Notes

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Christy I. Wenger
WAC Clearinghouse

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While some yoga poses will be explained and others visually represented within my text, many more will be only alluded to or omitted altogether for the sake of my narrative. I direct my reader to Appendix A for a copy of the handout I gave students after their first “yoga for writers” practice. While this handout does not include all the poses students learned in successive practices, it does represent the basic poses my yoga teacher and I used to create a foundation of yoga for students’ combined yoga-writing practice.
Butler dismantles both sex and gender in Bodies That Matter as she attempts to address critiques of her earlier work, Undoing Gender (2004), in which she outlines her theory of gender performativity. A central premise of Butler’s argument of gender performativity is that sex is not “a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but … a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” (1993, pp. 2-3). In this book, I examine the limits of feminist theories of performativity and propose embodied alternatives by going to contemplative theory and practice. I am interested in writing pedagogies that utilize the strengths of both feminisms and the contemplative in my work.
I use this term throughout this book in a wide sense to include secular notions of the divine, which are often linked to the heart, the feeling center.
All student writing is taken from student-authored blogs in my first-year writing courses from 2009-2014. The students quoted in this book elected into my IRB-approved study. All students have been assigned pseudonyms.
This is akin to Belenky et al.’s connected knowing. Haraway defines the mutated modest witness’ seeing as “passionate detachment,” but I read it as connected, since her phrase is oxymoronic.
There are many reasons, then, why situated knowledge is crucial to Haraway’s project. Like so many feminists of the third wave, she is driven to provide an alternative to whitewashed feminism, which takes women’s experience to be homogenous without factoring in the differences of women everywhere, without accounting for crucial discursive and bodily constructions such as race and sexual orientation. The “woman” in the center of feminism has more typically represented the economically secure, heterosexual and generally normative white woman. Haraway’s uneasiness over this homogenizing prompts her to be an early voice against claiming a singularity of women’s experience, replacing it with multiplicity. Her preference for local, situated knowledges and tolerance for differential positioning will, in fact, establish a foundation for her latter theorizing of companion species based on kinship and relationality. As she proves time and again, closure is what should make us uncomfortable—a contemplative sentiment.
Haraway has indeed been taken to task over the differentiation of affinity and identity and has since taken pains to explain how it isn’t so much that we can always choose our identities but that we can always choose to understand our inherent connection to others. She says in a recent interview: “I talked about kin as affinity and choice and people correctly pointed out that sounded too much like everyone rationally made choices all the time, and that’s not good enough. There are all kinds of unconscious processes and solidarities at work that aren’t about choice. Inhabiting “technobiopower” and inhabiting the material-semiotic configuration of the world in its companion species form, where cyborg is one of the figures but not the dominant one, that’s what I am trying to do” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 149).
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson build on previous work and approach the embodied mind through primary metaphors in language in their recent book, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999).
The differences between responses also highlight how important embodied notions of voice are as they determine who can speak against norms. The age and authority of the speaker, both of which are inexorably tied to the body, are differences that help to configure the right to speak.
This harmony could be compared to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of the optimal “flow” experience. See his Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (2008).
Sommers’ essay is an echo of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” as both seek to reflect on the nature of mother-child relationships. In Sommers’ case, the “child” is her writing, certainly an embodied conception.
This is the problematic domain of the traditional modest witness (see my explanation in Chapter One). In the spirit of this critique, Hindman points out that positioning ourselves as modest witnesses in our writing confers the “right” kind of authority to our prose, legitimizing the ideas it espouses precisely because it divorces the writer from her material existence. Hindman explains how she is a victim of this epistemology, which is antithetical to the embodied writing she practices, in her article, [Mis]Recognizing Awesome Bodies.
Of course, the issue at hand is never as simple as calling expressivism “essentialist.” There are many ways expressivism attempts to bridge or mediate the seemingly disparate positions of essentialism and constructivism. This mediation is a core thread running throughout Elbow’s work, what he calls “embracing contraries.” Here, I capitalize on how this embrace of contraries, because it allows for liberal-humanist notions of the self, is often collapsed into reductive essentialism. Whether or not this is a fair criticism of expressivism is not my focus here. I’m more interested in critiquing the idea that expressivist essentialism automatically reclaims the organic body.
Rosemary Hennessy in Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993) also argues that we need to see the interaction of the discursive and non-discursive.
I borrow and tweak Wendy Bishop’s notion of a “teaching life” (Teaching Lives: Essays and Stories, 1997) for use in my classes. I’ve found that the notion of a writing life helps students classify the novel approaches to writing they encounter within contemplative pedagogy. And because it is rather open to interpretation from the start, this term allows students to define what a writing life means to them, giving students a stake in their learning processes.
The website, mindfuleducation.org, has a map of primary and secondary mindfulness education programs running in the U.S.
. MBSR is a secular mindfulness practice and training program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. See umassmed.edu for information on MBSR and Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society at the University of Massachusetts. Also see Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living for a detailed outline of this program. For an easy introduction to MBSR, I particularly recommend Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein’s A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook. This book is an approachable guide to MBSR and fits well into larger discussions of learning and mindfulness in the writing classroom. It also provides a wealth of accessible practices for students and teachers that help address stress and increase mindfulness.
I am more interested in tracking students’ habits and changing views of the writing process by examining their metacognitive reflections of writing than on the products they produce or their grades. As research on assessment shows, students’ own perceptions of the writing process are equally-valid measures of their learning as exit exams or other product-based measures.
While Boler provides a holistic definition of emotion in line with my treatment of it here, she does prefer the term “emotion” to “feeling” while I use these interchangeably in order to underscore the social as well as bodily ways in which emotions are navigated and shaped. Boler chooses emotion as her primary term because it functions within our everyday, ordinary language and because she fears that the way feeling has been aligned with the sensational will restrict her attempt to bridge the cognitive, moral and aesthetic domains of emotion theory within philosophical psychology and philosophies of education (1999, pp. xix-xx). An example of the separation between feeling and emotion to which Boler alludes is Damasio’s preference to denote the “private, mental experience of an emotion” as a feeling “while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable” (1999, p. 42).
Haraway’s term for interdependent species that shape each other in significant ways is “companion species.” I discuss this co-constitutional model of subjectivity in my first chapter.
For my purposes, I will focus on Haraway’s notions of human embodiment. For the ways in which our embodiment is complicated by animal-machine hybridity, see Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.
Elsewhere, Bartholomae expands this argument regarding the dangers of ignoring the social construction of our ideas and feelings and claims, “it is wrong to teach late adolescents that writing is an expression of individual thoughts and feelings. It makes them suckers and, I think, it makes them powerless, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition, power, and authority as they are present in language and culture” (1990, pp. 128-129). Bartholomae’s classic critique highlights how emotion, conceived of as private, is put at odds with what is inherently social (language, power, authority) so that focus on feelings is necessarily a focus on the personal as foolishly removed from the public realm. But Bartholomae’s critique must be bookended if we are to give weight to “emotion as a rhetorical, performative enactment” (Micciche, 2007, p. 42) which would ostensibly fit into his paradigm of social constructivist/ discourse community pedagogy. Even if emotions as experienced personally by an individual body, they are also social constructions, according to Micciche.
To be fair, Butler struggles with the materiality of the body and writes Bodies that Matter in response to the critical reception of her treatment of the body in Gender Trouble. In an effort to be responsive to her critics, she claims, “surely bodies live, and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these ‘facts,’ … cannot be dismissed as mere construction” (1993, p. xi). Even so, Butler does dismiss these facts of materiality when she later claims that “bodies only appear, only endure, only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas” (1993, p. xi) and therefore lay no claim to materiality outside of discourse. To leave open the possibility of matter in excess of language is too dangerous for Butler who wants to question the organic nature of our gendered performances, a questioning that can be derailed with divisions between the naturalness of sex and constructedness of gender. Preferring closure on these debates, Butler ends up denying the materiality of sex along with gender, seeing them as cultural, linguistic performances. But, in my view, to lose the body to social construction seems no better than earlier paradigms wherein it was lost to naturalistic biology.
Micciche does acknowledge in her book that she is still developing pedagogical practices that invite the “rhetorics of emotion” into the classroom.
That feeling demonstrates the folding back or doubleness of our embodied selves has also been theorized by philosopher Merleau Ponty. Calling this the “double sensation” of feeling, he has said: “Between feeling (the dimension of subjectivity) and being felt (the dimension of objectivity) … a gulf spanned by the indeterminate and reversible phenomenon of the being touched of the touching, the crossing over of what is touching to what is touched …. In the double sensation my right hand is capable of touching my left hand as if the latter were an object. But in this case, unlike an object, my left hand has the double sensation of being both the object and the subject of the touch” (quoted in Grosz, 1994, p. 100). The continuous flux of positions here, what Haraway might label our “differential positioning” within the material world, shows the reversibility and thus companionate nature of the acts of feeling/ touching and being felt/ touched. This position of openness to the world does not mean that the subjects and objects of feeling are reducible to each other— the right hand is not the same as the left, but that they must always be understood as embracing one another (Grosz, 1994, p. 103). Ponty’s notions of reversibility without reducibility correspond to Haraway’s notions of companionate composers who too must be seen to make each other up in the flesh while retaining their own integrity. In other words, each is “significantly other” to each other.
This interchapter is an expanded and revised version of my article Writing Yogis: Breathing Our Way to Mindfulness and Balance in Embodied Writing Pedagogies, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Vol. 18 Winter (2012- 2013).
See Appendix B for a sample handout I provide students to guide our breathing exercises. While I introduce other pranayama methods to my students, this handout provides an overview of the core exercises we use together as a class.
The verbal prompts I’ve reproduced here are faithful to the same I used to guide my writing classes in meditative breathing. They represent an amalgamation of standard yoga exercises advocated in such books as Yoga: A Gem for Women (2002) and those taught by my yoga teachers, based on the traditions of Iyengar yoga.
At times, I ask students to try a completely silent breathing session without verbal cues from me. Because the majority of students express their preference for my guided prompts, I more frequently guide students. I understand their preference because I too enjoy guided pranayama in my own yoga classes. I am indebted, then, to many sources for the prompts I use to guide my students in contemplative practice.
Along with the tradition of yoga, I refuse the closure of neatly delineating between cultural affect, psychological emotions or physiological feelings. See Chapter Three for an in-depth theoretical discussion of emotion in contemplative pedagogy.
It may be worthwhile to note that while I talk with my students about centering and rooting in themselves as well as shifting outward toward others, I rarely use the terms extension and expansion in the classroom. While these terms are extremely helpful to me in my research because they allow me to work through the importance of these acts while drawing on the discourse of yoga, they become less helpful in demystifying writing or yoga for my students. I try to use as little of such jargon as possible with my students. For me, it is more important that they can engage in these acts and express them in simple, everyday language than it is that they can express themselves with the same rhetoric I use in my professional writing.