feels right” or “it’s natural,” indicating
we are unable to identify any one system or body part that is the initiator of movement, instead
feeling as if the whole body has worked, usually, with a feeling of effortlessness. In this project, I
claim that this sense of coordination is one of those principles of embodiment, and rhetoric, that
22

we are invoking when we try to explain “good writing .” Too, coordination as a methodological
choice, requires I attend to the multiple parts of a project, either simultaneously or in ways where
there is not an identifiable cause/effect relationship, as this relationship is artificial, and one
stomach, liver, other viscera or muscles” (The Thinking Body 27)
16

mode that gets placed on top of much research in our field, resulting in inefficient and overly
labored movement patterns.
LOCOMOTION is the final principle of an embodied methodology, one that involves
elements of the previous three. The ability or act of moving from place to place requires 1) an
understanding of that place and what other places exist, 2) a communications and networking
system to relate the multiple parts involved, and 3) a finely orchestrated series of signals and
actions that can fire with ease and clarity. Movement, both the desire for it, and the ability to
commit it, is at the center of rhetoric. While we may not be focusing on the movement inherent
in a given body, we are conducting research on studies of how meaning is made, how it is
transformed, as well as how it transforms other people, places, and things. We are teaching our
students this study, as a strategy for survival, maybe, or for mobility in a stratified world.

A Beginning: Interventions
In the pilates classes I teach, one of the most difficult things we have to be able to do is to
lift our head off the floor, from a supine position. The head is heavy, of course, and sits on top of
a supremely unstable structure, that of the cervical spine. Each of the seven vertebrae in this
section of the spine is highly mobile, and unlike other areas of the body, this one does not benefit
from large muscle groups surrounding it as support. This is a good thing; it facilitates our ability
to look over one shoulder, or to bend our head in any number of other directions. This also
makes for a very unstable platform when we are lying on our back, and need, for whatever

22

I take up this claim in more detail in Chapter 4
17

reason, to lift our head. The ability to do this requires a kind of postural strength and thoracic
23

mobility

that many of us just don’t have, for a variety of reasons.

So, in most cases, when someone first comes to pilates, and is faced with this difficult
task right away,

24

she or he struggles to do it without neck or shoulder fatigue. My role, in this

case, is to intervene in the patterns this particular body just can’t get around, by helping to hold
their head up with my hand, say, in order for them to begin a new pattern. Rather than continuing
to engage the muscles of the neck and the chest, they can start to experience other ways of
supporting their head on their spine, and a different way of maintaining their skeleton in gravity.
This intervention is another important part of what I argue is an embodied methodology, and it
25

has ramifications for all our academic and community commitments. My purpose,as a scholar

is to look for movement patterns – and then decide if they are efficient or not. My goal is not to
identify what’s wrong about that pattern, but instead, where energy is getting stuck, where
coordination is inhibited, where proprioception is challenged or weakened; then, I can intervene
in that pattern, find possibility for new ones, and support the process in the meantime.
As one of these sites of movement patterns, in Chapter 2 I look to one of our field’s longhailed traditions in the history of rhetoric for ways bodies have been understood . While much of
the current scholarship in Rhetoric Studies is now including multiple traditions and legacies, the
ancient Greco-Roman line is still held up by many as indicative of the “birthplace” of

23

refers to mobility through the thoracic spine, which corresponds to the spinal vertebrae in line
with the rib cage, one rib inserting into each of these vertebrae
24
Lifting your head off the floor, and supporting it, is something that happens in nearly every
exercise in the floor work of a pilates class, and in most exercises in the work using machines as
well.
25
as well as a teacher, and a writer.
18

Rhetoric.

26

The arguments around whether or not this is, indeed, the birthplace, is not as

important to my point as is the reality that plenty of people do still think of it this way. Given
this, and even by those of us who resist this easy location of an origin, the dominance of ancient
Greco-Roman traditions in contemporary and popular thought about discourse and knowledge
production makes my search’s beginning necessarily linked to the works

27

of Gorgias, Plato,

28

Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.

What is most interesting to me about our discipline’s notion of embodiment, specifically
the absence of material bodies, is the way in which these viewpoints seem so naturalized, even in
daily conversations in seminars, and conference presentations. Very few people seem curious
about the body itself. This is, to me, entirely consistent with colonialism, racism, theories of
dominance – an erasure of the physical body even as the discourse about them becomes more
29

and more visible . At the same time, it is also entirely inconsistent with how bodies are

26

Consider the popular texts for teaching the history of rhetorical theory: Bizzell and Herzberg’s
Rhetorical Tradition, Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics, Corbett and Connors’ Classical
Rhetoric for the Modern Student.
27
Of course, our disciplinary attachments to these lineages are filtered through the powerful
influence of Early Modern Europe, in particular the Scholastics and later, Enlightenment
philosophers. When I mention the ancient Greeks and Romans and their claims and belief
systems, I am of course, referring to the ways their works have been translated and codified in
very particular ways consistent with the agenda of those in EME who are credited with doing
much of this codification.
28
There are plenty of other ancient Greeks and Romans to pick from, of course. I use these five
as a sampling, to show the consistency over time and through the traditional canon, of how
bodies figure.
29
This is yet another instance of something Foucault has pointed out to us, in his genealogy of
discourse on sexuality, in particular “that Western man has been drawn for three centuries to the
task of telling everything concerning his sex,; that since the classical age there has been a
constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this
carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement,
intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself (The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1
23).
19

arranged, presented, and re-presented in other venues, particularly in dance and movement
education. I realized that one primary goal of this project was to position these consistencies and
inconsistencies alongside one another, and in Chapter 2 I do just that. The positioning helps to
show us how classical Greco-roman rhetorical theory has been enacted to submerge physical
bodies, and also helps to particularize the first two claims in my logic: that rhetoric is always
about power; and that power can be expressed as power over, or power to.
This submersion of physical bodies has become an important moment in my project. As a
movement educator, I know that change occurs after awareness; and so, in order to build a theory
of embodied rhetoric, I needed to see as many places where those bodies existed. In order to
show you how bodies are agents of knowledge production, I first had to show you where those
bodies are. I wanted the Greeks and Romans to be present and highly visible, as well as the
Europeans who came to use them in such specific ways.
In addition, my previous knowledge about how bodies work, and how they are their own
discursive practices, was knowledge I wanted to share. So, my interviews with Barbara
Mahler,

30

and my research in the New York Performing Arts Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance

Archives help to make visible multiple ways that the body is understood as an agent of meaningmaking. I begin to show these multiple ways in Chapter 2, alongside our disciplinary traditions,
as a way to complicate the view. Especially, the data I collected from Mahler and my archival
research fills out my discussion of the distinction between power over, and power to, as in the 2nd
claim in my logic. As an example of how to understand this distinction, I rely on the trope of
30

Barbara Mahler is a dancer and movement educator, living in New York City, who graciously
granted me interviews for my own project. For over 30 years, she has been one of the innovators
and developers of Re-Education Technique: Klein Stretch and Placement, a system of building
awareness and functional movement. Mahler maintains an active and well-respected teaching
practice in New York City, as well as around the United States and abroad.
20

“voice,” one which has explicit ramifications for much of our work in Rhetoric and Composition
Studies.
Chapter 3 builds from my introduction of movement education as a theoretical paradigm,
to further elaborate how another understanding of bodies and motion can deepen our discipline’s
work of studying meaning-making practices. In this chapter, I ask us all to consider as primary
our relationship to gravity, both literally and figuratively. Gravity is one of the foundational
forces to entertain in movement education, and you may have guessed that it’s not as simple as it
sounds. Orienting and reorienting to gravity is a physical activity that is constant, and one which
requires a fluid, resilient

31

body to sustain, in order for the individual body to survive, adapting

to its always changing environment. Not only that, but these reorientations ensure an individual
body maintains its relationship to other ones – bodies and environments both. By articulating
some of the ways we might use this notion of reorientation in our disciplinary work, I am
returning to the third claim in my logic: The body can be understood entirely as a system of
power.
Similarly to the way I position traditional canonical rhetorical theory alongside what I am
arguing is a model of embodied rhetorical theory in the earlier chapter, Chapter 3 takes up the
task of positioning current Rhetoric and Composition Studies scholarship that maintains a
singular orientation to gravity alongside other work that I argue moves and reorients to allow the
“body” of our discipline to learn and integrate multiple movement patterns, making us more
32

adaptable, more fluid, more resilient. I outline three important notions of the body , taken from

31
32

Both of these ideas – fluidity and resilience – are ones I illustrate in detail in Chapter 2.

Specifically, these notions are that bodies are fundamentally unstable, that bodies’ centers are
moving and shifting, and that there is nothing inherently good or bad about any particular body.
21

movement education, that suggest even more possibility for how we might research and teach in
our discipline, thereby building greater functionality.
But just to show these two approaches next to each other was not enough, I felt, not
satisfying. It certainly made obvious the discrepancies in paradigms, but did little to mitigate
them. If, as I claim above, the goal in a transdisciplinary methodology is to broaden perspective,
rather than just to share different ones, I need to offer some tools, terminology maybe, or lenses
through which we might reconcile the multiplicity. In Chapter 4, I continue elaborating my logic,
as listed in this introduction, that as I show in Chapter 3, the body can be understood as a system
of power, and since, as I’ve detailed in Chapter 2, rhetoric is always about some version of
power, then the body is rhetorical. How to understand it as such, requires all the previous
concepts of fluidity, resilience, gravity, patterns of movement, instability, centering, and a
distancing from assuming an inherent valuation of bodies. These concepts work together, in
movement education, but also in Rhetoric and Composition Studies, as ones which culminate in
larger phenomenon: Balance, Weight Transfer, and Range of Motion. These three phenomena
are ones which translate meaningfully when thinking about how we, in our discipline, might
study bodies, as well as how we study discourse of all kinds, as well as how we write and teach
writing.
One aspect of my central argument is that our traditional definitions of rhetoric and
histories of rhetorical theory constrain us in ways that are inappropriate and irresponsible. As an
alternative to ways to see bodies as rhetorical agents, in Chapter 5, I argue performance theory
provides us with some useful interventions. This alternative may well share some European
lineage, and focuses similarly on systems of knowledge production, but in this case the body is
not at all submerged. In fact, it’s surfaced and even integrated. Many scholars of rhetoric are

22

using performance analytics with their rhetorical theories; my aim is not to imply I am the first to
suggest it. However, what I am claiming is that what performance allows us is a way to
communicate our awareness about ideological discourses as they are embedded into our canon,
and through our own bodies. Also, performance theories can allow us other choices about how
to theorize what relationships can possibly exist between bodies, language, and knowledge. Once
again, my knowledge as a movement educator pushes me to remind us all that if you are looking
to affect change, awareness may be the first goal, but once you have begun that process, you
must also begin to build new patterns of movement, of thinking, of being in the world.
Embodiment as a rhetorical practice, or as a methodological orientation, is only
experienced as a system, deeply layered with strategies and tactics. It is a phenomenon of motion
and change, which can’t be seen or felt in ways that don’t account also for the myriad forces that
surround us. Rhetoric as an embodied practice is not simple; it can’t be reduced to how the
Greeks/Romans address the body, neither to how “other” cultures emphasize the body in
admirable ways. Rather, rhetoric as an embodied practice insists that ideology, language, and
material practices work together and on each other in order to shape and impact the world.
Finally, this dissertation marks rhetoric studies in the following ways: 1) Our discipline
33

has maintained a colonialist paradigm

about the value and worth of a body; 2) Looking to

multiple intellectual and theoretical paradigms about the value and worth of a body is critical to
our methodological and pedagogical commitments; and 3) Contextualizing ideology and
discourse as always material, always bodily, reorients us as researchers, teachers, and members
33

In my original notes, I wrote that this was accidental. When I reread my notes, I put “” around
the word, and later, as I typed it into my document, I took the word out altogether. While my
dissertation points out this phenomenon of preserving a colonialist agenda, it does not work
extensively to prove it. That work has been taken up by other scholars, such as Walter Mignolo,
Qwo-Li Driskill, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Malea Powell, Jacqueline J. Royster, and many others.
23

of multiple communities invested in the production and distribution of knowledge and
engagement in all elements of human life.

24

Chapter 2: “Stacking the Bones”: European Narratives of Rhetorical Bodies

We, in this discipline, have told ourselves a consistent story about the necessity of words
in our understanding of bodies, one with deep roots. Often, I suggest, we don’t even realize the
extent to which we are telling this story, at the same time that we claim to be expanding the
narrative, broadening our scholarly perspective. The deep-rooted story persists, one about the
relative worth and subsequent dependence of bodies on consciousness, a story which effaces the
body for something “richer” or “more complex” or “discursive.” In one graduate seminar I
attended, while I was trying to make a point about the bodily quality of knowledge, a fellow
graduate student cut me off, to say “But we are talking about consciousness, Daisy. Not bodies.”
My response

34

was perhaps a little short-tempered, or too hasty, but in the moment, I was

flabbergasted. Somehow I had overlooked the extent to which my peers accepted the notion that
knowing was not something that occurred in their cells, or even in their organs – such as the
brain. Afterwards, I began to see that this is not an uncommon belief, at least not in our
discipline, and maybe even in other fields in the humanities. I was curious about how we got to
this place, knowing that there are other professions, academic and otherwise, that didn’t accept
the same assumptions. If rhetoric is always about power, then what is the body’s purpose? Surely
it had one, I thought to myself, as an undeniable, and unavoidable aspect to human life.
What I offer next is a detailed examination of the story, as I have come to understand it,
woven through what is still considered our discipline’s primary canon. As I’ve already pointed
34

To be fair, I can’t recall the exact words I uttered, but it was some attempt to equate
consciousness with brains and bodies. Looking back, I find the moment itself to be most
instructive. My fellow student’s exasperation (for that’s certainly how it seemed to me) with my
persistent insertion of bodies into conversations that were needlessly (in my opinion) eliminating
them signals to me a well-fortified resistance to the possibility that bodies play a powerful role in
25

out, this canon is still heavily invested with the ancient Greeks and Romans – all of whom were
35

mostly uncomfortable, in my estimation, with the very existence of bodies . From this lineage,
we rhetors, compositionists, and theorists inherit and reinscribe our prioritization of language,
ideas, words, and epistemology. Implicit in these priorities is reflected our disciplinary ancestry’s
discomfort and mistrust of the physical self, and which results in an unstated, and largely
unequivocal, acceptance of rhetorical power as having power over. Over what, you may be
36

asking. By looking closely at selective texts

from this primary canon, I argue that rhetorical

power has been manifested as a force over physical bodies themselves by erasing their very
physicality and surveilling them with instruments of governance and religion.
In addition, I argue that the difficulty of erasing and policing these bodies results in a
need to reconcile other qualities, ones endemic to rhetoric as a practice. Specifically, the quality
of desire begins my argument that rhetorical power can also be felt as power to – to move, to
speak, to make, to effect change. In this claim, I identify two important elements borrowed from
movement education, fluidity and resilience; and through these elements as well as from close
analysis of our primary canon, I link one of our disciplinary tradition’s fundamental concerns –
that of voice – to rhetoric, to the body, and to power. Limiting our understanding of power as it
has been, as primarily something to hold over another thing, restrains us. These restraints are felt
intellectually, of course, in terms of how we pursue our research and teaching, but they are also

the way we make meaning and understand the world.
The existence of bodies is a foundational concept to all my claims in this dissertation, rather
than the “idea” of them. Much as I state in Chapter 1 regarding gravity, bodies are always
present, and as such, they are always doing.
36
Gorgias’ “Encomium to Helen”, Plato’s “Gorgias”, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”, and
“On Rhetoric” , Cicero’s “Oratory”, and Quintilian’s “Instiutio.”
35

26

felt physically, as arms of the imperial project always reaching to expand itself, and to conquer
people and lands.
The texts I draw from aren’t exhaustive, of course, and are not offered here to prove
without exception that the Ancient Greeks and Romans disavowed the physical self. In fact, we
know otherwise, and examples of how we mark the physical self in the ancient Greco-Roman
tradition are described in the following section. Much of these examples, I claim, are easily
interpreted to re-circulate our acceptance of a power over relationship: knowledge over body. My
hope is that, by suggesting an alternative paradigm for power, we can begin the process of other
interpretations, and in these interpretations we might revise our perspective, cultivating new
patterns and orientations.

Deferring the Physical Body
Deferral happens in a couple of ways, as I see it. We may talk about or allude to
culturally identified bodies often, in rhetoric studies. For example, consider the edited collections
by Lewicki-Wilson and Wilson’s and Crowley and Selzer, Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in
Language and Culture and Rhetorical Bodies, both of which include articles on the material
experience and cultural construction of discourse about bodies, as well as the lived consequences
attributed to some of those same bodies. This book, an important collection of scholarship
bridging scholars from disability studies and rhetoric studies, does remind us all of the
inescapability of having a body and of the value in studies that help to reshape what we mean
when we write about bodies and study them. Yet, the pieces in this book seem primarily
concerned with embodied rhetoric as rhetoric about bodies. This is important, very important, I
assure you – for as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, rhetoric has real consequences for us all, whether

27

we are thinking of ideological ones, or political ones, or everyday occurrences. My point about
the deferral is less about this, than about the ways the literal body gets seen as meaning-maker.
Too, remember Hawhee’s Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece, and
Fleckentstein’s Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Hawhee works to
remind our discipline to see the “interstices between athletics and rhetoric in order to help
elaborate rhetoric’s emergence in a network of educational and cultural practices articulated
through and by the body.” (Bodily Arts 4). A year earlier, Fleckenstein insists that “Locked
within the word, we cannot understand how images hurt or heal us. We cannot understand how
images embody meaning at the same time that they render it communal.” (Imageword 11). Both
Hawhee and Fleckenstein show how bodies are players in the production of meaning, and allude
to the ways culture is enacted through them.
Rather than emphasizing the cultural construction of bodies through discourse, some of
us, in rhetoric studies, infer bodies, when we describe rhetoric as a physically enacted practice.
In her introduction to Reclaiming Rhetorica, editor Andrea Lunsford points out the materiality of
this kind of scholarship when she claims that “the essays in this volume aim to contribute […]
first of all by listening - and listening hard - to and for the voices of women in the history of
rhetoric; by becoming, as Cheryl Glenn suggests, the audience who can at last give voice to
women lost to us; […] and by acknowledging and exploring the ways in which they have been
too often dismissed and silenced” (6). For Lunsford and, by association, the scholars whom she
has included in this volume of work, there seem to be two different levels of physicality – that of
the actual voices of the women who have been silenced, that of the sound of the voice of the
37

scholar speaking now

37

for these silenced women.

the quiet and listening audience
28

Yet, while many of us do consider the relevance or effect or impact of the material body,
often the effect leans toward something more abstract, even if it includes an influence with real
material consequences, lived experience. Take Brueggeman’s Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical
Constructions of Deafness. In it, she is indicating the weight and texture of Deaf Culture,
connecting notions of language and culture to the body in direct ways. Brueggemann is
38

theorizing about a language system reliant on bodies

in terms of its rhetorical weight. She is

using classical rhetorical theory to talk about the structure, use, and social elements of language
of a group of people who cannot

39

speak, read, and/or write in the ways we assume are the

standard mode. Importantly, Brueggemann points to ways in which rhetoric, rhetorical theory,
and history have been used and can be used still to maintain sites of power or agency.
However, the bodies themselves are notable for their absence. As I notice this, I am
wondering again why it seems we can’t admit the bodies themselves into the conversation. I’ve
already intimated that the answer might go something like this: “Rhetoric is about discourse.
About language.” Maybe we might ask in response “But how can we talk about bodies without
language?” Or “We only know our bodies through language.” And “We need words and
discourse to make meaning out of our bodies.” All of these questions make sense to me, but
strike me as ultimately preoccupied with working within unqualified expectations. Certainly
language is the most convenient, and possibly the only accessible, device we have for
communicating our ideas. I don’t mean to suggest otherwise, neither to do I seek to undo all
existing knowledges and understanding about the relevance of language to our meaning-making

38

Not “just” American Sign Language, as that system, but all manner of communication tools
that are customary for Deaf culture.
39
or choose not to, or cannot in the way Quintiliam may have intended as “speaking well”
29

practices. Instead, I’d like to point out some of the cultural and historical practices which have
influenced our preoccupations, so we might mark them as such.

Surveilling/Knowing the Body
Gorgias’ logic of the body lives in the emotions, however those emotions are clearly
articulated through the soul. The soul, for Gorgias and others, acts as the stabilizing force for
40

this

body, and these emotions. In “Encomium to Helen” Gogias relates speech and emotions to

drugs and body: “just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring
an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight,
some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind
of evil persuasion” (Ch. 14). Emotions, through speech, act on the body as drugs might, and
therefore this body needs some counter anchor to the “bewitching” and bodily affect, an anchor
that lives in the soul.
Plato’s version of this analogy is even more constrictive, maintaining the body’s constant
relationship to the soul, a relationship necessitating the soul’s oversight. The necessity is borne
from Plato’s concern that without the soul, the body is incapable of making sound decisions:

For indeed, if the soul were not in command of the body, but the latter had charge of
itself, and so cookery and medicine were not surveyed and distinguished by the soul, but
the body itself were the judge, forming its own estimate of them by the gratifications they
gave it, we should have a fine instance of what Anaxagoras described, […] everything

40

as in, the body to which Gorgias is referring to, which is a specific one, of course. See the
following footnote.
30

would be jumbled together, without distinction as between medicinal and healthful and
tasty concoctions (Section 465d, my emphasis).

Clearly, for Plato, the body is a thing that needs surveillance, in particular it needs to be managed
by the soul. It (the body) is prone to overly decorous acts, self-flattery, and fancy. On the other
hand, with the supervision of the soul (and it’s corresponding social venues – medicine and
justice), Man

41

and society exist as well-tempered, rational experiences, ordered and thus

capable of knowing Truth. Without this supervision , man would be unknowable,
undistinguishable for its parts. The body is only knowable by the soul, and only when the correct
relationship is in place – the soul “in command.”
42

We might compare Quintilian’s concerns about bodies

to Plato’s; both feel a body is

something to be disciplined, restricted, and contained. Where Plato thinks the body is an obstacle
for the soul’s endeavor to know itself, or to know Truth, Quintilian is adamant that the body is an
obstacle towards propriety, and propriety is the path to rightness. Quintilian shows his distaste
for overly ebullient displays of emotion, of “the prevailing practice of allowing boys to stand up
or leap from the seats in the expression of their applause. Young men, even when they are
listening to others, should be temperate in manifesting their approval” (Institutio 2.3.9).
But even restraint is not enough: Quintilian is quite clear about the impropriety of “boys
sitting mixed with young men,” in the off chance some unmentionable behavior should elapse.

41

I use the gender specific pronoun intentionally here, and throughout. It’s my understanding
that, while there were women considered to be rhetors, or in any case, worthy of discourse, for
the most part, the speakers whom I’m referencing here meant to exclude women from the debate.
It’s my understanding that when it comes to women, bodies meant something altogether
different.
42
In The Institutio
31

Regardless the teacher’s character and ability to maintain decorum in class, bodies are apt to act
out, as a point of their nature, and so “it is none the less desirable to keep the weaker members
separate from the more mature, and to avoid not only the actual charge of corruption but the
merest suspicion of it” (2.3.14). For Quintilian, bodies are likely to do the most unexpected
things. Or not; even so, they’re liable to look as if they have.
The body’s general tendency to betray the mind (or the soul) in these examples runs
43

counter to other perspectives on the relationship between the two . In terms of this imperative
to oversee the body, though, movement educators have very clear claims to the contrary. Mabel
Todd assures us of the physical body’s tendency towards knowledge when she argues “The
whole body, enlivened as it is by muscular memory, becomes a sensitive instrument responding
with a wisdom far outrunning that of man’s reasoning or conscious control.” For Todd, it’s not
actually the conscious mind that dictates control over the body, but a complex interplay of
cellular, neural, organic tissues. In particular, she points to “The neuromusculatures of skeleton
and viscera interact[ions]” (3), as identifiable locations where stimulus is received, evaluated,
and acted upon.
Consciousness is aware of these evaluations perhaps, and maybe even aware of the
stimulus, but not prior to, and certainly not in order for the material of the body to act.
Quintilian’s and Plato’s concerns that the body will 1) act in discordance with our mind, or 2)
“jumble” everything together, resulting in an unknowable truth, are founded on a very particular
worldview, clearly. This worldview, which comes to us via the ancient Greeks and Romans, but

43

Chapters 3 and 4 will investigate these in greater detail, but for now, when I say “other
perspectives,” I mean only that our classical western enlightenment view of mind as
hierarchically superior to the body is but one perspective. In fact, it’s but one perspective that’s
“classically western,” meaning it is not, in fact, universal, not in fact, accepted as the ultimate.
32

through the European philosophers of Early Modern Europe, is one which is necessarily built on
the premise of control.

44

It’s an admirable aim, control is, but in this view, control is still negotiated as power
over, not power to. In Movement Education, at least, power is nearly always defined as effort,
45

not coercion.

When Barbara Mahler describes herself as being “very untalented” and her

change as being “complete,”

46

she is also identifying an important aspect of the goals of

movement education. These goals, in Mahler’s view, “depend on what somebody wants to do …
the way they want to move” (my emphasis) and “to have the person be fluid enough, to be
resilient as a mover.” Power in this case isn’t dependent on forcing will on particular body parts,
or situations. Power is a quality a body can manifest, its parts in relation to each other, “fluid.”
Fluidity doesn’t allow for dominance; in this worldview, control is made up of motion, and in
that motion, “resilience.” Fluidity and resilience are, in this case, not synonymous for “power,”
but instead are crucial elements of power – whether we are talking about power over, or power
to. In either case, these elements became ways of describing it, and allow for some depth in the
kind of impacts and objectives power might contain.

Desiring Bodies
44

Many other scholars have articulated this genealogy of how Early Modern Europe translated
and thus reclaimed and revised a Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition at length. My intention is not
to reprove their arguments, but to stand alongside them, adding to it an emphasis on the impact
this has, currently, on what we believe we know about bodies. For more details, see Walter
Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance, and The Darker Side of Western Modernity.
Also, see Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.”
45
At this point, I’d like to restate the definition of rhetoric I am working through, and which is
stated in Chapter 1: the study of motion and function, the relationships between bodies, space,
and time, and all the resulting change that inhabits these relationships.
46
As I reference in Chapter 3, this change came as a result from her many years of work in re33

Gorgias, Plato, Quintilian all worry about bodies’ eventual betrayal of the soul, its
impropriety or unconstrained desire corrupting the soul’s tempered, reasonable nature. In
comparison, Aristotle wrestles with the notion and location of desire, attributing it varyingly to
the soul and to the body. Hinting at a general mistrust of bodies

47

and what to do with them, he

ascribes the desire for pleasure to the realm of the body. There are other desires, according to
Aristotle, ones he terms “rational”, which include those things we have heard of or seen, things
48

we have been convinced

are pleasurable. Therefore, pleasure is a thing that can be

experienced as a “certain movement of the soul […] a natural state.” Note that he also uses this
word “natural” to describe those desires which inhabit the body (On Rhetoric 1.11.5).
In a subsequent section of the same text, Aristotle’s tidy categories get blurry. He
explains things differently, namely, that different bodies, in different states of being, experience
different kinds of desires. He remarks:

49

“For if the young happen to be irascible, or

passionately desire anything, it is not because of their youth that they act accordingly, but
because of anger and desire” (1.10.9) It’s not the physical nature of the young that motivates
50

their passion. It’s the emotion. Previously,

Aristotle claims that emotion gets experienced in

the body, but is a quality of the soul. Does this place the anger in their body, or in their soul? I

Education Technique
in keeping with Gorgias, Plato, and Quintilian

47
48
49

through discourse, presumably

I’ll explicate the passage in excerpted bursts rather than tackling the whole section at once, for
clarity’s sake. The excerpted bursts are taken from On Rhetoric.
50
From the paragraph just above, that pleasure is known as a “certain movement of the soul.”
34

51

think what Aristotle is getting at is that the “irascibility” is in the body,

but the anger, the

52

desire, is in the soul.

Just after, Aristotle’s logic of desire argues that it’s not the material reality that creates
desire for wealth, but desire itself: “Nor is it because of wealth or poverty; but the poor happen
to desire wealth because of their lack of it, and the rich desire unnecessary pleasures because
they are able to procure them. Yet in their case too it will not be wealth or poverty, but desire,
that will be the mainspring of their action” (1.10.9). Again, it’s not the physical state that
motivates the man. If it were, by Aristotle’s logic, the poor would be motivated to seek wealth,
and the rich would not, since they already have it. Differently from young people, in this case,
anger may not be the only motivating emotion, and indeed, Aristotle doesn’t name that
motivating emotion specifically. What is important is that he qualifies the motivating agent as
something not limited to the outward manifestation, not limited to physical experience.
And then, just as it seems as if he’s arguing that the body that looks and sounds like a
duck may not, in fact, be one, he states: “Similarly, the just and the unjust, and all the others who
are said to act in accordance with their moral habits, will act from the same causes, either from
reason or emotion, but some from good characters and emotions, and others from the opposite”
(1.10.9). Clearly, Aristotle is trying to reconcile acts with intentions, and to do clearly and
consistently in categories that can be known. What’s not clear is how he has reconciled
inconsistencies with his categorization.
He’s just claimed that a body doesn’t act solely from the physical self. He’s also claimed
that sometimes, it does. Conveniently, whichever the case, that physical body is consistent with
51
52

as in, the physical cues
and so, the separation of body and mind is maintained - the understanding lives in the soul,
35

53

it’s correlative soul. In other examples, the physical body indicates some “truth”

about the

worth of the human, as in the following syllogism: “Virtues and actions are nobler, when they
proceed from those who are naturally worthier, for instance, from a man rather than from a
woman” (On Rhetoric 1.9.22) or “Customs that are peculiar to individual peoples and all the
tokens of what is esteemed among them are noble; for instance, in Lacedaemon it is noble to
wear one's hair long, for it is the mark of a gentleman, the performance of any servile task being
difficult for one whose hair is long” (On Rhetoric 1.9.26). Regardless the location of desire in
any particular body, and the subsequent relationship to that body’s soul, there are some bodies
that are “naturally worthier.” Because of the subsequent relationship to the soul, that too is
worthier, but note that it’s not the soul that carries the distinguishing mark - it’s the body itself.
The self is marked by its body, and so being, is at the mercy of a particular worldview
which identifies the individual self as necessarily good or evil, saved or doomed. Earlier in this
chapter, I noted that this worldview is linked with the imperial expansion practices of Early
Modern Europe. In order to see the world as a site of potential power over, some selves (and
their correlative bodies) must be “worthier” than others. This isn’t a new argument, of course.
What I want to add to it, and emphasize is the way in which we leave this concept of the soul and
body and distinguishing markers of value generally unquestioned, at least in our discipline.

54

not in the body.
In the following two quotations, there seems to be some discrepancy about the absolute nature
of reality – in the first, the sex of the body in question indicates an essence (to Aristotle, of
course) that is more or less noble, however in the second, the culturally specific norms are the
indicators, in which case “truth” is not universal. Hence, my quotation marks around the word.
54
As an example, note Hawhee’s justification in her introduction to Bodily Arts, that “the
cultural, conceptual, and corporeal connections between the arts of rhetoric and athletics, not
unlike the shipwrecked statue, have been more or less submerged since ancient times. To account
for this submersion, though, would require a long meditation on disciplinary division,
overspecialization, and mind-body separation, all of which this book labors, for the most part, to
53

36

Consider again my point about power as a quality of fluidity and resilience. If the soul and body
are constantly located in each other, as Aristotle is attempting to understand, then what results,
what’s visible, is also less fixed, more fluid.
Mahler tells a story about one of her earlier teachers to illustrate one way of “reading”
55

bodies in which Dorothy Vislocky , Mahler’s teacher,
would point out things that nobody could really point out. She’d say, ‘Look at that
dancer’s stage presence, or look at that, that quality.’ She could see way underneath, way
beyond what was presented in front of your face. It’s not just the choreography. Watch
the body in motion; watch the presence. See the person come out.
What Mahler is recalling is something that’s notoriously difficult to articulate, of course, and has
to be understood through many different filters - Mahler’s professional training and background,
as well as cultural definitions about “personhood” and “presence.” I don’t mean to imply
56

otherwise, neither to bend our conversation inappropriately . The importance for me in this

forget.” (4) This amnesia Hawhee aims for, and she is certainly not alone, is something I will
take up in more detail in Chapter 5.
55
Mahler’s teacher
56

These definitions can vary, depending on disciplinary associations (as in literary studies, and
the Romantic or Modernist traditions), theoretical frameworks (as in psychoanalytic theory or
deconstruction), etc. In our interviews, Mahler and I talked at length about what this “presence”
or “personhood” might suggest, whether there is an individual essence, or something less so. My
suspicion was that in a performance-based field such as dance, ideas about what makes a body a
person might be significantly different than we, in the Humanities, are accustomed to thinking.
Mahler contends that the “person” as an “essential self is completely buried, [that] what we see is
culture, and parenting, and environment.” The more we pushed on this topic, Mahler eventually
asked me “How can you know what the essence of the person is?” As a follow up, she added
“You get to know the person. You see the person. They communicate, they’re loving, they’re
compassionate, more that those are qualities of humanity.” While Mahler admits that her early
teacher (Vislocky) may have had particular ideas about a “person” emerging through dance
(Mahler says at one point “seeing choreography beyond what’s just placed in front of you”),
Mahler’s own negotiations of this word/idea is more tied to the ways a body moves, how it has
learned, patterned, and been taught to move in the world.
37

detail is two-fold: motion reveals a person “beyond what was presented in front of your face”;
and that person arises from her body, her body’s relationship to space, and her body’s parts in
relation to itself. The worth of a person can’t be reduced to that person’s body, but neither can it
be separated from it.

Vocalizing Bodies
For ancient Greeks and Romans, physical markers like one’s hair, or body parts
indicating biological sex aren’t the only things signifying character and subjectivity, of course.
Of particular use to us in Rhetoric and Composition Studies is a body’s voice, and the
abstractions that have evolved along with our disciplinary conversations. In Rhetoric and
Composition Studies, the notion of voice as something more than literal seems intuitive. After
all, we draw our trajectory beginning from an oral culture, where Rhetoric played out as spoken
discourse. Rhetors spoke, and they did so as a matter of deliberation, for multiple purposes. They
had to understand their voice as an instrument of delivery, one that could be modified depending
57

on the context – the audience

58

and the intention.

An effective orator used this instrument in

order to shape the speech, not only in order to reach his audience, but in effect, to create the
knowledge itself.
Cicero remarks that the Romans, after hearing the Greek orators, “were inflamed with an
incredible passion for eloquence” (On Oratory 1.4) and this characterization, eloquence, is
something Cicero emphasizes again and again as requisite for effective discourse. He rearticulates Isocrates’ call for range and breadth of knowledge, claiming that lack of it leads to a
“volubility of words […] empty and ridiculous” (Oratory 1.5) and further, that
57

the Senate, a Jury, the “people”, students, visiting emissaries or nobility, etc.
38

speech itself is to be formed, not merely by choice, but by careful construction of words;
and all the emotions of the mind, which nature has given to man, must be intimately
known; for all the force and art of speaking must be employed in allaying or exciting the
feelings of those who listen. (Oratory 1.5)

For Cicero, the depth of understanding is intrinsic to the effectiveness of the speech,
hence of the voice. Ultimately, this depth (and voice) is typified by character, “a certain portion
of grace and wit, learning worthy of a well-bred man […]accompanied with a refined decorum
and urbanity” (Oratory 1.5). The move is to consider oration as an art, more than, as Plato
criticized the Sophists, technical skill. Though writing may have been introduced for its
functionality, thinkers like Isocrates and Cicero elevated the practice into something with
59

aesthetic merit. This shift is described by D.A. Russell

as one in which rhetoric is transformed

“from discourse to literature.” (qtd. in Enos 28). Voice, as a device in rhetoric, may have its roots
in physicality, but as we’ve moved from oral transmission and delivery, the notion has
necessarily become abstracted to describe the persona of a writer.
The shift Russell and Enos note in this emphasis on the art of oration as directly tied to
the character of the man is one that is still felt powerfully

60

today. We refer to “voice” and

maybe mean “character.” Or virtue. Or worth. Status. Privilege. Subject. Self.

61

And yet, as
62

explicit or implicit the connection between a writer’s voice and that same writer’s self, her
58
59
60
61
62

argumentation, jurisprudence, instruction, praise
in Enos’ Ancient Writing Instruction
pun intended
all of which are also indications of power
The gender pronoun, as in earlier sections, is intentional here, for two reasons. 1) I am the
39

body is expected to remain invisible, or at least unmarked. Persistent questions about how much
of this person’s self should be revealed revolve around observations of the writer herself as
indulgent, or narcissistic. Even Peter Elbow, father of expressionism in first year writing, doubts
himself and his writing pedagogy when he admits
I’m afraid that I invite first year students to fall into the following sins: to take their own
ideas too seriously; to think that they are the first person to think of their idea and be all
wrapped up and possessive about it - even though others may have already written better
about it - I invite them to write as though they are a central speaker at the center of the
universe - rather than feeling, as they often do, that they must summarize what others
have said and only make modest rejoinders from the edge of the conversation to all the
smart thoughts that have already been written.”

63

(“Being a Writer” 497, my emphasis).

If voice is a quality resonant of a physical body speaking, it is also resoundingly critiqued for
making this same connection all too obvious. Students of writing today still come to class
ingrained with the value of “objective writing”

64

and a belief that successful writing

65

actually

66

obscures the writer and the writer’s body.

author of this text, and I identify as female, and so to use the reflexive pronoun associated with
my identification is important; and 2) female bodies are, as we already know, presumed to be
silent, and inappropriate for rational language use.
63
I want to be clear that I understand Elbow is reflecting on a tension in his teaching, and not
lambasting himself, or his students, for being naive, too proud, or too permissive. I understand
that Elbow is considering this tension as a common one in the field, and a difficult one to
negotiate. Still, his word choice suggests to me that there is a heavy subject to this tension, that
perhaps we do not recognize often enough. That is, to place yourself as a writer at the center of
your text is a sin, likewise, any posturing at the centrality of your own self, voice, persona, and I
add, for the purposes of my dissertation, body, is only pretense, something to do in practice, or
as a novice, but not something to aspire toward.
64
Of course, many of us in Rhetoric and Composition work to revise that sense that there is no
writer visible in “good writing.” Elbow is one of those, certainly, and there are many more. See
Brandt, Cushman, Ruggles-Gere, Herrington, Miller, and Villanueva’s “The Politics of the
40

Enter Peter Ramus. Ramus’ particular annoyances with Cicero and Quintilian reveal
more layers to what has been suggested as a modern sensibility for objectivity in writing – a
voice we might describe as “sterile” or “detached” or “distant.” His argument is mostly against
Quintilian’s pedagogic instructions, in particular of those “for stirring the emotions, and then for
causing delight.” For Ramus, such things have no place in the teaching of Rhetoric, “arousal and
delight [having no] proper arts, […]especially drawn from moral training, where you learn to
recognize what is virtue, what is vice, what things please honest men, what things delight the
wicked, and likewise what offends each.” (“Arguments in Rhetoric” 125). Arousal and delight
are unavoidable elements of composition to Ramus, but have no place in the instruction of
Rhetoric. For him, these things belong to philosophy perhaps, or ethics. In Ramus’ world,
grammar and dialectic serve rhetoric primarily, and “the remainder – dealing with embellishment
by means of tropes and figures and with grace and dignity of voice and gesture – would be
explained by definitions, divisions, and examples” (“Arguments” 129) –all being things that are
delimited by logic, reason, and in our parlance, “objectivity.” These distinctions recall the
“known body” as well as the troublesome “desiring body” in both bodies’ vocalized selves. To
know the body in speech is to strip it of its desires, and to parse it through categories. Recall
Plato. Recall Aristotle.

Personal: Storying our Lives Against the Grain.” See also, Royster’s “When the First Voice You
Hear is Not Your Own.” See also, Rose’s “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at
the University”. See also Villanueva’s “Considerations for American Freireistas”. See also … the
list is long.
65
or, rhetoric.
66

Chapter 5 connects some of these ideas to performance theories as another possibility for how
to include in our own disciplinary conversations the impact of writing on bodies, as well as
writing as a bodily experience.
41

67

But, surely this “objective voice” is a voice too? Even this one signals the presence
a body within the text, whether it is the one speaking, or the one speaking for “the Other”.

of

68

What to make of Ramus’ voice, one marked by rational language, language not intended to
excite response for its readers, but to stimulate courses of logic in his mind? This too is a felt
presence, one of the state, perhaps, to recall Bender and Wellberry’s

69

claims about the use of

the speaker to bind the “physically demonstrative social systems that so powerfully
institutionalized its doctrines” (7). Michel DeCerteau’s concerns with the work of historiography
as a colonizing and stabilizing force also illustrate the connections between “objectivity” and
“authority.” He speculates on the binary supposed between the Authority (History) and the
Literary:
Surely only this language ‘authorizes’ the historian’s writing, but, for the same reason, it
becomes history’s absent figure. An Infans, this Voice does not speak. It exists only
outside of itself, […] but it allows him to become a ‘popular writer’, to ‘jettison’ pride
70

and, becoming ‘rough and barbaric’.”

(2).

The voice of authority exists in its absence. The distance itself creates a voice, a felt being that is
“outside of itself.” This distant voice, while pretending at civility and objectivity, is also violent.
Of course, all of this is reminiscent of Foucault’s panopticon, and the discursive structures of
language which discipline - which maintain power over. For a voice which is characterized by
67
68

Recall Mahler. Recall Vislocky.

this rational voice, one marked as Ramus would have it, by reason and objectivity, is one that
gets used over and over again to justify the silencing/erasure of bodies marked as less equipped
for such rationality, to justify the colonial model, and to justify acts of extreme bodily
consequence, conquering lands
69
more on Bender and Wellberry in coming pages, particularly when I discuss the connection
between cultural and cellular borders.
42

reason and logic - all elements of “the mind,” this same characterization takes on a particularly
physical, I might suggest bodied existence, along the lines of Mahler and Vislocky’s claims
about the emergence of a person in motion. Even as “voice” aspires to remove the bodies from
speech and knowledge, bodies persist, sometimes in especially insidious ways.
Whether thinking of voice, or the body in general, the deferral and surveillance I’ve
described above can be experienced and made visible in two particular ways. First, the body
becomes an entity that is important primarily for identifying Goodness. Second, deferring the
physical body facilitates a categorization of groups of bodies, easily recognized in language, and
named according to institutions such as republics or states. The next sections help to point out
these manifestations, according to the goal I set out in the opening to this chapter – to build our
awareness of disciplinary patterns, in order that we might also work towards integrating new
ones.

Manifest Goodness
Aristotle addresses the body extensively,

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identifying it as a place where “goodness”

lives – through behavior, through speech, and through expression of emotion. Lived experience
is a necessary factor in a particular body’s ability to act with reason, morality, and prudence. The
old body, in particular the old male body, is the one with developed facility in rational thought
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and speech, which we’ve already seen is the desired state.

We’ve also already determined that

the body is the physical expression of the intellectual (or philosophical, or spiritual), is worthy of
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from The Writing of History

In the following sections, I rely particularly on the Nicomachean Ethics, and On Rhetoric, as
texts where Aristotle makes his arguments and counter-arguments about the relationship of the
body and the mind.
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relish, and reveals the soul. Importantly, as being the site of goodness, the body is also something
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to be protected. Aristotle positions the body as more vulnerable than the mind,

given the way it

is susceptible to the senses and emotions. Also, if the body is susceptible and vulnerable in ways
that the mind is not, then bodies need to be defended, avenged, supported. These needs are not
just needs of physical survival, however; they are in service of the soul, of the Good Man.
This susceptibility to the senses leads to the next quality of bodies, according to Aristotle;
that bodies are something to be relished.

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Through bodies, we experience pleasure and desire –

two things that Aristotle claims motivate Man to act. While it’s the soul that must be relied on
for making “good” decisions and deliberations, the body is the site on which we cultivate
consciousness about what pleases us and what doesn’t. In the excerpt I quoted from above,
Aristotle names “desire” as “the mainspring of their action” (On Rhetoric 1.10.9) and previously
he has equated these desires, resulting in pleasure, with a “natural state.” Yet, it’s not the
physical body where desire can be identified, but in the soul, or more accurately, the soul’s
consciousness of the body. So, a “natural state” is in the culmination of the soul knowing the
body.
Finally, this conflation of “natural” indicates to Aristotle that the body is something
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through which the soul is revealed , something more than simply an outward manifestation of
it. While Aristotle recognizes some elements of character that are recognizable in the physical

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of being, of the republic. Pun intended.

For the rest of the chapter it’s safe to presume that mind is equated with spirit or soul. In later
chapters, making distinctions between “mind” and “spirit” will be fleshed out, if you’ll pardon
the pun.
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consider this alongside my claim in chapter 2, that there are “no good bodies”
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Compare this to my discussion of Mahler’s story and theory about the “person” as a bodily
entity, relative to her teacher’s observation about the “person coming out,” earlier in this chapter.
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appearance and/or behavior of a body, so it would seem he is working to reconcile the ways
these two aspects (the body aspect and the soul aspect) are wound around each other. Further, he
equates inheritance of character and achievements with moral character

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when he argues “it is

probable that virtuous parents will have virtuous offspring and that a man will turn out as he has
been brought up. […] Achievements, in fact, are signs of moral habit; for we should praise even
a man who had not achieved anything, if we felt confident that he was likely to do so.” (On
Rhetoric 1.9.33).

Manifest Language
For Cicero, as much as the body may be an indicator of character or worth of a man, so
are the words an indicator of the body. Cicero makes an analogy in which he connects languagethought to body-soul. In this comparison, language and thought are unable to be split from each
other, in much the same ways that body cannot be spliced from soul. This equation suggests to
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me that Cicero feels language is a phenomenon manifested bodily,

“exertion and exercise of

the voice, of the breath, of the whole body, and of the tongue itself, they do not so much require
art as labor” (1.34). Similarly, thought belongs to the internal being-ness of a man, the soul, the
“essence” of the citizen. Cicero’s citizen is critical to understanding the role of the body, now.
Where Plato and Aristotle emphasize the soul as the supervisory element to a person, Cicero
emphasizes the role of the person in the republic. For Cicero, bodies aren’t just bodies, and aren’t
just souls, but are members of a governing and governed structure. These citizens then, use their

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what we would now name “genetic inheritance”

Again, more of this conversation about the bodily relationship to language, writing, and in
particular, “voice” is taken up in Chapter 5.
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bodies, and in particular speech to express their goodness, their truth. These expressions are
necessarily connected to the same citizens’ inherent superiority or inferiority:
But since we are overwhelmed by opinions, not only those of the vulgar, but those also of
men imperfectly instructed, […] who sever the language from the thoughts like the body
from the soul, neither of which separations can be made without destruction, […] I will
only signify briefly, that neither can embellishments of language be found without
arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the
light of language (3.6).

In some important ways, movement educators might help us to understand this
relationship differently. Irene Dowd, who relies on metaphor and image particularly for
accessing new movement and alignment patterns in her clients, states outright that “the English
language is not very rich in describing sensation - kinesthetic things […] I would get crazy trying
to put down things I knew, but didn’t have the language to express at the time” (“A conversation
with Irene Dowd” 92). Mahler emphasizes the distinction between language and knowledge in
some similar ways, and goes further to say that knowing the language for the experience, in her
case knowing the bones, muscles, and ligaments, doesn’t result in a more effectively arranged
and expressed body. That knowledge “needs to be learned in the body, with the body, and not
just with words.”

In the Voice, the Empire
Cicero’s representative nature of “bodies” as political, something resembling our modern
sense of “nation,” turns the physical manifestations to entities that have rights and

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responsibilities to a larger, more abstract entity - the republic. As well as rights and
responsibilities, citizens include a distinct character that separates them from other bodies of
other republics or similarly bounded places. In erasing the physical body, as I argue in the
opening to this chapter, groups of bodies can also be “erased,” dismissed as ultimately
unknowable, irrational, or unnatural. Language, as Cicero has already pointed out to us, is one of
the more visible and obvious markers of citizenship, and excellence, that “The abilities of our
countrymen […] far excelled those of the men of every other nation” (On Oratory 1.4)
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In the same excerpt,

Cicero cautions us “to be particularly careful whom we imitate

and whom we would wish to resemble” (1:34). I offer this selection to suggest ways Cicero’s
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claims hint at nationalist

ideals – or will be taken up as such, in later centuries. Cicero remarks

that Romans have a natural talent for effective speaking, a talent that is not observable in bodies
of other states in a way which also allows for future thinkers and nation-builders to articulate
Subject-Other identification. He suggests that there are some bodies which are born to speak,
others which, while they may be taught and may labor to improve, are simply not capable of it.
The inability is in their body:
what will he say of those qualities which are certainly born with the man himself,
volubility of tongue, tone of voice, strength of lungs, and a peculiar conformation and
aspect of the whole countenance and body? I do not say that art can not improve in these
particulars […] ; but there are some persons so hesitating in their speech, so
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In the next breath?

It’s inappropriate to use this term in the context of Cicero’s Rome, I know. I use it anyway, to
foreground the ways in which these readings of Cicero come to me through 18th century
England and Scotland, and have been revised to suit that era’s political agenda. While Cicero
doesn’t mean to be Nationalist, I’m sure, I think he is presenting a case for a state-subjectivity,
understood through the entire text. The accumulation of claims points to his call to use rhetoric
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inharmonious in their tone of voice, or so unwieldy and rude in the air and movements of
their bodies, that whatever power they possess either from genius or art, they can never
be reckoned in the number of accomplished speakers; while there are others so happily
qualified in these respects, so eminently adorned with the gifts of nature, that they seem
not to have been born like other men, but moulded by some divinity (On Oratory 1.25).

From the Greeks’ preoccupation with and concern for power over individual bodies to
Cicero’s expansion of that power to the sort that can be held over citizens, Quintilian adds to the
discussion of bodies in rhetoric a layer of propriety and the relationships between teacher and
students. Especially cogent to my argument is the way that Quintilian claims these relationships
configure appropriate discourse. Quintilian’s concern about power, is one over discourse, speech,
language, and the ways that this kind of power contains and constrains bodies’ inherent power to.
Individual character is as much a factor as the dynamic between bodies/characters, shown in the
way he argues “the purity of the teacher's character should preserve those of tenderer years from
corruption, while its authority should keep the bolder spirits from breaking out into licence”
(Institutio 2.3.3). Simply, some bodies are more pure, and are obligated to carry the
responsibility of protecting other, more susceptible bodies. In Quintilian’s example, the teachers’
bodies ought to look out for the younger “tenderer” bodies of students.
In Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, we see how he uses Cicero and
Quintilian’s ideas about elocution for a systematic defense of “taste,” “the sublime,” and
“progress.” It’s discourse of empire, in particular, English empire. His agenda is to assert the
need for “good men, speaking well” not just for effective speaking and writing, but to assert the
goodness of his countrymen, the Scots, recently colonized by the British. His lectures are
in a way that expresses the superiority of one group – the Roman citizens – over others.
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intended to be used widely as instructions, edifying and justifying one group’s mastery over all
others. Not only does Blair call on Cicero’s “good man” to “speak well.” He also draws on
Quintilian’s insistence that those who are “naturally” superior and truly good should endeavor to
teach and therefore lift up those who are “tenderer” or less “dignified” in their speech, but also,
in their character.
Words, for Blair, are not the source of the sublime, neither are they a source of taste
(read: civility) – they are affect, and truly good speech will arise from a truly good man: “when
the thought is truly noble, it will for the most part, clothe itself in a native dignity of language”
(Lecture IV 48). The “native dignity of language” is something peculiar to English, in Blair’s
estimation, as he specifies in Lecture IX: “The English tongue possesses, undoubtedly, this
property, that it is the most simple in its form and construction of all the European dialects
[…][which] renders the acquisition of our language less laborious, the arrangement of our words
more plain and obvious, the rules of our syntax fewer and more simple” (99).
Blair speculates that early iterations of language “must have been extremely barren,”
consisting of few words, and buoyed by “many exclamations and earnest gestures.” This dearth
of words made necessary other modes of explanation for “rude, uncultivated men”, modes such
as using a variety of intonation, matching different tones to different gestures, variety in
“emphasis and force, as along as language was a sort of painting by means of sound.” (Lecture
VI 63). While his speculations are yet another rhetorical strategy to insinuate the importance of
language’s civilizing force, he does also re-inscribe the connection between voice, speech, and
composition. Before we had language, he is saying, meaning English, we had to use our vocal
instruments. Now that we have English, we transfer the need for those instruments into our
language. In this use of the word “language,” I offer also, “writing” in order to make visible

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another place in which physicality gets obscured. Language, or writing, or composition, or
rhetoric comes to be synonymous with the mind, an abstraction belonging to consciousness. At
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the same time, language

becomes a powerful tool in the service of colonization and empire

expansion, systematically cultivating material consequences on millions of bodies.
These goals aren’t initiated by Blair; in fact, they’ve been around since at least the 16th
century, claims Don Abbott. Richard Brinsley’s

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Consolation for Our Grammar Schools, lays

out key guidelines for the American colonies. The list encompasses elements of writing and
rhetoric, but in particular, I note one item on the list:
To grow in our owne English tongue, according to their ages, and growth in other
learning: to utter their minds in the same both in propriety, and purity, and so to be fitted
for divinity, law, or whatever other calling or faculty soever they shall be after employed
in (qtd. in Wright, Halloran 214).

Brinsley’s Consolation was published in 1622, and well pre-dates Hugh Blair’s Lectures.
What I want to signal with this inclusion is not so much a causal relationship, as an existent
atmosphere that is sustained or revised over time, a discourse of power. By the time Blair makes
his pronouncements about the superiority of English, there has been another big shift, not from
discourse to literature in this case, but from God to Nation. For both the Scots and the European
Americans, colonization necessitates proper English to be spoken by any who wish to belong.

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or writing, or composition, or rhetoric

An educator/scholar examined in Don Abbott’s “Renaissance Rhetoric and Writing” and
Wright and Halloran’s “From Rhetoric to Composition: The Teaching of Writing in America to
1900.”
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82

Bender and Wellberry

describe this shift as one which transfers the “sphere of face-to-face

encounter” to an “entity to which one relates abstractly through the internalization of its laws and
concretely through its bureaucratic apparatuses” (“Rhetoricality” 22). In America, then, as in
Scotland, cultivating one’s English voice is a matter of state, the material body is erased again,
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and written

over it is rhetoric.

As a result of these continued and layered deferrals, as well as the imbrication of power
into abstractions about voice, the physical body has become, in the study of rhetorical theory, an
entity without agency. Even the bodies of those in power

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are marked as in need of constant
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supervision, by the mind, if not by other bodies. Language has been pulled in to save us,

it

seems, from certain chaos and embarrassment. And, as I mentioned in the opening to this
chapter, our current disciplinary practices do little to make these markings and imbrications
transparent. In the coming pages, I will offer another story about the role of bodies and rhetoric,
one which includes identifiable categories for describing this role that allows for the body as an
agent of knowledge production, an agent with power to use. Reorienting our own intellectual
habits and patterns also provides a way of continuing our scholarly interrogations about the
body, the relationships between them, and the implications this has on our daily practices.

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Already mentioned once in this chapter, Bender and Wellberry write about the connection
between rhetoric, and social and power structures
83
or spoken
84
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as in, power over
I would add, to police us.
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Chapter 3: “Righting the Pelvis: Orientations and Tropes from Movement Education and
Rhetorical Bodies”
One of the most important principles in many movement education techniques concerns
where and how a body’s bones align with each other, and how they work to distribute the force
of gravity through them. This principle allows a body to connect more fluidly and efficiently to
the ground, which also facilitates the passage of the same gravitational forces back up the bones,
and out the head. In this way, then, a moving body is connected, we might say “grounded” as
well as able to move upward. This oppositional movement through a body’s skeleton has a
function that supports powerful connections through all the moving parts - the spine into the
arms and legs, and these into the hands and feet. It’s the accumulation of these forces and the
positioning of the bones that I will focus on in this chapter, and will describe how a detailed
understanding of these relationships can influence and energize scholarship on rhetoric and
writing.
Generally, considering and reconsidering the relationships between bodies and gravity, as
theorized by key innovators and practitioners in Movement Education, can reveal significant
lapses in our discipline’s own understanding about the role and value of bodies. Even more, this
level of consideration can suggest to us some other ways of revising our understandings, as well
as an invigorated and complex manner of approaching what is a growing interest in the notion of
a subfield, Embodied Rhetorics. Specifically, this chapter elucidates the relationship of gravity
and bodies, and argues this relationship is foundational to work in Rhetoric and Composition
Studies. By looking to existing scholarship in the field, I will illustrate the manner and effect of
different orientations, and describe visible and felt patterns of these orientations. I argue that
resulting reorientations and patterns also help to further explain in what ways we can fully

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understand the body as a system of power, leading me to name three elements of Embodied
Rhetoric: instability, centeredness, and reevaluation.

Bodies in Gravity: A Re/Orientation
Last week I was on my way to the pilates studio where I teach when I decided that we
needed to start the class standing up, this week. Every week, for the last couple of years, I have
begun this class asking participants to lie on their backs, with their knees bent and feet flat on the
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floor. We do this in order to find what Irene Dowd and Lulu Sweigard
Rest Position,

87

call the Constructive

in order to experience our skeleton’s weight into the floor and so we can

breathe. Week in and week out, I’ve begun class this way, explaining that one thing that’s so
beneficial about this is that when we lie on the floor, we’ve reoriented our bodies and gravity. In
fact, for the almost 15 years I’ve been teaching Pilates, I’ve started classes by asking students to
lie on their backs.
But last week, as I drove the 20 miles into town and towards the studio, it occurred to me
that this reorientation to gravity, while a “kinder” position for the skeleton, may not necessarily
allow people to feel the way forces in the universe can travel through their skeletons, through
their joints, into the floor and back up. Lying down does help people to let go of many of the
muscles they need to, in order to connect to the floor. Also, lying down means you don’t have to
worry about falling over. And at some point, the reorientation to standing would become

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Irene Dowd is a student of Dr. Lulu Sweigard. Sweigard is considered one of the founders of a
branch of movement education called Idiokinesis, though it’s early conception is often attributed
to Mabel Todd. See also Sweigard’s Human Movement Potential: Its Idiokinetic Facilitation,
Pub. Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1978.
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For more details about CRP, see Irene Dowd, Taking Root to Fly “Visualizing Movement
Potential” p. 6
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necessary, just as a matter of fact, since most of the exercises we do in that class involve moving
from a prone position. But just because we’ll have to get on the floor, on our backs, eventually,
there is certainly no chance we’ll be able to stay there forever. At the end of the hour, we’ll all
have to get up and walk out of the room, into and through gravity. It will always be there waiting
for us.
A contemporary of Dr. Sweigard, Dr. Ida Rolf emphasized the inevitability of gravity in
her stark claim that gravity “is the omnipresent, all-powerful, unremitting determinant of [a
person’s] uprightness or lack of it.” (163)

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An even finer point - even when we are lying down,
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either on our backs or on our bellies, gravity is still there. I often joke that this position

offers

us the experience of being out of gravity. But it’s not true. We’re just different, in it. There are
lots of ways to talk about this difference - as a mathematical equation, perhaps - a geometrical reassembly of the surface area of our body in relation to the omnipresent physical force which is
then distributed through a larger plane, resulting in a more diffuse sensation of the way that force
pulls on matter, our matter, our bodies.
There are also neurological ways to talk about this difference - as a shifting of stimulus
and the way our brain might process the different stimulus, the view of the ceiling (rather than
the wall opposite us) providing new input to our nerve centers, the sensation of the hard floor
under our shoulder blades, our skull, the back of our pelvis simultaneously offering support to
our skeleton and information for our nervous system about where we are in space, and how we
fit into the room. All this new information, in the form of sensory input (visual, auditory, tactile)

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from an interview with Ida Rolf. The selection appears in an article “Gravity: An unexplored
factor in a more human use of human beings”
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lying down
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sends new messages through the synaptic gaps and our body makes different decisions about
where or how or what to move.
All these reorientations to gravity are important, good even, and instructive for how to
move with greater ease, more power, less pain. But, I was thinking, what about when we do have
to get up and walk out of the room? There is a common phrase in yoga practices, that a person
“comes to the mat,” meaning that a person’s yoga practice is both intentional and spatially
directed. You bring your practice to the mat, and commit that time to breathe, to draw your focus
inward, to extend your body through space from that inward focus. There is also a variation of
the phrase which goes something like bringing your yoga practice “off the mat.” To bring your
practice off the mat is not to stand around in a zen-like trance with your legs spread apart in a
warrior position, arms reaching to the front and the back of you, all this while you’re in line at
the grocery store. To take your yoga practice off the mat means that the inward and outward
focus/extension moves with your physical body through the world, as you interact with other
bodies, in other places - in other orientations to gravity.
I am not asking you to take up a yoga practice, or pilates, or marital arts. I am asking us
to begin to consider our orientations to gravity, to consider them as multiple, and to consider
them as critical to the way we pursue our intellectual work. Very often, we might think of our
work as doing just this, for example the way many of us ask our students to try writing from a
different ethos, or towards a different audience. In our research, we might think of the ways we
redraw the scope of our projects to include participants or objects of inquiry that have not yet
been recognized as significant. In our writing, we might attempt some of the same tasks we ask
of our students, or we might look to other sources of distribution or experiment with form and
arrangement in the production of our texts.

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All these options, as just a few general and unspecific ways, are excellent possibilities for
the kind of work we could take on, and suggest the extent and range our scholarship has already
revised itself. However, these tasks don’t reorient our relation to gravity as much as change the
manner in which we maintain the standard orientation. Writing from a different perspective is
more akin to shifting the hand with which you hold your pen; likewise, writing to a new audience
is more like turning to face the people who are standing behind you, rather than in front of you,
and shifting your research gaze from a traditional site of inquiry to one previously unnoticed is
similar to shifting your position, while still standing. Changing the form of your text might feel
like standing on one leg, instead of two.
As I’ve already pointed out, all of these adjustments and revisions in scholarship in
rhetoric and composition studies are admirable, interesting, and worthwhile. I’ve also claimed
that these same adjustments and revisions are not as much a reorientation as they are a shift in
manner. Therefore, because they maintain a standard relation, or an accustomed relation in any
case, the nervous system is not challenged, not asked to make new and different and confusing
decisions. Without challenging the nervous system, without new, different confusions, our
bodies and our resulting scholarship practices the same patterns, already well rehearsed, well
substantiated at the level of our cells and tissue.
To challenge the nervous system requires changing the sensory input; it requires an
element of surprise. One radical way of doing such a thing involves changing what the body (and
its nervous system) expects to be up, and what to be down, or right and left. It’s radical in that
this one change creates an entire network of changes in how the body has to perceive its position
in space, in relationship to other objects and bodies. Simply put, if you stand on your head,
everything is suddenly different: the way your body experiences force is different, as you are

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now bearing weight into your skull, rather than your feet; the way you hear sounds changes; the
things you see are different. Obvious, maybe, but perhaps what is less obvious is the overall
effect this has on the system that is your body. All these changes mean that your nervous system
can no longer rely on what it assumed to be true, what it assumed to be natural, based on the
patterns your body has practiced over and over again, in your customary orientation to gravity.
Practicing patterns in itself is a productive task, in rhetoric studies as well as in muscular
training and movement education. Indeed, it’s the practice itself which builds the pattern and
accumulates into a well integrated knowledge base, whether this base is expressed in our
scholarship, or in our bodies. However, consider the way your lower back might ache at the end
of a work week, or the crunching sensation in your knee as you climb the stairs day in and day
out. Neither of these sensations are inherently bad, neither are they necessarily imposing
limitations on your movement. Even if your lower back aches at the end of the day, you may be
able to get in and out of a chair, or go for a bike ride. Similarly, your knee’s crunching could
certainly be irritating, but may not prevent you from getting up and down the stairs, or bending
down to pick up the pencil you dropped.
Both of these examples are expressions of a movement pattern, one which is composed of
multiple and specific layers: lower back pain could be a configuration of the alignment of your
particular skeleton, as well as the related muscular contractions, tightnesses, weaknesses, and
imbalances, as well as the compression or restriction of circulatory pathways for blood and
lymph through, as well as a reduction in your breath capacity in your lungs and respiratory
diaphragm, etc. All or some combination of these things could exist, none of them necessarily
limiting this particular body’s ability to move and interact with the world; and yet, all or some
combination of these things also continue to work together, over time, to rehearse and perform

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the same patterns over and over again. Eventually, these patterns become so strong that they
move the skeleton and the body as a whole into a position where it is no longer organized in
gravity. Gravity acts on the body, of course, but the fluency and coherency of these forces
distributing themselves through the body is disrupted, and so this same body is subject to
gravity, at the mercy of it, rather than in relation to

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gravity.

Often, we, in Rhetoric and Composition Studies, talk about embodiment in ways that
embrace our previous knowledge, our history of understanding knowledge and discourse. This
makes sense of course; we want to begin with familiar patterns.. These embraces, or patterns,
involve several different tropes I’ve identified: embodiment as affect; embodiment as inscription
of material acts; and embodiment and language as respective metaphors for each other. In the
following sections, I will point out instances of each of these tropes, and explain how the patterns
serve a constant orientation to gravity. As I’ve argued already, this patterning, while familiar and
therefore strong, has effects on our disciplinary practices, of course, but perhaps even more
importantly, has resounding effects on bodies themselves.

Trope: Embodiment as Affect
We may talk about embodiment through the valence of affect, which includes feeling,
sensing, emotion, basically something beyond language that is to be valued in the way that we
value meaning. Naming this “thing” affect makes it separate from meaning, necessitates
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The concept of relationality is one which deserves much more attention, and which many
other scholars have theorized in ways I am grateful to acknowledge. Many of these scholars are
those who locate themselves in and beyond multiple disciplines, and who are discussed in greater
detail in an article in progress, by the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab at Michigan State
University. For particular detailed descriptions of these theories of relationality, refer to Qwo-Li
Driskill, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, Malea Powell, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Emma Perez, Shawn
Wilson.
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language, intellect, the mind, in order to equate the two. In this equation, affect is different than
meaning, ultimately. It is the Other Meaning,

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the one which lives in the body, in senses, in

intuition, in the part of the brain dictating emotion. Those scholars who want to claim that
embodiment is equivalent to affect might disagree with my earlier statement: that affect is
different from meaning. The cornerstone of their argument, I think they would say, is exactly the
opposite. I honor this argument, and trust that their intention is to validate this “part” of
knowledge which is not first organized through intellect, through words. I believe the argument
continues along these lines: we feel something in our body, a response to someone else’s body
perhaps or an act of our own,

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and that feeling is what counts as meaning. That feeling is not

necessarily made into meaning by words; the meaning is contained in the feeling itself.
As an example, consider Sondra Perl’s integration of Gendlin’s “felt sense” with respect
to writing. For Gendlin, felt sense describes a kind of knowledge that exists in the body,
something that exists before it is named through language, something which is experienced
physically. Gendlin, a psychologist, used this theory of knowing to describe phenomena such as
intuition, or to assist in the task of focusing, not as we might intend it in academics as forming a
research question, but as a somatic and cognitive process of reckoning. Perl uses Gendlin’s
theories to apply to the task of writing, as a way to find the right words or to come to a better
understanding. Along these lines, Perl has developed a system of writing and thinking which
encourages a cooperation between the body and the mind, in which the writer cultivates an
awareness of her physical body, while she is writing. This awareness facilitates an intervention

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[sic] Capitalization here is intentional, referring to the way in which “Others” represents
specific groups marginalized, and set apart.
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or something else entirely
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by the writer, and potentially, by the writer’s body, to assist in the composition and linguistic
processes.
Perl’s revisions of the composition process are significant, and, for many people, have
also been revolutionary for the intrinsic admission of things like feeling, intuition, and bodily
reaction into a task which has often been charged with the expectation of objectivity, reason,
semantic precision, clarity, and the like. Still, at the center of Perl’s process is a preoccupation
with the product as the ultimate site of knowledge; the body is a tool towards refining that
knowledge, but in the end the knowing comes through finding a “better understanding” - the
“right word.” Even in this admission of the sorts of knowledge Perl and Gendlin concede exist,
these must be expressed finally, with the word, with logos, with the mind. The mind is still the
arbiter of reason, of “the good, the true, the beautiful.” No matter the value of the body, our
Early Modern version of Plato resonates. Indeed, not only does he resonate, he hunkers.
However, what if we could defer this resonance, just reroute around it a little bit, and
look at Gendlin and Perl’s notion of felt sense, as a movement educator might? For example,
Barbara Mahler tells me about how she was an “untalented” dancer. In this story, she describes
her difficulty with common dance techniques

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and the kinds of changes she experienced

through the work she now teaches and has innovated. In her reflection on exactly these changes,
the “meaning” in her dancing wasn’t something inherent in her body, but was something that her
body produced and developed over time, through a particular practice that involved a
neurological patterning.

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such as extension of the leg in the hip joint greater than 90 degrees, or flexion of the spine, or
rotation of the trunk, etc.
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This patterning and practice included taking 3 classes a day, from Susan Klein, the
woman she later worked closely with in building their Re-Education Technique.

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During this

time, Mahler explicitly states now that she “never felt anything.” The emphasis she places on this
comment is vital, especially in the context of the work: classes are typically 90 minutes to 2
hours long, and involve slow, sustained positions which demand that the student’s body lengthen
muscularly, articulate deeply, and re-position skeletally.
For example, in one 45 minute period of the class, students may start from a standing
posture, and incrementally roll the top of their head towards the floor, paying very careful
attention that the pelvis maintains the appropriate relationship with the femoral head. Without
thinking of other variables in this activity, the pelvis/femur relationship is one which necessitates
an extreme lengthening of the hamstring muscles, as well as the release and lengthening of the
quadriceps and hip flexor muscles, which for most people, and certainly for Barbara at the time
of her story, were particularly short, tight, and strong. The experience of asking those muscles to
cooperate in the “hanging down” as this exercise is called in Re-Education Technique, almost
universally results in an intense sensation; some people describe it as painful.
Understanding this, let me repeat Barbara’s commentary on her own learning process: “I
never felt anything.”
Regardless her lack of sensation, she also describes the change her body underwent
during this period of time as “complete.” Whether or not she was aware of the change her body
was absorbing, the learning process her body was going through, that change (or learning) was
happening. Also, that change was profound - not just for the way Barbara felt from day to day,
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For the duration of this book, when I refer to Re-Education Technique, I am including all the
work that Barbara helped to develop and innovate, as a working partner with Susan Klein,
beginning in the 1970s, and ongoing.
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but also for what she was capable of doing physically, what kind of movement she was able to
produce and sustain in her dancing.
For this reason, I argue knowledge lives in the body, is made by the body, articulates
itself through the body. It may be affective, by which I mean that it is something “felt” as a “gut
feeling” or a “vague sense” or simply “just known.” Also, it may not be. Embodiment as
knowledge doesn’t require our affective consciousness to communicate itself. It doesn’t need
feeling, as a sensorial element, neither does it need be felt, in terms of emotions at all.
Affective Knowledge, as we talk about it in Rhetoric and Composition, maintains a
divide between meaning as it is understood through consciousness (the mind) and meaning as it
is understood through the body. Affective Knowledge sustains a Western desire to privilege one
kind of meaning over another, rather than to see it all as one. It may seem like a small point to fix
on, but my experience and research spanning 10 years of working simultaneously in one field
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governed by the word
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bodies in space

and another one primarily concerned with the physical practice of

pushes me to my argument.

Trope: Embodiment as Material Acts
Affective Knowledge isn’t the only way we talk about embodiment, however. We also
use the trope of embodiment to describe material acts which are inscribed with meaning, through
language. These material acts tell a story, we may say. Or, our everyday practices, practices
committed with our bodies, make meaning, meaning we can describe with our words. As one
particularly striking example, think of the act of a sexual assault, with undeniable consequences
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and everything that “the word” entails - language, intellect, reason
similarly, everything that “bodies in space” entails - coordinating limbs and trunk with neural
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97

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for bodies, that of the attacker and the victim both . The “practice”

is committed in

movement, but also with a kind of inscription. Depending on the bodies involved, the
signification takes place in a dark place, or a well lit room; it may be unplanned, or the opposite;
it may take place between two or more people who know each other intimately, superficially, or
not at all. The material objects associated with the event, bruises perhaps, or rape kits
administered by medical personnel, or police reports, etc. are ones which interact with other
material objects (the bruises and kit documented in the report, the bruises being covered, the rape
kit refused and noted in a report, etc).
The accumulation of the event, the interactions of material objects, and the changed
physical body carry a story. Still, this story is one we understand, and tell, in words. Again,
depending on the people involved, the material act and bodily effect may tell a story of abuse, of
oppression, of betrayal, of punishment, shame, ritual, sacrifice, endurance, survival.
As in the case of Gendlin and Perl, the meaning is located in the verbal language about
this material and performative act. JL Austin would also emphasize the verbalization as a
signifier of meaning, the constitutive element of “I am a rape victim” or “I am a rape survivor”
and similarly “I am a rapist” marking and changing the physical person. The event also changes
the person, certainly, but it’s the naming with language which carries the burden of the story.
After all, we say “bruises heal.” We say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will
never hurt me.”
patterning and muscular conditioning
and indeed the bodies of other people indirectly connected to the assault, in the form of
legislation and policy regarding criminalization, curfews and restricted access, prosecution and
acquittal, cultural standards for public and private behaviors - sexual or otherwise.
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I use “” around this word for some acknowledgment of the sensitive nature of talking about
these kinds of acts - but also want to maintain a conversation about physical and material events
as entities which are, indeed, practiced in social groups and communities.
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As a direct counter to this axiom, Michel De Certeau argues that, in fact, the words are
precisely the things that hurt us, as instrument of empire and colonization.

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The story of rape

creates a rape that lasts and implicates everyone long after the event itself. This point is not to
suggest that we should steer away from telling stories about rapes, not at all. Instead, we should
be aware of the stories we tell, all kinds, and consider where the body exists in these stories.
“Bruises heal,” while true, effaces a knowledge about the effect of violence on the body, as if
once the contusion disappears, the visible damage is rendered inconsequential. But what lingers
is what really matters - the story, the language of the practice. Too, the story the attacker and
victim tell produces the significance, the consequence. And still, this consequence is manifested
in the body. Attackers must announce themselves to new neighbors, inviting scrutiny about their
living conditions - where they can live, how they can live, what kind of jobs they can have, how
they will participate in a society, physically. Victims will have to decide whether they are indeed
a “victim” or a “survivor” and then experience the physical effects of whichever name they
adopt. The story goes that whichever name the person adopts will determine this person’s future
health and happiness - victims are depressed, survivors are empowered.
As I said, I’m not critiquing the people involved in such an act, as much as I’m hoping to
call attention to the power that we’ve afforded language not only in discourse about the event of
rape, but the materiality of that event itself. To understand this act as an embodied act would
require attending to the bodies themselves, both of them, all of them. I’ll return to this event, the
images associated with it, and the various perspectives on how to understand them in coming
pages. For now, I emphasize the entanglement of physical act/movement with story/inscription.

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in particular, in The Writing of History
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As one attempt to reconceptualize materiality and image, Kris Fleckenstein advocates for
a new logic, a new poetics of meaning, of the “imageword” in her recent book Embodied
Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Fleckenstein argues that the discipline’s
incorporation of images into composition practices has relied on a textual imperative. I agree
with her on this point. She calls us to recognize how “imagery is more than just another text,
more than a separate mental system that interfaces with language, more than a one-dimensional
strategy” (22). If we use Fleckenstein to understand the material and “imaged” version of an act
of sexual assault such as I began above, then we would need to understand the objects, as well
as the image of the bodies involved in this act as multiply tangled. Rather than the fairly linear
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narrative version of the story, which we tell with words, through language,

the event would,

according to Fleckenstein, be more akin to an “ecological system” (22) comprised of the
“imagery’s’ corporeal is logic and words’ discursive as if logic” as well as the interrelated,
looping dynamic between these two logics. In this way, then, Fleckenstein sees images as bodily
entities, or corporeal in any case, and linked to words, but not of words.
Yet this corporeality of images sustains the distinction between self and other, where the
“subject matter of imagery is feeling” (22, my emphasis). What I understand this to mean, in the
assault example, is that while the image/bodies/materiality of the event necessitates an
alternative logic to the meaning produced within the act itself, one which is attempting to resist
the textualization of bodies, that same meaning production is still embedded in the verbal
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The story usually goes something like this: Attacker approaches Victim. Victim resists and
refuses. Attacker persists and forces victim to participate in sexual acts against victim’s will.
Attacker uses violence along with sex to coerce and pacify the victim. Victim reports/does not
report the act to friends/authorities. Victim prosecutes/does not prosecute attacker. Attacker is
found guilty/innocent. Attacker is punished/set free. Victim goes to counseling. Victim suffers
PTSD. Victim’s body heals. Victim has trouble maintaining relationships until victim “gets over”
trauma of event. Attacker attacks again/never attacks again/goes about life as usual/lives with the
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storytelling of the event. Even with Fleckenstein’s interrelated logics (the is and the as if), the
meaning of the assault is primarily understood through language, an interpretation and
inscription upon the images.

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The image is still an image of the body, not the body itself. The

body still gets written on, as De Certeau would claim, in words, but also in images. I claim that
this continues to enact the assault itself, language being laid over the body in ways that render it
invisible, insignificant without that language. The body needs language, then, in order to be
recognized as viable. It’s “self” and “other” all over again, a bedrock of our Euro-American
understanding of the universe.
Reroute again, around this “bedrock” of self and other as distinct, albeit related elements.
Todd, considered by many as the originator of the term and technique, Idiokinesis.

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One of

Todd’s foundational premises is that the way a person understands her or his relationship to the
universe occurs at the level of the bones. She argues that the bones’ relationships to each other
instigates postural patterns, which then allow for neurological transmission, which engage
muscular support and movement, which feed the body’s cognition – about place, about
relationship, about the universe.
Barbara Mahler describes something similar when she talks about how a body stands,
“using the floor.” This phrase is a common one among dancers and movement educators, but to

name “rapist”.
Of course, language is inescapable, and a vitally important instrument to recognizing bodies,
the worth of them, the existence of them, the roles they play. Indeed, this whole project is a
“languaged” manifestation of my theories. My bone to pick is less with the notion of language
itself, as an arbiter of understanding, and more to do with the ways in which we privilege it, or
use it as a model on which we base other modes of understanding.
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A form of somatic education practiced by physical therapists, kinesiologists, dancers, athletic
trainers, etc. The term “idiokinesis” was later coined by Dr. Lulu Sweigard, mentioned earlier,
and who was a student of Todd’s. Irene Dowd, a practitioner I’ve referred to already, is a
contemporary of Barbara Mahler.
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actually feel the floor, to use it requires a skeletal relationship that is not nearly as common. All
of us, as bodies, have what Mahler refers to as “places of disconnection [which could be the
result of] muscles holding, or the structure being pulled out of line for a particular reason.” These
places of disconnection interfere with the fluency with which gravitational forces can pass
through our skeleton, to the floor. Gravitational forces, for Mahler, as for Mabel Todd, are
critical, not only as part of the physical laws of the universe, and so being undeniable elements
with which we have to contend. These forces are the very things that connect us to the earth, to
the floor, the us being explicitly our bodies. Mahler explains:
when gravity comes down from the heavens, or from the head, or from the sky - whatever
you believe - and it hits one of these places [of disconnection], there’s this eddy that
builds up - and so some of the force that should be trickling down to the floor - ideally
100% - is caught up in this eddy. Let’s say 10% goes. And then there’s 10% less going
down. If there’s one disconnection, chances are there’s another, so you run into another
one - like hyperextended knees - and some [more] energy spills off. Depending on how
many [disconnections] you have, less and less force is able to get all the way down to the
bottom. And then, in terms of physics, everything that goes down must come back up. So
this 5% that you have to push off the floor with, doesn’t grant you a lot of power.
While Mahler is talking about harnessing gravitational force falling down through the skeleton
into the floor and back up, we might understand this as Todd would ask us to - as a force which
connects us to the universe, and as a force which allows our body to make meaning from this
connection. What we understand from such a connection includes the distinction between our
self and other selves, or our self and the rest of the world, but also, importantly, our relationship
to the world, to other bodies in the world.

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Therefore, to return to the material practice of an assault, and to attempt to “read” it in
Mahler’s perspective on gravitational force as a connector, the bodies and the material objects
present in this event are wound together , their musculo-skeletal and neural selves, through
gravity, and through the material ground which they use. The experience connects them by
matter, as well as by image, and feeling, and word. In this view, the material act is not inscribed
with meaning by the words that surround the event or those that are carried through our
imaginations, during and after the event. The meaning rises out of the connections forged
through neural pathways, which invites inscription as well, but is not separate from it, neither is
it a tool of such inscription.

Trope: Embodiment as Language–Language as Bodies
Rhetoric and Compositionscholars invested in notions of embodiment are, of course,
preoccupied with the interactions between discourse and materiality. In most cases, these
interactions are more likely to be metaphorical relationships; for example in the way that James
Wilson and Cynthia Lewicki-Wilson articulate what they see as a natural connection between
composition studies and embodiment. In their introduction to Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in
Language and Culture they claim:
Composition’s long history of pedagogy scholarship and its position within the academy
in the nearly ubiquitous first-year literacy course set it apart from other disciplines as
situated and ‘embodied,’ a field which serves other knowledges, as the body ‘serves’ the
mind, and whose subject, student writing, is uniquely and closely aligned with its object,
the student writer” (8).

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Certainly I take their argument to mean that composition’s relationship to other disciplinary
practices sets it apart from other fields, and that this relationship involves a systemic and
complex series of identifications and significations. But, they describe an embodied field of
study as one which ‘serves the mind’ and one which is clearly identified in terms of subjects and
objects, which does little to expand our understanding of the role of bodies and minds. One
serves the other. In this case, it is the body that serves.
Embodiment, to Barbara Mahler, involves something different, something along the lines
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of function, which brings to mind the definition of rhetoric I offered in Chapter 1.

Rather than

using language to talk about bodies, or vice versa, Mahler suggests that the two are quite distinct,
and rely on multiple modes of experience to move through them. Embodiment suggests
possibility to Barbara, and doing. She says “If you read some of the stuff on my website […]
about what the work is, you know it’s intellectual, it’s smart. That’s not going to change you. It’s
not going to make you a better dancer, a better mover, it’s not gonna put you more in touch with
yourself.” It’s in the change where meaning lives, when we talk about embodiment, change and
“doing, finding and experiencing. And allowing for possibilities.” Embodiment necessitates an
action, and movement between. It’s not the body’s relationship to the mind that marks something
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as embodied, but the body’s relationship to space, time, and other bodies or objects.

This is a common enough belief in dance studies, in arenas where spoken and written
language is either absent, or significantly less important. Another theorist, Rudolf Laban,
developed space-harmony theories to describe effort, movement, and bodies. A student of his,
who later developed her own continuations of these theories, Irmgard Bartenieff helps to explain
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from p. 7: “I believe rhetoric to be the study of motion and function, the relationships
between bodies, space, and time, and all the resulting change that inhabits these relationships.”
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these theories as something “[Laban] saw that in the situation of survival you have to make use
of space and energy. You are forced to. From there, he developed the interrelationship of energy
and space to what we call our Effort” (224

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)

In some ways, composition scholar Belinda Kremer suggests this kind of relationship in
her advocacy of the “infection” trope to describe writing. Infection, for Kremer, doesn’t
necessarily imply something negative, not necessarily pathological. Instead, it allows her to think
of the borders between things (whether they are genres, texts, organisms, bodies, and on) as
fluid, and not discrete. One “thing” can infiltrate another, and impact it, change it, infect it,
making it something else entirely. And so on. She uses the concept of infection in the form of her
own writing on the subject,

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tries to make the messiness transparent, and claims that an

academic mistrust of this messiness
distance

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is grounded in the insistence on a scientific objectivism, a

from the text/subject/ body. Kremer speculates that what might be at the root of this

distance “stands right behind the avowal that subjectivity makes critical thinking impossible, that
fear is part of what drives this distance from the text? It seems excruciatingly difficult, within
universities, and particularly within the liberal arts, to justify the worth of, or even admit to the
existence of, arguments that can’t be solved” (104).
But still, Kremer is using bodies as a trope for writing, an image for it, and this image is
one which certainly exists in bodies, but is perhaps not thought through fully. Infection, as a
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105

Ibid.

from “Interview with Irmgard Bartenieff” in Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of
Embodiment, Ed. Don Hanlon Johnson.
106
in “So It Was, This Beautiful Night” in Alt:Dis Alternative Discourse and the Academy. Eds.
Bizzell, Fox, and Schroeder.
107
read: subjectivity
108

read: cleanliness
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phenomenon, is something that is fought, in and by bodies. Sometimes that fight is successful
and others it’s not. I don’t intend to obsess on the image, but as a potentially desirable quality to
writing, I think ‘infection” denies a particular understanding of how bodies react to them. White
blood cell counts elevate, lymph accumulates around the area, circulation increases, all to allow
the body to diffuse and absorb the infection, or to embrace it. With or without the stigma of a
pathologized infection, Kremer’s metaphor disavows bodies of the kind of agency she claims to
want for them.
Her point is fixed on a way to use bodies in service of writing, “infection” being a way to
move from the sanitized and falsely objective voice of academic prose. The intention is
compelling, yet her result is still largely invested in a way for us to think of writing that is not
“normal” or “conventional” and naming it something bodily, “infection.” Kremer’s theory places
one subject over top of another - to recall, she has changed the manner in which she maintains
her relationship in gravity, rather that reorienting it. Her own essay, one she models as a kind of
“infected writing” is really language about language, language which mentions bodies. What has
been infiltrated, impacted, changed in her essay? An academic essay has been collided with
personal narrative, email text, and transcribed personal conversations, infused with a biological
image to shape it. My question about what has been changed is not intended as insult, but rather
to ask of us all, what does our language do, when we use bodies to give it shape? In what ways
are these moves really advocating for a newly patterned mode of being. I feel confident that
Kremer’s intentions are to validate the kinds of writing she is modeling for us, but what is at
stake with her naming it bodily, naming it “infectious?” These aren’t easy questions, to be sure.
And I’m not sure I have a simple answer for them. I only want to point out that while “infection”

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may seem like a provocative metaphor for talking about discourse, there are many bodies for
which infection is something more than provocative.
Until now, I have insisted that our discipline has nearly consistently shied away from
physical bodies and their functions, even in work that purports to be emphasizing the
rhetoricality of these things. I’ve also called on us to reorient ourselves, as a discipline, but also
as individuals working in the discipline, to reposition our understanding of embodiment as one
which includes and even integrates knowledge about how bodies are organized and how they
exist in the world. Rather than leaning on our proclivities towards abstraction, in language and
consciousness, I ask us to envision a view of rhetoric that is innervated and coordinated

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among systems of thought, of cultures, of disciplines. This would entail a view that imagines
both what is known, and what is not; that enlists multiple faculties, rather than relying on what is
most accessible; and utilizes the system with appropriate distributions of labor. Insofar as we can
learn from Movement Education, I’ve identified three elements of Embodied Rhetoric that I
believe can help to more clearly understand what an innervated, coordinated view of rhetoric
looks like. These elements – instability, centeredness, and revaluation – and some related
examples follow.

Unstable Bodies
The abstraction I describe above can make it seem as if bodies have been wholly
erased

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from our scholarship, but too, the body, even in cases where it is more visible, is

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Recall my articulations of an embodied methodology, from Chapter 1, as one which
recognizes the relationships between bodies, space, and time as rhetorical, but also constituted by
layers.
110
As I’ve detailed in the previous chapter.
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stabilized, stripped of its systems and layers, its rhetoricity. In some ways, we might understand
bodies as stable things, given that they tend to maintain the same form, generally. They also tend
to act and react in predictable ways, in controlled circumstances. For example, we know that in
order to breathe, the respiratory diaphragm is in a particular position at rest: it “domes” upward
into the ribcage, helping to support the lungs and heart. Too, we know that in order for the lungs
to inflate, the diaphragm must displace itself, contracting by dropping into the abdominal cavity,
making room for the lung tissue to expand and fill with air. At the same time, the ribcage must
swell, giving the respiratory diaphragm a pathway for it’s movement downward and allowing the
spine to lengthen and move, also to accommodate the filling of the lungs. Then, in exhalation,
the diaphragm pushes itself back into the thoracic cavity, the rib cage “shrinking” (as opposed to
its “swollen” position during the inhale), the lungs deflating, and air moving upward and out the
trachea, the mouth, the nostrils.

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This is a fairly predictable course of events, and one which

occurs over and over again, without our consciousness supporting it, without even an awareness
of this course of events. Yet, how many times does this predictable course of events go wrong?
Many times. What leads to a strayed path of breathing?
Anything, really. Perhaps the lungs are losing their elasticity, and so do not inflate easily,
making the movement of the ribcage and diaphragm generally unnecessary, and similarly
disrupting the spine’s potential to flex, extend, or rotate. In this case, what happens to the heart,
without constantly being massaged via the inflation/deflation cycle of the respiratory apparatus?
Or, perhaps one rib gets a little twisted in its insertion point either into the sternum (in
front) or into the spine (in back). This twist makes the ribcage’s swell more difficult, inhibiting
the diaphragm’s ability to descend into the abdomen, failing to make adequate room for the lungs
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More detail about the physiological phenomena associated with respiration is available in
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to inflate, resulting in less movement around the heart, drawing less oxygen into the
bloodstream, and preventing the spine from lengthening, therefore keeping the nervous system
relatively un-stretched, un-invigorated.
Maybe instead of this, the body in question spends all day sitting at a computer, folded
forward, closing off the area of the spine which keeps the diaphragm compressed inside the
thoracic cavity and disallows movement into the abdomen. In turn, this compression of the
spine/diaphragm prohibits movement through the ribcage, and full inflation of the lungs. The
scenarios could extend forever, and can easily cover a range of severity - from life threatening,
emergency dis-ease and injury to slow and eventual deconditioned muscle tissue; this one small
yet crucial bodily event breaking down over time and disrupting our expectations for how a
human body breathes.
My point is not that we are bad breathers, though we may be. My point is that the
physical practice of breathing is involuntary, and on paper, a completely unified occurrence. We
know how it is supposed to happen, and yet, it is often not exactly so. If we look at this through
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our classical Early Modern Europe Greco-Roman lens (as we so often do),

these mis-

practices are understood as perversion, distortion, deviation, disease, malfunction. These mispractices are seen this way because our bodies are intended to be predictable, understandable,
and importantly - controllable.

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So far, I’ve primarily focused on breath as a mechanism for connection or reorientation in
gravity, but this is not entirely accurate as a statement. It’s not “the breath” or “oxygen” or even

Irene Dowd’s Taking Root to Fly, “On Breathing”
More of this claim will be taken up in the next chapter.

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As with the phenomenon of erasure, I will point explicitly to the false predictability of bodies
in the following chapter.
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the flow of air that is the mechanism, singularly. There is no singular mechanism, actually,
singularity implying a unity or stability to the process. The act of breathing is the thing that’s
important here, and this act is an intricate, deeply layered one.

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Breath is rhetorical.
Breath is rhetorical, of course, in the ways it is employed in oration, or performance.
Consider the effect of a long pause finished with a deep and heavy sigh, indicating anger,
resignation, contemplation, frustration, relief, joy, etc. Or think of how so many people describe
the use of commas in writing - as a textual pause, a moment to “catch your breath.” Neither of
these things are the sort of thing I refer to when I claim breathing is a rhetorical act.
First, to understand my claim about breath as a rhetorical act, you should know that when
I say “breath,” I mean “respiration.” Respiration includes the filling and emptying of the lungs,
as well as the contraction and release of the respiratory diaphragm, extension and flexion in the
spine, expansion and tensing of the ribcage, elevation of the collarbones, rotation of the shoulder
blades, widening of the pelvis and pelvic diaphragm, and opening and constriction of the trachea,
nasal passages. More for reasons of space than anything else, this list leaves out actions like
pulmonary contractions, involuntary reflexes sent from the brain through the nervous system,
circulation of blood and lymph and synovial fluid through all the tissues of the body, et cetera.
The act includes all of this in one shape and function or another. Really, the only way to
understand this act is in terms of all these functions; none of them can be separated out as
inconsequential, or accidental. They all participate towards an identifiable and changeable
purpose: to oxygenate the body, to settle the nervous system, to provide power for the vocal

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Recall my third and fourth claim, in my logic from Chapter 1: The body can be understood
entirely as a system of power; and The body is rhetorical.
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chords, to persuade the bones to move. Depending on which of these purposes takes precedence,
a body may make a series of adjustments, executing particular strategies to achieve its goal.
The accumulation of all of these events results in rhetorical breathing, in the way that I
define rhetoric to mean the study of motion and function, the relationships between bodies,
space, and time, and all the resulting change that inhabits these relationships. Breath as an act
helps orient and reorient us in gravity all the time. But it doesn’t act alone. In fact, it acts
according to other systems and structures, also rhetorical, and in service of particular and
identifiable (if not always conscious) purposes
How does this serve us, when thinking about our disciplinary practices, however? As just
one example, I’ll share with you an experience from an upper level professional writing course I
was teaching, one focused directly on grammar and style. The course is a required one for
undergraduate majors who are specializing in a track for Editing and Publishing, and it’s not
uncommon that most students come into the class either completely intimidated at the prospect
of having to study grammar for an entire semester, or overly confident and practically giddy at
the prospect of being able to “take apart, cut up, and bleed all over bad writing”

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to show their

skill. My primary goal for the course was to reveal to them the ways in which grammar is merely
a system, with its own logic, varying of course, according to the language and cultural context in
which it “lives.”
So many of these students seemed to believe that grammar was a list of “right way” and
“wrong way” and that these ways could be determined in simple and direct fashion. Much as I
described breathing as an act which may present itself as straightforward, following a clear set of
occurrences, in a clear order, grammar to these students was a matter of knowing the rules and
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These are all phrases various students in the different sections I’ve taught have used with me,
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then applying them. In some ways, I believe, they were right. But as we came to find out, it was
generally more complicated than that, depending of course, on all the sorts of things we know as
teachers of writing. Was the document the students were editing one for a trade publication, or an
academic audience? Was it bound by conventions of social science, or journalism? What was the
writer really trying to say, in any case, and how could you help the writer to see the multiple
meanings suggested by simply moving parts of the sentence around?
One student in particular had studied multiple languages, and had always scored very
highly on her verbal exams, had consistently been praised for her command of the English
language. She burst out in frustration one afternoon. I can’t recall exactly what element of
grammar we were working on, or what the specific document was, but I do recall her utter
exasperation that she could no longer remember what she used to know. “I can’t keep it straight
anymore,” she told us, “it all keeps changing!” And in that moment, I thought “Exactly.”
It’s not that I wanted this student to despair over her once very stable knowledge of
language and all its arrangements, not at all. Instead, I empathized with her frustration, at the
same time that I could see she was developing a much more nuanced understanding about how
meaning gets made through relationships, between the words and sentences, between these
things and the document, and between all these things and the audience, the writer, the culture
they inhabit. Even more, these relationships move.

Centered Bodies
In movement education, “getting centered” has more to do with cultivating an awareness
of a system, a rhetorical entity, in which no one part does more work than it is required to do and
in which all parts working together create the whole. In fact, this center also maintains a
when talking about what they expect out of the class.
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connection to similar systems within the body, continuing the relationship model in order to
move the body, to propel it in space, and in gravity. A common starting point for identifying “the
center” is the pelvis, as it is relatively halfway between a body’s head and its feet, and the way
the spine inserts into it, and the legs reach out of it. The shape of it also insinuates a container,
cradling our visceral organs.
There are a million images to use when trying to see and feel your pelvis - a bowl, an
arch, a suspension bridge, a wheel. Irene Dowd alternates between these images, but elaborates
particularly on the pelvis as wheel as “the point around which the entire body weight balances
equally above and below, and to all sides.” (19). This notion is a common one in movement
studies, whether dance, physical therapy, kinesiology, martial arts, athletics, theater, yoga, etc.
We talk about “getting centered” and “moving from the core” but whether or not we can see this
center as a wheel, the metaphor is intended to reorient our physical intentions from distal
initiation (our hands and feet, or arms and legs) to a proximal one.
Often, this movement towards center can be interpreted as something that moves us
inward, as in away from the “real world” or that forces us to move smaller, closer in, and with
less attention to the outer edges. This is a false interpretation. Possibly, this orientation towards
the center could be understood as an insular movement, or a withdrawal, or even protectionist.
All of these interpretations are misinformed. Much as bodies are fundamentally unstable, the
“center” is something that is constantly moving, and in relation to other connected parts. It’s not
easily located as a single place. Movement inward is directly proportional to the movement
outward, even if the feel of those movements feel “smaller” or as “less attention to the outer
edges.” Moving from the center needs to be re-conceptualized as movement with greater power.
According to Mabel Todd,

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“Man’s bones play a large part in his sense of control and position in the world. How he
centers them, determines his degree of self-possession; they are continually centered and
ex-centered in his rhythms of movement. Mechanically, physiologically, and
psychologically, the human body is compelled to struggle for a state of equilibrium.” (2)
Moving from the center is a search for equilibrium, and it occurs at the level of bones. Barbara
Mahler emphasizes the bones as “the deepest and densest tissue [that] conducts the most energy,
gravitational force.” Conducting gravitational force is inevitable, as I’ve already explained, so it
seems the best practice involves how to use it. Using gravitational force supports a body in space
and time, and also helps to project it.
What is the connection between moving to/from the center and embodiment? Above, I
suggested that moving towards center is something that repositions our attention inward, and
away from what’s happening outside of ourselves. Maybe we talk about this as concentration,
and in order to concentrate, we limit the kind of external stimulus our nervous system has to
process.
In the previous section of this chapter, I referred to an argument about composition
studies being an “embodied discipline” - one which ‘serves other knowledges […] and whose
subject is uniquely and closely aligned with its object” (Lewicki-Wilson and Wilson 8). This
take on embodiment, therefore, seems sympathetic to the notion that to be of the body also
means to be closely focused on its inner workings, and to assist other “bodies.” If we were to
manifest this understanding of embodiment and attempt to locate the “center” of our discipline,
then, we might note some of the options described below.
Maybe we would locate studies for First Year Writing curriculum as the center, as it is
often perceived as “on the ground” research, with “real world implications” that have lived

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consequences for many real people. These studies and implications for the work therein get
conceived and distributed as research that effects a larger population of individuals, as well as for
multiple disciplines, institutions, and industries. These kinds of research projects - about how
students learn to write, how faculty and administrators assess student writing, how faculty and
students can effectively engage each other in the production of texts - are certainly projects that
do have all kinds of effects on all kinds of people and organizations. Some proponents of a
robust First Year Writing research agenda might claim that this is indeed the wheel around which
the vehicle of Rhetoric and Writing Studies operates.
Perhaps scholars of digital writing and rhetorics would take issue with this claim,
marking their intellectual territory as central. Now, they might argue, as the production of texts
moves from paper and ink to pixels and code, our discipline’s locomotion is even more reliant on
a critical understanding of an expansive and “new” while simultaneously “old” definition of
writing. This definition has to include the ways we produce text visually, how text gets used in
various mediums, what functions these texts take on as products and agents of meaning making,
community building, and negotiations of power. Maybe this is the “wheel” of rhetoric and
composition, the organizing principle that coheres the various spokes of our interests and
research and teaching.
And now rhetoric history scholars speak out about the centrality of our inherited
traditions and theories which have infused into and laid groundwork for all the various
modalities in which we all work. What holds us together, they might insist, is the wheel of time,
all the layers of rhetorical theory that have accumulated into this SUV of disciplines - one that
can traverse multiple terrains, and carry multitudes of people through their present lives. This is
our wheel, historians could claim, this is what propels us forward and through.

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All of these arguments are accurate, and there are others. Arguments for Basic Writing,
or Writing Center Theory, or Technical Writing, or Writing as Community Based Practices, or
Social Action and Justice, etc. The problem is not the arguments. The problem is the metaphor.
To say “center” is to suggest something much more complex, less singular than a wheel, or even,
a bowl. In movement studies, we’ve seen how the concept of “getting centered” usually refers to
an entity less unified. Plenty of people may use the image of a wheel or a bowl or a bridge, but
the key is that this image never works alone. A wheel is powerless without its relationship to
other parts - the chassis, the axles, the transmission, the fuel line, and on. Same with a bowl. An
empty bowl is only that, but when it is holding something(s), and sitting on something, and next
to another thing(s), then the bowl carries a much deeper and richer function. Likewise, a bridge.

No Good Bodies
In traditional-canonical rhetoric studies, our discipline maintains its inheritance of the
Ancient Greeks and Romans, via the Scholastics and Early Modern Europe, even locating this as
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a kind of “center” of our discipline. There is room, we say, for Other Rhetorics,
other rhetorics are always in relation to our defined and easily locatable center.
this inheritance requires an attitude toward the body that it

118

117

but these
Our belief in

is 1) subservient to the mind, 2) in

need of salvation and redemption, 3) understandable as always better or worse than another body

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African Rhetorics, Asian Rhetorics, Native Rhetorics, Chicana Rhetorics, Disability
Rhetorics, even this dissertation - Embodied Rhetorics
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which we know, from the previous section, is a fallacy.
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the body
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119

(usually that of the “speaker”). As common and diffuse as this worldview is,

it is not a

universal worldview, not a default stance about bodies, not even in Western traditions.
I say not even in Western traditions because the general presumption is that cultures and
communities that take a “different” stance on bodies are those in “remote” places, or the “3rd
world” - where people have “primitive” relationships with the land, who use their bodies for
daily labor and subsistence. This view is a problem of course, for myriad reasons, not the least of
which is the racist and orientalist code which goes unsurfaced.

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I say not even in Western traditions because I come from the west; my ancestors are from
Eastern Europe and Germany, England and Wales, New York and Ohio. I am educated by public
schools and universities in the United States. I have worked in modern dance and movement
education, fields which are distinctly western albeit certainly influenced by thinkers and cultures
from all over the world. I come through all these traditions, learning and practicing through them
all to accumulate an “other” stance on bodies. Where I come from, the west, I have learned that
bodies are always in relation to the world around them, to the other bodies, and that, truly, there
is no good or bad body.
There is only body.
This is a bold statement, a frightening one to make, even. To say there is no good body
means that I am no longer equipped to feel pleased with myself, in respect to another body. I am
no longer able to say “I am good because I recognize what is bad.” I am able to walk across the

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As I argued in the previous chapter, these attitudes are visible, though often not noticed
explicitly, in our own discipline’s canonical history and adoption of particular texts and
translations.
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This argument is one which is made consistently by theorists working in post-colonial and
para-colonial studies. It was perhaps first articulated by Said, in Orientalism, but has been noted
by many others, such as Spivak, Minh-Ha, and Bhabha.
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room without the aid of a crutch, a walker, a wheel chair, a prosthesis, a limp, a guide dog, a
caregiver, a paid assistant, a nurse. I am able to do this, and yet, this does not make me good.
While we may be uncomfortable admitting it, the general perception is that anyone who is able
to walk across the room with assistance of one of the aids I listed above is not good, relative to
someone who does not use these supports. What term, then, do we use to describe this body that
uses such aids? In our good and bad frame, we call this person disabled; in fact, we call any
person who uses an aide to locomote herself across a room the same thing, since we “know” that
a good body is able to accomplish this task without such an aide.
But for Barbara Mahler, there’s no such thing as good. She says she teaches “people how
to stand up. How to find a relationship with gravity in the simplest way possible, through their
body. It’s not just about mobilization, it’s about mobilization of body parts to reach the particular
aim of righting the pelvis on top of the legs so that force and direction are much more clearly
facilitated through the legs.” The aim is not to cultivate a good body, but a moving body. This
revaluation dictates that how that body moves is inseparable from the materiality of the various
parts of that individual. These parts can be stacked or organized in ways that facilitate the
distribution of force and energy through them. Barbara emphasizes that it’s not stable, not linear;
“It has to do with how clearly one bone transfers weight through the joint below to it to the next
bone to the next bone to the next bone, without having an “optimum” skeleton - ‘cause none of
us have an optimum body.”
Considering your own individual orientation to gravity connects you into a system that is
much larger than your self, and much larger even than a relationship with another person.
Focusing on your bones, and your body and these things’ relationship to the ground, to the sky,
through gravitational force allows you to feel the ground under your feet, and the way the ground

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participates in your uprightness, or whatever orientation you presume. This participation
connects YOU to the PLANET, in a way that suggests you are part of it, not on top of it, and not
separate from it. This participation also makes everything much easier, more powerful.
To illustrate my point, I gesture again to a recently published book, Feminist Rhetorical
Practices: New Horions for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, co-authored by
Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch. Early in the book, both authors reflect on their
own intellectual stories, meditating on the motivations, methodological choices, and various
impacts both have had on themselves as well as on each other. I’ve referred already to some of
Royster’s reflections, particularly to her use of the landscape metaphor to describe methodology
in the opening chapter to my book, which has its own resonances with what I describe as an
orientation to gravity that ensures your participation in it. But I’d also like to include some of
Kirsch’s insights here, to build on it.
In particular, Kirsch points out a tension in her historical research, a historiographical
question about how to “speak” for the dead, and how to negotiate difference and boundary
crossing. Kirsch says “I realized that when we study women who are no longer alive, who can no
longer speak back, explain, or set the record straight, questions of ethics and representation take
on an increased urgency” and later, of her work with a very much alive Royster, “our
differences, as well as our common concerns about the necessity of trying to do good work
together, have centered on the challenges of engaging historical women’s lives respectfully and
meaningfully – for their day and our own” (7). I want to splice these two comments together to
try to show how I believe these two scholars are working not only to consider their own
orientation to gravity, but to consider their orientations to other bodies (as in, each other, as well
as their research subjects, as well as to their disciplinary conventions, etc). It’s striking to me too,

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that both Kirsch and Royster see these orientations as unstable, and as variations which
profoundly root them to a structure in which they can sustain their scholarly and collegial lives.
What I mean by participation in gravity, then, is pretty simple: The subversion of
physical bodies in conversations about discourse systems is incredibly easy to do, and also easy
to ignore, but only because of the way Ancient Greco-Roman rhetorical theory has been
universalized. And this phenomenon, via the imperial project of Early Modern Europe, is in
many ways, entirely inconsistent with how bodies are arranged, presented, and re-presented in
other venues, particularly in dance and movement education. In the next chapter, I will position
some of these consistencies and inconsistencies alongside one another to reveal some of the ways
classical Greco-roman rhetorical theory has been enacted to defer physical bodies, and what real
and imagined effects we can still feel today. These effects get articulated in individual bodies, as
well as onto groups of bodies, as well as in between these groups of bodies – creating
connections, disruptions, and obfuscations. Erasing the body makes other things possible – a
whole list of -isms that insist on one kind of body as the best kind.

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Breath: Seated

Close your eyes and return to your balloon lungs. See them fill and empty, and notice the
differences between the areas that expand easier than others.
As you are sitting comfortably in your chair, with your eyes closed, feel the weight slip
down again, into your hips. See your pelvis as a bowl filled with water, and notice where the
water tends to collect in that bowl. Is there more contact between your pelvis and the chair
towards the front, or the back? Can you feel a stronger connection on one side or another? Does
water spill over the edges of the bowl anywhere?
As you fill the balloons of your lungs, try to notice whether the bowl pulls up out of the
chair, or if it falls deeper into it? What part of the bowl pulls up, or falls down? How does the
water move in this bowl, as you fill the balloons?
Now watch the balloons empty, and feel again how the rib cage gathers inward. Notice
what happens to the bowl when you do this. Watch the water slosh or pool in the bowl. Feel what
happens to the bowl itself. Does the front or back dip lower than the other? Do the edges of the
bowl pull in towards each other or do they stretch away? What happens from side to side?
When you are ready to inhale again, try inflating the balloons in a way that supports the
bowl in it’s upright position, resting on the chair underneath you. See how the balloons’ pressure
against the bones of the rib cage suspends the upper rim of the bowl. With the rim suspended this
way, more water can pour into the entire bowl. With more water inside the bowl, your pelvis can
hang more fully into the chair.
Now, use the balloons’ deflation and the inward movement of the ribs to sustain that
feeling of suspension, and to encourage an upward drift of your spine, between the deflating

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balloons, through your throat and out the crown of your head. Check in with the bowl of your
pelvis again, and notice if any of the water is spilling out, and where you can see it.
Open your eyes and look around the room where you sit. What do you feel, sitting in the
chair? What do you feel in your belly? In your shoulders? What do you feel in your legs and
your feet?

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Chapter 4: “Axial Elongation”: Cellular Culture and Rhetorical Bodies

In the voice, the white people
In the opening to this book, I told you my story of Sharon Crowley’s keynote address. In
this story, I recounted the well-meaning questions she posed about the kinds of historical work
our discipline sustains, and about what I see as a continued reluctance to negotiate questions of
race and coloniality in our scholarship.

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The difficulty for me, in the audience of that address,

and in telling you the story of it, was not to do with Crowley’s invocations, or what I believe
were her intentions, but in the difficulty our discipline has, to risk an easy generalization, with
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locating bodies, skin color or other markings included, as physical sites of rhetorical agency.

As I sat in Crowley’s audience, all these troubled thoughts were in my skin. I want to say
they were in my mind, but that’s not what I mean at all. What was in my conscious mind was
how hungry I was, and nervous, and how hard it was to hear her words, since she seemed not to
be too comfortable with the microphone. In this situation, and in others beyond it, it was my skin
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that responded. What I refer to here is less my culturally constructed skin,

than my cellular

one. I acknowledge there may be some of the culturally made version in the physical tissue, but

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I am definitely not the only one to notice this. In the chapters that lead up to this time, I’ve
named a number of scholars working in Rhetoric and Composition Studies who are doing just
that, and in addition to “noticing” it , are offering examples of projects that do, in fact, negotiate
and revise relationships to coloniality, imperialism, and racism. Via this book, and my own
project, I hope I am joining them in this effort.
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Maybe even the Humanities has this difficulty.
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in the way we are accustomed to talking about it, as an object that is the focus of discourse,
and so is understood via that discourse, in the manner of Judith Butler. for example
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then,

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as I sat in the audience, something made a prickling sensation. What was it, I came

away wondering, that made that sensation, if not my conscious mind?
Remember Mabel Todd, and her theories about the body as a structure which arranges
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itself skeletally and viscerally,

making sense of its arrangement as one individual in the

universe, as well as its relationship to it. On an even smaller scale, Todd explains the body in
terms of its cellular systems, that “All the myriad cells of the body have characteristics in
common, but each lives a somewhat independent life of its own in a fluid medium.” She
emphasizes the various elements of these independent lives - breath, assimilation, irritation,
reparation, reproduction - and the ways that all cells, regardless their independence in turns of
function, participate in discrete roles for the entire structure. Todd says, of the multiple cells and
resulting groups and systems, that “The reactions of all parts are so coordinated and integrated by
several different factors, chemical, physical, and nervous, that we perceive the individual as a
whole, rather than as a collection of parts” (24).
Given this sense of cellular organization, as a system of parts, integrated, assimilated, and
stimulated, which is often perceived as a whole, might we consider the cellular body a kind of
culture? It’s a stretch, I realize. But not impossible, especially once we think of the ways that
culture (whether we are referring to that of a particular body, or that of many particular bodies)
dictates behaviors and movement. Rhetoric describes a study of particular systems of meaningmaking behaviors, and in Chapter 2, I have emphasized how our discipline’s canon of rhetorical
theory has made sense of bodies. At this point, I’d like to shift my orientation in gravity, as I
recommended in Chapter 3, to re-contextualize some of the trends I’ve discussed in Chapter 2, as
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as in, in that moment in time
Among the other systems in the human body, these two are ones Todd refers to repeatedly, as
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elements of cellular and cultural activity. This re-contextualization serves several purposes: one,
an understanding of the body as a cellular and also a cultural mechanism allows us to defer,
instead of the physical body, the tendency to avoid it; and two, looking directly to the way the
body functions as a site of rhetorical power as well as cultural practice helps us to identify
different models for naming the process of knowledge production.
These trends I named in Chapter 2 include, to sum up, naming the body as a thing to be
controlled, protected, and ultimately, obscured. They also include understanding the body as a
container in which the soul, character, and overall value of a man can be seen. The body is
inferior, in all cases, to the mind, or the soul, or the consciousness. The body is something to
aspire to have power over, rather than the body being seen as something with power to use.
Finally, the body is a site through which language emerges, as in the sound of it, in speech, along
the same lines as it being a container for the soul. Language is somehow connected to the body,
but not bodily. The re-contextulization I mention in the paragraph above insists that the body,
however, is a rhetorical entity, in particular, a body in motion involves specific qualities –
Balance; Weight Transfer; and Range of Motion – which we can use, explicitly to understand
how rhetoric and language is, in fact, bodily. Not only are the qualities useful for understanding,
but they are ones that are useful for developing a theoretical model for studying rhetoric, one that
resists the reinscription of the colonialist paradigm.
These are only three possible qualities to use, which I borrow from movement education,
and all three of them necessitate an understanding of bodied selves which are constantly in
relation to other bodied selves. This suggests the development of a cultural mode of being, in that
the relationships are developed through systematic practices and behaviors, and which share
common organizational strategies. The qualities I identify are also deeply entrenched in
those through which a person senses herself, neurologically, in relation to the world around her.
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understanding the function of a body on a cellular level, as systems of arrangement and purpose,
which I have already claimed are rhetorical. Underneath this premise, rests Bender and
Wellberry’s modernist explanation of rhetoric as an ultimately social, institutionalized, and
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physical act involving a speaker, a system, and its doctrines.

The qualities (Balance, Weight

Transfer, and Range of Motion) are woven together; you can’t understand one without some
sense of the others, and yet there is not an identifiable origin for these relationally understood
phenomena. Therefore, I begin with balance more as an arbitrary decision than anything else,
though it might be said that balance follows conveniently from a discussion of gravity, as in the
previous chapter. Each of these qualities is described and illustrated next, both as principles from
movement education, and with examples of how the quality/principle can be understood to exist
in rhetorical theory/scholarship, as appropriate decolonial interventions.

Bodies in Balance
The notion of balance is a tricky one. There is a tendency to think of it as an identifiable
place, something fixed, and a destination we arrive at clearly. But the truth about balance is that
it’s constantly moving, not fixed at all. Balance is something we look for, and when we find it,
we are especially aware of how easy it is to move out of it again. In fact, many times, as we are
seeking balance, for example, when we lift one leg to put our pants on in the morning, we are
probably moving back and forth and side to side, maybe even bobbing up and down on our
standing leg, or in our torsos. But balance indicates things other than standing on one leg. In
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In “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric”, they describe the significance of the
Speaker to the ancient Greeks in two ways: one, the modification and adaptation to different
occasions by the speakers affords them a semblance of mobility, in regards to social position;
two, the physicality of the act, speech or voiced-ness, binds rhetoric to “the physically
demonstrative social systems that so powerfully institutionalized its doctrines: city-state
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movement education, a popular goal is to strive for a balance between strength and flexibility, or
balance around a particular joint - the knee, for example. Both of these types of balance are just
as fluid, or wobbly as in the example of standing on one leg. One body’s relative proportion of
strength to flexibility will likely not stay the same, over time or in different moving situations.
The same goes for balance around a joint.
One key component of moving is something called reciprocal innervation, a phenomenon
that exists in muscle action; generally, this exists when a muscle contracts on one of many sides
of a joint, and the corresponding muscle on the opposing side of the joint releases. This
reciprocity of contraction and release creates a condition in the joint where the bones are held in
a kind of equilibrium, something that you may recall Mabel Todd pointed out is a state for which
the human body is “compelled to struggle.”

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Whether you think of this notion as reciprocity,

or equilibrium, the implication is a kind of balance between work and rest, and one which occurs
between bones and the connected musculature. Because this principle dictates movement
however, it does not ever stay the same. The condition of reciprocity exists in a state of flux, and
therefore is also reliant on some constant decision-making force to assist in direction. That
decision-making is a complex of parts, which are, Todd says,
Moving definite distances in space, in a scheme perfectly timed, and with the exact
amount of effort necessary to support the individual weights and to cover the time-space
movement. These delicate, accurate, and intricate regulations are made in the substrata,
below the ‘threshold of consciousness’.” (22)

democracy and its republican redactions, as well as aristocracy”
I introduced this idea in the previous chapter, as one fundamental idea on which Todd builds
her theory of the thinking body: that a person knows herself and her position in the universe at
the level of her bones.

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In the body, according to Todd and her peers, balance

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exists below consciousness, not in it,

and happens without our awareness. These “perfectly timed” schemes, “with the exact amount of
effort necessary” might help us understand some of what rhetoricians argue language affords us,
a kind of usable power, through both written and spoken language.
For example, consider Isocrates’ intentions behind instruction in rhetoric. His belief that
students, as emerging rhetors, should be versed in as many different sources of knowledge as
possible, and be able to converse about them (whether in speech or writing) was key towards
effective discourse. For Isocrates, fullness in understanding allows the subject to “[speak] in a
manner worthy of his subject and yet is able to discover in it topics which are nowise the same as
those used by others” (“Against” Sect. 12). This same fullness of understanding helps a subject
make effective choices about which elements from the various material to include, how to
organize it “and also, not to miss what the occasion demands but appropriately to adorn the
whole speech with striking thoughts and to clothe it in flowing and melodious phrase”
(“Against” Sect. 16). Good rhetoric, as an embodied rhetoric, is constantly assessing the
decisions necessary to cultivate balance around the joint, able to know the subject, as well as to
understand new elements in it. Finally, good rhetoric does all these things, appropriate to the
situation. It’s not a new idea, in fact; it’s one many of us are entirely used to. What I ask is that
we consider it from this other perspective on the role of the body, however. Rather than seeing
the body as an obstacle towards propriety, and so something to be manipulated and controlled,
balance allows us to recognize the complex nature of knowledge production.
As a contemporary example of this principle at work in scholarship on rhetorical theory, I
gesture to the work of Jacqueline Jones Royster, in particular to her book Traces of a Stream:
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again: or reciprocity, or equilibrium, or how we know where we are in the world
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Literacy and Social Change in African American Women. Royster articulates a theoretical
framework through which we can attempt a more effective, I suggest a more fluid and
resilient,

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analysis of rhetorical theories as developed within and by African American

women’s communities. In her preface, Royster recalls and responds to what had become for her
typical reactions to her scholarship, reactions characterized by surprise and disbelief that the
rhetorical theorists she was identifying were largely unheard of in our discipline, and in others.
Royster’s response is admirably restrained; her responses coolly affirming that yes, these women
were prolific in their public personae, and yes, there are many others to note.
To my point regarding the quality of balance as a way of recognizing the embodiment in
rhetoric, however, I want to emphasize Royster’s explanation of the filters and barriers that
historical approaches to rhetorical theory have facilitated society’s

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ability “to discount,

ignore, and disempower” these many rhetors and theorists. (Traces 4). These obfuscations lead
into other consequences, namely an ease at noting the “exceptions” to what has been perceived
as “the rule,” and in Royster’s words, “neutraliz[ing]” their value and achievements (4). She
answers this observation with a straightforward claim, that in fact, African American women’s
“rhetorical prowess” (5) has not been neutralized; it only looks that way because of our flattened
and out of balance methodologies. She says, “the theory begins with the notion that a
community’s material conditions greatly define the range of what this group does with the
written word and, to a significant degree, even how they do it” (5) and “we need not just a long
view, but a kaleidoscope view” (6). Material conditions have a significant impact on the
rhetorical prowess of a group of people, material conditions including their bodies and the bodies

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130

For more on “fluidity” and “resilience,” refer back to Chapter 3.
both public society, and academic society, in this case
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of others’ in relationship to them, and conditions being subject to change, constantly, hence the
long, as well as kaleidoscopic view. Conditions, rhetorics, and communities of people can’t be
seen, not well, as static and linear entities. They must be understood as varying elements all
stacked and in relation to each other, constantly shifting according to the turn of the
kaleidoscope, to the light filtering through the far end. They are constantly arranging and
rearranging themselves in gravity, reciprocally contracting and releasing in order to keep the
entire system’s structure in tact.
Indeed, reciprocal innervation is not the only quality important to a movement-based
understanding of balance. Critical to that understanding is a refined comprehension of the
various qualities of muscle contractions. Generally, we may think of a contraction as a
shortening of muscle tissue, but this is only one of three possibilities. Muscles may contract by
shortening (called a concentric contraction), but they may also do so by lengthening (eccentric),
or maintaining the same length at rest as at work (isometric). Different muscles and different
activities require different kinds of contractions, of course, much as different audiences, or
different purposes require different arrangements, inventions, deliveries, etc. in our rhetoric. In
the most general way, an eccentric contraction tends to support the weight of the body in space,
as in maintaining posture, where concentric contraction tends to support the weight of an object
on the joint, as in performing bicep curls, and isometric contraction tends to support the weight
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of the body in space, as well as an object on the joint.

The idea of balance, then, incorporates

this multiplicity of contraction, stipulating that the body in question would need to be able to

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These are completely generalized descriptions of the three contractions, not intended to be
used as definitive and fixed, but rather to illustrate some of the different possibilities a body
might choose a particular sort.
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assess a given situation, and act on it, variously, triggering multiple sorts of muscular work in
multiple muscle groups, in order to achieve a given task.
Imbalance, much as its opposite, is multiply understood, and complicated. It may include
a constantly contracted
contract by shortening.

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134

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muscle, an overly flexible

one, or a muscle which can only

It may also describe a joint, and therefore a system of muscles,

ligaments, nerves, etc, which could fall into one or some of the above criteria. Or, it may
describe another system of the body, perhaps the cardiovascular system, being out of relationship
to another one, perhaps the endocrine system. Let’s continue with the example of a joint,
according to Dowd: “the imbalance at a joint that is ‘out of line’ does not just involve muscle
weakness. It involves a relative imbalance in mass, endurance, and flexibility, as well as
strength. If a joint is being held in ‘perfect alignment’ all the muscles are contracting just to hold
you up and are therefore at a great disadvantage when called on to move” (4).
Imbalance then, describes a situation of disadvantage, in so far as movement is
concerned. Perfect alignment is not the goal, Dowd is suggesting, if you can’t move as well. The
function of the body is to move, and I argue that this too is a function of rhetoric. The goal of
rhetoric is not to perfectly fix my self, my body, my speech with my audience.

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In Chapter 1, I

offered my 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. Given this
defintion, I argue that a goal of rhetoric is to move my self (and my connected body and speech)
and to move my audience, in order to “discover […] topics which are nowise the same as those
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133
134

or constantly resting, of course
or overly inflexible, similarly
as above, or by lengthening, or by maintaining a constant length
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used by others.”

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In this claim, I intend the verb “to move” in its more basic sense – to create,

invoke, spur motion. Another way of understanding this word, from a movement education
perspective, would be “to change.”
How might this “situation of disadvantage” translate to notion of voice in our discipline?
How might this help us to re-contextualize some of our inherited values about the writer’s
presence in a text? We’ve all heard and used this word “voice” with students (even with
ourselves and our colleagues) at some point or another to describe a necessary and also
troublingly ambiguous aspect to “good writing.”

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We may feel it is recognizable, individual,

adaptable, collective, or authentic. We may feel it is some combination of these things. The trope
inspires a series of connotations – among them presence and authority, but also orality, speaker,
persona, visibility, self-reflexivity. Given our multiple histories and traditions, our confusion
about the word is understandable. In some ways, I believe we are “out of balance” with all this
word suggests.
As we’ve come to use it in our 21st century classrooms, many of us like to think we are
advocating for increased subjectivity and diversity in who gets represented in text. In so many
ways, important ones, I believe we are doing just that. Look to our national professional
organization and journal, the CCC’s resolution for Students’ Right to Their Own Language,

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136
137
138

138

“Fix” as in “stabilize”
Isocrates, see above selection.
or, good rhetoric

Reprinted here, from the Fall, 1974 issue of CCC: We affirm the students' right to their own
patterns and varieties of language - the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which
they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a
standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable
amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim
leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of
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as well as texts such as Kirsch and Rohan’s Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process,
and Gilyard and Nunley’s Rhetoric and Ethnicity for evidence that our origin story of the ancient
Greco-Roman and European rhetorical tradition has expanded in other directions. Recall some of
the pieces referenced in the previous chapter, the likes of Peter Elbow, Villanueva, Rose, and
still more, collected in an often used text for composition theory, Cross-Talk in Comp Theory.
All of these artifacts I list now, to illustrate multiplicity of the representation of voices has made
excellent and important strides in alleviating the colonialist imperative.
Still, I feel it’s important to remember in what ways this notion of voice has been written
and re-written, and by whom. Regardless the inclusion of NCTE and CCC policies, canon
expansion, and the popularity of expressionism in first year writing classrooms, “voice” still
carries with it the heft of Cicero’s “good man, speaking well” and Blair’s “native dignity” of
English. Other voices are still othered, despite our best intentions, as long as we ignore the
manner in which we have relied on imbalance to define our movement. Dowd again, simplifies
this understanding of balance and innervation, when she urges us to be multiply directed, not just
in our thinking, but in our practice: “Practicing one kind of contraction enables you to do more of
just that kind, but it doesn’t help you with the other two kinds. In other words, what you practice
is what you can do. There is no one all around exercise that prepares you for everything else.” (4)
In other words, as a discipline, we have practiced the exercises we know so well to this point that
we can reiterate a humanist, colonialist agenda without even knowing we are doing so.
Even Quintilian argues for the necessity of balance to a speaker’s art, “that it should be
neither dry nor jejune […]; nor on the other hand must it be tortuous or revel in elaborate
descriptions” (Institutio 2.4.3). Proper “voice” is one which vibrates between poles of sensation
its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We
affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to
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and reason. Certainly, we know already that Quintilian is always advocating for propriety in all
things, and a particular flavor of propriety, as I’ve articulated in earlier pages. It’s inappropriate
to overlook the ways in which our European narratives about rhetoric have naturalized the way
we define “good writing” and “voice.” For Quintilian, in our naturalized reading, the emphasis in
his claims toward balance, is on balance between what he sees as two separate things: sensation
and reason.
But perhaps we should emphasize instead, the vibration, in terms of our movement
oriented definition of balance. A speaker’s art has to be fluid, acting and reacting according to
the stimulus that exists both within and without that speaker, much as a knee joint (and all its
parts) must constantly make choices about how to flex, extend, bear weight, and connect the
bones of the upper and lower leg. Whether one of these categories can be qualified as sensation
and another as reason is ultimately an unproductive distinction.
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Balance (and imbalance) is transformative, then, either as restorative
progressive.

140

or

In turn these restorations or progressions facilitate new rhetorical situations for

new opportunities of balance/imbalance. For example, Blair maintains that voice is a necessary
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tool for climbing the ladder of Power:

“to be entirely devoid of relish for eloquence, poetry,

or any of the fine arts, is justly construed to […]being prone to low gratifications, or destined to
drudge in the more vulgar and illiberal pursuits of life” (15). A speaker must be aware of and
have some facility with “eloquence” in order to be recognizable as one of the elite, or at least, as
respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.
as in building new, efficient movement patterns which help to repair damage resulting from
old, inefficient ones
140
as in, building new, efficient movement patterns which lead to greater power and more
sophisticated movements
141
In this use of the word “power” I mean, of course, socio-political power, generally referred to
139

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civilized. However, while these familiarities are of great use to a speaker, as in the development
of particular kinds of muscular contractions, Blair cautions his audience not to overdevelop such
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sorts of contractions, similar to the Ancient Romans.

As I pointed out in earlier sections of

this chapter, Blair’s intention is entirely to justify and fortify a vision of English as inherently
superior, naturally superior. A good man, therefore, would not overuse, or even have to “[hunt]
after tropes, and figures, and rhetorical assistances” but that they “must come unsought, if [they
come] at all; and be the natural offspring of a strong imagination (Lecture IV 47). The naturally
superior English speaker doesn’t need to “practice” the arts of good speech; it arises out of him
naturally.
As with Quintilian, I suggest that the importance to Blair’s assertion is not in the
sustained vision of a naturally superior English, but in the sense that facility in multiple modes of
articulation is merely a practice in multiple modes of effort. Also, as with Quintilian, we mustn’t
overlook the nationalist, colonialist imperative in Blair’s discourse.

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Overlooking it merely

supports an imbalanced movement pattern, as we’ve already practiced this one to the point of not
being able to sense it once it’s engaged. We have an opportunity, now, to build a new pattern
through our re-contextualization of Blair and Cicero and even of Plato, through our bodies,
through the joints of our canon.
Malea Powell describes several such experiences, in her essay on, among other things,
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her archival work she has undertaken.

In one library archive in St. Louis, Powell reflects that

in the sense of “power over.”
meaning Cicero and Quintilian

142
143

and that of his contemporaries - Adam Smith, Richard Sheridan, and Richard Whateley, in
particular
144
specifically, from “Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory, Autogiography, and
Geography in Indigenous Rhetorical Histories,” included in Kirsch and Rohan’s Beyond the
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“it wasn’t the people in that place that tore at me and filled the articulated bones in my body with
inflammation; it was the words, the writing, the documents, and their presence in that place that
ate at me” (118). In my interpretation, the archive and Powell’s body interrelate in that
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moment,

the words and space, and her physical presence “articulating with inflammation.”

The vibration, in other words, is like friction, the surfaces of each rubbing against each other,
heating each other, swelling and aggravating. The distinction between which of these surfaces is
sensation, and which is reason, distracts us from understanding the manner in which knowledge
is made, for Powell, for her readers, for me, and for you, now.
“Voice” in writing instruction can’t be boiled down to a simple transference of oral
culture to print, neither can it be reduced to a straight forward assertion of the colonizer over the
colonized. However, we can attempt to understand it as a series of choices and assessments,
made by a complex interchange of systems, and transferred through these systems in relationship
to other ones. These transferences shift from imbalance to balance and back again, over and over,
in Todd’s words, in “relation with the forces of gravity and inertia, constitut[ing primary patterns
of behavior millions of years old, and all are dependent upon nervous reflexes” (30).

Bodies that Transfer
Mabel Todd’s fundamental premise is that “we should use the muscles mostly to move
the bones, and let the bone support the weight.”

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As with rhetorical theory, there are many

other movement educators with variations and different premises, all having to do with the ways

Archives.
and likely, after

145
146

as stated by Andre Bernard, a current practitioner of Todd’s techniques with acting students,
in a 1999 documentary called The Thinking Body: The Legacy of Mabel Todd
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in which a body moves, and how it deals with weight. Ida Rolf, a contemporary of Todd, and the
developer of Structural Integration, takes a somewhat different view, that

Man consists, more of less, of stackable units. The agents of this balance are the bones
and soft tissue (myofascia). Bones determine position in space, but bones are held by soft
tissue. When the myofascia is repositioned, bones spontaneously reorient. When the tone
of the soft tissue is balanced, there is a sensation of lightness in the body. The masses of
head, thorax, pelvis, etc. are no longer dragged out of true by their weight; the structure
presents less resistance, and gravity can ‘flow through’.”

147

(163)

Do I want to argue that the bones are the initiator of movement, or that the muscles are?
Neither actually. This difference in opinion is one that movement educators are familiar with,
and negotiate in all their daily practices. It’s similar to the differences we negotiate, in Rhetoric
Studies, between Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric, as one example, and Toulmin’s. Instead, notice
what’s similar between both Todd and Rolf: gravity. For both women, the musculo-skeletal body
is constantly arranging and rearranging itself according to gravitational forces, physical force,
and inertia. Movement occurs as a result of these rearrangements and the transfer of this energy
through the bones.

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Weight transfer, or this passage of gravitational force through the skeleton,

is the second quality of a rhetorical body in motion.

147

This selection comes from an article by Rosemary Feitis, a student of Ida Rolf, in which
Feitis helps to explain some of the important elements of Rolf’s theories about the organization
of the body.
148
Of course, Todd and Rolf are not the only ones interested in this frame for understanding
movement. Refer to the previous chapter for more description of the movement of gravity
through the skeleton, and the resulting effort and freedom to move.
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The transfer of weight builds on our understanding of balance, meaning that balance is an
important prerequisite to efficient transference. Also, balance builds on an understanding of
weight transfer. In some ways, we might say that the two categories have a reciprocal
relationship to each other. Dowd argues for the imperative in clear weight transfer through our
bones, when she points out the reciprocity

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this way: “if weight is habitually never transferred

through the center of a joint, some of the muscles that cross the joint are constantly being
stretched while others are more contracted and unable to stretch nearly as much. Stronger
muscles may be more massive than weaker ones, but if they are too massive they get in the way
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of full movement range.”

(3) In other words, in order for weight to transfer through the

skeleton appropriately, the joints must be in balance; also, in order for the joints to be in balance,
weight must transfer through the skeleton appropriately. Much as the speaker moves herself
through the audience, the audience moves itself through the speaker, and what results is a new
understanding.

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Return to my discussion of voice as a trope in rhetoric studies, to think of this transfer of
weight. So far, I’ve mostly argued that voice is traditionally taught as a tool of Empire, that it is a
desired element in rhetoric to assert a subject’s right to belong, and inherent superiority over
other subjects. Of course, this isn’t the only way we think of voice in our discipline. Even in
Cicero, we hear the assertion of Self. He declaims the power of voice as one which evinces
autonomy: “a great task and enterprise for a person to undertake and profess, that while every
one else is silent, he alone must be heard on the most important subjects, and in a large assembly
149
150
151

Whether in terms of function or dysfunction, the relationality still exists.
More details on range of motion follow this section.

Much as I did in the section on balance, I refer you back to my definition of rhetoric, from
Chapter 1, and recall my claim about the necessity of motion.
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of men” (On Oratory 1.25). To give voice to something is to make it known, make it public,
make it felt. Even more, to give voice to something is to make your Self known, to make your
Self public. Voice acts as a gravitational force, perhaps, transferring through the skeleton of the
speaker’s body, connecting her

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to the ground underneath her, and to the public space in which

she is speaking.
At this point, recall my reaction to Sharon Crowley’s address, my prickly skin. Add to
this image my description of the cyclical nature of speaker and audience, and my claim about
balance and weight transfer from above. Crowley was pointing us to our bodies in that space,
attempting to make her self known, harnessing the gravitational force of history, and W.E.B. Du
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Bois, along with the photographs of Elizabeth Eckford

in order to cultivate a vision and felt

experience of the multiple bodies present and absent in that room. And yet, my skin prickled, my
interpretation of that prickle indicating an inability of the audience to be able to participate in
that transfer of weight. What would it take, I was wondering then, for us to do just that?
Given the accumulation of what we still hail as legacy in our field, Crowley’s question
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then

seemed to me ignorant of what else our legacy has offered us. What I’ve offered in the

accumulation of these pages is by no means an exhaustive, or even a representative, sample.
What I’ve offered does, however, reveal sentiments about the role of bodies that are felt even
today. If the body is not to be trusted, neither to be acknowledged as indicative of agency, I think
my experience at Crowley’s address signals to me the interruption of the passage of force, a
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I am aware that Cicero did not intend for the speaker to be a she. Still, I insist on using the
female pronoun. Perhaps I am reorienting my own skeleton in gravity here, in history as well,
making my Self public.
153
famous photographs of Eckford, an African American girl trying to enter Central High
School in Little Rock, AR, in 1957.
154
and still does now
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disruption. To use Mahler’s explanation about being taught how to stand up,

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I believe we are

unable to feel the floor.
Feeling the floor is directly tied to the ability of our bodies to transfer weight, for if
weight can’t move through the bones, it also can’t make contact with the ground. It’s the contact
with the ground that also, as Mahler puts it, bounces back up through the bones, and provides our
bodies the power necessary to push off, moving in whatever direction and capacity we intend.
Weight transfer, and likewise, balance, is, according to Mahler, “not just about mobilization, it’s
about mobilization of body parts to reach the particular aim of righting the pelvis on top of the
legs so that force and direction are much more clearly facilitated through the legs.” If we, in
Rhetoric Studies, are so accustomed to assuming the role of the body as something which is an
obstacle, I liken this to Mahler’s description of how many of us, in an imbalanced body, tend to
move. She says, “we just learn how to haul ourselves around, from any possible muscle group, or
part of the body” and that this “hauling around” actively prevents us from being able to use our
feet.
The obvious benefit, as I’ve already stated, is that the force of that push back through the
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feet gives us more power to move,

but there’s more than that, too. In much of the same

cyclical ways that balance and weight transfer support each other, the movement of gravity
through the spine and the rest of the skeleton simultaneously creates the conditions for more

155
156

See my description of this explanation in the previous chapter.

Note two important aspects to this phrase: 1) the power to rather than over; and 2) moving.
Also, remember the repetition of my final statement in my logic, from Chapter 1: The body is
rhetorical.
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gravity to move through the spine. It sounds like an obvious point, maybe, or a teleology, but as
157

Mahler explains the anatomical function in the “hanging over”

from ReEducation Technique,

[Gravity] goes through the body; there’s more space available, and the muscles have a
chance to release because the bony structure, the skeletal structure, starts to change. The
shoulder blades start to release, which effects the entire rest of the girdle. And, some
people touch the floor, some people never touch the floor, but it’s really a question of this
connection. I can just kinda bounce off the floor.
In this moment of the interview, Mahler is demonstrating the “hanging over,” and when she
mentions bouncing off the floor, her torso appears to float away from the floor and her feet. After
this demonstration, she offers the alternative movement, from a position where she is still
hanging over, but not transferring the weight of her body through her feet, into the floor. In this
version, she is modeling what she described as “hauling” herself around, contracting the muscles
of her legs and back and chest in order to both maintain the shape of the position and lift her
torso away from the floor and her feet. The difference is pronounced, the second demonstration
being markedly rigid and labored.
This distinction might sound like what Blair is advocating regarding voice and balance,
but I want to emphasize a key difference. For Blair, the facility and ability to move effortlessly in
speech comes from a superiority in one kind of body over another. For Mahler, this facility exists
in any body’s relationship to the ground. Accessing that facility is one that develops over time, in
practice, and requires a view of one’s body as not only powerful, but a requisite element towards
cultivating that power. It happens through the skeleton, not through consciousness about the
skeleton. Bodies DO, more than BE.
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I described this activity in closer detail in Chapter 3.
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As scholars of rhetoric, then, in Crowley’s audience, I was unconvinced that we had
enough balance through our collective skeleton to facilitate that transfer of the gravitational
power through us, in order to move in the directions Crowley seemed to want for us.

Bodies in Motion
Range of motion is pretty much exactly as it sounds, describing the extent to which a
joint, a body part, a body in entirety can move. Imbalance, however it is expressed,

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culminates as inappropriate priorities, we might say. Stronger muscles are just that, stronger, but
that generally means they are bigger, and so disproportionate to the system to which they belong.
This means they will take up more space, perhaps crowding a joint with overdeveloped tissue,
prohibiting movement through that part of the joint. Similarly, weaker muscles, while smaller,
don’t take up enough space, and so allow for too much movement through the corresponding part
of the joint. This leads to an unclear transfer of weight through that joint, which creates a
situation imbued with less power, as well as the accumulation of patterns of misuse, and
resulting imbalances. And, as I’ve already pointed out, the existence of all these conditions work
cyclically on each other, sustaining a system where imbalance and unclear weight transfer each
encourage more of the other. Hence, restricted range of movement. Not to beat a dead horse, but
that same restricted range of movement encourages continued imbalances and unclear transfer or
weight.
In Chapter 3, as I called us to reconsider our orientation to gravity, I suggested some
ways that many of us in the discipline are attending to our work as hopeful reorientations. I also
argued that this is a false metaphor. The kinds of work I noted, while important, useful,
158

as in, in terms of the proportion of strength to flexibility, or the musculature around a joint,
107

interesting work,

159

tends to rely on a standard orientation, rehearsing familiar patterns,

encouraging the already strong muscles to stay strong, ignoring the underutilized ones and
allowing them to stay slack, facile. As I’ve illustrated in the previous two sections of this
chapter, in movement education, these patterns are built on a system that is imbalanced, and
don’t facilitate a clear transfer of weight. Both of these conditions work together to maintain
their persistence, and also to restrict the range of motion. In the work of our discipline, this
presents as what I called the sustained and continued reluctance to negotiate questions of race
and coloniality.
So I suggest we are rehearsing familiar patterns, and that this is not, in fact, a
reorientation in gravity, not encouraging our disciplinary work to innervate reciprocally. These
familiar patterns I allude to might look like this: rehearsing a linear narrative of discovery and
progress in first-year writing; asserting that bodies are a text to be read and consumed by an
invisible subject; ignoring the way our language about bodies enforces a Cartesian priority of
consciousness over physicality; overlooking the way bodies are implicated in policies and
procedure; or co-opting the idea of bodies as a method and instrument to access the mind,
trumping once again an ultimate – language, consciousness, the enlightened, the sign of the
civilized. Our familiar patterns are keeping us entrenched in a colonial system of discourse, not
just about bodies, but about people, groups of people, and culture. What I have hoped to reveal
here is how we have been lead to believe bodies exist, in our discipline, “hauling ourselves
around” through our traditional canon.

or between systems, etc.
Generally, to recall, some of these included writing to a different audience, redrawing the
scope of our research projects, looking to other sources of distribution, or experimentation with
form and arrangement.

159

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This haul has resulted in embodied rhetoric scholarship which rewrites our imbalances
and inefficient patterns, endlessly. Bodies are important to understand, we look as if we are
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saying, when they are markedly ab-normal?

As sites of rhetorical exigency, however, bodies

are still fundamentally an obstacle, unless we can approach them as we have learned to do with
text − things which are stabilized, and subject to the same kinds of logic as language. Rather than
looking to and feeling bodies as instruments of power, not power over remember, but power to,
we emphasize them as objects we can discourse about instead of with. Despite our best
intentions, we hesitate to locate bodies as identifiable, and movable, sources of the production of
knowledge.
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Such a hesitance might be cleared by considering what other scholars

with other

legacies have to say about bodies and about knowledge. I believe our field is understandably
anxious about bodies, and perhaps I could even venture to say here - about embodiment, after
having looked closely at some of the words of those whom we claim as significant contributors
to rhetoric theory. Still, some attention to particular other theorists might help us to broaden our
view a little, and to weave our European roots with a more complicated perspective. In the next
chapter, I will offer one way to mitigate our canon of rhetorical theory with performance theory,
and describe particular claims I’ve identified about the role the body plays in the production of
knowledge.

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I use the word “normal” cautiously here. What makes a body normal, besides that it is
missing from scholarly conversations? The bodies that gets mentioned in intellectual discourse
are primarily those which are considered “noticeable” which is of course code for “not like the
dominant group of bodies” in which case, “dominant group of bodies” comes to mean bodies
which don’t make themselves known in rational ways.
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There are many scholars of rhetoric today who are investigating just such a thing. My
intention is not to overlook them, nor to suggest what follows in this chapter, and dissertation,
should supplant these other investigations.
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Breath: Standing
In your bare feet, find a place to stand, away from any walls or furniture, and bring your
feet directly under your hip sockets, about two, maybe three inches away from each other. Make
sure your heels are lined up directly behind your second and third toes. If you can, arrange your
feet so they are weighted equally, inside to outside of each foot, and front to back. You should
feel contact at the balls of both feet, and the center of both heels, as well as the inside and outside
of your arch. Once you have your feet under you and positioned this way, stand upright, and
focus forward. If you can, close your eyes. If you’d prefer not to settle your gaze straight ahead,
but soften it slightly, so you are not creating any tension in your facial muscles, or your eye
sockets.
Put your hands on your hip bones, and return to the feeling of your balloon breath, and
the way this breath affects the weight of your upper body over or into the bowl of your pelvis.
Notice how this feeling is different when you are standing, than when you were seated. As you
inhale, feel you can use this action to slightly move the bones of your pelvis back and forth, over
the tops of your thigh bones. Notice how these shifts correspond to shifts in the way your weight
distributes in your feet, perhaps increasing the weight on one side, or more in the front or back,
of your feet. Perhaps you feel the weight move more easily on one side than another.
Bring your attention to your knees, and notice what sensation you have there, as you breathe and
gently move the position of your pelvic bones. Imagine the weight of gravity pouring down
through your torso, into the bowl of your pelvis, and spilling through your hip sockets, into the
bones of your thighs. Does that weight slip through the space in your knees, or does it get stuck
in any part of this pathway? Can you feel the weight pour through your knees, into the bones of
your lower leg, and into your feet?

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Chapter 5 - “Feeling the floor”: Exposing and Transforming Ideological Discourse Through
Performance and Rhetorical Bodies
“Using the floor is much more than a phrase. It’s a reality.”
- Barbara Mahler
In the last few pages, I’ve stated I don’t think we, in Rhetoric Studies, are standing in our
historical traditions in ways that orient us efficiently in gravity. I’ve claimed we can’t feel the
floor, to use Mahler’s phrase, and that this inability is leading to a resistance in our scholarship.
Resistance, you might be wondering, to what? I’ve suggested some possibilities in the kinds of
patterns we are all too accustomed to already, and in closing the previous chapter, introduced a
question about the kind of intellectual work in our discipline that focuses on bodies. This work, I
suggest, is usually primarily about bodies that have been marked as “abnormal.” What I mean in
this observation is that for the most part, the kinds of research and other public work in rhetoric
studies that deals explicitly with material bodies are the sorts whose objects of inquiry are “other
bodies.” “Body research” is usually focused on marginalized groups like those populated by
people of color, or LGBTQ folks, or dis/abled bodies, or non-traditional student bodies, etc.
Perhaps there is an indication in work of this kind that all bodies can benefit from these kinds of
research, and I certainly agree. Yet, I’m perplexed by the continuation of a colonialist and racist
paradigm when it comes to locating the physical bodies. Still, it seems, Foucault’s panopticon
and De Certeau’s distant and violent voice of authority exist, observing all these marked bodies.
In this way, similarly to my reactions to Crowley’s speech at the RSA convention, I rely
on my reading of the ancient Greeks and Romans, of the European impulse to erase the dominant
bodies in order to sustain the hierarchy of reason. In addition to preserving this hierarchy,
negating bodies as key sites of rhetorical agency, as bodies primarily, our disciplinary hesitance
resists an understanding of the material body as a site of culture. The cellular/cultural body is an
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idea I will continue to investigate in this chapter, but as we’ve seen, our own lineage of European
rhetorical theory does, at times, restrict our understanding. Coming to us as it does, through the
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filter of imperial expansion, we have difficulty reconciling some key inconsistencies,

ones we

can’t afford to overlook; neither can we abandon them.
To pretend these inconsistencies don’t exist is impossible, and irresponsible. I’ve alluded
to it before, and I mean only to remind us now of De Certeau and his description of the “rough
and barbaric” voice of history, the distant voice. While he is speaking specifically of the
authoritarian voice of objectivity, the barbarism is apropos in my current predicament as well. To
“look the other way” when teaching or studying Cicero, or Blair, or others, and avoid the ways in
which these works have been translated and used in particular cultural contexts with rhetorical
motive every time, is not the same but similar to pretending objectivity as a writer in a text.
Objectivity is impossible, we believe now, and much of our current practices reflect a desire to
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make the writer’s presence more visible, more integrated

. However, without examining the

ways in which our historical legacy has shaped these current practices and operating theories,
simply making the writer’s presence more visible isn’t adequate.
In fact, even this phrase, “making the writer’s presence more visible” is evidence of the
kind of colonialist paradigm I argue we have become numb to. The writer is visible. Talking
about practices that make her so is redundant. Though, as I’ve pointed out, our failing to
recognize the materiality of the writer’s body, as well as the artifacts produced by that body
insinuates that body needs some external force to make her seen. Maybe this seems I have
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These inconsistencies are laid out explicitly in the previous chapter.

In particular, I am thinking of feminist research practices, as in those Gesa Kirsch outlines
and calls for, in Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Publication,
and Interpretation, and Victor Villanueva’s “Memoria is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of
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become overly fastidious; maybe this seems like another instance where I am over thinking
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things, where I “know too much.”

But the whole of this book has been intent on helping us to

recognize the vitality in a body, the presence, the visibility and more than this – the power within
it. I admit I have used this phrase “make the writer visible” more times than I can even count,
and it’s only here, at the close of this book, that I realize to what extent I have left some of my
own assumptions unnoticed. It’s as if the text itself has the power, now, to “make the writer” –
the text being the site where ideas are “brought into being” or “made real.” The words make the
man, or something like it. Not, the man makes the words.
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But this is exactly what I’m saying, that the person

is the agent of this making, and by

making, the person is present. Writing comes from our bodies, and in our bodies fill up our
writing. So much of what we have inherited and adopted from the traditional canon of our
discipline obscures and even denies it. Words will hurt us, whether they are explicitly intended to
do harm,

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or not.

It seems to me now, that the question is not how to make the writer

visible, but how to see the writer. This is another instance of what I mean when I say we cannot
feel the floor. To feel it requires sensory information, as well as bones which are stacked
appropriately, allowing gravity to drop through them. To feel it requires that we believe it is
there.
Several times, I’ve claimed that our disciplinary hesitance disavows this floor, as much as
it does of our bodies connection into it. If this is true, if it’s unavoidable given the dominating
Color.” College English, Vol. 67, No. 1. 9-19. Web.
Remember my reaction to my yoga teacher and her white light image, from Chapter 1?

164
165

I choose “person” for two reasons: 1) to avoid a gender specificity; and 2) to echo the
conversation about personhood and self and body as in Chapter XX.
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in the case of legislation and ideology bent on power over other people
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lineage of our discipline, why not, you may be wondering, simply discard this lineage? Because
just as it’s impossible to overlook the ways that intellectual lineage has worked to protect and
serve a particular ideological design, the truth is that our discipline has been created on these
premises. In some ways, this disavowal is the floor.

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My intention isn’t to do away with the

floor on which we stand, but to feel it. Recall my discussion of the necessity of orienting one’s
physical self in gravity rather than subject to it. An orientation which requires a physical body’s
participation in the physical world also allows for that physical world to interact through the
physical body, rather than merely exist near it. Gravity always exists; the floor is always there.
There is no choice not to experience it, so why not benefit from that omnipresence?
The question is how.
One answer to that question follows in this chapter, and includes some key insights from
performance theory to assist. These theories hold at their center a couple of crucial premises: that
the body is a necessity to the production of knowledge; that both the body and knowledge are
ephemeral; and that both bodies and knowledges are transformed through each other. In order to
show how these notions of performance can help us in Rhetoric and Composition Studies, I will
rely on two specific examples for performance artists and their theories. Both of these examples
help to expose ideological discourse as it is experienced on the body and to reveal more complex
understandings of “the individual” as a modern entity; these two phenomena in turn help me, as I
suggested above, see the writer, and feel the floors on which I, and they, are standing.

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as in erasure of histories and entire groups of people, deemed irrelevant, or unimportant
At least, it’s part of it.
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Considering bodies as entities which move through and are moved by external forces is,
I’ve pointed out, not a new argument. By considering these modes of framing the world,

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we

can expand our conversation about how we see bodies in the world, and what changes as a result.
I don’t want to replace rhetorical theory from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and Western
Europeans. I want only to acknowledge the ways in which it’s ineffective to try to remove those
theories from the gravity in which they exist – the cultural, political, social machinations that
produced them. At the same time, I want to provide some theories of how else we can
contextualize our intellectual ancestry so that we might cultivate balance, facilitate the transfer of
the weight of both that ancestry and our contemporary desires through bodies which have
significance. I want to resist the narrative that there are particular bodies with significance, and
particular bodies without it; I want to suggest that we all have bodies, all of which contribute to
the meaning we make and circulate, all of which move us through space. To that end, along with
describing the ways performance artists/theorists have worked with these notions of the
rhetorical body, I will outline ways Rhetoric and Composition Studies have already and can
continue to sustain embodied scholarship and pedagogical practices.
I begin by defining some fundamental frameworks in performance theory, and comparing
them to our own disciplinary foundations., as well as pointing out some helpful intersections
between both of these and with concepts from movement education. At this point, it’s helpful to
remember the elements of an embodied methodology I outlined in Chapter 1: proprioception
(knowing where and who you are), innervation (stimulating body parts with nerves),
coordination (the integration of parts and stimulus to the point of perceived effortlessness) , and
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My objective is not to assert that these performance theorists are more right than rhetoric
theorists; in fact, my objective is to stay away from “right/wrong” types of dichotomies
altogether.
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locomotion (movement as effected by all three of the above). Generally, in order to have a fuller
sense of gravity, of the ground underneath us, and our impact and connection to the world around
us, we need all these things working together. Specifically, while disciplinary boundaries allow
us to see particularities and help us to focus our energy, they are also constraints which limit the
extent to which we can challenge our bodies, our systems of thought, our patterns of doing.
When performance scholars write about performance they could be referring to one of
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three general categories: performance as theater;

performance as a mode to be evaluated;

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or performance as coded practice. For the sake of my arguments, I am particularly interested in
performance as coded practice, which means exactly what it sounds like, as rituals or other
actions that carry with them cultural or social meaning, for example different dress codes in
different cultures. These practices could be coded as performance in themselves,

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or they

could be what Judith Butler calls performative, meaning the practices may not look like a
performance in the literal fashion, as a wedding might, but the ways in which these practices are
used and/or modified creates an alternative meaning, or an additional one. Butler’s classic
example of this is drag.

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No matter how the term “performance” is being used, all of these categories share the
following elements: the performer/spectator dynamic; the phenomenon of a thing being

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just as it sounds, is any mode which involves a stage, actors, an audience, props, costumes,
lighting, in whatever form those might occur
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the way in which someone or something fulfills obligations of a job, or another event which
involves assessment by outside source - a supervisor, or clientele, or perhaps an oversight
committee
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for example, memorial ceremonies, rites of passage, spiritual unions, etc
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see Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”
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174

rehearsed;

and the necessity of bodies to the production of knowledge. As I see it, the first

two of these three easily relate to rhetoric, as they suggest a highly contextual way of creating
meaning. Where performance scholars name “performer,” rhetoric scholars would likely say
“writer;” and in place of “spectator,” “audience.” Think of Schechner’s “twice behaved
behavior” as revision, perhaps, or even invention, in the ways the two work together to make a
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text and resulting meaning.

Last, the third element I mentioned above, the necessity of bodies

to the production of knowledge, is one which I argue is equally related though as I’ve pointed
out, figures more as a problem than as an agent in ancient Greco-Roman rhetorics. In these
pages, I will describe all three of these common threads as combinations that help us to see daily
negotiations between bodies and power. Too, we can see how performance helps us to see the
way these negotiations are transformed. Both of these things culminate in a revised sense of
rhetoric - as something experienced and performed with, in, and on the body, always cellular and
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always cultural

.

As I mentioned previously, in this chapter I will rely on the performances of two artists as
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examples: Orlán

and Anna Deavere Smith.

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For the purposes of this chapter, I am drawing

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Schechner uses the phrase “twice behaved behavior”, which has become a kind of mantra for
scholars working in performance studies, to delineate what he (and we) intend when we say
performance. Schechner and Victor Turner, considered two of the “fathers” of performance
studies, combined their two disciplines of Theater and Anthropology in the early 1980s. In their
work, and in Schechner’s in particular, behavior is understood as existing separate from those
who “DO” the behavior, and so the actions themselves can be understood as “symbolic and
reflexive […] harden[ed] into theater of social, religious, aesthetic, medical, and educational
processes. Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time.
Performance is “twice-behaved behavior.” (“Restoration of Behavior” 37)
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I point out these commonalities at the risk of seeming to be “textualizing” performance,
when my motive is more concisely the inverse - I’d like to “performatize” text.
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from my logic: The body is rhetorical.
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Orlán is a French feminist performance artist whose work has spanned several decades and
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primarily on Orlán’s projects investigating what she terms “carnal art.”

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One series of these,

from the mid 1990s, involves a number of cosmetic and prosthetic surgeries in which she
undergoes multiple operations to change her body according to various specifications.
Significant details about the surgeries include, but are not limited to, live videography of the
operations, signed legal contracts by the surgeons and operating room staff agreeing to the
modification procedures stated by the Subject (Orlán) as well as her denial of using general
anesthetic. Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror is useful to my own purposes here for three
reasons: she is explicitly interested in the role of speech and bodies as sites of knowledge
production; she offers a detailed explanation for her research and performance processes, as well
as the methodological reasons for both; and her project itself can reveal to us some relevant and
portable intersections between performance, rhetoric, and culture.
Both of these artists suggest meaningful conversations about the role bodies play, the
significant role they play, as carriers and agents of knowledge. These roles get expressed as
individual and deeply layered agents, but also demonstrate how performance as an analytic can
both expose ideological discourses as they play out on the material body and transform that
material body as well as the discourse itself. This relational impact is similar to the sorts I claim
exist within the body;

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therefore, performance as an analytic works to destabilize and

usually centers around representations of female bodies, sexuality, and western ideals for
femininity and beauty.
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Deavere Smith is an American actress, playwright, and educator. As just part of her long
career in the performing industry, she has produced three one-woman shows as part of her On
the Road: A Search for American Character project. One of them, Fires in the Mirror, is a
collection of monologues she performs from interviews she conducted exploring the Crown
Heights riots in Brooklyn.
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For more details about this concept, see Orlán’s official website at
http://www.orlan.net/texts/
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See my discussion of balance, weight transfer, and range of motion in Chapter 4.
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simultaneously help us to see the rhetoricity of meaning and culture as bodied practices - the
embodiment, if you will. Seeing these rhetoricities is a valuable objective in its own right, but
too, seeing them helps us to look differently at our own projects, too, and helps us aim for similar
objectives.

Exposing Ideological Discourses/Gravitational Force
Regardless whether you thinkof performance as theory or practice, knowledge
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production is a phenomenon which occurs in and through the body. Philip Auslander

identifies the body as an element which “exposes the ideological discourses producing it, through
performance that insists on the body’s status as a historical and cultural construct and that asserts
the body’s materiality.’ (286, my emphasis). The body isn’t just a thing that is likely to
misbehave, or require constant supervision by the mind. Instead it reveals the cognitive processes
- language, ideology, cultural structures - which work within it. The materiality of the body, in
other words, makes the abstractions of the mind more visible. Even more, in so doing the
materiality of the body builds knowledge about these abstractions. These abstractions could
include any number, but as I am emphasizing the use of performance theory in terms of
European narratives of rhetorical theory, and the role of the body in it, I have restricted my
discussion of which ideological discourses to two: the valorization of individualism and
independence; and the body as an obstacle in the path towards enlightenment.
While Mabel Todd is not speaking about the body as illustrative of ideology, she is
stating that the body is a site through which abstractions and cognitive processes exist.
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This explanation of body and discourse comes from an article by Tanya Augsburg, in which
she describes and analyzes the performance art work of Orlán. Auslander is an important
contributor to performance studies, as a theorist whose work has centered on performance art and
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Remember her claim that the body’s sense of self is at the level of the bones, that cognition and
consciousness develop through the neurological balance below consciousness. As a corollary to
these notions, add her emphasis on function over form: “thinking preceded mind, the verb
preceded the noun, doing was experienced before the thing done. Everything moves, and in the
pattern of movement, life is objectified.” (3, my emphasis). Life is objectified, for Todd, after the
condition of doing. Through the doing, or through the body, understanding is solidified through
language, through structure. Ideological discourses then, might be could be understood first as an
external force, as gravity perhaps, a force which always exists, at once outside of us, and then
also distributing its weight through our skeleton, connecting us to the ground and environment
around us. Performance theories and practices are concerned with locating the simultaneous
exteriority and interiority of that force.

(Composite) Individualism/ Weight Transfer
Recognizing discourse, especially ideological discourse, as something which exists both
inside and outside a body also helps us to revise our notion of the individual as a discrete being.
If we can think of ideological discourse as something with weight, as gravity, then its
distribution through our skeleton, the ground, and then back up, either through our own bones, or
those of another body shifts where we locate boundaries between ourselves and others. What
“individual” stands for is less discrete in this view. Where a humanist “individual” is
characterized by self-determination, will, and the strength of the conscious mind over the body, a
performative idea of a person individual depends on both the body and the mind in a correlative
relationship, as well as forces not limited to inside the body’s cellular structure. The individual,

postmodernism.
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in this case, is more of a collaborator, all the parts of its “self”

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with each other, as well as all

these parts with outside forces, such as ideological discourse, other selves, the floor. In the first
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meaning of the word, the individual is contained, singular, in control, True.

The latter, the

collaborator-individual, however, complicates this viewpoint, in that knowledge is produced in
the midst of multiple agents, whether these agents exist in one person, or among them. A
humanist tends to see this relationship amid as one filled with conflict, an either-or scenario. A
performative lens recognizes the midst is a foci, a site which can’t be fixed in place, but which
travels between many places; it allows for meaning to take place, not in an autonomous
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individual, but in relation to other bodies, things, and places.

Classical Greco-Roman

Rhetoric makes it difficult to talk about this foci; while there is some intention to represent it in
the relationship of the rhetorical appeals, for example, the appeals still stabilize the meaning
makers as discretely understood selves. Further, these selves can be read, much in the way that
texts are. Texts, in this light, are products of logic and reason; they are stable; meaning is
preserved.
But if “self” is produced as a shifting relationship between mind and body, body and
body, or within one body - say, between cells - logic and reason have little to do with the
cultivation of it. If not “little to do,” then at least “less.” Antonio Damasio, a contemporary
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neuroscientist,

asserts that the self, and cultivation of such, is a biological process, one that

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I use “” around this difficult word to highlight the difficulty. In this instance, I don’t mean
Self (as I’ve used it in other places in this book) to indicate an autonomous soul, but rather as a
conglomerate of many parts and systems.
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in the Platonic sense of the word. See Chapter 4
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and not necessarily in a superior relation

Damasio’s work on neuroscience and cognition has been an influence on several
performance theorists, such as Rhonda Blair, but also has impacted work in Philosophy, for
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begins in the brain (as opposed to the mind):

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“The sense of self depends [...] on the brain’s

ability to portray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability in turn is a
consequence of the brain’s involvement in the process of regulating life [homeostasis]” (qtd in
Blair 253). It’s the brain which negotiates understanding the body in relation to other bodies. It’s
just this relationship that is a mainstay of performance. Further, it’s not just the relationship
between bodies that’s significant here, but the relationship within the body; the brain is
fundamental to the entire organism’s understanding. In the place of “understanding,” substitute
“meaning.” Performance allows for bodies, not necessarily as regulated by minds, to be
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transmitters and makers of meaning too.

Performing Bodies
At a casual glance, Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror may look as if it is
attempting to enact a powerful statement about individuality, as Deavere Smith’s body

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is the

example in the work of Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. I’m including Antonio
Damasio’s work for two reasons: 1) he is a contemporary neuroscientist and 2) his work is
considered significant by several theorists in Performance Studies. I’d like to point out that much
of what he discusses is a continuation of Mabel Todd’s theories, while they lineage is not direct,
and its possible Damasio is unaware of her work in movement education. Todd predates
Damasio, of course, and her work is just as relevant to contemporary practitioners, as I’ve
already pointed out.
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meaning, in the physiological organism we call a brain, and not the abstracted notion of it,
which we refer to when we say “Mind” or “Intellect” or “Consciousness.” To say “brain”
includes the material fact of it.
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Recall this incident I shared early in the book, where a fellow graduate student “corrected”
my understanding of mind to mean “consciousness, not bodies.” Also, recall my realization
about the extent to which my peers in Rhetoric Studies assumed this differentiation to be
universally accepted.
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For those who are not familiar with Deavere Smith, she is an African American woman. I
point this out for a couple reasons: one, the ways in which her body is made visible by race is a
participant in the meaning-making, especially in a show focused on race riots; and two, as I will
discuss in this chapter, much of the critique of her work has exactly to do with “what it means”
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one performing each of the multiple characters in the script. But Deavere Smith herself is careful
to point out that this

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is exactly not what she is performing. She explains that what is visible is

difference - between the character (the performance) and the audience (the spectator), as well as
between the interviewee (the performer) and Smith (the spectator). Meaning is made in “the
obvious gap between the real person and [Smith’s] attempt to seem like them.” (xxxviixxxviii).

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Her comment speaks directly to concerns that others have voiced about her project’s

role in perpetuating stereotypes, and in essentializing identities. Deavere Smith’s argument
centers on one particular quality of performance, one with related currents in rhetoric,

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which

is to question who can speak for or as whom else.
These questions are important ones, and I take them up with more detail in the
subsequent sections of this chapter, but for now, assume critics of Smith’s work are worried that
much of the agency that’s been forged by particular groups of people,

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may be damaged by

what Smith seems to be claiming. What she may be claiming, is that she can speak for anyone,
and that a person’s experience, be it cultural, or individual, can be replicated easily. However,
underneath this claim is the warrant that any given body/person has a fixed self, one that doesn’t
shape shift, or modify. The Humanist belief is that we have one self, and that this self is what
makes us “individual”, again recalling self-determination and free will. Performance theory and
for a woman of color to enact bodies of multiple genders, orientations, ethnic or religious
backgrounds, etc.
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individualism
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I will return to Deavere Smith’s explanation again, in coming pages, for more insight into the
function performance plays as an analytic.
191
In this case, I use the lower case rhetoric to refer to capital R rhetoric, as well as a more
general field of study. I don’t intend it as a critique, as much as to recall that this concern about
who can speak for whom is as viable a concern among the traditional Greco-Roman canon as it
is among many rhetorical traditions, past and present.
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practice, as Deavere Smith’s project articulates, unsettles this warrant. What makes us
“individual” is the combination of performances we play from moment to moment. Deavere
Smith says “If we were to inhabit the speech pattern of another, and walk in the speech of
another, we could find the individuality of the other and experience that individuality viscerally”
(xxvii). Of vital importance to Deavere Smith’s point here is the first part of this quotation – “to
inhabit the speech of another.” This has to do with a studied practice of listening to another
person’s speech patterns and repeating them in your own mouth. The emphasis on the repetition
is physical – attempting to make your mouth a home for the sounds. This entails listening for
physical cues – like breath, aspirated consonants, positions of the tongue against which teeth, or
palates, speed, rhythm, an identified location in the throat for vibration, etc. It’s an attentiveness
to the materiality of speech, rather than the idiosyncrasies, dictated by an understanding that all
speech is material – no kind necessarily better than another.

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Much earlier, Cicero cautions us to “be particularly careful whom we imitate” (On
Oratory 1:34), motivated not by the worry that a speaker will perpetuate damaging stereotypes,
but that the imitation itself can muster enough power to make a person into someone he

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would not wish to be. Smith counters the arguments in her defense and explanation of theater, as
illustrated above, and also comments that “If only a man can speak for a man, a woman for a
woman, a Black person for all Black people, then we, once again, inhibit the spirit of theater”
(xxix). Her argument is not to undo the critical work that’s been done among marginalized and
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groups who have been marginalized and silenced by public discourse, undeniably

Deavere Smith states “The act of speech is a physical act. It is powerful enough that it can
create, with the rest of the body, a kind of cooperative dance. That dance is a sketch of
something that is inside a person, and not fully realized by the words alone. […that] could create
the illusion of being another person by reenacting something they had said as they had said it.”
(xxvi).
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oppressed groups to build recognition and power around multiple subjectivities. Deavere Smith
believes that to move beyond stereotyped characterization of individuals (some of whom belong
to exactly the groups I refer to, previously), a performer

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should attempt to enact the

“subtleties in real-life behavior [… the] linguistic as well as physical details that make a person
unique” (xxx). Even more, the performer’s goal is not to make the highly visible “subtleties”
obvious to the audience, but also “to portray what [is] invisible about that individual” (xxxii).
Rather than her monologues being seen as mere memorization and repetition of what one
individual said in the interview, her performances reveal what is visible about the interviewee, as
well as about Deavere Smith, but also what’s not visible about both. She describes the “spirit of
theater,” as something “which lives in the bridge that makes unlikely aspects seem connected.
The bridge doesn’t make them the same, it merely displays how two unlikely aspects are related.
These relationships of the unlikely, these connections of things that don’t fit together are crucial
to American theater and culture if theater and culture plan to help us assemble our obvious
differences.” (xxix). Much as I argued a few pages ago, performance creates a possibility to
acknowledge composites, or collaborations, rather than reductive equations. I believe Smith’s
point is not that differences are “assembled” to make them (and us) more similar, but to help us
see the multitudes, to present the seams as part of the whole, rather than to erase them. In what
may seem a contradiction, Deavere Smith’s work identifies individuals, and in the process,
creates meaning about the differences between them and her, and her audiences. Instead of a
series of individuals, bounded within the frame of a physical body, and grouped together to
compose a society, performance theory helps us to see a composite body - the general/social
within the particular/body.
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Again, the “he” here is purposeful.
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While Deavere Smith’s work is clearly grounded in theater and performance studies,
some might also say her work is still connected to the colonial paradigm, seeing Deavere Smith
as a removed agent of power who can validate the experience and knowledge of the Other,
colonize it for her own purposes. I think there are resonances, however faint, with Gloria
Anzaldua’s theories of mestiza consciousness. Deavere Smith’s proclaimed primary goal is to
attempt to enact difference, not as a stabilized entity, but as a phenomenon. Perhaps what is
missing from this attempt is a recognition of the external forces (that become also,
simultaneously, internal) that work through and within the bodies in motion. Anzaldua’s theories
require an admission of these forces – ones of colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia – as
instrumental and powerful shapers of la mestiza:
Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and
their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an
inner war. Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture
communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple,
often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually
incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision. (Borderlands/La
Frontera 100)
Ideology and its discourses, as well as cultural practices are experienced in the body, making
another “kind” of body, la mestiza, in the process. Importantly, these impacts, these makings are
not assimilations, not unifications, and also not rejections or refutations; she states “the new
mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. […] She

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read: Speaker. read: Writer.
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has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good, the
bad, and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (101).
Here I would like to return to a claim I made in Chapter 2, one grounded in movement
education, that there is no good body. I add to that discussion a version of what Anzaldua and
Deavere Smith are talking about, that while we may have multiple and unique differences across
bodies, there is not one of those that is good, and likewise, not one that is bad.

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The lack of

valuation is critical. Self-determination and individualism requires a drive to “better oneself”
which also requires a perspective built on striated experience ranging in goodness. In a
composite body, that range of goodness and badness doesn’t stand still long enough for a self to
be identified consistently on it. What makes a body unique are the never ending decisions,
actions, and reactions that a body carries out. Some of these, as I hope I’ve pointed out already,
are the result of voluntary reflexes and conscious decisions, and some are involuntary.
Whichever the type of decision making, our bodies are active in that process.

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What Shall We Do With All these Bodies?

Recall ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric, in particular the ways in which the body is
considered to have agency, as in Aristotle’s perspective on the experienced man, or Gorgias’
explanation of a kind of “body logic.”

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Remember too, however, the urgency and primacy

placed on the supervisory nature of the soul, how the body was ultimately translated via another,
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To be clear, there are some behaviors and actions that are definitely bad. This statement
about lack of valuation is only relative to the assignation of value to a particular kind of body,
not to decisions people make about what to DO to other bodies.
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See also, Sharon Crowley’s Address at the 2010 RSA Convention, or my description of the
event, in Chapters 1 and 4.
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Both of these examples are explained in Chapter 3.
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higher order. Certainly, our European narratives admit the persuasive nature of the body, but
closer to my point is this - the inherent, or at least, desirable, separation between the body and
the mind. Performance theory offers a glimpse of the knowledge living in a body, but it also
questions the extent to which the mind/soul act independently of the body. It suggests an
alternative to the Cartesian hierarchy, in that whatever bodily knowledge exists, performance
theories insist it is not only knowable by the mind.
In fact, not only is this knowledge visible and understandable through the body itself, it
needs the body to be known, and needs it to reveal the knowledge inhabited in the mind. The two
work together, neither one replacing the other, nor does the body subvert the hierarchy. In
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performance, meaning is made as the result of a cooperative relationship between these “two”
elements. The cooperation isn’t necessarily equitable, neither is it static, as it appears to be in
discourse from ancient Greece and Rome and Renaissance Europe. Regardless, performance

theories can help us to articulate these phenomena, especially when looking to representations,
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images, or conscious practices - all of these being compositions

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of one sort or another.

I use “two” in order to suggest a falseness to the easy categorization of parts of a self - the
mind and the body. There is also a soul, spirit, psychic energy, depending on your worldview, as
well as what may be referred to by some as mindbody or bodymind. And if you’re willing to
acknowledge extrasensory experience, there may be other elements as well. Barbara Mahler
describes one such view in which a person is assumed to be made up of three elements: body,
mind, and spirit. Each of these elements is also constituted of the same elements, whereas a body
is made up of body, mind, and spirit. Then body’s body is also composed of body, mind, spirit,
and so on. It’s difficult to imagine, perhaps, but the general sense is that the distinctions between
these three elements are so finely expressed to be not so useful in and of themselves. Instead, we
could talk about the mind of the body, or the spirit of the mind, or the body of mind’s spirit, etc.
It’s confusing to write out, in this linear fashion, but also illustrates exactly how limiting are our
easily demarcated boundaries, coming through Descartes and others.
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My use of this term is purposeful, to draw parallels between the work I am talking about in
this chapter, with the kinds of work we, in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, are
primarily engaged with.
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Deavere Smith’s project relies on her body as well as the bodies of her interview subjects,
in ways I’ve alluded to previously, and in ways I will expand on below. Orlán’s “plastic surgery
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project”

clearly also must involve bodies, her own, as well as the bodies of the surgeons who

perform the procedures, the camera people, etc. Indeed, the very content of her exhibitions are
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multiple and bodily - her own changed body, and in many cases, the biological matter

that is

removed or altered from her living body. Meaning for Orlán doesn’t live solely in the discourse
about the body, but in the tissue. The meaning rises out of the relation of each to the other. The
body is important. It participates.
For both of these artists, the significance is in the presence of, and in the interplay
between the body and soul.

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It’s not as Quintilian says, “the good man, speaking well,” not the

character/soul of a man coming through the physical voice, but perhaps more as Antonio
Damasio puts it: “Imagination, a result of our brain’s evolutionary development, is essential to
the fact of our physicality, not just our psyches” (qtd in Blair 255). Or, 70 years earlier, consider
again, Mabel Todd’s assertion about the location of “knowledge” as being “not in man’s
‘command,’ but in the various systems cooperating with the neuromuscular mechanism to
establish right conditions.” (6) Damasio’s and Todd’s work reconsider what has become the
common assumption about the relationship between body and soul, an assumption we have

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For simplicity’s sake, I’ve falsely combined various installations and projects under this
name. It’s far too general to be sure, but Orlán has taken on a series of various surgeries and
resulting products as the artifacts of such, and all have different names and dates. In an attempt
to be succinct, I’ve reduced them to this “plastic surgery project.”
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I list some of this in a later section about the kinds of consequences bodies experience, and
which are made explicit
203
It bears repeating - between all the bodies and all the souls - of performers and spectators
alike.
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inherited

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from Descartes. Think of it this way: instead of “I think, therefore I am,” invert the

active verbs.
I am, therefore, I think.
Of course, the dilemma with this is that the inversion is exactly that – a replacement of one with
the other, but, as I noted in Chapter 3, a maintenance of the original manner of orientation.
Consider this inversion as an exercise in investigating possibilities, how easy it is to invert, and
still make meaning. This, in movement education is one of the significances of inversions, in
which a body’s head comes to be in the usual position of the feet, and the feet in the position of
the head. The point is not so much to be able to stand on one’s head, but to feel, in your body,
what is possible and different in this orientation. If this position can suggest other opportunities
that a body can adjust to and make meaning from, then the body becomes more fluid, more
resilient in all positions.

Mediated Body (Not Used)
Orlán’s performances, including the various elements I’ve described above, reveal how the
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lived act is not the primary signifier, as far as what her work means.

The surgeries are

certainly a critical part of the significance, but equally significant too are the video recordings of
the events, as well as the resulting changes to her material self. The meaning is definitely
understood in ways that are abstracted, ways we might consider “cognitive,” as in when we read
about her intentions of composing her body after the ideals noted by Western art “masters” to
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and until recently, in certain disciplines in the sciences, have left primarily unquestioned

These surgeries include cosmetic and prosthetic operations, in which the performer’s body is
modified, permanently, to take on the physical features of female bodies as represented in
Western art. For example, one such surgery adjusted Orlán’s mouth to look like the Mona Lisa’s
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reveal western ideals of beauty. But the deep critique and irony of this beauty, and of European
artistic ideals, isn’t fully realized by these abstracted ideas alone. Orlán offers her “lopsided
smile and bumpy temples” (Augsburg 290), not just as a text, but as the body she lives and
moves around the world in. This body is her present body, the “real” one, but it is also a living
representation of other representations (the Mona Lisa, for example) of this abstraction, beauty.
The body and the image of the image of the body [sic] all work together to make an often
made argument about the commodification of bodies in the name of art. Instead of looking to the
body as a canvas, or as a text, as we often do in Rhetoric Studies, Orlán maintains the body as
her body, as one which is still living, breathing, and commencing in all other bodily acts.
Alongside the specificity and materiality to her work lies the series of citations;

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in

Augsburg’s interpretation, “evidently, the female body for Orlán is unintelligible without the
mediation and materiality of representation” (295).
As Tanya Augsburg reads it, Orlán

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is not done to, or done on, but does the doing. This

recalls the literal use of “body” to manipulate our conventional notions of self/subject, and our
conventional assumptions about how the body is written/represented/rhetoricized:
To engage in a visceral critique of the discourses and institutions that ‘create’ the ideal
female medical body by one’s own volition […] seems to entail making a spectacle not
only of medicine and of beauty culture, but also of oneself - in other words to make
visible the tensions between one’s social restraints and one’s personal choices (287).

smile, another one adding tissue to the sides of her forehead, creating protrusions at her temples.
as Derrida would intend it

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207

When I use Orlán’s name in this description, I intend her body, specifically, in a performance
context, not to refer to her self as a construct of her consciousness primarily. I believe this is how
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Given the crucial role the body plays in performance, and the resulting correlations
between the body and the mind, as well as how both of these things reshape an understanding of
the individual, it seems obvious to suggest now that, in performance, the site of meaning
production happens between bodies. Indeed, this event occurs as a visibly changeable one, and
perpetually changing. These bodies may belong to multiple performers as well as to spectators,
and in any permutation. Recall Deavere Smith, that what is visible is difference, not caricature,
not stereotype. Difference in her work includes that between the character (the performance) and
the audience (the spectator), as well as between the interviewee (the performer) and Deavere
Smith (the spectator), between multiple characters, between character/performance and Deavere
Smith/performer, etc. Meaning about the characters is made in “the obvious gap between the real
person and [Deavere Smith’s] attempt to seem like them.” (xxxvii-xxxviii).
Performance gives us a language to talk about enacting difference; even, more than to
talk about it, we can describe the attempt. The word “attempt” is key to understanding
performance, both in the active construction, and also in the meaning of the word - the endeavor
is where meaning is made, rather than in a seamless imitation, or in a metaphorical replacement.
Smith attempts her performances, to seem like the people she interviews, and what occurs may
be within some range of success or failure. No matter which, the attempt is the point of interest.
Not only is it the point of interest, but it’s the point of visibility, for difference as well as the
seeming. These moments are where we see ideology most easily, we can feel it, even, as we
watch Deavere Smith enact the gestures and sounds of an Orthodox Jewish woman, alongside
her enactments of the gestures and sounds of Angela Davis. In these moments, ideology as a
discursive formation has texture, and weight. It can, as Mahler instructs us regarding gravity,
drop through the bones of our skeleton, into the floor and back up.
she intends her work to be understood.

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Transformations: Bodies, Boundaries, and Ideology
Much of the work I emphasize here focuses on a premise that neurological patterns
located in a body have signifying power in ways that refutes much of what we accept from the
Ancient Greeks and Romans, via Scholastic and Enlightenment thinkers. Rhonda Blair relies on
this understanding of the importance of the biological brain
and the process of acting. She argues that Stanislavksy

209

208

in her theories about performance

himself believed consciousness lived

not just in the mind, or the imagination, but in the body too, “in which voluntary and involuntary
processes and behaviors are not so cleanly separated from each other.” (253). Specifically, Blair
notes that Stanislavsky’s later theories about acting emphasized more the “given circumstances
and behavior” than the emotional experience of a character. This method, “the ‘method of
physical actions’,” dictates that actors research physical movements and actions that help them to
integrate the script’s and character’s positions, “rather than, for example, relying on an emotional
memory, sense memory, or inner monologue.” (253)
While “inner monologue” or narratives we have assumed to be true

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is certainly a

powerful motivator for channeling further textualized understanding, it seems that performers
and performance theorists also rely on action, behavior, movement for composing what I call,
rhetorical situations. Earlier in this book, I’ve claimed that power to is a direct force through
which new understanding is built, and exists in the material form. Todd articulates this meaning
of power in her opening argument, that “Living, the whole body carries its meaning and tells its
own story, standing, sitting, walking, awake or asleep” (1) and Mahler recounts an experience in
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209

as opposed to consciousness, a term often used to separate the body and the mind
considered the “father” of Method acting
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a class she had recently taught, when one of her students spontaneously began to weep. This
experience isn’t a frequent one, yet neither is it unusual. Mahler says “sometimes feelings come
up; you can’t pin a name to them, you can’t pin an idea on them. You can’t pin necessarily an
event on them.”
The importance of this experience is simple: our bodies carry information, and they
process that information in ways we can’t always be aware of in our conscious selves. Mahler’s
Re-Education Technique is not psychologically therapeutic; it is distinctly physical, and
explicitly attends to muscles and bones. And yet, these muscles and bones have reactions, at
times, which are not constrained to feelings that can be expressed as pain, or stretching, or
physical effort. These reactions can be understood as transformations of stimulus, of messages,
whether the physical quality changes, and leads to a shift in emotional or intellectual experience.
What results are new neural pathways, and patterns which offer different perspective, different
understanding.
There are other kinds of transformation evident in the performance artists I’ve included
as examples. Obviously, one of these is the changed physical body, as in the case of Orlan. In her
plastic surgery performances, she has made her body into one which is, most people would say,
deformed. She is certainly scarred, but also the arrangement and features of her material self is
“distinctly UNnatural,” (Augsburg 290), UNbeautiful by our present cultural standards. She has
transformed her body into Kristeva’s abject self,

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composed to reveal disorder, rather than to

order it. Her body works as the subject, or the author of the text, as well as the text itself, and
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based on memory, on ideology, on cultural norms, etc

“The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an
otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. […] It lies outside, beyond the set,
and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of
banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.” Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching
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yet, resists Quintilian’s directive to become the “good man speaking well”. Orlán’s body can’t be
reduced to a text, neither can she be granted full agency as the sole creator of meaning. Meaning
is made in the spaces between the agency she’s maintained (her refusal to be anesthetized, the
contracts her surgeons must sign in order to proceed) and the outcomes that play out through her
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material self, as well as how society responds to her.

As I’ve already argued in the previous section of this chapter, performance theories
reveal these discrepancies and discourses, but they also facilitate a fuller understanding of this
transformation. Rather than a replacement, or a metaphorical relationship between the
abject/object/subject and Orlan/surgery/beauty, multiple identifiers and bodies can be layered.
On/In a body, it’s easier for us to see these accumulations, and the effect of them, whereas on
paper, in text, those layers are lost. How can we see it? Perhaps it’s a question of dimensionality,
our interactions with bodies occurring in three dimensions, as opposed to our interactions with
paper being limited to two. I think too, we can see a body or other reasons, reasons I have hinted
at throughout this dissertation: bodies are unstable, and one advantage of this instability is that
change becomes more noticeable. What my body looks like in the morning, is not the same in the
evening. When I come home from work or the grocery store, I can see that I am not standing as
straight as I did in the morning, my shoulders are starting to roll forward with the weight of my
workbag, or my groceries, and of course, of gravity. What Orlan carries in the results of these
surgeries is an accumulation of meanings from the works of art she is citing, the experiences of
the surgeries, the experiences from one procedure to another, but also the accumulations of
movement through her daily life. As a text, Orlan might exist only in a museum, or in a library,
on a bookshelf, inanimate, and not subject to the world around her, not in the same way. We
Abjection,” pp.1-2
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can’t only see the bumpy temples as isolated oddities; they accumulate with the lopsided smile,
as well as every other part of her body. Of course, the way we see these accumulations is just as
informed by our own bodily experiences and cultural, gravitational forces.

Forging New Patterns/Neural Pathways
This building, or accumulation, necessarily describes rhetoric as an always embodied
practice, as cultural practices enacted by and on bodies, with explicit consequences. The
inversion of Descartes I inserted above sets in motion a re-contextualization of many more
assumptions about the relationships between a person’s soul and that same person’s body. More
than that, it requires we rethink the relationships between bodies and souls, as in the republic,
society, or culture. That is to say, the neurology of a particular body suggests an agency in the
body itself, but this is not limited to the individual; we might consider this kind of bodily
knowledge as existing among groups of bodies, similarly. “Culture” could come to include the
body/bodies, in relationship to the minds, but not secondary to them, as much of the Roman
rhetors’ work maintains. In Elizabeth Wilson’s words,

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“[The] gesture to a nonneurological culture or environment not only misrepresents the
complex relationship between neurology and its outside, but also, by locating
malleability, politics, and difference only in the domain of culture or environment, it
abandons neurology to the very biologism it claims to be contesting” (qtd in Blair 250).
Neurological knowledge, in other words, is not constrained to the nerve cells inside a “closed
system” of an organic body. Instead, neurological knowledge extends beyond and within that
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Again, when I say “her” I mean explicitly her body.

Wilson is another neuroscientist, self-classified as a feminist scientist. Her work revolves
around psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, feminist and queer theory, and contemporary
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body, to others, and to environments outside it/them. Not only might this shift how we come to
think of groups of people, and their bodies, but also how we consider the relationships between
bodies and spaces, and consequently, offer us a complex understanding of culture as something
fluid, in the ways organic matter is fluid.
This fluidity, whether we are speaking in terms of the fluidity of a body or of culture,
refers to the constantly shifting, moving qualities we experience and struggle to write about.
Rhetoric attempts to describe this movement, yet so often, the process of describing, naming, and
qualifying it results in an artificial stability. The same happens in the ways that Ancient GrecoRoman rhetorics treat the body as something that, while likely to behave (or misbehave)
unpredictably, frivolously, and/or messily, ought to be looked after by the mind. The desire is to
control the body and its wily ways, to fix it.

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As one example of a neural pathway created in our own discipline, consider Jay
Dolmage’s “Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, Medusa.” As I have, Dolmage emphasizes the ways in which
our popular version of rhetoric has erased the material body, instantiating as “normal” a view of
embodiment that is feminized, disabled, and fetishized. What I am particularly interested in at
this point, however, is the way in which he attends to his project, a way that I argue is embodied
in practice. In this project, Dolmage uses action, behavior, and movement to get through his
questions, in his own words, he “exhumes the myths of the Greek goddess Metis, [enliven] an
embodied rhetoric […]” all to connect, reconnect, remythologize, and “choreograph new
rhetorical possibilities” (2-3). Is an embodied practice as “simple” as choosing active words to
describe your methodological choices, you may be wondering. In some ways, the answer is yes.
That assumes however, that you consider that action as simple.
neuroscientific data.
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I’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing the relationship between language and bodies,
and I don’t mean to rehash it here. What I do mean to discuss however, is the way that the idea
of performance shifts the agency located in a text to the writer(s) who produce that text, and
similarly, creates an agency for the text itself. However, this kind of textual agency isn’t located
in a text’s power over other texts, or other bodies, but instead in the materiality of it, the action of
it, the possibility to do, for change. Dolmage’s approach is important, and embodied, precisely
because he is clear that his text is both an accumulation of bodily practices and a bodily practice
in itself. It’s choreographed. It changes histories, and it also changes us. Dolmage sees his
scholarship as an expression of his movement through the world, as well as the movements of
others through that world too.
We know, or believe we know now, that language, discourse, and the culture that arises
among both of these things are all dynamic, processual. Differently than in rhetoric studies,
where meaning is often codified in texts, in performance, knowledge is ephemeral. The inbetweenness of meaning makes it difficult to locate and recreate, predictably. Meaning is
constantly moving around; it’s momentary. Both Deavere Smith’s and Orlán’s work, as multiply
mediated objects, events, recordings of the same, and their living bodies carry different
meanings, depending on the media, the temporal circumstances, and of course, the spectators.
This could be true in rhetorical theory as well, yet in the way we’ve read the Greco-Romans
traditionally, the ephemerality of meaning gets interpreted to mean something a little closer to
“contextual.” This is satisfactory, as long as we are thinking of discourse as it occurs in a textual
frame, where bodies are unpredictable entities and elements, and so, not useful for interpretation.
But in performance, it’s exactly that unpredictability that is central to production. Again,
Kristeva’s “abject” helps us to reconcile the self as a subject and the self of its objects; that the
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double meaning intended. “Fix” as in to stabilize, as well as to correct an error.
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self “has but a precarious existence, since it must be constantly, inexhaustibly posited as a
defense against the threat of disorder and bodily dissolution.” (Augsburg 299).
The self is precarious. It must be constantly posited as a defense. Disorder and bodily
dissolution threatens it. Still in this argument from Kristeva, self and body are sustained as
separate, and their relationship still characterized by threat. While Augsburg is referring
specifically to Orlan’s work when she claims “That which is uncertain is neither subject nor
object; it is that which can be expelled from the body; fluids, excretions, tears, vomit, menstrual
blood, and so forth,” we can draw from it generalities that inform our relationship to material
bodies. The physicality of meaning, in this case, is often perceived as being “excluded to the
margins, [but which] nevertheless remains a constant threat as it is what makes the constitution
of the subject possible.” (Augsburg 299).
Take Orlán’s performances, live productions, videos, representations and products which
have been composed of the matter of her surgery, whether of digital representations of the
events, or tissue, fat, skin that have been excised from her body during the events. Both the
representations and the “left overs” carry a distinct meaning of Orlán’s self, of Orlán the
individual, body and language and consciousness all in relation to each other. At first glance, it
may be possible to view her surgeries as melodrama or gratuitous “self-mutilation in the guise of
art” (288), especially if we think of rhetoric as something which strives towards persuasion
through reason and governance of the body by the same.
However, if we look at Orlán’s surgeries as “ multimedia surgical theatre” (288) and
remember that performance negotiates the knowledge-making practices which necessitate bodily
presence, we might see, as Tanya Augsburg does, that Orlán is “self-consciously exploring a
means of identity transformation that is currently glamorized in our mediatized society without

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much reflection.” (288). Orlán is foregrounding the abject, moving it from outside the frame to
within it, not to exclude the subject, but to complicate the ways we conceive ourselves as Selves
[sic]. Further, our selves are not recognizable as separate from what is expelled from our body.
The individual is more than the physical self, more than the intellectual self, more than an easy
equation between the two. The individual includes both the physical and the intellectual, along
with the multiple excesses, ruptures, gaps. The individual, through a performance lens, is never
wholly visible as a contained, singular unit.
In Rhetoric Studies, look again to Dolmage’s choreographed remythology, in particular
to his story of Hephaestus,
most often depicted as having a physical disability, his feet twisted around backwards or
sideways. Yet both his bodily difference and his craftsmanship are evidence of
Hephaestus’s metis. Having feet that face away from one another doesn’t necessarily
entail ‘impairment’ – it means he can move from side to side more quickly. In turn, this
side-to-side movement had symbolic value. His thinking could also be lateral, slippery
responsive. […] These abilities allowed him to harness fire and invent metallurgy (70).
Dolmage’s shows us how Hephaestus’ body transforms from an abject self to a body
characterized by cunning, strength, fluidity, resilience. Dolmage is also careful to point out that
this transformation is not imposed on Hephaestus, and so on history, by modernity, or
postmodernity, or even by the writer himself. Instead, Dolmage and his text show us the ways all
the external forces I name above have settled on these myths to stabilize them, to unify them
according to our expectations, our previous patterns. Dolmage the scholar and writer has
performed an act of remythologizing for his spectators, changing himself, his subject, and

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ourselves in the process. The performance asks us to see Hephaestus differently, even more, it
asks us to see ourselves differently too.

Accumulations
Out of this experience and subsequent questions and attempts to explain, I understand
that my interest in bodies and rhetoric can join, and perhaps even begin, some pressing
conversations in our field. What follows in this dissertation is an accumulation of questions and
answers, the only way I see as appropriate for working through some of these issues. To flatten
them, to suggest there is just one way to make sense of all the layers of history, knowledge bases,
and disciplinary pressures is not only ineffective, but irresponsible. For woven through all these
things are people, bodies with minds and spirits, and as complicated wholes, these bodies bear
the weight of all the layers. Sometimes, they are broken underneath them. Always they carry
with them the stories of this weight, their breaks and bruises, their multiple healings.

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WORKS CITED AND CONSIDERED

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Works Cited and Considered

Abbott, Don Paul. “Rhetoric and Writing in the Renaissance.” A Short History of Writing
Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America. Ed. James J. Murphy. New
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Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd Ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London: Heinemann, Ltd, 1934. Perseus Digital Library
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Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Ed. Linda Ferrreira-Buckley and S.
Michael Halloran. Carbondale: SIUP, 2005. Print.
Brandt, Deborah and Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles-Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller,
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(Sept. 2001): 41-62. Jstor. Web.
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness.
Washington DC: Gallaudet UP, 1999. Print.
Cicero. On Oratory. Translated by J.S. Watson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1871.
University of Michigan Americana Collection and The Internet Archive. 1 June 2010.
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