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3: Interchapter One- Using "Body Blogs" to Embody the Writer's Imagination

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    I have never heard of the mind-body experience in my life but
    at this moment I still feel like writing is a brain thing and not
    a mind-body thing. There are only two things that you need
    to write: your brain, and a hand.
    —Student blog response


    The first step in developing what I am calling the embodied imagination is encouraging student writers to think of themselves as writing yogis, writers who self-consciously embrace their materiality and approach their writing bodies and the writing process with mindfulness. In the last chapter, I explored how we might weave together the contemplative philosophies of yoga with materialist feminism to theorize the presence and domain of writing yogis. In this interchapter, I move theory to practice. What I outline in the following pages is one attempt to get students both to contextualize their writing experiences in terms of their bodies and to conceptualize their bodies as agentive points of mediation between a culture that seeks to mark them in particular ways and a personal, material reality awash with experiences and feelings that can be used to speak back to that culture, particularly through the creation of embodied, situated knowledge. Using a composite account from a series of recent first-year writing courses (referred to here in the singular), I detail the ways feminist contemplative writing pedagogies can make the body visible in the writing classroom and examine the practical consequences of such visibility.

    In this course, I developed a double focus on our bodies both as the subject of inquiry and as integral to the writing experience itself. Not only did I want students to investigate the corporeality of the writing process, I also wanted them to imagine the ways they made sense of the world as primarily embodied and, thereby, to complicate their notions of experience and personal knowledge. I hoped that my students would begin to see how their material realties and corporeality helped construct notions of how they understood the world and the ways they created meaning in their writing; I wanted them to become attentive to their fleshiness and to adapt their writing process to admit in elements of feminist contemplative pedagogy, which is receptive to the student writer as an embodied whole. That is, I hoped students would begin seeing themselves as flexible writing bodies, as writing yogis.

    I believed that investigating embodiment as a field of study as well as a lived condition would recursively strengthen these abstract and concrete endeavors, lending a pragmatic balance between the two. An investigation into the importance of our flesh itself represents a cultural and theoretical shift in writing studies, making our once untouchable, unacknowledgeable bodies the focus of the writing classroom in ways that do not seek primarily to textualize them. Instead, the cultural body and lived body are here fused into one, at once complicating our rhetorical notions of reading and writing as well as our field’s understanding of “the personal” in ways I related within my last chapter. Claiming the personal as the “particular and specific embodiment” (Haraway, 1991c, p. 190) that makes meaning-making possible frees a space in which to think about the material-semiotic entanglement of the fleshy body and the cultural body which come together under the full rubric of embodiment—without essentializing this term or reifying the writing body.

    In order to work toward a positive and integrative hermeneutic of corporeality, my first challenge lay in helping students reconnect to their bodies in the classroom, bodies that they had been programmed by years of education to ignore when doing academic work. The opening quote in my epigraph to this chapter humorously yet seriously highlights this learned ignorance by pointing to the irony of my student Nikki’s ability to articulate the importance of mind and hand to the writing process and yet fail to connect the two. By the time we get them, our students have learned to disconnect their intellectual pursuits from their personal bodies, unless they are in physical education classes where the body cannot and need not be pretended away. From the hard plastic chairs in which they are to sit passively, to the rules students are accustomed to follow prior to their college classes (and even in some classes at this level), such as waiting to use the restroom until after class or not eating during class, students have been cultured to ignore and control their bodies when attending to the development of their minds. Prior to concluding that writing was solely a mental endeavor, Nikki, the student quoted in my epigraph, shared a response in her blog that was telling of how student bodies are endlessly trained to “behave” in educational settings. She noted:

    Class is one of those things where my mind is awake (for the most part) and my body just wants to do something, finding the only occasional relief when I raise my hand to answer a question. My brain is processing the information that is being said in class while my body is like “I want to move around” and normally responds with my foot tapping. Although, by the end of the first class my brain has had enough for the day as my body is excited to finally move.

    Here, the primary body expression my student imagines acceptable in the classroom is the docile one of raising her hand. Aside from calling up Foucauldian images of passive bodies, Nikki’s controlled language is telling in the ways it submerges the tug-of-war between body and brain at the same time that it describes it. Her reliance on the “although” that begins the final sentence reproduced in her response belies the ease with which she controls her body, underscoring the involuntary nature of her foot tapping. Also worth note in this response are the action verbs—do, raise, move—that she uses to describe her body even when she is ostensibly telling her reader how her body must remain passive when her mind is “processing information.”

    Because her brain soon wears out from this processing, she capitulates to her “excited” body after just one class. Even though her body belies her, Nikki has been so well trained that she concludes in a later blog her belief that writing is a purely mental endeavor—the quote in my epigraph—even though she seems to recognize some unfulfilled link between the mental body and physical body in both responses. First-year composition instructors can easily support these learned views by conducting classes in ways that encourage students’ passive bodies, such as when we don’t spend time openly discussing how our bodies are implicated in the writing and learning process, and when we dismiss the constructive role of the lived body and experience, often a knee-jerk reaction to sidestep the labels “expressivist” and “essentialist.” Even so, there are pedagogical means by which we can recover these losses without trapping ourselves within uncomplicated views of language or culture. I am particularly interested in the ways contemplative writing pedagogy, particularly when informed by feminist principles and practices like yoga, can be such a means. Here, I detail the ways I proceeded with small steps toward that end goal.

    To work against this learned reaction to dismiss the body and to begin investigating and valuing embodiment within the context of my class, I constructed a series of “body blogs” that asked students to consider how their bodies were implicated in their writing and learning processes. Known to my students at the start of their blogs were the ways we would eventually build off early writings with a sequenced yoga practice integrated into our class, a practice meant to actualize their initial findings and speculations and to move them toward non-dualistic notions of the mental body and physical body within the context of the writing process. I explore this integrated practice of yoga and writing in Interchapters Two and Three. The pedagogical reasoning behind these blogs was fairly simple: if ignoring our bodies is learned, then it can be unlearned as my own development as a yogi suggests. Of course, this “unlearning” is a slow and gradual process that students may initially find strange since it flies in the face of their pervious relationship to their bodies as learners.

    As my course unfolded, I had numerous concerns about how to go about such a process of “unlearning” in ways students would find productive; I did not want them to feel they were simply riding a hobby horse of their teacher’s; I wanted them to find a personal stake in our journey. I was especially worried about students’ negative reactions to a body focused-class. As this experimental course of mine was also a first-year writing requirement for my students, the first of a two-semester sequence at my university, they had no prior knowledge of the course prior to being assigned to my section and were simply placed into my classroom to meet general education requirements. Even if students found themselves drawn to our investigations, I was worried that their interest would wane as they began to discuss their classroom activities with peers and friends enrolled in other writing sections structured around topics and exercises they might view as “safer” or less disruptive of their preconceptions of a composition class. Finally, I was concerned that students would resist sharing information about their bodies, information they might view as private or too personal.

    Ultimately, this final fear was baseless, as I have found most students eager to discuss and analyze their bodies—something they hardly get to do reflectively in the context of other courses and, often, in the context of their personal lives. In the latter case, students are often too busy being a body to think much about what this means, as I’ve discovered in my conversations with them. As with other invitations to explore the significance of personal experiences, students are often excited to talk about themselves and engage in a discussion that puts their lives in dialogue with our course themes and texts. Nevertheless, I always do put in place safeguards for reluctant students, including making certain blog posts private (shared just to me) and allowing students to discuss bodies other than their own. These individual blogs were supplemented by public posts on our course blog and, of course, collaborative, real-time classroom discussions.


    This page titled 3: Interchapter One- Using "Body Blogs" to Embody the Writer's Imagination is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Christy I. Wenger (WAC Clearinghouse) .

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