2: Chapter One- The Writing Yogi- Lessons for Embodied Change

[It’s] not that I always write about the body, though I often
do, but that I always write, consciously, as a body. (This
quality more than any other, I think, exiles my work from
conventional academic discourse. The guys may be writing
with the pen/penis, but they pretend to keep it in their pants.
—Nancy Mairs, Waist-High in the World

Mairs is helpful when thinking about what it means to write “as a body.” In the quote from my epigraph, Mairs acknowledges three major consequences of self-consciously negotiating the writing process as a material endeavor: first, when we acknowledge that writing always springs from our material placement, we add authority and transparency to our compositions, no matter how explicitly our content references our body; second, in this process, we necessarily move beyond the rules and structures of “conventional academic discourse;” and third, this movement engages us in a feminist endeavor that disturbs the ways patriarchal power is enforced by a malestream tendency to erase the writer’s materiality in order to create an illusion of objectivity. To write as a body in the ways Mairs describes means disrupting the objectification and marginalization—in other words feminization—of bodies in the academe. No longer is distance from the body a prerequisite to truth; instead, proximity lends persuasiveness.

To understand embodiment as a central facet of feminist composition pedagogy, we must follow the lead of writers like Mairs and accept our bodies as flesh and text. In this chapter, I argue that contemplative writing pedagogy is the best means of achieving this goal while remaining mindful of the consequences of attending to writing bodies. Mairs is an example of a writer who has a greater than usual awareness of her writing body. The quote I use to open this chapter is from her Waist-High in the World, which in title and content fronts this author’s literal perspective on the world, her embodied and partial “perpetual view, from the height of an erect adult’s waist” (1996, p. 16). Mairs enacts a method of embodied writing in her text such that situatedness and perspective are always understood as material and connected to her writing body; notably, they are not simply convenient metaphors for theorizing.

Mairs’ perspective is literally one from the margins because her voice resounds from the seat of her wheelchair. She explains the consequences of this “waist-high” positioning:

“[m]arginality” thus means something altogether different to me from what it means to the social theorists. It is no metaphor for the power relations between one group of human beings and another but a literal description of where I stand (figuratively speaking): over here, on the edge, out of bounds, beneath your notice. I embody the metaphors (1996, p. 59)

Sitting waist-high in the world isn’t a prerequisite for embodied writing, but it does make Mairs mindfully aware of how writing comes just as much from the placement of her fleshy body—sometimes in a wheelchair, sometimes placed on the toilet by her husband—as her cultural and historical orientation. Ours does too, although we can “stand” to ignore this fact because of our able-bodiness.

Because bodies and language unfold to reveal each other, Mairs’ material reality influences her semiotic understandings and choices. Mairs’ recognition of her embodied subjectivity changes how she chooses to reconstruct her world discursively as she finds less value in normative constructions. Mairs states a preference for calling herself a “cripple” against the wishes of rhetorically-sensitive, politically-correct individuals who understand the power of language to construct the world. She argues that their reconstruction of her world through such “PC” terms as individuals with “differing abilities” do not represent her embodied reality:

“Mobility impaired,” the euphemizers would call me, as through a surfeit of syllables could soften my reality. No such luck. I still can’t sit up in bed, can’t take an unaided step, can’t dress myself, can’t open doors (and I get damned sick of waiting in the loo until some other woman needs to pee and opens the door for me). (1996, p. 13)

To deny Mairs’ physical reality is to deny her selfhood and her writing body. Pointing out the social construction of disability does little to change her reality of sitting impatiently in the bathroom hoping for someone to open the door.

Mairs serves as a powerful reminder that while mapping out bodies rhetorically may help us to recognize our cultural construction and the shaping power of language, we cannot lose sight of our very real corporeality. Within the field of composition studies, there are few pedagogical approaches we can easily follow to reintroduce the tension of the living, organic body as Mairs does within disability studies—and even fewer that respect the kind of embodied self-reflexivity Mairs demonstrates. We can, however, find ways to bring the productive tension of the writing body to bear on composition praxis by approaching this body through the lens of contemplative pedagogy and practices like yoga. Disability studies and contemplative pedagogy may seem strange bedfellows at first glance, but they share a common focus on respecting the body where and as it is. And, just as disability studies was strengthened by overt attention to disability’s intersections with gender (a premise upon which Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s work revolves: see, for instance, Extraordinary Bodies (1996)), so too can contemplative pedagogies be made stronger for their explicit uptake of feminisms.

Contemplative pedagogies stress embodied self-reflexivity, or the ways the body is an anchor of our self-awareness and can be used as a tool of executing and monitoring this reflexive-reflective attention. The ways contemplative pedagogy forwards an integrative approach to education that addresses students as whole beings, bodies, hearts and minds, leads contemplative educator Zajonc to assert that contemplative educators are “engaged in a revolutionary enterprise” that has the power to radically transform higher education (2010, p. 91). The body is the lynchpin for connection: because the embodied self is partial, she can join others without claiming to be them or erasing their difference. While we tend to approach disability/ race/class/gender as embodied barriers within Western rhetorical pedagogies, contemplative pedagogies see these as bridges to connection. Even when coupled with a heightened awareness of the social dimensions of learning and knowing, what contemplative pedagogies they yet need is a deepened awareness of the feminist nature of such attention. As of yet, contemplative pedagogies are often unaware of the ways reclaiming the body in our classrooms is an overtly feminist act since women typically have been objectified as bodies and emptied as minds in Western culture and education. Consequently, my efforts in this chapter will be aimed at developing a theoretical grounding for a feminist-minded contemplative writing pedagogy that constructs the writer as an embodied imaginer in the ways I outline in my introduction and to the ends of respecting the writing body Mairs pinpoints.

Finding sustainable ways to understand this body, or what remains outside the text, is work that remains to be done on both a theoretical and practical level, according to Sanchez in his recent article on empiricism and identity (2012, p. 236). Sanchez offers a reading of the contemporary moment within composition studies as one that “need[s] more, and different, theory” because “composition’s modernist and postmodernist legacies together do not offer enough equipment with which to theorize, examine, and teach writing in contemporary contexts,” contexts that have us re-examining the role of the writer’s “commonsense materiality” (2012, pp. 235-236). I respond to Sanchez’ call for “different theory” by following Haraway to explore what feminist science studies may offer contemplative writing pedagogy in the way of new, feminist-contemplative models of subjectivity to help compositionists move from theories of writing subjects to “writing yogis,” a necessary first step in addressing the embodied imagination and approaching the writer and her body with mindfulness in the composition classroom. But first, I explain why such a theoretical move is necessary.